Woman's Hour - Can the way we breathe change our mental and physical health?

Episode Date: January 29, 2021

Can the way we breathe change our mental and physical health? With Rebecca Dennis, author of new audiobook 'Breathe', and Prof Mike Thomas from the University of Southampton. The campaign for a statue of Emmeline Pankhurt's forgotten sister and the first woman to die for the suffrage movementPlus a look at new research which reveals discrimination against Afro hair in the UK is widespread, with black people stating they have experienced microaggressions around their hair. And Ann Wolbert Burgess the woman who inspired the character of psychologist Dr Wendy Carr in the TV series Mindhunter. Presenter Anita Rani Producer Beverley Purcell

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. I'm Natalia Melman-Petrozzella, and from the BBC, this is Extreme Peak Danger. The most beautiful mountain in the world. If you die on the mountain, you stay on the mountain. This is the story of what happened when 11 climbers died on one of the world's deadliest mountains, K2, and of the risks we'll take to feel truly alive. If I tell all the details, you won't believe it anymore. Extreme, peak danger. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.

BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. Hi everybody, Anita here, welcoming you to today's Woman's Hour podcast. Good morning. We have made it to Friday and breathe. Hands up anyone who's suffering with a bit of anxiety at the moment. I'm not going to lie, both of mine are currently well in the air. Well, we're going to learn how to breathe properly later and maybe alleviate some of that stress in the process. It's my Friday gift to you all. I also want you to get any microaggressions you may have experienced off your chest today. Subtle digs, insults, offence, whether intentional or unintentional, you may have had to deal with as we're talking about

microaggressions around black hair in just a moment so my most recent experience was with someone i just met in a work environment i was about to interview them and the first thing they asked me was have i always lived in this country so of course i said no i grew up in yorkshire so what's your experience of any microaggressions whether it's to do with your race gender sexuality or indeed your hair you can text woman's hour 84844 text will be charged at your standard message rates check with your network provider for extra costs or you can get in touch via social media at bbc woman's hour or you can email us through our website now we're also unearthing a bit of hidden history today.

A hero who you will most probably never have heard of, the first suffragette to die for the cause, and the sister of Emmeline Pankhurst, no less. Now, a group want to immortalise her in statue form, but not before they've told us why. And if any of you have seen Mindhunter on Netflix about how the FBI, along with psychologist Wendy Carr get inside the minds of serial killers,

apparently it's excellent viewing. I'll be talking to the real-life inspiration behind her character, Anne Burgess. Her story is fascinating. She's now in her 80s and she's still an absolute force so not to be missed. And we'll also be having the final episode of Lamentation a little

bit later. But first, 93% of black people in the UK have experienced hair discrimination, according to a recent survey. Hair touching without consent is the most commonly experienced microaggression reported by nearly half of the black people surveyed and a quarter say they've been picked on at school or work because of their hair. So why in 2021 is this still an issue? Well, Katie-Anne Rosher is from the Halo Collective, an organisation of people working to put a stop to hair discrimination.

And Emma DeBerry is the author of the book Don't Touch My Hair. Welcome to Woman's Hour, both of you. Katie-Anne, you've got quite a job on your hand, haven't you, if you want to put an end to this, when 93% of people say they've experienced hair discrimination. So explain what people are telling you is happening. What is hair discrimination? So hair discrimination can take place in the form of exclusions from school, little comments and insults that people make about hair.

Common ones are that afro textured hair is wild, messy, unkempt, needs to be tamed. We've had a lot of stories of people telling us that they are so quick to adapt their hair and try to change their hair when they're going to school just to stop comments being made to them. So me personally, my experience with hair discrimination has been through people telling me that I need to comb my hair, telling me that I need to change my hair in order for it to be neater. So yeah, these are all the little things that can build up to the wider issue that is hair discrimination. Emma, you wrote a book about this two years ago. Two years on, 93% of people still say they've experienced hair discrimination. Why is it so damaging?

Wow. Yeah. So first of all, hi, Katie-Anne. Big up to you and all the work you're doing. It's so impressive. So thank you. I like that. Well, that's a very nice way to kind of bring yourself into this. Yes, absolutely. How old are you, Katie-Anne? I'm 16. 16. Yes. Amazing. So, yes, the book was written two years ago. At this stage, we still have 93 percent of people saying, of black people saying this is something that they've experienced. And to be honest, I consider that counterintuitive, as that may sound, I consider it progress in that at least now, you know, that those figures are there

and the conversation is having this type of mainstream attention, you know, and all of these initiatives like the Halo Collective are happening because that discrimination has been there, you know, historically, but it just hasn't been so openly acknowledged and named in the way that it is now so that we can like go about addressing it. So how is it being played out, let's say, in the workforce on a day-to-day? Let's like really explain to everyone listening how this manifests itself. What is going on? So first of all, you know, I think when one talks about hair, there's this assumption that it's just like a superficial or like a frivolous topic.

And it's really just something, you know, that women or girls are talking about and it's to do with vanity. And it's so much, it's so much deeper than that. There are certain norms that one is expected to conform to, to be deemed as being suitable in the workplace or in the school environment. Most of those norms are quite easy to achieve if your features are a certain way. When we think about hair, those norms have been, have developed to suit the characteristics of European textured hair or non-Afro textured hair. Our hair texture is dramatically different to other hair textures and it requires completely different techniques and methods you know to maintain it for our hair to resemble how um what is deemed as professional

which is like very very culturally specific you know it's not professional professionalism isn't kind of neutral in how we perceive it, or to conform to the school uniform policy, we have to do, you know, intensive labor to achieve those looks and also go through processes that are often very damaging to our hair, because the norm is, you know, to have your hair kind of straight or going down, or even hair that you can tie back easily, you know. In order to do that, we really have to straighten our hair, either by like a chemical process or by heat processes, which are really damaging. My hair is covered today.

This is another thing when I was in school, because my hair isn't done, okay? I didn't have time to do it. So I'm wearing a head wrap. This should be a completely ordinary thing to be able to wear into school or work. I wouldn't have been allowed to wear a head wrap to school. But for me to kind of, you know, maintain a neat appearance when my hair isn't done, which takes hours, a head wrap is, as you can see, a very neat, quote unquote, looking item. So I think that

acknowledgement needs to be there that we have different norms you know for her and so um this is to both you how are these micro aggressions playing out sort of day in day out what what i mean tell me about your own personal experiences emma what happens to you in the workplace what do people say just how do how do these small comments uh affect you i think it's you you have to spend a lot of um time and energy into thinking about how you're going to present yourself for a particular event or place that you're going to be and you have to think well if I go with my hair just as it grows from my head if I go with my hair um in an afro which is how my hair is you know when I haven't um when I don't have braids or when I haven't twisted it or done one of these styles what

assumptions are going to be made about me and how is this going to impact um that experience are people going to think things that I've been accused of? Are people going to think that I'm I have an Afro, so I'm some sort of quote unquote militant or I'm I've been asked, am I anti-white because I'm wearing my hair as it grows from my head? You know, because these assumptions with them with with Afro textured hair or classed assumptions or just different just different judgments that will be made about you that might be damaging if it's, you know, a job interview or if it's something that your behaviour or your appearance is very important.

And Katie-Anne, how is it playing out in schools? How does it affect children in schools? So in schools, I think I can identify two different ways in which hair discrimination plays out. So one is where it's quite extreme, where students are actively taken out of class or even sent to the back of their classes because their hair is too big and too distracting. Or it comes through the comments of, can I touch your hair your hair's so big oh you look like a lion or it looks like a bird's nest these can um these can seem to outsiders as really small comments that don't mean much but once it builds up over time it can really take a knock to the confidence of kids and in school years these

are your formative years these are where you start to express yourself start to build up your first sense of identity and when people are making comments about something that's so culturally significant to you and it's such a key part of your identity it can really take a big knock to them and pride yeah i mean you've hit you hit on something there in the survey it said that hair touching without consent is the most commonly experienced microaggression and you said that you know some people might not think this is a big deal so explain why it is a big deal because some people might say you know maybe i just wanted to pay you a compliment maybe i'm just curious I mean compliments and

showing appreciation for people can always can always take place in other forms um you could call their hair beautiful I'm sure a lot of people would appreciate that once it comes to a lot of people touching care without consent um especially it can make people feel like they're in some sort of petting zoo and it's like they're the other in that situation and all of a sudden they've been made to stick out they've been made to um feel different to everyone else and and I think it's often in environments where you already feel conspicuous because you might be the only black person you might be the only person of color. And then that attention on your hair is just kind of adding to a situation where you, in which you already might feel self-conscious. And I've had a number of times people reach out

and touch it without consent and then say things like, oh my it feels like pubes you know as a um a a teenage girl um i mean it's happened to me as a teenager and as an adult that's not something that is particularly enjoyable particularly specifically when you're in an environment again where you are only the the only person of african descent or the only black person yeah because on one hand it's not an overtly oppressive act like a racist slur but it is equally upsetting and I think it goes back to it's people what people want to comment about your race but they there are certain things they can't say but they're like oh but I can ask about the hair but sometimes it is it is the kind of the equivalent of where are you from or why are like they want to ask you about your blackness and they feel the hair is the entry point into that and as katian said it's such a fundamental to your identity and it's so bound up

your hair heritage is bound up in your history and the story absolutely so one of the things that was really important for me and in writing don't Touch My Hair was while there is all of this discrimination and there is a lot of stigma attached to Afro textured hair that finds its roots in the transatlantic slave trade and the processes of dehumanization that occurred in that period to kind of to to dehumanize black people, essentially to justify the enslavement, I really wanted to tell the other side of the story as well, which is that our hair is this Afro textured hair is this wonderful material that lends itself to being manipulated into all types of incredible structural shapes. So we have this history of braiding, for instance, and I go into the science of that, different social histories around braiding, different, the different meanings. Braiding patterns are replete with meaning

and forms of technology. So Don't Touch My Hair has a chapter on maths, mapping and coding and how that pertains to the patterns in our hair. So I really wanted the story of our hair not to just be steeped in this story of discrimination and history of oppression. Yeah, well, I think we've barely scratched the surface with this, but I want to thank you both.

Katiaan, you're only 16, you've set up the Halo Collective. There's a lot of work to be done. um if you want to get involved with the discussion you can please do uh share your experiences by texting 84844 um emma and katianne uh thank you very much for speaking to us this morning now you probably know the names of emeline pankhurst and emily wilding davidson but what about Mary Clark? Well, she was Emmeline's sister and the first woman to die for the suffrage movement. And yet she's been almost entirely forgotten over the course of the last century.

Well, now a new campaign is pushing for a statue of her to be erected in Brighton, where currently there are only two statues of women, both of Queen Victoria. Jean Calder is a founder of both the Brighton and Hove Women's History Group and the Mary Clark Statue Appeal. And she joins me now.

Very good morning to you, Jean. So who was Mary Clark? Good morning. Well, as you say, she was Emmeline's sister. She was, from the point of view of Brighton, she, in 1909 to 1910, which is the last two years of her life, she worked as a paid organiser for the Women's Social and Political Union, the suffragette organisation in Brighton, incredibly hardworking, very, very effective organiser. And died at the end of that time in really tragic circumstances.

I mean, she'd grown up with Emmeline. She'd been very close to her. She was artistic and they ran a small business together very ineffectively. But she'd supported Emmeline all along the way. But she made one of the most interesting things about her was that where Emmeline made a very good marriage to Richard Pankhurst, Mary married a man called John Clark, who was abusive. And after several years of marriage, she managed to extricate herself. But during that time, she experienced destitution, she had to flee several times. And she obviously had enormous courage, a very, very difficult thing to do at that time. And it was after that that she really became very involved in the suffrage movement.

And where did she fit in with it? How did she fit in with Emmeline and Emily and the suffragettes that we know about? Well, she was involved right from the start, from 1903. 1906, her name appears as one of the central committee that set up the National Women's Social and Political Union. So she was a key part of it. She went to prison three times. But unlike Emmeline, she was a bit lacking in self-confidence, possibly because of the experience she had in her marriage.

She was initially very supportive to Emmeline. So she would look after the children. She would do Emmeline's job, her paid job, so that Emmeline could go out and campaign. But then she became an organiser. And I think that's when she was coming into her. The tragedy is that her life was cut short. But all the accounts of her life in those last couple of years of her life was that she was incredibly effective, that she was brave, but also what comes across as her gentleness. She wasn't a charismatic speaker, though she did do public speaking, but she was very, very active, hardworking. She used to sell the newspaper in Brighton.

She was out in all weathers having open-air meetings. She suffered many assaults by hostile crowds. And what comes across again and again from all the people who observed her was that she could turn aside aggression by reason and good humour. She could be very funny. And that comes across in the accounts in local newspapers after her death. But this, I mean, it is really that combination of gentleness and dignity, as well as a certain frailness with this huge courage and bravery,

which showed at the end of her life, particularly, and there were several instances of her going in to assist women who are under attack and so on. She was very, very committed to nonviolence, but she would always go to support other women. But at the end of her life, she was present at what was known as Black Friday, which is on the 18th of November, 1910, where women, 300 women, were savagely beaten by the police and plainclothes and uniformed. It was believed on Home Office instruction. They were sexually assaulted as well. Their breasts were attacked.

It was very, very consistent. And then several women were very badly injured there. And she obviously was injured as well. I mean, we don't know the extent of that, but we do know that she was bedridden for three days afterwards. And then she went back to London to protest about the police treatment. On that occasion, she deliberately broke a window of a police station, got a month's imprisonment as a result of that. We think that was her first actually illegal action, although it was the third time she'd been imprisoned.

And then she went on hunger strike. Although she was very frail and ill, went on hunger strike, was forcibly fed, was released on the 23rd of December 1910. And on the 25th, she died of a brain hemorrhage so the assumption has to be that there was some sort of head injury probably her sister who was absolutely devastated by this thought it was Black Friday and she was so they all referred to her as the first martyr. And how old was she when she died? She was just 59. She was so young. I mean, what an incredible story.

She was right there, involved, you know, like you say, the first martyr, but also did a hugely important job of looking after Emmeline's children as well, supporting her sister throughout all of this. Why is so little known about her? Well, it's extraordinary, isn't it? I mean, I just couldn't believe it. I mean, we were back in 2018, we were looking to get to find out about the local suffrage movement in Brighton and to get blue plaques, but also the possibility of a statue. And I found a reference to Mary in the back of a book.

I mean, it was I mean, I'll never forget it, actually. There's just a line saying that two women died on Black Friday, one of whom was Mary Clark, who was Emily Plank's assistant who worked in Brighton. My jaw nearly hit the table, you know, and I thought, this is it. But why? I mean, one can only speculate, apart from the obvious, which is that she was a woman. If she'd been a man, you know, I mean, we celebrate the first soldier to die in the World Wars, the last soldier to die.

We know their names. We know where they're buried. We don't celebrate. I mean, we have the Tolpadil martyrs who weren't actually martyred. They didn't die. And here we have Mary. And so why do you think she's the right person for a new statue? Why do you think that's the right way to celebrate her? I think it's hugely significant to ordinary people. I think there's been an enormous amount of support from children, from adults. I think women particularly feel that there are lots of statues of men. There are, you know, it's a terrible realisation over the last few years that there are hardly any memorials, blue plaques or statues of women.

And that children need images of female heroism. But also she was somebody who will matter to other people as well, because what she was fighting for in terms of justice and democracy and freedom is going to be significant to a number of people. And she'd experienced torture, she'd experienced state aggression, and she'd experienced domestic violence. So there are a number of people. I think her story resonates. Yes, absolutely. Jean, thank you very much and good luck with the campaign to get that statue down in Brighton.

Lots of you getting in touch with microaggressions, talking about black hair in particular this morning. Elaine has texted to say, no one should be able to walk up to anyone and touch their hair. An assumption has been made that this is acceptable. No, it is not. 84844 is the number to text or you can also tweet or get in touch via social media at BBC Woman's Hour. on Netflix, which tells the story of FBI agents Holden Ford and Bill Tench and psychologist Dr. Wendy Carr as they team up to attempt to get inside the minds of serial killers back in the

70s and 80s. The characters were inspired by the work of a real unit and Wendy is based on Anne Wolbert Burgess, a forensic nurse and academic in Boston. Anne did some pioneering work with rape trauma victims, which led her to work with the FBI. She's now in her 80s and she's still teaching, and there are waiting lists for her courses in forensics and victimology. When I spoke to Anne, I asked her about that initial rape research, how it came about back in the 70s.

Well, that came about because I was an academic at the time. I was at Boston College. One of my colleagues there, Linda Lytle Holmstrom, who was a sociologist, had an idea for a new project, and she wanted to study rape. She knew this was going to be a problem. She was following the consciousness-raising groups of that time, and so she invited me to join her. So that's really how the genesis, if you will, of the project started. And you say she knew this was going to be a problem. Why did she know this? Well, back in the mid to late 60s and into the early 70s,

the women were gathering together in small groups and talking about things that they had never talked about before. And this was bringing together all kinds of women, whether they were working women or homewives or whatever. And one of the topics that they kept bringing up was this problem of sexual assault and sexual violence. So she had gone to, Linda had gone to some of these meetings. They were in the big cities and the momentum was going. Pressure was also being put on to the legislatures to do something about investigating rape cases. And what were you finding? What were the attitudes? I think we forget, don't we? It's very quick to forget what the attitudes were around rape at the time in the late 60s and early 70s? Well, there were seven major ones. The two I was most familiar with is they would say, well, what's a woman doing out at a certain hour of time? So when she was breaking, quote,

the social rules of, say, being alone outside at seven o'clock at night or something like that, that was considered. The other was what she wore. Maybe she was wearing a skimpy dress or something. And the third one was maybe that's what she secretly wanted, that she really wanted to get raped. There's these wild kinds of myths out there. I mean, I know this was the 60s and we have obviously progressed, but really, how far do you think we've come? Oh, I wish we could say we had come further, but we still have these. I've just seen a case where the defense lawyer held up a picture of the victim as a high school graduate holding a bottle of beer and saying, and you expect us to believe that this wasn't consent. So the whole issue of consent is still alive and well, and juries will buy it.

So it's been a constant battle of women trying to get some kind of leverage as we move along. It's been very, very difficult. You've been described as a living legend by the American Academy of Nurses. I mean, what a title, what an honour. And it was nurses who you recruited to work on this study, wasn't it? Yes, yes. Nursing is my basic profession. Could you give us a definition of rape trauma then? Because you worked on this, you developed it. What is the definition? Well, the trauma was that we realised that it created a lot of problems afterwards, that abortion couldn't just go on with her life as if nothing

had happened, that it created a crisis. So trauma was the word that we used in physical injury, and we just extended it to psychological injury. There were four basic areas that women had difficulty with. Of course, the physical, sometimes there was bruising and bleeding and things like that. So she had physical injury. She also had social injury or trauma where she couldn't tell people. They felt shame. Sexual was a big issue. Having to get into a sexual relationship again was a difficult one. And then, of course, all of the psychological issues had to do with the flashbacks, the fears, the phobias, basically found that it was the fear of being killed that set into motion the psychological.

So that if she was, say she was raped inside, she became terrified to stay alone inside. Say she had been raped outside became the fear of going out alone or things like that. So we saw the actual psychological genesis, if you will, of the trauma. And then this led on to you setting up the rape counselling programme in Boston. Tell me about that. Linda and I had started a counselling programme. All of the victims that we saw, we followed up. We had 146 in the first year. And the nurses at the hospital wanted to continue our work. And so we trained them. And that was really how the counselling programme at Boston City Hospital started.

And then, Anne, there's another twist in your tale, because your research led to you working with the FBI on their investigations. So tell me how that came about. Well, that came about from a publication. It was Roy Hazelwood was at the FBI Academy. He taught sex crimes and was out in Los Angeles and mentioned that he had this new assignment. He was going to have to talk on rape investigation and he didn't know anything about it. And did anyone know? Of course, nobody raised their hand. This was to a group of agents and law enforcement.

But afterwards, Rita Kinnett came up to him. She was a police officer in the detective division. And she said she also was a nurse. Saw my article in American Journal of Nursing and said to Roy, why don't you give her a call? She's on the East Coast. And he did. How fortuitous. It just goes to show, and thank goodness they had a female police officer, otherwise that would never have happened. Never would have happened. And so it shows you the power of publication is important. So he invited me down. And at first I was a little bit hesitant because I'd only been speaking to women's groups and rape crisis and nurses.

And I thought, gee, do I want to speak to a group of men on this? And then I decided, yes, I did. I want it. And I said to him, I want to see how they think about rape. And I did. I went down and that started the relationship with the academy. Well, it sounds like it was an incredible relationship because not only did you talk to them about the research you've been doing into rape, you actually encouraged them to formulate the first profiles of serial killers as well. Well, also what they were doing at that time is they were getting all these calls from police departments that said we had this terrible murder. We don't know, can't understand it. Can you help us?

And they were informally profiling the type of person that they felt had committed this murder. So also at that time, they were getting pressured to do their own research. So they said, would you help us? So I really became the method, what we call the methodologist. I helped them develop the questionnaire of 57 pages, 488 variables. I mean, it's huge. And so their job was to go into the prisons, interview these serial killers, bring back the tapes. My little group, we'd listen to the tapes and put it onto these master surveys and get all the data in and then crunch it down. And that's what our serial killer profiling was. So we also studied two things we did. We looked at the characteristics of serial killers, 36. And then we also looked at how they profiled the cases, how they would go to a crime scene and say, this is the type of person, not who, you know, we

wouldn't say, well, this was John Smith or whatever, but this was a male. He might have his race, his education, his work habits. Those were the kinds of things that they profiled. And this is what led to the Netflix series Mindhunter, where you're fictionalized as the psychologist, Dr. Wendy Carr. How closely did they stick to the facts in the series? They stuck to the facts on the cases. They were very good on the cases, but where they went off base is the backgrounds of the three of us douglas wrestler and myself they tried to put i don't know they they just made up very unusual backgrounds instead of taking the actual backgrounds i think would have been much better but that's hollywood for you you know they well

it is it is an absolutely excellent series so you must be very pleased with that and that you know your work is being shown and as and has made such a huge impact. But, you know, you did say, look, we haven't come as far as you hoped. We know that. We know that there's still judgments made on rape victims. There aren't enough people who are convicted of rape. We still, people, it's still a lot of shame and guilt. And in the college group, which is the largest group of ages for women to be raped, is the whole issue of drinking on campus. And we've tried to work harder on that because college students won't come forward against another college student.

Talking to Amber just there, an absolute force. Now, when people are stressed or anxious, which, let's face it, is most of us at the moment, we're often told to take some deep breaths to help us relax. It's nothing new, of course. There are writings from China and India that are over 2,000 years old, extolling the virtues of controlled breathing for mental, physical and spiritual health. Now there's a real resurgence in these ideas at the moment, mostly going by the name of breathwork. But is there anything in it? To talk us through it all is Rebecca Dennis. She's a breathing coach and author of a new audio book called Breathe. And we've also got Mike Thomas, a professor of primary care research and expert in the use of breathing

exercises for asthma at the University of Southampton. Welcome to you both. Rebecca, every single person I can guarantee listening to Woman's Hour right now is breathing. Surely it's the most natural thing on earth. Why do we need to be taught how to breathe? Yes, you're right. Obviously, we're all breathing. Otherwise, we wouldn't be here. And we inhale, we exhale 26,000 times a day. So we wouldn't be here and we inhale we exhale 26 000 times a day so we can't be conscious of every single breath that we're taking um but when we when we work with breathwork and when we know it's so important to to understand that the way that we breathe is indicative to how we feel about life and we can change the way that we feel and think just by changing the rhythms and the patterns and the depths of our breathing. So what are we doing wrong? What is breathwork? Well, breathwork is,

there's thousands and thousands of techniques out there. And breathwork is really working with the breath in the way that obviously it's automatic. We don't have to think about breathing. We breathe in and we inhale and we exhale every day. But but when we work with it consciously we can change our states so um on on some more advanced levels of breath work we can work with it at a more therapeutic level when we're working with pdsd or we're working with trauma or or otherwise we can just work with other other levels when we're trying to change our state from if we're feeling anxious we can use the breath to help us to feel more calm and we if we're trying to change our state from if we're feeling anxious we can use the breath to help us to feel more calm and we if we're feeling scattered again we can we can connect to our breath we can change the patterns of our breath and it can help us to feel more focused

and even if we're feeling a bit tired like at four o'clock rather than reaching for an espresso you can use other techniques which can help to to make you feel more energized as well so it really is this multi-faceted tool a bit like a swiss army knife really that we've got it's right underneath our nose it's free and i never say it's a one size fits all um breath breath techniques you know it's really about how the way that i love to teach breath workers is become the architect of your own breathing practice and just understand more about why we're breathing in the way that we are. So, Mike, you've been working in this area as a research scientist for nearly 30 years the time. And like you say, we think, do we need to think breath. You know, if we get anxious, we maybe start to over breathe. So there are different breathing patterns that slip into our daily life. Why does that happen? Sorry.

And it is clear that emotions and breathing are very closely linked together so that, you know, if you're under stress, your breathing pattern can change. And some people can kind of slip into abnormal what we call dysfunctional breathing patterns quite easily and it seems particularly people with underlying lung disease you know who who get episodes of breathlessness which make them very anxious and maybe trigger breathing patterns that make the symptoms worse rather than better and also people with anxiety can perhaps do this so and what is that happening there mike why why is why does anxiety make us breathe in a different way what's going on well um normal quiet breathing is is predominantly through the abdomen it's what we call diaphragmatic breathing but when we're

excited or when we're kind of stimulated in the adrenaline flowing we we, we get ready for much greater activity. And we also start to breathe with our upper chest. So what can happen is that people who should be breathing quite kind of quietly and regularly through the abdomen can actually start to do irregular upper chest breathing, also mouth breathing, because normal quiet breathing is nasal breathing. And these things you know they're actually quite useful to breathe in that way if you if you if you have to run hard or if you have to fight or if you're under stress but if you're actually having to cope with daily life you know these can actually produce abnormal symptoms which can actually make things worse

and what's the difference between breathing through our nose and breathing through our mouth well the function of the nose is to filter the air you know remove the particles to to warm the air and to humidify the air so it's like an air conditioner really so if we're breathing straight into our mouth we're breathing kind of unhumidified cold and and dirty air straight into the lungs and that can be an irritant to the lungs that can cause sensations that are unpleasant and if you've got something like asthma it can actually make the asthma worse. I've seen things online that say it stimulates our parasympathetic nervous system the rest and digest part can you explain what that is and is it true yeah i think broadly it is true i mean it is like many things it's a bit of an oversimplification

but there is a close link between breathing and and the um and the nervous system and the emotional senses and and the sympathetic nervous system is is kind of there for fight and flight and the parasympathetic nervous system is more the kind of background you know enabling enabling us to to cope in an efficient and functional way and uh and if we're overstimulated and the sympathetic nervous systems in in the hyperdrive uh this can actually lead to you know these dysfunctional situations and and abnormal breathing patterns that can make people feel unwell in various ways and can be corrected by the kind of exercises that Rebecca's talking about. Well, Rebecca, we should, we should, there'll be lots

of people keen to know what we should be doing, how we should be breathing properly, and certainly how we can alleviate a bit of stress and anxiety at the moment. So could you talk us through something really basic very quickly, how we should all be breathing? Maybe we could all do it whilst you're listening. Let's do some breathing. How long have I got to do this? Yes. So that I don't go on for too long.

How long have we got? A couple of minutes? Yeah, about a minute or so. A couple of minutes. Okay. As Mike was saying, when we're using a deep diaphragmatic breath, then that's really the breath that we want to be using throughout the day. And when we're in this state of fight or flight, then we tend to be breathing much more up in the upper chest and overusing muscles that we don't need to be using. So those muscles start to get overused and contracted, and then that becomes a more unhealthy breathing pattern. So just by, first of all, just feeling your feet on the ground and just having breath awareness, so just being aware of how you're breathing

and the way that you're breathing and just noticing the breath in your body. Yep, doing it. And as you're inhaling and exhaling, just seeing if you can push your belly away as you inhale. I've spent a lot of time holding my belly in, so you're telling me to just push it out. Absolutely. And this is where because so many people conditioned to hold their belly in,

they're not using these lower abdominal muscles, the diaphragm and these other muscles, which really are the primary breathing muscles. And this is how we get unhealthy breathing habits. So if we just put our hands on our belly and just every day just noticing you know when you're when you're um emailing when you're texting am i breathing how am i breathing am i holding my breath is my breath shallow and just breathing into your belly breathing into your hand so as you're breathing in yeah put your belly away and then as you exhale your belly comes in and because if if that's not been something that you've been doing for a very long time that can feel like it's really hard

so really the more that we train and the more that we practice that every day then we can just get the body to remember how we used to breathe when we were babies and when we were toddlers and that's why you see little babies bellies pushing out when they're breathing and so that's what we should be doing release our bellies we're not going anywhere breathing. And so that's what we should be doing. Release our bellies. We're not going anywhere at the moment anyway. So we've all got stretch pants on. So this should be very easy. So just breathing into our diaphragm, release our bellies, just relax and enjoy it.

And it's as simple as that. Rebecca, thank you so much. Mike, obviously, very quickly, there'll be people out there saying, you know, lots of people making claims, making money out of this. We should just, any advice how to navigate it? Yeah, I think this is a very useful technique and particularly people with asthma might want to consider it. But some of the claims that have been made in the past have been inflated and it's not a cure. This is something people do as well as not instead of the standard treatment.

Good advice. Thank you both very much for joining me this morning. That's all for today's Woman's Hour. Join us again next time. A new podcast series from BBC Radio 4. In the first stage of a poltergeist haunting, the entity will confine itself to making noise as if it's testing its victims. The Battersea Poltergeist. My name's Shirley Hitchens. I'm 15 years old. I live with my mum, dad, brother, gran... and Donald. Subscribe to The Battersea Poltergeist on BBC Sounds. And the deeper I dig, the more questions I unearth. How long has she been doing this? What does she have to gain from this? From CBC and the BBC World Service, The Con, Caitlin's Baby.

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