I’ve been breathing wrong for over 40 years.

Yes, breathing. The most innate, fundamental, autopilot thing my body does to stay alive. I didn’t even know there was a wrong way to do it. But there is.

I can’t remember a time when I didn’t get winded easily while running or engaging in high intensity exercise. No matter how fit I felt or how often I was active, my lung capacity never seemed to improve.

“My legs could go forever but my lungs are weak,” I’ve joked for years. But even as I made light of my situation, it frustrated me.

Until recently, though, I just lived with it. What else could I do?

How Strengthening My Core Helped My Breathing

Over the past year, I’ve been more diligent about strengthening my core. After struggling with sciatica, I not only found stretches that helped but also decided to better support and stabilize my lower back with stronger abdominal muscles.

The funny thing is, as I began incorporating specific ab exercises into my routine, I learned I needed to focus on breathing to keep my abs engaged and prevent further lower back strain. I needed to use my diaphragm—something I’ve heard people talk about my whole life, but typically in relation to singing.

How to Use Your Diaphragm When Breathing

But how do you use your diaphragm? I really didn’t know.

And what IS a diaphragm, exactly? Turns out, the diaphragm is a muscle located between the stomach and the heart and lungs, right under the chest cavity.

With this in mind, I started engaging that area of my body to breathe when I worked my core. It definitely helped, which led me to wonder, Is this how I should be breathing all the time? Because I wasn’t.

After doing more research and paying more attention to how I normally breathe, I came to the conclusion that, yes, I was indeed breathing wrong. Fixing the problem would require me to completely retrain my body’s ingrained tendency—and that meant actively thinking about all the inhales and exhales I take throughout my day.

It’s a process.

What (I Think) Caused My Shallow Breathing

So how was I breathing before? With my chest. Instead of expanding my upper abdominals to inhale, I was expanding my upper torso and simultaneously drawing in my stomach. The way I see it, I was breathing backwards.

But how did this happen?

I’m theorizing here, but I think the cause is tied to my adenoids. Growing up, mine were so enlarged that I could barely breathe out of my nose. Yes. I was a mouth breather until the age of 12, when I had surgery to remove the swollen lymph tissue to clear my nasal passages. The successful surgery allowed me to breath through my nose after that. But, I have a feeling all those mouth-breathing years led me to adopt poor, shallow breathing techniques.

Again, this is only a theory. Yet, research tells me that breathing through the mouth is generally more shallow, so I may be on to something.

Regardless of the reason, the solution is the same: practice, practice, practice.

Breath of Life

As I anticipate the day when I don’t have to think about breathing again, I can’t help but wonder if this forced focus on breathing is somehow a gift. I’ve spent most of my life taking for granted the fact that I wake up with the ability to breathe. Aside from feeling out of breath at times, I simply expect that my next breath will come.

And when I stop and think about it, that’s a wild assumption. At some point, I will take a last breath. We all will.

Only God knows that day for each one of us, because He is THE source of life. The Bible makes this abundantly clear.

What Does the Bible Say About Breath and Breathing?

Here are only a few passages of scripture that attribute every breath—and our very existence—to our Creator, God.

Of course, Genesis is a good place to start.

Then the Lord God took dust from the ground and made a man. He breathed the breath of life into the man’s nose, and the man became a living thing. (Genesis 2:7, ERV)

And Ecclesiastes covers the end of our lives.

Our bodies go back into the ground as dust. The breath of our life goes back to God, who gave it to us. (Ecclesiastes 12:7, EASY)

But my favorite passage is Acts 17:22-28 (ERV), where the Apostle Paul addresses the Areopagus council in Athens, Greece to share the gospel. While verses 24-26 speak directly to our breath and life, I included the other verses for context.

[22] Then Paul stood up before the meeting of the Areopagus council and said, “Men of Athens, everything I see here tells me you are very religious. [23] I was going through your city and I saw the things you worship. I found an altar that had these words written on it: ‘ to an unknown god.’ You worship a god that you don’t know. This is the God I want to tell you about.

[24] “He is the God who made the whole world and everything in it. He is the Lord of the land and the sky. He does not live in temples built by human hands. [25] He is the one who gives people life, breath, and everything else they need. He does not need any help from them. He has everything he needs. [26] God began by making one man, and from him he made all the different people who live everywhere in the world. He decided exactly when and where they would live.

[27] “God wanted people to look for him, and perhaps in searching all around for him, they would find him. But he is not far from any of us. [28] It is through him that we are able to live, to do what we do, and to be who we are. As your own poets have said, ‘We all come from him.’

And how should we respond to this truth?

Everything that breathes, praise the Lord! Praise the Lord! Psalm 150:6 (ERV)

This is a daily challenge for us all—to wake up grateful for functioning lungs and thankful for another day of life. And we can rest in the reality that God knows exactly how many days each of us is meant to live on this earth.

You saw me before I was born.
    Every day of my life was recorded in your book.
Every moment was laid out
    before a single day had passed.

(Psalm 139:16, NLT)

And on that note, let me leave you with the song “One More Day” by Sons of Sunday. Listen on YouTube here.