Healthy Breathing Makes You Brainier

How everyday breathing affects your ability to concentrate, and what to do about it

Breathwork facilitates a slowing down of automatic patterns, like bad eating habits, so you can take back control. Yolya Ilyasova/Shutterstock

There’s no denying that the past two years have presented challenges.

At work and in family life, we’ve all dealt with unprecedented situations. The COVID-19 pandemic has created an urgent need to address mental health issues due to a global increase in anxiety and depressive disorders. While mental well-being is a multifaceted issue, research out of Harvard shows us a simple truth: A wandering mind is an unhappy mind. In 2010, Daniel Gilbert and Matthew Killingsworth collected real-time data from an app known as Track Your Happiness. They concluded that “the ability to think about what is not happening is a cognitive achievement that comes at an emotional cost.”