Why “Just Breathe” Isn’t Always Helpful Advice

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Picture this: The stakes are high—or they seem that way to an athlete (or student or performer) you care about. One glance and you can feel the obvious tightness in their chest in your own. There’s a look of panic on their face. What do you do?

Most people operating from a regulated nervous system will try to encourage the athlete in question to breathe—which is appropriate. However, if they’re still conscious, they are breathing, even if not optimally. What’s often impairing their breath cycle is that they’re getting stuck in the process of inhalation.

That stuckness originates in physiological function. Think about the first thing most people do when they become aware of a threat: often that is to inhale, probably sharply. This helps us brace for impact.

Maybe try it yourself when you’re able. Maybe picture a threat coming into your awareness. Notice what your inhalation is like. Notice what you sense in your chest as you inhale. Maybe you notice a broadening or an expansion as you inhale, a sense of becoming larger. Notice how your body prepares to act. Notice the extent to which you trust the action your body is guiding you toward. Notice when and how you exhale and how your breath cycles from there.

When you’re ready, perhaps reflect on the tools you have that helped give you confidence in the course of action your body was guiding you towards. In other words, what skills or resources have you developed that gave your body the trust and confidence to release the expansion or broadening of your inhale? (More specifically: do you have skills to fight or neutralize this particular threat? Do you have confidence in your ability to move away with speed and agility? Do you have both or some combination?)

Remember that our nervous systems do not differentiate between “actual” and perceived threats. Perception is reality for our nervous systems.

If we haven’t had an opportunity to build a sense of confidence in our skills to meet a (perceived) threat effectively—or if trauma has thwarted our ability to find a sense of confidence or efficacy in the skills and resources we have available to us for meeting a threat—we often get stuck between the expansion of inhalation and the release of exhalation because that release involved in exhalation involves surrender. We have to give something up, consciously or unconsciously.

For someone under threat—particularly someone who has been subjected to threat in ways that deprive them of choice, agency, or autonomy—surrender is quite literally mortifying.

We used to say a runner was “rigging” in competitive distance running, referring to the rigor mortis that locks up a runner’s stride and buoyancy and ability to generate power when their body is full of lactic acid from exertion. Ideally, you wouldn’t rig until the very end of a hard race, if at all, but rigging can happen before a starting gun ever blows.

Fatigued respiratory muscles increase lactic acid levels. If we’re holding our breath, we’re fatiguing our respiratory musculature just as holding any weight or body posture fatigues the muscles involved.

So we absolutely want to encourage this athlete to breathe full, easy cycles of breath. But if they’re not aware that they’re caught in an inhale, telling a person to breathe may result in their attempting to inhale further, which their taxed respiratory muscles may struggle to do, and which they may experience as a failure that not only disappoints and frustrates (and scares!) the person who feels not only like they can’t breathe but also like they’re failing themselves and you.

As Norwegian sports psychologist Geir Jordet illustrates in his beautiful book Pressure, a 20-year study of penalty kicks in World Cup soccer, nothing incites choking so much as a task that we should be able to execute with ease and for which failure impacts not only the performer but also others around them. When the person is not able to “just” breathe, their activation—and possible panic—only escalates.

In other words, it’s never “just” breathing.

What to Say Instead of “Just Breathe”

One way to help someone who’s stuck bracing for a threat is to lengthen your own exhalation. Let the length and softness of your own exhalation become audible in your own voice and inflection. You might combine this with non-evaluative eye contact if they’re able to meet your gaze. Another possibility is to encourage them to place a hand over their heart and sense the weight of their own hand, which may help to facilitate exhalation.

Other options include hugging one’s own self. There are many different ways to do so, including giving one’s shoulders or lats a squeeze or pressing into the space between the shoulders and sternum. All of these options create contact with muscles involved in respiration and can support exhalation and a smooth breath cycle.

And of course, if it’s safe for all parties involved, a chest-to-chest hug where you can feel each other’s breath can also be powerful.

All of these practices work most effectively when practiced in low-stakes, less-threatening settings, making the skills more readily and efficiently accessible in the face of a threat.