Micropause after breathing: depression and life satisfaction

Researchers of the Complutense University of Madrid and Nirakara Labin collaboration with the Biotechnology Institute (BTI) of Vitoria-Gasteiz (Basque Country), have identified a micropause that occurs after each exhalation that may be related to symptoms of depression and life satisfaction.

The study, published in Cerebral Cortexreveals that this post-expiratory pause is closely linked to the brain networks responsible for processing emotions. To reach this finding, scientists have evaluated brain behavior during the respiratory cycle of 46 healthy adults through advanced magnetoencephalography (MEG) techniques.

“We breathe about 20,000 times a day without realizing it. “Now we know that each of those breaths contains information about how we feel,” explained the co-principal investigator of the study, Nazareth Castellanos.

The research, which has also had the collaboration of Harvard Medical School (United States), opens the door to understanding the reason why Meditation techniques or certain breathing exercises improve mood. In addition, it will allow exploring the development of simpler and more accessible mental health monitoring tools.

“It not only provides a new way of understanding the brain, but also a potential tool to improve mental healthsomething especially relevant in current times,” stressed the director of Nirakara Lab and co-principal investigator of the study, Gustavo G. Díez.

“We all know that when something scares us we usually block the respiratory gesture. What we can now see is that interaction between breathing and brain. It is like having a window, through breathing, to the internal world of people,” said the director of C3N, the Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience laboratory of the Complutense University, Fernando Maestú.