Diaphragmatic!

I first learned about diaphragmatic breathing when I was 15 or 16. All i knew about it at the time was that it helped to keep you calm. Didn’t know why or how, but it worked, so i incorporated it into my life.

I can’t even say when, but it just became a habit of my body, and i didn’t think anything of it until recent years. I found that not everyone breathes this way, and it can be alarming to people who see you sleeping and your chest doesn’t move. Recently, i have learned all sorts of spiffy stuff about the activation of the parasympathetic nervous system, mitigation of the fight or flight response, and various improvements to the functioning of several body systems.

I was thinking about it today… is not breathing diaphragmatically a learned behavior? If you look at just about any other mammal – dogs of course, come to mind first – when they’re just chillin, if you watch, their belly is what moves, not their chest/ribs. I wonder how babies and small children breathe. I don’t have either, so i’ve not had the opportunity to observe for myself. But if they do breathe from their belly and not their chest, that makes me lean toward the idea that it is learned behavior.

if that is the case, why? Why would we, as a species, teach our offspring to breathe in a way that is sub-optimized for the way our body systems function?