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Most of us think of breathing as something the lungs do. The nose barely registers, except when it’s blocked.
Air doesn’t arrive at your lungs in the state it left the room. It passes through the nose first, and a fair amount happens on the way down to your lungs.
Chiropractic care takes an interest in breathing from the other end: how freely the chest can move to work with the process that starts when the nose takes in air.
The inside of your nose isn’t a smooth passage. It has ridged structures called turbinates. The air passes over these, which give it a longer and more turbulent journey than a straight tube would.
These surfaces are lined by a mucous membrane. This is the body’s first line of defence. It catches whatever might be in the air you’re breathing in: dust, pollen, and other contaminants. They’re moved to your throat and pass into the stomach instead.
The membrane is driven by millions of tiny hair-like structures called cilia. They line the surfaces and beat constantly. But here’s the interesting part. Cilia always push in the same direction, inward and down, no matter what position your head is in.
As the air passes over the turbinates, four things happen to it.
It’s heated.
It’s cleaned.
It’s slowed down.
And it’s pressurised.
Warmed, filtered air, delivered at the right pace and pressure, is easier to work with. It allows your lungs to extract more oxygen from each breath than they otherwise would.
Now here’s something most people don’t realise. Nostrils don’t work equally at the same time but take turns.
The process is controlled by erectile tissue that lines the inside of the nose. As blood flow increases on one side, the tissue expands and narrows the airway slightly. At the same time, the opposite side becomes more open. After a while, the process changes sides. Why we do it isn’t clear.
Most of us never notice this happening. The change is usually subtle, yet it happens 24/7 without any conscious input.
When you breathe through your mouth, you bypass the processes that involve the turbinates.
Air that enters through the mouth doesn’t go through the warming, filtering, slowing, and pressurising processes that take place inside the nose.
Mouth breathing also lowers pressure within the airway.
Normally, when you breathe correctly through the nose, air is directed towards the soft tissues at the back of the mouth. This helps prevent those tissues from relaxing inward and reducing the available space.
Breathing also relies on correct rib function.
As you breathe, the rib cage needs to lift, widen, and settle again. That movement depends on the ribs, the joints they form with the thoracic spine, and the surrounding muscles and connective tissues.
When movement through the mid-back becomes restricted, the ribs often have less freedom to move with it. The chest can still expand, but the work may be shared differently through the surrounding structures.
Helping those joints continue contributing their share of movement is one of the focuses of chiropractic care. How much difference that makes varies from person to person, but the aim remains the same: to support the mechanics involved in comfortable breathing.
The nose does far more than simply provide a passage for air.
Before each breath reaches the lungs, the air is warmed, filtered, moistened, slowed, and pressurised. All of this happens automatically, thousands of times a day.
Understanding that process makes it easier to see why the route air takes matters. The nose was built to do a series of jobs before the lungs ever become involved.
