Your lungs work 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year to keep you alive and breathing. They breathe between 12 and 15 times per minute, which is equivalent to 17,000 breaths per day or more than 6 million per year.

Learning to control your breathing can help clear your lungs, calm your stress response, and even help you tolerate exercise better.

According to experts, taking a slow, deep breath to calm yourself benefits not only your lungs and airways but also your mental health.

Learning to breathe correctly—specifically through diaphragmatic breathing—reduces heart rate and decreases anxiety.

Therefore, learning to breathe to improve lung health involves practicing specific techniques daily, if possible.

These methods actively retrain the respiratory muscles, help expel residual air from the lungs, and maximize oxygen intake.

Specific and practical breathing techniques to improve lung function include:

Diaphragmatic (abdominal) breathing. This method strengthens the diaphragm, the main muscle of respiration preventing you from relying excessively on your neck and chest muscles.

How to do it: Lie on your back with your knees bent and a pillow under your head. Place one hand on your chest and the other on your abdomen. Inhale slowly through your nose, feeling the air push up your abdomen outwards (the chest should remain relatively still). Contract your abdominal muscles and exhale slowly with pursed lips, allowing the hand placed on the abdomen to press inwards and downwards

Pursed or compressed lip breathing. This technique slows your breathing, keeps your airways open longer, and helps relieve shortness of breath.

How to do it: Relax your neck and shoulders. Inhale slowly through your nose while counting to two, keeping your mouth closed. Purse your lips as if you were gently blowing out a candle. Exhale all the air slowly and gently through pursed lips. Try to make the exhalation last at least twice as long as the inhalation (for example, exhale while counting to four).

Deep breathing (expanding the rib cage). This exercise increases lung capacity by ensuring that air reaches all areas of the lungs.

How to do it: Sit or stand with good posture to allow your lungs to expand fully. Place your hands on either side of your lower ribs. As you inhale, focus on expanding your ribs outwards (like an accordion or wings) without lifting your chest. Exhale slowly and without forcing it.

Keeping the lungs and airways clean supports your health on all levels: physically, by allowing the body to react more efficiently to seasonal viruses and mentally, by allowing you to relax and reduce anxiety and stress.