Magazine Health Books. To send a link and summary of this article to a friend, click here . The respiratory system gives us the breath of life. The diaphragm is the main breathing muscle. When you breathe from your diaphragm, you expand your abdominal cavity instead of the chest area, pulling air to the deepest parts of the lungs.
Deep breathing is also a major stress-reducing technique.
Most of us, though, take inefficient shallow breaths. The airways of each lung look like a sideway tree of many branches. The trunk of the tree is the big bronchus, the larger branches are the secondary and tertiary bronchi and the smaller branches are called bronchioles. The air you breathe comes in through your mouth, goes down your throat and drops into your windpipe. Then it wends its way through the bronchial airways to reach 300 million tiny air sacs called alveoli.