halcyon house

a worker owned holistic wellness cooperative

Category: Physiology

Your fight or flight muscles (part 3) – accessory breathing muscles
What other muscles get activated during the fight or flight response?
Overcoming Chest Breathing: How Stress Locks Your Neck and Chest Muscles
In my two previous blog posts, I explained how the psoas and masseter muscles hold tension when your sympathetic nervous system (the fight-or-flight response) over-activates. However, the tension pattern does not stop there. Chronic stress also recruits your accessory breathing muscles.
What Are Accessory Breathing Muscles?
These small muscles reside in your neck and chest. Your body activates them automatically when you stop practicing deep diaphragmatic breathing and fail to expand your rib cage.
Under normal circumstances, your body safely engages these accessory muscles to assist your breathing during heavy exertion, such as vigorous exercise. However, using them for daily, relaxed breathing is highly inefficient. Wellness professionals call this habit chest breathing, a dysfunctional pattern where your rib cage lifts upward toward your chin rather than expanding outward.
The True Cost of Chronic Chest Breathing
When daily stress locks you into chest breathing, your neck and chest muscles work overtime. This constant over-activation keeps your body trapped in a perpetual fight-or-flight loop. By training your body to return to lateral rib cage expansion, you can release chronic neck tension, lower your stress hormones, and restore optimal respiratory health.
The chronic overuse of these neck and chest muscles leads to fatigue, tension headaches, neck pain, jaw tension and upper back pain. By breathing in this way, you are also stimulating your flight or fight nervous system in an ongoing feedback loop. It is important to have a breathing assessment if you have any of these symptoms.
Breath re-patterning is an important part of a holistic approach.
At Halcyon House, both Jennifer and I will assess your breathing pattern as part of our treatment assessment. We will recommend breathing practices that will assist you in regaining optimal and efficient breathing.
Part 1
Part 2
2026-08-26
What are fight or flight muscles?
These are muscles that activate when we are in a sympathetic reaction (fight or flight). This can be in reaction to something in our environment that doesn’t feel safe, something happening internally (a physical stressor) or in our mind (stress).
One of these muscles is the Psoas. This muscle does several actions that support us in fight or flight. It helps lift our knees up to run (flight) or defends our core (fight). If these muscles activate and then turn off again, we might not feel any consequences. It’s when these muscles turn on and stay on that we will notice symptoms. These could include hip pain, back pain, restricted breathing, fatigue and nervous system dysregulation (anxiousness, depression).
The tightness of the psoas muscle will also be increased with prolonged sitting.
The Halcyon House staff have many practices/treatments that will support you in releasing tension in the psoas:
- Acupuncture
- Massage
- Craniosacral therapy
- Somatic based movement/yoga
Part 2
Part 3
2026-04-10
Our bodies are truly amazing
Ready for some massage education?
Every time I do a deep dive into a system I thought I knew well, I am reminded of the subtleties of how everything works together in a beautiful symphony. This is especially true of the pericardium. In Traditional Chinese Medicine it is sometimes referred to as the Heart Protector and indeed it does that job well.
Recently, when Jakki needled my PC-6 acupuncture point, I felt a surge of energy shoot out of my middle finger, right where the meridian is mapped in the acupuncture charts.
But my practice is all about the fascia, so I started studying more about how the pericardium works, and how it is designed.
The pericardium is:
- a ball of dense fascia,
- a thin layer of fluid,
- and a soft inner ball with the heart suspended inside the soft inner ball.
The outer ball has a facial connection into the top of the diaphragm. Both the diaphragm and the pericardium are innervated with vagus nerve attachments, further pointing to their importance in nervous system regulation.
Visualize:
Every inhale is by design tugging on pericardium and pulling it gently downward. Every exhale releases it back to its neutral position. When we bypass primary diaphragmatic breathing for secondary thoracic breathing, we are stalling this natural rhythmic pulsing of the fluid surrounding the heart. If this function was not very important, the pericardium would not be connected to the diaphragm, as there are plenty of other anchor points available inside of the rib cage.
I have been imagining my pericardium is a jellyfish, with every downward movement of my diaphragm on the inhale gently tugging the jellyfish downward. Each exhale releases the diaphragm and allows the jellyfish to float upwards. Every breath soft and gentle moves my imaginary jellyfish up and down in my internal ocean. Just a few minutes of this breath imagery can really calm my spirit.
The more I learn about the body, the better I understand the systems within, and the better I can provide massage education to my clients or anyone who will listen!
More Physiology Posts
2026-04-10
Reflexology
Our understanding and exploration of the physical world around us is most often interpreted with our sense of touch through our hands and our feet. I have been interested in Reflexology for a while, but it wasn’t until this last month that I really started to dive into treating and understanding the whole body through the lens of the feet. If the feet are in distress the body follows suit, as the feet are the shock absorbers and terrain explorers of the whole body. They tell your body how it is connecting with the world, if the ground is stable enough to support you, and they move to disperse the stress of impact with every step.
My understanding of the fascial meridians and common disfunction patterns has made me feel ready to dive a little deeper into the nuances of the feet and explore different ways to treat them while keeping the whole body system in perspective. Piecing together and learning new tools to develop my understanding of the incredible human body is fun and keeps me on my toes!
Come in for an Evil Bone Water Reflexology Only session to de-evil your feet!
2025-10-01
Vagus Nerve
The vagus nerve is the longest and most complex of the cranial nerves, acting as a critical communication highway between your brain and your internal organs. It serves as the primary component of your parasympathetic nervous system, which controls your body’s ability to relax, rest, and digest.
Here is a breakdown of how it functions and how you can actively engage it to reduce stress.
Anatomy of the Vagus Nerve
The word “vagus” means wandering in Latin, which perfectly describes its path.
- Origin: It begins at the brainstem, right at the base of the skull.
- Pathway: It travels down both sides of the neck.
- Reach: It branches out into the chest and abdomen, connecting directly to the heart, lungs, and digestive tract.
The Brain-Body Connection
The vagus nerve provides a continuous loop of information between your mind and your body. It acts as the “brake pedal” for your nervous system. When you experience stress, your sympathetic nervous system triggers a “fight-or-flight” response, raising your heart rate and blood pressure. The vagus nerve counteracts this by releasing chemicals that lower your heart rate and signal to your brain that you are safe.
Activating the Vagus Nerve: Diaphragmatic Breathing
You can consciously stimulate your vagus nerve to trigger a relaxation response. The most effective way to do this is through diaphragmatic breathing (belly breathing).
You can practice this by following these steps:
- Hand Placement: Place one hand on your chest and the other hand on your abdomen.
- Inhalation: Breathe in deeply through your nose. Feel the hand on your abdomen rise and expand, while keeping the hand on your chest as still as possible.
- Exhalation: Exhale slowly. Feel your abdomen release and move inward.
Deep, slow breaths—especially when the exhalation is longer than the inhalation—instantly stimulate the vagus nerve, sending a powerful signal to your brain to calm the entire nervous system.
2025-07-25