Searching for a simple but highly effective way to reduce stress in your body and improve both mental and physical health? When stressed, you may have been offered the advice, “Just breathe.” The truth of this simple suggestion runs deep.
When we’re anxious, we tend to shallow-breathe, and that’s where the problem of being stressed begins. Our body slips into fight-or-flight survival mode in response to whatever circumstance has caused us to feel stressed. Instead of breathing deep, from the belly, we take short, shallow breaths, from the lungs only.
Breath is Life
If someone around you seems stressed, it’s more than likely that they’re holding their breath! And that just exacerbates the problem, doesn’t it. Maybe you’ve been that person, forgetting to breathe during a tense situation.
Today we’re going to “un-learn” the bad habit of shallow-breathing when stressed, and explore ways to optimize breathing to deliver nourishing, life-giving oxygen to the deepest recesses of our body’s cells.
Is There a “Right Way” to Breathe?
Consider that we can certainly train ourselves to optimize how we breathe. Breath is something that we can control. So when everything else feels out of control, it’s helpful to know how to control our breath. Once we do that, we can work toward a healthier state of being. Being healthy in body and mind empowers us with the strength and fortitude to work on, and solve, our own problems.
Thinking about a right or wrong way to breathe certainly can add to stress levels. So let’s think of different ways of breathing as having a definite purpose, or direct effect on the body. Here, the goal is to reduce stress and give ourselves the gift of that oxygen-rich breath of health, and life.
Breathing, when optimized, can lead to better mental, physical and emotional health. Technically called ventilations, the common definition of breathing is the movement of air in or out of the lungs. However, ancient texts from yoga refer to the breath as the ebb and flow of life force energy or vitality. This makes sense, being that breath is one of the measures of being alive.
