The Power of Your Breath

Breathing: a vital, yet perfunctory process necessary for survival; nothing to it! Or is there? Your breath may be the most powerful tool you have access to at any given time. You can use it to relax, focus, get an energy boost, get more out of a workout, assist with your meditation, cool your body down and warm it up at will, and even get better sleep. Breathwork training has been practiced in many ancient cultures as a way of life, by modern athletes to achieve incredible feats of strength and endurance, and by freedivers and spear fisherman to hunt, swim to great depths, and even play underwater sports for several minutes at a time on a single breath.

Without going into the crazy physiological and biochemical science behind breathwork, I’m gonna give you a few breathing exercises that you can practice to make your life better. Note: with exercises intended to relax you, its important to focus especially on lengthening your exhale. Exhaling is linked to our parasympathetic nervous system, the activation of which greatly aids in relaxation. Conversely, the inhale is more closely linked to the sympathetic nervous system, which controls the “fight or flight” function in our bodies, or the sympatho-adrenal response. You can see this for yourself by placing placing your fingers over the artery on your wrist and feeling your pulse. When you breath out slowly, you should feel your heart rate slow down, and then when you breath in, it should speed up.

Breathwork for Sleep

In order to get your body into “the zone” for a great nights sleep, or to aid in combating insomnia, try this breathing exercise. We’ll call it “Imagery Breathing”.

1. Begin by closing your eyes and breathing deeply through your nose
2. As you inhale, pay close attention to the feeling of expansion and how good it feels to be oxygenating your body
3. As you exhale, pay attention to how you feel. For instance, imagine time slowing down around you’; imagine yourself sinking deep into your bed with each breath out; imagine a feeling of comforting weight settling on you as you breath out; feel your eyes getting heavier, the room getting darker etc…
4. Repeat the full, refreshing, expansive inhale
5. Use the same or different imagery as you exhale
6. Repeat for 5 or 10 mins or until you’re too tired to think about what your doing and you can fall asleep.

Another simple exercise is a simple mindfulness technique with a small twist. This technique couples the soothing affect of breathing deeply with a “counting sheep” like essence.

1. Close your eyes and mouth
2. Inhale deeply, slowly and deliberately through your nose.
3. Exhale slowly and deliberately.
4. Steps 1 and 2 are one breath, and once you finished your exhale, count one
5. Repeat steps 1-4 until you reach 10 breaths and then start your count over at 1 until you become relaxed and tired enough to fall asleep

Breathwork for Anxiety

Anxiety. What a nasty demon. This breathwork exercise will help you overcome the symptom: an overwhelming sense of anxiety, or an an anxiety attack. The underlying issue is something that you definitely need to explore on your own or with a coach or therapist, but as you take down that monster, here are a couple specific things you can do, utilizing the power of your breath, to help you stay afloat.

Because this is a topic that is super important and that affects an increasing amount of people these days, I want to take a little extra time to explain the basics of breathing for combating anxiety.

When a person is having an anxiety attack, or is stressing out to the point that they’re panicking, they are naturally going to start breathing heavily and from the chest. There are two fundamental types of breathing: Thoracic, which is chest breathing, and Diaphragmatic, which is abdominal breathing. You may have heard abdominal breathing talked about like its breathing from your stomach.

The Breath Test

The easiest way to tell which way you are breathing (thoracic or diaphragmatic) is to lay down on your back and place one hand on your chest, and one hand on your lower abdomen, or stomach. Now take a deep breath and note which hand rises and falls. If it’s your upper hand, you are breathing with your chest, or Thoracic breathing. If your lower hand rises, you are breathing though your lower abdomen, or Diaphragmatic breathing. Your body will use diaphragmatic breathing if left to its own devices, without your conscious influence. Diaphragmatic breathing is what you want to be doing when you are breathing to combat anxiety. So without further ado, here are a couple of breathing exercises you should commit to memory so that you can whip them out when you need them.

This one is probably the most simple breathwork exercise out there, but it sets your breathing pattern to one where your body thinks, “Oh, I’m safe, obviously, because I’m breathing slowly and correctly”.

1. Keeping your shoulders relaxed, breath in deeply through your nose. Your abdomen, or stomach area, should expand while your chest rises very little, if at all.
2. Exhale through your mouth, pursing your lips slightly, and keeping your jaw relaxed.
3. Lather, rinse, repeat, for 3 to 5 minutes, or until you start to feel better!

A Note on CO2

Note for those of you who try this exercise and feel even MORE anxious: If at first, when you try this exercise, you feel MORE anxious, don’t worry. An excess of CO2, a gas naturally created by breathing, is increased substantially by hyperventilating and shallow breathing, both symptoms of anxiety and anxiety attacks. Here is a pubmed study on that. BUT, the good news is that you can train your body to react differently to CO2. Scott Carney, an extraordinary immersive journalist, and author of The Wedge, talks about his experience with CO2 and the fact that, even though a strong intake of CO2 can actually trigger panic attacks, with enough practice, your body can learn to respond positively to it. So take a break when you feel overwhelmed, and try again. Eventually, this breathing technique will help you regulate your body tempo, and help you calm down.

Here is a similar exercise, but one that takes a little more time and focus.

1. Lie down and close your eyes
2. Breath in through your nose, for a count of six. Imagine that you are breathing in a calm color like cool blue, or warm yellow.
3. Don’t fill your lungs to full when you do this (focus on slow breathing, not necessarily deep breathing)
4. Breath out through your mouth for a six count, lips pursed slightly, imagining that you are exhaling a stressful color, like red, or black
5. Once you feel calmed and soothed, take a couple of minutes to breath regularly and focus on how your body feels

Resources

For more breathwork tips and tricks, check out Whim Hoff, this Healthline article, and longwhitecloud qigong. I also wrote an article about stress that may offer some perspective. Hope it helps!

I promise you, taking a deep dive into your breathing will lead to nothing but better performance, health and mental well being. So take a deep breath, and become the incredible person that your family, friends, community and the world needs!