Did You Know You Have Probably Been Breathing All Wrong?
Breathing right can change your life.
Take a deep inhale and expand your belly.
Hold your breath.
1.
2.
3.
4.
Exhale fully.
Doesn’t breath feel amazing?
Breath is your best tool in leading a happier and healthier life.
Breathing: a tale as old as time.
I took me a while to discover the magic of intentional breathing. Today, I cannot imagine my morning without a proper breathing session.
Breathwork is an ancient practice and is gaining a momentum.
According to Google Trends, searches for “breathwork” have increased 6-fold over the last five years.
Our culture is saturated with stimulation. Breath gives you space to take in less and give out more.
Deep breathing helps you to stay calm and relaxed and effectively capitalize on your energy and focus.
Breathwork practice is alluring because it gives immediate results.
What does it mean to breathe properly?
We know we need to breathe to be alive. But did you know you have probably been doing it all wrong?
The average person breathes four times more than they need. Over-breathing causes our body to receive less oxygen, not more.
There is also another end of the spectrum — shallow breathing.
Children breathe while fully expanding their bellies. With time, our breath becomes shallow.
We learn to constrict stomach muscles, so they look tight, and we look fit. A flat stomach is considered attractive. But this acquiescence to skin-deep beauty trends comes at the price of suppressing who we are. We are “belly-breathers”.
The shallow chest breathing, instead of “belly breathing”, aggravates your anxiety.
Breathing is always a genuine representative of your emotional state.
Proper breathing starts in the nose and then moves to the stomach as your diaphragm contracts, the belly expands (not just your chest), and your lungs fill with air.
How we breathe indicates how we feel.
The way we breathe determines how we think and feel and how we relate to the world.
I encourage you to pause throughout the day and check your breath. When you connect to your breath, you communicate with your body.
Many times we do not realize how certain events affect us. But breathing is always a genuine representative of your emotional state.
When you are anxious, you breathe more rapidly. When you are afraid, your breath becomes shallow.
By attuning to your deep breath, you bring your body back to a state of harmony, changing how you feel in the moment.
And how you feel in the moment impacts your actions and, consequently, your future.
When you make deep breathing your priority, you calm down racing thoughts, and you make better decisions, based on unity rather than from a place of stress or anger.
By taking control of your breath, you can change your life.
It is an effective self-awareness skill.
I like to think about breathwork as a more active form of meditation.
While meditating, what is your go-to technique to quiet the mind?
I bet many of you would answer: breathing.
By disconnecting from the mental chatter, you connect with your Higher Self.
Breathwork offers an invitation to enter unruffled nooks and crannies of your mind.
By disconnecting from the mental chatter, you connect with your Higher Self. This benefit alone sounds pretty awesome to me.
From this elevated state of consciousness, you heal, grow, and expand.
Breathing opens up a portal to your inner wisdom. Sessions of deep breathing bring answers to many questions and insights into challenges.
As you tap into your intuition, you experience the feeling of all-encompassing love, gratitude, and appreciation for your existence.
Breathwork is a modern-day superpower.
It stabilizes your nervous system.
Taking minutes off your busy day and investing them in breathwork offers you huge leverage over stress.
Remaining in a fight-or-flight state activates our sympathetic nervous system, accelerating our adrenal glands, cortisol levels and hormonal balance, which can affect our ageing process.
In the long term cortisol impacts our sleep and heart rate by making us feel jittery. Deep breathing resets the nervous system.
When your exhalation is longer than your inhale, the vagus nerve (running from the neck down through the diaphragm) brings your body to a state of calm by slowing down your heart rate and reducing the release of cortisol.
As deep breaths slow your heart rate, your vagus nerve recognizes the cues of safety and sends information to parts of the body, turning off their defences.
Your breath is your saviour.
Participants who completed 20 breathwork training sessions over eight weeks had significantly lower levels of the stress hormone cortisol compared with those who did not receive the training.
With deep breathing you let your body know it is safe.
When you practice diaphragmatic breathing, you activate your parasympathetic nervous system and go into the ‘rest and digest’ mode, which helps lower your blood pressure and cortisol levels,
says certified breathwork teacher Ana Lilia.
You are no longer in a reactive mode but mindfully responding to the world around you.
It makes you hyper-focused.
Did an afternoon slump strike?
Try breathing.
Breathwork can substitute for your cup of coffee. It boosts your attention span and balances the amount of noradrenaline that enhances focus.
Deep breathing provides extra energy to your cells. It improves oxygen capacity in the blood and makes you feel energized.
Breathwork sharpens attention and concentration, improving neuroplasticity — the ability of brain cells to adapt and change in response to situations we encounter.
Neuroplasticity improves our psychological flexibility, allowing us to pause and respond thoughtfully to problems and challenges instead of reacting or trying to control the uncontrollable.
It serves as a painkiller.
Controlled breathing at a slowed rate helps us cope with physical discomfort.
Whenever I bump my toe against the chair, the pain is excruciating.
Focusing on my breath diverts my awareness from the pain to inhaling and exhaling. I do my best to keep my attention on my breath until the pain lessens.
When you breathe deeply, the body releases endorphins, reducing sensitivity to pain and boosting pleasure.
It gets you out of your head.
Breathwork is ideal when you feel overwhelmed. It creates a safe space to manage anxiety.
Breath helps us connect with our emotions instead of remaining slaves to our thoughts.
Unprocessed negative emotions get stuck in our bodies causing energetic blockages that often manifest as diseases.
These traumas and blocks can stay in the body since childhood taking a toll on the quality of our lives. Inhaling and exhaling help you release fear, traumas, limiting beliefs and negative emotions.
Breath creates a safe space to manage anxiety.
Breath wipes out disturbing thoughts and makes space for clarity and deep connection with the Truth.
The mind runs because you are giving it the power of your attention. Focus your attention on the breath, and the thinking mind falls away.
Breath is your friend. It brings you back to the present moment and saves you from missing out on life.
In the world of rapid transformations, make slowing down your priority.
Tips for starting.
- Set an intention. What are you looking for to get out of breathwork? A strong “why” to a new habit helps you stick to it.
- Set a time and place. To get in the groove of intentional breathing, you need to make it attractive. Find a comfortable space and a time slot when you don’t have to rush anywhere.
- Find a guided breathwork session that feels good to you. Then you can level up your game by researching more advanced techniques. Start small but consistently. It will take you somewhere special.
- Throughout the session, pay attention to your breath. Instead of thinking about your next meal or appointment, be here and now.
- Have an open mind. There is no wrong way to practice breathwork. Give yourself time for the benefits to sink in.
If you are a beginner, I encourage you to try box breathing, 4–7–8 breath, 2–1–4–1 breath, and alternate-nostril breathing. Experiment with different options to see which works for you.
If you are a ‘seasoned breather’, I wholeheartedly advise two YouTube channels:
- Breathwork Beats. You will discover many breath styles like the breath of fire, alkaline breathing, Wim Hof breathing, power breathing, the gasping breath, shamanic breathing, & alternate nostril breathing.
- Breathe With Sandy. Longer sessions can lead to open hearts, manifestations, trauma release, and altered states of consciousness among many others.
Deep breathing changed the relationship with my belly. I am no longer trying to hide it.
Instead, I inhale acceptance and breath out bullsh**.
Being alive is a gift. Breath is a reminder of that privilege.
And it is always available, right under your nose.
I wish you a breathtaking life, happy and breathing people!