Everyone experiences stress in life, whether it comes from home, work, family, or other sources. How you manage that stress is key to living a happy and healthy life, according to Body & Brain Yoga Tai Chi.
The New Year is a great time to get started on a new plan to manage stress, and one of the best ways to approach it is to practice breathwork.
Breathing exercises are known to improve one’s overall mental wellness. What’s more, practicing breathwork is easy because you can do it anywhere and anytime you want.
Below are some specific techniques you can utilize to manage emotions and cultivate resilience through breathwork.
Why Breathwork Works
Every time you breathe, you introduce oxygen into your body, which is essential for survival and thriving. When you experience stress, it can significantly affect your breathing, causing you to breathe faster, shallower, and/or irregularly.
Most of the time, when you’re stressed, you unconsciously start to breathe shallow and fast. This may limit the full exchange of oxygen (breathing out carbon dioxide to breathe in oxygen), triggering a stress response known as fight-or-flight, according to Harvard Medical School.
All of this can lead to even more stress, which contributes to anxiety, depression, and other mental and physical ailments. Breathwork can help to regulate your breathing so that you can bring your body back to a calmer state.
Studies show that breathwork can reduce stress, improve your mood, and have an anti-inflammatory effect on your body. Why? Because you’re reassuring your brain that everything’s fine and it doesn’t need to freak out.
Effective Breathwork Techniques
You can manage many aspects of stress by practicing specific breathwork techniques. Here are some of the more popular ones:
4-7-8
The 4-7-8 technique takes your focus away from everything else and brings it to the breath by forcing you to count beats while you breathe. The concept is that you breathe in for four seconds, then hold your breath for seven seconds before finally exhaling for eight seconds.
Not only does this slow down your breathing, it helps to ensure that you’re emptying your lungs completely, ridding your body of stagnant energy.
Deep Abdominal
A little different from the 4-7-8 technique, deep abdominal breathing utilizes much longer inhalations. Body & Brain Yoga Tai Chi says that the goal is to visualize the air filling your entire body as you inhale.
You should feel and visualize your chest and belly expanding with air as you inhale and then relaxing while you exhale. Not only does this practice help to rid your mind of everything else, but it also helps to relax your body at the same time.
Alternate Nostril
Much like the name suggests, this breathing technique will have you alternate breathing through one nostril at a time.
You can start by pressing one nostril closed while breathing in using the other one. Then, alternate and do the same thing in reverse.
The fact that you are connecting your physical body to your mind while you breathe helps increase the power of this technique.
About Body & Brain Yoga Tai Chi
Body & Brain offers yoga, tai chi, and a wide variety of mind-body practices online and in-studio for holistic fitness and energy healing. Founder Ilchi Lee began sharing his transformative principles with a single stroke patient forty years ago. His audience grew, and his principles became known as Brain Education. Today, this curriculum is practiced in 80 Body & Brain locations nationwide and several countries worldwide.
Sarah Brown (RN) is the Lead Editor at Health News Tribune where she covers mental health and emotional wellness. Sarah graduated with a degree in nursing from Ryerson in Toronto. She currently lives in Toronto. Prior to becoming a journalist, Lindsay worked as a health professional in Cambridge Ontario.
