Breathe in deeply to bring your mind home to your body.
-Thich Nhat Hanh
When life feels heavy, overwhelming, stressful or maybe just a little off, connecting to your breath may be the most effective intervention you can do in that moment. By accessing a deep, diaphragmatic breath, your entire internal chemistry can shift.
Breathwork is an ancient practice found in various cultures and traditions, extending from yoga's pranayama to modern therapeutic interventions aptly labeled breathwork. It involves managing the breath through various techniques for the purpose of releasing stress; bringing the mind and body to a state of calm and serenity.
Breath awareness is always available to you, whether in times of calm or when experiencing uncertainty, stress or fear. Many believe that breathwork needs to be connected with meditation and/or yoga to be helpful. Whereas I am not downplaying the benefits of either as both meditation and yoga involve and focus on the breath and provide innumerable health benefits to the mind and body, the good news is that you do not need to be participating in either to derive the benefits of breathwork, as it is a complete and independent practice, and is fully effective in cultivating an internal state of peace.
Always accessible, proper breathing can aid in helping your body reach and maintain a state of homeostasis. Giving yourself time to take a few, deep diaphragmatic breaths can help bring a much needed restoration to your nervous system.
Breathwork can activate the parasympathetic nervous system (PNS) which is responsible for your body's rest and digest function. This can help calm the stress response which in modern times has grown so out of balance as so many today are over-worked, over-scheduled, and over-stimulated. We have become mass consumers of distressing news, and are chronically living with a sense of burdensome deadlines and urgency.
An off-shoot of chronic stress is the eventual feeling of burnout. Whereas breath management may not be the answer to burnout, it can help you push the pause button long enough to explore solutions and options that may better align with your soul and purpose, or help create organizational changes that mitigate the deleterious effects of burnout. By reducing stress and anxiety, emotional well-being improves!
2. Enhances Self-Awareness
By calming the mind, opportunities for introspection and self-reflection occur, which can help unlock creative insights and ideas.
The process of self-discovery is both wide and deep, oftentimes resembling a labyrinth. Analogous to navigating through marsh or swamp land in an effort to explore parts of nature not easily observed, so too is the trek inward. Knowing ourselves requires investigation and exploration. It requires giving yourself a moment to stop and connect inwardly. Being on the proverbial hamster wheel creates shallow breathing in its perpetual state of busy-ness!
The very act of pausing, reflecting, connecting and planning is transformatively powerful and can be the determining factor in increasing your energy levels, which leads us into —>
3. Boosts Energy
Breathwork can allow for more oxygen to flow to your brain and body, which will result in improved lung functioning and energy. Improved lung capacity benefits respiratory health, which can serve to improve overall health in the body. A regular and consistent practice of breathwork can lead to improved lung capacity and efficiency, and improved respiratory functioning helps elevate energy levels in the body.
Everything comes down to energy.
Health (both mental and physical) is about energy.
Time management is about energy.
Productivity and efficiency are about energy.
Relationship building is about energy.
Learning, attention and concentration are about energy.
When low, very little happens.
When mindfully high, you become unstoppable.
YOUR LIFE FEELS JOYFUL!
4. Improves Focus & Attention
Controlled breathing can improve clarity of mind, thereby boosting focus and concentration, which are subcomponents of your executive functions. These are the skills required for achieving success in life, and they are interconnected, complex and coordinated and are your control or supervisory center, located within the frontal and prefrontal lobes of your brain. To learn more about your executive functions, click here —>
5. Promotes Restorative Sleep
Sleep disturbance is a common health complaint, affecting approximately 10-25% of the general population and pharmaceutical sleep aids remain the first line of treatment for insomnia and other related sleep issues.
Although they can be effective, they also have the potential for abuse and cross-reactivity with other medications, as well as a plethora of side-effects. Breathwork techniques can improve sleep patterns by relaxing the mind and body. In addition to breathwork, if sleep is a challenge for you, you may wish to consider a Yoga Nidra practice. This type of yoga, also known as yogic sleep, helps place the body into a deep state of relaxation, by transitioning you from beta brain waves to a more relaxed alpha state of mind.
6. Helps With Pain Management
A stronger and calmer nervous system is one of your best defense against pain, and breathing exercises can be a natural method to cope with and reduce pain. In addition to pharmaceutical and mainstream medical intervention, decades of research into pain management supports the efficacy of combining talk therapy (psychotherapy) and stress management strategies, such as breathwork, to create a comprehensive treatment protocol, supporting recent advances in better understanding the wisdom of the mind-body connection. Stress reduction interventions typically involve stimulation of the vagus nerve, which has a regulating effect on the mind and body. By strengthening this connection, the body can achieve balance and a decrease in the sensations of pain, as well as decreasing anxiety and fatigue.
7. Boosts Immune Functioning
Each and every benefit listed above is good for your immune system! Each and every one! A strong immune system delivers so much to you by way of emotional, cognitive and physical gains. With a strong immune system, you will have more energy, become less susceptible to disease and illness, and if you do in fact become ill, a robust immune system will help you HEAL faster and more completely. Who wouldn't want that?
Never underestimate the power of just one intentional breath.
Just one!
For better results, REPEAT OFTEN!
Let's connect:
FACEBOOK: Marie Therese Rogers
Atlantic Behavioral Health Professionals
Life in Focus
LINKEDIN: Marie T. Rogers, Ph.D.
INSTAGRAM: Mariethereserogers
YOU ARE ALSO INVITED TO LISTEN TO THE LIFE IN FOCUS PODCAST ON APPLE AND OTHER STREAMING DEVICES.
The information presented in this blog is intended for general knowledge and is not a substitute for medical advice or treatment. As with most things in life, there isn't a magic pill or "cure-all" but there are strategies to help regain control of your life.
I‘ve been working on breathwork and meditation for a couple of years and they’ve been incredibly helpful for my anxiety and sleep! Thank you for sharing this important information!
Your brain is constantly processing information, and does so with lightning speed. It quickly decides what stimuli to attend to and what to ignore. Emotions play a large role in the brain's filtering process. How the information is processed will determine the degree to which you feel focused, serene, calm, anxious, stressed, and/or discombobulated. Your executive functions are key to critical reasoning and problem solving. Critical reasoning and problem solving are negatively correlated with cognitive distortions. As one goes up, the other goes down. Everybody cognitively distorts! You can't always think clearly, logically and productively. But, you can help notice when thinking goes awry. You can learn to mindfully halt a runaway thought process that is taking you down a dark and deep rabbit hole. You can learn to leverage your executive functions and mitigate cognitive distortions. Th...
ENERGY FLOWS WHERE ATTENTION GOES Too many of us are living lives that are unsustainable, with rates of chronic illness, anxiety and burnout escalating at exponential rates. We are spending less time outdoors, tapping into nature's rhythm and bountiful health offerings, and more time indoors, in isolation, and in front of screens. Few are reporting feeling energized, focused, and a general sense of well-being. Dysregulated, distracted, and disconnected, we have allowed ourselves to fall into habits that reinforce this unhealthy and heavily tech-driven lifestyle, that has led to executive function fatigue. These are neither natural nor desirable states of being and will eventually lead to dis-ease within our bodies, affecting health and energy levels that are needed for connection, harmony, focus , imagination , purpose and direction. Rather than feeling a sense of forward progression, many are living lives analogo...
QUIET YOUR MIND ENERGIZE YOUR BODY RECLAIM YOUR SENSE OF PEACE Recently, I heard the following quote and it both resonated with and deepened my understanding of how we end up asking ourselves: How did I get here? From Ernest Hemingway's novel, The Sun Also Rises, one character asks the other: "How did you go bankrupt?" The response: "Two ways; gradually and then suddenly." How did I end up here? This self-reflection question is usually associated with a negative outcome. We do not tend to be curious about how we achieved a high level of success because built into the success model is the incremental stages of disciplined and focused work that led one from point A to point B. Success follows a formula and there is a conscientious effort that advances life in an onward and upward fashion. However, when life spirals downward, it usually follows this formula —> gradually and then suddenly. This traje...
The process of self-discovery is both wide and deep, oftentimes resembling a labyrinth. Analogous to navigating through marsh or swamp land in an effort to explore parts of nature not easily observed, so too is the trek inward. Knowing ourselves requires investigation and exploration. It requires giving yourself a moment to stop and connect inwardly. Being on the proverbial hamster wheel creates shallow breathing in its perpetual state of busy-ness! 
I‘ve been working on breathwork and meditation for a couple of years and they’ve been incredibly helpful for my anxiety and sleep! Thank you for sharing this important information!
ReplyDeleteThank you for reading and sharing your experience with breathwork and meditation!
DeleteThanks for sharing this! It’s so easy to forget the power of one mindful breath.
ReplyDeleteGreat article 👏
ReplyDeleteGreat article! Super informative, thanks for sharing!
ReplyDelete