Think about your breathing... it is a reflex, meaning ironically, for most of us - we DON'T have to think about it!
What a gift that is, because I'm sure with all thoughts running around in our heads and the feelings of our hearts... some of us might literally FORGET to breathe.
Think of how a mother in the throes of labour BREATHES through contractions.
The joy of that precious tiny newborns first breath and the quick thinking of medics when someone is NOT breathing...
Have you seen how athletes just before they do something really big or important they take a deep breath...
Think of how the breath sounds and feels after exerting yourself... sometimes we push so hard our lungs even burn...
Take your mind to a childhood place of jumping off ledges deep into the water and kicking so hard to get back to the surface to gasp for air!
When kids around me get upset or even cry... I ask them to breathe with me... I know that slow big deep breaths are calming. I learned this from watching my son's pre-school teacher, Miss de Wet.
Think of when you arrive at a beautiful place in nature and instinctively take a deep breath... as your eyes and heart take it all in.
In the English language, to breathe in, is to inhale, to breathe out, is to exhale.
A sigh is "a long, deep audible breath out expressing sadness, relief, tiredness"
We exhale and yawn as reflex when we are tired or bored.
So:
When last did you really focus on your breathing?
A yogi or meditation breath is to breathe in for 5 counts, hold the breathe for 3 and breathe out for 8!
Give it a try next time you are anxious!
From http://scienceline.org/2007/06/ask-hsu-fightorflight/
What are the benefits of being mindful about breathing.
We tend to breathe fairly quickly most of the time—from 14 to 20 breaths per minute is standard, which is about three times faster than the 5 or 6 breaths per minute proven to help you feel your best, says Patricia Gerbarg, MD, assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at New York Medical College and co-author of The Healing Power of the Breath. In times of fear, a flight or fight heart rate of 115 to 140 beats per minute is optimal for sustaining rapid, coherent thinking and quick reactions. But above 140 bpm, the sympathetic nervous system begins shutting down certain “unnecessary” bodily functions in order to focus on survival.
• At 145 bpm, you lose most of your ability to do complex motor skills or movements – remember how people in movies fumble to get a door open during critical moments?
• At 170 bpm, tunnel hearing and tunnel vision kick in, a response that allows your body to focus all its attention on the immediate danger at hand.
• Above 170 bpm, your thinking is reduced to the primitive fight or flight response. Running (or charging) is at its peak performance. The vast majority of people also tend to lose control of their bladder and bowels at this stage because even those functions consume resources that the body prefers to save for fighting or running.
I had never REALLY thought about the power of breathing until 2016 when I learned that in fight/flight mode the part of the brain we use (the oldest part of the brain) is the same as a reptiles (reptiles are known for being survivors, and attacking first and asking questions later). When we get all riled up, we sometimes talk so much and so fast and so loud we hardly breath at all. The lack of breath switches off the reasoning part of our brain - which is why we often attack, saying the first thing that pops into our mind, some even get physically abusive... (http://www.copingskills4kids.net/Reptilian_Coping_Brain.html)
Of course - it's called "taking a breather!" for that reason! Good quality time outs might include a prayer for help, or hugging the person we are in conflict with instead of sitting on the "naughty chair".
“There is a very direct relationship between breath rate, mood state, and autonomic nervous system state,” says Sat Bir Singh Khalsa, PhD, assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School who studies yoga and meditation. The autonomic nervous system governs the body’s sympathetic (fight-or-flight) and parasympathetic (rest-and-restore) responses, dialing functions like heart rate, respiration, and digestion up or down as necessary in response to potential threats. Evolutionarily, this worked as a survival mechanism, but today’s nonstop barrage of smartphone pings, emails, and news updates also trips the body’s alarms—and often.
“We’ve long known that breath changes in response to emotion: When people get panicky and anxious, their breath becomes shallow and rapid,” says Khalsa. “But we now know from a number of really good studies that actively changing the breath rate can actually change autonomic function and mood state.”
Here’s how researchers think it works: With each breath, millions of sensory receptors in the respiratory system send signals via the vagus nerve to the brainstem. Fast breathing pings the brain at a higher rate, triggering it to activate the sympathetic nervous system, turning up stress hormones, heart rate, blood pressure, muscle tension, sweat production, and anxiety. On the other hand, slowing your breathing induces the parasympathetic response, dialing down all of the above as it turns up relaxation, calm, and mental clarity.
So make a list of the all the things that make you breath easily
Prayers or Mantras
Peaceful beautiful places
Photos of loved ones
Reading peaceful and comforting words
Mindful exercise
Art, music & movement
Some find peace and relaxation in cooking, crafting, knitting and more...
Also make a list of your triggers (those buttons other people press that take you from peaceful to furious).
Learning about what set us off, instead of blaming the culprit, can set the stage for some real emotional work and also GROWTH...
Breathing and being mindful can help us step up and out of painful moments - because they are part of life, they are going to happen...
My Triggers:
Unkindness Rudeness Neglect
When people break my stuff
When things that happen break my heart
In my own "growth spurt" I'm learning not to judge, blame, complain or criticize but to breathe and meditate, and try to imagine the pain being an object of my environment, I let it "sit over there" until it is able to leave. Instead of it consuming me and becoming a total body experience... because pain is part of life... and we need to stop fighting, running and hiding from it... but let it be. Let ourselves consciously step up and out of it by doing more of the things we love. Let the tears come if they must, but dry them and do more of those things on "your list" that make you breathe more slowly, more deeply, more mindfully.