Sweat & Smiles: Do Yourself a Favor - Take a Breath
By Melissa Romano on March 13, 2021 from Sweat & Smiles
Just take a breath.
Take a moment to catch your breath. Breathe a sigh of relief. Don’t hold your breath. Don’t waste your breath. Take a breather. Until the last breath. The breath of life. The power of your breath is remarkable. You could live for up to three weeks without food. You could survive three to four days without water. You can only survive approximately three minutes without breath.
Most humans are utilizing their breath as a subconscious act, something needed to survive, but what happens when we tap into the remarkable power of the breath. Utilizing the power of the breath you can rewire the brain, train your nervous system, and heal your mind and body.
With just a few deep breaths you can lower blood pressure and cortisol and increase parasympathetic tone. To put it simple blood pressure is the pressure of the blood within the arteries, when you are given those two numbers at the doctor’s office the top one measures the pressure after the heart contracts and the second number before the heart contracts. With a few deep purposeful breaths, you can change the pressure and flow of your heart.
Cortisol is the body’s built in alarm system, it’s the main stress hormone that works with certain parts of your brain to control mood, motivation, and fear. Your adrenal glands (I’m sure you can think adrenal… adrenaline…) are small organs above your kidneys that produce cortisol. Your hypothalamus (a region of your brain) and pituitary gland (the master gland in the brain) can sense if your blood contains the right amount of cortisol and your adrenal glands can pick up on these signals.
This is best known for fueling your fight-or-flight instinct which while it was designed to help you when in immediate danger most humans are spending their day to day lives with too much cortisol in their system. With a few deep purposeful breaths, you can lower your cortisol levels. For perspective cortisol plays a role in managing how your body uses macronutrients (carbs, fats, and proteins), keeps inflammation down, regulates blood pressure, controls your sleep/wake cycle, and boosts energy.
The fight or flight response is the sympathetic nervous system. Your parasympathetic tone is the part of the autonomic nervous system that which in general inhibits or opposes the physiological effects of the sympathetic nervous system. The Parasympathetic tone stimulates digestive secretions, slows the heart, constricts the pupils, and dilates blood vessels. With a few deep purposeful breaths, you can signal your parasympathetic nervous system to calm the body, manage your stress response to help decrease anxiety, fear, racing thoughts, a rapid heartbeat and shallow chest breathing.
If a couple deep intentional breaths can do all of that, imagine what you can do with breathwork. Breathwork refers to the active practice of controlling the breath. Imagine exercise and meditation meeting somewhere in the middle and you’ll find breathwork.
Utilizing breathwork you can manipulate your breathing rate and depth. In yoga this is referred to pranayama. If you’ve taken a modern yoga class for exercise it still consists of synchronizing the breath with movements between asanas (the different poses), but pranayama is also a distinct breathing exercise on its own. While nobody knows exactly how old the practice is, some scholars believe pranayama practices are 7,000 years old. Yes, seven thousand.
Prana is life force and yama is restraint or control of. Life force. Your breath is your life force. Through my own breathwork I find clarity, alertness, and increase in the awareness of my mind-body connection, and even emotional purging (because who needs some of that to stick around forever). Breathwork practices range from simple and easy to do at home to other requiring a practitioner to teach you the practice. Other breathwork practices are entirely secular and were developed to help people heal their minds or bodies or even to withstand extreme physical conditions.
Breathwork aids in positive self-development, boosts immunity, process emotions and heal emotional pain and trauma, develop life skills, increase self-awareness, enrich creativity, improve personal and professional relationships, increase confidence, self-image, and self-esteem, increase joy and happiness, aid in overcoming addictions, reduce anxiety and stress levels, and release negative thoughts. Breathwork is used to improve anger issues, anxiety, chronic pain, depression, emotional effects of illness, grief, trauma, and traumatic stress disorder.
If you’ve read this far, I imagine you are convinced enough to at least begin an active practice of breathwork and hopefully have taken a few deep, intentional breaths along the way. An easy and popular technique to begin with is box breathing, made more popular when the country learned that it is used by US Navy SEALs. Box breathing, also known as four-square breathing, involves exhaling to a count of four, holding your lungs empty for a four-count, inhaling at the same pace, and holding air in your lungs for a count of four before exhaling and beginning the pattern again. Try it now: inhale, 2, 3, 4. Hold 2, 3, 4. Exhale, 2, 3, 4. Hold, 2, 3, 4. Inhale, 2, 3, 4. Hold 2, 3, 4. Exhale, 2, 3, 4. Hold, 2, 3, 4. Inhale, 2, 3, 4. Hold 2, 3, 4. Exhale, 2, 3, 4. Hold, 2, 3, 4. Inhale, 2, 3, 4. Hold 2, 3, 4. Exhale, 2, 3, 4. Hold, 2, 3, 4.
Utilizing the power of the breath you can rewire the brain, train your nervous system, and heal your mind and body. Use it as you need throughout the day and as an active exercise practice and watch as your results unfold, and your mind and body healing improve.
With a breath of gratitude,
Melissa
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