How to Practice Deep Breath
Hello there, it’s Katie from Compass Counseling, and today I wanted to share some quick tips with you about deep breathing.
What’s the Big Deal About Deep Breathing?
Deep breathing is one of the most versatile and easy to use skills to use, wherever you are, to help you relax. When we get worked up or stressed out, our fight-or-flight response system kicks into gear. We start breathing quicker and taking more shallow breaths. Deep breathing works by being intentional about taking slow and deep breaths, which can help combat those symptoms when feeling triggered by the fight-or-flight response in your body. When we take these deep breaths, it can help us in many ways. It can help us increase our oxygen, lower our blood pressure, and when these things are working together it can help us feel more relaxed.
How to use the breathing
I'm going to give you some tips here and then we can walk through an exercise together, with the audio recording included in this post. You are going to want to sit back into a comfortable position and close your eyes. Closing your eyes isn't required, but oftentimes people find it helpful to remain focused on the deep breathing activity as it can minimize distractions.
When you're learning to use deep breathing, it's also helpful to try to place one of your hands on your belly so you can feel when your body rises and falls each time that you take a breath. That helps you understand that you're taking a full, deep breath. You're going to get in the habit of doing this if you do it over and over again, so that may not be required, but what we're trying to do is get it to where you will be in the habit of taking large breaths, totally filling your lungs. THis is sometimes referred to as breathing with your diaphragm and prevents shallow breathing.
When you're doing deep breathing exercises, you will want to breathe in slowly through your nose. I find it helpful to do some “prep breathing” to help me get ready for the actual exercise. This is by no means a requirement, just something that is helpful for me when entering into a deep breathing session. I spend no longer than a minute preparing myself. Then I try to spend 4 seconds inhaling. You can go slower if you want, but take four seconds to make sure that you're taking that deep breath in. You can mentally count that in your mind, down from four, three, two, one. Once you get your lungs full, you want to hold the air in your lungs, but not to the point to where you feel strained or uncomfortable. If you can hold the air inside your lungs for four seconds, that's a good place to start.
So, you did your four seconds of breathing in, you held it for four seconds, or whatever's comfortable, you want to slowly exhale through your mouth. You want to spend about 4-7 seconds to release the air. You want to practice it like you're blowing it out very slow, sort of like if you were blowing or exhaling out through a straw. This will get you in the habit of exhaling slowly. Then, you can repeat this cycle. Whether you try out the audio exercise included here or are going it alone, a good goal is to set a time and start with two minutes of focused deep breathing and work up to a practice of maybe five or 10 minutes of deep breathing for greater benefits. I suggest putting your phone on airplane mode and setting a timer to get started. Picking a time such as right before or after lunch, or in your car before you enter your home after a long day at work.
Remember, this is to help improve our mental health not something to be perfect at. Some people, just naturally breathe fast and take shallow breaths. It's easy to fall back into that habit, even if you're in the middle of deep breathing practice. What we want to do is just practice deep breathing and get in the habit of it, and then you will notice the benefits in the moment and over time.
If you would like some guided help on getting started check out the quick audio exercise here. Make sure that you are NOT DRIVING, the exercise is about 5 minutes.
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