God's Natural Rhythm - Breathing
Breathing! Yes, we do it all day every day. Unfortunately, many people have picked up unconscious habits of breathing shallowly, in the upper part of the rib cage, because they hold their stomach muscles tense. Did you know that this is one of the ways that God gave us to quickly calm and soothe ourselves?
Intentionally changing our breathing and impacts how our nervous system is responding. Need a 30 second way to break strain and tension to find peace & calm and boost energy naturally … deep breathing is it! Want to trigger anxiety, fast shallow breathing is it! (Just kidding, I’m pretty sure you don’t want to trigger anxiety and are looking for solutions!)
Relieve Stress, Anxiety, or Worry with Deep Breathing Techniques
Run a simple test … pause and note how you are physically feeling and what your thoughts are like. Set a timer for 30 seconds and really quickly inhale and exhale – try and go as fast as possible. What do you notice - shortness of breath, fuzzy thinking? Let your breath go back to normal. Pause and check in again. Now inhale as slowly and deeply as possible and slowly exhale as slowly and deeply as possible. Notice the difference – calm, less tension, more focused?
When stress, overwhelm, anxiety or worry surface, our breathing gets even shallower and feeds physical tension and strain. This can lead to health problems, including high blood pressure. Consciously, manipulating our breath can stop the physical stress response occurring in the body and induce relaxation.
Even the FDA recognizes that 15 minutes of deep breathing a day supports reduction of stress and blood pressure. Of course, the FDA wants industry to profit instead of using the techniques that God gave us to heal ourselves. To monitor that you are breathing right, there’s a medical device approved with these claims! There’s also plenty of other medical devices to teach deep breathing for asthma, COPD, physical performance. 5 – 15 minute breathing work out per day lowers blood pressure as much as exercise & drugs. Save yourself the money and don’t feed their profits! God gave us a free method – the breath in our nostrils!
Given how busy and hectic you are, maybe you are not ready to set aside 5 to 15 minutes a day, so just give it a try with micro-breaks. It will still make a difference.
RELATED: Taking Smallest of Actions to Energize & Reduce Stress
Different Techniques to Recharge & Unwind …
In case if you have not focused on your breath before, here are a few tips & techniques.
Introduction to Basic Deep Breathing Exercise
Observe how you are breathing now - place a hand on your belly and on your chest. Are you mainly breathing in your chest? How much are you engaging your diaphragm to move the belly? The following will get you practicing moving your diaphragm more. Besides being relaxing, there are some bonus benefits with this style of breathing as it gently massages the colon stomach, helping to reduce digestive issues.
Here are the instructions:
- Slowly breathe in through the nose for at least 3 seconds. As you fill your lungs, your diaphragm pushes down on your abdominal organs making your belly area expand. Keep filling you lungs until you feel air to the top of your chest and your chest rises.
- Hold for a second.
- Slow exhale out through the mouth for at least 3 seconds. Belly goes back to normal as diaphragm contracts. Chest falls as air is expelled.
- The slower you can cycle the more relaxation you can experience. Don’t slow it down to the point that you feel physical tension or constriction building anywhere in the body. Keep flow and relaxed muscles.
Being able to stop the spiral of strain & tension, only takes a few seconds. Practice for longer periods to get greater health benefits.
This can be converted to a breath prayer with any Bible verse or prayer. Since you are super stressed out, I suggest the Serenity Prayer; it's got a lot of meaning and so has much broader application than just for people in recovery from addiction.
Training
There are multiple breathing “workouts” to help train and allow you to deepen your breathing and deepen your relaxation. As you experienced in the little experiment a moment ago, varying the rhythm and depth of your breathing can get different results. Here are two popular variants that include counting which can help slow spinning, negative thoughts and recover focus.
- Inhale for 4 count.
- Hold Breath for 7 count.
- Exhale for 8 count.
- Repeat no more than 4 times to avoid getting light headed.
- To make this work as a breath prayer, I find Psalm 46:10 works well.
- Inhale - God says, "Be Still
- Hold as listen for Holy Spirit
- Exhale - "know that I am God; I will be exalted"
- Inhale for 4 count
- Hold breath for 4 count
- Exhale for 4 count
- Hold for 4 count
- Repeat until you feel calmer.
- As this gets easy, train yourself with longer counts.
- To make this work as a breath prayer, instead of focusing on counting, I suggest reciting the Lord's Prayer where each line is an inhale or exhale and the hold is just a pause after each line to let it sink into your heart.
Variations
Breath exercises can be combined with other activities to get you into a deeper relaxation response. For example, all of these can be used with breath prayer as noted above. When there’s physical tension, my favorite is to wiggle or shake it out from toes to nose. Others like progressive muscle relaxation where each muscle group is tightened for 2-3 seconds and then relaxed going from toes to face. Or self-massage wherever there is specific area of tension, like the neck or shoulders
When anxiety and worry are in full swing, taking a moment for a gratitude exercise using HeartMath’s technique is really uplifting.
- Focus your attention in the area of your heart. Imagine your breath flowing in and out of your heart, as you breathe deeply.
- Focus on a positive emotion or strong memory that has a lot of feelings behind it (love, gratitude, kindness, care, compassion, joy, etc). This stimulates additional neurochemicals to offset the strain and stress than just breathing alone.
- Optional, include a prayer of gratitude and praise to God.
- You want to fan and encourage the positive emotions until you feel recharged and free.
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Experiment for Yourself
You are bio individual! Only you and God knows what the right break pattern and activities are for you. Play with some of these ideas or use these to seed some brainstorming of your own. Try some of these tactics for yourself for a week. Try a mixture of these for a week with different durations. See what appeals to you and quickly transforms stress, overwhelm and anxiety to relaxation.
I am confident that you will feel more energy and be able to enjoy more of your day. You’ll also find yourself more productive, creative, or strategic than when you skip breaks.
My hope for you...
Doing too much and feeling not enough can leave you little time for self-care. Yet, finding just a few minutes for deep breathing a few times a day will energize and restore your zest and vibrancy. Deep breathing is a great coping skill to use when you feel tension and strain rising - just pause and feel yourself recharge and unwind a few moments later.
I hope that these words can serve to inspire and energize changes in lifestyle that help you reduce stress & improve work-life balance. God intends for you to thrive & flourish.
Do you want to include a daily habit of prayer or breathwork in your day? Sometimes you need a little help to find some time in your crazy busy day. Here's a free guide to implementing faith-driven tiny habits. You can start wit just seconds a day and slowly increase your time, which leads to long term transformation. Begin to relieve stress and improve work-life balance today.
