By taking taking longer and deeper breaths, we can breathe ourselves to a healthier life. Control you breath, control your mind, control your life!
Yogis put a great deal on the breath and here’s why. The quickest and easiest way to calm your mind, to feel less stressed and annoyed at the small things, is to learn to control your breath. In the fast pace society we live in today we rarely stop and take our time to breathe fully. Shallow breathing leaves less time for the oxygen to be taken up by our red blood cells. The deeper your breath in your belly, the deeper it goes in your lungs- allowing the capillaries to grab on to the oxygen that nourishes your body.
Shallow breathing activates our sympathetic nervous system, our ‘fight and flight’ mode, and we need that too but not for the long time periods most people experience every day.
It can arise by someone cutting in front of you in the coffee-shop line or driving in hectic morning traffic. These small things can easily make anyone annoyed and perhaps even angry, creating a faster heartbeat, adding shallow breathing and getting a dopamine rush, like your body is preparing for a fight with a bear in a caveman style kind of manner.
Now that fight doesn’t really happen often in today’s modern world but our bodies still work in the same way.
During the ‘flight and fight’ mode, basic functions in our body, like digestion, turn off to focus everything on survival. For people that live in this state most of their day, their bodily functions are disturbed and function less optimally. Being in a stressed situation or feeling anxious can quickly be changed by elongating your exhale. By doing that we start to activate our parasympathetic nervous system, our ‘rest and digest’ system. It slows our heart rate down and increases activity in our intestines and glands that help our bodies run smoothly.
Science shows that prolonged stress and anxiety can lead to depression and many chronic diseases being some of the biggest killers today. Whenever you feel the stress creeping up on you, make it a habit to focus on your breath. Calm your mind by slowing down your breath. This allows us more time to respond rather than react to things. Taking 10 deep breaths putting your focus on your exhale to be a little longer with each breath, notice the difference instantly. Practice this frequently and it will take you less time to reach that state of calm and peace of mind each time.
Natalie is a yoga and meditation teacher with over 400 hrs of Teacher Training in Vinyasa, Yin-Yang, Yin and Mindful Meditation from Buddhism traditions and a holistic health coach from the Institute of Integrative Nutrition NYC (IIN). She is where yoga, wellness and spirituality merge to create change and to find harmony from the inside.
IG: @natalie.soderstrom Website: www.natalie-soderstrom.com Email: hi@natalie-soderstrom.com