Breathing As Therapy

The term "fight or flight" is also known as the stress response. It's what the body does as it prepares to confront or avoid danger. When appropriately invoked, the stress response helps us rise to many challenges. But trouble starts when this response is constantly provoked by less momentous, day-to-day events, such as money woes, traffic jams, job worries, or relationship problems.

Health problems are one result. A prime example is high blood pressure, a major risk factor for heart disease. The stress response also suppresses the immune system, increasing susceptibility to colds and other illnesses. Moreover, the buildup of stress can contribute to anxiety and depression. We can't avoid all sources of stress in our lives, nor would we want to. But we can develop healthier ways of responding to them.

One way is to invoke the relaxation response, through a technique first developed in the 1970s at Harvard Medical School by cardiologist Dr. Herbert Benson. The relaxation response is a state of profound rest that can be elicited in many ways, including meditation, yoga, and progressive muscle relaxation.

Breath focus is a common feature of several techniques that evoke the relaxation response. The first step is learning to breathe deeply.

Deep Breathing Benefits

Deep breathing also goes by the names of diaphragmatic breathing, abdominal breathing, belly breathing, and paced respiration. When you breathe deeply, the air coming in through your nose fully fills your lungs, and the lower belly rises.

For many of us, deep breathing seems unnatural. There are several reasons for this. For one, body image has a negative impact on respiration in our culture. A flat stomach is considered attractive, so women (and men) tend to hold in their stomach muscles. This interferes with deep breathing and gradually makes shallow "chest breathing" seem normal, which increases tension and anxiety.

Shallow breathing limits the diaphragm's range of motion. The lowest part of the lungs doesn't get a full share of oxygenated air. That can make you feel short of breath and anxious.

Deep abdominal breathing encourages full oxygen exchange — that is, the beneficial trade of incoming oxygen for outgoing carbon dioxide. Not surprisingly, it can slow the heartbeat and lower or stabilize blood pressure.

Practice Breath Focus

Breath focus helps you concentrate on slow, deep breathing and aids you in disengaging from distracting thoughts and sensations. It's especially helpful if you tend to hold in your stomach.

First steps. Find a quiet, comfortable place to sit or lie down. First, take a normal breath. Then try a deep breath: Breathe in slowly through your nose, allowing your chest and lower belly to rise as you fill your lungs. Let your abdomen expand fully. Now breathe out slowly through your mouth (or your nose, if that feels more natural).

Breath focus in practice. Once you've taken the steps above, you can move on to regular practice of controlled breathing. As you sit comfortably with your eyes closed, blend deep breathing with helpful imagery and perhaps a focus word or phrase that helps you relax.

Ways to elicit the relaxation response

Several techniques can help you turn down your response to stress. Breath focus helps with nearly all of them:

• Progressive muscle relaxation
• Mindfulness meditation
• Yoga, tai chi, and Qi Gong
• Repetitive prayer
• Guided imagery

Creating A Routine

You may want to try several different relaxation techniques to see which one works best for you. And if your favourite approach fails to engage you, or you want some variety, you'll have alternatives. You may also find the following tips helpful:

• Choose a special place where you can sit (or lie down) comfortably and quietly.
• Don't try too hard. That may just cause you to tense up.
• Don't be too passive, either. The key to eliciting the relaxation response lies in shifting your focus from stressors to deeper, calmer rhythms — and having a focal point is essential.
• Try to practice once or twice a day, always at the same time, in order to enhance the sense of ritual and establish a habit.
• Try to practice at least 10–20 minutes each day.

Understanding The Importance Of Deep Breathing In A Crisis

Although we all breathe every day it remains a largely unconscious process. This means our breathing often changes in important ways without us being aware of it.

Anxiety, anger, deep calm, or steady concentration each have their own patterns of breathing and we move between different styles or breathing every day without usually realising it. If we can recognise these styles of breathing, we can also consciously change them and this, in turn, produces a change in our emotional state. We can therefore use changes to a pattern of breathing to change our mood and mental states.

For example, if you are anxious, the breath is often shallow and sharp, and changing your breathing to slow and deep, using the diaphragm, will lower your level of anxiety. This change is not usually so powerful as to make you totally relaxed in a few moments, but it is usually enough to ‘take the edge off’ the anxiety and ‘crank it down a few notches. For someone suffering anxiety, this is usually enough to allow them to think more clearly about the situation and decide upon what additional strategies to use to help.

In my work as a Chaplain, I have taught simple ‘belly breathing’ or diaphragmatic breathing to literally hundreds of people with severe anxiety, in traumatic situations, and they learn how to rapidly learn to calm themselves. It is your ultimate Self Care tool and one we should all take the time to learn, notice the impact, and master.

Severe anxiety can be very debilitating, and if someone was offered a pill that could reduce their anxiety levels by 30 percent in one or two minutes, there would be a big market for the medication. The same thing, however, can be done with simple breathing, and anxiety is just one application. Breathing skills can be used to change states of mind, concentrate better, enhance performance, and much more.

When people become ‘stuck’ in psychological difficulties, such as depression, anxiety or chronic post-traumatic stress, they are usually also stuck in habitual and limited breathing patterns. Let’s talk about moving from habitual breathing patterns to more helpful breathing styles.

A very restricted range of breath limits your emotional responses. This emotional restriction may be helpful in the short terms – such as staying alert to threat or not wanting to break down and sob in public – and may be initially conscious or unconscious. But in the longer term it can become ‘stuck’ and very unhelpful. Changing the breathing can open up more emotional freedom.

Changing Modes

In the play The Bourgeois Gentleman by Moliere, Monsieur Jourdain asks his philosophy teacher to help him compose a love letter. The teacher asks if he should write it in poetry or prose. Monsieur Jourdain does not want poetry and has to ask what prose is. When told that prose is what he speaks all the time, he is delighted to discover he is a master of such a skill. All the while, he has been an expert in prose without even realising it!

Like Monsieur Jourdain, all of us are masters of many skills which go unrecognised in day-to-day life. One of these skills is the way we ‘change modes’.

While people sometimes talk about being in ‘work mode’ or ‘party mode,’ we change ‘modes’ throughout the day, without usually being aware of them. Stress, depression, creative states, ’survival mode’, and the ‘zone’ of peak performance might all be seen as particular modes.

Often we get stuck in a particular mode without realising it. Staying too long in any one mode is a sure way to induce stress, frustration, and a vague sense of being a robot.

In any mode, ways of thinking, acting, feeling, and relating are interlinked. For example, if someone is depressed, they tend to feel depressed, think depressing thoughts, notice all the negative things around them ( but not the positive things), and often avoid other people. If someone is in the ‘zone’ of peak performance, they tend to be fully absorbed in the task, active, energised, and calmly focused.

While such modes happen every day, the idea of modes is radical. It goes against many deep-rooted convictions in Western thought, such as those which hold the mind to be separate from the body and reason to be separate from emotion. Although the ‘mind/body split’ has become an outdated concept in recent medical advances, it is still a dichotomy that remains pervasive in both healthcare and broader Western culture and acts to obscure the ways that thinking involves a body that is actively responding, feeling and perceiving. Thoughts, emotions, and perceptions are not separate objects in everyday life but occur as intertwined aspects of living in the world.

Each mode offers different types of awareness and different ways of knowing and acting. They reflect the ways that mind, body emotion, and language are intertwined as aspects of the one living process.

The breath is also linked to these modes. Different modes are linked to different breathing patterns. Changing breathing patterns can allow us to enter different modes. In particular, if you are stuck in a mode you don’t like, simple controlled breathing allows a way to step out of it and refocus.

On subtle levels, we shift modes dozens of times a day. Stress, anger, depression, play, and inspiration might all be seen as particular states of mind, with different physical and emotional orientations.

A clear example, is the particular mode related to the ‘fight or flight’ response, a natural response that occurs in humans and animals when faced with danger. This is useful in an evolutionary sense, as the release of adrenaline and other physical changes help in either running away faster or fighting better. The brain also goes into something of a short circuit, so that we can notice and respond to danger well, but are not very creative or clear-thinking. This mode and all its associated changes are a great help if you are about to be hit by a truck, but not so helpful if you are about to give a talk to your work colleagues.

Some modes might be highly desirable. Others, like stress, can be harmful if we get stuck in it for too long. Even someone who is perpetually cheerful can become grating on their companions if cheerful is the only mode they have, and they can be limited in their response to serious issues. The important point here is to notice the ways we move in and out of different modes. Once we recognise these modes we can recognise unhelpful ones and consciously choose to change them. Sometimes it may be changing the degree – you might not be able to stop being depressed just by choosing it, lessen its severity, and more choice in how to respond to it. The more awareness you have of these modes, the more choice you have over moved between them.

There are many techniques to help change our mind-body states. Breathing skills are especially easy and effective. Breathing can be used as the ‘reset’ switch to change modes.

Sometimes our pattern of breathing is part of a particular mode, and at times it can also trigger particular reactions.