Controlling Your Breathing

Many people, myself included, do not breathe properly, and hold tension in their body while breathing. Years of poor posture, nerves and anxiety are most likely to be the cause of this. This will result in poor breathing patterns.

Ideally we should be breathing full, deep breaths from our lower abdomen.

If you feel nervous, anxious, or catch yourself breathing high in the chest, you can follow this simple 4 step technique to “vacuum your lungs” and reset your diaphragm back to a deep breathing pattern.

Resetting your Diaphragm

1. Exhale completely, blow out every single bit of air from your lungs as best you can.

2. Bend over Forwards. It helps to fold your arms in front of your stomach when you bend to get that extra little bit of air out. Bending over releases the last bits of air from your lungs. When you’re totally out of air make sure you hold you breath, so you don’t accidentally let any air in.

3. Stand up while holding your breath. This increases lung volume, so air will want to flow into your lungs, but don’t breathe. Wait about 10 seconds until your body really needs a breath.

4. Then, when you can’t take much more, Breathe! Your body will have moved over from your normal, everyday breathing to unregulated, autonomic “response breathing.” You should feel your breathing has switched to deep and rhythmic breathing.

That’s all there is to it. Once you let your body take that unregulated breath in step 4, your nervous system reboots your lungs, and your previous tense and anxious breath becomes a thing of the past.

I recommend performing this technique, then breathing deeply for a couple of minutes to ingrain the positive feeling of breathing deeply and fully.

How to use your Diaphragm

In order to get back to a good breathing pattern, try doing this little exercise of practising to use your diaphragm a couple of times a day:

1. Sit in an upright position looking straight ahead. You can close your eyes if it helps you to concentrate on the process.

2. Put one palm on your upper chest and the other over your navel. (Your objective is to have the lower hand rise first when you breathe in.)

3. Breathe out gently and effortlessly. Now wait for a second or two until the body spontaneously begins the inhalation - this will occur naturally and of its own accord.

4. Allow the air to naturally flow in again until it stops, again of its own accord. Make no effort , whatsoever, to in any way deepen the inhalation. You are allowing your body to find its own natural rate of breathing and, through relaxing into the process, allowing your breathing to slow down and become more and more shallow. Remember your aim is to relax and to conserve your ‘natural tranquilliser’ - to counter the effects of losing carbon dioxide caused by anxious, rapid, upper chest breathing.

5. Continue doing this for about 5 to 10 minutes.