Ease anxiety and stress: Take a (belly) breather

Quick: think of three things that make you feel anxious or stressed. Most of us have no trouble reeling off answers. And people who suffer from anxiety disorders — such as social anxiety, phobias, or generalized anxiety — may have a variety of triggers that send anxiety soaring. While belly breathing alone can’t fix deep-seated anxieties, it works well as a tool to help ease anxiety and garden-variety stress. Regularly engaging in belly breathing (or trying the mini strategy described below) can help you turn a fight-or-flight response into a relaxation response that’s beneficial to your health. How should you breathe? You take up to 23,000 breaths per day, so make sure you do it right. How should you breathe? Like a sleeping child, says Dr. Katherine Rosa of the Harvard-affiliated Benson-Henry Institute for Mind Body Medicine. “If you ever watch children sleep, they all breathe from the belly and not the chest. This relaxed state is the more normal way to breathe.” Yet most people are chest breathers, which is how we react to stress. When we sense a threat, our fight-or-flight response automatically kicks in. We breathe at a rapid pace to suck in extra oxygen, to fuel our heart and muscles so we can flee the danger. Of course, we don’t need our fight-or-flight response to escape predators anymore. Our threats now come from the stress of emails, personal confrontations, daily news, and traffic jams. “Your fight-or-flight response is meant to be a short-term re...
Source: Harvard Health Blog - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Anxiety and Depression Health Stress Source Type: blogs