Raising Your Baseline

In practicing the slow, shallow breathing approach from The Oxygen Advantage that I shared about during the past two days, I’m grasping that the key to this approach is to define a new baseline for my breathing and then keep synching back to that new baseline whenever I catch myself drifting from it. The initial temptation is to sync back to my old way of breathing, which can happen automatically when I lose awareness of my breath. Then I might catch myself and practice consciously reducing my breath so I’m not over-breathing. An aspect of this change that’s easier to catch is when I moderately exert myself for a short burst, like walking up a flight of stairs. My breathing becomes a little heavier afterwards, so I make a conscious effort to bring it back down quickly, ideally within no more than 2-3 breaths. So it’s like I have a breathing budget, and I’m doing my best not to squander it. My budget for air this week is much lower than it was last week. And next week I’ll try to nudge it even lower. I realized that a similar strategy also works for adjusting our emotional baselines. Suppose you often feel depressed, frustrated, angry, anxious, or some other emotion you’d prefer not to feel so much. Pretend that you’ve suddenly been allocated a lower budget for feeling negative emotions, and you have to be careful not to squander it too quickly. Imagine if life dramatically cut your negative emotion budget by sa...
Source: Steve Pavlina's Personal Development Blog - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Tags: Emotions Health Productivity Source Type: blogs