Take a breath has become a cliché – but taking a breath the right way can indeed calm you down. The fundamental way to do this is to breathe slowly through your nose but as if you were breathing with your belly. Be aware of the rise and fall of your belly as you breathe through your nose.
Calming the nervous system
What this does is to activate the calming part of your nervous system. It’s called the parasympathetic nervous system but I think of it as the calming part. It’s necessary because we’ve also got the “up and at ’em” nervous system which is the sympathetic nervous system – that’s necessary for dealing with threats, for throwing ourselves into an action and so on. But we need to be able to come down from that, to rest – which is where the calming part comes it and indeed people sometimes describe it with the phrase “rest and digest.”
An effective variation
I have described the fundamental way of doing this above but really good variation on it was found to be very effective for calming in a study at the University of Pisa, reported by The Washington Post.
This involves partially breathing in through your nose, pausing very briefly and then completing the in-breath. Then you breath out slowing through your lips.
You can think of the in-breath as ‘1 (pause) 2’ and of the out-breath as ‘3’. Another way is to think: ‘Breathing in (pause) I am here. Breathing out I am here.’
Breathing out through the mouth gives you a longer out-breath which is also calming. You can breathe out so gently that nobody else in your space knows you are doing it.
A marvellous, free resource
Your breath is a marvellous free resource which does much more than keeping us alive. Try these exercises and see how they feel.
Learn more about mindfulness in my online course Easy Mindfulness. Payment is by donation.
