mentalhealthhqcicBreathing. You do it every second of every day, so how could breathing help with mental health?
This simple but powerful breathing exercise will help you see breathing in a completely different way. You have to try this if you sometimes get so stressed that you feel your heart race, your palms sweat and your mouth dry up. When you feel this way, it’s called the “fight or flight” response.
If you or someone you care about feels extremely anxious, has experienced trauma, or is stressed about life, seemingly non-threatening situations can trigger a “fight or flight” response.
Back in the days when people had to fight and hunt to survive, this “fight or flight” response served a purpose; it kept people safe.
If you routinely feel under attack, your fight or flight response is regularly being triggered. This can lead to all your body’s processes being disrupted. As time goes by, you’ll find it more challenging to regulate your emotions, you’ll have trouble sleeping, have trouble concentrating and remembering things, you could experience headaches and even digestive problems.
But you guessed it, you can use breathing to calm yourself as soon as you feel those “fight or flight” feelings taking over.
When you recognise the first signs of the fight and flight response, focus on breathing. Slowly. Even slower. 7:11 breathing is a really powerful exercise to help you breathe slowly and fully, even when you’re stressed.
Learning this one technique will make your breathing effective for relaxation. See, when you’re tense, you tend to take shallow, fast breaths. You’re not really fully inflating your lungs. To use breathing to calm yourself as soon as you feel those “fight or flight” feelings take over, you need to fill your lungs right down to the diaphragm (the bit of muscle below our lungs). Then empty your lungs, slower than you filled them.
The 7:11 breathing exercise is a simple way to relax, and an essential tool to help you manage the impact the stressful events in your life have on your menthal health.
7:11 Breathing
Here is how you do it, and it is as easy as it sounds:
- breathe in for a count of 7,
- then breathe out for a count of 11.
Make sure that when you are breathing in, you are doing deep ‘diaphragmatic breathing’, rather than shallower higher lung breathing. You will know you’re doing it when you feel your diaphragm moving down and pushing your stomach out as you breathe in. If it helps, try to imagine you have a balloon in your stomach. When you breathe in you are filling it with air and inflating it. When you breathe out you let the air go.
If you find that it’s difficult to lengthen your breaths to a count of 11 or 7, then reduce the count to breathing in for 3 and out to 5, or whatever suits you best, as long as the out-breath is longer than the in-breath.
Continue in this way for 5-10 minutes. If you have time, do it for longer – and enjoy the calming effect it will have on your mind and body. An added bonus is that the act of counting is a distraction technique, taking your mind off your immediate concerns.
This 7/11 breathing technique for relaxing quickly is the most powerful we know and has been used for thousands of years throughout the world.
To practice 7:11 breathing or to how to relax and mange your emotions get in touch
