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Correct, deep, belly breathing, says Dr. Hendricks, has been shown to:
• Melt tension. It counters the shallow tight breaths produced by the instinctive fight-or-flight response that we find ourselves kicked into frequently.
• Clarify and focus the mind.
• Increase energy and endurance.
• Clear unpleasant emotions. Two or three big breaths at the onset of an injurious emotion such as fear, anxiety, or depression are often enough to move it out of the body.
• Help manage pain. (This is why it is taught in natural childbirth classes.) Do not hold your breath when in pain or anticipating pain. Instead, breathe – calmly, deeply.
• Improve athletic performance.
• Significantly lower blood pressure.
Deep breathing and breathing in general help in treating many modern-day maladies. “Breathing exercises are a major emphasis of the yoga classes I teach in Hawaii,” says Arthur Brownstein, M.D., medical director of the Princeville Medical Clinic and clinical instructor of medicine at the University of Hawaii John A. Burns School of Medicine in Honolulu. Breathing exercises are also a major component of the stress-management program taught to heart patients during the highly touted programs conducted by the Preventive Medicine Research Institute in Sausalito, California.
Breathing exercises
The following are the basics of Breathing 101, as taught by Dr. Hendricks as well as Barbara Lang, who teaches Yogic breathing in an intensive medically supervised program for people with heart problems and other degenerative diseases.
Get past tense. Tense your abdomen. Relax your abdomen. Tense your abdomen. Relax your abdomen. Do this maybe a dozen times, until you are well aware of how a relaxed abdomen feels.
Give yourself a hand. Put your hand on your abdomen. Breathe slowly, comfortably, deeply enough to make your hand rise with each inhalation and fall with each exhalation.
Go for ribs. Keep breathing slowly, comfortably and into your belly. If you are truly breathing correctly, you will feel your rib cage expand to the side with each inhalation.
Move your spine. “Babies can lie in a crib all day without getting a backache because they move their spines with each breath,” says Dr. Hendricks. “We tend to hold ourselves more stiffly as we age.” With each in-breath, let your spine move away from the chair back (if you’re sitting) or away from the floor (if you’re lying on your back). On each out-breath, let it flatten against the chair or floor.
That’s your basic, healthy breathing. To remember to do it, associate the term breathe with normal everyday activities such as standing, sitting, or turning, says Larry J.
Feldman, Ph.D., director of the Pain and Stress Rehabilitation Center in New Castle, Delaware. Then, he says, taking healthy, deep breaths at intervals throughout your day will be as natural as, well, breathing.
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