How You’re One Breath Away from Feeling Great

I love a quote I once heard about how our breath is portable and how it is our best tool to control our state of mind at any time. And it is so true. You take your lungs everywhere you go, and if you aren’t breathing, you’re dead!

It’s becoming more and more well-documented that breathing is one of the best forms of stress relief and performance enhancers.

I’ll give you a quick example of where I see breathing becoming so important in everyday life and you tell me which one is less tense, and which one is more calming.

Person A and Person B. Both are driving and get cut up by a car in front who clearly makes a mistake.

Person A begins to swear, honk their horn and shout at the driver in front. For the next five minutes, their heart rate is elevated, and their breathing has not returned normal, as they are breathing out their mouth in short shallow breaths. Moreover, they are on the lookout for another driver that is about to make another mistake that they can criticise and attack.

Person B on the other hand is take a deep breath with a long exhale. Mutters something under their breath about how annoying that was. But 5 minutes later has a normal resting heart rate and has returned to normal. They are drive as normal. Conscious of the road and environment around them able to enjoy their music playing and company in the car.

Now, I don’t have to tell you that out of the two scenarios that Person B is the more desirable one (unless you enjoy being angry and stress). And these weren’t made up scenarios. These were 2 situations I had been in before where I was the passenger. But I’m sure in your life at some point you are able to relate to this.

But the fundamental difference in both these scenarios, was their breathing. I wasn’t aware of it at the time as I hadn’t been educated on the effects of breathing but now, I can see it was a total game changer. Only the other day, I lost a load of work on my laptop and rather than losing my head, I chose to breath, and it worked. Rather than spending wasted minutes or hours complaining about it I just got on with what I needed to do to better the situation.

The simple strategy of breathing to focus, calm, re-energise and be aware is something that I now teach with professional athletes and is well documented as something that the world’s top performers are engaging with.

So why aren’t you trying it? You have the same tools that they do!

Before I give you a couple of tools to use yourself. Let’s quickly go over a few of the benefits.

FOCUS

In a busy world we live in our focus is constantly being shifted from place to place. It can really easy to lose your focus on your desired task that you’ve set out in the day. By simply stopping and focusing on your breathing allows you to think really narrow down to one simple thing at that moment before you move forward with the rest of your day. The brilliant thing is that you can literally do this as many times as you need to. Your lungs are always with you!

STRESS RELIEF

Usually a result of loss of focus, and all the reasons that cause it, end up result in higher stress levels. Higher level of cortisol (our stress hormone) can have a wide range of negative effects on our physiology. Through breathing techniques, we are able to switch on our parasympathetic nervous system which allows us to return to our rest state much quicker.

BOOST ENERGY

When you are low on energy whether that’s hitting a midday slump or whether it’s in the morning. We are able to pick up our energy levels through breathing by oxygenating the brain leaving us more alert and effective to perform.

AWARENESS

Through the process of breathing we are focus on a task that is internal and with this allows us to train ourselves to be aware of all other things that are going on internally. Not just physically but psychologically.

These are only a few of the benefits in which you can get from a breathing practice, and by breathing practice, I mean simple breathing techniques that you can learn to use at certain times and scenarios during your day.

So how do you do this? A couple of techniques that I use regularly are 3-4-5 breath and belly breathing. You can view these in this months Top Tips.

3-4-5 breath: Sitting comfortably, inhale for a count of 3, hold for 4 and exhale for 5. Repeat 5 – 10 times

Belly Breathing: Either seated or lying comfortably, Hold one hand on your chest and the other on your belly. When you inhale only let the hand on your belly rise, keeping the hand on your chest stay still. When you exhale the belly should fall. Repeat this 5-10 times.

Give these a go and let me know how you get on.

You can access more videos to practice at home on my online platform www.thesportyogi.com

SBT reader get 30% off all plans by using the code SBT30 at checkout.