Money and politics, budgets and finances. All of this can easily lead to a downward spiral where stress affects your health and well-being. What’s a body to do? How do you manage the stresses around you? When we are stressed out we tend to chest breathe. This is generally a shallow breath, one related to a fight-or-flight response.
What does this mean? Well, if you are in the jungle and you hear a low growl, you feel the adrenaline and you naturally run for your life. There is no time for deep breaths – just enough to feed the arms and legs. Adequate blood flow and thus oxygen to the digestive, reproductive and immune systems is put on hold till the danger is over. But as we all know, in our modern lifestyle, most of our “tigers” are fictions of one sort or another – representative concepts in our brains, such as taxes, rents, bills, relationship woes, obligations, public speaking, etc. One way to reverse this autonomic response is to change our breathing.
Breathing is a lot like posture in that it is something that the body does on auto-pilot but that we can manually take over for a short time if we’re conscious about it. Breathing and posture both play a huge role in how we feel about ourselves and how stressed or grounded, ungrounded or confident we feel. Eastern traditions of meditation often focus on the breath as a way to calm the mind.And a growing scientific literature continues to expand our understanding and importance of breathing and its effect on the nervous system.
A training I attended last Fall provided me with some insights into just how important breathing is to your overall health. First of all, nasal breathing has physiologically been found to be more calming and beneficial than mouth breathing – especially the in-breath. Also, most of us try to increase our abdominal breathing, but did you know that the breathing muscle – the diaphragm – works in 360 degrees? That is, a full breath should expand your ribcage outwards (I call this a wide rib breath) as well as into the back. In fact, the back breath is the most important of all of these. it seems to affect the fascial system and the entire nervous system.
Try this simple exercise: lie on your back on the floor with your knees bent and breath in such a way that you feel the floor pushing your back away on each inhale. That’s finding your back breath. And what about posture? By lifting your sternum and drawing your shoulders back, together and down, while subtly tightening your core, you are also actually affecting your mood! And try this: when you walk, swing your upper arms more and take longer strides, walking quicker and with purpose. Add all this together and not only are you changing your physiology, but you are actually also supporting and properly activating your lower back. These are instructions which I give my patients with low back pain. And the same instructions help when someone is feeling stressed or down!
So go ahead and pay your taxes, but do so with a posture of confidence, and don’t forget to breath!