Breathing Exercises to Relieve Stress

Deep breathing helps to relieve a range of stress-related symptoms such as anxiety, panic attacks, and irritability. In fact, sighing and yawning are signs that that you’re not getting enough oxygen in your body; the sigh or yawn is your body’s way of righting the situation.

The following deep-breathing techniques are modeled after yogic breathing exercises and can calm the nervous system, relax the small arteries, and permanently lower blood pressure:

• Abdominal breathing. Lie down on a mat or on your bed. Take slow, deep, rhythmic breaths through your nose. When your abdominal cavity is expanded, it means your lungs have filled completely, which is important. Then, slowly exhale completely, watching your abdomen collapse again. Repeat six to ten times. Practice this morning and night.

• Extended abdominal breathing. This is a variation on abdominal breathing. When your abdomen expands with air, try three more short inhalations. It’s akin to adding those last drops of gas to your tank when your tank is full. Then, when you exhale in one long breath, don’t inhale yet. Take three more short exhales.

• Abdominal lift. Stand with feet at about shoulder width, bend the knees slightly, bend forward, exhale completely, and brace your hands above the knees. Then lift the abdomen upward while holding your exhalation. Your abdomen should look concave. Stand erect again, and inhale just before you feel the urge to gasp. Greer Childers, in her video Body Flex, demonstrates this technique very well.

• Rapid abdominal breathing. This is abdominal breathing done fast so it feels as though your inhalations and exhalations are forceful and powerful. Try this for twenty-five to one hundred repetitions. Each breath should last only a second or so, compared to the ten to twenty seconds involved in regular deep abdominal breathing.

• Alternate-nostril breathing. Hold one nostril closed, inhaling and exhaling deeply. Then alternate nostrils. This is often done prior to meditation, and it is thought to balance the left and right sides of the brain.