Natural ways to reduce anxiety – Part 3

What I want to share with you know is probably the simplest and easiest method of reducing anxiety, you can do it anywhere and it costs nothing.  Its called breathing.  Yes I know we do it all the time.  But when you get anxious we begin to breathe rapidly and shallowly from our upper chest.  This breathing breath from your upper chest is why you get tight neck muscles as they can get overused as they help to move the top rib we breathing.

What I am talking about is breathing deeply or calm breathing.

Calming Breath
  1. Take a long, slow breath in through your nose, first filling your lower lungs – put your hand on your belly and you should feel it move out as your breath in.  Then breath into your upper lungs.
  2. Hold your breath to the count of “three.”
  3. Exhale slowly through pursed lips, while you relax the muscles in your face, jaw, shoulders, and stomach.

Calm breathing you can stimulate the body’s parasympathetic response. This is the body’s equally powerful and opposite system to the flight or fight response and is often called the relaxation response.    When you trigger the body’s relaxing response, your

  • heart rate slows
  • blood pressure decreases
  • muscle tension decreases
  • growing sense of ease in body, calmness in mind

So you stop anxiety in its tracks!.  I recommend you practice this calm breathing for several times a day (up to 10 times) for several weeks until it becomes natural.

 

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