Take care of yourself.

Our Simple Tips for Coping with Stress article gives you ideas to take care of yourself during stressful times. Now, we are adding to your self-care toolkit with something you already do all the time…breathing. But we want to make it intentional by showing you some breathing exercises. Breathing exercises are a simple and wonderful way for you to manage your stress, lessen your anxiety, and even give your core a workout!

Place one hand on your chest area and one on your belly, just below your belly button. Take a normal breath. Which part of your body did you feel move more? Most likely it was your chest area. Now, try again, this time taking a deep breath, imagine you are filling your stomach with air. Did you feel your belly rise more than your chest area this time?

With breathing exercises, the most important tip we can give you is to take deep breaths that you can feel in your belly. Once you get the feel of doing that, move on to the exercises below.

Let’s begin.

Part 1: Deep Breathing
1. Choose a comfortable place and position for your breathing exercise. You can lie on your back in bed or on the floor with a pillow under your head and knees, or you can sit in a chair with your shoulders, head, and neck supported against the back of the chair. Place one hand on your stomach. Place the other hand on your chest.
2. Breathe in through your nose. Try to breathe in for a count of 3 to 5. Feel your stomach rise. Hold for a count of 3.
3. Breathe out through your mouth for a count of 3 to 10. Feel your stomach lower.
4. Repeat steps 2 and 3, three more times until you feel comfortable with taking full, deep breaths.

Once you feel comfortable with you deep breathing move on to Breath Focus

Part 2: Breath Focus

1. Choose a comfortable place and position for your breathing exercise.
2. Think of a word, a phrase, or place that helps you feel relaxed and a picture that goes with it: maybe a word like “love” or “calm”, or a phrase like “Peace and calm surround me”. Maybe you can picture the beach, the warmth on your skin from the sun, feeling the gentle breeze coming in off of the water as you hear the birds flying up above and listen to the rhythmic sound of the waves. Got it? Good.
3. Close your eyes and focus on your word, phrase, or place until you feel relaxed.
4. Take a deep breath as you learned in Part 1. Imagine the breath washes a sense of calm over you. Say to yourself “I breathe in calm and peace”.
5. Breath out slowly just as you did in Part 1 this time saying to yourself “ I breath out anxiety and tension”.
6. You can start doing this exercise repeating it for 6 breaths. That will take about 2 minutes,  slowly try to work your way up to 10 minutes per day and then eventually 20 minutes.

 

Core-Activating breathing

1. Choose a comfortable place and position for your breathing exercise.
2. Take a deep breath in as you learned above, filling your belly with as much air as you think you can fill it. Hold it for 3 seconds.
3. Now, part your lips slightly, exhale with short quick breaths using your belly, and saying “sh, sh, sh” until your belly is empty (about 10-15 breaths).
   4. Repeat 10 times.