Abdominal Breathing for a Healthier You

There are so many ways to relieve stress and maintain over-all health. But the most effective and oldest way is mind control and proper abdominal breathing exercises. It started in ancient India and this has been incorporated in yoga, martial arts and other holistic practices. Abdominal breathing is highly recommended by healthy practitioners. It is easy and inexpensive way of relieving stress.

Breathing is a rhythmic process of expansion and contraction. Many cultures think that breathing is the essence of being. In yoga, breathe is prana or the universal energy that can be used to find a balance between the body-mind, the conscious-unconscious, and the sympathetic-parasympathetic nervous system. The breathe is easily used to communicate between these systems which helps facilitate positive change/ Breathing is the only bodily function that we do both voluntarily and involuntarily.

When we are emotionally stressed, our sympathetic nervous system is affected and results in a number of physical responses. Our heart rate is fast, we perspire, and our muscles go tense. And our breathing becomes tense and shallow. If this continues for a long time, our sympatric nervous system is stimulated and may lead to an imbalance. Our physical health is affected and may lead to high blood pressure, muscle pains, to name a few. It is more difficult to consciously slowdown our heart rate, decrease our perspiration or relax our muscles than to take a slow and deep breathe. Breathing can be used to directly influence all of this stressful change in our body. Proper breathing can be done to reverse the changes in our body.

Breathing can be trained for both positive and negative influences on our health. That is why it important to have the proper and correct breathing to relieve our body of all the bad elements which leads to an imbalanced body. Using and learning proper breathing techniques is one of the most beneficial things that can be done for both short and long term physical and emotional health. It is best to use abdomen breathing rather than chest breathing.

Abdominal breathing should be done twice a day to relieve pain or to turn your mind away from any unstressful things or thoughts. According to Integrative Medicine by D. Rakel, here is how to do the proper abdominal breathing:

•    Place one hand on your chest and the other on your abdomen. When you take a deep breath in, the hand on the abdomen should rise higher than the one on the chest. This insures that the diaphragm is pulling air into the bases of the lungs.

•    After exhaling through the mouth, take a slow deep breath in through your nose imagining that you are sucking in all the air in the room and hold it for a count of 7 (or as long as you are able, not exceeding 7)

•    Slowly exhale through your mouth for a count of 8. As all the air is released with relaxation, gently contract your abdominal muscles to completely evacuate the remaining air from the lungs. It is important to remember that we deepen respirations not by inhaling more air but through completely exhaling it.

•    Repeat the cycle four more times for a total of 5 deep breaths and try to breathe at a rate of one breath every 10 seconds (or 6 breaths per minute). At this rate our heart rate variability increases which has a positive effect on cardiac health.