Be Free

Chapter 6: Breathe: Because you need to! Exercises for Everyday Living and Crisis. “I breathe in peace and exhale calm” As my chest feels tight, and I gasp for air. My lips tingle and my head feels light, I feel like I can’t get breathe and it is terrifying. My first few panic attacks were horrific. I was 15 years old and I had no ideas what was going on. Once they started, they became a regular occurrence. They became my body’s go to response in times of stress, anxiety and worry and a lot of the time they came for what seemed like no reason. My mum was obviously as terrified as she was taking me to the doctor, hypnotherapist, homeopathist. These all seemed to help for a short period of time then it would reoccur. I remember being so embarrassed, locking myself in toilets crying my eyes out. This embarrassment led to me harming myself. I felt stupid and different and out of control. I would slap my head, punch my face and even hit my head off things. Goodness knows how I didn’t give myself a severe injury. But thankfully I never. I hated myself and my body. Being a teenager is a challenging enough time as it is, without randomly hypo ventilating and bursting into tears. The panic attacks carried consistently on from age of 15 to the age of 35. As I got older, I knew when they were coming. I would feel it building and bubbling. I would find a private place and allow them to unfold. I had a brown paper bag I would carry and had one in our first aid box to use if they happened at home. I would use this little brown bag to regulate my breath. This bag would move in and out so rapidly as I held it to my mouth, but it helped. It helped get my breathing back to an even level. Throughout the years I was taught various coping techniques some more valuable than others and I’ll go through some of these in this chapters. Have you suffered a panic attack? Even if you haven’t, all the exercises and information in this chapter will benefit you. Our breathe is such a powerful focus to reducing stress, anxiety and shifting our mood. It can switch us from our flight or fight response back to calm and serene. Breathing is something we so frequently take for granted, yet without it we wouldn’t be alive. A lot of meditation and mindfulness techniques focus around the breath. The breath and awareness of the breath allows us to get out of our heads and connects our minds and bodies. ‘You cannot breathe deeply and worry at the same time. Breathe. Let the worry go. Breathe. Allow the love and intuition in.’ Sonia Choquette What does our breath do? Breathing is an incredible process. It allows our body to take in oxygen which is needed for most of our bodily functions including digestion, thinking and moving our muscles. This all connects to our brain who monitors our oxygen and carbon dioxide levels. Our brain then adjusts our breathing to support our bodily function. All super smart. Our out breath is our bodies way of detoxing. The body uses our out breath to clear itself of carbon dioxide. Our breath is key to supporting our nervous system and responses to stress, overwhelm and anxiety. Our body has two nervous system responses that are worth noting, ‘The Sympathetic’ and ‘Parasympathetic’. Our sympathetic nervous system is the one that is triggered when were scared anxious, it causes us to breathe faster, sweat, and our palms to get clammy, it’s our fight or flight response. Our Parasympathetic is the opposite. Its where our brain triggers our body to lower our heart rates, lowers blood pressure and calms our mind and bodies. This parasympathetic state is where we want to be. And the magical and amazing thing is we can actually trick our brain into being calm even if we don’t feel it. How do we do this? By using our breath! We can use our slow outbreath to send a signal via our Vagus nerve to our brains to turn down our sympathetic response and turnup our parasympathetic response. Genius and a great mind body hack to help calm us instead of going into full scale panic. The breathing techniques below have all helped me find peace, reduce anxiety and have given me another tool in my Be Free tool kit to turn to in times of need. My clients use these daily to support themselves. Allowing clearer minds and calmer bodies.