Breathing Exercises for Anxiety: A Simple Progression

Anxiety disorders constitute the majority of psychiatric illnesses in theUnited States. Although as yet there is no known cure for this condition, there are many simple coping strategies that anyone can use. One of these is a controlled breathing method is known as 4-7-8 breathing This blog details a short progression that takes sufferers of anxiety from basic breath-awareness exercises to mastering 4-7-8 breathing.

Almost all of the symptoms of anxiety can be linked back to a particular pattern of breathing called hyperventilation. When you hyperventilate, you take rapid, shallow breaths from your upper chest. This disrupts the ratio of oxygen to carbon dioxide in your bloodstream, which in tum causes your heart to beat faster. This raises your blood pressure, making you feel weak, confused, and maybe a little ill.

This is all part of your body's emergency response system. Fortunately, because all of these symptoms have their root in a breathing pattern, conscious control of the breath can revert you to a state of ease. The earlier you regain control of your breathing, the easier it will be to return to calm, so it's important to practice breathing often and to recognize the development of anxiety from its earliest stage.

The very first stage begins in the mind, not in your environment. If you are afraid of social gatherings due to some previous unpleasant experience in public, then you might believe that you avoid public places because that is where unpleasant things happen. Actually, if you feel anxiety, just thinking about going out, then you can consider this thought your very first trigger. It's not the reality of some unpleasant experience, but just the thought of it that set you off.

If you know that going out causes you anxiety, then you need to catch and treat your anxiety not as you open the front door, but as soon as you consider doing so. If you don't, you might give yourself time to affirm that going to get groceries is bound to lead to failure, and your symptoms will escalate. From this point, it's possible to start dwelling not only on the reality of leaving the house, and not only on the concept of leaving the house but on the symptoms that arise as a result of these considerations. It's at this point that you may hit a vicious cycle that results in panic. And all of these things can occur before you move a single finger in action.

Reading this so far may have been little assurance to you, but don't worry. As soon as you have unpleasant thoughts, the trick is to focus them on your breathing. To recap: thoughts trigger anxiety; anxiety triggers the emergency response in your body; the primary symptom of the emergency response is hyperventilation; hyperventilation is shallow breathing in the upper chest. By taking deeper and slower breaths, you can reverse this process and even replace certain upsetting thoughts altogether.

The kind of slow, deliberate breathing that will help ease your symptoms, is called diaphragmatic breathing. As the name suggests, rather than taking breaths from your chest, you breathe from your diaphragm, which is a flat and wide muscle that rests below your lungs. Place one hand on your chest and one hand over your abdomen, and take note of the rising and falling of each hand as an indicator of where your breath is concentrated. Try to increase the expansion of your lower abdomen as you inhale. If this is difficult, don't consider this experiment a failure. The diaphragm is a muscle, and it can be trained to do this exercise effortlessly with time.

If all of this is too much of a challenge, you can start not by exercising your breathing, but just by increasing your awareness of it. Visualization can be useful for this. Close your eyes and breathe as normal. Try to imagine the flow of your breath throughout your body. See it come in through the top of your head and watch as it streams into your torso, branching off into your arms and legs all the process reverse, gathering all the stale breath and expelling it out the top of your head again. Don't try to force your breaths only take note of their movement.

When you're ready, you can start to challenge your lung capacity. Shallowness of breath can occur as a result of incomplete inhalation and exhalation, so breathe all the way in as comfortably as you can, then all the way out, and repeat the process. Your lung capacity can be improved with proper posture. If you slouch often, try sitting as straight as you can and see how different each breath makes you feel. If sitting up straight is a struggle, you can begin your breathing exercises from a reclining position. Lie straight on your back, and continue breathing consciously and slowly from your abdomen.