Let’s talk a little bit about stress breathing.
Chronic stress creates stress-breathing patterns, and you can change your breathing pattern back to something more healthy. Stress breathing leads to chronic tension, chronic pain, digestive issues, sleep issues, hormonal issues, TMJ issues, immune challenges and much more.
What’s stress-breathing?
Stress shifts our breathing into a shallow, fast chest/shoulder breathing. Biologically, this is designed to help us take in more oxygen when we perceive a threat, such as being chased by a tiger. (When was the last time you were chased by a tiger?)
Once the breathing is shifted to the chest, our body stays in the survival state. In the survival state, we can only access our survival brain. Within our survival brain, we can only see and think options limited to what can keep us alive.
One of the most powerful ways to reduce breathing stress is to teach the body how to breathe through the stomach using the diaphragm muscle. Every breath we take into our belly sends the signal to our brain that we are safe, we can relax.
Over time, this naturally reduces the tension in our whole body, especially the neck and shoulders because the neck and shoulders are the secondary breathing muscles that get activated by stress.
The moment we are stuck in survival mode, our attention shifts outward into our environment. Our nervous system start to look for threats. We become more sensitive, and are more easily triggered because, deep down, we do not feel safe within our body.
This creates a disconnection from our body. Our minds are so busy trying to figure out the best way to identify threats to our life. Thus, chronic stress makes us feel like we’re always overthinking. As we focus outward on potential threats, this can also create chronic anxiety.
Anxiety — and being in a survival state — is all about fear. The opposite of fear is safety. But this is a perception of safety because there really is no tiger that’s chasing us, But biologically, the body does not see a difference between financial stress, relationship stress, or work stress as it all affects our ability to survive long-term.
The more stress we’ve stored in our body, the weaker our immune system becomes, because our energy gets sucked away by the constant need of trying to staying alive.
Soon, things that didn’t stress you or trigger you starts to trigger you. You start to notice more negative thoughts in your mind. All of which are symptoms of being stuck in chronic stress.
Chronic stress creates chronic tension. Chronic tension creates chronic pain. Chronic pain then triggers chronic stress. The cycle is endless.
How can we take control?
We can control how we breathe.
It takes effort, concentration, and consistency in the beginning. But once we’ve reprogrammed our body and nervous system how to breathe, it immediately reduces tension within our body.
In our wellness center, we’ve seen how the power of diaphragmatic breathing is able to help our clients get out of chronic pain and tension.
It’s possible to change our breathing at this very moment, and you’re in control of it!
Wellness Within is here for you. If you’d like to learn how to breathe to relieve tension, pain, have better sleep, better digestion, better immune health, we offer a comprehensive breathing analysis when you sign up for a root cause analysis.
