3 Breathing Techniques to Activate Your Parasympathetic Nervous System
Breath is one of the most helpful tools to reduce anxiety and stress and return to a space of relaxation and rest. When your sympathetic nervous system (fight or flight) is triggered, your body produces stress hormones like cortisol as it increases your heart rate and breathing in order to react to the perceived threat.
For the most part in our world today, these triggers are not actual life threatening events, but only a perception based on a trigger of past wounds and trauma, so it is not actually helpful or healthy for us to be in this elevated fight or flight state for any length of time.
In order to activate our parasympathetic nervous system and signal to the body that it is actually safe, we can use our breathe in many forms.
In this short video, I cover three different (and very simple) breathing exercises:
1) Ocean Breath: An equal count of inhale and exhale with no pause at the top or bottom of the breath (like an ocean wave coming in and out on the shore).
2) Box Breath: Equal count of each of the 4 parts of breathing [1) Inhale, 2) Pause at the top of the breath, 3) Exhale, 4) Pause at the bottom of the breath].
3) Candle Breath: An exhale that is longer and more intentional that the inhale (breathe in for 6 seconds and breathe out as if you're blowing out a candle for 8 seconds).
Breath is a wonderful way to restore your system to a space of rest in the moment, but it's also important to understand the triggers that are creating the fight/flight reaction for long term and deep healing. For more on the intelligent design of your body and somatic healing, watch my Intro to Somatic Healing & Self-Love here.