Breathing Exercises for Stress Relief
If you are on a mission to relieve stress, you have made the first most important step: seeking out help. Stress can impact just about every area of your life and should not be ignored. It can affect you mentally and emotionally by making it hard to focus and concentrate, taking away from productivity, and getting in the way of friendships and relationships. Physically it also impacts you by causing headaches, stomach and digestive problems, insomnia, and so much more.
Now that you know why you need to relieve your stress, you can start looking to natural remedies, such as with breathing exercises. This lets you practice deep breathing that can help calm and relax you, therefore helping you to reduce your stress. These same breathing exercises also work great with anxiety. Keep reading to get some helpful tips for using breathing exercises to relieve your stress.
Guide to Breathing Exercises for Stress Relief
Find a Quiet Place to Breathe
When you want to practice breathing exercises, it is best that you begin in a quiet place without distractions. Eventually, you will be able to do them anywhere, but it is good to start here in the beginning. It can be your office with the door shut or at the kitchen table when you wake up early in the morning before everyone else. Give yourself at least a few minutes a day to practice them.
Focus Only on Your Breathing
When you are practicing your breathing, you focus only on the breaths you inhale and exhale. Sit in a comfortable position and begin inhaling deeply, concentrating on that breath and how it feels in your lungs. Hold for a few seconds and you feel the sensation, then exhale slowly and embrace those sensations as well. Keep breathing in and out, deeply and with purpose.
Set a Timer
There are a few ways to do this, but when practicing your breathing exercises, it sometimes helps to set a timer. That way, you aren’t trying to keep track of the number of times you inhale and exhale, and instead can put your full concentration on just the breathing.
Try This Multiple Times a Day
You may only have a few minutes a day, but if you can, try to do this more than once a day. You can try them shortly before getting into the shower, if you have a couple extra minutes before dropping your kids off at school, or even while sitting in your car during your lunch break.