An interesting topic today with ‘News to ENRICH’ blog #4: variety of breathing styles

Styles of breathing matter! If you are on a diet and you want to restrain from feeling hungry, don’t start breathing deeply. Why? Because by breathing deeply, you increase metabolism and digestion resulting in you feeling hungry for food.

If you feel stressed and normally that ends up in feeling uptight and out of breath or breathing shallow, having breathing gaps (pauses in breathing especially during the time of a stressful event driven by fear), you want to break this pattern and start breathing deeply with your abdomen.  If you observe a child that is relaxed and happy you can see that their abdomen moves out when they inhale and it moves in when they exhale with almost no movement in their chest. Based on the research, abdominal breathing reduces stress and relaxes muscle tension within 60 seconds. Mindfulness breathing is one of the abdominal breathing techniques (check the mindful breathing exercise as part of the Ladder of Needs blog post).

If you want to energise yourself and after waking up actually get up from your bed, do something that requires a lot of energy, you want to start breathing fast, rhythmically and rather shallow using your chest. This will kick off your sympathetic system that can mobilise your internal mental resources.

There is also a trick in me writing about it. Just by merely thinking about it, your awareness and consciousness has increased and now you automatically have paid attention to this aspect of your life, which is already 60% of success in adopting the above skills.

See you soon in the next post where we will be talking about the water we drink!

Until then, stay ENRICHed!