Breathwork

_{What is breathwork?}

Breathwork refers to breathing techniques that intentionally channel and focus on the breath. For thousands of years, Eastern medicine practices, including Ayurveda and traditional Chinese medicine, have employed breathing techniques to calm the body and the mind.

“Our minds tend to be very active, often thinking about the past and worrying about the future instead of residing in the present moment,” Dr. Young explains. “This can lead to the activation of stress hormones for extended periods of time, which can have adverse effects on the body. Chronic stress increases the risk of a number of diseases and disease processes in the body.”

It’s no secret that mental and emotional stress can manifest in physical ways, playing a role in issues like:

• Aches and pains.
• Digestive problems.
• Headaches.
• High blood pressure.
• Insomnia.
• Muscle tension.
• Sexual dysfunction.
• A weakened immune system.

But stress management techniques — including breathwork — are one way to help you step back from the chaos and keep your mind and body healthy.

Breathwork benefits

Breathwork helps calm you down and move your body and mind out of fight-or-flight mode. To understand how, though, you need to know about your autonomic nervous system, which consists of two parts:

• Your sympathetic nervous system is responsible for your body’s “fight-or-flight” response. This system’s activity increases when you’re stressed or in danger.
• Your parasympathetic nervous system is the “rest-and-digest” part of your brain, responsible for relaxing your body after periods of stress or danger.

Fight-or-flight mode is helpful when you’re being chased by a bear or fleeing a burning building. But these days, many of us are in a mental fight-or-flight mode even when our bodies aren’t under physical duress — think major work deadlines, upsetting news headlines, financial woes, arguments with your spouse and more.

We need our sympathetic nervous system to be aware of danger in our environment, but in today’s society, we’re too often in fight-or-flight mode when we’re not actually in danger. We need to be able to tap into our parasympathetic nervous system to be able to calm sensations of stress.

Breathwork, then, is a way to activate your body’s parasympathetic nervous system and help you de-escalate and de-stress. That can also lead to all kinds of positive feelings.

Breathwork helps us with focus and energy, which can lead to a better quality of life where there’s space for joy and fun. If we’re constantly in a state of stress and tension, it’s very hard to find those important qualities in life.

Joy and fun? Yes, please! Plus, breathwork is one of the most accessible wellness practices out there. Anyone can do it, regardless of age or other medical conditions, so long as you find the breathing techniques that work best for you.