BREATHWORK: BREATHING EXERCISES AS A DRUG

Suffering from stress? Your breathing is the way to relaxation. With breathing exercises, you can calm your central nervous system, thereby reducing feelings of stress. You can even trip sober, purely by doing certain breathing techniques. Breathwork is the official name for this practice. Read how to apply it and how exactly it works here.

What is breathwork?

Breathwork is influencing or calming your mind and body by breathing in the right way. You can use it to reduce your stress levels, as well as to get into higher realms. Wim Hof has made breathwork more popular than ever. But even thousands of years before he was born, breathing was an important part of Ayurveda and traditional Eastern or Chinese medicine. Breathing exercises are an important part of his method, which revolves around gaining more control over your central nervous system.

Breathing when stressed

When you are stressed, you tend to breathe more shallowly. You take shorter breaths and don't breathe deeply enough. As a result, you don't get enough oxygen and your body picks up on this as a reason for (mild) panic. Breathwork is nothing more than breathing in the right way to get your body out of that stress mode again. With breathing exercises, you yourself influence the central nervous system: your brain and spinal cord. The central nervous system picks up the information your senses pass on and processes it, for instance by controlling your muscles and organs. If this system is disturbed, you may experience both physical and mental symptoms. Pain, for instance; breathwork can be a way to reduce your pain without pills. You can also use breathwork when you suffer from shortness of breath symptoms, especially to train your lungs.

Research shows that breathing exercises can indeed reduce stress, anxiety and depression. However, there is not yet a bite-sized manual of which techniques work best. So for now, that is a case of figuring out what is effective for you. Fortunately, for regular breathing exercises the following applies: if it doesn't work, it doesn't hurt.

Breathwork for tripping

You can also do breathwork to enter an altered state of consciousness. Unlike calming breathing exercises, the technique in trippy breathwork actually involves hyperventilation. We would urge you never to undertake this form of breathwork on your own. This is because with the Wim Hof method, you also need to do similar breathing exercises, and several people have died doing it on their own. If you do it properly, you can definitely benefit. But preferably, learn this from someone who is an expert and can keep an eye on you. It is probably a lot safer to just trip on psychedelics and stick to regular, calming breathing exercises.

Breathing exercises for stress

There are lots of different breathing exercises you can do when you are stressed. YouTube is full of them, so be sure to look around there too.

Abdominal breathing

A basic exercise you can do to work on your breathing is conscious abdominal breathing. When you breathe shallowly, we call this chest breathing; only your chest expands with the air you breathe in. Abdominal breathing is deeper, as this also involves your belly expanding. It also takes longer. This is how to do the belly breathing exercise:

• Lie down or sit down; whatever you find comfortable.
• Close your eyes.
• Put your hands on your belly.
• Breathe in slowly and in a controlled way, consciously moving the air from your belly towards your hands.
• Breathe out slowly and feel how your belly sinks again.
• Breathe in again only when you need to.
• Repeat for about 5 minutes, until you feel calmer again.

More tips for stress

Besides breathing exercises, there is more you can do for stress symptoms. First of all, it is important to identify the cause of your stress and deal with it. See your GP or consider therapy if stress is dominating your life. Furthermore, you can try yoga or meditation. And there are all kinds of natural relaxants that can calm you down, such as valerian. All tips for a calmer mind can be found here: Just unwind, the best tips.