Breathing exercises can help transform your mental health

Breathing is living.  We need abundant oxygen for our bodies to prosper in health.  Without oxygen, we die in three minutes.  Despite this stark eternal truth, breathing is often neglected, and as a result, health declines.

Typical oxygen deficiency
It may surprise you to learn that oxygen deficiency is believed to contribute to disease in both body and mind, and our modern world isn’t helping matters.  Pollution and toxins make it more difficult for our cells to get the oxygen they need…while stress, anxiety and repressed emotions further deprive us of oxygen by creating restricted, shallow breathing patterns.

Let us say that again;  When you feel stressed, anxious, or are repressing emotions, you don’t breathe deeply.  You breathe shallowly.  And when that happens, you are getting less oxygen to your cells, which in turn can mean you don’t think as well and your body doesn’t feel as well.

Why do we breathe shallowly?
It is said that people use shallow breathing to disconnect from processing emotions.  If you’re under stress, shallow breathing helps to disconnect from the negative emotions that you feel.  Unfortunately, when you don’t allow yourself to feel emotions, you hold on to them, and repeat negative feelings and thoughts over and over.  If negative energies are held in the physical body, they can become dense, and perhaps manifest as disease.

Practice, practice, practice
An answer is to practice taking deep breaths every day, whenever you think about it.  There’s an old saying that “practice makes perfect.”  While that may not make sense here, practicing when you think of it leads to deeper breathing when you don’t think of it.  And that in turn leads to a habit of breathing deeper, which is much healthier.

When you’re driving your car, where many of us spend a lot of time, notice your breathing.  How shallow is it?  You have the time to practice deep breaths while driving, so do it.

Right now you’re sitting at your computer while you read this article.  Notice your breathing.  How shallow is it?

Starting now take a deep breath.  How deep?  Let’s say that you start counting in thousands.  That takes about one second each.  How many thousands can you count?  Can you make it to seven thousand?

However far it is, breathe as deep as you can and then hold it for say another five counts, and then let it out for the same number of counts.  Slowly repeat this process.

Benefits
After repeating it several times, how do you feel?  You probably feel better.  Why?  Well, if your mental focus is on your breathing, then you have turned your thoughts away from whatever is stressing you.  That’s a help towards reducing your stress.

Also, the very act of deep breathing is a physical benefit.  You will feel better physically by breathing deeply rather than shallowly.

And, since oxygen deficiency is linked to serious illness, conscious deep breathing can help with chronic fatigue, detoxification, asthma, allergies, panic attacks, addictions and depression, to name a few disorder.

Don’t believe it?  Don’t discount the idea until you’ve tried it for sayone whole week at five minutes or more a day.  In fact, to make it easier to remember, why not share the idea with family members or friends or business associates.

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