Breathe Away Stress: Harnessing the Power of Breath for Relaxation

So maybe you’ve tried my tips for creating calm in my free download “ Stress Less: 3 Tips to Instantly Relieve your Stress“, (if not, please get your copy now and have a try), and, like me, you may be interested in how this works to activate the relaxation response in the body. I want to present you with a short explanation and you may want to research this further yourself, or you can reach out to me for further information, or check out my other blog articles.

It's important to understand the role of the autonomic nervous system (ANS) in the body. This is the part of the nervous system that works behind the scenes constantly, to maintain a state of balance between all of our systems. These are involuntary functions of our body that we do not have to consciously think about but are crucial to maintaining life and include our respiratory rate, heart rate, digestion, pupillary response and more.

The ANS consists of two main branches: the sympathetic nervous system (SNS), which activates the "fight or flight" response, and the parasympathetic nervous system (PNS), which promotes a "rest and digest" state.

Together, these branches work dynamically to ensure the body responds appropriately to internal and external stimuli, helping us to adapt to changing environmental demands.

When a threat is detected in the brain, the stress response is initiated which activates the sympathetic nervous system. Stress hormones including adrenaline and cortisol are released, preparing the body for action. This activation is necessary when we are facing actual danger, and a healthy stress response is usually a short-term response to an immediate threat or situation.

Not all stress is bad! Good stress, known as eustress, arises from challenges or exciting events that are within our ability to handle. Good stress is useful as it can be used to enhance performance, boost motivation, and contribute to personal growth. It is often short-term and leads to positive emotions such as excitement and satisfaction.

If our thoughts and perceptions begin to perceive normal situations as threatening, our bodies adapt by keeping the SNS turned on, and this becomes the new normal baseline for our body. This is not a healthy state.

The term “allostatic load” refers to the cumulative physiological wear and tear on the body as a result of chronic exposure to stress. It represents the long-term effects of the body's attempts to adapt and respond to stressors.

Ongoing exposure to stress may lead to the inability of the body to return its normal level of baseline functioning and result in physiological changes such as:

• high blood pressure
• overactive or underactive immune system
• atherosclerosis
• increased inflammatory response
• obesity
• poor sleep patterns
• bone demineralisation (osteoporosis)

It goes without saying that ongoing exposure to stress can also affect your personal relationships, career and mental well-being.

Understanding the effects allostatic load can have on our health really emphasises the importance of adopting stress management strategies and promoting a healthy lifestyle to reduce the long-term physiological consequences of chronic stress. Regular physical activity, relaxation techniques, and social support are among the interventions that can help mitigate allostatic load.

It's important to recognise the pervasiveness of stress in modern life and actively adopt strategies to manage and minimise its impact on mental and physical well-being.

It’s so important to acknowledge the power of the breath! Our breath is our gift of life, we enter the world with a first breath in and leave it with our last breath out.

The breath is our only automatic process that we can choose to immediately regulate with our focus, actions and attention!

We can choose to slow down our breathing rate, we can choose to change the depth of our breathing, we can choose how we use our muscles to assist our breathing. We can’t do this with our heart beats, we can’t actively choose to change our pulse rate, strength of beat or coordination of the beat. Similarly, we can’t choose to immediately regulate our digestive system and the many other automatic processes that are influenced by our autonomic nervous system.

But, by changing the way we are breathing, we can switch the focus from the sympathetic nervous system to the parasympathetic nervous system - how powerful is that!

Our breathing is affected by our thoughts, feelings and experiences as well as biochemical and biomechanical factors. The major functions of the breath are to deliver oxygen to our red blood cells, breathe out carbon dioxide and preserve the pH level in our body. When our breathing patterns change, our whole body is affected. Stressful situations can often result in overbreathing or hyperventilation. This results in reduced carbon dioxide in the body, which can cause feelings of anxiety. It also results in a reduction in blood supply to your brain which leads to brain fog. People often don't breathe out fully either, and this leads to excess carbon dioxide in the body which can trigger anxiety.

Breathing plays a crucial role in initiating the relaxation response through its influence on the autonomic nervous system (ANS).

When you engage in slow, deep and rhythmic breathing, you activate the PNS through the stimulation of the vagus nerve. This shifts the body away from the stress response – lowering blood pressure, inflammation, increasing immunity and recovery, heart-rate variability and cognitive function.

Follow the tips in "Stress Less: 3 Tips to Instantly Relieve your Stress" for tips on how to breathe efficiently using a relaxed pattern focussing on using your diaphragm and breathing in and out through your nose.

(Bonus health tip: Practicing diaphragmatic breathing results in the most efficient breathing pattern which allows air to flow easily into the lungs. Our breathing patterns can change as a result of trauma, illness, habit and stress but we have the power to retrain our patterns. If you are having difficulty with your breathing, please seek individual advice from Physiotherapists trained in breathing pattern disorders (e.g. Certified Bradcliff Breathing Method Practitioners). Similarly, breathing through the nose is important for our health, the air is warmed, humidified and sterilised as it passes through the nose, into the sinuses then to the lungs. If you are having difficulty breathing through your nose, it's important to seek medical advice.)