Breathing and Relaxation Techniques
for Energetic and Physical Health

Breathing and relaxation techniques can have huge long-term benefits for your health--physical, mental, emotional, and energetic. They also make you feel better right now by relieving the misery of anxiety and stress.

Breathing for relaxation—a kind of “breathwork”--is effective and simple to learn, and you can do it any time, anywhere.

How to Breathe for Relaxation
Deep breathing (also called diaphragmatic breathing) works on a physiological level to help “turn off” your stress response (“fight or flight” mode) and activate your parasympathetic nervous system (“rest and digest” mode). This helps you to relax--with profound benefits for your health.

Here is a breathing and relaxation technique that will allow you to turn off your stress response and relax deeply:

1. Breathe in through your nose, out through your mouth.

2. Breathe deeply-- all the way into the lower third of your lungs. Your belly should expand when you breathe in and return to normal when you breathe out. Place your hands flat on your belly to make sure that it expands as you inhale and contracts as you exhale.

Breathing like this—deeply, into the lower third of your lungs so that your belly rises and falls—is called diaphragmatic breathing, abdominal breathing, or belly breathing. Deep breathing tells the body’s stress mechanisms that the danger is over and it’s OK to relax. (It has a number of other wonderful health benefits, too!)

3. Breathe evenly, in a nice, smooth rhythm. Smoothing out your breathing relaxes you and helps you feel grounded.

You can count your breaths to help you keep the rhythm even. (Unless it makes you tense up to count--in that case, just estimate.)

4. After you've got the rhythm of your breath nice and even, slow down the exhale in comparison to the inhale, to super-charge the relaxation response. Long exhalations communicate with your nervous system, underscoring the message that it’s OK to relax.

Breathe in for a certain number of counts, say 6 (or whatever is comfortable for you), then breathe out for approximately twice as many counts. Do this for a minute or so. (As before, if it makes you tense up to count, then just estimate.)

Note: If at any time you start to feel dizzy or faint, you can either return to your normal breathing for a while, slow down your exhale, or lengthen the natural pause between your inhale and your exhale.

Caution
Because breathwork can make you light-headed, do not do breathing exercises while driving or operating heavy machinery (or standing on the edge of a cliff).

How Breathing and Relaxation Techniques Benefit Your Subtle Energies
The energy field of a person when they are relaxed feels very different from when they are tense and anxious.

Breathwork, by helping us to relax, helps our subtle energies to shift more easily to a state of healthy balance and flow.

It also helps us ground to our own bodies, connect the upper and lower chakras, and unify the subtle and physical aspects of our being.

How Breathing and Relaxation Techniques Benefit Your Physical Body
Relaxation and stress are governed largely by your nervous and endocrine systems. Your body’s autonomic nervous system is made up of two related systems: the parasympathetic nervous system and the sympathetic nervous system.

”Rest and Digest” Mode
The parasympathetic nervous system is related to relaxation, creativity, awareness, and normal body processes such as digestion (which is why it’s sometimes called the “rest and digest” mode). When your parasympathetic nervous system is activated, your body is able to carry out the functions it needs to maintain and restore itself. Thus activation of the parasympathetic nervous system is very good for your health.

”Fight or Flight” Mode
The sympathetic nervous system, in contrast, is activated when we are in danger or under stress. Our sympathetic nervous system puts us into “fight or flight” mode, gearing up our minds, bodies and emotions for dealing with a real or imaginary enemy. As our body is readied to respond to a challenge, our heart pounds, blood pressure goes up, breathing gets shallow, the adrenal glands pump out stress hormones, immune function is suppressed, and any body function that is not absolutely necessary for fighting or running away is suppressed.

Effects of Long-Term Stress
While this fight or flight mode is necessary for our survival when we are in dangerous circumstances or need to react to something quickly, it has major health consequences if we get stuck in it—and many of us do.

Prolonged stress can make you vulnerable to illness. It also accelerates aging. Over time the stress response can contribute to high blood pressure, heart disease, ulcers, autoimmune diseases, cancer, anxiety, insomnia and depression.

Fortunately, as we have seen, you can use breathing and relaxation techniques to relax and relieve stress any time, anywhere. And there are other simple methods for relaxation as well.

If you’d like to learn how to meditate to relax, click here.

And you can learn how to do Progressive Muscle Relaxation here.