Breathing is essential
You need to breathe fresh air all the time. It is essential for your survival. You can well live without food for a few weeks. Many people do this in a willingly act to abstain from food, called fasting. You can also survive without water for some days (which won't be so good for your health). But without fresh air you will die after a few short minutes, or at least your brain will suffer severe damage. The reason for this is that the body, especially the brain, needs huge amounts of oxygen to function. And furthermore the body has no mechanisms to store oxygen.
So the oxygen in the air is absolutely necessary for your life. Fresh air is life energy. You breathe in to supply your body with fresh energy. And you breathe out to free your body of carbon dioxide.
Luckily we usually don't need to pay attention to our breathing as it works totally automatically.
Breathing under pressure
If you're under pressure your natural breathing changes. As part of the "fight or flight" response you breathe faster, not so deep. Or you may have the feeling not to be able to breathe at all. If this happens sometimes there's no need to worry. It is an all natural reaction of the body.
But it's all too common in our modern world to have high stress levels over a longer period of time. So your body will experience these changes in breathing quite often. Therefore your body's supply with fresh air will be slightly lower than necessary. What follows are the typical stress symptoms like muscular tension, headache, problems to fall asleep or depression.
Breathing to relax
Fortunately your breathing is a body function you can control easily. And so it is easier to calm down and relax as you may think. Simply find the time to do the following easy exercise:
- Just sit down.
- Close your eyes.
- Watch as your breath flows in and out of the body.
- Pay attention to where you feel the breathing.
- Can you feel the breath at your nose as the air flows in and out of the nose?
- Can you feel your breast or belly move up and down as you breathe in and out?
- Just watch your breath flow in and out and do nothing else for at least 3 minutes.
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