Breathwork for anxiety and panic is a mindfulness practice we need to familiarize ourselves with to find inner peace. On today’s episode of the Anxiety Boy podcast, I’m going to share with you one of my favorite breathing techniques for mental clarity.
To understand breathing, we need to understand hyperventilation. As a result, hyperventilation is compatible with the unconscious and living within it survival mode. For anxiety and panic, breathwork brings us back to inner knowing. Inner knowing is an intuitive place, rather a place of feeling overthinking and worried. Just like dominos falling one after the other, hyperventilation can lead to many mental, emotional, physical and spiritual blocks.
Breath work for anxiety and panic is simply to bring ourselves back to a state of emotional neutrality.
Some people master breathing very quickly, while others require months of practice. Either way, if there’s one area of focus I’d recommend spending your time on, it would be this. In addition to the anxiety and panic techniques we’ll be using in today’s podcast, I have a few other suggestions for you:
- Breathe through your nose when you can. It increases resistance to stress (where a YouTube meditation) and helps to activate the parasympathetic nervous system.
- Don’t use too much technology during the day. Your perfectionist side may want to spring up for anxiety and panic during recess, deny them at every turn. A simple awareness of how you breathe is often all that is needed slow down and encourage abdominal breathing.
- As you breathe in, imagine (this playlist There will be a guide on YouTube). Since color is the first language we learn from the womb, we can use color to send safety signals to the subconscious mind. As you breathe mindfully, imagine breathing in your safe color and moving it throughout your body. This color gives the well a sense of relaxation as it moves from head to toe.
- First, use the mirror. For anxiety and panic, use a mirror to check if your stomach or abdomen is moving up and down rhythmically when you start breathing.
- Additionally, begin to associate safety with expressing your feelings constructively. Often anxiety sufferers think that sleeping is a safe route, a pleasant way to go when around others. Suppression is a concern while the expression is healing. So express how you feel, your thoughts, and the actions that work for you with all this great breath work for the anxiety and panic you’re doing.
In the beginning stages of internal changes in my breathing habits, I felt a sense of dread rise up inside me. I was afraid to change my old ways, my familiar ways. At that time, I did not understand that I was not afraid of what I was doing, but rather that I was doing it differently.
As we better understand our anxiety, we will see that familiarity = safety and change = danger.
The more often we use this type of breathwork for anxiety in our daily lives, the sooner we can associate things with new meanings. Change should no longer be threatening. On the contrary, it can be exciting instead. When you were a child you loved all kinds of surprises, the uncertainty of them was amazing. Now we can go back there again, just so you know. You still have those ‘parts of you’ waiting to come out and join the experience.
Just because life has looked a certain way recently doesn’t mean that’s how your future will look.
Life is a series of challenges that are easier to deal with the more mindfully you breathe. Just as your breath affects your concentration levels, so will your actions and perceptions. Everything changes with your new breath work for the anxiety and panic habits you will acquire and use. As Louise Hay points out in her book Heal Your Body, breathing problems are associated with fear, distrust of the life process, and being stuck in childhood.
Breathwork for anxiety also changes our perceptions of our past, our traumatic past.
It is no longer a past trauma what has always happened until now. Rather, it is an experience. As soon as we understand that it is another experience, we begin to learn from it. Once we can place ourselves in this space, we no longer see things as good or bad, but as life. As life unfolds, we trust the process and it leads us out of anxiety and into inner peace. At this point, life feels more like a flow than a struggle. Breathwork for anxiety and panic can bring us to this place of deep understanding, I believe.
Also remember that breathing can be done for different purposes. Today on the worried boy podcast, we’re going to focus on a calming technique. However, breathing exercises can usually be used for trauma and emotional release. This approach emphasizes a faster breathing rhythm and allows for a direct connection with the subconscious mind/inner child. Keep this in mind as you move on to the next chapter your healing journey.
Enjoy today’s podcast episode, my friends, and I hope to connect with you again soon. More love.
Dennis
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