How Healthy Breathing Can Help You Reduce and Manage Your Stress
In today's
fast-faced, anxiety-driven world, stress management has
become paramount not just for individuals faced with
excessive stress in their daily lives, but also for the
owners and managers of businesses of all sizes. Researchers
now believe that excessive stress is associated with 60-80
percent of all visits to doctors. Not only are numerous
health problems associated with unnecessary tension and stress, problems
which are reflected in our growing health-care costs, but
businesses of all kinds are faced with the increasing use of
"sick time" by employees at all levels and the
overall loss of corporate productivity.
There are, of
course, many powerful tools for stress management, for
turning on our parasympathetic nervous system--our
"relaxation response." One of them--healthy
breathing--is often overlooked. In fact, most of us take our
breathing almost entirely for granted, not realizing that
the way we breathe influences every aspect of our lives. The
paragraphs that follow--which are taken from The
Tao of Natural Breathing, by Dennis Lewis, explore some
important issues associated with
stress--especially the negative emotions often associated
with it--and how healthy, natural breathing, can help us
understand and free ourselves from these emotions.
From The Tao of Natural
Breathing
"As
troublesome as they are in our lives, it is clear—at least
sometimes—that what we call “negative emotions” have
important “survival” value. Many of our negative
emotions are simply signals that something has gone wrong in
our lives or that some action is necessary to avoid a
potential problem. A student’s anxiety about an upcoming
exam, or an executive’s anxiety about a financial report
that is due the next day, can play a beneficial role in
stimulating appropriate preparation, as long as the anxiety
does not become so excessive that it causes fear and a lack
of concentration. A woman’s anger toward a man who
physically or psychologically abuses her may motivate her to
leave the relationship or to find a healthier relationship
with someone else, as long as it doesn’t become so strong
that she becomes violent. A mother’s anger toward a
teenage daughter who stays out all night may be what is
necessary to motivate both mother and daughter to try to
communicate with each other in a new way. Our lives are
filled with many examples of how our so-called negative
emotions, as long as they do not become excessive, can
provide important information about what is happening in our
lives—information that can help us take intelligent
actions on behalf of ourselves and others.
Unfortunately,
many of our negative emotions seem to quickly reach a point
where they have no apparent solution, and we frequently find
ourselves unable to learn anything from them or to do
anything about them. These emotions leave us with pounding
hearts, contracted muscles, poor digestion, constipation,
tension, and so on. Over time, these conditions can become
chronic and can consume the energy we need for healing and
for inner growth. Once these conditions become habitual, the
parasympathetic branch of the autonomic nervous system,
designed to put the brakes on the sympathetic nervous
system, will have little power to bring about more than
temporary relief—unless we can learn how to consciously
turn it on for longer periods of time.
Learning
to Turn On the Parasympathetic Nervous System
To learn how
to turn on the parasympathetic nervous system, it is useful
to know something about its organization. The neurons for
this system reside mainly in certain cranial nerves, such as
the vagus nerve, coming from the brain stem, and in the
lower-back region of the spine. The parasympathetic ganglia
do not run down the spine, but instead are located near the
organs that they influence. Impulses coming from these
ganglia reduce the heart rate, dilate the blood vessels,
increase digestive peristalsis, and constrict the air
passages in the lungs, and thus help the body slow down and
restore itself.
How can we
intentionally turn on this system, our relaxation response,
without the outside help of psychologists, massage
therapists, and so on? The key is our attention. We know
from experience that when we are tense or “stressed out”
our attention—directed by the sympathetic nervous
system—automatically focuses on the supposed cause of our
tension, the compulsive thoughts and feelings that arise in
relation to it, or the particular unpleasant physical
symptoms we are experiencing. As a result, our experience of
ourselves becomes so narrow that we cannot even imagine an
alternative. To learn how to relax in such situations, we
need to learn how to work actively with our attention, to
widen it to include the parts of ourselves that are not in
the grip of the negativity we are experiencing. One of the
most effective ways to accomplish this is through
self-sensing. According to Ernest Rossi, a pioneer in the
field of mind/body interaction, “You simply close your
eyes and tune into the parts of your body that are most
comfortable. When you locate the comfort you simply enjoy it
and allow it to deepen and spread throughout your body all
by itself. Comfort is more than just a word or a lazy state.
Really going deeply into comfort means that you have turned
on your parasympathetic system—your natural relaxation
response.”[i]
As we shall see later, natural breathing plays an important
role in learning how to go “deeply into comfort,” and
thus in learning how to use our awareness to harmonize the
aggressive and restorative functions of our nervous system.[ii]
What’s more, since natural breathing massages our internal
organs and relaxes our lower back, it has a beneficial
influence on the parasympathetic nerves and ganglia in these
areas.
Unfortunately,
most of us are not very good at sensing ourselves and have
little awareness of the extent to which our perception and
behavior are conditioned by emotions such as fear, anger,
and anxiety. We have become so accustomed to high levels of
stress and negativity in our lives that we take it as
“normal,” not realizing the tremendous toll it takes on
our health and vitality. The noise produced by this stress
makes it almost impossible to hear the quiet, ever-present
intelligence of our own bodies. Unable to experience this
inner intelligence, we exacerbate our situation by seeking
quick relief through excessive stimulation of some
kind—alcohol, drugs, tobacco, caffeine, food, sex,
television, and so on. Sometimes, when we wake up for a
moment to the senselessness of our situation, we may try to
deal rationally with the stresses we face. But our minds by
themselves have little power to “figure out” effective
solutions—especially in an “information society” that
floods our consciousness with negative news and images from
around the world. The end result is the accumulation of more
and more tension, a sense of helplessness, and the eventual
appearance of various chronic symptoms and ailments in our
lives—many of which are not just the result of stresses we
face, but also of the way we try to escape them.
Coping
with the Effects of Stress Is Not the Solution
Unable to
figure out effective solutions to the many stresses in our
lives, we have over time learned various ways to “cope”
with their effects on us instead. Some of us, for example,
simply vent our negative emotions, especially anger, on
others, believing that this is good for us. Recent studies
suggest, however, that venting our anger causes us to get
more angry, not less, and thus increases our health risks.[iii] What’s
more, such an action simply spreads our negativity to
others, adding to their own problems.
The
expression of negative emotions, however, is probably not
nearly as prevalent as finding ways to avoid experiencing
them. As children, some of us learned how to use fantasy and
repression to shut ourselves off from the painful feelings
of contradiction that we felt when our parents did not seem
to accept us as we were, but rather demanded that we “grow
up” according to their image. As adults, many of us have
learned how to “swallow” our negative emotions and take
refuge in what we consider to be our more positive ones. We
have learned how to suppress our negative emotions in order
to function in what we believe to be a reasonable way based
on our self-image. But we know by the scientific law of
conservation of energy that the neurochemical energy of
these emotions cannot be destroyed—it can only be
transformed. And we also know, if we look carefully, that
this energy is often transformed into kinetic or mechanical
energy that acts, without our awareness, on the nerves,
tissues, structures, and movements of our bodies.
The
repression or suppression of emotions manifests itself not
only in our postures and movements, but also in tensions
buried deep in our bodies, tensions that consume our energy
and undermine our physical and psychological health. By
learning how to sense these tensions in ourselves, we will
eventually come face-to-face with our mostly unconscious
emotions of anger, worry, fear, anxiety, and so on. The goal
is not to get rid of these so-called negative
emotions—this would be both impossible and
undesirable—but rather to find the courage to experience
them fully, to open them to the transformative light of
impartial awareness. From the Taoist perspective, when we
become fully aware of our negative emotions without
amplifying them or trying to defend ourselves against them,
the neurochemical energy they activate in us can be
transformed into the pure energy of vitality. As the Taoists
might say, “clouds, rain, and lightening are as necessary
to our environment as sunshine and calm. Without a
harmonious balance of both kinds of weather, nature would
become barren.” It is through our breath, especially
through natural breathing, that we can begin to discover
this dynamic harmony in ourselves. It is through deep,
comfortable, natural breathing that we can begin to activate
the parasympathetic nervous system and thus the process of
healing—of becoming whole again."
Copyright
1996 by Dennis Lewis. This passage, from pages 58-62 of The
Tao of Natural Breathing, may not be used for any
commercial purpose.
Anyone who is
interested in discovering how breathing can help with stress
management should try the free
breathing exercises and techniques on this website. You
might also wish to read the article entitled Breathing
Exercises, which discusses some of the dangers of breath
control exercises, and the article entitled Hyperventilation
& Health. And be sure to take a look at Dennis Lewis' new book,
Free Your Breath, Free Your Life:
How Conscious Breathing Can Relieve Stress, Increase Vitality, and Help You Live
More Fully.
Learn about the Freeze Framer
Interactive Technology for stress relief!
[i]
Ernest Lawrence Rossi, The Psychobiology of Mind-Body
Healing (New York: Norton, 1988), pp. 173-74.
[ii]
Another effective way to turn on the parasympathetic
nervous system is through special movement and awareness
practices such as tai chi and chi kung. Among many other
benefits, these practices can help release unnecessary
tension in the back, especially in the spine, where the
main neurons of the central nervous system reside. It is
my experience that people with frequent lower back pain
are often the same people who have trouble not only
relaxing but even admitting that they need to relax. When
carried out in the correct way, tai chi and chi kung
increase relaxation not only by making the spine more
flexible, but also through the deeper breathing that they
promote.
[iii]
For further information on the subject of anger, see David
Sobel and Robert Ornstein, “Defusing Anger and
Hostility,” Mental Medicine Update: The Mind/Body
Newsletter, Vol. 4, No. 3 (1995).
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