Tag: Breathing

Two Anxieties but One Breath

So, something occurred to me as I was dealing with stress about a work project…and then got news of changes that may require us to quickly move from the place in which we’ve lived for over ten years.

I am experiencing two different textures of anxieties. I’ve heard people discuss chronic and acute anxiety, but I would characterize the way I experience anxiety differently.

The first anxiety may wear you down but won’t require a complete change in your life.
Photo by Aiony Haust on Unsplash

The first is anxiety about what may happen or anxiety about what has taken place in the past and I can’t change. That encompasses stressful events that you need to work through, like a job-related project, which requires holding on and managing. It’s more of a chronic type of stress even though it might be time-limited. There are things out of my control or, in the case or what has already taken place, there’s no going back. It doesn’t qualify as life-changing as it may intensify and relax depending on conditions.

The second, however, is anxiety about something that *is* life changing. Those of us who have been handed a cancer diagnosis know what it feels like. It means that the future will look dramatically different from what we expected it be. Other examples are a death of a loved one or losing everything in a natural disaster. A sudden involuntary change in your living situation. This requires letting go and radically recalculating what you’ve become very used to. It can be very difficult to do, especially for those of us who like stability in our lives.

The first anxiety is exhausting. The second is terrifying. Having experienced both, I can definitively state that the first anxiety pales in comparison to the second. In fact, in the face of the second anxiety we may actually let go of the first completely and wonder why it ever bothered us.

The second anxiety is more intense and will alter life as you currently know it.
Photo by Ann on Unsplash

At the same time, as terrible as it may be, the second anxiety offers us a perspective and clarity that we would be hard pressed to accept as quickly any other way.

I do not wish either of these anxieties on anyone, but if there’s a bright side to them it’s that the same type of mindfulness practice that helps us deal with the anxiety of the first kind will also help when the expectation-smashing heaviness of the second anxiety hits.

Although you may still wake in the middle of the night, heart racing and wishing things had not changed, a consistent mindfulness meditation practice will provide you with the tools to smooth the jagged edges of rumination and fear, slowing the breathing and with it the heart rate, even in the presence of frightening thoughts.

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Of course, since this is a mindfulness blog in addition to being cancer-related, I cannot resist talking about one of the most effective techniques that I’ve found for calming myself: belly breathing.

Start by simply breathing deeply into the belly, as anxiety often results in shallow breaths. The deeper the inhale, the more air you will have for the exhale – try matching inhales and exhales in length. It won’t happen immediately. Give it time.

Create a breathing cycle and keep going. Establish a breathing practice and stick with it.
Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash

Keep breathing into the belly, fully engaging the diaphragm, allowing it to drop and make space for your lungs.

As you do this, focus on the breath. The uncalm thoughts can still be there, but gently allow them to sit on the sidelines for now. I used to try to completely push them away, but they would bob back up to the surface like a balloon pulled under water, bringing the intensity of my anxiety back with it.

So let them be there…keep one eye on them if necessary but give your breath the main stage.

Once the inhales and exhales have evened out in length, insert a short pause between them. Breathe in … pause … breathe out … pause. Just a little stop to elongate the cycle. Consistently breathing into your belly.

Transition to full box breathing, where the inhales, exhales and pauses are all equal in length. If you get very comfortable doing this, for a little extra, try to make the exhales just a touch longer than the inhales.

Or if it gets tiring, simply try to make your exhales a little bit longer than your inhales and dispense with the pauses altogether.

Maintain this type of soothing, intentional breathing for a few minutes or longer, depending on how your body is responding or what your nervous system needs today.

Truly, you don’t have to do this perfectly or adhere to a specific count. Simply focusing on your breath and slowing your breathing will help immeasureably in making space for your thoughts so that you can back away a bit and survey the scene without feeling claustrophobic, no matter which anxiety you’re dealing with at the moment.

Calming the Mind by Counting to 10 – with a Focus Twist

I’ve posted several times about different counting techniques that I’ve used to help calm and ground myself (counting backwards, counting 100 breaths). It sounds like such a simple thing, but it is surprisingly effective.

Counting is one of those things that we naturally learn when we are very young, and because it’s so familiar to us, we can do it with ease as adults.

Job #1 is to stop the swirling thoughts so that you can drop back to sleep.

This ease comes in handy when our Monkey Mind is jumping around like mad, stewing over what has happened or fearing for what is to come. Counting gives it something to do so that its attention is drawn away from anxious thoughts.

In particular, I’ve found this to be useful at night when falling back to sleep has been hindered by that incessant buzz of thinking that won’t go away.

The technique that I’ve used over the last few weeks weaves a counting pattern like this:

Become aware of your body lying in bed. Try to soften the most obvious places of tension (for me, neck and shoulders) and turn your attention to your breath.

Begin by focusing on your inhales of your breaths and counting them, up to ten. Then, switch your focus to your exhales, counting each one up to ten. And again, switch back to focusing on the inhales, continuing this way

The combination of counting up to ten and focusing on either the inhales or exhales provides enough of a distraction from your thoughts, but requires some gentle attention to keep on track. The switching of focus invites your mind to return to the breath.

Counting sheep might work just fine, but counting breaths helps you stay present and grounded.

I’ve found ten to be a very good number; however, five would also work. Whatever you prefer. This might require experimentation to see what is best for you. For example, counting to two might work better for some people during waking hours when there is naturally more stimulation around.

As you establish a pattern with your breath, extend your exhales regardless of where your focus is. This helps slow both your breath and heartrate.

Again, this technique works because counting to ten is simple and unstimulating, allowing the mind to lull itself into a calmer state. When I find myself missing ten and instead counting into the teens without switching my inhale-exhale focus, I know that I’m beginning to drift off. I gently stay with it, but sleep is nearby.

When I Think I Don’t Have Time To Meditate

This being the last week of 2020, it’s a good time to write about establishing new positive behaviors. I myself am working on biofeedback practices to increase my heart rate variability, commonly referred to as HRV, and balance my autonomic nervous system (ANS) since I have a history of being very “sympathetic”-heavy (that is, “fight-or-flight”).

This is particularly critical for me as a cancer survivor since stress is closely associated with inflammation which is linked to cancer. So bottom line, I consider getting good at calming myself a matter of life or death. Most of my life has been a runaway train as far as stress is concerned.

To achieve this, I’m using a smartphone app called Elite HRV (but I’m sure there are others). In the biofeedback section, the app recommends two daily breathwork sessions of at least 20 minutes each. Now, that got me thinking about whether I had that kind of time available. As it is, come hell or high water, I meditate at least 30 minutes a day, often using a variety of apps and a mixture of guided meditation and breathing practices, in addition to informal meditation sessions.

“I just spend three hours doing WHAT???” Sometimes, when we’re busiest, we’re also most vulnerable to completely zoning out.

But adding another 40 minutes? Seems unlikely, since I’m often going from morning to night without much of a break, especially because my bedroom is also my COVID-office.

Still, is it really unlikely? Yes, it’s true that I’m working longer hours, but I’m still making room for non-work things that are critically important to me, like exercise. So I find time for what matters.

And if I review my workday, I know I experience periods of “zoning out”, often when something on my computer or phone catches my attention. These breaks aren’t long, but it’s not uncommon for me to get caught up in focusing on something else along the way…before you know it, that can be 10 or even 20 minutes.

And sometimes it’s really long. Case in point: over the weekend, my daughter and I ended up (and I seriously don’t know how we started on this, but…) watching several hours’ worth of YouTubers streaming video games. I don’t even play a lot of video games, but I was tired and became transfixed. And we did do this for several HOURS because one YouTube video often leads to another. That’s a chunk of my life that I will never get back, and in retrospect, that time could have been spent more wisely.

Now I realize that it would have been so simple to retreat to my bedroom for less than the length of one of those videos and eke out some quiet time to turn inward. I could have returned to the videos afterwards without feeling like I’d missed anything.

Leave yourself a reminder to pause activity and simply BE.

All I need is that little reminder, the mindful awareness that meditation and breathwork are available to me at literally any time. Even if it’s not a full 20 minutes. Five or ten minutes interspersed throughout the day will still offer benefits, so they’re still worth doing–and I’m talking about in addition to my regularly scheduled sessions. And who knows? Once I begin, I may find it possible to stretch those few minutes into a few more minutes. And a few more.

This is particularly important because as lovely as it is to have a longer calming meditation, the ultimate goal for me is to seamlessly incorporate mindfulness into my everyday activities, so that I am always able to take a deep breath and pause before my ANS gets triggered into “fight or flight”. It is especially those little blips of meditative time–a minute or two here or there–that help reset my nervous system.

Taking a mini-break for mindfulness may seem so simplistically obvious but I’m willing to bet that many of us don’t even entertain that possibility. We’re convinced we can’t shoehorn another thing into our busy days. If a sticky note by our computer reminds us to take five deep breaths, for example, and we begin incorporating that into our day, we see that there is more room for pausing than we imagined. Just opening up that breathing space can not only invite more consistent practice, but also slow the hectic pace of our lives.

We could all use that.

How Do You Want To Feel?

I’ve really been enjoying a guided meditation on Insight Timer by Australian trainer and life coach Emma Polette, entitled “Morning Visualisation Meditation”. In fact, it’s been the first meditation that I’ve done every morning for the past month. What makes me like it so much? It reminds me that I can choose the emotional state with which I enter into my day.

Emma facilitates this by instructing the listener to “allow yourself to feel how to want to feel today.” I love this concept! So many of us want to be calm or happy or courageous, but we look at it as a cognitive endeavor and get nowhere with it. Emma reminds us to actually feel what it feels like. If my goal is to feel peaceful, then I imagine what it would feel like, if I were actually peaceful – I generate those feelings in my body.

By feeling into the sensations of a positive state, we can lessen the severity of negative emotions. It takes consistency and practice, but is worth the effort.

This takes practice and focus, but the payoff is wonderful. Think of it as establishing a new habit – repetition is necessary in order to seal it into your daily routine. The more you bring up those feelings in your body and really feel into all the different sensations associated with them, the easier it is to invoke that feeling the next time. And that next time might be a time of stress, when you’re in particular need of soothing.

Just as you may associate a meditation cushion with a sense of grounding, or a certain time of the day with a mindful mood because that’s when you always meditate, you can also improve your ability to bring up positive sensations that help keep you present and calm. All it takes is consistent practice.

I should mention that this is not to suggest that if you’re feeling strong negative emotions or succumbing to anxiety it’s a flaw of some kind. There will be numerous occasions when we get swept up by distressing thoughts. Sometimes it will be hard to release them. And that’s okay.

But I find it very empowering to start my day in a positive frame of mind, knowing that I am not helpless against stressors. Just as how in mindfulness meditation when we realize that we’ve lost focus and have slipped down a rabbit hole, we simply return to the breath, we can also notice how it feels in our bodies to experience stress or anger or whatever negative emotion settles down on us.

It might be a tightness in the chest that shortens our breath and sends our heart racing. It might be a cold sensation in our stomach and lower abdomen that elicits nausea, or it may be a hot flush that toasts our cheeks. With the awareness of what we are experiencing in the moment, we can gently breathe through those bodily sensations, relax the agitation and then remember how it would feel to feel the more pleasant sensations that we’ve practiced every morning.

How would you rather be feeling right now? Can you feel it?