Your Breath & Your Emotions
Your breath is with you through every single emotion.
Every emotion has a different associated breath rate. How do you breathe when you’re happy? What about when you’re angry? What about when you’ve had a fright versus when you are content?
By recognising our different breath responses to emotion we can see the different ways our body responds and the impact that different emotional triggers have on our breathing.
Conversely, the way we breathe can influence the way we feel.
Knowing how our breath impacts our emotional state, and how our emotional state impacts our breathing, gives us the ability to control and change our emotions. It is so empowering.
If we’re angry or upset our breath may become fast, and perhaps a little ragged…
so by changing the way we breathe and slowing our breath down we can turn that upset into feelings of safety, contentment, and help get back to feeling happy. This is an amazing way we can change our whole state.
What can happen in time is that we go through stressful events or periods, maybe a week or a month - and that ongoing stress elevates our breathing rates as our bodies are in a constant state of self-preservation: do we run away or fight the thing causing our stress?
What happens over time is that our body adjusts to the higher pace of breathing to keep us in that survival mode but if we have another stressful event, the breathing rate increases again and for every subsequent stressor our breathing responds by getting faster and faster, and all of a sudden you’ve got this lifetime of events that are stacked up, and our breath rate becomes an absolute mess.
Now, we know the way we breathe influences how we feel, so, if during a lifetime of events we’ve taught our body to breath faster and faster, what is this doing to our body??
It’s keeping us in a hyper aroused state and sending messages to our brain that there is danger, that you need to run away, that you need to fight, and the brain translate these messages into looking for these danger cues - which of course feels like anxiety, it prevents us from winding down at night, from sleeping properly (if you can get to sleep at all), and keeps us in a state of constant tension that we don’t know what to do with.
We can see already, in ourselves, that these patterns are there. What if you had a tool that you could use to help your body feel safe?
Instead of working from a “mind-down” approach (ie. thinking to yourself “I have to be doing all these things, I have to calm down!”), you can work from the body up and calm the mind.
This simple tool is so incredibly powerful. Using the breath to impact your mind and emotions works. This is why I am so passionate about it and love sharing the knowledge of how to optimise your breathing to get the most out of every aspect of your life.
