Breathing Exercises for Stress

Your stress levels are tied directly to your overall wellness and there's really no way around that fact. The more stressed out you are, the worse you will ultimately feel. That's not only because stress brings with it feelings of anxiety, malaise, and other bad feelings, but stress also negatively affects one's sleeping and eating habits. A little bit of stress can certainly accumulate and end up going a long way. What starts out as you feeling stressed can easily snowball into poorer health all around and even depression. There are a lot of experts out there who notice that stress is definitely accumulating in people more now that we're dealing with a global pandemic. In some states and nations, lock-downs are still going on, and people are cooped up and stressed out.

For these people, focusing on their breathing might actually help to alleviate some of that accumulated stress. Now, no one is claiming that it�s a miracle cure; however, anything that can put your body at ease and help to reduce your stress levels is a good thing for your overall wellness. So, let's have a quick look at a few very simplistic breathing exercises that the professionals recommend you try at home when you want to get rid of some of your stress and just relax.

Pursed Lip Breathing

Pursed lip breathing is one of the simplest breathing techniques that anyone can try at basically any time they wish. It's very easy to practice this breathing technique. Simply relax the shoulders, and keep your mouth closed while breathing in through your nostrils. When you exhale, you want to keep your lips pretty tight together, as if you're trying to whistle, and breathe out very slowly.

What this does is it helps to calm the body down a great deal. It really helps one catch their breath, too, if they have been doing any sort of strenuous activity. This is a technique that is also said to help correct your body's breathing pattern, if it's practiced four to five times daily. Overall, it might be a great way to help one alleviate a lot of that stress they have been accumulating.

Focused Breath

Focused breathing is pretty much precisely how it sounds, and it's also a very easy technique one can try that may help you to reduce those stress levels. With the focused breath technique, you want to take control of your body's breathing. You breathe automatically and are rarely aware of it. For this technique, sit in a comfortable position and take control of your breathing. You control when you breathe and the length of your breaths.

Think "inhale" as you inhale, and "exhale" as you exhale. Stay in control of your breathing pattern for a few minutes. The thought here is that turning your focus toward your breathing really rids your mind of all that clutter, while also helping you to take in more oxygen through longer, steadier breaths inhaled, and more C02 exhaled. It is said to make some people feel a whole lot better after they perform focused breathing for a few minutes.

Equal Breathing

The equal breathing technique shares a lot in common with focused breathing, in that you will still sit down calmly and take control of your breathing. Only instead of focusing on just breathing in and out, inhaling and exhaling, you instead want to turn your focus to the length of the breaths you're taking. The idea here is that you want to inhale and exhale the same amount of air.

This technique is meant as a way to help regulate your body's breathing rhythm. You also get the same sort of benefits you do from the previous focused breathing technique, in that it's going to help you clear your mind and just focus on your breathing. Best of all, it's a very easy breathing exercise to accomplish. The more stress you're able to relieve, the better you'll end up feeling, which is a boon for your wellness to be sure.

There are dozens upon dozens of different breathing techniques that are fairly simple to implement in your daily lives. The idea behind them all, however, is that you should find some time to relax and calm yourself. The goal with these breathing exercises is to eliminate some of your stress to boost your overall mood and wellness.