Breathing? Yes, Breathing Exercises Are THE Key to Managing Your Stress

By Joshua Singer, C.Ht.

One of the biggest challenges that clients in my Dayton and Cincinnati Hypnosis practice face is that of stress. Unfortunately, as Americans, we're always on the go, always have ten million things to do, and always ten minutes late for something.

The following is one of the many exercises that I have my Dayton and Cincinnati Hypnosis Clients do as part of the Stress Management Services we offer.

One of the basic ways of clearing and managing stress is concentrating on first how you breathe and then, practicing a new way of breathing, so that this new way of breathing becomes automatic when you need it to manage your stress.

When you consciously change your breathing to the point where you rehearse it until it changes unconsciously, it clears your head of distractions so that you can concentrate on the task at hand. Harvard Medical Center researchers call this the relaxation principle.

To do this, you must relax your diaphragm. This is not easy to do when you are tense. It takes true self-awareness to realize that your body is tense. It takes effort to relax those muscles in your stomach and discipline to breathe steadily.

However, before you change how you breathe, most people do not realize that they never fully exhale. All of the toxins that people don’t fully discharge then become built up in our bodies, adding to our daily stress.

So start the exercise by taking a giant inhalation as big as you can lifting your shoulders and chest as you do. Then, exhale with a loud, grunting noise, imagining all the tension and stress leaving your body through your breath.

Don’t be shy about this step! The louder and more cleansing the sound you make, the better!

Then, to begin the breath, imagine that your abdomen and is a giant upside down balloon with the mouth of the balloon in the genital area. When you begin to inhale, concentrate on keeping the chest completely still and imagine starting the breath from the genital area, and then the rest of the balloon expands.

Try and inhale for six counts, hold the breath for one count, slowly exhale for seven counts, and then stay empty for one count before inhaling again.

As for your mental talk, try to focus on your breathing: Say to yourself, Inhaling, one, two, three,four,five,six, and hold, and exhale, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven and hold. Repeat, etc.

You will find that if you continue this cycle for five minutes, you will find an amazing sense of calm that perhaps you haven’t felt in a long time. You will also find that you will be more in tune to the present moment.

As your mind is focused on your breathing, your senses take in the situation around you unencumbered and unfiltered.

You begin to see things as they unfold, hear and listen to sounds as they come, feel and smell aromas as they arise without automatically shutting any of it out or reflexively reacting to them.

Continued practice of focused breathing will help you deal with situations in a more rational and objective manner. It lets you put things in perspective. And it gives you insight into the way your body responds under different situations.

This is one of the many exercises that I have my clients in my Dayton and Cincinnati Hypnosis practice do as part of the Stress Management Services we offer at the AbsolutePeak Hypnosis Center.

Coupled with the incredible power of hypnosis to unblock the sources of stress, these exercises are most useful to provide people with a proven system of managing their stress whenever and wherever they choose to practice it.

To find out more information about how you can combat stress with hypnosis at the AbsolutePeak Hypnosis Center, please feel confident that we are more than happy to answer any questions you might have.

and we’d be happy to answer any questions you might have about hypnosis, hypnotci techniques or our services.