Written by Shannon Carleton

The practice of Paced Breathing as a form of meditation and mindfulness is becoming increasingly widespread. 

Since this shelter-in-place thing started you’ve probably heard a celebrity, health professional or someone you know recommend you do breathing exercises to cope with stress. 

Why?

Paced Breathing is an excellent strategy for managing your stress response and coping with feelings of anxiety and panic because it is a highly effective way to change your physiology from your fight/flight emergency response to your rest/digest calm baseline state. 

Paced breathing works because:

1. When we inhale, our heart rate speeds up a little bit. 

2. The reverse happens when we exhale. Our heart slows down a little. 

3. So if we spend more time exhaling longer, we effectively slow our heart rate down more.

Two minutes of long exhale breath - that’s just TEN breaths - can:

• reduce your heart rate, 

• relax your breathing, 

• calm your stress response and 

• give you an overall feeling of focus and relaxation.

It’s as close to a magic power as we humans get.

If you haven’t tried it yet, perhaps it’s because you don’t realize that you are Dorothy and you’re wearing the ruby slippers.

Use them now:

This simple exercise is part of a network of skills that the best adjusted people leverage to have satisfying lives, solve big business problems, lead amazing teams, and consistently amaze their friends.