Looking for a beginner-friendly way to transform your mind and body in as little as 10 minutes a day? Breathwork may be exactly what you are looking for.
Anyone practicing yoga and meditation understands the importance of breathing on and off the mat. However, more and more people are turning to breathwork for various reasons, including physical and mental benefits.
Breathwork has been credited with helping manage anxiety symptoms, improving focus, strengthening lungs, increasing energy, and improving sleep. Read on to discover more about the benefits of breathwork.
Article Topics
Manage Anxiety Symptoms
Research has shown that using breathwork can help reduce symptoms of anxiety in many different ways. Breathwork has been known to create a healthy relationship with your mind and body, helping you manage emotions, stay in the present, increase attention, and develop body awareness.
Like almost any activity, breathwork can become second nature when practiced frequently. Training your body to breathe deeply and fully on command increases the chances that your body will begin to do it in a period of heightened stress or fear. A seasoned breathwork practitioner can begin to calm down and slow a racing mind without a second thought.
Improve Focus
It’s no secret that breathwork helps alleviate anxieties and helps people stay in the moment. When the focus is entirely on breathing, what it feels like, which muscles to use, and how long to inhale or exhale, the practitioner must not let his mind wander from the task at hand.
Training our minds to focus entirely on a single task for a few minutes benefits other areas of our life. Many breathwork practitioners see an improvement in attention spans. The increased focus isn’t entirely the product of the discipline involved in breathwork but a byproduct of the extra oxygen brought into the body.
Noradrenaline, a chemical messenger in the brain that perceives our work, is impacted by breathing. The chemical will see the task in front of us and decipher how much attention we can give. Breathing increases the amount of attention our brain can provide to any task at hand.
Strengthen Your Lungs
We breathe at every moment and without much thought. No wonder it’s easy to overlook breathing as a form of exercise. Sometimes physical activities like yoga, strength training and running call upon us to look and focus on our breath.
However, breathwork is an exercise for your lungs. Breathing in and out causes the walls of your lungs to expand and contract, and using different breathwork patterns helps strengthen your lung muscles.
Strength-training your lungs can help with endurance, increase the amount of oxygen in your bloodstream, and even help manage some asthma symptoms.
Increase Energy Levels
Since breathwork increases the amount of oxygen in your bloodstream, many individuals feel an energy rush after a breathwork session. These sessions mimic the same invigorating feeling many individuals get after a great workout and provide similar benefits.
When we control our breath through breathwork, we can impact the process of gas exchange in our cells. Increasing the amount of oxygen that comes into our bodies also increases the number of cells receiving fresh oxygen to carry through our bodies and heal them.
Oxygen is vital to everything that makes up our bodies, from blood to muscles to organs to skin.
Improve Sleep
There are many reasons why someone may have a disrupted or lousy night of sleep. Today’s society creates many opportunities for us to fall into the trap of bad habits that negatively impact our health and well-being. These include getting our eyes and hands glued to mobile phones, tablets or desktop computers, excessive drinking, frequent parties, stress, work overload, certain medications, etc. Sleep is vital for our physical, emotional, and mental health, so we must take proper steps to ensure a good night of sleep.
Since breathwork can help reduce stress, increase emotional stability, strengthen your lungs, help you stay grounded at the moment, and increase stamina during workouts, it’s not hard to see why it can help you get a restful night.
Using breathwork with a slow yoga flow before bed can help your body wind down for the evening. Reducing stress and allowing your body to calm itself before attempting to sleep can help you create the perfect zone for sleep.
Where Can I Learn More About Breathwork?
Thanks to the increase of people seeking natural and holistic approaches to wellness and living, many activities, including yoga, meditation, and breathwork, have become daily habits for millions. Although certain cultures have been practicing these for thousands of years, they have become more popular and mainstream in the West in recent decades.
Finding a breathwork class can be as easy as walking into your favorite yoga studio. Many studios have begun offering breathwork workshops along with their regular yoga sessions.
If your area lacks a breathwork community, you can find one online. There are some great online resources for breathwork coaching certificates allowing you to dive deeper into your own practice and gives you the skills to help others make positive and lasting change in their lives.
Summary
Breathwork is perhaps the world’s best-kept not-so-secret secret. After all, many cultures have been utilizing and experiencing the benefits of this practice for centuries. Today, millions of people are turning to holistic and natural approaches to living and wellness, leaving behind Western medicine and prescription drugs.
Breathwork has been known to help alleviate anxiety symptoms, improve focus, strengthen lungs, increase energy levels, and improve sleep while providing many other physical and emotional benefits.
The journey to breathwork is a personal one. A great place to start is finding a local or online breathwork coach. Some people find it through yoga and pranayama. Others prefer guided meditations that involve controlled breathing. The beauty of the journey is that it is inclusive, and almost anyone can benefit from doing breathwork.
Which benefit of breathwork entices you the most? Start your breathwork journey today and see how your mind and body improve – one breath at a time.
