Are you feeling anxious and searching for a natural way to transform your mental state? Dive into the power of breathwork with our enlightening video "Anxious? Induce Transformational Change with Breathwork." Discover the scientific backing and practical exercises that can significantly lower anxiety symptoms through intentional breathing techniques. From the physiological sighs recommended by experts like Andrew Huberman to the calming effects of box breathing and belly breathing, learn how to harness the power of your breath to initiate transformational change in your life.
Studies have shown that intentional, slow breathing can decrease anxiety in both older and younger adults, offering a simple yet profound tool for emotional regulation. Explore various breathwork methods such as cyclic sighing, box breathing, and the intriguing benefits of integrating breathwork into your exercise routine. Understand why focusing on the exhale can lead to the highest increase in positive effect and how breathwork can enhance resilience and clear the amygdala, leading to improved mental health.
This video is perfect for anyone looking to find peace, reduce anxiety, and foster a greater sense of well-being through the science and practice of breathwork. Whether you're new to breathwork or looking to deepen your practice, there's something here for you.
Your Host: Kimberly Beam Holmes, Expert in Self-Improvement and Relationships
Kimberly Beam Holmes has applied her master's degree in psychology for over ten years, acting as the CEO of Marriage Helper & CEO and Creator of PIES University, being a wife and mother herself, and researching how attraction affects relationships. Her videos, podcasts, and following reach over 200,000 people a month who are making changes and becoming the best they can be.
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Breathing and breathwork can help lower anxiety symptoms. When we start to become anxious, as we said earlier, we begin to gear up to fight, and when we gear up to fight, we are, we begin to breathe heavier, our respiratory rate goes up, as we said earlier, and so we may not realize it that when we're anxious, we're actually breathing heavier, breathing faster, and what happens is when we breathe faster, it continues that response, that physiological response in our bodies that continues the feeling of fight or flight. In fact, if I were to just sit here for a minute and breathe quickly, I would start getting anxious. Our body will react to the way that we breathe. So one way that we can oppose the feelings of anxiety is by slowing our breath intentionally. So when you do this breathwork, when you do intentional breathing exercises, intentional slow breathing it decreases anxiety, and this was found in one study that was done by Magnan and colleagues in 2021 in the Scientific Reports Journal Anxiety decreased among older and younger adults after doing five minutes of deep and slow breathing, which is great. Another study that was done in 2023 by many people Bobby was the leading or Balbin was the leading journalist or the leading researcher on this study, but it was also a journal study published by someone you may have heard of before named Andrew Huberman. He was one of the guest or the contributing researchers of this study that was looking at physiological breathing and the way that our bodies respond to breathwork with a physiological response. So this is Huberman's work, which is just kind of cool to look into.
Speaker 1:
They took 108 participants and put them into two different groups. One had a mindful meditation protocol where they were simply instructed to lie down and for five minutes, to focus on their forehead while breathing. So they weren't told to breathe any certain way or for any certain amount of time, or even to breathe deeply, just to lay down and focus on their forehead, which sounds really relaxing to do in and of itself, if we're going to be real. But then the second group of people were given some different breathwork. They were put into some breathwork groups. One was told to do cyclic sighing. So they were told to lie down and to inhale slowly until their lungs were full and then inhale again before breathing out to achieve max capacity and then to slowly and fully exhale.
Speaker 1:
This is called cyclic sighing. Huberman talks a lot about it on his podcast as the physiologic sigh and it goes like this you breathe in, you breathe in twice through your nose, you breathe out once through your mouth, and that, specifically, was compared to box breathing, where you breathe in for a count of four, you hold it for a count of four, you breathe out for a count of four and then you hold the breath out for a count of four. And it was also compared to cyclic hyperventilation, which is similar to the Wim Hof method for any of you who may know that. But it's where the cyclic hyperventilation is more like this. So it's a lot of breathing, but it's really focusing more on the inhale than it's focusing on the exhale. And here's what their results found. They also took some anxiety inventories along all of the groups to an anxiety inventory. Along with this, they found that exhale emphasized.
Speaker 1:
Well before that. They found that cyclic sighing, which is the breathe in, breathe in again and then breathe out through your nose, had significantly higher increase in positive affect when compared to just the mindful meditation, just the people lying on the couch thinking about their foreheads, which I still think sounds calming. But the cyclic sighing had way better results in positive affect and the exhale emphasized cyclic sighing group had the absolute highest increase in positive affect. Here's why Because it's in our exhale that our body down regulates. It's in our inhale that everything is gearing up to go. It's in our exhale that we can calm down. So when you focus on doing the breath in, the breath in and the exhale, you really want to focus on making the exhale longer than any of the two inhales. So it should go a little something like which already feels good.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, yeah. Actually, after I saw this on a human episode, I started doing it when I would feel anxious and it works, like it really, it really does, like you just did it like immediately makes you feel 10 times better.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, they've also talked about. He's said it on the podcast. I don't know if they put it in the if they published it in the paper, but that doing it in the middle of exercising is a great way to like reset you and get you ready for your next round.
Speaker 2:
Interesting.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, which is really interesting. There's many different types of breathing, though. We've talked about box breathing. There's the belly breathing, where you just focus on breathing in to your belly. You can kind of put your hand on your belly and really focus on filling up your diaphragm. Actually a fun side note on that one if you do that, laying on the ground, you really want to focus on filling your not just your belly up, but you're focusing on filling out your core as you breathe in and expanding your core. So if you had a pair of shorts on, you would even want to feel your core expanding on your back, like the back part of the bottom of your back, like top of your glutes. You would want to feel your breath even expanding your shorts in there.
Speaker 1:
So why this? Because it's about deeply breathing and the deeper that we're able to breathe. It actually helps us to be able to breathe better when we're exercising, when we're running, especially with cardiovascular training, when we're in our day to day. Life and the posture that we're in when we breathe, which I won't get into here has an effect on a lot of things, a lot of things as well. But by just beginning by focusing on breathing is a great place to start and some immediate impacts to feeling more resilient. We actually see in the brain that the areas that light up with resilience, like the amygdala clearing out the amygdala can happen quicker when we focus on things like four by four, box breathing, the psychological side or the physiologic side and different things like that. So you definitely have options.