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How to breathe diaphragmatically and connect with yourself

Diaphragmatic breathing is technique to help you to use the diaphragm correctly while breathing. It is intended to help you activate the parasympathetic nervous system. In other words to calm down, inhabit your body, connect with yourself, get out of fight or flight, and relax.

Breathing helps to elicit the relaxation response that results in less tension and an overall sense of well being. Something that generally eludes addicts and trauma survivors. I did not realize that the majority of my mental and emotional discomfort (restless, irritable, discontent) was linked to my physiology. My struggle with being present, in the moment and without massive fear could be, at least in part, helped with certain consistent breathing techniques. It is important to note here that one of the common symptoms of trauma is dissociation (leaving the body).

Abdominal Breathing Technique

Practice as many times a day as possible or whenever you find your mind dwelling on upsetting thoughts or when you are experiencing pain.

• Place one hand on your chest and the other on your abdomen. When you take a deep breath in, the hand on the abdomen should rise higher than the one on the chest. This insures that the diaphragm is pulling air into the bases of the lungs.
• After exhaling through the mouth, take a slow deep breath in through your nose imagining that you are sucking in all the air in the room and hold it for a count of 7 (or as long as you are able, not exceeding 7)
• Slowly exhale through your mouth for a count of 8. As all the air is released with relaxation, gently contract your abdominal muscles to completely evacuate the remaining air from the lungs. It is important to remember that we deepen respirations not by inhaling more air but through completely exhaling it.
• Repeat the cycle four more times for a total of 5 deep breaths and try to breathe at a rate of one breath every 10 seconds (or 6 breaths per minute). At this rate our heart rate variability increases which has a positive effect on cardiac health.
• Once you feel comfortable with the above technique, you may want to incorporate words that can enhance the exercise. Examples would be to say to yourself the word, relaxation (with inhalation) and stress or anger (with exhalation). The idea being to bring in the feeling/emotion you want with inhalation and release those you don’t want with exhalation.
• In general, exhalation should be twice as long as inhalation. The use of the hands on the chest and abdomen are only needed to help you train your breathing. Once you feel comfortable with your ability to breathe into the abdomen, they are no longer needed.

I have been practicing this exercise 10 minutes about 6-10 times per day. Mostly when i feel trauma responses being activated and/or if i need to let go. Remember the goal is not a rigid plan to breathe properly. The objective is to connect with yourself and learn how to use self care so that it is not necessary to find something outside of yourself to comfort you. This has been my own experience.

Using and learning proper breathing techniques is one of the most beneficial things that can be done for both short and long term physical and emotional health.

Related Reading

Trauma and Breathing

Other Related articles

• Breathing: A Deeply Overlooked Matter (naturalbias.com)
• Pavel Somov, Ph.D.: The Relaxation Turbo — Not Just for Saab Owners! (huffingtonpost.com)
• Breathing techniques- Part 1 (bcrunner.blogspot.com)

By: jenniferarmour|March 20, 2010|Categories: all|Tags: Breathing . diaphragmatic breathing . fight or flight response|