Breath is very literally life. Learning how to accurately use your breath can help you tap into what some call a superhuman capacity. Don't believe me? Keep reading and I’ll show you 4 key reasons why breathwork isn't just something for yogis and monks. It’s for everyone who is interested in rapidly optimizing their mental, physical, and spiritual states.
I know, it sounds too easy to be real. If mood-enhancing, body-benefiting, and even career-boosting consequences are what you are after, then really think deeply about breathwork. Open your mind to a new wellness hack capable of taking you to transformational levels of clarity and focus.
Let's dive in!
What is breathwork?
Breathwork is the art and science of using the breath to create deeper awareness, physical health, and a more profound mind-body connection. It is an intentional breathing technique that can improve your life in transformational ways.
Some breathwork techniques emphasize the rate of breathing, which will create differing effects on the body. From slow to rapid, breath-work exercises can target any aspect of healing. This includes relaxation, stress reduction, enhanced focus, and deeper sleep. Whatever your goal, there is a breathwork technique out there that will help you achieve it.
Before truly respecting the practice of breath-work, one must ask the question…
Why do we breathe?
The initial answer to this is pretty obvious. You wouldn't be here reading this if you weren't breathing. As many of us know, inhaling oxygen is an unconscious process regulated by our autonomic nervous system (ANS).
What many don't know is that our cells need oxygen and the way you breathe strongly affects the chemical and physiological activities in your body. It's our breath that replenishes our cells with oxygen that they need to keep directing the correct amount of energy into our bodies.
Benefits of breathwork...
Release Trauma
Traditional therapy may help one identify some psychological problems, stressors, childhood baggage and internal trauma. Many of these therapies fail to detect their effects on the body.
Bessel van der Kolk wrote the New York Times bestseller book The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. In his book, he explains how trauma is a fact of life. However, because the body remembers every traumatic experience we have ever had, if not released properly, the body can be continually affected into the future.
That’s where breathwork can help the body and mind to release and return to a balanced state. Breathwork can increase blood circulation, allowing the body to let go of whatever comes up during meditation. You may find yourself crying or shaking as your body works though traumas.
Breathwork release can promote an increase of self-love, worthiness and a balanced, clear feeling within the mind and body.
Faster recovery from physical exertion
Fast recovery is the key to getting off the bench and back into the game for athletes. That is also true for every person who is bringing their body back from a challenging workout. Without proper recovery, your body accumulates stress, and over time, it can result in physical fatigue which in turn leads to sore muscles, inflammation, and ultimately injury.
For proper recovery, getting enough sleep, staying hydrated, and eating healthy food is essential. Adding breathwork into this mix will ensure your body has all it needs to achieve faster recovery and train harder.
Improve Sleep
Everyday stressors, social media, and home duties all demand our mental and physical attention. As we give all we have during the day, the evening rolls around and we have little left in our tank for our self-care. Not having the essential energy needed to take on any more tasks, our brain seeks the easiest track that will keep us entertained.
Because your subconscious mind is alway taking in information, all the ads and random bits remain active in your brain, which makes it hard to sleep. Why? Your brain is a problem solving machine that has just received all this new data. It doesn't know what to do with it and can’t stop processing. The information keeps being repeated in your head as a way to properly stock the new information correctly.
That, along with the blue light exposure from your indoor lighting, phone, and laptop, causes your night to be filled with a lot of tossing & turning.
Luckily, some breathwork techniques before bed can help our body reduce the effects of these stimulants and work to bring us more calm. This will promote a healthier bedtime routine that will restore your nighttime patterns from troubled sleep to sleeping like a baby.
Focus and Mental Clarity
Concentration problems are something that most of the world deals with. To focus on a task is to give your full attention to it. This is easier said than done though, as family life and work collide in the home. You can see how hard it has become to fully engage in any task with undivided attention.
Think about this...most concentration problems are stress related. This means, when we start to feel uneasy internally, a distraction is a more than welcome entrant into our mental space.
This is where breathwork can aid you in aligning your focus to the correct points.
When you take a conscious breath, you instantly tell your body to stop the production of stress hormones. As you continue doing this the body recognizes that it is safe and will return you back to the parasympathetic state of being. There you can focus better and be productive in your goals.
Closing your day with breathwork, mixed with other well rounded modalities, and you can supercharge your day and your life.
