Breathing Exercises for Enhanced Mental Health

If you are looking for easy ways to improve your mental health, such as anxiety, stress or depression, there are many basic strategies you can use. One of them is breathing exercises, which you not only can do anywhere when you need to, but can incorporate them into your workout routine.

Benefits of Breathing Exercises

When you start looking into natural ways to help with your anxiety or panic attacks, relieve stress, or just find emotional wellness, the topic of breathing exercises probably come up. But how exactly can they help you? Here are some benefits of incorporating breathing exercises into your daily routine:

They can ease up panic attacks – If you get caught with a bad panic attack, it is hard to focus on anything else until it’s gone. While they tend to last only a few minutes, those few minutes feel like torture. One thing you can do is try using breathing exercises to begin calming yourself down.

You can do them anywhere, at any time - Another big benefit of breathing exercises is that there are no tools needed. You can do them during workouts, at home, while walking or showering, at work, even while driving as long as you pay attention to the road.

They often help you learn how to meditate - Meditation can be used in conjunction with breathing exercises, but if you learn breathing techniques first, it makes it easier for you to learn meditation later down the road.

How to Perform Them

Breathing techniques start very simply, with just taking in deep breaths. This might seem like it is something you do already, but deep breathing is much different than what you do naturally. You want to sit in a quiet place and first relax. You then will just inhale deeply through your nose, hold for a few seconds, then exhale out your mouth. I suggest a ratio of 4:8, meaning, 4 seconds in and 8 seconds out.

You can also incorporate what is known as belly breathing, where you hold a hand on your stomach and focus on the sensations as you inhale and exhale. You may even want to image air flowing through your body during this process.

Breathing During Exercises

For people who are exercising for their mental health, they have a unique advantage for adding in breathing techniques. Combining both can really get you to a place of relaxation and start improving your stress or anxiety. It is best done during workouts like Yoga, Pilates, hiking, and walking. If you are just starting out, try beginner’s yoga, which focuses on gentle movement and various breathing techniques.