Breathing Exercises to Calm Your Anxiety

Your breathing is deeply connected to your mental, emotional and physiological states. When you become agitated, feel anxious, or get mad, your breathing becomes faster. When you consciously slow your breathing, you can lower your feelings of anger, anxiety and stress.

Calming your breathing using a breathing exercise works best if you do it regularly throughout the day, stopping every few hours to tune in and slow down. You can’t overdo it if you want to do it more often. But if you wait until you’re really stressed/ anxious to slow your breathing down, you may find it doesn’t seem as effective.

Basic Breathing Exercise

1. Breathe in for four seconds.
2. Breathe out for four seconds.

Repeat the basic breathing exercise for one minute. Within the minute, one of three things will happen:

• You’ll see no change to the way you feel. If that’s the case, progress to the intermediate exercise below.
• You won’t be able to keep this rhythm up for one minute. You’ll want to take breaths earlier than four seconds, it will feel like you’re running out of air. Adjust your breathing so that you can keep up the rhythm for a full minute – it may be a count of in for 2, out for 2.
• You’ll feel calmer. Yay! You’ve hit upon the right rhythm for you.

Remember, it’s not a competition. Sometimes, it’ll feel easier or harder. Adjust depending on the situation. The more you consciously practice slow breathing, the calmer you will be. You’ll also get better at it – see moving onto intermediate and advanced rhythms, below.

Intermediate Breathing Exercise

1. Breathe in for four seconds.
2. Hold for two seconds.
3. Breathe out for six seconds.

When you hold your breath for two seconds, you cause your brain to temporarily stop producing the stress hormones which are causing the feelings of agitation, anxiety etc.

Advanced Breathing Exercise

1. Breathe in for four seconds.
2. Hold for seven seconds.
3. Breathe out for eight seconds.

Breathing out for longer than you breathe in has the effect of slightly slowing your heart rate.

Once you’ve practiced enough, you can slow your breathing anywhere. You can slow your breathing whenever you’re in situations that cause you stress of anxiety of any kind, and it can help you feel calmer, within just one short minute! Slowing your breathing is a completely portable calming technique that you can use anytime, anywhere.

Apps that can help:

“ReachOut Breathe” – Allows you to choose how long you breathe in, hold and breathe out for.

“Breathe – 4-7-8 Method – Keep calm and get to sleep” – Specifically for the advanced breathing exercise.