Breathing Emergency!

[Privet]

Hi, in this topic I want to share some tools that can help you when the shit hits you really hard. 

Breathing exercises!

I find it very helpful in my own life and use all the time, although I greatly underestimated the power of it before and thought that it's not effective.

When can you use it?

- addiction urges

- depression attacks

- panic/fear attacks

- social anxiety attacks

- procrastination/resistance to something

- impatience

- in your bed if you can't fall asleep and agitated

Exercises

Exercise #1 "I'm a balloon!":

This is my interpretation of 4-7-8 technique. Inhale as hard as possible and then hold your breath with your throat muscles. Relax your belly and chest, hold air only by your throat. Wait for 5-10 seconds and blow air through your lips (not slow nor fast). I find that it works better when you sit or stand with erect back. 

Exercise #2 "Can't get enough!":

Breathe fast and deep 50-200 times. Yup, just that. You can experiment with depth and frequency.

Exercise #3 "Am I enlightened or just high?":

Combination of two previous exercises. 3-30 fast deep breaths and then "inhale as hard as possible and then hold your breath with your throat muscles...". Experiment with amount of breaths before you hold it, I discovered that when you sit or stand you need way less breaths than when you lie to make you high. Caution: this can literally make you knock off a little.

Exercise #4 "Captain! Our ship is leaky!":

Clench your lips and breathe deep through this slit with a little effort. Clench lips both on inhale and exhale. 

How to use this?

When you experience any strong emotional issue you have 2 choices: concious intellectual responce and reactive behaviour. Unconcious reactivity is: giving in your addiction, eating, drinking, having sex, jerking off, watching porn and any other thing that just distracts you from issue instead of working on it. Breathing exercises are one of the possible ways of actually working through your emotional states. It won't cure you from depression or addiction or hypomania but if shit hits you really hard you can use breathing as a mean to avoid destructive behaviour.

It really works! Start small and make a commitment to do one of the exercises every time your emotional state arises for one week straight (#3 is most useful from my experience). 

For example, you can make a breathing routine to use it before sleep in bed, something like:

1) 100 breaths x 3

2) Exercise #3 x 10

3) 30 slow breaths through clenched lips.

Very helpful if you are impatient and can't fall asleep, entertain yourself in bed!

Usually, when you feel intense emotions/states it's not just enough to do one exercise, probably you will need to spend like 10-30 minutes to achieve significant relief.

Try this and post what you've got! Share some other exercises that you came up with.

Mindfulness meditation works really well for increasing your sensitivity for emotional states, you can recognize them arising and work through instead of reacting.

P.S. Sorry for grammar, I'm not a native speaker.

Edited August 22, 2017 by Privet