Podcast #32: Breath as a Tool: 5 Short but Powerful Exercises for More Focus, Calm and Energy

Mirna Smidt (0:00)

Hey, it's Mirna from Happiness Academy. Welcome to the Happiness Academy Podcast, a place where you can discover practical, simple, yet effective tools from the science of positive psychology.

You're at the right place if you're looking to live a life of well-being and joy, staying resilient when facing any challenges, and incorporating a sense of meaning in things you do.

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Let's dive in.

Today, we are talking about one of the most powerful toolboxes to manage our energy and our emotion, and that is our breath. Our breath is a unique thing we have available that sits in the crossroads between our emotions, our body, and our mind, and it has a big influence on all of it, and we can use it as a toolbox to work and adjust any of these areas in many different ways. So today, we are exploring with just a brief intro how to use our breath in more intentional way, to create emotional or mental stains that we wish to create. And then I'll share with you five specific exercises of using your breath in different ways for any goal you're looking to achieve. Our exercises will be short and sweet and a little bit diverse, and I will invite you to test them all five, and then choose the ones that work for you. So when we talk about using our breath, the first rule of thumb you need to know and be aware of is that it's all about seeing how we balance between inhale and exhale. And it sounds very simple. The general rule of thumb is every time we do bigger, deeper, stronger inhales, that gives us more oxygen and that basically energizes our body and raises our energy. On the other hand, when we do an exhale, the more we can extend it, the more we can slow it down, the more we can do it as a deeper exhale, longer exhale, the more we will relax and our body will relax. As most of breathing exercises are often oriented around relaxing and calming down and when you're working with stress, because of that, often in different breathing exercises, including in some that we share today, you will notice that there is more of this focus on exhale and on kind of that relaxation part. However, being aware of difference between focusing on inhale and extending the inhale, or focusing on exhale and extending and deepening it, you can actually choose how to adjust such exercises or breathing pattern to you. Now with that in mind, we can also say that one of the easiest ways of using your breath for more well-being is simply to try to remember a few times through the day to just take a couple of deep long breaths when with a little bit of extended exhale, simply because most of us are used to breathing too shallow and too fast and not really giving our body enough of oxygen. And even that can create a really big difference in how relaxed we are, how we are less stressed. So just kind of doing, you know, four or five times, a couple of times per day. That's the simplest. You don't have to go for structured exercises. You don't have to go and explore every technique that exists. You can just focus on doing a few of these breaths, and this will already extend your energy for the day so much. The difference will be really, really big if you're not doing that yet. Now having that said, of course, structured exercises have their role in it as well. For the exercises I'm sharing today, they're mainly related to relaxing a bit more or to also focusing better. They're a little bit different between each other. Some are more simple, some are a bit more structured. And again, I would invite you to experiment and test different ones because that's the only way to actually feel which one works well for you. They're all fairly short. They're all like 10 breaths with some counting involved and fairly straightforward. I do want to invite you if you're experimenting and trying out a certain breathing exercise to always do that in a way that before you do it, you briefly check in with yourself. So you basically just say, hey, how do I feel right now? What's my motion? What's my energy? How does my body feel like? So just how do I feel right now? And then do the exercise. Just the first time you're doing it, this is a good thing to do. And then after the exercise, check in with yourself again and say again, hey, how do I feel now? What changed? What changed about my energy? What changed in my emotion, in my body? Maybe nothing, maybe a lot, maybe subtle. Usually it's subtle, but important changes. So first time you're doing the exercise, it's a really good idea to test this, to try to do this check in before and after, because only that way will you really notice which exercise was more effective. Because very often, once we change your state and we get more relaxed, we're like, sure, that's how I was before as well. But we miss to notice that there are some part, maybe tension in our neck or maybe a little bit lower energy or something that we didn't even notice that the exercise actually changed. So with that test, you can choose the best exercises for yourself. And after that, I would suggest choosing one and then committing to it for a week or several weeks, doing that exercise maybe two times per day. Each of them takes like between two and five minutes, so it should be easy. Doing each couple of times per day and just making these exercises, the chosen exercises, not all five, a part of your routine. It will be really, really helpful for you to have it as a tool for your emotional management, for calming down when you need, to get more focus, to build your energy, whatever it is that you want to achieve. So with that, let's go into exercises. The first one is quite well known. It's called four, seven, eight, and it basically just says, for each cycle of breath, do an inhale, and while you're doing it, count to four. Then stop, hold your breath for count of seven, and then exhale for count of eight. So one, two, three, four, in.