People struggling with anxiety are often advised to take a deep breath, but may be surprised to end up feeling more anxious than before. This is why—and what to try instead.
Session 1, “Don’t tell me to take a deep breath, because it doesn’t work.” Many times, my own kids have screamed, “I don’t want to take a breath!” mid-tantrum. As I pushed out my second child, in the middle of my awesome breath practice, an L&D nurse told me “Stop that! You’re wasting all your energy!” At some point, I stopped fighting them on it and got curious about why.
, that’s perfectly fine, because you can observe those thoughts without getting attached to them. But in the middle of a freak-out, it’s more likely you’ll get hooked by the thoughts and carried away into panic-town.One of the most terrifying signs of a panic attack is feeling like you can’t catch your breath. Hyperventilation means you’re exhaling too much carbon dioxide. There’s too much, not too little, oxygen in your system, in relation to the amount of CO2.
As a further illustration, in the Bikram yoga tradition, Kapalbhati, AKA breath of fire, requires using quick, successive, and deep exhales to stimulate the sympathetic. That’s the exact wrong half of the autonomic nervous system you want to activate if you’re having an anxiety attack! The sympathetic nervous system revs us up and further prepares us for danger. Fire breath is considered an activating or energizing breath exercise, not a relaxing one.
Slow breathing works well as a regular preventive practice, or as a method of stilling an already-still mind even further, but it’s not good at the height of a crisis. Once you are grounded and have some distance from those pesky thoughts about thinking and breathing, you can move to #2.Try to get it slower each time, breathing in for 3 seconds and out for 4 seconds, then in for 3 and out for 5, and so on, rather than starting with 3 counts of in-breath and 8 counts of out-breath.