The holiday season is upon us and that usually means big meals, family events and parties. While this is often a lovely time of year to connect with family and friends, sometimes it comes with a degree of stress that can feel overwhelming and leave you unable to enjoy your time fully.
I find the holiday season particularly stressful. Although I love hosting, seeing everybody there is to see, and dressing up, I can also find myself getting easily overstimulated by the lights, noises and high-energy interactions. When this happens, I’ve found the best thing I can do is take five minutes away from the noise to focus on my breathing. Then, I can come back and sparkle as required.
This five-minute video of calming breathwork by Adriene Mishler of Yoga With Adriene fame (a Fit&Well favorite and one of our favorite yoga YouTube channels) is perfect if you need to take a moment to center yourself. Not only does it help with the potentially overwhelming thoughts and feelings of stress, but it helps to reconnect mind and body—a grounding experience.
How to do the breathing exercise
My experience trying this breathwork video
I took five minutes out of a busy workday to follow Mishler’s soothing guided breathwork and see if it helped reduce my stress. Here’s what I discovered.
1. I regained my focus
When there are a million things to do, it can feel like you have to do them all at once. I often struggle to prioritize my tasks when feeling overwhelmed, and this can lead to me freezing and making no progress, or focusing on something completely irrelevant. This breathwork gave me a five-minute break from everything I needed to do and encouraged my frazzled nervous system to stop chugging away. After this five minutes away from everything I needed to do, I was able to look at my tasks with fresh eyes, and more easily prioritize my time. Instead of feeling overwhelmed, my mind was more easily able to focus on what I needed to do and begin to make progress.
2. I felt more present in my body
Mishler encourages you to feel your body, breathe into your belly, lengthen your spine and bring your attention to your inhale and exhale. This is an excellent way to ground yourself in your body and works in a similar way to body scanning, requiring you to focus on different areas of your corporeal form and consider how each feels. This allowed me to check in with my body and I realized that my neck was sore from hunching over my computer and that I needed a glass of water.
3. My spinning thoughts slowed down
Noticing my ribcage expanding and contracting meant that I wasn’t thinking about anything else, which stopped my thoughts from spiraling into panic. Even on busy days with a million things to do, taking a small slice of time to think about nothing but your breath can allow you to stop anxious thoughts in their tracks and reassess them with fresh eyes once you are done.
This is also a technique used by therapists to help calm anxiety, as it engages the parasympathetic nervous system (associated with the rest and digest state) rather than the sympathetic nervous system (responsible for the fight or flight response).
4. I felt calmer
One of the things I liked the most about this particular session was that Mishler gave options for how to perform it. Not feeling up to sitting? That's ok, you can lie down. Not keen on closing your eyes? She says you can just soften your gaze. This is great for those who might struggle to feel safe or comfortable in their bodies, as it allows them to undertake the breathwork in a way that suits them.
I don’t like closing my eyes to meditate, although I prefer to sit than lie down, so I performed the breathwork session with my eyes open and sat on a cushion. This allowed me to fully engage with the session and allowed me to feel calmer, instead of worrying about what was going on around me.
More ways to find calm
We have plenty of other suggestions for breathwork, such as humming bee breath, these two yoga breathing techniques and this five-minute breath workout. You may also find cyclic sighing effective.
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