How mindful breathwork can help with anxiety

In a world filled with plenty of things to be anxious about, it can feel hard to breathe easy

In this blog we explore how mindful breath practice (sometimes called breath work) can support with anxiety

Attending to the breath and breathing with mindful awareness is a powerful tool to support and help with anxiety. In times of stress and anxiety, breathwork can restore a sense of inner capability and calm. In recent years, there’s been growing interest in breathwork - how simply focusing on breathing and breathing with intention can improve your mental, physical, and spiritual well-being. This blog is the first in a series of two to consider breathwork and the role breathwork has to play in managing anxiety.

Breath as self-support

Your breath and your capacity to regulate your own breath is a key support system for life, and for serenity. Recently, my eye was drawn to two books on the topic of breathing: Breath, by James Nestor (2020) and the less recent Close your Mouth by Patrick McKeown (2004). In this blog, we’ll consider some of the learning points taken from these books on the role breathwork can play in managing anxiety. I’ve aimed to provide a simple summary of some basic breathwork practice and mindful breathing can be a form of self-support when facing anxious feelings.

I've enjoyed sitting down to read both Nestor and McKeown's books. It's felt relaxing and strangely productive at the same time. And, based on a resting respiratory rate of 12 breath cycles per minute, I've taken somewhere close to 72,000 breaths as I've read! It’s caused me to be far more aware of my breathing, moment-to-moment, and has reminded about the role breathing plays in emotional and neurological regulation, particularly when experiencing anxiety. 

Take a breath

Mindful breathing can be a form of self-support when facing anxious feelings

Breath Awareness: A powerful tool for managing anxiety

How aware are you of your own breath? Breathing is an automatic function for us as humans and is impacted by what you’re doing and what you’re experiencing. Yet, without a conscious attending to your breath, its easy for this essential process to be outside of your awareness. Become more aware of your breathing in any given moment provides valuable data about what’s happening. Such data gives you more information about what is, leaving less to our fearful, anxious imagination. At its core, any form of breathwork practice includes a paying attention to and attending to your breath so that you begin to increase your awareness of this important life giving function. 

Perhaps you've noticed how your breath changes in response to emotional experiencing - becoming faster or slower, deeper or more shallow, smoother or more erratic? These changes provide information about you’re feeling. Choosing to mindfully notice and pay attention to your breath in a non-judgemental way can be a way to stay curious about your own experiencing.   

For anyone who wants to build breath awareness into daily life, it can help to try sitting and tuning into what you experience in the present moment. Aim to narrate or describe what it is you experience about your breathing with a non-judgemental approach. There’s lots of more comprehensive tips and ideas about ways you can do this below.  A good place to start is simply to use the phrase “right now, I am aware of my breath.  I am aware that my breath is (insert description).”

Awareness of your breath in this moment is possible.

The phrase “right now, I am aware of…….” can be a helpful tool towards non-judgemental awareness of your breath.

Using description as a way towards breathwork mindful awareness:

Questions that can support the mindful practice of  breath awareness exercise include:

• What word describes my breathing right now? Is your breathing laboured? Smooth? What other word(s) express the felt sense of your experiencing? 

• Consider the pace of your breathing: fast, slow, gradually increasing or decreasing in pace?

• Consider the depth of your breathing: shallow, light breaths or somewhere closer to deep breathing? 

• Consider anything you notice about the out breath as distinct from the in breath. How does your exhale differ from your inhale?  

• Consider where in your body you sense the breath as it moves within your system. Which muscles move as you breathe? Does your breath change with your increasing awareness? 

Having greater awareness of your breath as you engage in breathwork practices allows you to mindfully notice any rumination thought patterns, breathing changes and/or tension in your body. Our breathing patterns can be signals of anxiety building and allow us to choose to respond in a way that is self-supporting and self-caring. 

What do you notice as you breathe in? Breathe out? How does this act of giving deliberate focus affect your experience of anxiety?

Non-judgemental acceptance of the here-and-now through breathwork

As you tune into your own breath and increase your awareness of your experience of your breath, you may find yourself drawn into judgements or injunctions. These might take the form of:

• I need to be more relaxed.

• Why can’t I just chill out like other people?

• I get distracted too easily.

• My breath is too ….. or not enough…….

As you read through this list of judgements and injunctions, I wonder how you are feeling right now? For many people, judgements, and injunctions (the “shoulds”, “must” and “oughts” of life) lead to contraction and tension. Judgements about the way you’re breathing can reinforce anxiety. As you look to embed breathwork practice for managing anxiety, consider if you can adopt a non-judgemental approach to breathwork awareness? In other words, an acceptance of what is in the here-and-now, rather than a striving for change. Sure, change may happen in the process - but this is not the end goal. Instead, you are seeking to adopt a mindful acceptance of whatever it is you notice about your breath and your experience of breathing. Such a state of mindful and non-judgemental acceptance of the “what is” helps to place you firmly in the present moment, in the here-and-now. That can be a powerful antidote anxious worrying about the future or ruminating on the past.

Breath awareness - when practised with an attitude of compassionate non-judgementalism can help ground you in the here-and-now.

Breathing and the Autonomic Nervous System (ANS):

When you experience anxiety, or face some stress or threat, your autonomic nervous system (ANS) prepares the body for fight or flight in response. Your heart rate increases, muscles tense and your digestion slows. Most aspects of our nervous system cannot be consciously controlled. Breathing is unique in that, through conscious breathing, you can regulate your nervous system. People who practice breathwork regularly come to experience how conscious breathing can bring a degree to control over the nervous system.

The autonomic nervous system (ANS) is the way your body regulates processes for rest and activity, and this process happens automatically. It consists of 2 main branches: the sympathetic and the parasympathetic. The sympathetic branch of the ANS stimulate the body’s fight or flight response. When faced with a danger, or potential danger, the sympathetic system causes changes in your heart rate, rate of respiration, digestion and muscle tension so that you’re physically prepared to fight or flee. This happens as soon as your brain detects threat, even if the brain is mistaken. For example, on seeing a coil of rope from the corner or your eye, your heart may begin to beat fast and your breathing rate will automatically increase. Your brain has read the sensory data as “snake” and responded in much the same way as it would if you saw an actual snake. This process is extremely useful to your survival. However, when you remain in a state of heightened sympathetic stimulation, your body remains tense, on edge and anxious. 

The parasympathetic branch of the ANS is focussed on restoring calm and balance to your brain and body after sympathetic stimulation. It prevents the body from overworking and brings your breathing, heart rate and muscle tension back to a more regulated state in order to facilitate rest and recovery. Breathing has a vital role to play in kickstarting the parasympathetic response of calm and balance.It’s been shown that mindful breathwork via deep breathing can activate the parasympathetic branch of the ANS (Gerritsen & Band, 2018) and decrease levels of the cortisol stress hormone (Ma et al., 2017).

If you are looking to manage your anxiety - are you willing to give breathwork a try? You could experiment with building in an awareness breathwork practice when you sense you’re becoming anxious. Allow yourself to simply breathe and use your breath as a focus for your awareness as a way to benefit from parasympathetic activation.  

Like the ebb and flow of the sea, breath comes in, breath goes out

There’s no need to force or change your breath

And so, a commitment to noticing and describing - with a non-judgemental, descriptive approach can be a powerful place to begin with breathwork for anxiety. Noticing and naming how your breath changes in response to feelings of fear, panic and anxiety can be a helpful place to start when looking to incorporate breath practice into your daily routine.

In a later blog, we'll consider some practical and accessible breath practices to support your parasympathetic branch of the nervous system in restoring a sense of calm regulation.

Get in touch

Many people benefit from working with a therapist to consider how awareness and mindful breathwork practice can be incorporated into their life. Counselling is a helpful space to explore some of the factors that have led you to feeling anxious. 

If this is something you’d like to explore further - either through face-to-face counselling in Preston, or via online therapy, please do make contact with me, Claire Law. I’m a BACP Senior Accredited Psychotherapist offering professional counselling and psychotherapy in Preston, Lancashire and online for adults based in the UK.

I offer a simple, no-pressure approach to people who are considering therapy - and can chat through how I work, and to share with you my availability for new clients for either:

• In person counselling at my therapy room in Preston.

• Online counselling via MS Teams.

References:

·      Gerritsen, R., & Band, G. (2018). Breath of Life: The Respiratory Vagal Stimulation Model of Contemplative Activity. Frontiers in human neuroscience, 12, 397.

·      Ma, X., Yue, Z. Q., Gong, Z. Q., Zhang, H., Duan, N. Y., Shi, Y. T., Wei, G. X., & Li, Y. F. (2017). The Effect of Diaphragmatic Breathing on Attention, Negative Affect and Stress in Healthy Adults. Frontiers in psychology, 8, 874.

·      McKeown, P. (2004). Close Your Mouth. Buteyko Books: Moycullen.

·      Nestor, J. (2020). Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art. Penguin Books: London.