The 6 basics of abdominal breathing for anxiety management.

These are the basics for understanding how abdominal breathing works in combating anxiety.

It is clear that breathing is fundamental for the maintenance and survival of the human organism, but many people tend to overlook the implications of this in our emotional state. Not in vain several of the techniques and strategies used in psychotherapy involve the conscious control of how we breathe.

In this sense, abdominal breathing is one of the most important ways to learn how to regulate how we think and feel.. And in particular, it helps to achieve a state of relaxation and to mitigate anxiety. In this article we will focus on it, but first, we will review the main types of breathing.

The most important types of breathing

Before going into the keys to abdominal breathing, it is necessary to look a little more in depth at the types of breathing that exist. Mainly, we can consider that there are three different types of breathing.

1. Abdominal or diaphragmatic breathing

Abdominal breathing is one in which there is an important movement of the diaphragm, a muscle that separates the thoracic cavity from the belly and acts as a spring. and acts like a spring. During breathing, the diaphragm descends towards the abdomen, the air is sucked into the lungs and, when this muscle rises, the air is expelled towards the outside. That is to say, it acts as a kind of plunger pressing the lower part of the lungs and making the air go up towards the trachea.

It is considered that this type of breathing helps to take advantage of the lung capacity and to achieve that the cells of the body are oxygenated efficiently.

2. Thoracic breathing

Thoracic breathing is the breathing in which opening and closing of the thoracic cage.. This mode of breathing causes relaxation if it is done in a directed manner, but uses both lung and abdominal capacity.

3. Clavicular breathing

Clavicular breathing is breathing at the top of the chest and, as a result, causes the clavicles to rise. This is the typical breathing of the states of anxiety and nervousness, being very superficial and inefficient, because with each breath of air the Blood is little oxygenated.

When performing this type of muscular movements, little air enters the lungs, making it necessary to take many breaths.This makes it necessary to take many breaths in a row to oxygenate properly. And since little oxygen is inhaled, little reaches the brain and a state of "alertness" can occur because the body is in a vulnerable situation. Thus, it is both a (partial) cause and a consequence of anxiety.

The basics of abdominal breathing

These are the key guidelines and ideas you should keep in mind when performing abdominal breathing.

1. Start learning in a context that makes it easy.

If you are just starting to practice belly breathing, do your best to make it easy for yourself, do your best to make it easy for yourself, as starting from zero is a challenge in itself.. Go to a quiet, undistracted place that offers privacy. Otherwise, you will be more likely to struggle or get frustrated, and that will demotivate you.

2. Make sure that the belly expands more than the chest.

A very easy and intuitive way to know if you are doing abdominal breathing well is to put one hand on your chest and one hand on your belly. If both move about the same, you are doing it wrong. Ideally, the hand on the belly should move much more and the hand on the chest should move hardly at all. and that the one on the chest hardly moves at all.

3. Quality is more important than quantity

Make sure that each cycle of inhale and exhale occurs without haste but without pausededicating time to each one. Allow several seconds to pass both during the in-breath and the out-breath process.

4. Rhythm is more important than strength

Some people make the mistake of trying to perform abdominal breathing by forcing the capacity of the lungs too much, until they reach a point where they feel discomfort due to the tension generated in their muscles and tissues in general. But this not only produces a totally unnecessary discomfort, but also plays against the most important aspect of a good way of breathing: the fact of maintaining a constant and consistent rhythm..

5. The lungs expand in all directions.

Keep in mind that although we notice the phases of breathing mainly in the front part of our trunk, the lungs do not expand only towards the front, but they do it in all directions; the only thing that happens is that we have more soft parts in the ventral part of our trunk..

That is why, when performing abdominal breathing, you should let them expand also towards the sides and in the lower part of your back. Many people are surprised to learn that if they take deep breaths with the diaphragm, they notice how the part of the kidneys "inflates".

6. Do not become obsessed with breathing like this all the time

It is normal that in your day to day you go through different types of breathing. No one can control the way he or she breathes at all times.This would be exhausting and would imply an important effort at the price of neglecting other important aspects of life (besides, paradoxically, this perfectionism would make us prone to suffer anxiety).

Keep in mind that if we breathe automatically and anxiety predisposes us to breathe in a certain way it is not by chance; there are survival mechanisms that are behind that, and that have been carved over hundreds of thousands of years of natural selection. The goal should be to intervene in your breathing, especially in key moments when you notice that anxiety is not helping you, but is an obstacle.

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