Hey guys, Dr. Jon Dandridge here. Look, we’ve all experienced this before myself included, times where we’ve just felt overly stressed or stressed out. And there are things that we can do to help bring us back into balance.
There are some very simple things that we can do to help lower those stress levels and control it and get us back into balance back on track. So two of my favorite things are going to be breathing exercises to lower stress. I’m going to share with you here some very, very simple things that we can do, whether we feel stressed out or not, they’re really great exercises to do regardless. And the first rule with these exercises that we’re only going to breathe in and out through our nose. So we’re only going to use our nose to breathe in and out. We’re gonna keep our mouth shut. We’re not breathing through our mouth.
The first exercise is really simple, we’re going to inhale through our nose and we’re going to exhale through our nose and at the bottom of the exhalation, we’re going to hold our breath. You can hold your breath for about five seconds. And then when you’re finished with that five second breath, hold or just resume normal breathing until you feel back in control again. So we’re just going to repeat that cycle over and over again, you can do this for minutes at a time.
The second exercise is we’re going to time our inhalation and exhalation. So the concept is this because this is going to be different for every person, we want to exhale for longer than we inhale. So for example, I’m going to inhale through my nose for four seconds, and then exhale out through my nose for six seconds, we’re going to inhale for a certain amount of time, exhale for a longer amount of time, and it’s that longer exhalation that’s going to start to lower our heart rate and really reduce the stress levels bring us back into balance.
If you have any questions give us a call or come into our clinic. We look forward to talking to you and seeing what we can do to help you relieve stress!