How Deep Breathing Can Make You Happier
You’re going to be amazed at the incredible benefits that can happen for you, simply by doing 5 minutes of deep breathing every day. Watch my 7 minute video.
Especially at this busy time of year, taking some deep breaths can help enormously!
Especially at this busy time of year, taking some deep breaths can help enormously!
In these series of videos I’m talking about concepts from my book “The Journey to Happy — How Embracing the Concept that Nothing is wrong can transform your life.”I hope you’ve been following along with these videos about the concept of Nothing is Wrong, because that will make all this make a lot more sense.
I’m talking to you here about a Radical way to start living your life. A way that can make you happier than you ever felt possible.
It’s the concept of living your life from the knowing and understanding that Nothing Is Wrong.
To recap…
It’s not what’s happening to us that is causing most of the problems in our lives, it’s our reactions and responses to what’s happening.
How you’re thinking about it.
How you’re talking about it.
How you’re feeling about it.
What I’ve found is that the more I drop my resistance, the more I am able to go with the flow, the happier I am and the more things have happened that are almost miraculous.It’s a shift out of the energy of Everything is Wrong and into the energy of Nothing is Wrong that changed everything in my life.
The question is, how can you do that? How can you flip that switch?
In these videos I’ve been giving you lots of processes about how to flip that switch and today I’m giving you another one — Deep Breathing.
If you try this, I think you’re going to be shocked at what it can do for you.
I’m going to be talking to you about 2 ways of doing this:
The first is to start each day with 5 minutes of deep breathing.
Studies have shown so many benefits for breathing deeply, including reducing anxiety and stress.
If you are one of those people who feels worried or anxious, or you get angry easily, doing deep breathing can really help.
When we take short, shallow breaths, we’re triggering the fight or flight mechanism that’s wired in our brains, and our body thinks there is danger near. But when we are taking slow, deep breaths that signals the body that you are in relaxation mode, what some people call the Relaxation Response. This puts you at ease and reduces the anxiety that you feel.
And then the long exhalation connects with your nervous system and tells it to calm down.
At the same time, deep breathing slows your heart rate. When you do the deep breathing, you pump more oxygen into your cells. This lowers your heart rate and blood pressure, and improves circulation.
The ultimate result is more energy to complete the tasks you are doing, while simultaneously lowering your heart rate and helping you to calm down.
And again, at the same time, deep breathing improves your energy level. As I said, when you do the deep breathing, you pump more oxygen into your cells. With more oxygen you have more energy.
Our modern world is really hard on our body, especially our lungs. Air pollution, smoking, all kinds of things can lead to lung problems. With the deep breathing, it forces oxygen into the deepest parts of your lungs and breaks up particles and residue that may be there… cleansing the lungs and possibly preventing you from getting sick as often as you normally might.
Deep breathing can also help improve lung capacity and performance.
What I recommend is spending 5 minutes each day doing Deep Breathing.
Just sit quietly, relax, and set the timer on your smartphone for 5 minutes, so that you won’t be thinking “is the 5 minutes up yet?” Just breathe deeply for 5 minutes. It might help to really visualize your lungs filling up with air and being cleansed.
Feel the relaxation that happens almost automatically. I hesitate to call this a meditation because so many people react to that word, but if you do this consistently, you will go into a meditative state, meaning a state where you feel happy, relaxed and alert. Isn’t that great?
If you start to actually go into an altered state, meaning you feel really light headed and you feel like your consciousness is changing, stop breathing so deeply – we’re going to talk about that next time, because that’s a whole other area of breath that is incredible.
Do 5 minutes of Deep Breathing every day and you will start to see incredible changes in your life.
In addition to doing 5 minutes each day…
The second part is to do deep breathing when you start to feel stressed, angry, anxious or low energy.
All of the things we talked about will be helped immensely if, during the day, you do a little bit of deep breathing. I know for me, it helps me so much when I start to get upset, to just stop and take a deep breath.
If you watched the video on the Enneagram, you know I’m an 8, the Aggressor, so I’m wired to get angry. And I mean, sometimes I can just go from 0 to 60 in a snap! And if I say something or decide something when I’m angry and upset, that just doesn’t help anybody.
When I get triggered, and you can feel it, can’t you, that feeling that’s somewhere in you, you can feel it and if you start noticing it just a little, and take just a nano-second to STOP, take a deep breath – and maybe another one – and sometimes I’ll invite the other person to take a deep breath with me… then I can slow down, calm down and not say or do something that I’m going to regret.
Try it and let me know how you do.
