Do You Know How To Breathe Well?

Aimee Hartley believed that she knew how to breathe. After all, that’s what she has been doing all her life. Aside from that, she was also a yoga teacher, and yoga is a practice which involves breathing exercises.

But then she took a lesson with a breathing coach, who told her where she was going wrong. He pointed out she wasn’t taking the air into her lower lungs but was, she says, an “upper chest breather. He then taught me this conscious breathing and I felt my lower belly open, and I felt myself breathing a lot better after just one session. So I then became fascinated by how we breathe.”

Now, Hartley is a Transformational Breath Coach, passing on to people what she had learned about breathwork.

These are exercises that promise to help us become better breathers, which, it is claimed by practitioners, can transform our physical and mental health by improving immune function, sleep, digestion and respiratory conditions, and reducing blood pressure and anxiety (or transporting you to a higher realm of consciousness, if that is your thing).

There is little high-quality research to back up many of these claims, although it has become widely accepted that diaphragmatic breathing (engaging the large muscle between the chest and abdomen to take bigger, deeper lungfuls of air) can reduce feelings of stress and anxiety – and the NHS recommends this for stress relief. 

So how do we breathe well? See the steps over at The Guardian.

(Image Credit: alfcermed/ Pixabay)