Diaphragmatic Breathing
How?
- Inhaling into the abdomen as slowly and deeply as possible
- Exhaling slowly and completely as possible while abdomen contracts
- Focus on 4-6 breaths per minute for 15 minutes per day
- A free app called The Breathing App can help
Why?
- Help reduce anxiety, depression, and stress
- Improves attention, enhancing sustained attention
- Improved emotional regulation
- Reduce fatigue
- Increases heart rate variability (HRV) which is the measure of the variation in time between each heartbeat
- HRV is an interesting and noninvasive way to identify Autonomic Nervous
- System imbalances. If a person’s system is in more of a fight-or-flight mode,
- the variation between subsequent heartbeats is low. If one is in a more
- relaxed state, the variation between beats is high. In other words, the
- healthier the ANS the faster you are able to switch gears, showing more
resilience and flexibility. - Reduce blood pressure
- Improve pulmonary function
- Reduction of sympathetic nervous system activity (flight-fight-freeze)
- Increase of parasympathetic nervous system activity (rest-digest)
- Improved sleep
- Increased vagal tone
- Stimulating GABA pathways from the prefrontal cortex and insula, inhibiting amygdala overactivity.
- Reduction in release of cortisol which is the hormone that is released in
response to stress; it is associated with depression, anxiety, and negative emotions and regulates metabolism, immunity, and some mental processing
Research
- 1-week intervention with 2004 tsunami survivors equivalent to traumatic
- incident exposure therapy, with effects persisting at least 24 weeks
- Adjunctive treatment for patients suffering strokes and cancer
- A decrease in test performance anxiety in primary school students
- Reduced stress-related physiological response
- Increased cortical thickness and prefrontal-hippocampus functional activity
References:
Campos, M. (2019). Heart rate variability: A new way to track well-being – Harvard Health Blog. Retrieved from https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/heart-ratevariability-new-way-track-well-2017112212789 Ma, X., Yue, Z. Q., Gong, Z. Q., Zhang, H., Duan, N. Y., Shi, Y. T., … Li, Y. F. (2017). The Effect of Diaphragmatic Breathing on Attention, Negative Affect and Stress in Healthy Adults. Frontiers in psychology, 8, 874. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2017.00874
