Understanding How Deep Breathing Works to Reduce Stress

deep breathing

Deep breathing techniques are often cited as an important tool that can help you to immediately alleviate stress, anxiety, frustration, and anger. Yet, many people have difficulty practicing deep breathing exercises because they either don’t believe that it’ll help or they try once and then don’t try again. Understanding deep breathing at the biological level makes us more likely to do it.

I’ve written about deep breathing before here: https://carolbrusegar.com/deep-breathing-for-stress-relief/ That article included benefits to our bodies, types of deep breathing exercises and how to fit a practice into your daily life.

What’s going on in our bodies when we are stressed and anxious? How does that change when we employ this practice? Having a basic understanding can increase our appreciation of the practice and motivate us to do it.

The Fight or Flight Response

The body has two systems within the nervous system: the parasympathetic and the sympathetic nervous system. Both of these systems contribute to the reasons why deep breathing exercises can calm us down.

 Our biological systems have a natural ability to react during times of stress, especially in those situations where we’re facing a huge threat. Having this ability has been a matter of physical survival. In prehistoric times, humans came face-to-face with all sorts of wild animals, such as bears or tigers.

In response to such a threat, our body activates the Fight, Flight, or Freeze Response, or FFF reaction. Our threats today aren’t ordinarily of the lions and tigers and bears variety, but the sympathetic nervous system is responsible for the physical sensations we get when we feel stress, anxiety, or severe anger and frustration.

These can include sweaty palms, increasing heart rate, and faster breathing. The activation of the FFF response is preparing our bodies to either run, fight the threat, or freeze.

Perceived Threats

The activation of the Fight Flight or Freeze Response can occur whenever we perceive that we’re up against a threat – whether we really are facing a threat or not.

Situations involving personal relationships, work responsibilities, work promotions, verbal arguments with others, and bad news about your health or the health of loved ones are just a few scenarios that can trigger the FFF response.

Despite the fact that all of these situations may be emotionally hurtful or painful, our body’s nervous system may interpret them as physically threatening. As such, our bodies activate the natural FFF response to get us ready to fight or run away.

Triggering the Opposite Reaction

In order to tell our biological systems that the situations we’re facing don’t require a fight or flight response, we must trigger the parasympathetic nervous system. The parasympathetic nervous system produces the opposite response to the FFF, causing a relaxation response instead.

The Fight Flight or Freeze Response also diverts your blood flow. To prepare you to fight or to get ready to run from a perceived threat, blood is diverted away from the brain to the extremities in the body, such as the arms, legs, hands, and feet. No wonder when we are stressed or perceive a threat in some way, we aren’t able to think clearly!

Deep Breathing Reverses This Process

Breathing exercises send the blood supplies back from the extremities (since we’re not concerned with running or fighting) to the areas of the brain that allow us to think, reason, and problem solve.

This is why breathing exercises work to calm us when we experience acute stress, anger, or frustration. Blood is returning to the brain and it becomes easier for us to think.

 A Simple Approach for an Immediate Change in Times of Stress or Anger

In the heat of the moment when FFF has been activated, this simple approach can really make a difference:

  1. Close your eyes.
  2. Tense your whole body for four seconds while inhaling deeply.
  3. Then exhale slowly.
  4. Repeating this three or four times can take you back to a state of relaxation and calm.

The body’s natural ability to fight or flee from a perceived threat has been useful throughout the ages and is still useful today. However, reversing the process through breathing exercises places you in a better position to think more clearly and reason about the stress or issue that you’re facing.

In addition to this on-the-spot approach, consider developing a daily practice that can help you better deal with ongoing stressful and challenging situations as described in my earlier post – https://carolbrusegar.com/deep-breathing-for-stress-relief/

The more you get into a routine of practicing breathing exercises, the better you’ll become at doing so, which will give you the ability to reduce stress, anger, and frustration easier than before.

To explore the topic more, check out these books for adults and children about deep breathing for health:  Deep Breathing for Adults and Children

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2 Comments

  1. Thank you, Carol. I’m beginning to remember to deep breathe when I’m stressed. It happened tonight. I was worried about something. My right hand shook, I felt heart palpitations, and it was a bit hard to breathe. I walked up and down my stairs (we live in a two story house, which increased my breathing and I felt better. I didn’t plan to do that, but I’m happy I did so that my body could calm down.

    My coping style is to move. That’s why I went up and down the stairs twice, to change the energy. Now I realize it was the deeper breathing that helped.

    • Thanks, Juliana. Your experience tonight is so interesting. It may have been the combination of moving and the resulting deep breathing. Most importantly, it made a difference.

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