Dr. Suraj Shakya
'To breathe is to live, but to breathe properly is to live healthily'.
Please check if you are breathing properly! Poor breathing habits might lead to anxiety, depression, panic attack, muscle tension, fatigue and headaches. This is the reason for many relaxation experts, yoga experts and healers to focus on breathing exercises. Most people do not realize that they are breathing through chest rather than natural way of breathing through abdomen.
Please check if you are breathing just through chest or through abdomen (diaphragmatic breathing)!
This can be realized by observing or feeling chest and abdomen while inhalation of air. If the chest expands first, letting the shoulders to rise, this is chest breathing or thoracic breathing. We tend to breathe through the chest during anxiety or stress.
However, if the abdomen rises up first while the chest expanding just in the harmony with the abdomen during inhalation of air, this is the correct way of abdominal breathing or diaphragmatic breathing. So while inhalation of air abdomen should rise up not down.
In fact as a baby we are all abdominal breathers, but as we grow up we try to control our abdomen. Chest breathing lets very limited oxygen or carbon di oxide to flow in or out of the body, hence results in more energy to breathe for same amount of life gas.
Please check if you can try a simple exercise for abdominal or diaphragmatic breathing- Sit or lie down in a comfortable position given the condition that your back is straight. Place one hand on the chest whiles the other on the stomach. Breathe out air and take in deep breathe. While you breathe in, feel the stomach moving out. Similarly while breathing out, feel the stomach moving inside. Continue this process for few minutes.
Breathing exercises can help improve this poor breathing habit and promote good physical as well as mental health- so why not revive natural diaphragmatic breathing!
