The Importance of Breathing

Are you feeling stressed out in your life? Take a few minutes out of your day to perform some deep breathing exercises. When you breathe in deeply, it sends a message to your brain to start calming down to relax. Every system in the human body relies heavily on oxygen. Through performing different breathing exercises, it can help you to not only relax your entire body, but it can also lower your stress levels, reduce your blood pressure, provide you with a greater sense of mental clarity, improve your bodies immune response, digest food more efficiently and even help you to sleep better. Just a few minutes of deep breathing exercises every day can offer improvements in your lungs and diaphragm, as you are engaging your neck, back, and chest muscles to help you breathe. There are multiple breathing exercises that exist, but the best way to breathe more effectively is to follow these three basic rules:

1. Sit down on a chair where your back is straight at 90° posture. Your chin, hips, knees & ankles should all be 90° to the floor.

2. Breath in through your nose for a count of four seconds, hold for two seconds and then breathe out through your nose for a count of four.

3. Then repeat the above process several times to focus on your breathing with your hand placed on your stomach.

By making time and learning how to breathe in a proper posture it connects our mind and body to better work in harmony. By forcing the air in your lungs to build up and then be released it can increase your blood's oxygen level and strengthen your diaphragm in the process. So, next time you are feeling overwhelmed in your day, take a moment to breathe and notice how you will feel better, more relieved and healthier.