Your stress level is a huge factor in your skin health and your overall health. When you’re stressed, this triggers increased inflammation throughout your body, which can lead to a skin flare. To help manage your skin condition in a holistic and natural way, it’s essential to keep your stress levels under control.
But we can’t always avoid stressful situations. In everyone’s life, stressful things happen – from little things like traffic jams to bigger things like being laid off from a job. Although the specifics obviously vary, no one gets out of experiencing challenges in their life.
What we can control is how we respond to those situations. It’s often easy to get stuck in a thought loop, ruminating about how awful things are. This makes you feel even more stressed. It’s definitely okay to feel your feelings – you don’t have to pretend that everything is okay when it’s not. At the same time, it’s not healthy to get stuck in a state of stress and anxiety.
To break out of a negative thought loop and bring yourself into a calmer state of mind, breathing is one tool you can use. For centuries, people across many different cultures have used breathing as a tool to help change their state of mind. Simply by altering your breathing pattern, you can help to guide your nervous system towards a less stressed state.
To explore how breathing helps you to manage stress, we first need to talk a little bit about how the nervous system responds to stressful situations.
How breathing impacts the two main branches of the nervous system
There are two main branches of the nervous system, known as the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems. The sympathetic nervous system is sometimes referred to as “fight or flight,” while the parasympathetic nervous system is “rest and digest.” The balance between these two branches is constantly shifting.
When you’re in a stressful situation, your sympathetic nervous system becomes more active. This is known as sympathetic dominance. Your breathing and heart rate speed up. Blood flow is directed towards your major muscle groups, to prepare you for any actions that may be necessary for your survival. Other tissues stop spending energy on maintenance and repair, because these aren’t immediately crucial activities.
When you’re in a safe situation, your parasympathetic nervous system becomes more active. This is known as parasympathetic dominance. You feel more calm and peaceful. Your breathing and heart rate slow down. Your tissues direct energy towards maintenance and repair.
In order to help yourself feel more calm and less stressed, you need to shift your nervous system into a state of parasympathetic dominance. Breathing is one way to achieve this.
How breathing can promote parasympathetic dominance
The reason that breathing is a powerful way to shift the state of your nervous system is that the connections between the brain and the body run in both directions. Of course the brain influences the body – but the body also influences the brain.
When you’re feeling calm and relaxed, with your nervous system in a state of parasympathetic dominance, your breathing automatically becomes slower and deeper. However, when you deliberately choose to breathe in a way that mimics this pattern, your brain receives that information from your body. In turn, this activates your parasympathetic nervous system. By breathing in the way that you would if you were relaxed, you actually help to bring your nervous system into a more relaxed state.
Parasympathetic breathing techniques
In order to shift into a parasympathetic state, you’ll basically breathe in a way that mimics the pattern of breathing that you have when you’re very relaxed. This involves slowing down your breath. When you’re stressed, your breath speeds up, but when you’re relaxed, it becomes a lot slower. Parasympathetic breathing techniques all include slowing down the breath.
It’s not only the overall speed of the breath that’s important, but also the particular pattern of breathing. Parasympathetic breathing is characterized by an exhalation that’s longer than the inhalation, so rather than lengthening both parts of your breath equally, you’ll take longer to breathe out than to breathe in.
In addition, a parasympathetic breath is very deep, filling all parts of the lungs. This means that both your belly and your chest expand during this type of breathing. (By contrast, when people are feeling stressed and are in a state of sympathetic dominance, their abdominal muscles often tense up, preventing the belly from moving very much while breathing.)
Here’s a beginner parasympathetic breathing technique:
Lie down or sit comfortably in a chair. Use as much support as you need to keep your body comfortable.
Place one hand on your belly and one hand on your chest. As you breathe, the goal is to have both of your hands move.
Breathe in for four seconds and out for six seconds. You can simply count, look at a watch or a clock that has a second hand, or use a timer or app on your phone. (It’s okay if the times are not exactly precise, so just counting is okay.)
Continue breathing in this pattern for at least five to ten minutes. If you’d like, you can stay with the breathing exercise for longer.
Research has actually shown that this breathing pattern shifts your nervous system into a state of more parasympathetic dominance. Just ten minutes of breathing slowly with an extended exhalation has been shown to measurably increase the parasympathetic activity in the nervous system. Even five minutes of a deep and slow breathing pattern has been found to decrease physiological measures of stress (like heart rate) as well as people’s self-reported feelings of anxiety and stress.
Once you’ve tried this breathing technique, you can experiment with some variations. For example, you could extend the exhalation even further, breathing in for four seconds and then out for eight. Feel free to play around with the ratio a little, until you find what feels best for you. Just keep in mind that it’s generally best to have your exhalations be longer than your inhalations.
Some people also add a pause in their breathing, usually in between the inhalation and the exhalation. A popular version of this is to breathe in for four seconds, hold the breath for seven seconds, then breathe out for eight seconds. If you decide to try adding a breath hold, adjust the pattern as needed to feel comfortable for you. If you hold your breath for too long, then you might start to feel a little panicky, as your nervous system detects that you’re not getting enough air. Only add a breath hold if it helps you to feel even more relaxed, and feel free to skip it if it doesn’t work well for you.
Try parasympathetic breathing for yourself
I invite you to give parasympathetic breathing a try. It’s often beneficial to practice the technique daily, so that your nervous system gets used to shifting states in this way. Then, when you find yourself starting to feel stressed, you can use the breathing technique to help shift the state of your nervous system.
Try ten minutes of parasympathetic breathing now. Then get your journal and a pen, and write a little about how this felt for you. What did you experience? How did you feel different after you did the breathing, compared with before?
Over the next few days, try a few different variations on this breathing technique. For example, you could vary the specific timing of the inhales and exhales, or try adding a breath hold to each cycle. Keep journaling after each session. The goal is to develop a breathing technique that feels just right for you, so that you feel more calm and relaxed each time you do it.
Breath is a simple tool that’s always available to you. This is a fantastic way to help manage stressful situations and keep yourself feeling more calm and centered even when you encounter challenges.
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