Psychologist reveals: With this exercise you can quickly get rid of stress

SOS exercise
Harvard psychologist reveals how to quickly get rid of your stress

Sometimes it feels like we’re drowning. When the mountain of tasks darkens our inner horizon. When the demands become so great that we feel helpless, like a small child. Then it feels like we are sinking, deeper and deeper, until no more light can reach us.

While this idea can be depressing, even frightening, for some people, for Harvard psychologist Lindsay Bira it is the perfect environment for stress relief, as she reveals to the online magazine “Make it”: The scientist swears by free diving, i.e. diving underwater for long periods while holding her breath. And the best thing is: If you don’t have a lake, pool or the sea on your doorstep, you can do without the water for this exercise.

How a breathing exercise can help reduce stress

Breathing is a reflex for us humans and that’s why it seems so natural to us – but we can still do a lot of things wrong. Especially when we feel stressed, we tend to breathe shallower and shorter – which is quite counterproductive for our body, after all, it needs oxygen (of which we logically get more when we breathe deeply) to function.

It is therefore advisable to get to grips with breathing – and train it, explains researcher and physiologist Daniel Craighead in an interview with the online magazine “npr”. Because: “The muscles we use to breathe, like the rest of our muscles, atrophy as we get older.” Those who train breathing strengthen, among other things, the diaphragm and other breathing muscles, which can promote heart health and lower blood pressure. Loud According to study results, breathing exercises can also have a positive effect on our psyche by triggering relaxation reactions in the mind – which reduces stress.

The 60 second breathing exercise

Health psychologist Bira explained a possible breathing exercise at the NeuroLeadership Institute Summit in New York. The processes are simple:

Holding your breath for 60 seconds – an impossible idea? That’s exactly why the exercise works so well, explains Bira in an interview with “Make it”: Tolerating holding your breath for a long time is “the same skills that strengthen those areas of the brain that enable us to tolerate the stress in life,” explains she. Physiologically speaking, humans are capable of holding their breath for longer than 60 seconds, “but our brain starts sending distress signals before we reach that point.”. The brain also sends these emergency signals in situations that overwhelm us emotionally, for example before a presentation that we are very afraid of, no matter how well we are prepared for it.

In fact, the results of one study confirm that the average person can hold their breath for up to 90 seconds. But certain people should avoid this and other types of breathing exercises, warns the health magazine “Healthline”: For example, if you suffer from asthma or emphysema or are pregnant. It is also clear that in the long run, it is not very helpful to hold our breath when life regularly presents us with seemingly impossible tasks and we have the feeling that we can no longer meet our own and other people’s demands. Breathing exercises may ground us in the moment and can also have long-term positive effects on our bodies and minds – but they treat symptoms, not the cause of our suffering.

So if you regularly feel immense stress, you shouldn’t prioritize trying to function somehow, but rather concentrate on the areas of your life that cause this high level of stress and make changes there.

Sources used: cnbc.com, aok.de, npr.org, ncbi.nlm.nih.gov, healthline.com

csc
Bridget