Your breath is your constant companion.
But did you know it is also your faithful helper, always at the ready—to help you feel less overloaded or overwhelmed?
In the coming weeks, I will be sharing with you various tools, techniques and strategies to promote your emotional health. You can think of all this as a tool kit from which you can draw.
The number one tool in your emotional health tool kit is your breath.
More specifically, I am talking about your ability to take a deep breath, and slowly breathe out. The key is to breathe out longer than you breathe in.
When you breathe out, your body enters into a state of calm. So when you prolong your out-breath, you are connecting with the calm that is always inside of you.
When you are in a hurry or under any other kind of stress, even one in-breath out-breath cycle can give you a moment of relief. You can think it like a punctuation mark.
The next time your day feels like an endless run-on sentence, remember to use your inborn emotional punction marks! Use them often and use them freely!
How it works:
In-breaths rev up our body and the out-breaths calm us down. That’s why it makes sense to exhale longer than you inhale when you want to intentionally feel calm.