Without breath there is no life. Diaphragmatic breathing is an effective strategy to protect against panic. Many times, people dealing with physical anxiety and its associated overpowering feeling of panic forget to employ breathing or just stop using it to reduce feelings of panic. Suffer from huge waves of panic is horrible and sometimes people going through a huge episode believe the feelings are so strong that deep breathing will not provide relief. You know panic is getting bad when you have panic about impending feelings of panic. For many people working on therapies to manage panic, they feel that therapeutic breathing is not effective. This is normally because they do not know how to do it the right way. The other thing that often happens is once they have learned to breathe properly to manage panic, they consider it unnecessary because they are now feeling fine. Once they experience pangs or full onset of anxiety, they are sure it will not work because as a method to manage anxiety it is too basic. Hence, it is critical for therapists to focus and refocus with clients that breathing will reduce or eliminate feelings of stress. Clients need to listen to this advice, take heed to it, and do it.
The largest hurdle to assist oneself to making therapeutic breathing effective at managing or stopping anxiety feelings of panic is the commitment to doing breathing drills to the point where it becomes a built-in behavior. Many books on relaxation instruct people to do breathing drills for 10 to 15 minutes per day. This number of breathing drills is rarely effective because it is plainly not done enough times. The key to breathing becoming a habit to manage anxiety is to first practice deep breathing a dozen times per day for one minute at a time. This can be accomplished by employing the strategy throughout day during daily activities like waiting in line to pay for gas, waiting in line at the grocery store and waiting in a doctor’s office. The key to making it a habit is do practice the one-minute breathing drill every day throughout each day at least 10 times if not more. This will lay the groundwork needed for a person to connect breathing to all types of settings and daily chores. This will increase the likelihood the person will employ breathing as a strategy to manage or stop anxiety when occurs.
If you have overpowering feelings of anxiety and need help managing it, give Healthy Families of Albuquerque LLC a call at 505-842-9911 or complete our contact form by visiting the page by clicking here.