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How breathing can help bring you out of spiraling negative thoughts
- arianacahn
- Feb 2, 2022
- 2 min read
To paraphrase Charles Darwin "I am very poorly today [...] & hate everybody & everything." (Darwin Correspondence Project, Cambridge University)
While he meant it slightly differently, that his brain felt stupid and off, I an internalizing it in a very different way. I am having a very bad day, I feel annoyed by the state of the world around me, and I have everybody and everything because of it.
A concert I had tickets to was suddenly cancelled, without much explanation (probably the pandemic...).
There continues to be white-supremacists "protesting" (see, complaining) at my nation's capital, waving around Nazi and Confederate Flags.
It is Groundhog Day today, but it feels like we've been living the same awful day for two years now, and I'm just about at my whit's end.
Because of all of this (and so much more), I am finding myself going down some very negative spirals today. I have been working with my therapist on solutions to be able to change my thinking when these things happen and get myself out of the spiral faster (CBT; we can talk about this in another post!)
But for right now, what I find to be the best solution is to breathe.
Yes, you read that right. Breathing. That thing we do everyday that we don't usually think about, which keeps us alive. In fact, it is the direct act of consciously deepening breathing and focusing on it that helps get us out of the stressed mindset!
When we find ourselves in frightening and stressful situations, we go into the "Fight, Flight, or Freeze" mindset, where our bodies prepare to either fight off a threat, run away from it, or freeze in fear. This reflex is regulated by the sympathetic nervous system. Alternatively, the parasympathetic nervous system regulates the "Rest and Digest" reflex, which is the state we're in when things are calm and good, and there's no need to escape predators.
Focusing on one's breath helps move us out of the Fight, Flight, or Freeze reflex, dampening down the sympathetic nervous system's control, and instead highlighting the function of the parasympathetic system. The exact mechanism by which this occurs is lengthy and complicated, and you can read more about it here, but in simple terms, the increased stretching of lung tissue signals to the brain to stop neurons from firing wildly and out of sync, and helps bring balance to brain regions that are involved in these systems. This leads to our bodies' decreasing blood pressure, heart rate, and oxygen consumption.
So the next time you find yourselves going down that negative spiral, take a minute to focus on deep, rhythmic breathing to help get you back to a more calm and relaxed state.
For some useful breathing exercises, check out this video:
Did you enjoy learning about the neuroscience of relaxed breathing with me today? Do you want to learn more about your mental health, especially during this ongoing pandemic?
If so, please subscribe to my blog, share this article, and tag #MentalHealthMatters!
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