Use this breath to calm yourself down in stressful times

Your nervous system is still very primal and operates very simply. It's main objective is to keep you safe.

When your system percives a threat it will bring you into fight or flight so that you can literally either fight the threat or run from.

In figth or flight (sympathetic activation) your heart rate increases, your blood gets sent to your limbs for fast movement and your breath becomes shallow and fast in and out of the mouth.

These days we are not often in life or death situations, instead the threats that we face are  when our to do list is never ending or we quarell with someone and it's unresolved or our work load is too much to handle.

In these cases you are in fact safe but there is a perception of danger that our system wants to protect us from.

To tell your system that you are in fact safe the best way is to use the body. The Vagus nerve sends 90% of it's messages from the body to the brain and is reponsible for putting the break on our stress reaction.

To breathe out slowly, particularly through the nose till tell your system that you are in fact safe. If you were having to run from or fight a predator there woould be no way that you would be able to do this.

Breathing out slowly through the nose will send a message up the Vagus nerve to the brain to signal that the threat has passed and that it's time to activate the rest and digest system (the parasympathetic nervous system).

Just a few rounds of this longer exhale breath will enable you to bring your system back into a place of calm so that you can move forward with a much clearer mind.