How Deep Breathing Can Help Reduce Anxiety, Stress and Panic

August 27, 2008 | Leave a Comment

Along with food and water, giving your body a supply of air is essential for maintaining your heath and well being. If you’re not breathing properly then this can cause imbalances in your blood and affect the way your body behaves.

Poor breathing can cause dizziness, shortness of breath and shaking, which are all too familiar symptoms if you suffer from anxiety or panic.

The key is to learn how to breathe deeply in a natural manner that fills your stomach and rib cage, as well as the top part of your chest, and it can be practiced using simple exercises throughout the day.

Why is breathing properly so important?

Breathing regulates the balance of oxygen and carbon dioxide in your blood. Too much oxygen can cause you to feel agitated and nervous, whilst too much carbon dioxide might calm you temporarily but it can make you feel light headed and distort your responses.

Instead you should practice being able to breath deeply and naturally so that your body can maintain a healthy balance of oxygen and carbon dioxide and behave healthily.

Deep breathing is practiced as part of Tai Chi, Yoga and other forms of meditation due to its effectiveness in helping you think and behave in a clear, healthy manner.

The benefits of breathing properly include:

•    Release tension in your neck, chest and diaphragm
•    Reduce anxiety and panic by having a healthier balance of oxygen and carbon dioxide in your blood so you can think and behave in a calmer, clearer manner
•    Reduce build up of stress and tension throughout the day
•    When practicing as part of a meditation exercise, breathing can divert your attention from stressful, unhelpful thoughts
•    Exhaling for longer than you inhale will help you to relax

Why ‘just take a deep breath’ is bad advice

We’ve all heard the advice to ‘take a deep breath’ when we’re feeling stressed or anxious. However, the problem is that most people interpret this as taking rapid breaths, rather than deep, natural breathing that fills our stomach, as well as our upper chest.

Rapid breathing can simply imbalance the oxygen in your blood, causing you to feel more agitated and nervous. Deep natural breathing is slow and calm, rather than rapidly gulping down oxygen.

So how do I practice deep breathing?

Here are a few breathing exercises you can practice to train your body to keep a healthy balance of oxygen and carbon dioxide, as well as help to reduce stress, panic and anxiety:

Sigh Breath

-   Take a moderate breathe through your nose and then slowly exhale, prolonging your exhale for longer than your inhale.
-    As you exhale try and relax the muscles in your face and shoulders to release any built up tension.
-    When you next inhale, try and divert your attention to the sights and sounds around you without passing judgement on your thoughts but just letting them flow
-    This breathing technique works well with mindfulness meditation because it focuses your thoughts away from whatever stresses you’re feeling that day.
-    Sigh breathing can be practiced whenever you’ve got a spare minute or two throughout the day, and can help you learn to regulate your breathing.

Easy Breathing

-    focus on only your breathing for 3-4 minutes.
-    Ignore everything around you other than your breathing
-    move your chest and diaphragm in harmony so that you’re breathing naturally, rather than forced
-    concentrating on your breathing in this way will divert your thoughts from your anxiety and stress

4-7-8 Breathing

-    inhale for four seconds, hold it in for seven seconds then slowly release your breath for eight seconds
-    As you exhale release the anxiety , stress and tension from your muscles, shoulder and face
-    this exercise helps you to exhale for longer than you inhale, which can help your body relax if you’re feeling nervous
-    you could practice this at any time, whether on public transport, waiting in a cue or when you’re just at home to help calm your breathing

There are plenty of other breathing exercises you can practice which you can learn more about from books and other resources on the net.

Healthy breathing is an important part of coping with and reducing anxiety, so try a few different breathing exercises to find which ones work best for you and in which situations.

Posted by Matt | Filed Under Blog, anxiety treatment, breathing, meditation, social anxiety disorder

How You Can Reduce Your Anxiety by Reducing Your Self-consciousness

August 19, 2008 | Leave a Comment

Do you ever find it difficult to follow conversations? Does your mind go blank ‘trying’ to think of something to say? Or do you feel overcome by nervous whenever you enter or leave a room?

If so then it’s probably due to anxiety getting in the way. Social anxiety is rooted in the fear of what people think of you and causes you to worry about everything you say and do. As a result, anxiety can cause you to feel extremely self-conscious, making it difficult to relax and behave naturally.

When you feel self-conscious you focus on your own thoughts and feelings, instead of what is going on in the world around you. Rather than reducing the chance of doing anything stupid, feeling self-conscious can simply magnify the uncomfortable thoughts and feelings that make you feel anxious in the first place.

So in order to be able to relax and reduce your anxiety, you need to be able to reduce your self-consciousness.

So how do I reduce my self-consciousness?

To reduce your self-consciousness you have to distract your brain away from focusing inwardly. You have to divert it from analysing your own thoughts and feelings to focusing on the world around you.

If you suffer from social anxiety I know this is a lot easier said then done. So here are a few ideas for keeping your over active brain occupied:

Concentrate on what other people are saying. Even if you don’t have any witty anecdotes to share, simply listening intently to others will distract your brain for long enough that you might find yourself making the odd comment and then joining in without consciously realising it.

Try playing detective mind games - observe the way other people are behaving to deduce what their occupation could be. The way they’re standing, the clothes they’re wearing or how they interact with others can all provide you with small clues. Just remember not to jump to conclusions, but rather see yourself as gathering evidence like a modern day Sherlock Holmes.

Act like a scientist in analysing your own safety behaviours. Try making a determined effort not to do the things you normally do when you feel self-conscious, such as fiddling with your phone, playing with your hair or sipping constantly from your drink. See whether this makes you feel any better and gauge your anxiety on a scale of one to ten, this will at least distract your mind from some of your more uncomfortable thoughts.

Practice mindfulness meditation. Although you’d normally do this in quiet surroundings, you can practice mindfulness meditation when sat on a bus (just remember not to miss your stop!) or waking down the street. Simply focus your attention on the sights and sounds in the present moment, and observe your thoughts as passing cars arriving and then disappearing into the distance.

Distracting your mind from feeling self-conscious long enough for your anxiety to reduce isn’t easy. But it’s a valuable skill which you can practice and get better at over time.

Gradually, being able to focus on the world around you and less on yourself will make social situations more enjoyable and conversations easier without allowing anxious thoughts to get in the way.

Posted by Matt | Filed Under Blog, social anxiety disorder

eBook released - ‘How You Can Overcome Social Anxiety’

August 11, 2008 | Leave a Comment

Well, it took four months and more sweat and tears than planned, but my eBook ‘How You Can Overcome Social Anxiety’ is now finally finished and up for sale on the site. It’s designed to be a clear, concise guide to social anxiety: what causes it, why you might suffer from it and, more importantly, what you can do to reduce the symptoms enough so they don’t impede your enjoyment of life.

Whilst there are already some excellent books and websites out there providing plenty of useful information, I thought some people would be happy to pay £4.50/$9 for a collated guide which provides an overview of social anxiety and what they can do to reduce the symptoms. It can be read through in under an hour, but its real value comes from printing out the worksheets, grabbing a pen and working through the exercises that teach you how to identify your negative, anxious thoughts and replace them with more objective, healthier ways of thinking.

Anxiety affects millions around the world

When I first started researching anxiety at the start of the year I was amazed to discover how many people suffered from it, with 15 million Americans and 2.3 million people in the UK estimated to suffer from an anxiety disorder. What also surprised me was the number of people searching on the internet daily for help in overcoming their symptoms.

Social anxiety is a complicated and a difficult problem to overcome, with a variety of personal issues and extremities causing people to distrust and even fear people they don’t know. If it goes untreated then it can lead to depression because of the withdrawal from an active life interacting with other people.

Social anxiety CAN be overcome

I’m not claiming to offer a miracle cure (unlike the drug companies), but cognitive behavioural therapy can provide people with the mental thought processing skills to identify the negative thoughts driving their anxiety and replace them with more helpful and healthier ways of thinking.

You feel the way that you think, and with practice and patience, your new ways of thinking can take hold, become your automatic beliefs and reduce your anxiety as a result.

My hope is that my eBook will provide anybody who suffers from social anxiety their first steps towards recovery. The complexity of social anxiety (and the fact that overcoming it means rewiring the way that you think) means that everyone has to find their own path towards recovery.

However, along with my eBook, there are plenty of resources and support out there to help you find your way. And I for one will be continuing to post articles every week offering tips and advice on how to overcome social anxiety for good.

Posted by Matt | Filed Under Blog, anxiety treatment, cognitive behavioral therapy, social anxiety disorder