Dre Does a Breathing Exercise

If you're like me you lead a pretty busy and fast paced life that can lead to crazy amounts of stress. Now sometimes we can sit down and take a look at everything we are doing to reduce the amount of stress we feel but more times than none, stress is unavoidable. For this reason, we need to focus our attention on managing the stress. Which brings me to today's post. Breathing exercises are one of the quickest ways to change our energy, anxiety, and stress level. Taking a few moments to calm ourselves and focus our attention differently can help you manage the stress you are feeling and turn your energy into something more productive. 

This leads me to today's post. I personally struggle with being able to turn my brain off when it's time for bed or focusing on something else. Even if I'm tired, my brain doesn't like to stop going over what needs to get done, what bills need to be paid, etc...so I can easily give myself way more anxiety than is necessary. 

If you find yourself having a similar problem I think you'll love this breathing technique I learned in school. You can either do it sitting in a chair or laying in bed. All you do is place your thumb and ring finger on each of your nostrils. This leaves your middle and index fingers to be placed in between your brows. Now use your ring finger to close one nostril and inhale deeply through only the nostril under your thumb. Before you exhale open the ring finger nostril and close the nostril under your thumb and exhale through the ring finger nostril. Now inhale again without changing anything, and before you exhale close the ring finger nostril and open the thumb nostril. Take about slow and deep 10 breaths this way, alternating which nostrils you leave open and closed. Depending on your lung strength you may need to start with only a few breaths so you don't get light headed, but you can work up to more breaths with time. 

This breathing technique is amazing for us overthinkers because it forces us to concentrate on opening and closing our nostrils (which sounds silly when written...haha) instead of worrying about tasks and problems. I love to do it before bed to relax myself, but if I ever find myself overthinking something during the day I'll take a 5 minute break and focus on my breathing.

Let me know if you try this and what you think about it! I'd like to start incorporating more stress management techniques into my blog so leave me a comment below if you like this idea or have any of your own! 

Have a beautiful and stress-free day,

Dre