Hi Blog, it’s me again!
This week my mindfulness strategy hunt led me to focus on breathwork and mindful breathing exercises. What prompted me to investigate this tactic was my daily breathing reminder on my watch from the Apple Mindfulness app. It is something I tend to ignore most days, but I decided for this week to implement a consistent daily practice of utilizing this app each morning and evening to work on fostering mindfulness.
What is Mindful Breathing?
Choosing Therapy defines mindful breathing as focusing your attention on your breath, while concentrating on carrying out deep and controlled breaths. Breathing exercises cultivate mindfulness by redirecting an individual’s attention to the breath, promoting awareness of only the present moment, encouraging a sense of calmness. By focusing on the breath, it allows past and future worries, along with feelings of distress, to slip away fostering overall mindfulness. Mindful breathing dates back to 200 B.C. and is a fundamental aspect of many mediation practices but can also be a standalone practice to promote mindfulness. A promising aspect of breathing exercises as a mindfulness cultivation strategy is that it is a readily accessible self-regulation tool for everyone, at all times.
Why Mindful Breathing?
Duke Health & Well-Being discusses the importance of conscious, mindful breathing and the research-backed benefits it provides to physical, mental, and emotional health (listed below):
- Decreased stress: Deep breathing helps activates the body’s relaxation system, reducing stress hormones, lowering anxiety and improving overall mood.
- Improved concentration and focus: By focusing the attention on the breath, it calms the mind and minimizes distraction, leading to better productivity.
- Boosts emotional regulation: Regulating breathwork allows for better control of emotions and reactions, improving the management of stress, anxiety, anger, and other emotional states.
- Improved sleep: Mindful, deep breathing prior to bed can promote relaxation of the body and mind, contributing to longer and deeper sleeps.
- Better lung functioning: Breathing exercises actively improve lung function, capacity and health by fully engaging the breathing muscles, oxygenating the body, and removing toxins.
- Pain management promotion: Breathing exercises naturally reduce pain perception and increase pain tolerance.
- Better digestion: Mindful breathing encourages relaxation of the body, boosting blood flow to the digestive system for more efficient digestion.
Apple Mindfulness App:
The app I used to develop my mindful breathing routine was the Apple Mindfulness app. I chose to use this app because it is readily accessible to me at any point in the day through my watch. The feature of the app I used was the Breath component. The breathing exercise ranges from 1-5 minutes depending on your personal preference. Throughout the practice the app uses an expanding (breathe in) and collapsing (breathe out) animation, along with gently vibrating to remind you when to inhale and exhale, facilitating deep and mindful breathing.
Takeaways from my Mindful Breathing Practice:
This past week I felt a little out of control due to personal challenges. The challenges presented drove me to utilize breathwork to attempt to ground myself and relieve my feelings of anxiety, tension, and sadness. During the first few days of this practice, I did find my mind wandering quite a bit. I used this as an opportunity to remind myself that training breathwork is similar to training a muscle in the gym – time, focus, and energy are required to make this practice feel more authentic and natural. I started with a simple 1-minute breathing time goal as this felt challenging for my busy mind. As the days progressed, I found it easier to let my thoughts quiet during the breathing exercises and was able to increase my time to 3-minute practices in the mornings and evenings by the end of the week. After practicing breathwork, I felt much calmer but also reenergized both mentally and physically. I was able to focus on the present moment, which gave me clarity and helped me to let go of factors causing tension and stress that were outside of my control go.
Integrating Mindful Breathing in Schools:
A really great mindful breathing resource I found online was “Deep Breathing Exercises for Kids” produced by Coping Skills For Kids. The website lists a variety of breathing exercises that can be implemented in classroom settings to bring mindful breathing to students in engaging and exciting ways. Mindful breathing exercises typically focus on breathing in through the nose and exhaling through the mouth. Here are a few examples below, but there are many more available on their site:
- Bubble breathing – Use bubbles to teach children to breathe slowly to form the bubbles – a great way to introduce the concept of focusing on our breathing!
- Bunny breathing – Take 3 quick breaths in, scrunching up your nose like a rabbit, then pause, exhale, and repeat!
- Square breathing – Trace along the sides of the square with your finger. On the first side inhale for 4 seconds, on the next side hold your breath for 4 seconds, on the third side exhale for 4 seconds, on the last side hold your breath for 4 seconds, then repeat!
- Color breathing – Assign colors to different feelings. When inhaling imagine breathing in a color with a positive emotion associated to it, when exhaling imagine the negative emotion and associated color leaving the body!
- 4-7-8 breathing – Breathe in for 4 counts, hold for 7, and exhale for 8!
- Rainbow breathing – Start with arms at your sides, as you inhale, swoop arms up to meet above head imagining you are painting the colors of the rainbow, as you exhale return arms to sides, and repeat for each color in the rainbow! (Below I’ve attached a short walk-through video utilizing this strategy.)
As a future teacher, I plan to incorporate mindful breathing into my classroom routine to help students manage their stress and recenter their focus. By introducing simple and effective breathing exercises I hope to create a calming classroom environment and community that benefits my students’ emotional well-being and their learning experience!
Catch you next week, Blog 😊