If we want to feel better, we could just take a deep breath. It could be quite fascinating to know that so many things are possible just by adjusting the way we breathe. We need to use diaphragm to breathe properly and it has important muscles that can act like a vacuum. Diaphragm should also aid in digestion and we could achieve this by breathing properly. Infants born as diaphragm breathers and when they breathe, their belly rises up and down regularly. As we grow older, we tend to have new habits and we may move muscles of the neck, shoulders and rib cage when we breather. Actually, babies move their upper torso when breathing when they are sick. Modern people tend to have sedentary lifestyle and we move much less compared to our ancestors. We don’t need to perform too many physical works and this could affect the way we breathe.
Breaths could also be affected by stress and other psychological factors, which could be related to financial problems, work and traffic. The lack of physical exercise and constant state of stress could change our breathing habits for the worse. If we constantly use accessory muscle to move during breathing, we could actually tell our bodies to get prepared for stress responses. This could also have unfavourable effects on normal functions of our body and our posture. Poor breathing habits could cause poor thoracic mobility, loss of core stability, poor digestion, forward head carriage and hunched forward. People who breathe badly could also have increased cortisol levels and higher degree of fatigue during physical exercises.
Fortunately, it is not all doom and gloom. It is possible to retrain our breathing patterns, so we could always feel great. Diaphragm is actually a highly dynamic muscle and we should be able to train it like other muscles. There are things we can do to reactivate our diaphragm. As an example, we could perform Qigong breathings and we could do this by placing our hands on our belly button. Then, we could inhale through our nose and we could slowly push our stomach out, so our hands could feel that our stomach inflates. We could exhale through our nose and the diaphragm breathing is successful if our stomach contracts naturally.
We could also perform the shoe visual technique and we can begin by lying down on our back. We could place one show on our chest and another on our stomach. Try to inhale deeply with our nose and make sure that the show on our stomach goes up noticeably. We could see that we are using our accessory muscles if the shoe on our chest is moving as we breathe. We shouldn’t need these shoes anymore if we could regularly breathe with our stomach. It is generally important to reset our breathing patterns and do this properly. It should be important to breathe naturally, without thinking anything about it. We should do this automatically while stuck in traffic or during exercise.How To Breathe Properly?