Mindset - Breath Control

Think about when you fail to be the person you want to be – when you needlessly snap at your kids, or spouse, get flustered at work, quit during a workout, or get upset over something small. These moments of weakness are very frequently caused by stress. Stress often makes u act in ways we aren’t proud of.

The human stress response – known as the fight-or-flight response – helps us survive life-and-death situations. When we become stressed, numerous changes occur in our brains and bodies (for example: adrenaline and cortisol levels surge, pupils dilate, and heart rate increases) that allow us to fight harder, run faster, feel less pain, and better notice threats in our environment. These changes are invaluable during life-threating situations like when you need to ignore immense pain and fatigue to carry an injured teammate off the battlefield or keep running to evade an attacker.

The problem is that fight-or-flight response also has many damaging side effects. Getting stressed causes anxiousness, discomfort, headaches, trouble sleeping, diminished sex drive/performance, and impaired focus, rational thinking, and complex problem-solving ability. Stress also increases our risk of high blood pressure, heart attacks, and serious disease. And if that wasn’t enough, stress also makes it really difficult to lose fat or build muscle.

The stress response is kind of like chemotherapy – it's horrible and has countless side effects, but sometimes we need it to survive.

But there’s a reason we don’t want chemotherapy when we break an ankle – we'd be destroying ourselves without getting any benefit in return. Chemotherapy doesn’t fix a broken ankle.

The problem is that we have become conditioned to trigger our stress response every time we are in a traffic jam, have a busy schedule, experience a setback, or just have to speak in a room where that are other people. This makes absolutely no sense because our flight-or-flight response can’t help us in these situations. We can’t finish our presentation by punching our PowerPoint slides or make our to-do-list disappear by sprinting away from it.

The fight-or-flight response was meant to be used when we’re being attacked by a jaguar, not by an excel spreadsheet.

When we get stressed by all these non-life-threatening challenges, it’s like going t chemotherapy for a broken ankle; we’re incurring enormous damage and getting no benefit. This is disastrous for our mental and physical health.

There is, however, good news. First, many of the tactics you will be learning – especially Stoicism, Choosing the Wrench, Micro-Goals, Focus, and Self-Talk – will help you to train your mind to stop activating your stress response during all these non-life-threatening challenges you face.

Second, when your stress response does become activated, there’s a tactic you can use to stop it in its tracks: breath control.

Breath control is the practice of breathing in a way that activates the parasympathetic nervous system. The parasympathetic nervous system is the opposite of the fight-or-flight system; its activation makes us feel calm and relaxed. The parasympathetic nervous system is a direct antagonist of the fight-or-flight response, meaning its activation directly causes the deactivation of the fight-or-flight response.

Here’s how you breath using the breath control method:

1.     Inhale and exhale through your nose.

2.     As you inhale, focus on expanding (pushing out) your belly and diaphragm instead of your chest. To test if you’re doing it correctly, place your left hand on your belly and your right hand on your chest. As you inhale, your left hand should move out while your right hand stays perfectly still. You don’t want your chest to rise. This is likely quite different than how you currently breathe.

3.     Once you inhale about 80% as deeply as you can, pause for one second and then exhale while allowing your belly to come back in.

4.     While you exhale, consciously try to release the tension from your body. Unclench your jaw. Relax your hands. Drop your shoulders.

5.     Pause for a second then repeat.

To have breath control effect take place, you should inhale and exhale (each) for at least four seconds. The longer the better, but longer durations will take practice.

Using breath control causes a series of signals and changes in the body that trigger the parasympathetic nervous system. Breathing the way most of us normally do – shallow, quickly, expanding our chests instead of our bellies, and breathing through the mouth instead of the nose – does not lead to any of these changes and therefore does not lead to the resulting parasympathetic nervous system activation.

Three notes:

1.     Special Operator and intelligence leaders are taught that in many chaotic situations the single most effective first step they can take is to start breathing using the breath control method. The breath control method will stop their stress response and allow them to assess the situation objectively and rationally so they can make optimal, logical decisions rather than decisions fueled by emotion, stress and panic. The fact that breath control is often the first thing combat leaders are taught to do in a crisis should give you a sense of how powerful this tactic is.

2.     You've probably heard the advice, “take a deep breath.” This advice misses the mark. Breathing deeply is not the key. In fact, if you inhale deeply – as people often do when trying to calm themselves down – this can actually make you feel more stressed. The key is not to breathe deeply; it’s to breathe:

a.     Slowly

b.     Nasally

c.      Using your diaphragm instead of your chest

d.     Releasing tension throughout the exhale

3.     In addition to using the breath control method when you’re stressed, start practicing breathing this way all the time. The ultimate goal of breath control is to make this your new default way of breathing. If you practice the tactic enough, it will eventually just become the way you breathe without even having to think about it. Once you achieve this, you’ll be able to use your breathing to prevent your stress response from becoming activated in the first place rather than just using it to stop your stress response once it’s already been activated.

We've all become conditioned to get stressed about so many non-life-threatening things. Getting stressed during all these moments is severely harming our health, calmness, happiness, and ability to act in a way which makes us proud. This breath control technique is like a fire extinguisher for stress. Whenever you notice yourself starting to get stressed, simply breathe using the above method and watch your stress be snuffed out.