Breathing & Emotional Wellbeing: A Two-Way Street

Oh, the way we breathe changes the way we feel and the way we feel changes the way we breathe. So it's kind of a two way street. So you did the right thing. Maybe you knew this and, or perhaps it was intuitive, but by changing the way you breathe and being able to take more, you know, deepen your breath and to breathe more correctly, you are able to then use your breath to regulate your nervous system. But people who did not breathe do corrective breathing, who remain short, shallow breathers. I would expect them to have anxiety because the way we breathe creates a predictable response in our body. And that's why our nervous system uses the breath. It's one of the first thing that changes in somebody. So if you're ever speaking to someone as a clinician or as a spouse or even your children, one of the things that you want to pay attention to is how their breath changes. So between the stimulus and the response, you know, Viktor Frankl says there's a space, and in that space, I would add, is the breath. So if you're speaking to someone and their breathing pattern changes, you know that the state of their nervous system changed.