Kari's Favorite Breathing Technique

This is episode 307 of the Empowered Team Podcast. Welcome to the Empowered Team Podcast, where we explore how to optimize your performance in career, sport, and life. And now, your host, executive coach, and life strategist, Kari Schneider.

Welcome. Welcome to the Empowered Team Podcast. This one's going to be a little bit different. I want to share with you my favorite, favorite breathing technique right now, as it has given me so much relaxation, it has given me so much peace, it has given me a greater and deeper and faster connection to my nervous system and my body, and it has been really, really powerful. So I want to share this with you today. And I'm sitting. If you're listening to this and you don't see the YouTube video, I'm sitting in a chair. I'm comfortable, I'm alone. And that is a scenario that I'd often be in in order to do this breathing technique. And a lot of the time I'm lying down, so I might be lying down for a meditation. I might be going to sleep at night. And I will so many, many times when I do this breathing technique, I'll be lying down. I find it easier for me to do lying down than I do sitting up. But I do want to show it to you sitting up, because I invite you to use this breathing technique when you feel like you can't breathe. That's what's happened to me for quite some time with the illness that I've been healing, where my nervous system was so on fire, my nervous system was so triggered or engaged that I couldn't yawn, I couldn't take a deep breath. So it'd be like being startled almost all of the time. And that's what I was experiencing for many, many months when I was going through the graves illness. So the reason I want to share this with you is because even if you don't have an autoimmune disease or you have not been startled, what often happens in our workday is that we have such a level of stress that we don't realize how deteriorating it is for our bodies. We don't realize the deleterious effect on our thinking, on our. Our presence, on our being. When we're constantly on this kind of alert, it ends up detracting from our. Our brain, it detracts from our body, it detracts from our ability to function the way we want to function. So I invite you to try this out. I'm going to describe it first, and then we'll do just a few of these breaths. The. The Thing that I do is take a number of different practices. Some of them, you know, there you probably know about the box breathing. Four counts in, four counts hold. Four counts out, four counts hold. There are elements like that. But I've found what works for me to really, really focus on my parasympathetic nervous system and to calm my sympathetic nervous system and to make a change. I can literally see the metrics when I'm doing this. Make a change in my heart rate and a change in my heart rate variability, and then be able to take a deep breath when, prior to doing this technique, I wouldn't be able to take a deep breath. And I've done many, many, many techniques over many years, but especially over the last year and a half. And this is one I've just brought together. So the first part is. Is an inhale. But when the inhale starts, it's a belly breath. So the inhale is by consciously pushing the diaphragm down. So if you're thinking of the diaphragm kind of sitting there in an upward half circle, then you're using that muscle of the diaphragm to push down so that the belly kind of goes out. So that first breath isn't coming from lifting the lungs. It's not coming from. You're not feeling it from the shoulders. You're feeling the push out of the belly because you're inhaling by pushing the diaphragm down. And for those of you who haven't done belly breathing or diaphragmatic breathing or practices in yoga, it may feel hard to do at first, but this part is really, really important because the vagal nerve comes from your spinal cord, but it goes right through into your diaphragm, into your digestive system. And this is what can help elicit more of the parasympathetic relaxation and really calm the sympathetic alertness the fastest by going through the diaphragm and through this nerve. So you're starting with this initial inhale by having the belly breath by pushing the diaphragm down, by letting the belly go out. And then like a wave, if the bellies come out a little bit, the wave kind of goes up through the lungs, through the chest cavity to start the inhale through the lungs and the chest cavity instead of just from the belly and diaphragm. So the initial wave is that belly kind of sticking out a little bit. And then that wave goes through the chest cavity. And now the ribs are expanding and the lungs are expanding until you think you've brought in as much air as you possibly can. And that might take maybe three seconds, just really pulling in all that air. And when you think you have all the air you can, I want you to think about finding that top, top part of the lung. The top part of the lung is literally just near your trap, between your trap muscle and your collarbone. And that top part of the lung where that, those little scalene muscles are, they're between that collarbone and the. The trap. That's where I want you to think about getting the tiniest sip of air to get that top part of the lung, to inflate everything in the lung, both lungs. So we've done this wave from the belly into the rib cage into the lungs. And then you've brought in all that air and you try and sip in a tiny bit more. Even though you feel like no more air can come in, you sip in a tiny bit more and visualize getting the very top part of your lungs at the top of your chest cavity, just beyond your collarbones. And then once you've got that in there, I usually will hold for anywhere between four or five counts and the counts I'm using. And this is an interesting part. I can hear. Hear and feel my heart rate. So if I can hear or feel the beats of my heart, then I'm counting four or five of those. If it's. If my heart rate's a little slower, I'll count four. If my heart rate's a little faster, I'll count five. And I'll count four or five of those. And holding that inhaled breath. And then I will slowly, slowly release. And I'll do so in either one of two ways. Either an Ujjayu breathing, which is kind of a throaty resistan like a. Or through, like a straw, through my mouth. So it's very slow. And the feeling to me, out of that slow exhale, which is very, very long, the feeling to me is like melting. I will feel my body just melt. It'll. It'll all be relaxing. I can see it in my mind's eye. I can feel my body just relaxing all the way from my head and my neck and through my shoulders and through the rest of my body. I can just feel the heaviness happening of releasing all of that air and also releasing tension at the same time. Now, if I'm really exhausted at the end of the night, I might do three of them. If I am really tight on time, I might just commit to three of them. And those three are what I will focus on for just as a bare minimum. So I invite you to do one of them, maybe three of them, and if you feel like you're really getting the practice, then do a few more. So we're going to try this on. I'll do a couple with you. And you can institute this at any time in your day. You can use this at a lunchtime, a lunch break. You can do it while you're driving, although just make sure you're keeping your eyes open. But it can be something that just relaxes you. Make sure if you're driving or something, you're not tired, because it will activate your relaxed part of your nervous system. All right, so the first part, I'm going to breathe in, starting with the belly breathing, And then hold. And to get that final little bit of an exhale out, I will usually finish with a contraction of my stomach to push on the diaphragm to push out any of the last air that was in. So that would be the final. I let the lungs and everything else just relax and slowly releasing it through my mouth. And then at the final little bit, I'll push any little last bit of air in, out by contracting my stomach and pushing that diaphragm. So we'll do another one inhaling. And once I've done a minimum of three, I will just breathe normally. And I'll find that I notice how much easier it is to breathe. I'll find that I can feel how much more relaxed my muscle tension, and I'll find that it's easier for my brain to focus on what I want to focus on or just relax and have a diffuse awareness. And I will also find that I will be able to take a big sigh, type of the diaphragmatic big sigh and. Or yawn even. And I would not often have been able to do that prior to doing a practice like this. So that is what I wanted to bring you today. I know it is not the normal topic of perhaps an interview, an expert interview, or a very specific distinction that I'm bringing to you in order to use as a tool to empower you in your life. Instead, this is the tool that I think can be very helpful and I invite you to use it. By all means, share it and just practice what you can do. Intentionally controlling your own internal environment, using your breathing in a very specific way that has helped me. Have a wonderful rest of your day and a beautiful week. I challenge you to use this at least three times this week. I use it every single day. Have a wonderful week. Be Empowered.

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