Chest breathing activates your fight-or-flight response, while belly breathing calms your nervous system. About 80% of women chest breathe. Start by inhaling into your belly first, then let your rib cage expand.
If you break down the breath, there's different mechanics to the breath. There's the way you breathe into the ribs or into the belly. Those mechanics spark the sympathetic fight or flight or the parasympathetic relaxation. So if you're breathing into a chest, which I once read that 80% of women are chest breathers, that's constantly spiking the sympathetic nervous system. If you're breathing into the belly all the time, then that's spiking the parasympathetic nervous system, right? So you want to breathe with both breathing into the belly first, then allowing the rib cage to So learning to regulate the mechanics and the duration is, is a good place to start.
