The science behind taking a few deep breaths.

Every day as I walk through our garage, I pass a toolbox sitting on a shelf that mostly goes unnoticed. Occasionally, when I need to hang a picture or tighten a screw, I’ll take out the hammer or screwdriver that I need. Obviously, the toolbox is only useful if I open it up and use something from it. Thankfully I don’t need to use it often.

Not so with the emotional challenges in my life, which call on me to use tools constantly to navigate the intense feelings, stress, worry, and overwhelm that show up in the course of my day and week. Much of my work as a psychologist involves teaching people to use tools in their day-to-day lives to do just that. I realize that there are two major challenges that tend to arise:

1. People need to have the appropriate tools in their repertoire and know how to access them.
2. People need to remember to pull out and use those tools as they go through their day.

While the second statement seems obvious, I can attest to the fact that even as a psychologist with so many helpful tools at my disposal, as a human being, I sometimes (more often than I’d like to admit) fall into the trap of forgetting to use what I know in the moment to help myself.

The mindful breath

Fortunately, one of the tools that I find most helpful is also one of the simplest. It involves taking a mindful pause by focusing on the breath as it comes in and as it goes out. This mindful breathing has become a lifeline for me, helping to anchor me whether I’m pacing at the hospital waiting to find out about a loved one, stuck in traffic and late for an appointment, or the other day as I literally watched all my folders and files disappear from the desktop of my Mac right before my eyes.

It is common for people to throw out the phrase, “Take a few breaths and calm down,” but it can be useful to understand some of the science behind this, to be more motivated to use this tool.

When we consciously direct our awareness to our breath through focused breathing, our breathing tends to naturally become slower and deeper as we focus on the sensation and rhythm of inhalation and exhalation. Every time we inhale, we activate the sympathetic branch of our autonomic nervous system, which among other things, increases our heart rate. Every time we exhale, we activate the parasympathetic branch, which among other things, slows down our heart rate.

These two branches of our nervous system work in sync and act like the brakes and accelerator of a car, trying to provide the right amount of energy we need for a given task. When we are in the grip of intense stress or anxiety, our breathing tends to become dysregulated, with a much higher level of sympathetic nervous system activation. While this is useful to mobilize us, too much input from this system can make us feel dysregulated (anxious, stressed, uneasy) and can give us less access to higher cognitive functions, such as being able to see a bigger picture and act more skillfully.

While most people are aware of the way that messages from the brain are sent down to the heart to increase its beating during times of stress, many people are less aware that the heart has more connections that go up to the brain than the other way around. This means that when we regulate our heart rhythms through deepening our breathing, we bring the inputs of the two branches of the autonomic nervous system into greater balance with even, slow, in-and-out breaths and messages get sent to the brain to help “calm” the brain down. Shifting our breathing allows for a shift of physiology and the subsequent effect on our cognitive and emotional functioning, including greater states of ease and more access to seeing the bigger picture and making skillful choices.

It’s as if the message to our bodies is, “It’s OK, there is no life-threatening emergency, you are safe to relax,” and our parasympathetic nervous system (responsible for the relaxation input) can begin to increase its activity. Additionally, when we stop and focus our awareness on our breath, we interrupt the “automatic pilot” mode that we often operate from, and thus we invite conscious choice rather than responding from habitual reactivity.

A short practice

To keep it simple, you might begin practicing by focusing on your inhalations and exhalations for a minute or two in combination with this mini-mindful pause.

1. With the first few rounds of breath, notice, acknowledge, and soften tension in the body as you scan your body from head to toe.
2. With the second few rounds of breath, name what you are feeling in your body, labeling your emotions.
3. With the third few rounds of breath, send some compassion and kindness to yourself for whatever you are feeling. (This third step is deceivingly simple, yet often our natural inclination is to want to get rid of our feelings and judge ourselves for feeling that way.)

Here’s a quick example of how this might look:

I am hurt or upset by something that someone said, and I am just on the verge of blurting out something in response. Instead, I pause for three rounds of breath.

1. I notice my chest and throat are completely constricted, and my hands are clenched.
2. I recognize that I am feeling hurt, sad, or misunderstood.
3. I accept all of these feelings in my body as I imagine feelings of care (from myself or some real or imagined, benevolent being) bringing ease to whatever I am feeling.

Having taken this momentary pause where I interrupted my habitual stress response, I am now able to think more clearly and choose how I want to respond from a more thoughtful and less reactive place. In the example above, perhaps I choose to communicate to the person how I am feeling hurt, not in an accusatory way, but in a way that they are able to hear, and that offers an opening for a repair of the relationship.

One last thought… it can be helpful to practice using tools in more neutral situations before you need them in highly stressful situations. It’s helpful to make sure I know how to use my screwdriver before I must use it to fix my door that is hanging on its hinge. Make it a habit of taking a mindful breathing pause several times throughout the day when you are not experiencing intense emotions. It then becomes easier to use this tool in more emotionally charged situations.

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Article originally published on Psychology Today.