De-stress yourself with these breathing techniques

We grapple with stress on a day-to-day basis in our life. There are two types of stress called eustress and distress. Eustress can be categorised as good stress and improves your performance. The stress before getting married, or the stress parents go through when they are expecting their baby is called positive stress. But distress affects your emotional, mental, and physical health as well as performance. Dr. Akhila Vinod offers three easy methods to deal with this stress, anxiety, and panic attack.

4-7-8 breathing technique

Takes deep breaths four times. Hold them for 7 seconds. And release at 8. You don’t need to stress about that. Just do it according to your pace. Take as few breaths as you can. Hold that for double the time. Try exhaling twice as much. By this, we can control the heart rate and breathing rate very quickly.

Belly breathing

Have you noticed how we breathe when we get tensed? During that time we mostly use the chest muscle. But if we look at a child happily sleeping, it must be breathing through the tummy. Therefore to remove stress, we need to shift from chest breathing to belly breathing.

How to do it

Slowly push the belly with your hands and inhale. Gradually release the hands while exhaling. After doing it once or twice, take a strong breath in the same way without the help of the hands and let it out. This will help in keeping your heart rate and breathing rate under control.

Bhramari Pranayama

Close your ears with your index finger and take a deep breath. Make a small humming sound. By doing this, our brain cells develop. No matter how angry or stressed you are, when you do Bhramari Pranayama, your brain cells relax that will in turn help in bringing your emotions under control.

How to do it

Close your ears with your index finger and take a deep breath. Inhale like this 9 times and exhale as a humming sound. Exhaling and humming sounds should be done simultaneously. You unconsciously pick up the humming sound while exhaling. After doing it two or three times you will know that you are becoming very calm. Your heart rate and breathing rate will decrease. Just by doing these three breathing exercises, you can become your own doctor.