How To Fight Stress With Your Belly

In our stressed-out world, the fight and flight response that kept our ancestors alive has turned into “stew and chew”. Stress is normal. It is our adaptive reaction to threat. It signals danger and prepares us to take defensive action. Stress is experienced by everyone, and more often than not stress causes negative to our physical, emotional and mental health. To help you combat stress here are some few tips in using our belly together with some breathing exercise to relieve your stress.

Deep abdominal breathing, or belly breathing, helps establish a state of physiological calm and can neutralize the negative effects of stress.

Here’s a step-by-step lesson:

1. Lie on you back and place a book in your belly. Relax your stomach muscles and inhale deeply into your abdomen so that the book rises. When you exhale, the book should fall. You’ll still be bringing air into your upper chest, but now you’re also bringing air down into the lower portion of your lungs and expanding your entire chest cavity.
2. Sit up and place you right hand on your abdomen and your left hand on your chest. Breathe deeply so that your right “abdominal” hand rises and falls with your breath, while your left “chest” hand stays relatively still. Breathe in through your nose and out through your nose or mouth, and enjoy the sensation of abdominal breathing.
3. Place a clock with a second hand in view. Breathe in slowly, filling your abdomen, for five seconds. Then breathe out slowly to the same count to five.
4. Perform deep abdominal breathing throughout the day; for example, when you wake up, before you go to sleep, and in any stressful situation.

Reference: Right Under Your Nose. Reader’s Digest, Feb. 2001

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