How to take a really deep breath

We’ve known for a while that deep breathing offers considerable benefit.

Focused breath work has been demonstrated to help with…

• Reducing stress
• Reducing anxiety
• Improving sleep
• Boosting energy levels
• Helping to reduce blood pressure

The issue is that few people really know how to take a deep breath.

With that in mind I thought I would provide a quick tutorial on how to take a deep breath.

First, if you meditate, get into your normal meditative position, such as sitting on the floor with legs crossed.

If you do not practice meditation, feel free to just sit on a stable chair with good posture.

Note: It is important to sit with your spine straight, and your eyes held level to the floor.  This puts you in the best position to take a full, deep breath.

Be sure to allow yourself to completely relax.

Now, while breathing in through your nose, feel your diaphragm push down and out.  This allows you to draw in air to fill the lower portion of the lungs.

This is known as diaphragmatic breathing, and many will suggest this is all you need to do to take a deep breath.

But there’s more.

Once you’ve pushed out your belly as much as possible, continue to draw in more air to fill in the middle portion of your lungs.

At this point you want to consciously expand your rib cage.

You can feel this by thinking of flaring out your lats (the muscles that run along the side and middle portion of your upper and middle back).

You won’t feel like you can expand your rib cage much, but it does allow more air to enter the lungs.

Once you’ve filled in that middle portion, then you want to continue to draw in more air to fill in the top portion of your lungs.

This is done by feeling your chest expand.

In fact, most people simply take a deep breath with this last step, which means they’ve never really taken a full deep breath since they haven’t performed step 1.

Once you’ve drawn in as much air as possible, hold for a second, and then exhale nice and slow.

At the tail end of the exhale you should feel your abdomen tighten, which forces every bit of air back out of the lungs.

Try to sit for a few minutes each day to work on this exercise.