Breathing Exercises for Anxiety Full Instructions

Don’t take a deep breath to calm down anxiety.
Deep breathing can make anxiety worse not better for some people!
 

For many people with anxiety slow deep breathing meditation techniques can help them to train their nervous system to calm down and I’ll explain how to use that type of breathing technique in another post, but there are a few people for whom deep slow breathing can rapidly intensify feelings of anxiety and even precipitate a panic attack. I’ve taught meditation breathing techniques to several hundred people with anxiety over the past 30 years that I’ve been in practice and I’ve only met a few people that had their anxiety made worse by deep breathing, I don’t think there are any accurate statistics on how common this phenomenon is that my personal guess is it’s less than 1%. Despite it being uncommon what was notable was how rapidly deep breathing could bring on increased anxiety and how switching to buteyko breathing would start antidote to the anxiety we just produced with deep breathing within 60 seconds. Furthermore for the people that got worse with deep breathing and better with buteyko breathing they experienced really worthwhile and permanent reductions in their anxiety within a few months by practising this technique daily until it became the new normal way they breathed; a breathing retraining programme so to speak.

 

Why Try Buteyko Breathing for Anxiety

When you breathe too deeply and or quickly it causes your body to expel excessive amounts of carbon dioxide and contrary to what you over-breathing results in less oxygen being released from your blood into the cells of your body including your brain.
 
The lack of oxygen in the brain triggers a stress response in the body, we release stress hormones, our heart rate speed up and our blood vessels become constricted we also naturally increase our breathing rate, all in an attempt to increase the supply of oxygen to the brain. Over breathing can become a chronic habitual way of breathing that maintains a background stress response and this continuously maintains a heightened level of stress/anxiety physiology in our brain.
 
You might be surprised to hear that over-breathing can result in less oxygen being delivered to the brain but it’s due to the way haemoglobin that carries oxygen in our blood works. Haemoglobin holds onto oxygen when it is in a low carbon dioxide environment and releases oxygen when it arrives at parts of the body with high carbon dioxide which is where the oxygen is needed this is known as the known as the ‘Bohr Effect’ or ‘Oxyhaemoglobin Dissociation Curve’.
When we breathe out too much carbon dioxide our haemoglobin releases less oxygen in our body responds by increasing our heart rate, breathing, blood pressure and other things, it seems that at least some people the stress response produced by low oxygen levels triggers feelings of anxiety or panic; the similarity between the racing heart, adrenaline and so forth is so similar to having anxiety and panic attack that it feels the same and tricks the brain into thinking that’s what’s happening.
 
Just for clarity, when you are exercising your muscles producing increased amounts of carbon dioxide and need more oxygen and at those times it’s totally appropriate to have an increase breathing rate; the type of over-breathing that may contribute to anxiety is over-breathing when you are at rest, not exercising and had no need to expel increased levels of carbon dioxide. Exercise especially aerobic exercise has proven antianxiety effects and you should do regular aerobic exercise to the point where you are out of breath. But then when you are at rest spend 20-30 minutes a day practising the buteyko breathing method and see if after a few weeks it reduces your anxiety.

If you have Anxiety learn the Buteyko breathing method first

Before you try any long slow deep breathing technique I recommend you learn how to do Buteyko breathing technique first, just in case you are one of those individuals for whom overbreathing is contributing to your anxiety. After just a few hours of practising the buteyko technique you would be sufficiently skilled at doing it that if the deep breathing exercises exasperate your anxiety you will be able to quickly antidote the effect by applying the buteyko method.
 

Don’t let your anxiety put you off trying new techniques

Now I understand that when you have anxiety and you hear something new could make it worse it can trigger fear and anxiety and put you off trying new things; but don’t let this put off trying the other breathing techniques. I’ve seen that carbon dioxide levels and over breathing don’t really seem to be the issue for some people with anxiety and so they can use the other techniques without any temporary rise in anxiety occurring.
 
If you’re lucky one of these techniques will help you, I recommend you try them all to expand your range of treatment options.
 

Buteyko Breathing Is Not the Best Method for Everyone with Anxiety

By far the majority of people with anxiety that I’ve taught slow deep breathing techniques to did not have any problems with these techniques increasing their anxiety and they were able to use these slow deep breathing techniques to their advantage.
 
With the slow deep breathing technique and describe in another post is an excellent technique to enable you to train your brain how to switch the balance in their (autonomic) nervous system from a (sympathetic) fight, flight or freeze dominant state to a (parasympathetic) relaxed, rest and restore dominant state. Breathing is one of the easiest and most direct ways that we can develop conscious control over our autonomic nervous system.

Advanced Anxiety Self-Help Therapy with Breathing Exercises

After a few months practice when you become skilled with any of these breathing techniques you can start to use them in an advanced self-help therapy way. The self-help therapy would look something like this: you would meditate performing the breathing technique you find the most effective at reducing your anxiety and then ‘step out’ of the meditative state and then deliberately bring up a feeling of anxiety in your mind, perhaps you think of the circumstances or scenarios that provoke anxiety or find some other way of doing it. Next you would restart the breathing meditation and spend as long as it takes for the anxiety to subside and you to be back in a peaceful mindfulness of breathing meditative state.
 
This is a kind of self-directed exposure therapy, exposure therapy is where one deliberately therapeutically exposes oneself to the very things that one is afraid of or provoke anxiety and stay with them until the feelings of anxiety subside. You would start with just little things, with baby steps just trying to bring up mild states of anxiety, another way of describing it is begin with picking the low hanging fruit and work up the tree as you become more skilled and confident at being able to control your anxiety.
This technique not only gives you a feeling of control over your anxiety which is therapeutic in its own right but you are retraining and reprogramming your amygdala. By exposing yourself (even in your minds eye) to the things that make you anxious whilst at the same time keeping your body and nervous system in a calm non-stressed or threatened state the amygdala learns that you can be ‘in contact’ with the thing that makes you anxious and nothing bad happens to you. The connection the amygdala had between the thing that made you anxious and state of fight, flight or freeze in your body becomes broken. Don’t get me wrong I’m not suggesting that doing this a few times is going to fully cure you of anxiety; .I had social anxiety and some extreme anxiety about public speaking or even speaking in front of small friend groups and it took quite a bit of work over a few years but now these things have completely gone. I’ve also gained full control over my bipolar disorder I know from first-hand experience that overcoming mental health problem is not an easy thing to do it takes concerted effort over an extended period of time.
 

How Long Will it Take To Get Rid of My Anxiety?

This is a question I get asked all the time and of course the answer is there’s no way I can answer that, it varies considerably from person to person. Changing the brain is absolutely possible but it takes time if you apply several self-help techniques including breathing, meditation brain training and appropriate therapy as a rough guide you should expect to see some signs of improvement within a few months and often less, if you’re not seeing signs of improvement within a few months you are missing something important in your treatment program because picture stimulating the right neuro plastic change in the brain you should definitely see signs of improvement within a few months. Many people can make really good improvements between 6 to 9 months and over the following year by continuously applying and developing the right combination of treatments to change the wiring in your anxious brain people with even severe anxiety can get to the point at which the anxiety is either gone or diminished to a fraction of what it used to be; they feel they are in control of and recovering from their anxiety. If at this point there is still some occasional or lingering aspects of the anxiety it often continues to diminish and fade away.
 
I’ve overcome my own anxiety and learned how to control my bipolar disorder, I know from first-hand experience that overcoming a mental health problem is not an easy thing to do, it takes time and effort.
 

How effective are breathing techniques to combat anxiety?

In over 30 years in practice treating and coaching people how to use natural and self-help techniques to overcome mental health problems I’ve never seen anybody fully overcome their anxiety by using just one simple technique like breathing exercises, or meditation brain training, or dietary intervention, or manipulating neurotransmitters with drugs or natural remedies, or psychotherapy. However, what I have seen is that each of these can make a substantial contribution to reducing the condition and when you combine them together into a multipronged approach rather than a single therapy approach then I believe it’s absolutely possible to overcome anxiety. With regular practice of breathing exercises you can expect to learn how to alter the balance of fight or flight versus rest and repair in your autonomic nervous system and change the balance of carbon dioxide and oxygenation in your body if this is relevant part of your anxiety. Breathing exercises are an excellent way to alter the balance in your autonomic nervous system
 
I used this same tactic of a multipronged treatment approach to overcome my own bipolar disorder and comorbid anxiety; my anxiety (mainly social) has now completely gone and seems to need no further treatment and my bipolar disorder is kept fully under control with just natural therapies. Mastering my own stress physiology with various breathing techniques helped me tremendously to regain my mental health, I hope this information helps you.
 

How to do buteyko breathing

1. Sit down and settle down for about a minute. Breathe normally, not deeper or shallower than usual.
2. Once you feel that you have settled and are breathing normally perform a breath hold after a normal exhalation. After you have exhaled (don’t overly exhale, just exhale the normal amount) block your nostrils with a finger and thumb and hold your breath; in buteyko breathing the breath hold is called the control-pause.
3. Stop the breath hold as soon as you notice the first signs of air-hunger. This is not a breath holding competition, do not try to hold the breath beyond the first signs of air hunger including a sensation of constriction or pressure in the throat or chest, a mental desire to breathe again, or uncomfortable physical feelings around the heart.
4. When you are holding your breath count at about one second intervals and make a mental note of how long you were able to pause your breathing. The point of this is with practice you should see the length of time you can pause your breath increasing.
5. Now return to normal breathing and continue normal breathing for 20 to 30 seconds or more if you need to. If when you return to normal breathing you have to breathe more deeply to catch your breath then you held your breath for too long, after the breath holds you should not be out of breath at all and able to return to normal restful breathing.
 
Buteyko breathing training is not just the breathing exercises, you should also be focusing on deeply relaxing; you should start to see that the more you can relax your body the longer you can hold your breath. When you are stressed, or if you have a big meal you will notice it can significantly reduce the length of time you can pause your breath before experiencing air hunger.
 
Another way of achieving a similar result that some of my patients found useful was to change their normal breathing to a reduced level of breathing, i.e. taking shallower breaths, make your breathing as diminutive or minuscule as is necessary and then make short breath holds the end of an exhalation from time to time. You should notice that the only way to perform this diminutive breathing is by simultaneously profoundly relaxing your body by activating the parasympathetic nervous system.
 

How often to practice

Practice the buteyko method either once a day for 20 minutes or twice a day for 10 minutes for at least a month to see results.
 
What you could do is do a directed focused mindfulness of breathing type of meditation and use the buteyko breathing method as the style of breathing you do during the meditation.
Directed focus meditation is different from the regular style of open monitoring mindfulness that is widely taught. In open monitoring mindfulness you hold the mind in a neutral position whilst passively observing your thoughts, feelings and other sensations including your breathing that come time into your mind, in open monitoring mindfulness you remain passive and do not direct where your focus goes or change anything such as your breathing. This type of passive open monitoring meditation does have some specific therapeutic advantages in the way it increases our capacity to remain neutral even when distressing thoughts and feelings come into our mind but I believe it can be too challenging for many people with anxiety depression to use in the beginning because intense anxious and depressing thoughts can easily overwhelm the meditation practice.
The type of mindfulness meditation that I recommend for beginners with anxiety is closed or directed-focused meditation. In this meditation practice you choose what to focus your mind on and deliberately and wilfully hold your attention on this thing, we often also change the things that we are focusing on such as are breathing.
 
Studies have shown in the anxious brain there is overactivity in a network called the default mode network that connects together the amygdala (the burglar alarm of the brain) with the hippocampus (where we store complex emotional memories including distressing and anxious memories) with the frontal cortex. When the default mode network is overactive the amygdala and hippocampus end up bombarding the frontal cortex thinking part of our brain with distressing and anxious thoughts and feelings. Studies have shown that with the right type of meditation brain training we can dampen down this overactivity in the default mode network. We now know enough from brain scans of people meditating how to perform meditation brain training to maximise the efficiency of how we do this.
 
I first used meditation to combat my own bipolar depressions in the 1980s and subsequently experimented with different styles of meditation to combat my own social anxiety. Today I teach meditation specifically developed for people with anxiety depression in online classes click here for Online Meditation Classes for Mental Health
 

Buteyko for Panic Attacks

When someone has a panic attack one of the techniques you can use is to have the person breathe in and out of a bag, what this does is to quickly recirculate the carbon dioxide they are expelling back into their lungs to raise the level of carbon dioxide in blood. I’ve seen people that have panic attacks in particular benefit from learning buteyko breathing, it may reduce the frequency of the attacks.
Now just like anything else you have to experiment to see which techniques help you as an individual; I first learnt the buteyko breathing method back in the early 2000’s and my clinical observation is that it is not universally a helpful technique for anxiety however for the people it works for the results are often very impressive; I’ve seen try slow deep breathing rapidly experience an increased level of anxiety and then switch to the buteyko breathing and within a minute reduce their anxiety to a state of calm. So it’s well worth experimenting with this breathing technique to see if over breathing causing low carbon dioxide in your blood is having a significant effect on your anxiety.
Perform Buteyko Breathing at the First Signs of Anxiety or Panic
If possible at the first signs of rising anxiety or panic take the time to perform a buteyko breathing session and continue until the symptoms abate.
 
Another therapeutic thing you can do is deliberately at the start of the session bring into your mind something that triggers or intensifies your feelings of anxiety, it doesn’t have to be a full-blown panic attack! Just give yourself something to work with and then perform the buteyko breathing method until you have produced a state of calm and brought down the feelings of panic or anxiety. Ideally you would continue until you have completely eradicated or dissolved the current feelings of anxiety but it is sufficient if you reduced the intensity of the anxiety by half. This is a type of deliberate exposure therapy whereby you expose yourself albeit in your mind to what it is that makes you feel anxious and then by passing through the state of anxiety to a state of calm the brain particularly the amygdala learns that these things are no longer a threat; performing this type of self-help exercise also helps to give one a sense of control which combats anxiety on its own right.
 
For most people it’s quite easy to learn and you breathing technique but you do have to practice 20 minutes a day for a while before it becomes the new normal habitual way that you breathe. Some people however find it a struggle to connect to their body and breathing.
 
Once you have understood how to do the buteyko breathing method it would be safe for you to try each of the next techniques, Parasympathetic Breathing and Coherent Heart Rate Variability Breathing. Try them all and find the one that you like the most and then stick with it either on its own or as part of a mindfulness of breathing meditation exercise and do 50 hours of training; good luck :-)
Parasympathetic Breathing
Coherent Heart Rate Variability Breathing
Online Meditation Classes for Mental Health