When it comes to transforming your life, the answer is as simple as breathing. It’s amazing what intentional breathing can do. Breathwork can help you chase your goals and become the best version of yourself, all while improving your mental and physical health.
Breathwork holds the key to living the life you’ve always dreamed of. With the ability to control your breath, you can truly change your life.
With yoga and meditation becoming mainstream ways to manage stress or get in shape, we often overlook a very important element of these therapies— breathwork.
Like these therapies, breathwork is not a new fad. It has been practiced by certain cultures for centuries. Today, the rest of the world is learning the amazing benefits of adding breathwork sessions to their day. Current meditation and yoga teachers can also become certified breathwork facilitators to improve their practice and increase their client base.
What is breathwork?
Breathwork is the purposeful manipulation of a natural breathing pattern in an attempt to influence your body’s mind or body positively.
Have you ever noticed how someone is always telling you to relax and breathe in stressful situations? That’s due to the power that breathing holds over your mind and body.
You can learn to control your breath and better yourself mentally and physically. Breathwork offers life-changing benefits, including:
- Reduced inflammation
- Lowered blood pressure
- Increased stamina
- Increased confidence and self-esteem
- Balanced nervous system
- Helps the body use oxygen more efficiently
- Increases the body’s tolerance to carbon dioxide
- Aids in stress management
- Efficiently process and release emotions
- Enter deeper states of meditation
As you can see, the benefits of breathwork cover various health conditions that prevent you from being your best self. Adding even five minutes of breathwork exercises to your day can help set you on the journey to a better life.
Four transformational benefits of breathwork you should know
1. Improves physical health
While it may seem like a mental ailment, stress also plays a huge role in our physical health. Stress is thought to contribute to a wide range of problems, including poor sleep quality, pains, headaches, irritability, increased heart rates and high blood pressure.
Breathwork can lower the levels of stress hormone cortisol, research shows, decreasing the likelihood of suffering from stress-related illnesses.
In addition to stress, breathwork can also help increase endurance and stamina. Like all exercises, the more you use them, the stronger those muscles become. Breathwork utilises core muscles, diaphragm and lungs. During your sessions, these muscles become stronger and healthier, increasing your stamina and endurance along the way.
2. Improves mental health
Mental health problems like stress, anxiety, and depression can be life-altering. Living with these disorders can be difficult, and reaching out for help or managing the symptoms can feel isolating and scary.
Depression can make an individual feel hopeless, sad or lethargic. It can impact every facet of life, including your mental health. With changes in appetite, muscle aches and inability to do basic hygiene practices like showering or teeth brushing, it can feel like you’ll never feel okay again.
A study shows that yogic breathing helps ease severe depression, even in individuals who did not respond to antidepressant medications.
3. Supports the body-mind connection
Many people use breathwork to disconnect from the world and turn their attention inwards. In a society that demands so much from us, it can be life-changing to slow down and really breathe. You can easily achieve deeper meditative states using guided breathwork sessions than if you were to do it alone.
Regular breathwork sessions help you calm your nervous system. Once your nervous system isn’t in fight or flight mode, you can begin to look at the world around you differently. How you process the world around you plays a huge role in your daily life.
Having lowered anxieties and fears allows you to process your emotions better. This can lead to more confidence and boost self-esteem. It may also help ease symptoms of other mental illnesses.
4. Awakens the soul’s purpose
Learning to control your breath is the first step in becoming your best self. With this skill, you determine how to more appropriately manage your emotions, increase your stamina and endurance, reduce stress and lower cortisol, and fight off any mental ailments.
Sitting in deep meditation and practising breathwork gives you a clear mind and a calm body, allowing you to truly focus on yourself and melt away the world around you. Once the clutter and noise of society disappear, you can listen to your true self.
Transform your life
Now you know how simple it is to take control of your life, manage your mental and physical conditions, improve your body-mind connection, and awaken your soul’s purpose.
Whether you find an in-person studio or try online breathwork sessions, you are on the way to better health. Now, find a comfortable place to sit and prepare to breathe your way to your best self.
Sara Sabharwal is a writer, poetess, wife, and mother. She has authored five books and has been featured in numerous literary publications and anthologies. While poetry is her passion, she also has a deep wanderlust and spends her free time traveling the world and writing about it.
