“Take a deep breath”. Perhaps you told yourself or others to take a deep breath, when things got stressful. I stated with thus simple sentence but behind, I would like to share an issue intricately linked to women’s wellness. Breathing is one of the most powerful women’s health tips that I can give to you.
We have a natural understanding that breathing in a certain way (slow and deep) can calm swirling thoughts and ground us. Yet, because breathing happens automatically, in the same way our heart beats and our eyes blink, we often take it for granted and don’t pay it much attention.
In fact, breathing correctly and with awareness is your best friend when dealing with stress and unwanted emotions accompany it. Unfortunately, in our modern world, stress is a particularly big issue in women’s health. Fist let’s have a closer look at stress.
Good stress vs. Bad stress
Not all stress is the same and not all bad.
Good stress keeps us feeling alive and excited about life like going after a promotion at work or having a date. Hormones surge and pulse quickens but here is no threat or fear.
Furthermore, good stress, whilst may not be happy or exciting, gives you motivation to work hard and deliver your report to a tight deadline or hit the brakes of your car to avoid a collision. They trigger body’s stress response – powerful hormones being released readying you to either fight the danger or flee it. It is a safety mechanism to protect you from a threat and often referred as ‘fight or flight’ mode. You start to breathe in a stressed breath pattern, experience accelerated heart rate and blood pressure rise. When the stress is temporary, they don’t take heavy toll on your body. Once you deal with the stressor, your body returns to its pre-stress balance.
However, when stress is chronic, it turns into bad stress. And this is where it starts to disproportionately affect women, women’s health and women’s wellness. Think of our complex hormonal balance and systems, which is much more sensitive to stress. Think of responsibility and pressures of balancing family, career, caregiving to elderly parents. As a result of these invisible mental pressures and physical exhaustion, constantly triggered with fight or flight mode, your body physically and automatically reacts as if it is under attack. It remains on alarm, fully geared up for self-protection. But our bodies simply aren’t designed for chronic stress and it takes heavy toll on our physical, mental and emotional health. Your systems start to decline with too much wear and tear, immunity drops with diseases creeping in, sleeping problems arise, your ability to focus and memory start to fail, you experience muscle tension with aches and pain, and feelings of anxiety, stress persists.
Chronic stress is a serios women’s health issue including hormone health and women hormone in reproductive health. If you are going for a women’s health check-up or screening for hormone health in female reproductive health, chronic stress that you may be experiencing should be one of the major topics that you should be discussing with clinician.
Results of such a life tempo and chronic stress can be felt by women at all ages and in so many different ways such as sleep disorders or insomnia, irregularities in monthly cycles, female reproductive health, low mood, forgetfulness or brain fog, bloating, even IBS and in later stages of life, increase in frequency and severity of menopause symptoms.
Touching so many aspects of our lives, I strongly feel chronic stress and its effects should be a non-negotiable part of women’s health check-up or health screenings for women hormone health and in female reproductive health. Stress should be a top priority in women’s wellness and practical women’s health tips and women’s wellness should be in every clinician’s arsenal like breathwork.
Many of us feel chronic stress is inescapable in our busy modern life style. But many scientific research has shown that a lot can be done by simply changing the way the mind and the body react to stress. The answer to activate these two solutions is right under your nose. Breath! Let’s explore how.
Here is one of the women’s health tips and women’s wellness that I can share with you: Breathing can change how you feel
You may have noticed that your breath becomes short and shallow when you are anxious or afraid or it becomes deep when you are happy. It is no coincidence. Emotions and breathing are closely connected. Scientific research has proven that not only the way we feel change our breathing pattern but the way we breathe changes our emotions too.
The amazing thing about breath is, it is the only function in our body that is both autonomic (after all we are breathing right now) but also completely under our control. This means you can consciously take your breath out of its auto-pilot and change its pattern (depth, flow, length etc.) at will. It is not an accident of nature. In fact, this characteristic of breath makes it an immensely powerful tool to self-regulate our physical, mental and emotional state of being.
Cluster of neurons within the brainstem generates different breath patterns such as fast, shallow, deep, gasping, yawning and so on. These neurons also receive real time feedback from our respiratory system (and the breath pattern) and relay it to a part of the brain that then creates a response such as relaxation, anxiety, excitement and so on.
By consciously changing your breathing pattern, you can hack messages relayed from your respiratory system to neuropathways in the brain changing how you respond and feel.
This means that you are not captive to the stressors and don’t need to suffer the toll chronic stress takes on your health. By simply changing your breathing pattern, you can choose to turn stress to calm and restore balance to your state of physical, emotional and mental being instantly! Isn’t this something so simple yet effective women’s health tool or tip.
Let’s do a quick exercise together
You don’t need to dedicate hours to breathing exercises. Even a few minutes of practice can make all the difference. Here is one exercise that I call ‘Reverse Triangle Breathing’ that you can do only 4 minutes and see positive results.
Let’s say that you noticed that your breath is short and shallow, it is a sign that you are under stress as this is the ‘stressed’ pattern of breathing. To restore calm, you need to breathe more deeply and at a slower rate.
There are plenty of ways to breathe more deeply, but the approach I use is the 4-4-4 method:
- Inhale through the nose for a count of our, feel your mid- belly expanding (you can put your one or both hands on the space right under the ribcage). Each approximating one second, count as IN, 2, 3, 4
- Hold breath for a count of four in the same fashion. This time HOLD 2, 3, 4.
- Exhale through pursed lips (imagine blowing out your exhale through a straw) for a count of 4 and in the same fashion. This time OUT, 2, 3, 4.
- Repeat for fifteen rounds or until you feel calm.
