Stress is a form of tension in the body that occurs in possible threatening situations. You can feel this tension in your head, mind and body. Your heart can pound, you get a dry throat, a rushed feeling or butterflies in your stomach. This tension is understandable: your body prepares itself for a reaction. If you would like to learn more about this, you can take a look at this article. Understanding and accepting the bodily sensations is a good first step towards reducing tension. But there is one tool that you can easily use to reduce tension: your breathing!

Breathing

Your breathing adapts itself to how you feel during the day. In a stressful situation, you breathe faster and more shallow. In a relaxed situation, your body has a more natural deeper and relaxed breath. This also works the other way around: by training your breathing, you can train how you feel. When you consciously breathe more calm and deep, you will notice that your body reacts on this by relaxing.

Short exercises

There are lots of exercises available that focus on your breathing and relaxation. Below you find a selection of three exercises. Just try which one works best for you and use this when you experience tension of stress during the day.

1. Using a deep abdominal breathing, try to breath synchronised with the rhythm in this video.
2. The Mindfulness app of VGZ contains various short and long breathing exercises. Try which one works for you.
3. Do you have some more time? Try the progressive relaxation exercise of Jacobson, where you tense and relax all your muscle groups one by one. As one of the results, your breathing also relaxes. You can find the exercise here.

Breathing in relaxation, breathing out tension.

NiceDay actions

Try planning a breathing exercise in NiceDay and register what this exercise did to your thoughts, feelings and stress level.