Adulting with Anxiety: Learning to Breathe Again...
Ironically, as I’ve aged, I’ve had to learn to breathe again. I’m not talking life giving breaths – or I wouldn’t be typing this. I’m talking about the deep breathing that helps calm the body and subdue anxiety.
I became incredibly interested in breathing when I started having panic attacks – again. And I was so tired of them and living in fear of them. They are debilitating. They make me miserable.
I scoured YouTube and listened to people talk about ways they overcame their anxiety attacks, and a common theme was breathing techniques. I narrowed my search, pairing words like “anxiety” and “breathing”. And I stumbled on a TED TALK that really was a game changer for me: “Breathe to Heal." The speaker was Max Strom.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Lb5L-VEm34
Max Strom...to begin with, his voice is so soothing. He could have told me my toes were falling off, and I would have smiled and known everything was going to be okay. But about 14 minutes into the video (actually a little before), he shares a breathing technique that helped me endure and overcome anxiety attacks. I won’t go into the details of his technique, because you can watch the video and hear him explain it in a beautiful way that I could never type out. What really caught my attention was his assurance that the technique forced your body to calm down. There was no positive thinking involved, no special yoga pose, no fancy tools. Just me and my body doing something very natural. I grabbed hold of this like a life raft. And I clung.
And it worked.
It was not an instant solution. During my next anxiety attack, I was still very uncomfortable for a while. But I continued the deep breathing and counting my inhales and exhales, and slowly, amazingly, my body was forced to calm down (just as Max had said), and the panic attack subsided. For me, this experience was life changing.
I’ve continued doing deep breathing, and it’s absolutely not a cure all, but it’s a tool in my toolbox that I can pull out when needed. And it’s an effective tool. I can’t guarantee his breathing method will work for you, but I want to share my experience, because it might work for you, and because I want to give you hope, just like Max Strom did for me. I still sort of shake my head in disbelief that the answer was with me all along. I could be corny and cliché and even say, “right under my nose”, and it would be true.
