If you suffer from anxiety, you may know some of the deleterious effects it can have on your life. All-consuming worry, racing thoughts, insomnia, panic attacks, and an inability to enjoy the present moment just skim the surface of some of the symptoms that many people experience due to anxiety. Moreover, real anxiety usually isn’t something you can throw off like an old coat. Most people who suffer from anxiety can’t just choose to not be anxious, or choose not to have racing thoughts, or choose to go to sleep and have a restful night.
Anxiety is an emotional pathology that subsists within the psyche like a disease and has physical talons as well, which influence the state of one’s body. In turn, the body compensates and often exacerbates the anxiety so that people who suffer from the condition become ill, depressed, lack energy, can’t sleep, can’t think straight, and are consumed almost completely by the way they feel, which is often based upon a highly exaggerated version of the negative aspects of their real lives.
In our culture, we tend to turn to medication for every ailment with which we are afflicted, rather than seeking first optimal health and wellness and seeing symptoms as the body’s way of telling us that something needs to be done. Prescriptions for Xanax and other drugs that are meant to treat anxiety have a deadening effect and seem to put people into a state of stasis rather than actually dealing with the root problem at hand.
Traditional yogic practices, as well as mindfulness meditation offer practices meant to alleviate these kinds of symptoms. Increasingly, other scientific and holistic practitioners such as those exemplified by the Breathing Normalization technique offer breathing exercises for anxiety that seem to work very well in having a calming and centering effect. One of the symptoms of anxiety that catches one up in a vicious cycle between bodily and emotional health is the tendency to hyperventilate when suffering episodes of anxiety.
Breathing exercises for anxiety have the advantage of calming the body first by giving each component the right amount of carbon dioxide in order to regulate cellular respiration, optimizing the body’s use of oxygen. Once the body is calm, it usually follows that the mind also becomes centered and relaxed. Using breathing normalization exercises for anxiety can lead to a new awareness of the immediate world around you, and then the reality of your situation, which you may find is not as fearful as your imagination portrayed it. The alleviation of stress and anxiety leads to restful sleep, more energy, and more hope for the present and future.
