Does My Breathing Make My Belly Look Fat?

Embarrassing to admit but this thought has crossed my mind. It has even stopped me from breathing properly at times. This feels incredibly shallow to admit … but I know I’m in good company. Especially among women.

We start off breathing correctly as babies. Watch a baby sleeping sometime and you’ll see what I mean. The belly rises on the inhale and lowers on the exhale, over and over.

As we grow up, however, we for some reason get out of that pattern and our breathing changes to mainly chest breathing. With chest breathing, our chests expand and our shoulders rise as we inhale and the opposite happens when we exhale.

Our bellies? Well, they stay as sucked in as possible. Totally different than when we were little.

The end result? Two totally different types of breathing with two totally different physiological experiences. Important to note that both types do keep us alive. However, if we were to keep breathing as we did when we were babies we’d be so much healthier than we are today. Physically, mentally and emotionally. To highlight my point here’s what Dr. Andrew Weil says on the topic.

“If I had to limit my advice on healthier living to just one tip,” says Dr. Andrew Weil, “it would be simply to learn how to breathe correctly.”

What thuh?!? Yes, you read that right. Breathing correctly would be the single most pivotal improvement, the biggest domino effect, the greatest…well you get my point.

Why do we change our breathing from those glory days of belly-breathing babyhood? Do we consciously choose looks over health? It’s tempting to blame the patriarchy or curse the beauty industry but that doesn’t help us. So, let’s just chalk it up to bad posture, sitting too much and ignorance. Because it doesn’t really matter why we are breathing this way.

What does matter is that when we know better we do better.

Bottom line one of the biggest reasons to switch to belly breaths is to give our nervous systems a break. When we breathe from what feels like lower down in our bellies, it informs our parasympathetic nervous system that we are safe and can relax. Chest breathing, because it typically is shorter and shallower, constantly signals to our nervous system that we are ready to respond to whatever fire needs to be put out. Additionally, with shorter shallower chest breaths we aren’t getting the full O2 inhalation and pushing out all the CO2 that our bodies need to thrive.

Mentally, this chest breathing pattern has the additional effect of contributing to anxious and worried thoughts, feeling edgy and just all around unsettled. Weird that our breath can directly impact our thoughts but it can!

Check your breathing right now. Are you a chest breather?

If the answer is yes, there is good news. Changing your breathing pattern is totally within your power and probably the easiest way to improve your health and mental wellbeing!

Try this. Every time you walk through a door, use that as a cue to shift your breathing to your belly. Once you have this down, see if you can find other cues to help you make this breathing shift. Over time you’ll find you are doing this as your new default.

Two of the biggest improvements:

1. Getting in the habit of breathing deep, rhythmic belly breaths can calm you by helping keep your O2 and CO2 in the perfect balance and reduce the times your body thinks there’s a “problem”.

2. It can improve your physical health by counteracting the wear and tear of stress by increasing the times your cortisol can stay in it’s place and take a break.

So, does proper breathing make my stomach look fat? With my mental and physical well-being at stake from improper breathing I have to say…I don’t care!

5 Ways to Counter your Anxiety without Breaking a Sweat

Let me be blunt about this. A real long-term sustainable anxiety change requires work on our thoughts. A strategic, focused and repetitive approach to wrangling up, challenging and putting problem thoughts out to pasture has to be part of a solid anxiety treatment plan. I don’t want to pretend this isn’t critical. What I do want to convey, however, is that there are many things we can do to support our ability to address our thoughts and overcome our anxiety. Best of all, many of you will agree, they don’t require even breaking a sweat! 

Here are 5 ways we can set up our successful anxiety counterattack:

1. Belly breathe more often. Breathing is a necessity of life that usually occurs without much thought. When you breathe in air, blood cells receive oxygen and release carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide is a waste product that is carried back through your body and exhaled. Improper breathing can upset the oxygen and carbon dioxide exchange and contribute to anxiety, panic attacks, fatigue and other physical and emotional disturbances. Most people often get into the habit of chest breathing, that is breathing in a way that expands the chest and shoulders. Typically, this is a shallow and rapid habit of breathing. In order to make sure we are fully oxygenating our bodies, properly expelling carbon dioxide and soothing our central nervous system, we need to belly breathe more. To do this, inhale slowly and deeply through your nose. Keep your shoulders relaxed. Your abdomen should expand, and your chest should rise very little. Exhale slowly through your nose or mouth as your belly pulls back in toward your spine. Repeat this as often as you think to do so. With time and practice, you’ll slowly shift from your autopilot chest breathing to this healthier way of belly breathing. 

2. Apply pressure on your wrist. Acupressure is an ancient Chinese healing method. It involves putting pressure with your fingers or the hand on certain points of your body to unblock the flow of Qi and release tension to restore inner harmony. I think we all agree, when we’re feeling anxiety we are definitely not experiencing inner harmony! The great thing about acupressure is that it is something you can do on your own so subtly that you can use this technique wherever you are when anxiety strikes. This is just one of many acupressure points to help with anxiety. Apply pressure with your thumb at the point where your wrist forms a crease with your hand. Press on the pinky side of your wrist. Hold the acupressure point for about 2 minutes, applying a generous amount of pressure. 

3. Cut down on caffeine. Okay, full disclosure, I’m writing this sipping on a coffee… But, taking anxiety and other things into account, I’ve begrudgingly figured out my caffeine limit and this coffee is my last one of the day. I’m what one might call a practical health nut. That is, I need pretty convincing and good reasons to limit things I like. Caffeine, and for me that almost entirely means coffee, definitely falls into that category. As a powerful stimulant, caffeine revs up our system and often creates physiological effects similar to anxiety: agitation, restlessness, twitching, dizziness, increased heart rate to name a few. So in order to help your anxiety without lifting a finger, simply acknowledge that caffeine may be increasing your anxiety and experiment with cutting back. 

4. Sing a song (inside your head). I stumbled into this one by accident when I was a kid visiting my cousins. My cousin Katie had a stuffed animal that sang the song “I Whistle a Happy Tune”. For some reason, I loved that song, committed it to memory and sang it (inside my head of course) whenever I felt afraid. It worked like a charm! I expanded that experience from fear of the boogeyman and continue to use that song to disrupt my looping, worrisome thoughts or to switch tracks when I catch myself overanalyzing things I just said to someone. As a little aside, it was almost 40 years later that I found out was from the popular 1950’s musical King and I. 

5. Reach out and make a social connection. One solid way to help us with mental wellbeing that ranks as high as good sleep and eating our veggies is to make and maintain connections with friends and family. Well, assuming family doesn’t totally stress you out. We are social beings and the need for a connection to others is built into our DNA. Unfortunately, and I know from experience, makes social anxiety particularly difficult. But taking time out of your busy day to catch up with a friend, join a book club and prioritize their meetings, or talk to the cashier as you’re checking out will help you with your anxiety. And totally worth turning these little connections into a routine or habit.

These 5 things aren’t the ‘silver bullet’ type of anxiety help. But they are totally in the ‘it takes a village’ type of help.

It’s easy to underestimate or blanketly dismiss this type of help without even trying. For some counterintuitive reason we tend to overvalue big, hard to do things and brush off easier things as not being worth it. If you feel like bucking the system, give these a try! You’ll be pleasantly surprised! 

5 Ways to Strengthen Communication with Your Vagus Nerve for the New, Calmer You!

Want to be able to cut to the front of the line and immediately get the attention of your calming rock star? Want a VIP pass with your nervous system for those times you are about to lose it? It is yours for the taking and it comes in the form of your vagus nerve.

Your vagus nerve is responsible for your ‘rest and digest’ functions of your nervous system (aka calming down). To some degree, you are genetically predisposed to varying levels of vagal tone (receptivity), but this still doesn’t mean that you can’t change it.

Here are 5 ways to increase the receptivity or tone the vagus nerve:

1. Slow, rhythmic, diaphragmatic breathing. Breathing from your diaphragm (you can think of it like breathing from your belly), rather than shallowly from the top of the lungs stimulates and tones the vagus nerve. Make a plan to do this slow, rhythmic belly breathing a few times a day for a couple minutes each. Celebrate! It’s not like we need to run miles each day. Deep, slow breathing is totally doable!

2. Humming and Speaking. Since the vagus nerve is connected to the vocal cords, humming mechanically or talking stimulates it. You can hum a song, talk with your co-worker, or even better repeat the sound ‘OM.’

3. Washing your face with cold water. The mechanism here is not known, but cold water on your face stimulates the vagus nerve. This is totally NOT what you feel like doing when you are getting that ‘ramping up’ anxiety feeling, but next time you do give this a try. I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised.

4. Meditation. Loving kindness meditation promotes feelings of goodwill towards yourself and others. A 2010 study by Barbara Fredrickson and Bethany Kik found that increasing positive emotions led to increased social closeness and an improvement in vagal tone. Again, the mechanics aren’t quite known but this one is too good and easy to pass up.

5. Balancing the gut microbiome. The presence of healthy bacteria in the gut creates a positive feedback loop through the vagus nerve, increasing its tone. Yes, your gut bacteria are finally getting their fifteen minutes of fame! It may seem like the trendy health topic of the day but more and more research is backing up the mind-body connection theory that has been around for a long time.

Toning your vagus nerve sounds funny, I know. Sorta kinky even. However, the vagus nerve holds one of the most easily accessed keys to creating the calmer new you in 2018. What have you got to lose?

I’d love to hear how they work for you!