Hello and welcome to Mental Health with Abbey.
My name is Abbey and I'm a licensed professional counselor and a certified yoga instructor.
Today I'll be guiding you through a quick breathing exercise called the physiological sigh.
This practice is a great tool for relieving stress and anxiety.
I find that it can be very helpful in the moment when you are feeling anxious or stressed or maybe having some insomnia,
Trouble sleeping.
There was also a recent study that showed that practicing this exercise for five minutes a day can lead to a range of mental health benefits.
So whether you'd like to use this exercise as a preventative tool to help improve your mental health or whether you'd like to use it as something to do in the moment when you're feeling anxious,
This is a great item to have in your mental health toolbox.
So with all of that being said,
Let's go ahead and get started.
I invite you to find a comfortable position,
Whatever that looks like for you right now.
That could be seated,
Could be lying down.
Make yourself comfortable.
Ask yourself whether you'd like to keep your eyes open today or whether you'd prefer to have them closed.
And if it's comfortable for you,
Maybe place one hand near your belly button and one hand on your chest,
Even just for the first couple of breaths today.
Now before we introduce the physiological sigh,
I'd like to start with just a couple of normal diaphragmatic breaths.
Diaphragmatic meaning breathing deep in your belly from the diaphragm area.
And one way to know if you're breathing from your diaphragm is to see if you feel that bottom hand,
The hand you've placed around your belly,
Move when you inhale.
You want to feel like your breath is pushing that hand outward and you want to feel the air moving from that belly area all the way up through your ribcage and into your chest,
Playing around with that.
And when you exhale,
We want our exhales to be long.
We want to release all of the air out of our lungs.
Now once you've gotten a couple of diaphragmatic breaths in,
We want to introduce the physiological sigh.
And I want you to keep this idea of deep belly breathing in mind.
Now to start the physiological sigh,
We're going to take a nice deep breath through our nose.
So mouth is closed.
And once you feel like you've taken in almost all of the air you possibly could with that first inhale,
We're going to sniff a little bit of air in through our nose.
So it sounds like this.
Inhale through the nose,
Sniff at the top,
And then we're going to sigh all of our air out through an open mouth.
So again it sounds like this.
Go ahead and join me.
Now I do want to mention that sometimes people might find that when they focus on their breath,
They feel a little bit anxious.
They might start to notice some tightness in their chest or might feel like it's hard to take a deep breath.
And if that's you today,
That's okay.
It's very common.
But something you might want to play around with to see if it helps is physically doing something to open and stretch the muscles in your chest.
Right,
So if our chest feels tight,
We want to open those muscles.
And so you can think about sending your arms out to either side like a T position when you inhale,
Finding a nice stretch,
Drawing your shoulder blades together.
Another option might be to place your hands behind your head with your elbows out wide or any other stretching motion that might make it feel a little easier to take in that air.
Just something to play around with if you like.
Let's do a couple more rounds wherever you are.
Let's do one final breath.
And when you're ready,
Go ahead and let go of the exercise.
Return your breath to normal.
Maybe wiggle your fingers and your toes.
Maybe take a stretch.
Move your head side to side.
Whatever you'd like to do to wake your body back up.
And just take a second to notice how you feel now compared to how you felt when you started.
There's no need for judgment,
But just noticing.
Did anything change?
And perhaps if you noticed anything interesting,
You might even wish to jot your thoughts down in a journal.
Or if you feel ready to move on,
Simply take a moment now to celebrate the fact that you did something kind for your mind and your body today.
With that being said,
I hope you have a nice rest of your day,
And I hope you enjoyed this practice.
