Week 10: Final Blog

This week I completed an assignment that is designed to provide people with breathing techniques for them to calm down during stressful situations. Here were four of them that I thought were some of the most common: before a meeting, before a sports game or competition, before a test, before sleep. For the first situation, I thought about what needs to occur in the body for someone to be ready to go into a meeting. I hypothesized that heart rate, blood pressure, and sympathetic stress all needed to be lowered which led me to Alternate Nostril Breathing (Nadi Shodhana). This technique is used to do all things stated before and is achieved by breathing in and out of one nostril at a time while the other is closed. Before a competition, the body needs a calming practice that places the heart, lungs, and circulation into a state of coherence, so that the systems of the body are working at peak efficiency. The technique for this situation is Resonant (Coherent) Breathing. It is extremely simple and just requires the participant to breathe slowly, in and out for 5.5 seconds at a time. As was completed in the experiment with the third graders a few weeks ago, box breathing is a breathing technique that will prepare your mind and body for a test or graded assignment. To do this, you must breath in for 4, hold 4, exhale 4, and hold 4, before you repeat the cycle. The final technique which is intended to be used before sleep follows a similar outline to this one: inhale to a count of 4, hold for 4 seconds, exhale 6, hold 2, then repeat. The reason for the differences in the two techniques is that, to go to sleep, one must activate the parasympathetic nervous system more, which is done when someone releases the breath. Feel free to use these techniques, and please let me know what you think.