“OK, OK, just take a breath.” If that’s what a friend advises after you panic-share about a major-anxiety-inducing situation — your teen taking his maiden solo voyage behind the wheel, work instability, another high-stakes world crisis dinging your phone every few minutes — it’s probably because they hate seeing you so on edge. But also, your friend is offering an effective means of slowing your spin. “The way you breathe affects anxiety, and anxiety affects how you breathe,” says James Nestor, author of Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art. “It’s a two-way street, and while anxiety isn’t a conscious choice, our breathing is.”
The idea that breathing consciously can help you calm down and make you feel better may not be breaking news (any yogi on the street thousands of years ago would have told you the same thing), but it’s something we all need to be reminded of, especially these days. And, of course, for Western scientists to take it seriously, it needed to be proven. “[The yogis] were right, and there are modern studies that suggest that this is true,” says Savitha Elam-Kootil, M.D., an internist at Kaiser Permanente in Atlanta and an adviser to MyYogaTeacher, an online yoga subscription service.
Indeed, as a review published last year in the journal Scientific Reports found, slow-paced breathing has all sorts of whole-body stress- and anxiety-reducing benefits: It can lower levels of the stress hormone cortisol; help you better modulate your autonomic nervous system (ANS), which controls involuntary reactions such as increased heart rate and sweating as well as digestion and breathing; and increase heart rate variability, an overall marker of good health.
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