Breathe, sigh, and hum your way through post-election anxiety
Add these breath practices to your self-care toolbox.
courtesy of Freepik
I am not a healthcare provider or counselor but a master life coach. If you’re under the care of a physician, have your menstrual period, or have high blood pressure, please avoid these breathing techniques.*
My candidate didn’t win. I felt sad when I woke up this morning knowing the outcome. Although I wanted to stay in bed, I joined my 8 a.m. Zoom support group I joined last month.
Here’s what I’m doing to reduce stress and anxiety.
When you find yourself anxious or freaked out by what you’re seeing and hearing, ask yourself,
Are you imagining a future that hasn’t happened yet?
Are you in a horror movie in your mind that hasn’t happened yet?
If so, return to the present moment. Look around the room and breathe.
Ground yourself.
Send a grounding cord down to the earth's center from the base of your spine.
Send all your fear and worry down the cord.
Next, pull white light back up to your cord and circulate it throughout your body.
*If you don’t feel grounded, or emotions come up, take a little break and come back to it when you’re ready
If you’re stressed, try these fast and simple stress-busting techniques:
Sighing deeply can reduce stress.
“When we sigh, that can signal sadness or frustration,” said Sacha Pfeiffer, NPR columnist. “But in the Journal Cell Reports Medicine, scientists say sighing, which involves exhaling deeply, can reduce stress even more than inhaling deeply. That's because all deep breathing activates part of the nervous system in charge of how the body rests. Heart rate slows, blood pressure drops, and the mind begins to relax,” Pheiffer said.
Humming lowers stress.
Research by Trivedi et al. (2023) highlights that humming significantly lowers stress more effectively than other activity, making it an ideal tool for stress management.
Humming calms your nervous system.
Humming activates your parasympathetic nervous system and reduces the sympathetic stress response.
Humming produces vibrations that stimulate the vagus nerve — part of the parasympathetic nervous system.
The parasympathetic nervous system calms the body and reverses the fight-or-flight response by shifting the body into rest-and-digest mode.
Humming can lower heart rate and increase heart rate variability (HRV), a sign of a healthy autonomic nervous system.
How to practice humming
Incorporating humming into your daily routine is simple and can be done anywhere:
Sit up nice and tall and close your eyes.
Take a full smooth inhalation through your nose.
As you exhale, gently hum, making a "mmmm" sound - pick any tone that works. Start again after your exhale.
Focus on the vibration in your body.
Repeat for a few minutes or five minutes.
*If you get dizzy, stop breathing and sit until you feel better.
Research linked humming to showed:
Improved mood and emotional regulation.
Enhanced body awareness and the ability to separate yourself from thoughts and emotions.
Another way to stimulate your vagus nerve includes breathing into your diaphragm and holding it briefly before slowly exhaling.
I’m going to show you here in our community here how to create a strong inner life so that no matter what happens in the outside world, you’re a warrior!
If you found this useful, please share it because these are quick and easy tools that WORK! Leave me a comment, please.
xo Sherold