I wonder WHY breathing exercises have always been such a dogshit "coping skill" for me.
It just feels so incredibly wrong to try to force my breaths to be a certain length. Usually, when I've tried them, it gives me the sense that I'm not getting enough air or I'm starting to suffocate, which slowly increases the longer I do the breathing exercises, and it's a very stressful feeling.
Last time I tried doing breathing exercises to relax, my back and torso became slowly more and more and more tense and locked up and tight until my back was very painful. It was like I was clenching down with all the muscles of my body to try to make the breaths start and end when they were supposed to.
It sucks because therapists usually think "breathing exercises" are the gold standard for anxiety coping skills, and I had one therapist tell me that it was impossible that they didn't work because scientifically, you Cannot have a fear/stress response if you're doing breathing exercises. Lady, if it was that easy no one would need therapy. Also I guess I'm some kind of alien or something.
In yoga class, I think I finally "got" some of the benefits of what breathing exercises were supposed to do from paying attention to breathing in different poses and feeling how that biological cycle affects the parts of the body that are holding the pose. That isn't trying to control the breathing though.
Also, it's engaging the whole body: trying to focus on my breathing while not doing anything else I think causes that tension to build in my muscles.
I'm just thinking like. I notice that my breaths become faster and shallower when I'm stressed or afraid, but when I try to force myself to breathe slowly, it's like my body is wrestling against me.
I think it's much easier and less pain- and panic-inducing to do breathing exercises when I'm already calm?
I kept trying to do breathing exercises for years after I knew they didn't work for me. I think I had the idea from therapy that coping skills weren't necessarily supposed to feel good or different or helpful at all, and that I had to keep doing them to "get better" which was something independent from "feeling better."
ive been wondering when id have my bananas arent supposed to be spicy moment but i cannot fucking believe this
what do you mean breathing exercises arent supposed to make you feel out of breath???? what???
also why the fuck did i need to be told the feel better exercise is supposed to make me. feel better? what went wrong here. genuinely asking.
jesus. what a revelation.
Reading everything above, I am having... several questions. Mostly about how exactly breathing techniques are taught, and also how these instructions are interpreted.
There's a few reasons why breath control is considered a gold standard in calming people down: 1) requires no additional tools or outside intervention, 2) a practice prevalent in many cultures and thus something most patients are already familiar with the idea, and 3) a solidly-proven and well-researched quickest method to regain homeostasis.
It is not supposed to make you feel worse, emotionally or physically, because it's acting directly upon your nervous system to change feedback patterns - I'm going to link as reference the following Wikipedia articles for anyone to read at their leisure:
Conscious breathing
Control of ventilation
Hyperventilation syndrome
I have no idea what anyone is telling a patient to make this literally painful for them, but you're supposed to slowly ease into a completely controlled state of breathing - not a single person is able to go from panicking to calm by ordering themselves to do so, regardless of general mental health. If that were the case then it would not be a state of panic.
Secondly, sometimes therapists are far too by the book, and I'm not sure if it's been recommending to purposefully tense your muscles from head to toe before attempting to regulate your breathing. This helps some people but does not help others; try it out and see if it helps you, because then at least you'll know.
The reason why yoga class was helping to make it click is because regulating your breathing is often done in conjunction with regulated movement, i.e. martial arts. (Yoga is a type of martial arts, for clarification.) The entire point of martial arts is to have good command over one's body, so at least a good third of it is learning exactly that before you get to any of the stereotypical martial part of martial arts.
See, this is more of the stuff I've always been told and never understood. I "get" the physiological basis of how it "should" work, but the way it feels in my body is distressing.
okay. pausing in typing this to sit up straight and do the breathing exercise thing for a few cycles so I can vividly describe what happens.
Breathing in deeply feels like I'm filling up my lungs too much, like I'm trying to engage the wall of my abdomen to get my breath to deepen but it feels wrong. I'm trying to feel that expansion in my stomach, but it just does not feel right. Sometimes there's a "locking up" that happens in my shoulders here.
Holding my breath is just against what my body instinctively wants to do. I feel myself tense up trying to stop from breathing out too soon, and sometimes there's this kind of locking-up feeling in my throat and it's like I almost swallow air trying to stop the exhale from happening. I keep accidentally skipping the hold breath part because the urge to exhale is too strong.
Breathing out for longer than my inhale makes me feel like I'm just trying to wheeze air out of my already airless lungs at the tail end of the breath, which also tenses up my body. It feels wrong to try to empty out all the air from my lungs to that extent, and there's kind of a "gulping" feeling or a spasm in my throat. Like I'm trying to actually flatten all the air out of my chest.
Then of course it seems like the problem is I need to exhale more slowly, but trying to control the length of my breaths more consciously makes the muscles of my back, stomach, ribs etc. lock up because I'm trying to stop it from going too fast and my whole body tenses.
Like, at every part it feels like I'm fighting and wrestling with my body against what it wants to do, and it increases more and more because it feels like I'm not even absorbing oxygen from my breath, like my brain has this panicked feeling of "not enough air" and I have this increasing, reflex-like urge to gasp that I also have to fight against.
Jesus Christ, I only did this for like 3 cycles for the purpose of this post and my neck already hurts.
I appreciate you taking the time to duplicate the steps you've been taught, and to describe the effects - please take care of yourself!
You're not required to do a longer exhale, if I'm being really honest - the goal is to extend the length of your inhales (and not even necessarily breathing deeply, just regularly and more smoothly).
Speaking partly from research and partly from personal experience, you can experiment a bit and see what helps you best. Some inhale-hold-exhale patterns that I've seen helping people are 7-5-4 (i.e. seven seconds inhale, five seconds hold, four seconds exhale), or 4-5-4, or similar ratios.
Personally, sometimes doing a long exhale as a start is often more helpful, because it's a good way to trick the brain, but any method works so long as you're slowly increasing how long it takes you to inhale (this is the main part of it). However long that takes you to accomplish, that's how long it takes.
If it hurts to immediately do a large inhale, then uh. Don't do that? You don't have to? If someone's telling you to, they might be more concerned with following their education than looking at the person in front of them.
One thing I would say is that you don't have to correspondingly increase how long you hold your breath with how long it takes you to inhale. A rhythm of, for example, 2-1-3 can be good to start off with, but only if you find it helpful.
Additionally, sometimes squeezing something in time with your breathing will be a better assist than counting - can be your own shirt, or pants, or someone's hand, anything at all that encourages your brain to focus on something other than your breathing (this is one of the reasons why yoga is so popular). Stress balls, fidgeting toys, necklaces, etc, are also helpful but sometimes completely overlooked by people like therapists.
Huh. I thought the exhale being the longest part was supposed to be what was important.
It doesn't hurt to do a large inhale, it just feels weird and wrong. The hurting comes in as I struggle more and more to breathe slowly enough and my body tenses up.
The pattern I learned was 6 seconds inhale, 7 seconds hold, 8 seconds exhale. When I learned about "box breathing" it was 4-4-4. There isn't much consistently. Box breathing feels really bad to me too though.
So, I'm hearing that people count out seconds in a certain pattern. I'm also hearing that you're supposed to slowly lengthen your breaths more and more. If that were the case, the cycles would get longer, right? So counting would only make it confusing? It seems really hard to mentally keep track of 3 different counters as they increment upwards.
I guess I'm overthinking this. But like, how do I know if I'm doing it "correctly" would be my question.
I'm gonna be 100% real with you, breathing exercises straight up do not work for everyone, and with the descriptions you've given about how your body reacts, I doubt that they'll be helpful for you in general.
For context, hi, we're actively studying psychology, specifically because we intend to go into psychiatry. This is very much within our area of expertise.
Breathing exercises are something of an exploit in your autonomic nervous system. You're effectively attempting to forcibly tell your body that things are okay by forcing your breathing to mimic how it would be if things were okay. For a large chunk of people, doing that works just fine, because their autonomic nervous system doesn't FIGHT THEM at every step of the process.
From the descriptions you've given, I would take a guess in saying that your autonomic nervous system is more active/resistant to conscious influence than most people, which means that techniques based on effectively Forging Signals like this just. Will not work for you.
...hmmm
I mean yeah it does feel like my body is struggling against me the entire time...
Okay here's pictures for anyone with this issue (other than op who is getting lots of other useful feedback rn). Below is a chart of how your lung capacity works.
Here's a handy chart with those points circled.
Tidal volume is how much air moves in and out of your lungs when you're just breathing normally at rest. Exact amounts vary, but it's a fraction of your total lung capacity.
Vital capacity is how much air you can possibly move in and out of your lungs as an alive person.
Residual volume is how much is in there if you feel like you've squeezed every possible molecule out. It's never zero, because your lungs are connected to the insides of your ribs, which are notably kind of round. If your lungs are actually empty-empty of air, you've collapsed your lungs and are probably dead.
So the thing is. As a mammal that breaths air. Your body does Not want you to damage your lungs. So breathing in to the top of your vital capacity? Kind of sucks! It can be a nice stretch occasionally but holding your breath there feels Bad. For me it's kind of stressful pressure, and my body wants to breathe it back out.
Similarly, being at minimum capacity Feels Bad! Because your body thinks you're gonna die of oxygen deprivation! So don't go there either!
So if you're doing a breathing exercise, you're not aiming for max and min. You're aiming to slow down hyperventilation breaths (hence the counting and, critically, the holding of your breath) and sort of trick your parasympathetic nervous system into activating. "If we were panicking because of a tiger, we'd be breathing really fast, but we're breathing slow, so we must not be panicking about a tiger, so I can calm down now."
Personally, during a breathing exercise, these are the areas I aim for:
This (theoretically) doesn't make your body More Stressed by adding in mammal animal fear of death.
Personally, I don't find holding my breath to be very necessary or useful other than settling into a meditation rhythm, but I can get that rhythm by reciting poetry too.
If your back and ribs hurt, your intercostal muscles (the ones that move your ribs in and out) are either Hella Tight or Hella Weak. Based on OP's descriptions, I think tight. If they want the exercises to help (which is not necessary and completely optional), I'd recommend practicing breathing like they're about to fall asleep while they are already calm, to see how those parts feel when they're not tense as hell.
But critically, breathing exercises are supposed to help like, moderate distress and dissociation. They only work if there Is No Tiger. If you're actively in a seriously distressing environment or experiencing Fear For Your Life levels of fear, breathing exercises will not help, because your body's gonna be like. "But there is in fact a Fucking Tiger." And if you try to tell it there's no tiger often enough while there is, in fact, a tiger (or other equivalently life-threatening fear, like, say, a medical professional telling you what to do when you have medical phobias), your body is going to stop believing you. You will in fact counter condition yourself and associate breathing exercises with Bad Things, and they will make you feel worse.
Fixing that is a whole bitch and a half. I'd start by taking one gentle breath, slightly larger than usual, like a yawn, and exhale immediately back to somewhere comfortable, when you're 100% safe and comfortable. Yes, that small. Gotta start that small to rebuild your body's trust in you.
But also breathing exercises are optional. If you don't like'em, fuck'em.
This is helpful, but I'm also crying a little bit now because I'm so fucking mad about how I was taught all of these things.
Like, everyone just expected me to know, as if by telepathy or divine enlightenment, that something being uncomfortable and feeling bad meant I wasn't doing it right and I was supposed to adjust it to where I felt comfortable...
Breathing pattern dysfunction is extremely common for people with dysautonomia too. I absolutely have it. Instead of full long breathing exercises (which can make a lot of people with this issue feel way worse, it makes me feel like I'm drowning) my PT recommended I do a few slightly deeper diaphragm / belly breaths, like two or three, several times a day. Ideally while trying to let go of tension on your body (mostly shoulder area for me tbh)
There's also more involved breathing retraining programs for POTS iirc, but I haven't had the energy to look into it enough yet.
Anyway yeah it's ridiculous that basically no one tells you if it feels bad, you're not supposed to keep doing it that way.
