Press Pause
The power of the breath
When you’re about to give an important presentation, or maybe before a challenging conversation with your boss or a colleague, you may well experience similar symptoms to those we talked about yesterday. When the mind perceives danger, the fight, flight or freeze response can kick in, sending adrenaline rushing through your body, raising your heart rate and getting you ready for action. The trouble is that when you’re giving a presentation or having an important conversation, it’s not that helpful, and it’s much better to be calm rather than being fired up for a fight.
If you find yourself in this sort of a situation, the best thing to do is press pause.
There are several ways you can do this, and there’s a simple 3 step process I discuss on the Stresslessness site that’s very useful when unhelpful thoughts become an issue. One of these steps that can be used on its own to create a sense of calm in those challenging situations, is simple but extremely powerful when used correctly - breathing.
It may sound obvious, but is it something that you’ve actively tried recently? Taking a few deep breaths, and just focusing your attention on the breath can have an immediate impact on your ability to stay calm.
Most of the time we breathe shallowly, taking short breaths throughout the day. In these important situations at work we’ll likely breathe even faster and with shorter breaths, as the fight or flight response gets activated.
A study by Yackle et al, has demonstrated the benefits of deep breathing, by proving there’s a small group of neurons that have the ability to help us stay calm.
Just by taking some conscious breaths you can steady your heart rate and lower your blood pressure and increase your sense of stresslessness.
So if you find yourself in a stressful situation today, whether at work or in your personal life, see if you can notice your heart rate increasing, and then focus on your breathing. Slow, deep breaths. You can do it without people even noticing, and by practicing in lower risk situations, you’ll then be more likely to be able to bring it into play in those high pressure or important moments.
