Breath First

One of the things I observe about most of my clients is that they don't breathe from their diaphragms.  There is an old Zen aphorism, one breath, one step, which is appropriate here, because often the first step with anxiety is to recognize the biology behind the disorder.

The importance of why poor breathing maintains anxiety states is rooted in what happens when one becomes short of breath.  Our bodies work using negative feedback loops to maintain homeostasis, which is a bit of a mouthful to say, let alone understand.  Put in simple terms a negative feedback loop regulates change by reducing changes, and homeostasis just means stability.

Anxiety effects breathing and people tend to do things to control their breathing that may end up causing positive feedback.  A positive feedback loop builds up a bigger reaction in the body, which may lead to panic attacks.  What drives the feeling of increasing anxiety is a combination of two things; oxygen and adrenaline, which known as epinephrine in the USA.

Therefore when people present with anxiety I will want to understand the persons beliefs about what will happen if anxiety were to run out of control.  This involves me asking uncomfortable questions about what it means and how certain they are that what they believe is true?  I will then ask them to do an experiment with me to test those answers.  Afterwards we will then discuss what actually happened versus what they believed would happen, and that will then become the first behaviour that we will work on changing together.