A Guide to Mindful Breathing

Breathing is our natural state of being. Breathing in and out happens involuntarily and effortlessly. But did you know that mindful breathing is a more conscious and powerful type of breathing that can give amazing health benefits?

On average human beings take up to 20,000 breaths per day. That’s a lot of breaths and we aren’t even aware of it most of the time. When you’re unaware and going through your daily activities, your body goes through a shallow breathing process, which is normal.

Obviously, you can’t and do not need to always be aware of your breathing. Rather, this article is about how you can start practicing mindful breathing to start understanding the process of breathing more and gain multiple health benefits such as reduced anxiety, ability to deal with stress better, improved awareness, and an overall improvement in the quality of your life.

These benefits may sound subtle but once you start experiencing the benefits, you’ll start to understand how much of a change you see in your life and how significant this change is.

What is Mindful Breathing?

Mindful breathing is a breathing technique that involves focused deep breathing while keeping complete awareness of the in and out motion of air through your nose. 

It is a multi-dimensional breathing technique that involves maintaining high levels of awareness of both the breath and the physical sensations that you notice in different parts of your body.

If you are able to keep taking deep long breaths with a certain level of awareness and practice it for long enough, you will be able to achieve different desired mental states such as inner peace, deep relaxation, meditation, and mindfulness. 

It is a powerful breathing technique that is a core practice of mindfulness training and offers multiple health benefits to practitioners. 

How to practice Mindful Breathing?

To start your practice, all you need is a quiet space where you will not be interrupted and comfortable seating. You can choose to sit on a chair, or you can sit down cross legged like you would for a meditation practice. 

What’s important is that you keep your back and neck straight and be comfortable so that your body does not become an inconvenience to your practice. 

When you have seated down and become comfortable, keep your palms above your knees or a little bit over the thigh area with either palm open facing upwards, or facing downwards. Close your eyes and start taking long deep breaths. 

Mindful breathing is all about continuous breathing while maintaining a certain level of awareness of it. You may find it extremely difficult in the beginning and find yourself distracted thinking about the past or future very often. Take comfort in knowing that this is very normal, sometimes even to very experienced mindful breathing practitioners. 

Once you’ve established the seating position and start taking deep long breaths, below are some techniques you can focus on to make sure you’re making progress and starting to reap those good benefits.

1. Keep a count on your breath: 

To minimize the amount of times you get distracted, it’s a great practice to keep a mental count of your breath. A good amount is 10 breaths. Once you reach 10, you can start again from 1. And a lot of the time, you’ll find yourself getting distracted even before you reach the 10 count. When this happens, don’t worry. Just start again from 1 and keep going.

2. Observe the physical sensations:

When you’re practicing mindful breathing, you will start to notice that there are so many different sensations occurring in different parts of your body. You may notice little discomfort on your legs, sometimes on your neck or back or any part of your body really. When this happens, acknowledge it, and try to dive deeper into that feeling. Is it uncomfortable, strange or just weird? It doesn’t matter, as long as you aren’t in pain, try to remain calm with it and focus on your breath at the same time. 

Why you should practice Mindful Breathing

Mindful breathing is a powerful breathing technique taught by some of the best mindfulness and meditation teachers in the world. By practicing mindful breathing, a practitioner can gain numerous benefits including mental, physical and spiritual.

Below are some great reasons you should start a mindful breathing practice today.

1. Reduces Stress and Anxiety

Research has proven that regular practice of mindful breathing can help practitioners reduce stress and anxiety. By taking in slow and deep breaths, you can activate a response that can help reduce stress hormones allowing you to calm your nerves and feel safe, centered and balanced. 

2. Promotes Relaxation and Inner peace

Another immediate benefit you can gain from practicing mindful breathing is being able to relax and let go of unnecessary worrying. When we move through our busy lives, so many stressors can tick off at any given time. 

By regular mindful breathing, you learn to relax more and see things clearly allowing you to read situations better resulting in a more appropriate response.

3. Improves Focus and Productivity

Mindful breathing has also been linked to improved focus and productivity. By practicing mindful breathing, you develop mindfulness of the present moment. This minimizes the time spent dwelling in the past or anxieties of the future, allowing you to be present with what’s in front of you and give your full focus and attention to it. 

Improved focus and attention means you get more high-quality work done. 

4. Increases Awareness

It’s not difficult to understand why mindful breathing leads to increased awareness of the present moment. Through regular practice of mindful breathing, you train your mind to remain in the present moment. Whenever you see yourself getting distracted, mindful breathing guides you to bring your focus back to the present moment. 

This repetitive pattern trains your mind over time to be more aware of the present moment and things happening around you resulting in a more vibrant and fulfilling life experience.

5. Improve Sleep

Another amazing benefit of mindful breathing that we should all be enjoying is good quality deep sleep. In today’s profit-driven world, it’s too easy to feel stressed, overwhelmed, and burned out that it starts affecting one’s sleep. 

Poor sleep can lead to so many different issues that make you weak, and sick and have a negative impact on the quality of your life. By practicing regular mindful breathing, you can regulate your sleep allowing you to fall asleep more easily and wake up feeling well rested and ready to achieve amazing results in your work and personal life.

So there it is, all the amazing reasons why you should start practicing mindful breathing today and start seeing amazing results in your life. If you are a regular practitioner of mindful breathing, or would like to get started, I would love to hear your experiences in the comments below and connect on a more personal level.