Breathe Your Stress Away
Stress increases heart and breathing rates as well as increases the bodies demand for oxygen. Rapid shallow breathing decreases the efficiency of oxygen delivery to your brain, muscles and the rest of your body and inhibits the clearing of carbon dioxide (a metabolic waste product) from the body. Lack of oxygen causes increased anxiety, poor mental concentration and inhibits growth and repair of tissue. Learning to control breathing is one of the best ways to control stress and to assure your cells are receiving adequate amounts of life giving oxygen while ridding the body of toxic waste products. Controlled breathing is in itself an easy and time efficient relaxation and is the prerequisite to other effective relaxation techniques such as meditation, guided imagery, and progressive relaxation to name just a few.