018 Solo Round: Breathing for Stress Relief

Today’s solo round is simply about breathing!  I was reminded of how important this was and how often we forget to use our breath in our favor this past weekend. Listen in and share your stories with us in our free Facebook Group at www.TheArtofLivingBig.com Music by bensound. com Transcript: Welcome to The Art of Living big. My name is Betsy Pake entrepreneur, author and personal success coach. This is the show that brings you stories and small ideas to help you live a big life. I hope this once a week podcast will inspire you, motivate you and encourage you to think differently about what could be possible for your life. Thanks for spending some time with me today. Now let’s go live big. Good morning, everybody. Happy Monday. So I am putting together this podcast, it’s Sunday afternoon. And this is just going to be a quick solo round. To start off the week, I am going to be heading to a high school tomorrow. And I’m going to be working with a couple of small groups of kids just to kind of talk through some things with the study skills class. And as I was working on pulling, pulling everything together, I thought, you know, there are some good things in here that that everybody could be reminded of. And in fact, when I was pulling it together, it reminded me of how much I needed to be reminded of it. So I wanted to share with you a little bit of what I’ll be talking with the group tomorrow, in hopes that maybe it helps you or maybe it’s even something that you can talk with your kids about. So I live here in Atlanta, and this past weekend, we were supposed to get a big huge snowstorm, which we didn’t, I was pretty disappointed. I grew up in Vermont, and I don’t really like the cold. No, actually, I hate the cold. But I was excited about a snowstorm because we don’t get snow very often in Atlanta, like really, maybe every like five or six years, we’ll get a snow storm. So I was pretty pumped. And you know, we went to the grocery store, we got snacks, you know, the whole thing. So I was ready to go, my neighbors actually had some people over. And it was really fun. It was sort of felt like a little bit like New Year’s Eve, you know, like sort of anticipating something good happening, but you don’t really know what’s gonna be happening. And we went in, they had a they have a one of those new virtual reality video games, and I am not a big video game player. But it was virtual reality. And I’ve heard a lot about it. And I really wanted to try it. And it was really cool. I put those goggles on man, it was I mean, I was looking all around, I was like, This is the coolest. And even though the video game was scary, and something I would never play, I got really into it because of the whole experience. Now, here’s what I noticed is when I first started, I was a little rusty, you know, I’m not a really good shooter. It’s not something that I do very often. And since I don’t play video games, but as I started, you know, like I wanted to succeed, right, because I want to be a winner. So I started like, really like calming down. And I realized that instinctively, I started taking deeper breaths, really starting to breathe, and slipped like kind of slowing my brain down. So I could almost visually slow the game down. And I started getting to be a really good shot of me like I did really well, I was proud of myself, y’all. So it got me thinking and what I’m going to share tomorrow with the kids and something that might help you is you know, our body, and our brains are so connected. So everything that our body does, it’s because of our brain and our brain because of our body. And when we get stressed, even if it’s something in our head, even if it’s a virtual reality, and not our real reality, when we are stressed or we perceive something as being difficult and hard to handle, we instinctively tense up our stomach. And so what happens when we do that is we don’t breathe in deeply. And when we don’t breathe in deeply, it affects our physiology, and that affects our brain making us more stressed. Alright, so you see the vicious circle there. And I talk with my daughter a lot and we talk about monkey brain. And monkey brain is where your head is, I mean, like you just your thoughts are all over, you know, you’re over here you’re thinking one thought you’re thinking another thought and you can’t focus in and bring it in. And so one thing that’s really great for kids, especially if they experience any anxiety or stress, if they have a big test or something coming up, that’s going to cause them to, to feel to have a different kind of day is just to remind them to use that breath. And so one way they can do it and you can do it is just to put your hand on your stomach. So often when we breathe in, we just breathe into our chest. But if we breathe all the way in and so that our hand moves when our hand is on our belly, and our hand moves out, we know we’ve read all the way down into the bottom of our lungs and our work many times with my daughter on different types of breath. Now this can be something that you do in the in the car, it can be something that you do in the shower, as your Just getting ready for your day. So just think through big deep breath through your nose, and then hold it, and then push it out through your mouth. So there’s different patterns. But holding that breath actually helps with some of your, like toxic evacuation systems sort of within your body. So when you hold it kind of helps that system, cleanse, and then release. So big deep breath in, hold it for a certain amount of time and release. Now there’s different types of breath you can do, you can do like your breathing like you’re smelling a flower is how I describe it to my daughter. So like you’d be smelling a flower through your nose. Another way is like if you were kind of a bunny, bunny breaths, I call it so. And then. So breathe in quick breaths, hold for a second, and then release. And so there’s different ways you can work with your breath to see what is the most calming. But you’ll find when you start getting that oxygen in, when you start getting regular breathing patterns that are holding your breath, like we do so often, when we’re stressed, will really help to give you clarity, help calm you and help you feel better throughout your day. So I hope that quick little tip for are still around today was helpful to you. I hope you guys have a great Monday. I’m looking forward to hearing everybody inside the free Facebook group. And you can find that at SS lB community.com that stands for start small. Live big community.com and we’ll see you on Wednesday for the next episode. Thanks for spending some time with us today. Remember to jump in on that online community at SS lB community.com. And, as always, here’s a little message from my husband. That’s it.