As we’ve seen, anxiety has a specific activation pattern with a specific purpose: to increase the amount of oxygen in the blood. In this sense, we must understand that it’s impossible to be nervous and relaxed at the same time. Therefore, working on breathing techniques has proven to be one of the most useful for regulating anxiety. If I manage to breathe slowly, I’ll regulate the amount of oxygen in my blood (among other things), and consequently, my anxiety will generally decrease.
The most useful technique is the four-part breath, which, as its name suggests, consists of four distinct phases. For adolescents and adults, it would be ideal to practice this technique for 4 or 5 minutes a day, in a comfortable and distraction-free place, preferably with your eyes closed. The phases of the technique are:
- Inhalation: Take a slow breath in through your nose. The idea is to fill your lungs gradually with air, from your stomach to your chest*, as slowly as possible, until you are completely full.
- Pause: Once your lungs are full of air, pause for 3 seconds.
- Exhalation: After the pause, release the air very gradually, as slowly as possible, through your mouth, until you are completely empty.
- Pause: Once you have released all the air, pause for 3 seconds before returning to the inhalation phase.
*Stomach and lung breathing: When inhaling, it would be advisable to fill the lower part of the lungs first (stomach breathing) and then continue to the upper part (lung breathing). This part of the exercise can be more complex. To better understand how to do it, here’s a video explaining how it works. In practice, it’s useful to do the hand exercise they propose in the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qGaIZvDmBpo
Breathing in Children
This same exercise can be used in a simplified way with children. To do this, we remove phases 2 and 4 (we remove the pauses) and we also remove the stomach-to-chest breathing transition. It’s also useful to present it as an imaginative game. You can use whatever you consider useful. Personally, I usually use two specific methods:
Blowing out the candle
The child is asked to imagine they have a lit candle in front of them, and they have to blow on it, but without putting it out. The flame has to move, but it can’t go out. At this point, I usually ask the child to remember their last birthday cake and how they blew the candles out strongly so they would go out. After they remember, I tell them that the exercise here is the opposite, that the flame moves but doesn’t go out. Once we make sure they’ve understood, we ask them to close their eyes and imagine the candle, and after that, to breathe in very slowly through their nose and try to release it as slowly as possible through their mouth, so that the flame doesn’t go out. With children, we can do between 3 and 5 repetitions.
Moving the balloon
This exercise is similar to the previous one. This time, the child is asked to imagine a balloon of a certain colour in front of them; their goal is to blow on it so that it moves away very slowly. After this, we alternate the colour of the balloons (the first green, the second yellow, etc.). It’s important to emphasise that the balloon has to move away very slowly.
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