Change the Way You React to Stress: Step 1: A Better Way to Breathe

Step 1: A Better Way to Breathe The reality is that you can't completely eliminate stress from your life -- nor would you want to.

Boredom can be just as stressful in its own way as racing to mail your taxes at 11:50 p.m. on April 15. But you can change the way you react to stress. And that's what counts. When researchers look more closely at the stress-heart disease connection, they find it isn't the stressor itself that's responsible for the negative health effects, Dr. Suarez says, but how much emotion that stressor arouses.

As babies we instinctively know how to breathe properly. But as adults we tend to forget. Babies breathe with their whole bodies, their stomachs puffing out every time they breathe in and collapsing when they breathe out. Now check your own breathing. Place one hand on your chest and the other on your stomach, then take a normal breath. Which hand moved more? If you're like most people, neither moved much, but the hand on your chest probably moved a bit more. That's the habit of shallow breathing that most of us have acquired -- and it's why we use barely 20 percent of our lungs' capacity when we breathe (even less when we're stressed). It's small wonder that scientists used to think anxiety and hysteria were essentially respiratory problems in nature and that they could be brought about by faulty breathing.

While that may not be true, it is true that you can use deep breathing to counter the fight-or-flight reaction any time you feel stressed -- whether you're seething in a traffic jam, worrying about a deadline, or replaying in your mind that fight with your spouse. "When you're stressed, you may be sitting on the outside but running on the inside," says Robert Fried, Ph.D., director of the Stress and Biofeedback Clinic at the Albert Ellis Institute and a senior professor of psychology at Hunter College, both in New York City. "Deep breathing for stress reduction means you're sitting on the outside and you're reposing on the inside."

Once you've learned to do deep breathing, says Dr. Fried, author of Breathe Well, Be Well, it takes less work to breathe, thus reducing the amount of work your body has to do and sending a message to your brain that you're inactive. After a while your body gets the signal and your heart rate and oxygen consumption slow.

Believe it or not, some people actually pay "breathing coaches" to help them breathe properly. But you don't have to do that. Instead, follow Dr. Fried's breathing exercise below to still your pounding heart, soothe your churning stomach, and send a signal throughout your body to slow down.