Breathing

Sometimes, I forget to breathe. It happens when I get stressed out, my whole chest tightens up and I start to take short rapid breaths. Which in turn makes me even more stressed out. I try to notice when this is happening. If I notice in time, I will "hit the pause button" and do a breathing exercise. So naturally, this means that I end up doing breathing exercises at least 5 times a day...

Now usually I just do these exercises on my own. They're really simple, they don't take much time, and I don't tell anyone that I'm doing them. It never occurred to me to share my breathing exercises with others. And frankly, the idea of telling other people how to do these exercises really frightened me. I'm not the kind of person that likes to stand up in front of a group of stressed out people and try to get them to calm down. All of that changed on Tuesday night.

Tuesday night was stressful. I was giving a talk about breast cancer prevention to a group of women. But in the half hour before I started my talk, two men at the gym where I work got into a really ugly fight that ended with one of them being taken away in a police car. So I didn't have time to set up properly (on account of being too scared to go into the gym.)

Then of course, having a group of women come together to discuss breast cancer (no one wants to get breast cancer) was really increasing my anxiety level. As the talk got underway, and I discussed risk factors, and ways to prevent breast cancer...I could sense the energy in the room getting more and more stressed out. Because really, who wants to think about the many ways to get cancer...yuck!

So I led everyone in a simple breathing exercise, which I'd never done before. All you do is breathe in slowly for five seconds, then hold your breath for 5-7 seconds, and exhale as slowly as you can (about 7 seconds or more.) Then repeat it a few times.

Well, you wouldn't believe how everyone calmed down after that, myself included. The talk went great, and everyone learned a lot. We shared a healthy meal of cancer preventing foods like salmon, kale, and beets.

Because I'm a nutritionist, I like being able to incorporate mindfulness and nourishing food into everything I do. Tuesday night really brought both of these things together. I hope everyone enjoyed the talk as much I I enjoyed giving it.