Basic Relaxation Techniques - How to do Abdominal Breathing

This is Allison Abizaid with Health Forward Wellness Center, and what we are going to be doing right now with Katie (ph) is we are going to demonstrate how to do some abdominal breathing. The first thing that I would like Katie (ph) to demonstrate is just how a person would just normally breathe. So, if you would just close your eyes, Katie (ph), and just breathe normally, chances are you are going to be breathing from your chest, and you are just going to breathe in, and you are going to breathe out. Now, if you can notice, Katie (ph) is breathing from her chest and this creates shallow breathe, shallow breathing and it becomes very difficult over a period of time for the body to complete relax. So, we want to do is something different, we want to try to encourage Katie (ph), instead of breathing from her chest, which is up here, is we want to bring it down to the stomach and bring it in through the abdominal muscle. So, think about the diaphragm. So, this is also considered diaphragmatic breathing, can also be abdominal breathing. I am placing my hand on her stomach, so you can see her stomach coming up and down, and I want to ask Katie (ph) to just breathe in for five seconds. So, breathe in, if you can take a breath in, and watch the stomach go up, good and breathe out and watch the stomach go down, and as the stomach goes down, you want to see the belly button just kind of pull itself down towards the small of back. Lets try that again, breathing in, nice and full, and breathing out, good. Now, most of us when we are just getting started with this, we will find that we have a tendency to breathe quickly, so can you do that for a minute going up and down quickly. And when you are breathing in quickly, what's happening is as a lot of carbon dioxide is going into the body, and you are going to have a sense of getting lightheaded, so you want to slow down. So, I am going to ask you to stop, because I want you to pass out on me here. So, lets just go ahead back to the abdominal breathing, take a deep breath in, nice and slow and then you can even go a little bit slower on me here, nice and slow, and breathe out, good. And again, slowly breathe in, and breathe out. This takes a little bit of practice to do, but if you could plan on doing this starting off with maybe five or ten minutes everyday, you will eventually get up to maybe 20 or 30 minutes and you will get pretty good at that. You will find that your body will start changing, it will start relaxing on you. The anxiety and the stress will start going down and you will start feeling a sense of relaxation.