Balancing Your Emotions with Your Breath

by Nina

Close-Up of the Falls by Melina Meza

As I wrote in Your Breath: The Key to Your Nervous System, while you cannot tell your nervous system directly to slow your heart beat, digest your food more quickly or to start relaxing right this minute, you can control your breath. And because your heart rate tends to speed up on your inhalation and your heart rate tends to slow on your exhalation, this enables you to consciously access your nervous system. By intentionally taking in more air (either by speeding up your breath or by lengthening your inhalation) you can stimulate your nervous system. And by taking in less air (by slowing your breath or lengthening your exhalation), you can calm yourself down.

Last week, I wrote about emotional counter-poses that you can use to balance your emotions. You can use various yogic breath practices in the same way. You can use breath practices when nothing serious is wrong but you’re just feeling slightly hyper (see anxiety or stress) or slightly down (see clinical depression). And you can also use them as a supplement to other treatments if you are suffering from anxiety, agitated depression, clinical depression or chronic stress.

(Note that yogic breath practices have evolved over thousands of years as yogis experimented on themselves and passed on discoveries their students. And while some schools of yoga teach yogic breath practices (pranayama) to beginners, the type of yoga that I’m trained in, Iyengar style, considers breath practices to be so powerful that pranayama is introduced very gradually. So if you start experimenting with breath practices to balance your emotional condition, do take it easy.)

Anxiety and agitated depression. Because anxiety and agitated depression—which is anxiety based—are so often related to an overactive sympathetic nervous system, for these two conditions it’s best to focus on your exhalation. You can simply work on exhaling completely or lengthen your exhalation a beat or two (by pausing after your exhalation is complete). Or, you can try a more formal practice that focuses on lengthening the exhalation, such as Viloma with interrupted exhalation, where you actually pause twice during your exhalation and once at the end. This is the practice that Iyengar himself recommends in Light on Life in his “Asanas for Emotional Stability” practice.

If manipulating your exhalation causes you to feel any agitation whatsoever, stop the practice. In addition, practices that lengthen your inhalation or even that bring your awareness to the inhalation (which can cause you to unintentionally lengthen or deepen your inhalation) may aggravate your condition, so you may want to avoid them.

If you’ve noticed that you are a chest breather—a type of breathing that seems to be associated with anxiety—and it doesn’t make you feel more anxious to work with your inhalation as well as your exhalation, you could practice abdominal breathing. In abdominal breathing, you focus on slowly inhaling into and exhaling from your belly rather than your chest, as you intentionally keep your abdominal area relaxed. You could lie on your back, and place a block or other light weight, such as a 1 pound bag of rice, on your belly to bring awareness to your abdomen, and keep your abdomen relaxed as you slowly inhale and exhale. Or, if lying on your back makes you anxious, you could lie in Crocodile pose (on your belly with your arms out to the sides, elbows bent, and forehead resting on stacked hands) so you can feel your abdomen moving toward and away from the floor as you slowly inhale and exhale.

You can also use any of these techniques if you're just feeling mildly hyper and want to calm down.

Clinical depression. For clinical depression, which tends to make people feel heavy and lifeless, focusing on your inhalation or breathing more quickly can stimulate your nervous system and bring you out of your lethargy. This is one reason why an active vinyasa practice, such as the Ashtanga series or Sun Salutations, can be helpful to those with clinical depression because when you move with your breath, you tend to breathe more quickly and take in more oxygen. So for you, it may be helpful to focus on your inhalation. You can simply work with inhaling more completely or lengthen your inhalation by holding it for a beat or two. Or, you can try a more formal practice that focuses on lengthening the inhalation, such as Viloma with interrupted inhalation, where you actually pause twice during your inhalation and once after. In Yoga As Medicine, Timothy McCall recommends Ujjayi breathing, which tends to lengthen both the inhalation and exhalation, as well as the version of Viloma with interrupted inhalation

Some people who are depressed tend to have a slumped posture, with a collapsed chest, so focusing on opening your chest and inhaling into that area can be beneficial. In Yoga As Medicine, Timothy quotes Patricia Walden, who herself has suffered from clinical depression, saying:

“When you start focusing on your breath, and taking the breath into your chest and breathing deeply, you begin to feel the presence of your breath. What comes with that is a feeling of life returning, a feeling of warm that percolates throughout your chest at the beginning, but then throughout your entire body.”

You can also use any of these techniques if you're just feeling mildly depressed or blue.

Because stress is often a trigger for clinical depression, it’s possible that working with your exhalation as described for anxiety rather than your inhalation, could be helpful for you. So don’t hesitate to give it a try if you feel so inclined. As I said in my post Anxiety, Yoga and the Front Body, when it comes to emotional balance, anything that makes you feel better is working.

Stress. Because chronic stress is the result of an overactive sympathetic nervous system, it makes sense to focus on pacifying your nervous system by working with your exhalation as I described for anxiety. However, from my observations of people doing pranayama, some people find any kind of pranayama relaxing (I, myself, do not, by the way). If you do find all breath work relaxing, go ahead and do whichever breath practice quiets your mind and relaxes you. Simply slowing your breath in general, with long, slow inhalations as well as exhalations, could be helpful in reducing stress. Practices where you speed up your breath will no doubt stimulate your nervous system. So if you are doing an active vinyasa practice to burn off your excess energy, end your yoga practice with a calming breath practice or an emotional counter-pose (see Balancing Your Emotional Body With Counter-Poses) that triggers the relaxation response.

Friday Q&A: Ujjayi Breath

Q: You have written quite a bit about breath, which is both interesting and helpful. I am wondering about ujaya breath (sp?), which I learned about from my first yoga teacher (Kripalu). We used to do this when holding more difficult poses, but I am not sure of why this breath is seen as important, and would like to know more about it.

A: Ujjayi (ooh-JAI-yee), known as the “victory” breath, is a breathing technique in which you slightly constrict the opening of your throat to create a slight resistance for your breath. As you inhale and exhale, this resistance produces a slight, raspy sound, which is compared to the sound of the ocean and/or Darth Vader. It is considered to be a heating or energizing breath.

In the Iyengar school of yoga (which is the style that, I, Nina practice and teach), yoga poses are always done with a natural breath, and ujjayi, like any other form of pranayama (breath practices) is only practiced formally in either a seated or reclined position. However, in some other styles of yoga, including Ashtanga Vinyasa Yoga, Power Yoga and Flow Yoga, ujjayi breathing is used continuously throughout the practice of physical postures. This theory behind this is that this particular form of breathing enables you to maintain a rhythm to your practice, take in enough oxygen, and build energy to maintain practice, while clearing toxins from your body. This breath is considered to be especially important during transition into and out of poses, as it helps you to stay present, self-aware and grounded in the practice. This is how Erich Schiffmann puts it:

“The main idea is to coordinate your movements with your breathing. This brings a graceful and sensuous quality to your practice and turns each yoga session into a fluid and creative meditation. As you become skillful at this, the breath and movement will no longer feel distinct. You will experience them as one action, inseparably entwined. You will instinctively breathe as you move or stretch, and move or stretch as you breathe.”

Ujjayi is also taught as part of certain practices by Krishnamacharya and his son Desikachar (Viniyoga), as well as the Kripalu school (and possibly some schools I may have overlooked). Whether or not this breathing technique is “important” depends on the particular school of yoga (or teacher) you follow. And, frankly, because all the styles of yoga that we practice in the U.S. were developed quite recently (the 20th century), I’d say it’s up to you to decide whether or not you want to incorporate ujjayi into your own asana practice. Does it enhance your practice? Or is it a distraction? (Remember, you can always do it on its own, in a seated or reclined position.)

—Nina (with help from Baxter)

A: From a western physiologic perspective, ujjayi creates a resistance to breathing, making breathing a bit more effort-full than it would be normally. In the world of medicine, respirators in the intensive care unit are sometimes set to something called PEEP, short for positive end expiratory pressure, which helps to keep the lungs from collapsing on themselves. Ujjayi may have a similar physiologic effect on healthy lungs. Whether this is of benefit may need further study. I believe the first mention of ujjayi breath comes in the Hatha Yoga Pradipika, Chapter 2, verses 51-53. The author claims it destroys defects in the nadis (energy channels), cures dropsy and disorders of the humours!

—Baxter