Episode 87: B3 Breaks: Remember To Breathe
People build tension when they get stressed. Once they’re stressed, they forget to breathe. We all have to remember to stop, pause, and breathe. In today’s B3 Break, join Amy Vetter and take 4 minutes to slow down your breath and reset your central nervous system so you can be more present and relaxed during the day!
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B3 Breaks: Remember To Breathe
This series is all about getting honest with ourselves and noticing the things that we carry with us. We each have our own life experiences to go from. Sometimes, it's hard to truly understand what it's like to be someone else and what we can do to create change to start with us. If each of us took one action each day in our own lives, we could collectively change the world around us. What does it take? It takes work, practice, and we have to be honest with ourselves as we get there. To do that, we have these B3 Breaks in order to pause and assess our thoughts before we speak to take an honest look at our interactions in our day and the energy that we may be creating around us.
We ask other people questions and learn their stories and experiences. We create positive energy with the people around us and find peaceful ways to show our support to our friends, family, and acquaintances. We observe all of this without judgment, we are present with the people we are with, and we show up in love. What can we do? We start with the little things. This series is all about short practices that you can put into your day. Practice this each day for 2, 5, 10 minutes, or whatever it takes so that you can observe your energy and be intentional with the energy you can create around you because if you believe you can, you will.
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Breathing Exercise: Tension gets created when you don’t take a break. Remember to slow down before you enter into your next experience.
For our B3 Break, what we're going to talk about is our breath. A lot of times, it can happen in the office, especially when working from home and going from one video call to another, we forget to breathe. More tension gets created because we're rushing from meeting-to-meeting, not taking a break, and not slowing ourselves down before we enter into our next experience. When we settle ourselves down and get back to our breath, we can start lowering the stress that we have internally in our body and relaxing our central nervous system. Remembering to breathe can be a great way to stop and pause in your day and settle yourself down.
It might sound a little bit strange to talk about how to breathe but when we're talking about slowing our breath down, there are techniques that you can do to get you started on this. What I'd like you to do is we're going to practice one breath which is a three-part breath. It’s simple to do. As long as you take a break and give yourself a couple of minutes between meetings, this can be something that will reset you and free your mind a little bit to be more present in your next meeting. If you're sitting in your chair, you might want to scoot back to the back of your shoulders or up on the back of your chair and both feet are firmly planted. What I'd like you to do is take your hands to your stomach so that you can start connecting with your breath coming in and out.
You can choose the close your eyes if you like or if you'd rather keep a soft gaze, you can. What I'd like you to do is start slowing down your breath, inhaling, filling your belly, exhaling, releasing your belly, and breathing back out through your nose. You'll inhale through your nose, down your throat, and into your belly and press that belly into your hands, and slowly exhale from your belly through your throat and back out your nose.
Let's do a couple more rounds of that inhaling through your nose, down your throat, into your belly, and exhaling from your belly, through your throat, and back out your nose. Inhale and slowly exhale. If you’d like, you can count it to 3, 2, 1, filling your belly, slowly exhaling out 3, 2, 1. One more round, inhale, fill your belly with that breath, slowly exhale back out 3, 2, 1, release that. You can do this for 5, 10, or 15 rounds. Start off small and grow it a little bit over time. What you'll find is when you connect back to that breath, you start slowing everything down, become more present in your body, release any of the tension that you're having from so many meetings jammed in together, not being able to get up from your desk, and allowing yourself to connect better to the people that you're within your next meeting because you've given yourself some space to release before entering into that next experience.
Breathing Exercise: When you connect back to that breath, you start slowing everything down. You become more present in your body and release any tension you have.
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Thank you for taking the time out of your day reading. I hope you will take a moment to pause before entering back into your day to reflect on this show and note 1 to 2 actions you are inspired to do from this conversation that you could incorporate into your life. To read the full blog and read back to this episode or any other, you can find them at AmyVetter.com/breakingbeliefspodcast and related videos on my YouTube channel. For daily inspiration, follow me on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn, @AmyVetterCPA. I hope that you will choose to like this and subscribe to this show on iTunes, Spotify, and more so that you can join us for more inspiration on our next episode.
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