Your body

Breath work goes straight into the body, and for some people that is the problem. If your panic has ever been about not getting enough air, putting your attention on your breathing can set it off rather than settle it.

Asthma, a history of choking or smothering, panic that arrives through the chest: any of these makes the breath a loaded place to put your attention.…

The famous count is not automatically your count. One teacher finds that adding a pause after the inhale wakes her up, while the plain long exhale has her asleep within three breaths.

Protocols get passed around because they worked for someone, often someone with a large audience. That is not the same as fitting you. Keep the shape…

When you are flat rather than wound up, try this. Rub your palms together until they feel awake, let them rest, then breathe in as your arms lift and out as they lower, two or three times.

Sluggish, heavy, far away: those states rarely respond to more calming. A bit of friction in the hands, some movement through the arms and a fuller…

For when you are stuck in shutdown there is a faster practice: short sharp exhales driven from the belly, letting each in breath happen by itself, about twenty of them.

It is meant to rouse, so expect to feel more awake and a little buzzy afterwards rather than calm. Twenty is plenty. Sit down before you start so…

The fast forceful practices are not for everyone. With high blood pressure, heart trouble or glaucoma, leave them out and use the slow ones, which carry no such warning.

Rapid breathing with effort behind it raises pressure inside the chest, the head and the eyes for as long as you keep it going. The gentler lift,…

Any breathing instruction that reaches you through a screen or a book comes from someone who cannot see you. Keep the final say over what your body does.

Recorded instructions have to be general. You are the one who knows that your chest tightens on holds, or that counting makes you anxious. Treat each…

Breath is the quickest way you have of turning your own nervous system up or down. Nothing else you can simply decide to do works on that timescale.

Your heart rate already rises slightly as you breathe in and falls as you breathe out, on every breath. So changing how you breathe changes something…

The rapid belly driven breath with pauses added is the strongest thing in this set. Not for high blood pressure, glaucoma, pregnancy or your period, and stop at once with pain or dizziness.

It has its uses for the flat, heavy state that comes over people after lunch or during a long low patch, because it pushes upwards rather than down.…

End a practice with a question rather than a conclusion. What do you notice works better than telling someone what should have happened.

If you announce that an exercise is calming, most people will agree with you whether or not it was. Asking leaves room for the honest answer,…

Put a hand just below your ribs and let it move. Most of us breathe up in the chest, and the settling effect comes from lower down, where the diaphragm can actually shift.

You can check this lying down with a book on your stomach. If the book rises, the breath is going where you want it. If only your shoulders move, it…

Breathe in for about five and out for about ten, and do not hold at the top. Go straight from the in breath into the out breath, five to ten times over.

That pause after the inhale feels natural to add, and it can raise your heart rate rather than lowering it, which undoes what you came for. If ten…

Fighting, running and freezing are the ones everybody can name. There is a fourth: going along with things, smoothing them over, making yourself easy to be around so that nothing bad happens.

It gets read as being agreeable, or as a personality, and it is often neither. If you grew up being criticised, or spent years around someone…

You are not trying to talk yourself into feeling calm. You are trying to move your body from one setting into another, and the breath is the handle you can reach.

Once the alarm system is running, stress hormones are already in the blood and telling yourself to relax does very little about them. Changing the…

A child cannot watch their own breathing, so give them something to watch instead. Bubbles through a wand show the out breath as it happens: too hard and it bursts, too weak and nothing comes.

Smelling a flower and then blowing it out gives each half of the breath a picture. The bubble wand is better still, because it answers back straight…

Hot yoga asks you to keep drinking all the way through the class. If forgetting to eat and drink is one of your regular problems, choose a different room.

This is not about the style being bad. It is about matching what you choose to the things you genuinely find hard. Dehydration creeps up quietly and…

There is no breath that calms everyone. The one that settles your friend may leave you worse, and that is information about your body rather than a failure in you.

Labels like calming or energising are a rough guide at best. What actually happens depends on how you usually breathe, what your body has been…

Start with a count of four in and four out, then drop the count. Once the rhythm is there your body will choose its own length: six and six, eight and eight, whatever settles you.

The count is scaffolding. Holding onto it too long turns the practice into something you can pass or fail, which is the opposite of the point.…

Four in, hold four, four out, hold four. The holds are the strong part of this one, and they stay optional every single time.

Some people find the pauses deeply settling. Others meet the edge of what they can tolerate there, especially at the bottom of the exhale. Both are…

If you keep only one thing, make the out breath longer than the in breath. Four in and eight out is enough, and nothing clever is needed on top of it.

This is the closest thing to a dependable settling lever. It suits the end of the day, a queue you are stuck in, the ten minutes before sleep. Some…

If big breathing feels like too much, make it smaller instead. Breathe so smoothly that the in breath rolls into the out breath with no sound and no edges.

This asks almost nothing of you, and that is the point. Nothing to count, nothing to hold, no depth to reach for. For anyone whose panic runs through…