Practices

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.…

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…

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…

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…

Let the in breath come however it comes, then breathe out through pursed lips as though through a straw for a count of eight, finishing with two more counts through the nose. Three ordinary breaths, then go again.

Three rounds is the usual dose. Notice what is deliberately left uncounted: the inhale. Counting the in breath when someone is already panicking…

The soft sound and the feel of this breath in your throat give your attention somewhere to sit. When the mind is loud, something you can hear holds better than something silent.

It is called the victorious breath, and the victory meant is over the noise in your own head rather than over anybody else. The vibration in the…