Could These 2 Breathing Exercises End Your Need For Anxiety Meds?

Anxiety can make it hard to get through everyday life, and if you’re like most, the recent year’s events have you feeling more anxious than ever.

While you could use medication or therapy to cope with anxiety, both can put a hurting on your bank account. To save money and crush anxiety, try these breathing exercises instead:

Equal Breathing

This type of breathing comes from pranayama yoga. It’s called “equal” breathing because you inhale and exhale for the same amount of time.

To begin, sit or lie down. Get as comfortable as possible. Next, perform these moves:

1. Close your eyes.
2. Observe your normal breathing pattern. Do this for several breaths so you can get a good sense of the pace.
3. Inhale through your nose as you count slowly to four.
4. Exhale for that same four-count.

Once you practice those simple steps a few times, add this into the routine:

• Pay attention to how your lungs feel full/empty as you inhale/exhale.

As you get better, you can increase the count beyond four for even more relaxation. As long as you keep the breathing equal in terms of the time spent inhaling and exhaling, you should get the intended effect.

Lion’s Breath

As its bold name suggests, this breathing technique has you exhale with force. Don’t let that fool you, though, as its effects are known to be quite relaxing.

Here are the steps:

1. If you can do it and still be comfortable, kneel, cross your ankles, and rest your buttocks on your feet. If this is too hard, sit with your legs crossed.
2. Move your hands to your knees, giving your arms and fingers a nice stretch.
3. Breathe in once through your nose.
4. Breathe out via your mouth, opening it as wide as possible and sticking your tongue out, so it stretches towards your chin. As you exhale, make an audible “ha” noise.
5. While exhaling, also focus on the middle of your forehead. Some call this your “third eye.” If you prefer, you can focus on the end of your nose instead.
6. Relax your face.
7. Inhale again.
8. Repeat all of the steps six times. After three times, switch up the crossing of your ankles/legs.

As with any breathing exercise, practice makes perfect. And since the goal is to alleviate anxiety, you’ll want to practice these exercises as much as you can to not only perfect them, but to feel calm as well.

Will these breathing techniques instantly crush your anxiety so that you can quickly eliminate the need for medication or therapy? That depends on many factors, but simply doing them whenever you feel anxious could provide much-needed relief. And as time passes, you may find that these exercises help you cope with anxiety to the point that you no longer need to spend cash to do so.