“When you extend your exhale by one to two counts longer than your inhale and you practice this for a couple of minutes, your heart rate will slow down. This sends a feedback message to the brain saying that everything is more peaceful and calm than it was a few minutes ago”
Ashley Neese, How to Breathe: 25 Simple Practices for Calm, Joy and Resilience
On a long car ride back from my parents’ home in Cleveland, Ohio to Raleigh, North Carolina, my girlfriend started wiping away streaks of tears from her eyes. I asked what’s wrong but she couldn’t explain—she only knew that she was stressed and upset and thought it was something related to her career not heading in the right direction.
Immediately I started going into problem solving mode: what are you trying to do with your career? Who do you want to be? What are your goals and aspirations? How are you thinking about it?
She snapped at me, stop.
I felt hurt and wronged, because I was only trying to help, so I turned up my sad music playlist and we sat there for a while, just listening to the music.
It was in that moment I learned a valuable lesson: logical problems need logical solutions and emotional problems need emotional solutions. But logical solutions cannot solve emotional problems.
In other words, you can’t think your way through depression; you can’t think your way through hurt or pain; you can’t think your way through anger or frustration.
In the self-development industry there is by far an over emphasis on mindset.
Reframe how you think! How is the worst thing that happened to you actually the best thing? What is the story you’re telling yourself and how can you change it?
Don’t get me wrong, these are powerful tools, but they ignore a large part of the self-development equation: how do you control how you feel?
The email from the rude coworker, the feeling you get when you need to go to work, and the sneer your significant other gave you when you told them something important—these all elicit small emotional responses that will, in someway, shape our behaviors and decisions over the course of our weeks.
So many of us choose to bottle these up. We might apply some mindset principles and ‘reframe’ them. But it continues to bottle up, and bottle up, until it lets implodes in an emotional release: a tear down the eye in a long car ride.
Emotions and emotional release has become a major topic of my reading, because of how crucial emotions are in our day to day lives.
This is how I found breathwork.
The breath is particularly interesting as an emotional solution because it is always with us no matter what situation we are in.
Breathing is our connection with our lifeforce. It’s the ease and swell of the wave by the ocean. The calm that keeps on calming.
Scientifically, breathing can change our brain state from the sympathetic (ANS) to the parasympathetic (PNS) and vice versa. In other words, we can choose to move our brains from flight and fight to rest and digest at will.
As Ashley Neese, a breathing expert, claims: when we exhale longer than we inhale, we’re actually able to slow our heart rate down. This signals to the brain that we’re in a state of calm, even if we were just recently emotionally triggered by a text or email.
She goes on, “Anxiety and stress cannot live in the body if you consciously slow down your breathing, because they require a cycle of fast and shallow breathing.”
In any moment, we can choose to be stressed or not. When we’re cut off by that driver, or lose a game of poker, we can choose whether we want to initiate rage or calm down.
In my experience, breathing is a great calming tool: it helps us separate from our emotions and bring some space where we can begin processing through the emotion.
From this point forward, I’m going to offer my own theory of emotions but none of this has been validated or substantiated by researched professionals; so take it as you will.
I believe there to be four phases to overcoming emotions:
- Shift from ANS to PNS
- Acceptance
- Processing
- Forgiveness
We’ve already discussed the shift from ANS to PNS by using breathing techniques, but I don’t believe that to be full the full solution to the emotional puzzle.
Instead I think three more steps are required to overcome and understand viral or subtle emotions.
The second phase is acceptance.
Put simply: it’s too easy to calm down from an emotion without understanding what we were feeling.
By only calming via breathing, our emotions still will get bottled up unless we work through them. Simply stating the feeling we had (i.e. I’m angry) allows us to attention to the state we were in without skipping past it.
The next step is to process through the emotion.
That means to work through it—for me that means journaling, for others it’s talking to a friend, a long car ride, or a walk. Whatever helps us think through the events, why we were triggered, and how we responded.
The final phase is forgiveness. Sometimes this may mean forgiving the people that caused you this emotion. For me, most of the time this means forgiving myself for feeling how I did.
This phase is about coming to terms with our emotion. We need to forgive ourselves for being reactionary creatures—it’s in our nature.
On top of that, our individual realities are real—two people may view the same event and have different emotional responses, but that doesn’t mean one was wrong for how they felt.
We have a right for feeling how we felt, and no one can take that away.
If there’s one thought I hope you take with you from this post, it’s this: emotions are a key part of the self-development puzzle, and it’s too easy to ignore them.
Don’t only listen to your thoughts and self-talk; take a step back and, for a few seconds, notice how you feel.
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