Written by Sadie Croshaw
After getting in a car accident last year, my car was totaled, and… so was I. The depression I’d suffered from for years morphed into depression and anxiety. Fear crippled me any time I got back in my car. Any other vehicle on the road terrified me. How was I to know if they were paying attention? What if another reckless driver hit my car, but this time, the impact paralyzed me?
I honestly felt like an imposter, teaching yoga and helping people breathe and move through their troubles. Yet, here I was, struggling to manage the five-minute drive home from the store.
After taking time to understand what I was dealing with, I learned that aside from medication and counseling, the tool I had right at my fingertips was exactly what I was teaching. I discovered how sincerely helpful breathing techniques and meditations could be. Learning to really exhale—my goodness, it was key. And my goodness—it needed to be shared!
My favorite part of teaching yoga is when I see something really click for a student. I realized my trial could be another way to reach different students.
We’ve developed a course at Cache Valley Counseling centered on breathing techniques to cope with anxiety. These techniques obviously haven’t “cured” me of anxiety. I still have moments and days where I feel crippled again by that fear. But that’s the point. Now, I know where to go. I know what tools I have. And I know that they work… And the best part—I want to share them with you!
What does breathing for anxiety look like?
There are a lot of pieces to answering this question. A great place to start is learning to notice our breath. Our bodies breathe for us automatically, so it’s not something we often pay attention to. We hardly ever take a moment to feel our body be breathed.
The next step is learning to take a full exhale. Have you ever caught yourself holding your breath? Or just taking a bunch of inhales over and over and forgetting to exhale?
Here, we need to understand how the breath relates to the nervous system. The sympathetic nervous system is the part of me that kicks in and makes me anxious about driving. It’s the fight, flight, or freeze mode.
Opposed to that is the parasympathetic nervous system. It’s the one that calms me down. So what’s the trick of getting the parasympathetic nervous system in control? Well, I bet you can guess. It’s the breath! Specifically, the exhale.
A gentle but full exhale can calm the body down and let that fight, flight, or freeze mode take a rest. In the Breathing for Anxiety course, we work with several breathing techniques, especially to fully exhale.
If you’ve struggled with anxiety, I hope you know that here at Cache Valley Counseling, we help people. We want people to find ways to heal and feel powerful against the things that cripple them.
Why continue to suffer when there are other ways to live?
We hope you join us at Cache Valley Counseling for our Breathing for Anxiety course, and we hope you know that you are always enough here.
To learn more about our Breathing for Anxiety therapeutic yoga class click here:
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