153 | Breathe and Stand Taller to help Reduce Anxiety and Calm the Nervous System

Ever wondered how something as simple as breathing could transform your life? Discover how mastering 360 breathing techniques and proper posture can soothe your nervous system, reduce anxiety, and enhance your overall well-being in our latest episode of "Moving Through Midlife." We’ll uncover the science behind how the diaphragm's movement and its interaction with the heart and vagus nerve can shift you from a fight or flight response to a peaceful rest and digest state. Learn practical steps to correct common postural issues and open up the sternum, allowing you to breathe deeply and reduce stress effectively.

But that's not all! We'll also highlight the holistic health benefits of 360 breathing, from strengthening your core and pelvic floor to alleviating low back pain and improving balance. If you're dealing with a leaky bladder, you won't want to miss how these techniques can offer relief. Join our community for more expert tips and tricks to stay active and healthy through midlife. If you find these insights valuable, please share our podcast with a friend or leave a review to help us reach more listeners like you. Grab your earbuds and let's move through midlife with grace and ease.

Chapters

• 0:05 Movement Snack Monday
• 17:56 Holistic Health Benefits for Midlife

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:05

Welcome to Moving Through Midlife. I am your host, courtney, a personal trainer and movement specialist who wants to help you move through midlife with more grace. Each week we will discuss ways we can show up better for ourselves and our children without the burnout, children without the burnout. We will focus on overall health through habit stacking to help increase energy, provide movement snacks to help you move more throughout the day, while also moving your body more, and learn from professionals on moving through midlife with ease so that you can feel confident with aging. Gracefully, grab your earbuds and join me on a leisurely walk while we discuss moving through midlife. Today is Movement Snack Monday and if you listen to me on a weekly basis, you will see that this isn't the first Monday of the month, but that is because it is summer and I ended up going to a every other week schedule during the summer just because life. So this week we are focusing on our nervous system, on our nervous system, and I am in the moving through midlife community. I am focusing on that as well. So things that we can do to help relax and calm our nervous system to help us, to help us deal with anxiety and stress.

Speaker 1: 1:46

A lot of us will have anxiety. Maybe you don't know why you have anxiety, but many of us will have this fight or flight response naturally within our body. That has more to do with, yes, life might be stressful or, you know, might be creating anxiety, but there are also times when you might just be going about your day and you start to deal with this anxious feelings, this fight or flight response. Maybe you start dealing with a heart palpitation or your breathing pattern changes or something happens where you just feel like you're on edge. I know, for me that's just what I notice and this has a lot to do with. There's a lot of variables with this, one of them being how we are breathing, because our diaphragm helps to do two things. So when your diaphragm is moving, it is naturally pushing on the heart to increase the heart rate and then, when the diaphragm kind of relaxes, pulls away, then the heart rate will drop. So the diaphragm and the heart really work together to create this heart rate, which, if you've ever heard of heart rate variability, it's good. You want your heart rate to move through different like speed up and slow down, because that has a lot to do with the diaphragm as well and breathing, the other thing that happens in addition to that is also the diaphragm is massaging the vagus nerve. So the vagus nerve is that fight or flight. It's the parasympathetic or sympathetic system, right, it helps to decide if you're in that fight or flight moment or if you are more relaxed in that rest and digest phase. So when you're breathing, if you were breathing in that 360 breathing pattern which I talk about all the way back in episode 2.2, and that was breathe, but I'll take you through because I didn't realize how far back that was, but I'll take you through that 360 breathing pattern so if you're doing that full 360 breathing pattern so that the diaphragm is expanding fully, you will get the massaging of the vagus nerve, which will help to bring you into that rest and digest phase. So breathing ends up having a lot to do with anxiety from a standpoint of, like, your movement standpoint.

Speaker 1: 5:02

Intrinsically. Another thing that can affect this is your posture. So posture is a cool thing. I love it. You'll hear me talk about it a lot Because for many of us we're in this rounded forward position throughout the day, right?

Speaker 1: 5:22

And if you sit in this rounded forward position, you're going to notice that that mid back creates this slight round forward, right. So you've got this little kink in that area. What happens when you have that kink in that area? When you take a deep breath in, it doesn't usually allow the back ribs to expand, which here again affects your diaphragm, so then you're not taking that full deep breath. So we want to work on opening that area up and it's almost like this opening of the sternum to kind of help with that sternum, to kind of help with that. So I'm going to take you through a couple of different things to help you with this relaxing movement, for helping you to kind of relax a little bit more so that you're out of that fight or flight state.

Speaker 1: 6:25

So what you're going to do, the first thing that you're going to do, let's first work on sitting up tall. So don't I know, as soon as I say sit up tall, everybody thinks to sit up tall. We all like try to fix our posture. But I want you to go back, go back to what's comfortable, because I want to make sure you're doing it correctly, so you're not like pulling on your shoulder blades or doing anything wonky. So what we're going to do is I want you just to think, get into your comfortable position and I want you to think about your spine. And there's a notch right up at the top kind of, where your neck starts. There's an area of your spine that kind of has a little bump. It's, you know, maybe a little bit more noticeable on you or you can feel it more than you can the other parts of the spine. What you're going to imagine with that portion of the spine you're going to imagine pulling it back to the wall behind you, to the seat behind you, to whatever is behind you as you are listening to this. So you're going to imagine pulling that notch of the spine back and you'll notice as you do that what happens. Your sternum kind of opens up a little bit. So think of that front area of the chest kind of lifts up and it almost lifts up.

Speaker 1: 8:00

I know some people talk about like open the heart that's another expression you might hear in yoga. That kind of helps get you in this position that I'm talking about. And what happens when you do it this way? You're not pulling on your shoulders, you're not creating any tension in that mid back or upper back, you're not trying to pull the shoulders down or pull them back to where the rib cage will open, because we also don't want our rib cage to be open too much where we're flaring our ribs. We want this natural neutral position and we all have a slightly variation of neutral, so don't feel like that there has to be a specific position. It's just all of us have a neutral and that's what you're shooting for. So just imagine thinking about that bump on that upper part of the spine as it comes in towards the neck. Imagine that, pulling back in your seat or towards the back wall, you'll feel that heart opening position and just hold there. Now, in this position this is where I also talk about imagining that string going up your spine and then you're going to lengthen up, pulling away. The thing that happens when we do this is now, if we are feeling shortened in our torso, in our midsection, we create a little bit of length, which should help you to start to feel those abdominal muscles firing on a little bit.

Speaker 1: 9:45

An active position. We're not looking for them to be braced, we don't want anything intense. We just want an active position where they're kind of help holding up the body right. We're not relaxing into anything, we're just being held up nice and tall. Then we're going to work on that 360 breathing which you've probably heard me talk about. I know that I've done it more than just that movement snack all the way back in episode 2.2. I know I've talked about this more because it's so important to get this breathing pattern right for so many various reasons within our body, so many various reasons within our body. So what you're going to do here is you're going to imagine your rib cage like a jellyfish and when you breathe in, you want that rib cage to expand in a 360 fashion and many of us will get a little tight, like I had mentioned earlier, tight in that back area, which is why our diaphragm can't expand fully in the back, which may affect how it is massaging in quotes the vagus nerve. So we want to work on getting that breathing to go all the way through that rib cage so we get that full expansion and you'll notice when you do this, you will naturally start to feel calmer. This is a great exercise.

Speaker 1: 11:19

I know I mentioned this in episode 75, which was better digestion through breathing. Five, which was better digestion through breathing, because in that I talk about getting out of that fight or flight moment when we're eating. We want to get into that rest or digest state so that we have better digestion, we deal with less gas and bloating if we get in this calm state. So one thing that you can practice is, when you sit down to eat, taking a few deep 360 breaths so that you do go into more of a calming state. So that is what I would recommend you work on today.

Speaker 1: 12:05

The other thing is opening up that thoracic area, like I mentioned. Just imagine that bony area of the spine, imagine pulling that back so that you kind of open your heart, so to speak, open that sternum area, to kind of unlock that area. The other thing that you want to make sure that you are doing is rotation and again In episode 148, mobility Exercises for Beginners. This was another movement snack that I did. I mentioned one of these things to do, working on rotation, where you put the toilet paper behind you on the toilet so that you're getting that rotation in, because that is a movement that many of us can't do very well. So we end up rotating through, say, our shoulders or through our lumbar area, the lumbar spine, which, if you deal with a lot of aches and pains in that area, say the low back, you might be more prone to rotating through that area and the reason we end up rotating through that area is because our mid-back, our thoracic area, is locked up so we're not able to move that as well. So, working on different things to help kind of release that area which I have a ton of exercises that you can do to help with that that is going to be perfect. And when we release that area we can release the stickiness of the diaphragm and allow it to get more movement, which will help to also calm the nervous system.

Speaker 1: 14:02

So this is something I always talk about and I feel like a broken record and I do apologize, but I'm trying to drive home the point that this is so interrelated. I think we get hung up on interrelated. I think we get hung up on what can I do for this, what can I eat for this? And it's really not that simple. I mean it is simple in the sense of just move your body in a lot of different ways. That's going to help you feel really good. That kind of simplicity, but not simple. This one thing, this three things. No, it's the more foods you eat, the more different foods you eat, the better you will feel. The more movements you do, the better you will feel. So it's really working on variety, creating a lot of variety in your movement patterns, in your food intake, all of that and that is hopefully going to provide you with something that you could focus on this month if you want to work on some movement. So taking that time to practice those 360 breathing pattern, also just paying attention to your posture, thinking about pulling that area of the spine back towards the back wall to kind of help you get taller, help you feel a little bit taller so you can do that 360 breathing a little bit better. That is going to help calm the nervous system a little bit more. That's just one step.

Speaker 1: 15:48

There's quite a few other things that you can do to help calm the nervous system as well, and I'll just run through them really quick. In episode 99, I talk about how fruits and vegetables can reduce anxiety. In episode 98, I interviewed someone who discussed how we can help children ease stress and anxiety. In episode 97, I also spoke to someone else about healing anxiety and trauma. In episode 50.2, I talked about posture and anxiety. And in episode 14, I spoke with Dr Alyssa Runyon on the vagus nerve things that you can do to help calm stress and anxiety by activating that vagus nerve. So I have a lot of information.

Speaker 1: 16:46

If you would like to kind of take a more active role in working on reducing anxiety, make sure to join me in my Moving Through Midlife community over on Facebook, where we will be doing different things. I'll be sharing tips and recipes and exercises that you could do to help calm that nervous system down, and then also I'll be sharing information about events that I have coming up. I've got a couple of classes on breathing to help kind of get deeper breaths by using a ball, and then also some stretching classes to help try to release that thoracic area, so get rid of that tension and tightness in that thoracic region. With lots of rotational work. Those types of classes will be coming up and if you've missed, if you're listening to this later than August, it is okay. We're doing different things each month. You will always see a lot of the same movements over and over again because they work to help other areas.

Speaker 1: 17:56

The 360 breathing also helps with core health, strengthening the core. It also helps with pelvic floor. If you deal with a leaky bladder, it's going to help with that. It helps with low back pain. It helps with balance. So all of these things are interrelated. So just make sure to join over in the community whenever you're listening to this, as I will be able to provide you with tips and tricks and things that are going to help you move better and feel better during this midlife stage. I hope you all have a wonderful day. I do plan on getting back on the weekly schedule here, hopefully within the next week or so, and make sure to keep moving. I hope you enjoyed this episode and found something to take away to help you practice healthier habits, move more or handle the midlife and aging with grace. If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with a friend or leave us a review to help us reach more moms just like you. Head to movingthroughmidlifecom to join the free community or learn how you can move more and feel better in your daily life.