I’ve discussed in our previous “I Can Breathe Life” series about all the wonderful benefits that deep breathing or meditation breathing has on your health. I also wrote about how it’s beneficial on a mental and emotional level; which affects your state of mind and how you view yourself and people and things outside of yourself.
So would you believe that simply learning how to breathe could affect the way you felt about yourself? When you’re constantly in a worried mind set when it comes to yourself, I believe it would definitely affect your breathing. You might notice your breathing being short fast breaths. Sounds almost like you’d be experiencing a panic attack. Well, in actuality you probably are or close to it.
Remember when in our previous articles I wrote how deep breathing relaxes the mind, allowing us to become more clear headed. If you have a clearer state of mind you tend to not be as worried or stressed resulting in having an overall better attitude. Which means that you’ll have a better attitude about yourself. Confidence, according to Google’s Oxford Languages, means to have a feeling of self-assurance arising from one's appreciation of one's own abilities or qualities.
Think about a moment when you weren’t feeling as confident or a time when you struggled with low self confidence. How did you feel about yourself in that moment or during that time in your life? Well I can’t speak for anyone else but I can admit that I often felt alone, sad, powerless and unimportant. It’s as if I needed someone to constantly tell me how amazing I was because I didn’t believe it enough to tell myself. It’s as if I gave my power or placed the control over me into someone else’s hands. Hence the significance of looking inward versus seeking outward.
However, we’ve discussed how deep breathing allows you to tap in or find your core self, which helps you to gain control and power over your life. You then realize that no one can determine how amazing you are besides you. You set the tone. You give the energy of who you are which ultimately sets the tone to everyone else. When you confirm that you have the power to be or not be in life, you then gain control and power back. That herein is where you gain or find your confidence.
I read Jennifer’s Self Confidence Special: 5 Minute Boosting Breath-Work Practice, from her Love Vegan blog. In reading her blog she gives four techniques that help with boosting your self confidence. In using breathing techniques, it’s said to calm the nervous system which makes you become calmer, happier and confident. Now if you’ve read my previous article in my “I Can Breathe Life” series, you realize that breathing is relaxing that natural stress hormone that we have in our body called cortisone.
Jennifer’s Four Breathing practices for boosting self confidence are:
Abdominal Breathing
Alternative Nostril Breathing
Hold The Breath
Squared Breathing
In trying all four I favored the Alternative Nostril Breathing but the Abdominal breathing was probably the easiest and simplest.
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