Published on the 17th November 2020
The Physical And Mental Benefits Of Mindful Breathing
Reading Time: 5 min read
Breathing is the lifeblood of our existence. It is a physical trait that all living creatures share among themselves, and we wouldn’t survive more than a few minutes at most without doing it. We know that it is essential for our life, but do we know that doing it the right way would prevent us from exhausting our health insurance coverage?
Mindful breathing can be a wonderful tool to achieve a state of physical and psychological serenity. Yoga and other relaxation methods are entirely dependent on the art of mindful breathing. We will talk about its mental and physical benefits, but first, let us explain what mindful breathing really is.
What Is Mindful Breathing?
Mindful breathing is a fundamental meditation technique. The notion here is quite simple; concentrate on your breathing and become aware of the rhythm at which the air passes inside and outside of your body. Don’t be fooled by the simplicity of the idea, it is a very effective tool that can bring forward effective results within a short period.
Breathing impacts the level of noradrenaline production in our brains, which in turn affects our heart rate and blood pressure levels. Mindful breathing allows us to breath in a calm and composed way. This keeps the noradrenaline and stress levels in check. In doing so, it ensures your mental and physical well being.
Mental Benefits Of Mindful Breathing
Bring Down Stress
Mental can reduce hyperactivity in your brain cells. The domino effect of this action brings down your level of stress and harmonises your emotional levels.
Makes You More Alert
The key aspect of mindful breathing is concentration. As you keep on focusing your attention to your breathing, you would be able to converge all of your attention on a single matter. Hence, you would be able to do anything more attentively.
Make You More Patient
Practising mindful breathing regularly, you would be able to learn the virtue of perseverance. You would notice the incremental progress you had been making, ever since you had taken up mental breathing. Consequently, you would be willing to practice it with more patience for even greater rewards. This would help you exercise patience in all walks of your life.
Make You Calmer
Only focusing on your breathing gives your mind a rare chance to isolate your thoughts. It would no longer be a disarrayed input of inputs. You would be thinking more clearly and this would make you calm and composed.
Increase Your Awareness
With a pristine mind, you would become more aware of your mental and physical state. You can establish a conspicuous link between your mind and body.
Hone Your Creativity
Mindful breathing can give you a sense of mental peace, which stirs up the flow of creativity in our minds. With a freed up mind, you will find yourself brimming with creative ideas.
Abolish Absentmindedness
Amusingly, retreating to a state of mental isolation through mindful breathing would let you connect better with your real-life surroundings. It would improve your focus and awareness, which in turn, will free you from absent-mindedness.
Physical Benefits Of Mindful Breathing
- Superior Oxygen Inflow
Mindful breathing can help you take in more oxygen even though you are not attempting to take deeper breaths. What happens here is that you establish consistency in your breathing pattern, which makes your oxygen consumption more efficient over time.
- Relaxes Muscle Tension
We have already discussed how effective mindful breathing is in alleviating stress. Stress is one of the culprits responsible for the stiffening of muscles. As stress goes away, the muscles return to their natural relaxed form.
- Detoxification
Mindful breathing teaches you to breathe better, and with breathing better, you are improving both your inhalation and exhalation. You are not only drawing in more oxygen, you are also letting out more carbon dioxide and other undesired gases.
- Gets Your Abdominal Muscles In Tiptop Shape
Mindful breathing delivers oxygen beyond your chest and goes right into the abdomen. As it engages the abdominal muscles, mindful breathing can be a great form of exercise for that region of your body.
- Soothes Pain
Breathing exercises have been associated with greater production of endorphins. Endorphin stimulates the opiate receptors in the human brain. In doing so, it enhances our sense of pleasure and diminishes the sensation of pain.
- Helps Maintaining BMI Standards
Mindful breathing optimises our breathing. That means, it increases our efficiency of using oxygen. And oxygen is crucial in livening up or cells and activating fat-burning processes. Therefore, mindful breathing would help you reverse both underweight and overweight conditions.
- Boosts Digestion
Oxygen increases the efficacy of our digestive tract. Mindful breathing distributes ample amounts of oxygen to our vital organs, including the digestive system. So, it functions better when you practice mindful breathing.
*GasanMamo Insurance Limited is authorised under the Insurance Business Act and regulated by the MFSA