Wellness expert Sarah Laurie is convinced that correct breathing is the best cure for the world’s fastest growing mental health issue – anxiety. Science backs her up!
2015 was a pivotal year for Sarah Laurie. After 15 years as a wellness expert and speaker, she was confronted by the shocking mental health statistics in the law sector when participating in a law conference. She took a break from her career and contacted scientists, cell biologists and breathing physicians from around the world to further study the reason behind the issue.
“Very quickly my lens widened to include the farming sector, construction, health… Before long, it became evident that anxiety does not discriminate. We were facing a ‘human’ challenge, not an industry one,” says Sarah.
Her team of experts realised that the 21st century pace and pressure has shifted our breathing from the tummy to the chest, which makes us take too many breaths, which, in turn, leads to increased anxiety and stress.
Stress response causes very specific changes in our body: our heart rate and blood pressure increase, our attention narrows in order to focus only on the danger, we become defensive and cautious, while our problem solving, critical thinking and decision making dial down.
This was intended by nature as a momentary response to danger, e.g. when we’re in an accident or experience a trauma. The problem is that the vastly increased pressure of life is recognised by our brain as a constant danger, so our breathing is now in our chest almost all of the time.
Hard to believe that? Do a quick check right now: place one hand on your chest and the other on your tummy. Take a breath and see which hand moves. It should be the one on your tummy! If it’s not, this is the first and simplest indicator you should be paying more attention to your breathing.
RESET YOUR BREATHING PATTERNS:
1.Breathe into your tummy 10 times before you get out of bed in the morning.
2. Set up a reminder to check your breathing every 30 minutes. There’s no need to stop what you’re doing
– simply breathe into your tummy whenever you get a reminder!
3. Breathe into your tummy 10 times as you go to sleep at night.
“Your lungs hang down – like rugby socks – as low as the tummy area, which is how the phrase ‘tummy breathing’ was coined – when you fill your lungs, your tummy should rise,” explains Sarah.
Even if escaping into the woods and ditching the stressful environment of modern life forever wasn’t an almost impossible scenario, it would hardly have helped. “Our brain seeks patterns and automates them. So, over time our breathing patterns have reset and we now breathe into our chest automatically and unconsciously.”
In 2019, after four years of research and experiment, Take a Breath was born. It’s an app and a website focused on assisting people in breathing well, the way we were designed to. “I’m not a tech person, so initially I resisted the idea of an app. I wanted to create a TV documentary or write a book,” laughs Laurie. “However, I always wanted to create something that would help many, many people and quickly. So, an app it became…”
Take a Breath is more than just beautifully designed breathing instructions. It also contains a lot of utterly fascinating facts and explanations on what is actually happening in our brain and body at any given time. The response to the app has been phenomenal!
In fact, to expand on this initial interest, Sarah Laurie and her team created a 7-Day Take a Breath challenge that guides you through reworking your breathing patterns. After seven days, 76% of people reported improved sleep, 96% of people reported feeling calmer and 82% of people reported increased energy.
The team now also has a 12-month programme for businesses with a robust schedule, several behaviour change activations, and built-in touch points to measure progress – everything that makes Take a Breath’s impact more visible to people’s daily lives. The unexpected bonus? For every business enrolled, one school gets the same programme for free!
“It feels as though we are creating a new health matrix – a new era of wellbeing – and it’s pretty game-changing.”
SARAH LAURIE RECOMMENDS:
