Teachers in Transition

Teachers in Transition - Episode 15 - Breathing for Stress Management

July 03, 2019 Kitty Boitnott Season 1 Episode 15
Teachers in Transition
Teachers in Transition - Episode 15 - Breathing for Stress Management
Show Notes Transcript

For most people, breathing isn't something you think much about. It's important, though, to recognize and appreciate that even though we breathe unconsciously, breathing shouldn't be taken for granted. We can go far longer without food or water to live than we can without oxygen. Breathing brings oxygen to the trillions of cells in our bodies and contributes to the proper function of those cells. Breathing is important and deep, intentional breathing at various times during the day can help ease your stress and the tension in your body.

A transcript is available at http://bit.ly/2XARSvV.

For more information about stress and how to handle it more effectively and proactively, check out Kitty's free ebook, Stressed, Stretched, and Just Plain Overwhelmed:  A Guide to Managing Your Stress and Developing a Greater Sense of Worklife Balance. It is available here:  http://teachersintransition.com/ebook.

Kitty Boitnott:

Are you a teacher who's feeling stressed out and overwhelmed? Do you worry that you're feeling symptoms of burnout or are you sure you've already gotten there? Have you started to dream of doing some other kind of job or perhaps pursuing a whole different career, but you don't know what else you're even qualified to do? You don't know how to start a job search. You just feel stuck. If that sounds like you, I promise you're not alone. My name is Kitty Boitnott. I'm a career transition and job search coach and I specialize in helping burnt out teachers just like you deal not only with the stress and overwhelm of your day-to-day job, but to consider what other careers might be out there waiting for you. Join me for"Teachers in Transition." In some episodes I'll be speaking to stress management techniques and how you can manage your stress on a day to day basis. In other episodes I'll be talking about career transition. What tools do you need to be successful in a job search when you're moving from one career into a totally different track? These are questions that you need answers to and I can help you find those answers. My name is Kitty Boitnott. Welcome to"Teachers in Transition." Welcome back for Episode 15 of"Teachers in Transition." Today I'm going to be talking about breathing and stress management. You know, it's interesting, the very first time I offered a workshop on stress management strategies. Uh, and for awhile after that I talked about six specific strategies for better managing stress; and I talked about six instead of seven because I had forgotten all about the importance of breathing and I'm not sure exactly when it occurred to me that I needed to add in breathing. But somewhere along the way I was reminded that breathing is particularly important to our overall well-being and good health, but it's also a helpful stress relaxer. I think I probably forgot to mention breathing in the beginning because we breathe without thinking about it. It's not like you have to remind yourself to get some water or to shop for healthy foods at the grocery store. You're breathing the whole time you're doing any of that. You're grieving nonstop from the moment you are born until you take your last breath, whenever that happens to be. And it's automatic. It's something that we must think about. But I want to suggest to you that if we can take on the task of consciously breathing and doing it more deeply and with greater intention that it can be used as a very effective stress reducer and relaxer and therefore is an excellent strategy for helping you to manage your stress. And it's not something that you have to take a break from your activity, whatever it is that you catch yourself doing. If you start to recognize that you're feeling stressed, you can just lift your shoulders and take in a deep breath. Now I would recommend there are different recommendations for breathing methods, but the easiest one for me is to simply breathe in through my nose for a count of six beats and then to breathe out through my mouth like I'm breathing through a straw slowly to the beat of six. So, for example, and I'm going to do that right now, and if you're on the podcast, instead of watching the YouTube video, my apologies that you can't see me doing this, but I'm going to to be purposefully louder than I would ordinarily be so that you can hear me taking in that breath. Okay? So taking in first and feeling it all the way up into my shoulders and into my neck and then breathing out, emptying my lungs, breathing slowly through my mouth. It's, it's encouraged that you breathe in through your nose and out through your mouth during an exercise like that. It's simply more relaxing. Now, recently I have come to really appreciate the importance of breathing in a way that I hadn't appreciated it before, even after I realized I needed to incorporate it into my workshop and into my book on how to manage stress. And that is a few months ago I was led to, uh, a new chiropractor who is not your traditional chiropractor. You sometimes think of chiropractors who do a lot of pressing and pulling. And my mother used to talk about her chiropractor cracking her bones in order to help her be more flexible. And my chiropractor doesn't do any cracking of anything. In fact, he never touches me more, a harder or more intensely than simply, you know, a gentle press, uh, on any part of my body. Very, very gentle. And it's referred to as a gentle type of chiropractic medicine. Uh, there's a special name for it and I'm not quite sure it's network, spinal or spinal network. I'm not sure. I'd probably need to do some more research into it. What I know is that it has worked. I went into him with a number of different aches and pains that was I reason for going in in particular, I had the sensation of a pinched nerve just to the left of my lower neck in my shoulder that had, uh, come about from something maybe sitting in front of the computer for too long. And it was a sensation that stretching didn't seem to help. And Tylenol took the edge off of, but it was, it was not only painful, it was distracting. Similarly, some aches and pains in my hips and legs. And so when I learned about this particular practitioner, I made an appointment and I went in for an evaluation and I knew immediately that this was someone that I wanted to work with. So on the spot I signed up for three months of weekly treatments so that I could feel myself getting back to myself. And over the course of the last two and a half months, I have certainly felt like a thousand times better. Part of what he offers is a breathing as part of his practice. So he will, for example, he might put his hands on my shoulders like this on my chest and say,"Breathe into my hands." And so I will start to breathe from my diaphragm all the way up into where his hands are lying on my chest and then breathe out slowly and doing that several times during the treatment. Um, sometimes when I'm on my stomach, sometimes when I'm on my back, it re has reminded me of the importance of just breathing in order to lengthen my, I have felt like my neck is less compressed. There is more flexibility in my spine and the pinched nerve sensation has been gone now for weeks. And the other specific aches and pains that I was routinely taking Tylenol for have for the most part evaporated. Every once in a blue moon, I'll still feel a sort of an achy sensation. But the main complaints that I went into him with, he has managed to banish. And I know that not only is he using whatever the gentle touch is with me, but he has reminded me of the importance of just breathing on a regular basis. So I here at my computer periodically through the day, I just take in a deep breath and let my shoulders fall back and breathe out. And I do that two or three times at a time. Um, anytime I start to feel some tension in my shoulders, I remind myself, okay, it's time to take some deep breaths. Now doing that intentional breathing has an extra benefit besides relaxing my shoulders and making me feel longer and, and more flexible. And that is, I'm also providing all of the trillions of cells in my body with the much needed oxygen that they need in order to function properly. And I mentioned all of these trillions of cells that make up our brain, our other organs, our heart, our digestive system, our pancreas, our liver, and, and all of the spinal network, the nerves in our bodies and the, the neurons, I mean everything, all of that we need to drink water and breathe in order for those organs to operate at their maximum capacity. And when we deprive our bodies of the necessary hydration and oxygen that comes from breathing, we create the potential scenario for becoming ill, for feeling less than our best for becoming compressed and locked up. And so breathing is one of the most underrated strategies, I think, besides perhaps sleep that people forget when they start to think about trying to manage their stress. They don't automatically start thinking about, well, I need to breathe more intentionally. We just don't. And, and here's another fact about breathing and stress. When we are particularly stressed, we breathe more shallowly and so we are not getting all of the oxygen into all of our lungs and our lungs need to be fully expanded when, um, to in order to operate at their best. So don't forget to breathe is the lesson for today. And just a quick word for any of you who may still be smoking, I want to caution you about the dangers of smoking. And I can speak to this because I'm a former smoker and I was old enough to know better when I started. I was in college and I was 20 years old. In fact, I may have smoked my first cigarette on my 20th birthday. It seems like to me that that was when I started. And of course when you're 20 you think you're invincible, you think you can't get hooked, you think you can't, it can't become an addiction for you. You're different from everybody else and you can quit anytime you want. And for years after I first got started, I told myself that lie that I could quit anytime I wanted. The problem was that then when I did want to quit, I wasn't able to quit as easily as I thought I would. In fact, I went through, uh, one cancer, the American Cancer Association related workshop, training, support system. Um, I went through an entire program in an effort to quit. And one of the things that impacted me during that particular time was that one of the ladies who was in our group was a former judge. She was in her seventies. She had smoked for more than 50 years. She was needing to quit because she was moving in with her son and his family and they didn't smoke. She was having to sneak around to smoke and she was tired of that. So she was in the group that I was in and she didn't show up one week and I asked about her because I had just, I had grown fond of her in that short period of time. And I learned she had died have a heart attack the week before. And so damn her, she was going, trying so hard to quit smoking and she only had a few weeks to live. So you know, that sort of made me think, well, you know, why am I going through all this if at the end of the day you're going to die anyway? So I didn't, I wasn't successful. Uh, that time I think Mark Twain had a quip about how easy it is to quit smoking, that he had done it dozens of times and so I can relate to that. I finally did manage to quit after 15 years and it's been over 32 years since I quit. Having said that, about 11, 12 years ago, I had a horrible case of bronchitis that led the doctor to diagnose me with viral induced asthma. I had never had asthma before and even to this day, I can feel a raspiness in my voice that I think I can probably attribute to having smoked for 15 years, even though it's been over 30 years since I quit. So my plea to you is if you have not started smoking, please don't. If you have started, please quit. The sooner, the better for everybody, including the people who live with you and are around you because we now know that secondhand smoke can do almost as much harm as firsthand. So. breathe. Take time during every single day to enjoy the fact that you can take a deep, cleansing breaths that will make you feel better, will help you to feel more relaxed, and will also have the added benefit of help helping you to be healthier. That's it for today. I hope you have a great week and I'll see you next week. So there you have it, an episode of"Teachers in Transition." I hope you enjoyed the information and I hope you'll plan to come back. Please subscribe to"Teachers in Transition" so that you can be alerted of future episodes. And let me know if you have any questions or topics that you would like me to specifically cover in a future episode. I'm more than happy to help with individual questions as well. So email me at KittyBoitnott@BoitnottCoaching.com. If you are interested in finding a new career or just enjoying your life more, this is the place to start. Hi, I'm Kitty Boitnott and this is"Teachers in Transition."