You’re about to learn 2 little-known techniques to manage stress. These 2 simple breathing exercises are super easy, you feel great when you practise them and easily help you manage your stress. Both breathing technique have been studied at top universities like Harvard Medical School and Stanford University.

Later, I will demonstrate for you these two techniques in a video below.

The first technique I discovered from neuroscientist Andrew Huberman, who runs a lab at Stanford University in California.

This first technique is really, really great for athletes and is awesome for oxygenating your blood which gives you more endurance and stamina. So, for example, for elite athletes who are either doing endurance training, power-lifting or planning to run a marathon and you’re just hitting the wall and you’re just at the end and you just need just that little extra push. 

What you do is you take two short breaths and then along, followed by a long exhale. So it would be something like this, see my video demonstration.

Let me do that again, so you take two short inhales so it could be through the mouth as well. However, I recommend to my students to inhale through the nose.

What you’re doing to your body is this you are releasing a high amount of carbon dioxide and at the same time oxygenating your blood according to research by neuroscientists and physiological studies. Cool, eh…???

The result of this cool breathing technique is that it gives you more strength, more endurance and more power for your sport or whatever physical activity you’re doing. 

So if you’re mountain climbing and you just need that extra edge just to get over the next cables to go over, you might be a good thing to try out.

The second technique which taught to military personnel, particularly elite military personnel, when they’re in a high-stress environment such as a war situation and you’re being shot at this one technique they teach soldiers how to relax and how to decompress, so to speak, from the stress. 

Well, you can use the same technique if you get stressed out at work or personal life or whatever. 

And the technique is really, really simple. 

And how do they do this?

It’s a matter of just laying down one hundred and eighty degrees horizontal, relaxing and taking in a deep breath and exhaling while at the same time doing a body scan. 

So you would think about perhaps the skin on your forehead and as you take a deep breath.

And then you imagine feeling the skin on your face and take in a long breath.

And then you might feel your neck and the muscles in your neck and take a deep breath.

Now, what this actually does is activates the sympathetic nervous system, which is responsible for stress response and activates the systematic nervous system which is responsible for our digestive system and also for relaxation. 

You see, being in a stressful state can be really useful and it’s a good thing at times, (see video bad vs. good stress) but it’s not good to be there for extended periods of time, meaning a little bit of stress might be good for you. It gets you to jump out of the way of the oncoming bus. Right. Or maybe a little bit of stress at work can be useful to get that project done. 

There was a study done by Yerks and Dodson years ago at Harvard University near the turn of the century early 1900s. And it shows that people perform better under a little bit of stress. 

But here is the twist, if that stress is prolonged for a long period of time, your productivity declines rapidly. 

Here you can see a slight of the Yerks and Dodson study.