Your Body Has a Brake Pedal — Most of Us Forget to Use It

We spend a lot of time talking about managing stress. Here’s something rather more useful:

your breathing is one of the few automatic bodily processes you can deliberately change.

You breathe without thinking about it, but you can also take control of it.

And that gives us a remarkably simple wellbeing tool.

When we’re tense or rushing, breathing can become faster and shallower. Deliberately slowing it down can influence the autonomic nervous system — including increasing parasympathetic activity, the part associated with the body’s rest-and-digest state.

You don’t need an app, incense or twenty minutes of spare time.

Try this:

Breathe in gently through your nose.

Breathe out slowly.

Make the exhale a little longer than the inhale.

Repeat for a couple of minutes.

Don’t force enormous breaths. Comfortable and slow is the point. If you feel light-headed, simply stop and breathe normally.

I particularly like doing this naked.

Not because nudity somehow makes breathing medically more effective — there’s no evidence for that — but because without clothing I notice my body differently. I can actually see and feel my abdomen and ribcage moving.

It becomes less about doing a breathing exercise and more about paying attention to something my body has been quietly doing since the moment I was born.

That’s the spiritual and physical parts of my Wellness Wheel meeting somewhere beautifully ordinary.

And as autumn pushes more of our naturist lives indoors, practices like this remind me why naturism never needs to hibernate.

Sometimes wellbeing isn’t about adding something new to our lives.

Sometimes it’s noticing what was already there.

When did you last spend two minutes doing absolutely nothing except noticing yourself breathe?