PTSD & Breathwork: How to Calm Your Body When the Alarm Won’t Switch Off

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[sighs and gasps] Stand down. It is time to stand down. Imagine consciously knowing there's no imminent threat. That you're safe. But your body is acting as though you are not. Your heart rate is elevated. Your respiration rate, your breathing is fast. You're on alert. Maybe you can't sleep, can't settle. A sound, a situation, or a scene activates you and puts you on alert. Puts your whole system on edge. For almost 4 years, I've been volunteering my time at the local VA hospital, working with a pulmonologist to bring breathwork to veterans. One of the things I hear again and again is how powerful it is when

they learn and understand their breath. Today, I want to show you how and why you can use your breath to influence how you feel. I want to be careful here because PTSD is complex. Everyone's experience is different and symptoms show up in different ways. I'm not a psychologist. I'm not a psychiatrist. And I'm certainly not suggesting that breathing takes the place for fact or historically based professional PTSD treatment. But understanding the nervous system and how you can influence gives us a great place to start. PTSD or post-traumatic stress disorder is a mental condition that is often experienced after seeing, witnessing, or experiencing trauma. Symptoms can

include memories, flashbacks, avoidance, changes in your behavior, sudden elevation and changes of mood, difficulty sleeping, concentrating, irritability, that hypervigilance, and exaggerated startle response. That's a wide range of experiences and I know there are more, but there is one area that is especially relevant to breath work and that's arousal and reactivity. Think about your nervous system as having an alarm. And if you're genuinely in a situation of danger or under threat, you want that alarm to be switched on. Your breathing elevates, your heart rate increases, energy gets sent to your muscles ready to run to or run from something. Your attention becomes focused on those potential

threats and this is exactly what survival physiology is designed to do. But with PTSD, something as simple as a memory, a sound, one of those triggers can have us activated and turn that alarm on when the threat can be long past. And this is where breathing can help change our physiology, change our state in a short period of time. But with PTSD, reminders or triggers can activate that alarm and put us in that elevated physiological threat assessment state. And that is where breathing comes in and can be a powerful tool to change our state. Breathing is something that is automatic, but it is also something

that we can control. You may not be able to control your trigger, but your breath gives you the ability to change your response. When we're activated or in an elevated state, our breathing patterns change. We tend to speed up our breath, breathe through our mouth, and often unconsciously we'll hold our breath. All of this tends to elevate our body's response to that stimulus. So, imagine doing the opposite. Instead of using your mouth, you use your nose. Instead of breathing into your chest, you breathe lower into your belly. Instead of speeding up your breath, you slow it down. All of this choreographs together to send different

information to your body. The VA's National Center for PTSD actually recommends using breath and using breath practices to alleviate the symptoms of stress, anxiety, and PTSD. You're not trying to breathe away the trauma. You're simply using your breath to help navigate your body's response to it. What the research says, and this isn't purely anecdotal, researchers studied breath-based interventions with veterans with PTSD. One small randomized study of veterans found that a breathing-based meditation program was associated with reduced symptoms of PTSD, anxiety, and respiration rate. Another randomized VA study of 85 veterans compared a breath-based meditation practice with cognitive processing therapy and found similar and favorable results.

But here's the important part of the research. It is ongoing and still developing, and the VA does not currently look at replacing or using breathwork to replace evidence-based PTSD therapy. So I look at breathing differently. Breathing isn't about changing or stopping treatment. It's about putting another tool in your toolbox. And that tool just happens to be available to you almost anywhere. If you're feeling activated, I don't want you to start with deep, activated, super ventilative type breaths, long breath holds. I want you to start with your awareness, simply noticing where your breath pattern is. Am I breathing fast? Am I breathing slow? Am I breathing

shallow into my chest, or am I breathing deeply down into my belly? Are you're holding your breath. Next, I want you to shift I want you to shift from breathing through your mouth to breathing through your nose, if that's available to you. And then I want you to start to extend your breath. I want your inhale to slow down, and I certainly want your exhale to be longer than what might actually feel normal. And then I will So, it is l- So, it is breathing low slow through your nose. Bring that breath down into your belly and gently relaxing that breath back out. So, I

want you to concentrate or focus on your breath, and we're going to do a couple of breaths here together. We're going to be breathing in through a count of four, and we're going to breathing out for a count of six. So, let's get our breaths synchronized here together. Here we go. Three two one in [snorts] three four out two three four five six in low slow with the nose out long low steady let it go. Breathing in for a count of four and out two three four five six No forcing no huge breaths and there's no competition. Just slow controlled breathing. And remember, we're not

trying to force calm. We're creating conditions that makes calm possible. What I've learned from veterans one of the reasons that this subject matter and this population is so important to me is what I've learned before, during, and after sessions at the VA. It's a common refrain that I'm told how powerful it was to simply learn and understand their breathing physiology and how to take a proper breath. And it is empowering that they now have a tool that can help them change when they're in an activated state. You don't need special equipment. You don't need to leave a room. You don't even need to wait until

you are in that activated or familiar panicked state. Using and learning and training these breathing patterns while you're in a more relaxed state makes them much more available to you when those telltale signs of PTSD arrive. So, if you're living with PTSD or the effects of, or maybe you have high levels of anxiety and stress, I'm not going to pretend for a minute that breathing in for four and out for six is going to solve something that's complex as trauma. It won't. Your breath simply becomes one more way to understand your body, to regulate your nervous system, and potentially create a little more time between

trigger and response. You can't always control what your nervous system reacts to, but you can learn tools that help influence what happens next.