Personal Development
Stress Management
Breathing Techniques
Breathing Made Easy - To Manage Stress and Reduce Anxiety
4.5 (60 ratings)
Course Ratings are calculated from individual students’ ratings and a variety of other signals, like age of rating and reliability, to ensure that they reflect course quality fairly and accurately.
2,358 students enrolled

Breathing Made Easy - To Manage Stress and Reduce Anxiety

Learn and use diaphragmatic breathing to manage stress, reduce anxiety, and become more focused and effective.
4.5 (60 ratings)
Course Ratings are calculated from individual students’ ratings and a variety of other signals, like age of rating and reliability, to ensure that they reflect course quality fairly and accurately.
2,358 students enrolled
Created by Randy Paterson
Last updated 3/2016
English
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Breathing Made Easy - To Manage Stress and Reduce Anxiety
Current price: $41.99 Original price: $59.99 Discount: 30% off
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This course includes
  • 1.5 hours on-demand video
  • 7 downloadable resources
  • Full lifetime access
  • Access on mobile and TV
  • Certificate of Completion
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What you'll learn
  • Understand the physiology of breathing and stress.
  • Learn a structured exercise to activate diaphragmatic breathing.
  • Use a sequential practice to develop the skill in more challenging situations.
  • Use signs of stress as cues to relax rather than signals to tense up even further.
Requirements
  • None.
Description

Join our community of over 1900 students learning to manage stress better!

Umm, I think I already know how to breathe.

Yes, almost certainly. And you also know that when you are stressed or anxious your breathing changes. These shifts can feed forward and produce additional symptoms of stress, including lightheadedness, dizziness, chest pressure, a tendency to increase muscle tension, and paresthesias (numbness and tingling in the extremities).

The stress response developed to help us cope with marauding tigers, but it also switches on when we're confronted with an angry boss, screaming kids, orthat lookfrom our partner. It produces changes in various parts of our body that we're not used to controlling directly. It would be great to have a handle we could use to ramp stress down - something influenced by stress but over which we also have clear conscious control. That handle is proper breathing.

This course provides instruction in four-stage breathing, an exercise designed to activate the diaphragm, enhance awareness of the distinction between diaphragmatic and intercostal breathing, and provide a strategy you can use to enhance your control over the stress response. You'll start out practicing when you're calm and relaxed, then use it in gradually more difficult situations, until you can practice in the middle of that challenging business meeting - and no one will be the wiser.

You'll get a series of twelve brief lectures, plus downloadable PDF text material on diaphragmatic breathing exercises and how to link your practice to stressful situations.

30 Day Guarantee: Not sure? You don't have to be. We have a 30-day complete money back guarantee, no questions asked.

Who this course is for:
  • Anyone can learn this skill. Those with asthma or other lung conditions should consult a physician before practicing. Those who have panic attacks are also cautioned that early practice can produce symptoms of anxiety in some individuals.
Course content
Expand all 16 lectures 01:36:31
+ – Breathing for Beginners
2 lectures 14:33

Welcome to the course. A bit about your instructor, and a rationale for learning to work with one's breathing. Some cautions for those with breathing related disorders.

Introductions and Cautions
Preview 04:12

Why lungs can't inflate and deflate on their own. The muscle groups responsible for breathing, and how to tell which ones you are using at any given time.

The Physiology of Breathing
10:21
+ – How do you Breathe Normally - or Under Stress?
3 lectures 10:15

An introduction to the world's cheapest form of biofeedback: your hands. A two minute exercise to see how you breathe naturally.

Your Baseline Breathing
Preview 04:33

The relationship between breathing and stress. Other stress-related symptoms. Why focus on breathing if so many other things are changing too?

Stress and Breathing
Preview 05:42

This nine-page document discusses the nature of the stress response - with an emphasis on how and why the response developed and what happens in your body when it becomes active.

Questions and Answers About Stress
9 pages
+ – Intercostal Breathing and Overbreathing
2 lectures 09:47

A two minute exercise in which we shut down the diaphragm and breathe only using the intercostal muscles, watching what happens when we do so.

Intercostal Breathing
05:54

An interesting design glitch in the human body, and why breathing into a paper bag might just work if you feel like you are suffocating. We have a better plan than a paper bag coming up, however.

Overbreathing and Symptoms
03:53
+ – Diaphragmatic Breathing and the Four-Stage Practice
4 lectures 22:47

Here we deliberately breathe using the diaphragm, comparing the volume of each breath with the volume attained using intercostal breathing.

Breathing with the Diaphragm
06:17

Time to put it all together and conduct four-stage breathing. A practice session and some troubleshooting. You also get a summary handout pdf.

Four Stage Breathing
10:52

This document summarizes what you've learned so far, and provides tips on using the four-stage breathing exercise.

Breathe and Read: The Diaphragmatic Breathing Handout
5 pages

Now that you know the exercise, how and where do you practice? A strategy for learning in the easiest possible setting and position, then making it more challenging.

The Breathing Practice
05:38
+ – Taking it To Go: Breathing Practice for Everyday Life
4 lectures 12:26

Once you've been practicing for a while, you can use the exercise in situations that normally cause you to increase your tension level, changing the cue to a signal to relax instead. Plus: Two exercise sheets to help you plan this work.

Cue Controlled Relaxation
08:36

This written exercise invites you to consider the various symptoms of stress you commonly experience, and the sequence in which they develop. You can use early symptoms as cues to intervene using the breathing procedure.

Identifying Internal Cues
3 pages

Everyone experiences certain repetitive situations that routinely elicit the stress response: arriving at work, attending the monthly meeting, having to talk in front of the condo committee, meeting new people. In this written exercise you list some of the most common situations that stress you out, then select just one or two (to begin with) before which you pledge to practice the breathing skill. Once you are good at these, you can add others.

Identifying External Cues
4 pages

A few final words and recommendations for ongoing practice.

Course Wrapup
03:50
+ – Optional Postscript: Breathe Along With This
1 lecture 05:43

An optional guided four-minute practice session, intended to be used only a few times (if at all) before you practice on your own, away from your computer.

A Guided Breathing Session
05:43