"The Surprising Way to Tame Stress Fast."
Learning to breathe deeply can foster relaxation. These breathing exercises can help you get started.

Life can sometimes be stressful. Health worries, financial concerns—even watching the news—can get you wound up.

And feeling tense isn’t just unpleasant, it’s also bad for your health. Chronic stress can contribute to or worsen sleep problems, headaches, gastrointestinal issues, high blood pressure, and depression and anxiety.

But there’s an easy, natural way to counteract stress: Take a deep breath.

Why Deep Breathing Is Calming

High-stress situations make you feel tense because they activate your sympathetic nervous system. This triggers the well-known fight-or-flight response, says Willie E. Lawrence Jr., MD, a preventive cardiologist and chief medical officer with the Cardiac and Vascular Interventional Group in Dallas. As a result, you breathe quickly and shallowly, your heart rate spikes, and your arteries narrow, which raises your blood pressure.

Breathing deeply counteracts this. It activates your diaphragm, a muscle at the bottom of your ribs, which stimulates the vagus nerve that runs from the brain to the abdomen. This activates your parasympathetic nervous system, lowers stress hormones, slows breathing, and brings your heart rate and blood pressure back to normal. The result: You start feeling calmer and more relaxed. Slowing your exhalations can enhance this, Lawrence says.

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Read more at: https://www.consumerreports.org/health/stress/the-surprising-way-to-tame-stress-fast-a1529084218/
 

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