July 18, 2023
I’ve always had a hard time letting go. For years, I’ve woken up at 3am and not been able to go back to sleep. My mind starts working over problems, worrying about things I can’t possibly change until the next morning. Sometimes the worries are work-related, other times they’re personal. Either way, after around thirty minutes of struggling, the ability to fall back to sleep is defeated. Feelings of helplessness, frustration and dread arise as the light of dawn brightens behind the curtains and the birds begin to chirp and sing.
The insomniac cycle is simple: you can't fall asleep because of anxieties, so you become anxious about falling asleep, so on and so forth. But I found a solution, built on years of research and practice: I learned some simple breathing exercises. Now, when my mind starts churning, I regain control of my brain by mobilizing my body using breathwork. Within minutes, I'm fast asleep.
I got lucky. I began working for Breathonics and started practicing breathing exercises, because that was my job. Initially, I was just trying to learn our product, to understand the value we were providing and how the breathwork techniques worked. Being a life-long asthmatic, I have a lot of experience and know-how with breath control. I’ve spent hundreds of hours learning to relax my lungs, to get over an attack, or to stop one from happening. It’s hard, and it’s not always successful. This is one of the reasons I was curious about Breathonics, and the idea of breathing exercises accompanied by quality music.
I worked at Breathonics for about three months, still plagued by mid-sleep anxieties, before I realized the solution was right in front of me. I started doing breathing exercises in bed, and it helped. I was able to get back to sleep.
At first I simply practiced whichever breathing pattern I could recall, just trying to calm my body as quickly as I could. But after a few weeks, I started to try out Breathonics' sleep-focused protocol, the Blanket breath. I can't even stay awake to finish a set of this exercise. These simple breathwork techniques have been transformational, putting body over mind, calming the stressors of my workday, worries in my personal life and let me rest and recharge.
