I find myself telling Azzan to “take a deep breath” with more frequency than I did nine months ago. In truth, I find I need to take more deep breaths these days. The “blissful ignorance” that marked Azzan’s initial experience with the pandemic seems to be the case no longer. After months of wearing a mask and keeping his “space” from people, awareness has replaced ignorance. As winter has limited his outdoor time and activities, and stopped what little facetime (socially distanced masked-time) he had with others, a mundane routine has supplanted the bliss. My three-year-old has more and more “threenager” moments, and I have to remind him to take a deep breath.
We might all have heard that deep breathing helps counteract stress, but there is more to it than that. In a 2017 Forbes Magazine article, David DiSalvo highlights the scientific benefits of deep breathing as discovered by several studies. A 2016 study located a neural circuit in the brainstem that is thought to be the essential part of the “breathing-brain control connection.” This circuit appears to be part of the brain’s “breathing pacemaker,” and the rhythm of our breathing controls activity levels in this neural circuit, which affects our emotional state. In a separate study, researchers measured the brain’s activities through EEGs and found that deep breathing influences activity throughout the brain, particularly in the regions having to do with emotions. They also found that those who took deliberate breaths had more organized patterns of activity in the brain regions related to emotion, memory, and awareness. Other studies outlined in this article share that in addition to affecting our emotions and reducing stress, deep breathing regulates blood pressure, lowers the risk of stroke and cerebral aneurysms, improves memory, and can support immune and metabolic health?
We might all be finding that we enter this New Year having to take more deep breaths than in years past. Or maybe we are holding our breath. This New Year is certainly not like others we have experienced. As a society, we find we have more to mourn than to celebrate; we have had more losses (many kinds of losses), more uncertainty, and more unknowns await us in 2021. This year might not seem like a year for resolutions, as we don’t know exactly how to make plans to execute those resolutions. Take a deep breath.
And while you take a deep breath, also be kind. First, be kind to yourself. If you don’t have a resolution, if stress/comfort/boredom eating has tipped the scale, if working from home while watching your kids has resulted in more screen-time, if your house isn’t tidy, if the projects you started nine months ago have been abandoned, if your patience is strained, or if you are not excelling at several other things that we are all trying to balance, take a deep breath and be kind to yourself. These are challenging times, and kindness will go a long way. When you are kind to yourself, you have the mental capacity and emotional fortitude to be kind to those in your home when the stress levels are running high, to frontline workers at the grocery stores or doctors’ offices, to customer service agents when calls take an inordinately long time, to coworkers who might be missing the mark, to the nurses who are exhausted, or to your kid’s teachers who are figuring out how to hold your child’s attention over a screen. When we understand that we need kindness from ourselves, we can more easily understand and recognize when others need our kindness.
We may not have a whole lot of resolutions for this New Year, but let us resolve to take a deep breath and to be kind. Jesus’ words, “do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” have never been as important.