If someone asks you to hold your breath, do you? Maybe when you are learning to swim. How about the opposite? What does it mean to you when someone says Don’t hold your breath? My understanding is that the phrase hints at an inverted promise—the notion of not following through on something or not believing that something is going to happen.
On a biological level, I would say do hold your breath. Hold your breath briefly. I’ll tell you why.
It is common knowledge that when people become anxious or stressed, they have a tendency to breathe in a dysregulated way. Either they fall into a pattern of really shallow breathing or they are overcome by heaves of desperation like they just can’t find a breath at all. A calming no-cost tool we all carry within us is the capacity to focus on our breath and bring it back to a state of rhythm when it has flown out of flow.
Since breathing is an unconscious act our body partakes in, it’s unique that we can choose how we breathe. We can control it. You might argue that we can also control our heart beat by focusing on calm or by exercising intensely, but the miraculous thing about breath is that you can really tune into each breath and notice it. With the heart you can’t really hold a beat and then let it pulse into the next beat at a specific rate—at least I have not experienced such coronary puppeteering. Perhaps it exists.
You can blink at will and notice the effects your eyes experience when getting cleared by your built-in windshield wipers. You can pause the blinks and feel dry-eyed, holding back the tears. You can blink in flutters to seem alluring, or think of something sad and cry as directed by a movie producer. But I would assert that holding your blinks has less effect than holding your breath. Without breath you are not alive. Without blinks, you can probably find remedies and work-arounds for such deficit of body function.
Holding your breath can rob you of precious oxygen. I think that is why people say, Don’t hold your breath. If I told you I would be back with a big bag of coffee beans but am not sure if the farmers market has them in stock this late in the day, I might say that I’ll be back with the beans, but Don’t hold your breath. The literal translation would be that if you hold your breath up until the occasion I bring back the beans, you might be holding your breath forever, or at least for an indeterminate amount of time. So don’t do that.
In recent years I have learned that one effective calming technique is to inhale, pause to hold that breath in, and then exhale. This provides a feeling of safety and comfort as oxygen is embraced from within. Holding a deep breath assures the body that there is plenty of oxygen available. I could have really used this knowledge back in the day, but better late than never!
After a deep breath in, taking a moment before exhaling convinces your body that you have the luxury of time. There is no rush. It may not be true overall, but for a few moments, that’s what your body needs to believe in order for you to unwind from tension. Try telling your body not to hurry, until it’s time to hurry.
One breath takes up very little time, so you can surely afford the extra seconds to take a pause before letting go. In fact, if you are feeling out of sorts, you can reset your state of mind and emotional levels by inhaling for 7 seconds, holding your breath for 3 seconds, and exhaling for 9 seconds. There are countless variations on these numbers, so I encourage you to find the perfect mathematical combination that works for you, that brings you down from your high or up from your low, to a place of ease and balance. There you go and there you have it.
So it’s okay to hold your breath. Just do it briefly and with full lungs. Then let it out and feel the release. Make sure your craft is stocked with ample supplies. So you can make the journey.
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