Breathe – The Simple, Revolutionary 14-Day Program to Improve Your Mental and Physical Health by Belisa Vranch.
It is very ironic that as I read this book, I heard three other people talk about how important breathing is to our health. One of them is a close friend who was having hip pain during running. The physical therapist said it was the result of breathing incorrectly and gave her breathing exercises to work on.
The author was a clinical psychologist and she teaches classes on breathing. She tries in this book to give us the same information she teaches in her class. She says that teaching people how to breathe is giving them the easiest life hack ever. Breathing can help with physical issues with your body and emotional issues with your mind. She shows us how to measure how we breathe and then gives the steps on how to improve it and then you measure it again at the end. Her whole process only takes 14 days to start retraining your body to breathe appropriately. She challenges us to make a workout plan for the breathing just like we were would if we were going to run or go to the gym. She has illustrations with the instructions to help with the different breathing methods. One of the reasons that breathing is so important is that proper breathing nurses the cells of our body with oxygen and optimizes the function of the body on all levels. She says by changing our breathing will be able to control stress better. Our bodies main source of energy is oxygen. I believe I even read that our brain uses 20% of that oxygen. Once we start breathing more affectively we will also start feeling less stiffness in her neck and shoulders. We should be breathing from the diaphragm. She calls that the lower level breathing. It will feel like a workout even for people who actually work out. They may not be using the right breathing muscles and they will be able to feel a difference. She takes us through the four basic exercises that she teaches in her class.
She also calls out how important sleeping is and the relation to forgetfulness and memory loss due to lack of sleep and lack of oxygen. I would highly recommend this book. And I think I feel it’s even more credible because I’ve been hearing the same thing from several different people within the last 30 days.
At the end of the book she share some take away points she summarizes them. She has a glossary of the types of breathing. I also recommend checking out her website where she shares even more information on breathing.
Dr. Belisa Vranich is a renowned clinical psychologist, public speaker, and the author of Breathe: The Simple, Revolutionary 14-Day Program to Improve your Mental and Physical Health (St. Martin’s Press/Hay House).
As founder of The Breathing Class™, Dr. Belisa has taught and lectured nationwide on topics related to dysfunctional breathing patterns and stress. Unique in its straightforward approach, The Breathing Class™ addresses both physical and psychological problems related to oxygenation that is out of balance, and teaching people to breathe in an anatomically congruous way that maximizes balanced inhales and exhales.
Her website is : The Breathing Class