1: Maury was referred to Gay Hendricks by a local psychologist who had read about Gay’s work with breathing and anxiety.
Maury explained how his anxiety was blocking his professional advancement.
“It took only ten seconds to see what the real problem was,” Gay writes in The Genius Zone. “He held his breath against his feelings. I noticed right away that when he talked about his anxiety, he would tighten his belly muscles and push his breathing up into his chest.”
Gay explains: “It’s one of the most common problems that besets us as humans. We often have ancient feelings stirring in us, but the expression of those feelings is frowned upon in modern society. If we’re getting berated by our boss, we may have the urge to pummel him with a cudgel or run screaming from the room, but most of us learn at an early age to curtail those impulses and stuff them away.”
Our breathing sits at the intersection of how we actually feel and how we must pretend to feel to navigate the social situation we find ourselves in.
“Our breathing is run by both our ancient autonomic nervous system and the conscious thinking machinery in our modern cortex,” Gay explains.
We “can easily verify this: We can consciously choose to take a big breath, but we can also forget about our breathing for hours at a time and it will do just fine on its own. For that reason, our breathing is perfectly positioned as an intermediary between our conscious and unconscious minds.”
Our breath reflects our feelings and emotions. It “has been refined over millions of years to reflect our emotional state,” he notes. When we “turn the searchlight of awareness on our breathing, we have a clear window into the feelings and sensations that are attempting to deliver us important information.”
Let’s say we are walking in the woods. If a grizzly bear is walking toward us, our brains register a threat and release a shot of adrenaline into our bloodstream.
“Within a split second,” Gay observes, “our muscles tighten, our heart pumps faster, our breathing quickens and shifts up higher in our chest. In the twitch of an eye our bodies are prepared for the Four F’s: fight, flee, freeze, or faint.”
While we don’t deal with bears on a regular basis, “if wild animals were all we had to deal with, modern life would be luxurious indeed,” he writes. “Our modern lives have stresses our cave-person ancestors never had to deal with. Foul air, food drenched in chemicals, the din of traffic, the background chant of alarming news—these are the grizzlies we face every day.
“Our bodies respond to these modern stresses with the same internal wiring inherited from our days of fending off sabertooth tigers and club-wielding neighbors.”
To increase our overall well-being, we must learn how to handle the ancient feelings that we feel.
What tool do we have to do that? Awareness of our breathing. Which “can really assist us with issues related to fear, anger, sexual attraction, and grief,” Gay notes. “With a bit of practice, we can turn our ancient feelings into a source of power.”
2: Gay’s #1 recommendation to increase our health and happiness is to notice when our breathing shifts up into our chests.
“It does that when we’re angry and when we’re scared,” he shares. “The important thing to remember is that when we get angry about something, we’re usually scared, too. Look for those two feelings to occur in tandem.”
When we notice our breathing shifting into our chests, we can ask ourselves, “What am I angry about?” What am I scared of?
“From a practical standpoint,” Gay writes, “it is incredibly important to explore the fear that is usually hidden underneath whatever we’re angry about.”
Why? Because when we “name and acknowledge the fear beneath our anger, we can get to the source of the energy that has been causing our anger to recycle.”
One day, Joan, a vice president of a large bank, came to visit Gay, complaining about chronic pain. “She had a house, a husband, two children, and a career on the ascendance,” he writes, “but she couldn’t enjoy any of this because her life was plagued by headaches.”
Joan was taking medications for her headaches that not only made her tired but also made her feel like she was on the edge of nausea.
“I was intrigued,” Gay recalls, “when I heard her describe one of the side effects she was attributing to the drug: ‘on the edge of nausea.’ That’s nearly exactly the same phrase I use with clients to coach them on the emotion of fear. I ask them to pay attention to an edge-of-nausea sensation, a slight queasiness in the stomach. When those sensations are there, we’re usually scared about everything.”
She explained two specific situations often triggered her headaches. Being criticized and being asked to do something that she felt was unreasonable, like when the bank president would appear five minutes before closing with an urgent problem she needed to handle.
Gay spent an hour showing Joan how to use awareness of her breathing to prevent her headaches. “Here’s what I showed her,” he writes: “When we’re scared, our muscles tighten and our breath shifts up higher in our chest.”
Gay continued to work with her. In time, she built up her confidence to name and express her feelings.
One afternoon Joan’s boss asked her to stay after closing time to handle a situation. “Instead of keeping her feelings stuffed inside, she told him that she got angry and scared when he made such requests,” Gay writes. “She said it put her in a bind because she was scared to displease him and also scared that she wouldn’t pick up her son from soccer practice on time and get home to cook dinner for the family.
“To her amazement, her boss didn’t get angry with her for communicating so honestly,” he notes. “Quite the opposite, in fact. He apologized and invited her to let him know about other things he did that stimulated her anger and fear.
“Not surprisingly,” Gay shares, “the frequency of her headaches declined rapidly after the conversation and faded away completely after a few months.”
3: Maury, Gay’s patient whose anxiety was blocking his professional advancement, achieved similar results. Â
“I showed him how he was fighting to control his anxiety by restricting his breath and tensing muscles in the belly area where our biggest sensations of fear live,” Gay notes.
“I explained how he was trying to push his rising anxiety back down into his belly by turning his breathing upside down. With a normal, healthy breath, we relax our belly muscles and allow the in breath to go all the way to fullness. Maury was doing the exact opposite. Attempting to shut out his anxiety, he tightened his belly muscles when he breathed in, preventing him from ever getting a full breath.
“With an hour of coaching, Maury got his breath right side up,” he writes. “He breathed with his anxiety instead of against it, allowing himself to feel the emotion instead of trying to pretend it wasn’t there.
“Breath is designed to flow with our emotions, not to be used as a weapon against them,” Gay notes. “The moment we figure this out, the body rewards us with rushes of good feelings where the anxiety used to be.”
More tomorrow!
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Reflection: Am I aware of how my breathing changes when I’m stressed or anxious, and what hidden emotions might be driving those changes?
Action: Practice noticing my breath throughout the day, especially in challenging moments, and use it as a cue to explore and name the feelings beneath my reactions.
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