{"id":8695,"date":"2013-04-22T06:33:39","date_gmt":"2013-04-22T06:33:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/acneeinstein.com\/?p=1061"},"modified":"2018-11-03T11:48:53","modified_gmt":"2018-11-03T11:48:53","slug":"study-shows-how-to-breathe-yourself-happy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/acneeinstein.com\/study-shows-how-to-breathe-yourself-happy\/","title":{"rendered":"Study Shows How To Breathe Yourself Happy"},"content":{"rendered":"

Controlling stress and emotions is one of the hardest challenges for acne patients. It\u2019s not like someone checks with you whether you want to get stressed or whether you want to have a bout of depression with your ice cream. Stress and emotional responses are largely involuntary, and damage control after the fact is often the best you can do, that is, if you remember to do it. Practices like meditation can, over long term, change your habitual reactions, but this takes a lot of time and effort.<\/p>\n

Fortunately, a study titled Respiratory feedback in the generation of emotion<\/a> offers new hope. It showed that different emotions are associated with different breathing patterns. The study found that people breathe differently when they are angry to when they are happy, and that if you match your breathing pattern to the one associated with happiness, you start to feel happier.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve written earlier how your emotions respond to what your body does<\/a>, for example forcing yourself to smile makes you feel happier<\/a>. Breathing is another one of these feedback loops between the mind and the body, technically known as peripheral feedback.<\/p>\n

Change your breathing, change your emotions<\/h2>\n

The study was done in two parts. In the first part the participants were asked to generate few specific emotions (joy, anger, fear, and sadness) by changing their breathing patterns and recalling memories that trigger those emotions. Afterwards they were asked to fill a questionnaire that queried attributes of breathing (depth, frequency, regularity, etc).<\/p>\n

The breathing pattern associated with each emotion was remarkably consistent across all the participants. Furthermore, these patterns were consistent with the patterns observed in other studies where emotions were elicited with movies. This suggests there\u2019s \u2018a signature breathing pattern\u2019 associated with each emotion.<\/p>\n

In the second part of the study the researchers wanted to see if changing breathing patterns also changes emotional state. And indeed it does. A second group of participants was asked to modify their breathing patterns based on the findings from the first part of the study.  So every participant was asked to do happiness breathing, anger breathing, etc. They were then asked to fill a questionnaire to elicit their emotional state.<\/p>\n

The researchers found that each breathing pattern reliably shifted emotions towards the emotion associated with the pattern. So happiness breathing made people happier and anger breathing made them feel angrier.<\/p>\n

Signature breathing patterns<\/strong><\/p>\n

Here are the breathing patterns used in the second part, so you can try this at home:<\/p>\n