Feeling Anxious or Stressed? My Colour Breathing Practice Will Help

Colour Breathing is a highly effective technique to help when you’re feeling stressed, anxious, upset, angry or any other negative emotion. In this short video, I guide you through the practice, which will help you feel calmer, more relaxed and at peace. Used daily, Colour Breathing will help calm your mind, body and nervous system.

I hope that helps – for more techniques like this, including breathwork, self-compassion, IFS and mindfulness techniques, visit my Insight Timer collection by clicking on the button below.

Love ❤️

Dan

Feeling Stressed? My Compassionate Breathing Practice Will Help

Here is a video of my Compassionate Breathing practice. You can use this any time you're feeling stressed, anxious, upset, agitated or if you're dealing with any kind of difficult emotion.

I hope you find it helpful – you will find this practice, as well as many other breathing techniques, mindfulness, self-compassion and IFS meditations, as well as guided-imagery techniques, in my Insight Timer collection: insighttimer.com/danrobertstherapy

Love ❤️

Dan

Ease Your Stress with Colour Breathing

Image by J Lee

How are you feeling, right now? Sadly, for many of us the answer would be anxious, agitated, irritable, frazzled – and, most of all, stressed. That’s because we live in a very stressful time, with challenges to our mental and physical health that our ancestors could not have imagined in their wildest dreams.

One of my recent posts was all about exercise – and why it’s such a crucial element of looking after both mind and body. But, as we all know, many of us don’t get enough exercise or simply move our bodies enough, throughout the day. We also consume too much caffeine and alcohol, as well as eating excessive amounts of sugary, processed and otherwise unhealthy food. This idea – that, for those of us in industrialised countries like the UK, the most damaging thing to our health is excess – is a very new one, because for most of human history we didn’t have enough, of anything.

Your ancestors, and mine, spent large portions of their day walking for mile after mile, hunting prey or searching for seasonal fruits, seeds and edible roots. They often had to endure periods of hardship and even famine. Life was dominated by not having enough food, rather than too much of it.

So it’s a weird time to be human. Too much stuff. Too much sitting. Too much junk food, constantly within reach, that tastes good but damages your body.

Busyness as a badge of honour

The other weird thing about being a 21st-century human is just how hectic and stressful day-to-day life is. We are all (myself included) so damn busy these days, aren’t we? Everyone I know spends most of their waking hours rushing around, meeting one deadline after another, working long days – in fact, working all the time, because work follows us home now, in a way it never used to. And, weirdly, this busyness has become a badge of honour – it’s something to be proud of, a goal in itself to fill our days with being ‘productive’, allowing no time to rest and be still.

I’m currently reading a brilliant book about how our attention has been hijacked by the goals, values and imperatives of capitalism in general and Big Tech in particular. And how to resist the constant pressure to be busy, distracted, hopping from one screen to the next from the moment we wake until we fall into a restless, fitful sleep. How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, by writer and artist Jenny Odell, champions time spent doing very little. Taking a break from the endless scrolling. Allowing yourself to be offline. Time to think, muse, daydream. It’s so important for the health of your brain, but so hard to do these days.

So, if your answer to the above question was ‘a bit stressed’, here’s a practice I created just for you. As regular readers will know, I am a big fan of mindfulness, as well as breathwork and other body-based practices to help manage tricky emotions and experiences. I love this practice because it combines those three things will adding an imaginary, visual element – which will provide a ‘healthy distraction’ if your mind is currently scattered and racing from one stressful thought to the next.

The practice

• Start by finding a comfortable sitting posture, on a straight-backed chair. Let your feet be flat and grounded on the floor. Gently roll your shoulders back and feel your chest open up, your lungs feeling expansive and open. This will help you breathe freely and deeply

• Close your eyes, if that feels comfortable for you, or soften and lower your gaze

• Scan your body and notice what you’re feeling, emotionally. You might be upset, angry, hurt, shocked, scared, threatened, agitated or feeling some other negative emotion

• Just let yourself feel whatever you’re feeling, for a few seconds

• Now focus on your body and mindfully scan your face, throat, arms, hands, chest, back and belly

• What do you notice? Perhaps tense, tight muscles. Maybe a sense of heat or rising energy in your chest. You might feel a tight knot, churning sensation or butterflies in your stomach

• There is no right or wrong way to feel, so just lean into whatever somatic sensations you are experiencing right now

• Check in with your posture, again rolling your shoulders back and letting them drop. Make sure you are sitting in an upright but relaxed posture

• Start slowing and deepening your breath, in through your nose and out through your mouth. Let your breaths be slow, deep and even, counting to four on the in-breath and four on the out-breath

• Keep breathing – slow, deep, smooth and steady, for a minute

• If you find yourself distracted by thoughts, memories, plans, worries or anything else, that’s perfectly normal. Your mind might keep circling back to whatever stressful situation you’re dealing with right now, which is fine. But when you notice you are distracted, just keep gently bringing your attention back to your body, back to the breath

• As you breathe in, know you’re breathing in. As you breathe out, know you’re breathing out

• Keep breathing deeply for another minute

• Now let’s add another element to this practice – as you breathe in, visualise a soothing colour. For some people that might be pink, purple, blue, green or gold, but just pick a colour that seems soothing for you

• And as you breathe in, imagine you are breathing in your soothing colour. See it travel in through your nostrils and down your throat, as it fills your lungs, chest, back and belly

• See your whole torso light up with this warm, gently soothing colour. Enjoy that for a minute

• Then on the out-breath, imagine you are expelling all that stressful energy – again, pick a colour that best represents your stressful feelings, which might be black, grey, red or some other strong colour

• As you breathe out, imagine exhaling every molecule of stress, blowing it out through your mouth like smoke, so it leaves your body for good and vanishes into the atmosphere

• Breathing in your soothing colour, breathing out your stress… Stay with that for a minute

• Again, if you get distracted it’s fine, just gently bring your attention back to your body, back to the breath, back to those colours flowing in and out for another minute

• Now you can let go of visualising the breath in this way and allow your breathing to find its natural rhythm

• Let go of all efforts and just sit, peacefully, feeling a sense of calm, ease and relaxation in your body and mind. Just enjoy that for a minute

• Then bring your focus to the weight of your body resting on the chair. Your feet on the ground. Sounds reaching your ears from all around

• Then when you’re ready, slowly open your eyes

• Now re-engage with the external world, carrying these feelings of calm, contentment and peace into the rest of your day

I hope you find that helpful – I will record this practice soon and add it to my Insight Timer collection, so you can listen whenever you need to de-stress and find a little calm and peace in your day.

Sending you love and warm thoughts,

Dan

Feeling Anxious or Stressed? Try 4-7-8 Breathing to Feel Calmer, Quickly

Image by Joshua Earle

Sometimes, we have to acknowledge that modern psychology doesn’t have all the answers. With great humility, we also have to realise that some of the most powerful, deeply healing techniques have been around for thousands of years. Take mindfulness, which only entered the Western medical mainstream in the 1970s. Mindfulness techniques were developed and taught by the Buddha 2,500 years ago, so it took us a while to catch up!

Another set of powerful techniques that have increasingly become mainstream are deep-breathing techniques, which can be incredibly helpful for any ‘hyperaroused’ (high-energy) state such as stress, anxiety, anger or agitation. Many of these techniques are part of the yogic tradition, which has been around for thousands of years (it’s hard to know exactly how long, but 5,000 years is an oft-quoted figure – let’s just say a long time).

These pranayama breathing techniques involve a whole host of practices, but this post will focus on 4-7-8 Breathing, which is incredibly powerful – what I call a ‘break the glass in case of emergency’ breathing technique, as opposed to the gentler Compassionate Breathing, which is also a key part of my therapy toolkit.

When should you use 4-7-8 breathing?

The first thing to say is that this isn’t one of those deep-breathing techniques you can surreptitiously use on the Tube, or in a meeting. It’s kind of loud and pretty funky, so it’s one for a quiet room, alone (or with your therapist, partner or a trusted friend/family member). As with Compassionate Breathing and Box Breathing (another ‘emergency’ technique I often teach people), this 4-7-8 Breathing involves abdominal/diaphragmatic breathing to help you move from a stress response to a relaxation response.

First, a little science (feel free to skip this bit if you want to go straight to the practice, below). Your heart, lungs, digestion and various other systems in your body are controlled by the autonomic nervous system. And this is divided into two branches, the sympathetic nervous system (SNS) and parasympathetic nervous system (PNS). The sympathetic branch is all about action and is a key part of the fight-flight response (fight being linked to the emotion of anger, flight to anxiety).

Put simply, this branch of the nervous system helps you mobilise for action to escape or fight off a life-or-death threat. So it’s pretty handy. But not so useful if you’re on a bus, or in a parent-teacher meeting, and are flooded with panic and anxiety. And sadly, if you’re a trauma survivor, you will probably have way too much SNS activation and not enough PNS in your life, so we need to fire up that parasympathetic system, which is involved in the rest-and-digest response and feelings of calm, relaxation, peacefulness and safety. The good stuff that we all want more of, but which can be elusive, especially if you’re chronically stressed or anxious.

The good news is that just a few minutes of 4-7-8 Breathing can quickly and powerfully activate the PNS, helping you move from stressed to more relaxed. Here’s how it works…

The practice

I would recommend trying this on your own in a quiet room. Switch your phone off and make sure you won’t be disturbed – take a few minutes out of your busy day, just for yourself. You can just count the breaths, slowly, in your head.

When you’re first learning, try to practice at least twice a day, but you can do it as often as you want. Only do it for four cycles in a row in the beginning. After you get used to it, you can work up to eight cycles in a row, throughout the day.

1. Start by adjusting your posture – gently roll your shoulders back and lengthen your spine, so you’re sitting in an upright but relaxed posture. You can close your eyes, or leave them open if you prefer.

2. Place your tongue against the back of your top teeth and keep it there.

3. Exhale completely through your mouth, making a whooshing sound (this might feel a bit silly at first, but give it a go). Try to get every molecule of air out of your lungs.

4. Close your mouth and inhale through your nose for a count of four.

5. Now hold your breath for a count of seven.

6. Exhale completely through your mouth, with added whooshing, for a count of eight. Get all that stale air out of your lungs…

7. This completes one cycle. Repeat for three more cycles.

Remember that, like any new technique, this might feel a bit weird, clunky or challenging at first. Try not to get discouraged – remember that practice makes perfect. Give it a go, for at least a few days.

If you really struggle (and some people do find this practice challenging, especially that long hold), switch to Box Breathing, Compassionate Breathing or just plain old deep breathing instead. As long as you breathe in through your nose, out through your mouth, and your belly is rising and falling with each breath, it should definitely help.

Warm wishes,

Dan

Don't Miss My Next Webinar: The Healing Power of Self-Compassion

Image by Taisiia Stupak

As part of my Heal Your Trauma project, I am offering a series of Zoom webinars throughout 2022. My second webinar – The Healing Power of Self-Compassion – will be held from 3-4.30pm on Saturday 28th May 2022.

One of the core values of this project is that everything is free, or priced affordably. So this 90-minute webinar costs just £29 to attend live, as well as gaining exclusive access to a video of the event, to watch whenever you like.

The Healing Power of Self-Compassion features 90 minutes of teaching, powerful exercises that will help you feel calmer and more relaxed, and a 15-minute Q&A with me.

In this powerful, highly experiential webinar you will learn:

• The key role that self-compassion plays in healing from any psychological problem, but especially trauma

• Key experiential exercises – such as breathing, guided meditations, journaling and imagery – you will learn to help you develop your self-compassion skills

• How self-compassion is crucial to help you deal with stress, anxiety, depression, low self-esteem, being overly self-critical, eating disorders, substance abuse and most other psychological problems

• And, during a 15-minute Q&A, you will get the chance to put your questions to Dan Roberts, Founder of Heal Your Trauma and an expert on trauma healing and developing self-compassion

Don’t miss this chance to learn from a leading trauma therapist and expert on mental health and wellbeing. Watch the video for more information and book your place now – for just £29 – using the button below.

Warm wishes,

Dan

Compassionate Breathing: A Step-By-Step Guide

This is a foundational practice that I use with all of my clients, to help them regulate their nervous system. You can use this practice any time you feel triggered and either ‘hyperaroused’ (high-energy states like being stressed, agitated, angry, upset, anxious) or ‘hypoaroused’ (low-energy states like being sad, ashamed, depressed or dissociated).

If you are a trauma survivor, you may experience one or both of these states on a daily basis, perhaps cycling between them – so having some simple, effective techniques to help manage that is crucial.

You can be guided by my video on Compassionate Breathing, below, but it’s helpful to read these guidelines first, to give you some idea of when to use the practice and what you are trying to achieve. The first two stages of the practice focus on calming and regulating your nervous system by adjusting the speed and depth of your breathing. I will send you a follow-up post which guides you through stages three and four, to help you generate self-compassion, sending warmth and kindness to the hurt little boy or girl inside.

It’s helpful to understand a little about the nervous system first. If you feel threatened and your brain decides that fight or flight are the best survival options, you feel either angry (signalling fight) or anxious (telling you that flight is the best option), your sympathetic nervous system is activated, you start ‘chest breathing’ (fast, shallow breaths from the top part of your lungs), your muscles tense up, heart rate increases and you get a bit shot of adrenaline/cortisol into your bloodstream.

All of this gives you strength and energy to either fight or flee – great news if you are faced with a hungry predator, not so good if you are on a busy Tube train. And if you can’t fight or flee, your brain triggers the freeze response, which can make you feel collapsed, exhausted, paralysed, spacey or numb.

This technique help you breathe deeply and abdominally, which is the opposite of fast, shallow chest breathing. And breathing abdominally stimulates the vagus nerve, which also stimulates the parasympathetic nervous system and the ‘rest and digest’ response to help you feel calmer, safer and more at peace – helpful whether you’re in a high- or low-energy state.

The practice

1. Adjust your posture. Make sure your feet are flat and grounded on the floor, then let your shoulders gently roll back so your chest feels spacious and open. Now lengthen your spine – sit upright but relaxed, with your head, neck and spine in alignment. Imagine an invisible piece of string attached to the top of your head, pulling you gently upright.

Sitting in this position helps you feel grounded, alert and stronger in your core. There is a great deal of research on the link between your posture and mood, so just a simple adjustment in posture can help you feel a bit more energised and stronger, with a subtle but noticeable uplift in your energy and mood.

2. Begin Compassionate Breathing. Close your eyes, take deep, slow breaths in through your nose and out through your mouth. Your breaths should be roughly four seconds in, four seconds out. Imagine that your abdomen is like a balloon, inflating on the in-breath, deflating on the out-breath. Keep breathing, noticing everything slowing down and letting your muscles start to relax.

Breathing this way should help you feel calmer within a minute or so, but if you have time, I recommend extending the practice for up to five minutes – it’s just deep breathing, so you can’t do it too much! I also love this practice because you can do it anywhere – on the bus, in a difficult meeting, at your desk…

Try using Compassionate Breathing every day, especially when you’re feeling triggered in any way. I very much hope that, over time, it will help you feel calmer, more relaxed and mindfully present in your day-to-day life.

Warm wishes,

Dan

Try Box Breathing to Feel Calmer, Quickly

Image by Johnny Africa

Everybody wants to feel calm, right? That’s a no-brainer. But feeling calmer, more relaxed, peaceful and at ease is not easy, especially if you have a trauma history and/or struggle with chronic anxiety, stress or anger.

These emotional states are the polar opposite of calm, primarily because they are designed to be – they’re all linked to the fight-or-flight response, gearing us up for action when we face a life-or-death threat like a hungry grizzly or hostile tribe after our territory. Of course, we rarely encounter threats like this in a modern, urban, 21st-century environment, but your brain doesn’t know that. Millions of years of evolution have primed it to react, strongly and instantaneously, to any real or perceived threat you encounter.

Having tried many different techniques over the years to help people feel calmer and more relaxed, I think that the huge variety of breathing techniques available to us can be incredibly powerful and effective. Of course, Yogis have known about these techniques for thousands of years, but we in the West are now latching on to their life-changing potential.

I have written extensively about Compassionate Breathing, my go-to technique to help soothe and regulate my clients’ (and my) nervous system. I am also evangelical about Box Breathing, which I see as more of an ‘emergency’ breathing technique, to use if you are feeling panicky, highly anxious or stressed, have a big presentation you’re freaking out about – or for any situation in which you want to feel calmer, quickly.

How it works

Box Breathing works so well because it does a whole bunch of stuff at the same time. This includes:

• Stimulating your vagus nerve and in turn your parasympathetic nervous system (the ‘brake’ branch of your autonomic nervous system, which helps you feel calm, digest food and sleep)

• Increase oxygen levels throughout your body, lower blood pressure and help you breathe as humans are designed to, most of the time – slowly and deeply

• Help you breathe from your abdomen, rather than a too-small section of your lungs (this is called ‘chest breathing’ and is how we breathe when fight-or-flight gets triggered)

• Give you not one, but two different forms of healthy distraction (counting and visualisation), allowing you to stop obsessively worrying, ruminating about something upsetting in the past, or imagining some awful thing in the future

The practice

Start by adjusting your posture, rolling your shoulders back, opening up the chest and sitting with an upright but relaxed posture. You will want to breathe, as deeply as possible, in through your nose for a count of four seconds, feeling your abdomen inflate like a balloon (just count, slowly, in your mind: one, two, three, four). Then hold that breath for four seconds (one, two, three, four).

And then breathe out through your mouth, letting your abdomen deflate and trying to get every bit of air out of your body (one, two, three, four). Hold for, you guessed it, four seconds (one, two, three, four). Then start the whole cycle again: in-breath, hold, out-breath, hold…

Close your eyes, if that feels comfortable for you, or just lower and soften your gaze. And you can also try visualising a square in your mind, lighting up from the bottom-left corner and running up the vertical line to the top-left corner for your in-breath; across, horizontally, to the top-right corner for your hold; down, vertically, to the bottom-right corner for your out-breath; then left, horizontally for your hold.

Got that? Hope so.

The longer the better

Do this for anything from one to (ideally) five minutes and you should notice a dramatic difference in your physical and emotional state. When I use Box Breathing I notice my body starts to feel really heavy and relaxed, especially if I can do it for longer stretches of time.

Try using Box Breathing every day, but especially when you’re feeling stressed, anxious, angry, agitated, hyper, frazzled, wired or tense; you need to perform in some way that’s stressing you out (driving test, first date, public speaking) or you’re struggling with insomnia, either having a tough time falling asleep or getting back to sleep in the night.

I really hope that helps. I have recorded a step-by-step guide to this technique for my Insight Timer collection, so just click the button below if you would like to listen now.

Warm wishes,

Dan

Try This Healing Self-Compassion Practice Every Day

Image by Ravi Pinisetti

I wrote a recent post about how to use Compassionate Breathing to help calm yourself down and regulate your nervous system (here’s a step-by-step practice I recorded for Insight Timer). You can use these two steps as a standalone practice, or try them as part of a four-stage practice that I use with all of my clients, which adds a couple of stages focused on developing self-compassion.

Again, I have recorded an audio version for Insight Timer – and you can watch the video, below, for a step-by-step guide to this simple, powerful practice. Before you try it, you will need to be acquainted with the vulnerable little boy or girl inside, who we direct the compassion to. This idea comes from both schema therapy and internal family systems therapy, so have a read of these pages first, if you would like. (This is not essential, but will make the practice more powerful for you).

THE PRACTICE

1. Adjust Your Posture. Make sure your feet are flat and grounded on the floor, then let your shoulders gently roll back so your chest feels open. Now lengthen your spine – sit upright but relaxed, with your head, neck and spine in alignment. Imagine an invisible piece of string attached to the top of your head, pulling you gently upright.

Sitting in this position helps you feel grounded, alert and stronger in your core. There is a lot of research on the link between your posture and mood, so just a simple adjustment in your posture can help you feel a bit more energised and stronger, with a slight uplift in your energy and mood.

2. Compassionate Breathing. Close your eyes, take deep, slow breaths in through your nose and out through your mouth. Your breaths should be roughly four seconds in, four seconds out – try counting the in-breath for one, two, three, four… then the out-breath for the same count. Imagine that your abdomen is like a balloon, inflating on the in-breath, deflating on the out-breath. Keep breathing, noticing everything slowing down and letting your muscles start to relax.

Breathing this way should help you feel calmer within a minute or so, but if you have time, I recommend extending the practice for up to five minutes – it’s just deep breathing, so you can’t do it too much! I also love this practice because you can do it anywhere – on the bus, in a difficult meeting, at your desk…

3. Supportive Touch. Gently place a hand over your heart in a friendly, supportive manner. Feel the warmth under your hand and imagine it trickling down until it reaches the hurt little girl or boy inside. Imagine that’s a warm, kind, healing energy that soothes this frightened or upset part of you.

4. Compassionate Self-Talk. Now talk to your little self the way you would to a troubled friend. Try to use a voice tone that’s warm, slow and reassuring. Say things like “Oh, Little Jane/James, I know you’re struggling right now – I really see how scared/upset/angry you are... But I want you to know that you’re not alone... I’m here with you... I care about you... I’ve got you... And we will get through this together...”’

Try this every day. You can play around with just using steps one and two, which are easier and can be done anywhere. And then add steps three and four when you’re alone and have time.

I very much hope that, over time, this will help you feel calmer and more relaxed; as well as generating self-compassion, which is a key skill in trauma recovery.

Warm wishes,

Dan