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

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

Try These Simple, Powerful Relaxation Techniques

Image by Hannah Oliver

When you are stressed or anxious, it's often hard to relax. So you will probably have a great deal of tension in your muscles – this is one reason for the muscular aches and pains, headaches, stiff neck, tight chest and back pain people suffering from stress or anxiety often experience. Learning to relax is a vital step on your route back to health and happiness. It's also an excellent way to combat insomnia.

Before I explain the techniques, a couple of general points. First, like any new skill, you may find these techniques take practice to master. It's like learning a musical instrument: you wouldn't expect to sit at a piano and play a complex classical piece on your first day.

Your stress or anxiety may have been building over months or even years, so it will take time both to learn these techniques and gradually reduce your levels of tension.

Second, the more you try these techniques when you are not stressed, anxious or upset, the more skilled you will become and so can use them even when you feel overwhelmed (I find that many clients stop using self-help techniques when they are having a rough time – which is, of course, when they need them the most).

And then the key is to use them every day. Like other cognitive therapy techniques, these are lifelong skills, available to you whenever your symptoms return.

Soothing-rhythm breathing

This simple breathing exercise (which is one of the key techniques in compassion-focused therapy) is an effective way to reduce stress or anxiety and increase feelings of calm, peacefulness and safeness. When you become anxious, your respiration becomes fast and shallow 'chest breathing'.

This can cause hyperventilation, as you inhale too much oxygen and become dizzy and light-headed. Instead, you need to breathe slowly and deeply, which turns off your ‘stress response’ and switches on your ‘relaxation response’.

Please note – these are only guidelines, not a set of rules. The most important thing is that you find a style and rhythm of breathing that feels calming and soothing to you. So vary the length of breaths, whether you breathe your nose or mouth, and so on, to find the approach that works best for you.

1. Find somewhere private and quiet, then sit comfortably and close your eyes. Switch off your phone so you won't be disturbed. Take a deep breath through your nose to a slow count of four. It can be helpful to count each number in your mind as you breathe, so thinking One, two, three, four on each breath.

2. Exhale through your nose to a slow count of four.

3. Continue to breathe slowly, deeply and evenly, in and out through your nose. If you are breathing deeply, you should naturally feel your abdomen rising on the in-breath and falling on the out-breath – don’t force this or worry if your abdomen isn’t moving. Breathing slowly and deeply is the most important thing.

4. Repeat this cycle for at least a minute.

5. Once you feel comfortable with this exercise, try increasing the time to five minutes or more. The key here is to breathe slowly and deeply – this has the physiological effect of slowing your heart rate and sending messages to the brain that everything's fine, you can relax.

Progressive muscular relaxation (PMR)

It's important to breathe slowly and regularly while doing this exercise. Tense your muscles, without straining, and concentrate on the sensation of tension. Hold for about five seconds, then let go of the tension for 10-15 seconds. Tune into the sensation of how your muscles feel when you relax them.

1. Feet. Pull your toes back and tense the muscles in your feet. Relax and repeat.

2. Legs. Straighten your legs and point your toes upward. Relax, let your legs go limp and repeat.

3. Abdomen. Tense your stomach muscles by pulling them up and in. Relax and repeat.

4. Back. Arch your back. Relax and repeat.

5. Shoulders & neck. Shrug your shoulders, bringing them up and in towards your chest and pressing your head back. Relax and repeat.

6. Arms & hands. Stretch out your arms and hands. Relax, let your arms hang limp and repeat.

7. Face. Tense your forehead and jaw, lower your eyebrows. Relax and repeat.

8. Whole body. Finally, tense your entire body: feet, legs, abdomen, back, shoulders and neck, arms and face. Hold the tension for a few seconds, relax and repeat.

If you still feel tense at the end of the routine, go through it again. If only certain body parts still feel tense, repeat the exercise in those areas. When you have finished and feel relaxed, stay where you are for a few moments, then stand up slowly and stretch gently.

Warm wishes,

Dan