Help Your Clients Heal: The Best Breathing Exercise for Stress

Are your clients feeling overwhelmed, stressed out, and in need of a serious break? I get it… times have been weird AF these last few years! From the pandemic and re-adjusting to “normal” to school and juggling housework, inflation, keeping up with the kids, and layoffs (or working overtime), it’s proved to be a very difficult time to handle stress – for soooo many people. I’m sure you’ve seen this with your clients. But lucky for us, there are literally dozens of methods out there to help us relieve stress.  One of the most powerful, oldest, and most effective techniques is breathwork!

Studies show that breathwork can help to reduce stress and anxiety and even relieve physical pain. With so many breathing exercises out there, it might be hard to decide which one is best for your clients’ needs.

So, what IS the best breathing exercise for stress? In this blog, I’ll introduce you to my absolute favorite one!

But first, let’s chat quickly about WHY breathing exercises for stress are so effective so you can understand why this technique works like a charm.

What Happens in the Body During Stress

Oftentimes when your clients get stressed, they go into either an anxious pattern where their minds are super busy or they collapse and fall into depression. They do this because most people don’t really understand how to properly handle the emotional triggers and energy present in their bodies. 

Most of the time, humans are so resistant to feeling pain, hurt, and even stress that we try to override and numb these feelings. Other times we try to distract ourselves with our method of choice – it could be social media, food, marijuana, or drinking. 

But before we allow ourselves to fall into this trap of distractions and numbing, there’s one very important thing we must acknowledge…

The pain that we feel in our bodies is a catalyst for our growth. 

How to Help Your Clients Manage Stress

We can help our clients manage the stress they feel by inviting them to feel it.  If we want to feel better, then we have to be better feelers. 

Feeling our pain is the best way of eliminating it…

But we live in a world today where we turn to our vices way too fast. When we feel pain, the first thing we do is ask ourselves, “How can I get rid of this? What do I need to do?” Chances are, your clients are running this mental pattern too.

Using a breathing exercise for stress helps them do the opposite. 

Breathwork helps people understand their pain and feel their emotions deeper instead of numbing out and avoiding them. We don’t need to start by looking for ways to get rid of emotions. What we need to do first is pause…. and then begin to feel.

Your Embodiment as a Facilitator Matters Too

As a coach, healer, or therapist, your job isn’t to fix their pain but to help them process and move through it. In order to do that effectively, you need to embody the tools yourself. 

So I’d love to invite you right here, right now, to do a little exercise with me to help YOU release some stress and get better at feeling what’s present.

Ready? Here’s your embodiment exercise:

Take a moment to just sit with your body…

I want you to ask yourself this question…what’s here now? 

Whatever is present for you, name it.

• Do you feel a little contraction in your stomach? 
• A little heartbreak? 
• A little closed in your throat? 

Once you’ve named it, acknowledge it and fully accept it – without resisting it, without pushing it away, and without wishing it was different. 

Once you name it, and after you acknowledge it… then you can use your breath to actually shift some of that energy. 

How did that feel? Are you ready to try a simple breathing exercise for stress that you can then share with your clients?

My Most Effective Breathing Exercise for Stress 

If it’s not clear by now… I love a good ol’ breathing exercise for stress. It’s my preferred method of healing – yes, even over meditation – because with breathwork, I don’t have to go through the layers of the mind that meditation requires. 

I use this simple breathing exercise for stress to get back in alignment and clear my mind. It’s not about thinking of how to feel better. 

In the exercise I’m going to share with you now, you’re letting the breath and the body do what they were designed to do. We were designed to be able to feel our emotions to clear stress – not through the force of the mind, but the wisdom of the body.

Now, let’s move on to the best breathing exercise for stress – what I like to call “The Halo-Active Breath.” This is a signature Pause Breathwork technique.

This breathing exercise is designed to bring an even flow of air into your body and help alleviate stressed-out feelings.

Here’s How to do the Halo-Active Breathing Exercise for Stress:

1. First, let’s start with taking a deep breath in through the nose and out through the mouth…
2. Now when you exhale, you can either relax it or you can intensify it to give yourself more power. This gives your body more activation and brings in more energy.  How you want to do it is up to you.
3. The speed you go is also up to you. If you want to slow it down or up, it doesn’t matter. 
4. Repeat that pattern 25 times.
5. And at the very end, take a nice deep breath in through the nose and hold your breath at the top before finally releasing…
6. And then repeat the entire cycle two more times.