How to Relieve Shallow Breathing Chronic stress, posture, and muscle tension can all play a role in developing shallow breathing, also referred to as chest breathing or thoracic breathing. Shallow breathing can contribute to serious medical conditions including anxiety disorders, panic attacks, hyperventilation, shock, asthma, pneumonia, pulmonary edema, and a buildup of carbon dioxide [...]
What is the Polyvagal Theory? The Polyvagal Theory is a theory proposed by Stephen Porges that describes how the mammalian autonomic nervous system evolved to keep us safe and alive. As mammals evolved from reptiles, our autonomic nervous system developed to automatically communicate with other mammals and engage different self-defense systems when needed. When our [...]
Over the next few months I'll be offering a series of guided meditations for beginners on YouTube. Some of them are true somatic meditations—exploring breath sensations, internal bodily sensations, and noticing and releasing tension throughout the body. Others will explore ideas such as attention and awareness, energy, and love. Click the titles or the [...]
How to Make Meditation Part of Your Daily Life Meditation may seem like the latest trend, but it's been around for thousands of years. Wall art in the Indus Valley, dating from approximately 5,000 to 3,500 BCE, depicts people sitting with crossed legs, hands resting on their knees, and eyes narrowed. Meditation techniques are [...]
12 Scientifically Proven Health Benefits of Meditation To say that it's been a stressful year would be an understatement. If you don't meditate, you may have considered starting as a way to calm your mind, stop worrying, and get better sleep. But starting a meditation practice can be daunting. How can you fit it into [...]
Karoshi: Is Working Long Hours Worth the Health Risks? In 1969, a 29-year-old man working in the shipping department of Japan's largest newspaper died suddenly of a stroke. While at first his case was called occupational sudden death, it was later determined that his stroke was caused by shift work and an increased workload. [...]
Why Body-Centered Therapies Help Heal Post-Traumatic Stress About one-half of adults in the U.S. experience at least one traumatic event during their lives. It might be a violent attack, accident, military combat, natural or human-caused disaster, or physical, verbal, or sexual abuse. People who have experienced trauma, whether or not they get diagnosed with [...]
Good vs. Bad Stress: The Critical Difference Between Challenge and Threat When we're faced with a potentially stressful situation, we automatically and subconsciously ask ourselves two questions: First: Could this situation cause me harm or loss, or is there potential benefit? Second: Am I capable of handling this situation? This is the transactional model [...]
How Gratitude Changes Your Brain and BodyThere's a trend in recent studies on human health: Mom's advice is proving to be the best medicine. When your mom told you to eat your roughage, go outside and play, stop staring at the TV, and get a good night's sleep—she may not have understood the underlying science, [...]
New Research on How Stress Affects Inflammation, Neurodegeneration, the Gut Microbiome, Cancer Treatment, and RelationshipsStress is a particular passion of mine—I love learning how to reduce negative stress, and I'm fascinated by the ways stress affects our health. This is the first in a series of posts I'll be writing about stress in the coming [...]
Breathing in Clinical Somatics exercises Many students ask me how to breathe correctly when practicing Clinical Somatics exercises. Your breathing pattern is more important in some exercises than others, depending on whether or not the exercise includes extension (arching) or flexion (curling) of the spine. In this article I'll describe why diaphragmatic breathing is important, [...]
The Anatomy of Your Tension Headache If you're reading this post, you may be one of the 45 million Americans who suffer from chronic headaches. Headaches are one of the most frustrating pain conditions because the causes are so varied and can seem completely mysterious. In fact, over 150 different types of headache have [...]
The Life-Changing Link Between Anxiety and Muscle Tension Anxiety is thought of as a psychological disorder, but it actually involves many systems of the body. Anxiety is a true “somatic” condition: It is typically brought on and made worse not by any external source like a virus, but by our internal psychological and physiological [...]
