There are two p skills in tip and the first P stands for paced breathing.
The idea is that if we can pace our breathing in a very particular way, we can slow down our heart rate and decrease our escalation or emotional intensity. We're going to link to a full practice in this video's description.
I just want to let you know about a few key points about paced breathing.
One is that you want the breathing to be from your diaphragm or from your belly area, not from your chest when we're under a lot of stress. And we're breathing very quickly, we tend to do more chest breathing, which is not a relaxation kind of breathing.
We want to move our breathing down into our belly area. The other thing we want to do in paced breathing is to slow our pace of inhaling and exhaling way down, you want to think about it on average of trying to only do five to six breaths per minute, that's roughly one breath every 10 to 12 seconds. That likely is a much slower pace than your breathing, when you're under are experiencing a lot of emotional intensity.
And then the last key point about paced breathing is that you want your out breath to be longer than your in breath. So for example, if you're taking about 10 seconds, for a full breath, you want to roughly do your inhale for about four seconds and your exhale for about six seconds. Similarly, if you're doing a breath that's at a rate of about 12 seconds per breath, you want your inhale to be about five seconds in in your exhale to be about seven seconds out. So the key points of pace breathing, breathe deeply into your belly area. Make sure that your pace of breathing is considerably slower, and make sure that your exhalation is longer than your inhalation.
Those three things together are going to help your breathing. Get to a more relaxed state and therefore calm your emotion intensity pretty quickly.
