Today, we’re going to talk about another holiday gift for your brain and your body.
If you haven’t noticed, the holidays are upon us. All the reindeer and all the stuff should have tipped you off.
One of the things we run into all the time is people are traveling, they’re on the road, they’re getting foods that are different than they normally eat because of all the holiday meals.
On top of that, maybe just the holiday season tends to be very stressful for people.
This has been well known for many, many years, so I want to go over something really quick with you today, an idea that you can use in the middle of your celebrations or whatever.
If you start to feel bad, start to get a little stressed, one of the things I need you to remember is that when we do new things, it’s very, very challenging for the brain from a fuel supply perspective.
We always tell people your brain needs two things to stay alive. It needs fuel. It needs activation.
One of our primary fuels is basically an oxygen. How we breathe and what you find or what we see very often is people get more stressed and their posture tends to roll up into that caveman position. Our breathing becomes compromised.
When your breathing becomes compromised, your brain becomes compromised and everything feels a little worse.
What I want to do is connect what we did last time with a little bit of the back exercises, et cetera, to open the body up, get us out of that caveman posture along with some breathing.
In our last video, what we talked about were just a few different simple exercises for the spine.
Now, one of the reasons that I’m going to tell you that we want to do this again is we’re going to do the same stuff that we were doing in our last video but now, we’re going to combine it with a little bit of breathing.
To remind ourselves, what we started off with was working through some of the muscles at the back. We started off with a head turn, so for instance, I’m going to turn my head left. I’m going to tilt it back. I’m going to pull my shoulder up, give it a little bit of a contraction and then relax out of there, all right? Really, really simple.
Now, what we’re going to add into it is one big breath so we’re going to turn, tilt back, lift up, deep breath up into the shoulder, hold, and then exhale on the release, all right? We’ll turn the opposite direction, tilt back, lift up, deep breath in, hold.
Remember you’re breathing up to this side and exhale, come back to the middle. Super simple.
Now, we’re going to do it in reverse. Turn your head left, tilt back, lift up. This time, we’re going to take a deep breath in, exhale all the way out.
On the inhale, come back to the middle, reverse that, turn, tilt back, lift up, deep breath in, exhale, hold it out, inhale on the way back to the middle.
Now, the reason we’re changing this kind of breathing pattern is we tend to get linked into one breathing pattern and we see this and a lot of people who are going through a lot of stress.
They breathe the same way every time, so there’s nothing magical about changing the breathing pattern other than it’s connected to your brain and your body and saying, you know what, I have more control over my environment that it’s currently seems especially with all this craziness going on.
What we’re going to do, we’ll do the same thing now for our mid-back so remember, we are here.
We pulled our shoulder blades back. We lifted them up, trying to rotate our shoulders down a little bit, so now, we’re going to hold that position, take a deep breath in.
On the exhale, relax down. We’ll repeat that, again reversing it, lift the shoulder blades up, pull them all the way back. Try to rotate them down like that, deep breath in, exhale.
Now, inhale as you come back to the middle. Again, simple, simple easy exercises.
Now, we’re going to jump now directly to a couple of the back muscles so we don’t make this too long because you already have a lot of stuff to do.
For this one, we’re going to use the collar of our shirt and our belt line basically as our guidelines or our guide points.
What I’m going to do, I’m going to bend my knees. I’m going to tilt my body to the right. I’m going to turn my body to the right and now, very gently, I’m going to pull the back of my collar toward the back of my belt getting a little bit of contraction down the middle line of my back. Once I’m in a nice contracted position, take a deep breath in, filling up this side the lungs particularly.
Exhale as you come back to the middle.
Now, we’ll again change that pattern so again, bend the knees, tilt to the right, turn to the right, tilt back, again collar to belt, nice little contraction, not too hard.
Remember keep this easy.
Now, we’ll take a deep breath in. Exhale. Big inhale and then come back to the midline, all right?
We’ll repeat that one more time on the opposite side and then you can get back to your gifts, all right?
Once again, bend the knees. We’re going to tilt the left, turn to the left, collar to belt, a little contraction, deep breath in, exhale.
Let’s come back up to normal.
Now, different pattern. Bend the knees, tilt, rotate, tilt back, nice contraction down the midline. Inhale. Full exhale. Big inhale as you come back to standing.
Now, if you’ve done that just literally following along with me, your back should feel a lot better. You should be more awake, should be standing up a little bit better and your brain should have a little bit more fuel.
So obviously, you can play around with a lot of different variations of this.
You can do it seated. You can do it on the floor, different positions but again, the main idea here is just keep changing that breathing pattern because we want to reconnect your more human brain, what we call your second brain with your first brain, which is your brain that controls all of these functions without you knowing about it.
Usually, when we do that, people tend to relax a little bit more. The brain gets a little bit more fuel.
Use this anytime you can throughout the holidays.
Enjoy.
If you have any questions about it, let us know. Thank you.
