June – Tool of the Month – 10-10-10 Breath Tool
This month’s tool…of the month…is a down and dirty way of engaging your nervous system if over- or under-activated, and helping it come back into balance. The breath is a remarkable tool for getting into parts of our nervous systems that our thinking mind can’t access (sounding like the adults in the Peanuts cartoons, i.e., making just nonsense noises). So here’s a simple pattern of breathing, with a link to a short demo, for you to experiment with and see what it does for your own system.
“The Amazing 10-10-10 Breath!”
For this month’s “Tool of Month”, we’re going to go back to the breath. In particular, on offer is the “10-10-10” breath pattern, a way of quickly grabbing one’s nervous system and calming it down via an intentional use of the breath. As always with such tools, you have to see how it works on and with your particular system, as some people are metric, some standard. One of the great problems with therapies and strategies for mental health (particularly for working with depression) is that there is an implicit “one size fits all” message, which is not true in so many ways (both because everyone is unique, and because these tools “wear out” over time). So, as always, I encourage you to experiment.
Here’s a short video of me explaining the technique: click here.
Breath is an amazing tool for working with what the neuroscientists refer to as the Window of Tolerance, which basically the range in which our systems stay balanced and regulated. Outside of that window, on the upper end, is anxiety and panic, and on the lower end, is lethargy and depression. The wonderful writer on neuroscience, Dan Siegel, has said simply that mental health diagnoses can be sorted into one or the other imbalance, or dis-integration. So much of our healing and growth comes down to learning how we throw ourselves out of balance, and how to return to balance, and breath techniques such as the “10-10-10” are key to that balance.
(If you want to read a bit more about this concept of “self-regulation,” here’s an article that uses the metaphor of “buoyancy control” from scuba diving to make the point: click here.)
