Breathing is widely acknowledged as a technique that calms some of our big emotions like anxiety, stress, anger or frustration. “Breathe”. “Take a breather”. “Just take a deep breath”. How often do we talk about breathing when we need some time out or to calm ourselves down?
“When you own your breath, nobody can steal your peace.” Author Unknown
When we are faced by a ferocious lion, an oncoming car or being chased, our bodies trigger a physical response that prepares us to deal with impending danger – ‘flight, fight or freeze’. This is an automatic response to dangerous situations, and it occurs when our sympathetic nervous system is triggered. Our brains believe that we are in danger or unsafe and prepares us to flee or fight the danger trigger. However, this doesn’t only occur when there is a physical danger. When we experience stress and anxiety, our ‘fight or flight’ response takes over. sThis increases our heart rate, makes our breathing slow and shallow, and it sends our blood from our brains to our limbs so we can run faster to escape. Our thought process and self-control are then affected by our automatic stress response.
Many children experience stress, anxiety, fear or distress to a range of different situations. They may feel out of control or overwhelmed by their situation with little understanding of why they feel the way they do or what to do to change how they are feeling. As supportive adults, we can help children learn to recognise these feelings and to build up their skills to manage their feelings and behaviours. We may use language such as “my body is going too fast” or “my engine is revving quickly” to help a child identify that they may want to slow their body and mind to be able to participate in the task at hand.
One quick and easy way to interrupt the anxiety and stress response is through deep breathing. It is simple, requires no equipment and the child always has it available. Deep breathing brings the body back into balance; it allows our heart to slow back down, our breathing to become slower and deeper and tells our brains that we are not in danger.
The purpose of deep breathing techniques is not to avoid anxiety, but to help a child lower their level of stress or feelings of being overwhelmed. It is important that children learn to acknowledge their big emotions and have the tools to help ride them out. We have created a visual prompt for your child to introduce them to a simple breathing exercise.
This YouTube video, “Just Breathe”, is a candid, unscripted interview with children talking about their emotions and anxiety and how they use deep breathing to calm down when they experience big emotions.
Deep breathing technique
In therapy, I use a deep breathing technique called “5-finger breathing” to help children feel calmer, calm their anxiety, and say goodbye to their big emotions in the moment. When a child is in a heightened state of anxiety, their auditory system might not be tuned into your verbal instructions, so I find it useful to use visual clues to help children learn how to do the deep breathing technique independently. With this technique, we use our own hands to prompt five slow deep breaths in through the nose and out through the mouth and use the verbal prompt of “smell the roses and blow out the candle.”
- Place your non-dominant hand in front of you and stretch your fingers out like a star.
- Take your index finger of your dominant hand and use it to trace the outline of your star-shaped hand.
- Point your index finger at the bottom of your thumb and slide it up your thumb. Pause at the top, and then slide it down the inside of your thumb. Now point your finger at the bottom of your index finger and carry on sliding it up one side, pausing at the top and then sliding it back down the rest of your fingers until you are at the bottom of your little finger.
- When you move your finger up a finger, you take a long deep breath through your nose.
- When you pause at the top, you hold your breath.
- When you move your finger down a finger, you slowly control an out-breath through your mouth. This often sounds a bit like a sigh.
- Keep repeating this until you have taken five deep breaths and finished tracing all of your fingers.
Download your free printable guide to support teaching this deep breathing technique to your children.
Most children require repetition and demonstration to learn this breathing method, and it is beneficial if the significant adults in their world also practice taking five deep breaths with them. Like many techniques, practice is essential to mastering and feeling the full benefits of it. To learn this, it may be helpful to use the following method of learning the techniques.
- Introduce the 5-finger breathing technique at home when everyone is calm, rather than only introducing it when the child is stress, or the environment is chaotic. Children find it hard to learn new skills when they are stressed or feeling overwhelmed by their big emotions.
- Learn to read your child’s triggers so that you can propose breathing exercises before them feeling overwhelmed.
- Practice by asking them to take time when out in nature by stopping to smell the flowers etc.
How to change it for your child?
If your child finds the co-ordination, the sensory experience or physically cannot run a finger up, and down the other hand, then they may benefit from adapting the technique. You may do any of the following:
- Trace their hand onto a piece of cardboard then they can trace around the cutout hand.
- Instead of running their finger along their hand, they could pretend that their fingers are candles and ‘blow out the flame’ on each finger.
- You could use five feathers and blow them off their palm.
- Use dandelions and blow the seeds off the buds.
I would encourage you to introduce this breathing for anxiety to your child
We have prepared a helpful one-page printable guide to the 5-finger breathing technique for your child. Click here to download.
If you are interested in finding out more about how Sprouts can support your child, I would love to hear from you; please feel free to contact me for any further information.
Please remember that this advice is sharing ideas about ways to support your child. I am not a clinical psychologist; therefore if you have any specific concerns regarding your child’s anxiety, I encourage you to speak to an experienced paediatric clinical psychologist.