April 27, 2010

Day 107 - Learn to Breathe

Date: April 23rd, 2010

I know what you're thinking, what with this being the middle of my finals period and all.  You're thinking this is going to be some poetic garbage about finding my center in a chaotic universe.  Well.  I did that too.  But I do that a lot.  And its not poetic so much as calming and then boring.  No, what I'm talking about is learning how to breathe correctly.

Apparently I've been doing it wrong my whole life.  Good to know.

Turns out there is actually a right way to breathe.  And here I thought taking air in, holding it and then releasing it back into the wild was all it took.  To be fair, that is all it takes to stay alive.  Not unlike learning the rules of Bridge is all you need to do to, you know, play Bridge.  If you want to win at Bridge, however, it takes a lot more work.

Pictured: One-on-one coaching.  Or date night.

Breathing is the same way.  I mean sure, I've been breathing my whole life, but like a loser.  I have been a shallow breather my whole life.  That means that when I take a breath in, my chest and lungs expand, but not my diaphragm.  What I learned yesterday is that my whole breathy existence has been a lie.  A shallow, slightly winded lie.

I found this website.  For breathing.  Yes.  Its legit.  They have you self-administer a breathing test and, well, I don't want to scare you, but unless I buy their breathing and sleep kits... I'm going to die.  I know.  Its a shocker, but surely a for profit website offering a self-administered test over the internet wouldn't lie.  That would be dishonest.  In other news, water is wet.

Actually,  I went looking for some breathing exercises cause of the whole "too fat to be in a pillow fight" thing that happened a couple weeks back.  Turns out there's a ton of literature on the subject.  So I spent the day practicing proper breathing.  I sat up straighter, inhaled deeper, laughed harder, loved more.  You know.  The works.  I will say, after a couple hours of forcing out the diaphragm, I felt like I had more energy.  So, there are definitely benefits to proper breathing that I didn't know about before.  Then again, that breathing website claimed that breathing deeper prevents cancer so... I'm not sure what to believe.

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