Breathe into change: why breathwork is your ally in making behaviours stick

How you can use breathwork to shift old patterns of behaviour and build new ones

How many times have you started the year with intentions to make changes and seen all your intentions fizzle away?

Maybe the changes you’re trying to make aren’t the right ones. Maybe they’re ideas absorbed from wellness culture that you need more discipline, more optimization, more protocols. When I talk about change, I mean the things that are going to make you feel more alive, maybe that’s moving your body more from a place of joy not punishment or a starting daily writing practice.

Even the changes you passionately want to make, that would be good for you in every way, can be hard to stick to. Because we’re wired for safety at a neurological and nervous system level and safety looks like sameness, like predictability. Our bodies response to change is unfortunately value-neutral.

So change needs to come at a somatic level, you can’t think your way out of patterns of behaviour that are deeply embedded in your muscles and connective tissues, protected by your nervous system and carved into your neural pathways. You can’t move into new behaviours that your body doesn’t feel safe enough to accommodate.

Which is why breathwork a great ally in making changes. It can help with three things that can be the difference between establishing new habits, and reverting to old patterns:

·      Clarity & confidence

·      Shifting old patterns

·      Capacity to hold change

Clarity and confidence

Starting with getting really clear on the changes you want to make. Are they what you really want, or what you feel you ‘should’ want? Conscious Connected Breathwork (CCB) reduces the activity in the rational, storytelling part of the brain and increases activity in the part of the brain responsible for emotional processing. This lets you access deeper levels of desire and subconscious material, bringing clarity about what you actually want.

It can also help address the fear of change, the unhelpful inner critic trying to sabotage your efforts. That inner critic is your social conditioning, it’s the response to being told not take up space, not to risk being judged. Even when we’re clear what we want to change, we have layers of conditioning and stories that can hold us back

That same process of quietening the storytelling part of the brain that brings us clarity, also lets you peel away those layers. And often, what’s there in the quiet place, in the deeper place beyond your conditioning, is unshakable confidence. Is self-belief. And over time, you can take that out of the sessions, and make that your normality.

Shifting old patterns

Our brains love following old patterns because following an established neural pathways uses much less energy than building a new one, and brains are all about energy efficiency.

CCB helps put our brains in a hyper plastic state a place of high adaptability. (The ‘how’ here has a lot of elements but briefly, we are gently overriding nervous system feedback to breath less, and placing ourselves in a both an activated and safe state at the same time, all that conflicting input induces a very adaptable brain state).  So our brain can more easily build new neural pathways. That’s just the first step, we need to reinforce those pathways with repetion of the actions we want to which takes us on to…

Capacity to hold change

Trying to be consistent with new behaviour through mental effort alone doesn’t work, you need to expand your nervous system capacity to handle the changes that consist actions will bring about. Without expanded capacity to feel safe with doing new things, your nervous system is it’s going to revert to old patterns to ‘protect’ you.

Expanded capacity is the ability to sit with greater discomfort, to do harder things, without feeling overwhelmed. It’s the ability to do those things without overactivation of your sympathetic nervous system. CCB builds capacity in our nervous system by placing us in an activated state, whilst also feeling safe (which is why the setting and support of a good facilitator are so important). This ‘safe stressor’ builds capacity over time.

So we have a path towards helping new behaviours stick: intuitive clarity + inner confidence + neuroplasticity + nervous system capacity.

What could this look like in practice, if you want to recruit your breath as your ally in making changes this year? I would suggest looking at this is three stages (thinking about it more as an ongoing loop than a linear process with an end point).

Þ   establish what safety feels like and spend time there

Þ   gently expand your capacity to listen and hold change

Þ   integrate into your everyday

Establish

Becoming familiar with what nervous system safety feels like in your body, so that you can come back to that place, is the vital first step. The tools you use to resource yourself in this way are up to you – maybe soft embodied movement, slow breathing, self-massage, time in nature, cuddling a dog – importantly take the time to really notice how it feels in your body and your breathing. Cultivate regular practices that let you spend time in this state, so it becomes familiar.

Expansion

From this place of safety, gently starting to expand your window of capacity, your ability to do hard and challenging things without feeling over activated, or getting stuck in an over activated state. Creating gentle expansion in body and mind to accommodate the things you want to bring in. This is where CCB comes in, not for big cathartic ‘breakthroughs’ but for accessing deeper insights, creating a state of adaptability and building gentle expansion of your capacity to hold change.

Integrate

This is where change happens, how you react in the moment when you feel resistance and overwhelm. Rather than trying to immediately regulate yourself back into comfort these moments of discomfort, can you allow yourself to fully feel them? Experience your new, expanded capacity at work (knowing that you can come back to your place of safety if it gets too much). Can you feel into the discomfort and do the hard thing anyway? Then you are on the way to change.

If you’d like to explore Conscious Connected breathwork with me I run monthly online sessions which you can access in the events section of the website.