Breathing can become more difficult when you’re stressed, but when you’re proactive about managing your worries and incorporating stress-reducing activities into your daily routine, you can lower your stress levels which can help improve your overall health.
Here are some tips to help you combat your worries:
- Challenge your thoughts: Say positive things to yourself which counter your negative thoughts.
- Imagine all the possible outcomes: Don’t limit yourself to only negative outcomes, consider positive outcomes, too. Ask yourself, “How so?” and “What if?” to reverse the tables on your thoughts.
- Do something physical: Expel all that worry into a physical activity that your doctor has cleared for you to do—it can be walking, stretching or even humming.
- Write everything down: Once you write your thoughts down, read them out loud. You may find how silly these worries sound when said out loud.
If you want to start journaling, try these writing exercises to help you get through stages of worry or stress:
- Write down the top three stresses you have.
- Then, write down all the thoughts you worry about related to each of the top stresses.
- For each thought you wrote down, write down a thought to counter these negative feelings.
Since stress tends to make breathing more difficult, try this breathing tip if you begin to feel tense:
- Let out a large sigh while dropping your chest.
- Inhale deeply.
- Exhale through pursed lips expelling all the air from your lungs.
- Repeat.
http://www.domorewithoxygen.com/avoiding-stress-and-worry-with-copd
