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Why Belly Breathe

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This 3 minute video for students features Wilkeson Elementary School Counselor Carla Burgi sharing about how belly breathing really works! In our Second Step program, we teach students when they are upset to stop, name what they are feeling, and do a calm down strategy. Belly breathing is a type of calming strategy where you take a slow deep breath in through the nose and exhale out the mouth. It is called a belly breath because you should see your stomach expand. Deep breathing activates something in our body called the vagus nerve; this is the biggest nerve in our body and is super powerful! Breathing during the day and when we are upset helps our mental and physical health! Research shows it improves our sleep, reduces headaches, helps our memory and thinking, and reduces anxiety. Challenge: Try doing some belly breathing every day this week, even if you aren’t feeling upset. It is a great practice to do daily.

Show Transcript

Hi students. My name is Mrs. Burgi and I am the school counselor at Wilkeson Elementary. I'm going to talk to you today a little bit about belly breathing and why we do it. So, a lot of times someone might say to someone, "You're really upset. You should take deep breaths. you need to take a deep breath. Take three deep breaths." or something. And a lot of times it can kind of feel like really is that really going to help me very much? And so, I want to talk today about the why people say that. Why do people say that we should take belly breaths? If you're in an elementary school in our district you probably seen this before. And even if you're in middle school or high school, you may have seen it in your past. Our Second Step program has some calm down steps, and so the steps are to stop, to name our feeling, and then do a calm down strategy. So it could be positive self talk, counting, or the all-important belly breath. The science behind this is when we take a good belly breath, so not a chest breath, but a breath where when we inhale through our nose below our belly button our tummy is rising up, and when we exhale through our mouth, our tummy is then coming closer to our spine. And when we take a few of those, it activates something in our body called the vagus nerve. The vagus nerve is actually the longest nerve in our body. And it runs from the brain down through body, all the way down to our abdomen area. This nerve is super powerful. Some things that can happen when we activate the vagus nerve is, we can actually improve the quality of our sleep, we can reduce headaches, we can help our memory and our thinking, and we can of course help our thinking to help reduce anxiety. That is why we say when we're upset we should take deep breaths. So there's actually real science behind this, and we can take moments where we're take deep breaths when we 're upset, and it can be very powerful. We can take those deep breaths slowly, not quickly, but slowly, and help ourselves when we're upset. But also the idea of belly breathing can be used several times throughout the day as just a practice for our own personal health. So we're talking about our mental emotional health, and our physical health. So the idea of stopping, taking moments for breathing, activates the vagus nerve and this helps a lot of things I didn't even mention, but a lot of things in our body to be a healthier person. So, I challenge you today to take time to start thinking about moments of the day where you can do some breathing, just to help your overall physical health as well as he's net when you're upset. Thanks for listening today students. Have a great day!

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