Welcome back, you've made it to tip number nine. Congratulations. So today's tip is about reducing stress and taking time out to tune in, to decompress. Any form of stress is an imbalance on the body. And if we define stress, it really means any form of change. So when you change your nutrition, if you change your exercise, you change your sleep patterns, you change your environment a job.

Regardless, there's the body has to have time to go through an adaptation phase before it comes back into its state of balance. But how often are we really in forms of balance within our life, sometimes we're living through high and low extremes. So we could look at our central nervous system as being us Similar to a car where we have the accelerator and we have the brake. And our central nervous system is actually what we call the sympathetic nervous system and parasympathetic nervous system, which is all part of the autonomic nervous system. Regardless, think of your car when you're driving too fast and you want to slow down. What do you do?

You press on the brake? Well, when all of our systems are an overload when we're feeling, in this case, symptoms of pain or discomfort, or fatigue, and we're not having good night's sleep, levels of stress, systemic stress is rising within the body. So how can we come into deeper states of relaxation, where our bodies can begin to mobilize themselves and heal more naturally. So any form of stress, we need to try to either reduce or eliminate, but you know, we can't control everything that happens outside of our ourselves, but we can control our reactions, or how we respond to certain things that might stimulate us or get us out of our center of well being. Let's begin with a deep breathing exercise, I'm going to show you how to do this just by taking three deep breaths will bring us into what we consider that parasympathetic nervous system, where the body starts to slow down and mobilize itself.

And this is where we begin to relax. So it's important when things do happen in life, to let off the scene daily and to discharge those stresses when they happen, and not let them accumulate until they become more tension. And that tension and stress can also lead to more discomfort and back pain. I say that my lower back is my stress barometer. As soon as my back starts getting a little tense. I can kind of take a look at how is this day going.

And if I let things kind of build up in my mind, sometimes I feel more tension about My back. So this is one of my go twos. Find a comfortable chair in the men my back full program, we actually do this lying on the floor in what we call our crisis position, when we're really in that mode where we're in a lot of discomfort, so grab a bench or a chair so that your spine is nice and straight. The breathing exercise I'm going to share with you, it's actually called the cardiac coherence exercise. And we have other more complete tips and techniques on deeper relaxation and meditation techniques later in the program as well. So sitting tall with your hands on your knees, roll the shoulders back, close your eyes, and just take two deep breaths.

Inhale through your nose and exhale through your mouth as you're exhaling through a big straw. Now as you do that, get a sense, is your breath going primarily into your abdomen and your lower belly? Or do you feel your shoulders and your upper chest moving It may be helpful to place your hands on your belly and your chest to get a greater sense of this. Let me guide you through a few rounds. So you get a feeling of the cardiac coherence style of breathing. with your eyes closed, let all the air out.

Inhale now deeply into your belly like you're inflating a balloon and exhale through that big straw slowly through your mouth. Keep breathing like that, inhaling slowly. Now, you may notice, especially if you're in pain, or if you're stressed in any way or tense that the breath might be a little bit shaky, or even difficult to get the breath into the lower lobes of the lungs or down into the lower belly and that's normal. Okay, with time and releasing the deeper tensions with this practice. You'll start to get the breath going a bit more deeply. Now I'm going to count for you five seconds We want to inhale for five seconds and exhale to five seconds.

Nice and smooth, smooth, steady flow of breath. So let's let all the air out. I'll count for you inhale. 12345 exhale. 54321 do your best to keep the Count 2345543 211-234-5543 211-234-5543 To 11234554321. So you would continue that breath for another few minutes.

Six cycles, like I just counted is one full minute. Ideally, we want to do this breath five minutes in the morning, five minutes at night. So I do this first thing in the morning when I wake up, but I'm still feeling a little sleepy in bed, I just tune into my breath, and I let it be full and steady. Fabulous for activating parasympathetic nervous system, the relaxation response within the body where the body starts to heal and mobilize itself, great for massaging the internal organs, the health of our internal body, because our diaphragm is moving, and it's stimulating all those internal abdominal organs as well. So try this Breath every single day, you can do this line on the floor with your legs up 90 degrees on a chair. That's the one that we show in the full men my back program as well.

So do yourself a favor, this is a wonderful gift that you can offer to yourself is slow down every single day, through meditation through deep breathing through different practices where you can really relax. And we'll talk a little bit more about this in the program later on as well. But let's start with the breath and let me know how you do see you next time.