 Hi, welcome back. Today I am going to teach you a really simple breathing technique called box breathing or square breathing. That's a square. Okay, so the point here is that I'm going to teach you this simple breathing technique which is one I like, I find useful for calming me at moments when I feel my anxiety rising and it can be something that is useful for people of all ages and just a great tool to have in your toolbox. Now there are loads of different breathing techniques out there and you know go and find the one that works for you. This is one that I found to be super helpful. I've been able to teach it to massive groups of people or use it one-to-one with people and also use it for myself. So the thing with breathing and anxiety and stress is that if we can kind of try and help our body override when we begin to feel a stress or anxious reaction that can help us to kind of keep our kind of emotion and feeling and physical response in check. So our kind of anxious response is both it's kind of a mixture of physiological and an emotional response and by focusing on our breathing and having a kind of go-to way of managing that we can begin to override that kind of you know very very fast breathing, heart getting faster and faster and then the sweaty palms and all the different kind of anxiety induced responses that come on. So if we can just then take check, take control of the breathing that can really help. It's helpful to try and do this as early on as possible when you feel anxiety rising and it can also be done as a kind of preventative measure. So you might do this when you know you're about to enter an anxious situation. So if you struggle with social anxiety you might do this. I do this quite often when I'm going somewhere else in the car and I'll do my box breathing just for a couple of minutes so that I'm then like really nice and calm and I've got a good base to start from. Equally you might do it just before going into an exam or you know whatever you know are the things that you know when you're more likely to feel slightly anxious. So it's kind of yeah your prevention just think of yourself as you're trying to like bring down the stress level get yourself into this kind of nice calm state ready ready ready. So box breathing or four square breathing or whatever you want to call it's really really simple. So first of all we just want to get ourselves I feel very very self-conscious about this but when I get ourselves in a nice kind of comfortable position you want to be sitting up nice and straight you're going to be thinking about breathing in and out so you don't want to be all slouched you want to be nice nice and straight. I find kind of having my feet on the ground so I'm a little bit grounded I can feel the the feel of my my feet on the ground and then I sit with my palms up so palms up on my lap that's that's my preferred way um you don't want to be kind of again anything that restricts your breathing not good. So you're basically like nice and open body language nice and calm so even thinking about the positioning of your body is helping to get that feeling of calm. Um so you start off by breathing out and you can do this either through your nose or your mouth and you're trying to expel all of the oxygen from your lungs and you're thinking about your lungs as you focus on the outbreath by just busting through the capsule up there just to kind of break the moment. Okay let's get back to our calm so we're sitting we're ready and we're going to breathe out for a count of four and so you're trying to get to think of every last bit of oxygen removing itself from your lungs so it's one two three four and it's or you can think of as a box so one two three four and sometimes with younger kids I might literally draw this or have them trace it with their finger while we're doing it so you breathe out and then you're going to breathe in through your nose and you're going to count to four slowly and you're going to slowly feel your lungs fill with air so again one two three four as you breathe in through the nose and then you're going to hold that okay so you've inhaled you felt your lungs really fill you're going to hold it for four one two three four and then you're going to exhale through your mouth so again for the count of four one two three four and you're thinking about that air leaving your mouth leaving your mouth and then again after that exhale you're going to hold for a further four one two three four okay so we're going to do it again um because obviously I was chatting a lot there which didn't really help um but this time I'm going to print the instructions on the screen because with the magic of movie maker I can do that and we'll do it together and we'll go through a couple of times and the prompts will be down on the screen and hopefully you'll kind of get a feel for it um after a while so okay we're starting with the exhale so okay so I look like a complete idiot doing that but hopefully it gave you a bit of an idea uh you can try it see how it works for you it's funny actually I wasn't feeling at all anxious before I did that breathing exercise with you um but just doing it really made me kind of feel calm you might notice I'm even like talking a little bit more slowly and stuff so yeah give it a go try it for yourself try it with people that you are working with try and introduce it into that toolbox of different things that we use every day just to help us cope and yeah remember where possible try and use it as a preventative measure to try and get you nice and calm before you enter a situation which might be likely to impact on your anxiety good luck hope you found it helpful if you've got other things that you find helpful like this or other breathing techniques that you think we should try then leave a comment down below if you want to hear from me in the future then please subscribe and if you liked what you saw today please give it a thumbs up I love it when people take a moment to give videos a thumbs up or leave a comment of any kind because I sit here in my little shed kind of talking to the ether um and so it's really really nice to know what impact the videos are having so yeah please take a moment to do that I love it thank you bye