Moving through Midlife | Habit Stack & Movement Snacks for Midlife Moms, Parenting in Midlife | Fitness over 40

Ep 15: Meditation and Breathing

August 09, 2021 Courtney McManus Episode 15
Moving through Midlife | Habit Stack & Movement Snacks for Midlife Moms, Parenting in Midlife | Fitness over 40
Ep 15: Meditation and Breathing
Moving through Midlife
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Show Notes Transcript

Last week Dr Alyssa discussed how we can work to help manage stress and anxiety in our home and one of the things she mentioned is a must is meditation.   Meditation is a mind body practice that has a very long history of use for increasing calmness and physical relaxation.  It helps to improve psychological balance, coping with illness, and enhancing overall health and well being.  

 

Meditation helps you attain the knowledge of self, so let that sink in, why are you denying the opportunity to get to know yourself better.  

I never really thought much of meditation, thought it was a little woowoo, but realized I did it quite often before I had children as I would sit in silence starting at something off in the distance without much thoughts running through my mind.  

 

Humming helps to reduce stress and blood pressure and increases lymphatic circulation and melatonin production.  It releases endorphins and nitric oxide and creates new neural pathways in the brain (from The Humming Effect, by Jonathan Goldman).  When you start humming your body starts vibrating, especially your brain cells start to vibrate which.  So to practice a humming meditation sit comfortably in a quiet place with tall spine.  Take some slow deep breaths, then slowly take a deep breath in and slowly exhale out through your nose while humming and continue to hum until the end of the exhalation.   

 

Not sure you want to hum; I also love the Insight Timer App, there is a free version with some amazing meditations on there.  I like to practice mine first thing in the morning when I wake up while my coffee is brewing, but I have a friend who does hers in the evening with her son before bedtime.  

 

Walking meditations are nice-explain

Nature meditations just sitting outside

 

Meditation is important for our children as well; children who meditate develop positive traits such as increased self control, better attentiveness in school, and more empathy and respect for others.  

With all of the technology they don’t have as much focus and attentiveness but meditation can help them see they can focus on one thing at a time.  Meditation helps children to become more self aware which will provide them with boosted confidence and better problem solvers.  

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Hi, I'd like to welcome you to raising healthy humans. I am your host Courtney, a personal trainer and health coach, and the founder of formfit. a community where I help busy moms move more. As a busy and sometimes overwhelmed mom of three myself, I understand that it can be difficult to find ways to live and raise Healthy Families. It is my goal to help provide you with the information and tactics you need to help raise healthy humans. Episode 15, meditation and breathing. So last week, if you happen to listen to Episode 14 with Dr. Alicia Runyan, she was mentioning how we can work to help manage stress and anxiety in our home. And one of the things she mentioned is a must is meditation. I'm sure you already know this, but I will quickly go through it. Meditation is a mind body practice that has a very long history of use for increasing calmness and physical relaxation. It helps to improve psychological balance, coping with illness, and enhancing overall health and well being. So when you think of meditation, what is it you think of sitting on a mat or sitting in a chair, placing your hands in a position sitting cross legged hands are in a position and practicing breathing and closing your eyes and letting your mind empty. And I would feel like I don't have time to do that. And then I started thinking more about it. And I realize it's an opportunity for our mind to rest. And when you think of it that way, I feel like that kind of eases some of this feeling of what meditation is, if I just think if I were to say to you take five minutes to rest your mind. I feel like that sounds doable. And I would like to do that, right. So I want you to start thinking about meditation as an opportunity to just rest your mind. We all especially now, with technology, we don't allow our minds to rest any longer. I think about listening to music in a car. And if you're one who listens to music in a car, think about how you listen to music, you'll be singing, and then all of a sudden, you'll just be driving and your mind might be you know, just paying attention the road, you're not singing any longer, you're just kind of driving, you're just in that in that state. And I think of that as kind of like a meditation, it's where the mind is able to just focus on driving, and nothing else is going on. But now we have so much amazing technology that we can listen to podcasts, we can be listening to a book, and our mind is processing that information constantly. And then we stop at a stoplight and we grab our phone and we start scrolling. So our mind is then processing that information. And I know for myself, a lot of times I will be doing two things at once I'll be scrolling while I'm trying to listen and you know that neither one of those is being done? Well, right, I no longer can hear what that person's talking about. And my mind is going through all the information that I'm seeing on the phone. So our mind is inundated with information constantly. And for many of us with children, we're not only thinking about ourselves any longer, we're now thinking about our children and their day and where we've got to be at what time to pick people up and move them here. And I've also got to make sure I got to get dinner on the table and Oh, I forgot to go get this and you know, it's that constant state of your mind having to process information and constantly trying to figure out what needs to be done and therefore we're not getting the rest that we need. So I am asking you for yourself and for your children to start taking an active role in resting your mind on a daily basis. Meditation, or resting your mind helps you attain the knowledge of self. Let that sink in for a minute. Why are you denying the opportunity to get to know yourself better, you can attain the knowledge of self. Imagine your children getting to know themselves at such a young age. I know that Children who meditate develop positive traits, such as increased self control, better attentiveness in school, and more empathy and respect for others, it helps them to become more self aware, which provides them with boosted confidence, and better problem solving skills. Let's take a minute and think about some ways that we can rest our mind. I like to do mine first thing in the morning, I have an app called insight timer, I have the free version, but it provides so many different meditation type programs that you can do, you can go for five minute program, you can go up to, I think there's 30 and 45 minute ones. But you just pick the time, and you listen to whatever it says. Some of them are just like music in the background, where you really just kind of let yourself go. Some of them are guided meditations, I, for myself, I find it's great to have them because they helped me focus on something so my mind isn't going off. And not that letting your mind wander is a bad thing. I think it's an opportunity for you to learn and just kind of let your mind go where it needs to go. But this meditation helps keep you focused and guided, which I really like, I have a friend who that she does the meditation in the evening with her son. And you can find meditations, children's meditations, there are some on the insight timer. But she mentioned how her son loves fortnight, and they have a fortnight meditation. So think about how you can bring this into your children's lives so that it's comfortable for them. Another way that you can meditate. So if you're not going to use an app, how about going outside and just looking at something. So maybe you go outside and you watch the clouds, and you tell your children to find different shapes in the cloud. And I feel like that is a moment where if you think about doing that, I know I did that as a child, we'd lay out on a blanket, and we would stare up the clouds. And we would see what the clouds would form when we try to find different things. But that focuses your mind on one thing and allows yourself to kind of rest we're out in nature, where we know that that provides us with a calming effect. And we're able to focus on just one thing. Another thing that is a great idea is walking meditations. So this is you're not taking your music long. You're not taking your phone, it's just you outside, walking, and you can do it this with your children as well. Even as young as when they're in a stroller just going out and going for a walk. And just being I think so many times we try to fill time, especially with our children, time talking to them and not allowing there to be a lot of silence. If you think about silence how uncomfortable you start to get in silence. But that's an opportunity to rest the mind. Just allow yourself to get more comfortable with silence and how long can you take to allow yourself to get comfortable with silence silence. So another one that is interesting is humming meditation. Now this is going to get a little bit more on what some people might think is the woowoo side, I would say start somewhere else. First start with the walking meditation or the nature meditation or just one where you know you have something, but I thought it was interesting to mention the humming because of the benefits of it. So humming helps to reduce stress and blood pressure, and it increases the lymphatic circulation and melatonin production. It releases endorphins and nitric oxide and creates new neural pathways in the brain. So when you start humming, your body starts vibrating, especially your brain cells start to vibrate, which allows the mind to become very vibrant. humming helps allow the mind and the body to become one again. And this can save you a lot of energy when your mind and body are one. So for humming, let's practice 100 humming meditation, you would sit comfortably in a quiet place with a tall spine. You would take some slow deep breaths. Then you take slowly take it breath in, and slowly exhale out through your nose while humming. And you will continue to hum until the end of the exhalation. So you breathe in. When you breathe out, you hum. So you can try this few times, and just see how it calms you. Now, they do recommend that after you're finished with this, you don't immediately jump up and get moving again, you take a minute, to recenter yourself, and then move on with your day, I've been practicing some of this more recently in my car, where as I'm driving down the road, I'll just start, you know, like two minutes before I get to where my destination is. And I'll just do that. And he does, it helps me to feel more at peace with myself. That's the only way I can describe it, I just feel more at peace. So I would encourage you to try that. The other thing I want you to practice, and I've mentioned it before is your breathing. Breathing is very important. Obviously, for us, we take advantage of it, we don't breathe, like we used to do to our posture, do talk to our positioning, and due to our increased that constant go stress in our body. So many of us have become these shallow breathers we're not using the full capacity of our lungs to breathe. And this creates a lot of tension and stress in our body. And it doesn't allow our diaphragm and our pelvic floor to work in conjunction with one another anymore. So if you're someone who deals with incontinence, maybe you leak when you jump, I would dare to say that your breathing pattern is off. So I would recommend getting to where you feel more comfortable with breathing and breathing deeper. So that doesn't mean breathing deep into the belly. I know that that's mentioned a lot of places. And I think there is a great reasoning for why they're telling you to do that. The goal is to try to get if we think getting breathing down into the belly, we're expanding more, we're breathing deeper. But the problem is, is if you're breathing so much into the belly, there's still pressure pushing down onto that pelvic floor. So we've got to start looking at our breathing pattern more in this 360 fashion. And if you happen to listen to my road trip episode, I did mention that you want to practice breathing those back ribs into the back of your seat. So that is something I would encourage you to do is start trying to breathe, think about your rib cage like a jellyfish and try to breathe in that 360 pattern to get the back of the Brit I'm sorry, the back of the ribs to start to expand backwards. And that's going to help you get this Fuller, deeper breath. And when we do that, then we can start playing with different ways of breathing. So the one that Dr. Alicia mentioned, where you breathe in, and then you make the you got to lick your lips before doing it. But the sound when you breathe out, you could also do box breathing, which this is a great one for kids. If you're looking at trying to create some meditation in your household, you can do box breathing to begin with, so that they've got something to focus on. And it would be I always start with like a four count. But you know, you can go eight to 10 count if you want, depending on how long you count. And that's basically you're going to breathe in for a count of four, you're going to hold that breath for a count of four, you're going to breathe out for a count of four. And you're going to hold that breath for a count of four. This breathing pattern was used by the Navy SEALs to help keep them calm and create clarity in the mind. So it's a great one for you to practice. And practicing it with the children is great. And then you look to expand the amount of time. So you're going to go from four seconds and try to go up to five seconds and see how long you are able to continue through that cycle. And you'll feel if you do it for three or four minutes, you'll notice how you start to feel much much calmer. So that's another one that I love to have people practice as well as we start to get back into a routine For many of us starting to head back to school, let's work on creating some opportunities to rest our mind during the day and provide that opportunity for our children as well. So as soon as maybe they come home from school, have Everybody sit down, maybe take five to 10 minutes to talk about your day. And then just sit and breathe, practice a breathing regimen or you know, mention how I mentioned the other ones go for a quick walk. It doesn't have to be a long walk, it can be a 10 minute walk to just kind of ease the mind. So there are ways that you can do these things in your everyday life. If you walk with your kids home from school, you could do it then just be okay with some silence. be okay with not having something going on in the background all the time and take a moment to breathe and relax. I hope that I have provided you with some ideas and actionable steps that you can take into your week to help ease your stress and anxiety and live a healthier life. Make sure to follow us over on Instagram at raising underscore healthy humans and join us in our community on Facebook. It is formed fit mom community where you can get healthy tips, ideas, exercises, recipes, we have it all over there. So make sure to join us and have a wonderful, wonderful week.