Breathwork can improve your mental and physical health and your children’s – learn to breathe better to help manage stress, depression and anxiety
- Chronic mouth breathing – inhaling heavily through the mouth, not lightly through the nose – can trigger problems from poor sleep to difficulty concentrating
- Experts say more parents are using breathwork to help their children cope with life’s increased pressures during the pandemic, and to focus on the present
Before becoming a certified breathwork trainer and life coach, Liza Rosen suffered from severe burnout.
She abandoned her high-stress finance job and grappled with depression and anxiety for years. It wasn’t until a therapist directed her to breathwork that she realised she had been breathing wrong all that time.
Now Rosen wishes someone had explained the concepts and effects of functional breathing to her early on, as “it would surely have helped me better manage my own stress and anxiety”.
“I am always amazed at how little people actually know about proper breathing and at how many people breathe badly today,” she says.
After addressing her own poor breathing habits and learning more about the subject, Rosen came to realise her 12-year-old son was a “chronic mouth breather”. He had a consistent tendency to breathe heavily through his mouth, rather than lightly through his nose.
An ENT (ear, nose and throat) specialist identified the cause. “It turns out he was totally blocked and had nasal obstruction due to common allergies.”