How to Change Your Emotional State in Just 5 Minutes a Day

Change Your Breath, Change Your Emotions

Did you know that every breath pattern you have is associated with a different emotion? And did you know that by simply changing your breath pattern you can change that emotion?

When you change your breathing you change your energy field and your energy field is created by your emotional frequency.

Here’s where it gets super cool.

You see your thoughts create your feelings, and based on your life experience, your feelings create your emotions and your emotions create your personal reality. So by changing your breath, the entire story you are telling yourself about your life can change! And you can begin to make these changes in as little as 5 minutes a day.

That’s it.

5 minutes.

Making the Change

This can feel challenging because your body is used to thinking and feeling in a certain way. So when you sit down to breathe and are actively working on changing those patterns, it is going to feel uncomfortable.

You’ll start saying things like…

• This doesn’t feel right
• I’m bored
• I’ll start tomorrow
• This is too hard
• I don’t have time

Jim Rohn has a quote I love, “You are the average of the 5 people you hang out with the most.” It’s powerful because you begin to see how your external environment affects how you live your life. But what’s even crazier is that the same can be said for your nervous system.

You are the average of the 5 emotional states you hang out in the most.

Now this is wild because that means internally you are also affecting your environment. And breathwork, simple conscious breathing exercises, can help shift you into relating and living with a new set of emotions.

Awesome, I know.

You must show up if you want to see change.

And showing up to breathe is not nearly as thrilling as other more active forms of behavior patterning like going to the gym. You won’t see the physical results as quickly, but you will notice the emotional results in your thinking, your actions, and the way your environment looks and feels.

When you commit to consciously breathing 5 minutes a day your mind is going to fight you. It doesn’t want to sit and focus on your breath. Why would it? You’re breathing just fine, I mean… You’re alive, right?

WRONG!

Your mind is uncomfortable because you are doing something it cannot predict and your mind is always looking for ways to protect you from harm.

Connecting New Neural Pathways

By beginning to reorganize your thoughts with new perspectives on old situations you begin to signal new pathways in your brain. Because our brains are plastic they can be molded and changed based on the information we feed it. We form new neural pathways by signaling new stimuli provided by our senses.

A good example of this is the voice inside your head that is always feeding you the same story about how you can never lose weight. You might even catch yourself making jokes about it so everyone else around is aware of this story. You might even be so wrapped into this story that any comment about weight you personalize as a judgment about who you are.

Creating new neural pathways around this story would look like you telling yourself a new story about how healthy and strong your body is and imagining what it would feel like to be in a healthy and strong body. Here’s how the connection plays out…

1. You have a new thought that your body is strong and healthy (thought)
2. You connect to how it would feel to have a strong and healthy body (feeling)
3. You hold on to the sensation of what that would feel like (emotion)
4. You pay attention to your breath in that moment of creation.

Equal parts simple and challenging.

If you’ve been telling yourself a story about weight, abundance, love, society, etc you know how ingrained these thoughts are. Most likely you aren’t even aware of when the thought began, it’s just always been there. So getting still and consciously breathing into a new thought will bring up a lot of resistance.

It’s about changing your identity, and changing your identity means letting go of the parts of yourself that no longer serve you.

When you decide it’s time to connect to new thoughts as a way to feel new feelings and experience new emotions, be ready because your brain is going to put up walls. Your brain is going to fight for its comfort zone. Just like an addict, your brain has become used to the dopamine drip of the latest political outrage, or the numbness of cheap network TV thrills. Your brain is used to getting up in the morning and begin playing the story of your weight or whatever it is for you. It’s comfortable there, it’s what the plan has been, and now you want to change it?

It’s going to take work.

The Work

Lucky for you the work I’m talking about is simply building a relationship to breath. Your breath is constantly sending you messages about what’s going on in your internal world. Your job is to listen. It takes a couple tries to really nail this down, but you can develop this relationship in as little as 5 minutes a day of conscious belly breathing.

Here’s how:

• Find a place where you won’t be disturbed and turn off your cell phone.
• Take a comfortable seat either on the floor or in a chair move yourself to the edge so your spine can be straight and your feet are firmly on the floor.
• Set a timer for 5 minutes.
• Soften your gaze, unclench your jaw, and begin to pay attention to your breath.
• Place one hand on your belly and one hand on your chest.
• Allow your breath to start naturally traveling deeper into your body as your belly expands on the inhale and softens contracts on the exhale.
• Notice how the hand on your belly gently expands and contracts with the flow of your breath.
• Start counting 1,2,3,4 as you inhale
• And 1,2,3,4 as you exhale
• Let your breath be your main focus as all other thoughts arise and fall with your breath.

Commit to 5 days of this slow conscious breathing. Show up whether or not you feel like it and notice the body and brain’s resistance.

The more you show up and build this relationship the easier it will become and the longer you will want to do it. Before long you will be breathing into a new set of emotions and things that used to trouble you won’t fire you up in the same way. You will be living with control over your emotions because you know the secret to following your breath.

Interested in learning more? Follow me breath_mindset on Instagram.