|
The best antistress(抗紧张)medicine we have may be right under your nose!Think you know how to do it?Try this simple test：sit or stand wherever you are and take a deep breath, then let it out．What expanded more as you breathed in, your chest or your abdomen(腹部)If the answer is your chest, you're like most people and you're doing it wrong．Take another deep breath-and keep reading．
The technique is so powerful that physician James Gordon, director of the Centre for Mind/Body Medicine in Washington, teaches it to nearly every patient he sees．
“Slow, deep breathing is probably the only best antistress medicine we have,”says Gordon,“When you bring air down into the lower part of the lungs, where oxygen exchange is most efficient, everything changes．Heart rate slows, blood pressure decrease, muscles relax, anxiety ceases and the mind calms．”
Obviously, everyone alive knows how to breathe．But Gordon and other experts in the field of mind-body medicine say that few people in industrialized societies know how to breathe correctly．They are taught to suck in their guts(内脏)and puff out(鼓起)their chests．At the same time, they are attacked with constant stress, which causes heart rate to increase．As a result, they become shallow“chest breathers”, using primarily the middle and upper portions of the lungs．Few people-other than musicians, singers and some athletes-are even aware that the abdomen should expand when they breathe in．
“Watch a baby breathe,”says Gordon,“and you'll see the abdomen go up and down, deep and slow．”With age, most people change from this healthy abdominal breathing into shallow chest breathing．
At Duke University Medical Centre, Dr．Jon Seskevich has taught abdominal breathing to most of the 18,000 patients he's worked with since 1990．About half the people he sees have cancer．
One of his most dramatic cases involved a lung-cancer patient．“I walked into the room to find this large man actually fighting for breath,”Seskevich recalls．“I had his sit back in his chair and place his feet on the ground．I then asked if it was OK if I touched his abdomen．He nodded, so I put my hand on and told him to breathe softly into my hand, to let his abdomen rise into my hand．”
After about six minutes of this, he was breathing comfortably．“All day, people were telling his to relax,”says Seskvich,“and it seemed to make his struggle worse．I just told him to breathe into his abdomen．We didn't cure his cancer, but we may have saved him a trip to the intensive-care unit”
|
