Psychological sigh for inner calm

The psychological sigh is a stress management technique that can be used to reduce stress or anxiety

Fun fact: The average person sighs approximately once every 5 minutes. That’s 12 sighs per hour and 192 hours per day during our waking hours.

Why does sighing matter? Well, it’s actually imperative that you sigh. Breathing requires 500 million little air sacs in your lungs (called alveoli) to be open, since that’s where the exchange of oxygen and carbon dioxide takes place. Over time, these little air sacs collapse, which would eventually impair lung function. By sighing, the alveoli are “popped” open and you can breathe at you full capacity.

The good news is that we don’t have to consciously think about sighing. it is an automatic behavior whose control center is located in part of the brain stem, called the pre-Bӧtzinger complex. However, we can choose to maximise our sighing by sighing consciously and in a specific pattern. This conscious sighing reduces stress and allows us to decrease the impact of stress on our body.

When we consider stress management, we can either approach it in a top-down manner where our thinking can trickle down to the body’s stress response, or with a bottom-up approach by controlling the physiological response, which then has an impact on our mental state. The “psychological sigh” is an example of a bottom-up stress management technique that can be used acutely to reduce stress or anxiety.

To practice the physiological sigh, receive an inhale, but before you get to the top, take another inhale. Then, expel all your air with an exhale. That’s it! A double inhale followed by a long exhale. That’s the psychological sigh.