How to Do Breathing Exercises for Menopause

Video Transcript

"Hello, my name is Doctor Susan Jewell and on behalf of Expert Village, I'm going to talk to you about how to live with menopause. Now, in this clip, we're going to talk about ways of breathing to reduce anxiety, to reduce the frequency of hot flashes and so on; symptoms that you find when you're in menopausal stage of your life. Now, paced breathing is a method that's recommended for most women when they are actually entering menopause or are in menopause. Now, what is paced breathing? Well, studies have shown that if you do regular, proper technique of breathing, it actually reduces the frequency of hot flashes, and the duration of the hot flashes. Also, it will help you to reduce your anxiety; it will improve the circulation of the body. So, I'm going to show you how to do paced breathing. Basically, what you do is find a nice, calm room and it's also good to put on some really nice, calming, relaxing music in the background. What you do is, you breathe in very deeply; inhale and you inhale deeply using your diaphragm muscles. Now, your diaphragm muscles, very quickly, is say, for example, this is the chest, this is the neck and the shoulders, and here's your waist here and your bellybutton. So, your diaphragm muscles in your thoracic, or your chest area. Here are your lungs here, your two lungs; it's a muscle. Your diaphragm muscle, this is your diaphragm muscle here. When you breathe out, the diaphragm descends; when you breathe in, it goes up. Most people breathe from the throat here, but really, when you want to take in a lot of air, you want to really use your diaphragm so that you can have more room, more volume to actually have air going in and air coming out. So, paced breathing; you breathe in deeply using your diaphragm muscles for five seconds, and then you breathe out slowly for five seconds, using your diaphragm muscles. So, let me do that again; so five seconds in, using your diaphragm muscles here; your stomach muscles - your diaphragm muscles - for five seconds very slowly. It's recommended you do 15 minutes of this every day, maybe twice. Two sessions a day would be absolutely wonderful for you; it also relaxes you and it makes you feel really, really good at the end. Here's a picture that I've got of a woman actually doing paced breathing and it's good, like I said, she has her head leaning back and she's really breathing in, she's very relaxed - see all the muscles around her neck is relaxed. This is a very good method, as I said, to have you reduce the occurrence and also the duration of hot flashes."