The ‘Pause’: A Great Virtue - Part I

When a weather storm hits, you seek shelter. If you are paying attention to the early warnings of a storm, you take proactive steps and protect your valuables. Any misstep taken when a storm is active could lead to a catastrophic outcome. You do what you can to survive the storm and revive later.

Emotions are also like weather storms, especially the negative ones triggered by anger, anxiety and jealousy can be stronger. Negative emotions trigger physiological changes inside the body causing one to loose temper, critical thinking and objective analysis. Any impulsive action taken in this state can potentially burn bridges and damage valuable relationships, friendships, reputation, and goodwill capital that has been earned over a period of time. It is very important to find ways to fortify and not get consumed by emotions.

In this article, I will explain how to handle emotional storms similar to how the weather storms are handled. It is a three step process and each step requires careful processing and development in a sequential order. These steps are:

• Preparation
• Endurance
• Recouping

We will cover these three steps in two parts to facilitate gradual learning and practicing. This article is Part I in this series; in which I will introduce the first step and concepts involved along with the exercises. In the upcoming Part II article, I will round up the topic by covering the remaining steps along with the additional concepts and exercises. Let’s delve into it.

Preparation

This step is about sensing ahead of an emotional storm that is brewing inside. This is similar to paying close attention to the weather forecast and preparing for an upcoming weather storm. If this step is missed, people can get caught in the middle of an emotional storm leaving them very susceptible to taking impulsive actions causing damage as explained above. Tuning into weather reports is easy to prepare for weather storms, but where do we tune in to know about emotional storms? Where do we even start from? This article answers these questions along with a few developmental steps.

Self-awareness

Self-awareness is an important component of Emotional Intelligence and is all about having a deep understanding of one’s emotions, feelings, strengths, weaknesses, needs and drives. For better or worse, strong emotions can cause strong physiological changes to the body.? Few example changes are; change in the heart rate, gnashing of teeth, change in the breathing pattern and so on. Among all, the most impactful and externally observable change and something you can do about it is breathing. Few example breathing patterns associated with underlying emotions are: gasping for fear, rapid breathing for anger, sigh for disappointment, panting for excitement and slow breathing for joy. So, tuning into self-awareness with focus on the breathing can be the pathway to sense emotional storms.

Breathing Primitives

There are four basic breathing blocks and a certain combination of them makes various breathing patterns. It is important to understand each block independently to be able to understand the pattern and emotion that is made up by them. They are:

• Slow breathing
• Rapid breathing
• Shallow breathing
• Deep breathing

Slow and Rapid Breathing?

Slow and Rapid breathing are associated with the number of breath cycles per minute. At normal times, humans breathe between 10 to 20 cycles per minute depending on the age and health.?

Slow breathing is about taking less breath cycles per minute than normal. It is associated with happiness and calmness and it also has a positive impact on the longevity of life (i.e. turtles take about 5 cycles per minute and have longer lifespans).?

Rapid breathing is about taking more breath cycles per minute than normal. It is associated with anger, excitement and anxiety and it is also associated with shorter life spans (i.e. dogs pant a few hundred times per minute and have relatively very short lifespans). Also, rapid breathing makes the breath shallow (see below).

Shallow and Deep Breathing

Shallow and Deep breathing are associated with the amount of oxygen that is taken in and how deep it is pumped. When breathing is shallow, the oxygen intake will be low. It is usually associated with panic, anxiety, or stress. Deep breathing is about inhaling more oxygen deeply into the body and exhaling fully. It is associated with relaxation and helps in relieving stress and anxiety.?

Deep breathing can be developed and practiced. One common practice is to breathe deeply into the belly. It can be practiced by keeping the palm on the belly and observing its motion as breathing happens. For shallow breathing, the palm would not move much as the belly is not involved. For deep breathing, the palm would go up as inhaled and would go down as exhaled. It can be observed prominently when a child is asleep.

Whales are best known for deep breathing. As they can’t breathe under the water unlike a few other sea animals, they come to the surface to breathe. They take enormous deep breaths by pumping as much oxygen as possible before taking a huge plunge for deep diving. This helps them to stay under deep waters for hours before coming back again to the surface to exhale. Whales are inspirational for deep breathing.

Conscious Breathing

Breathing is a foundational life force. Besides being associated with emotions, breathing is an excellent tool to ‘stay in touch’ with the present moment as it brings the wandering mind back to the body. Conscious breathing occurs when the mind and body are ‘connected’. It helps immensely in developing emotional aspects of self-awareness.

Summary

In summary, Self-awareness is the key in identifying emotions and it can be developed with conscious breathing. Emotions are associated with certain breathing patterns. Conscious breathing can help to pay attention to the changes in breathing due to an emotion that is brewing inside. Once a change is sensed, the type of emotion can be identified and prepared with necessary situational awareness. For stronger emotions, the most important thing is to avoid taking any impetuous actions. Doing so successfully meets the objective of the first step in the overall three step process; and the remaining two steps will be covered in the upcoming Part II of this article.

I hope you have enjoyed reading this article. Most importantly, I hope that this article gives information to develop awareness and make the best use of emotional intelligence necessary for graceful handling of emotional storms.