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Recently, a very stressful situation presented itself where I had the opportunity to test whether belly breathing would help to calm me in an extremely stressful situation. I work for an international company and our team is spread out throughout the United States and abroad, with many of us working remotely.  Most of our meetings are conducted via teleconference, but occasional we travel to other office locations to meet live with specific internal and external resources. On a recent occasion, I was asked with very little notice to travel to a regional office to give a presentation to the senior leadership team regarding a large project which I have been leading. This would be an understandably stressful situation carrying out the presentation via teleconference, but the need to travel to the meeting and conduct the presentation live in front of such a prestigious audience was rather unnerving.  Having just started my belly breathing practice, I decided to use the belly breathing to keep myself calm and focused during the time leading up to the meeting, the travel and the presentation. The day before leaving to attend the meeting, I followed my new morning routine of reflection and belly breathing and took some additional time to include alternate nostril breathing, or Nadi Shodhan Pranayama. I performed one set of ten rounds of alternate nostril breathing to start. Afterwards, I felt additionally calm and relaxed having taken the extra time to focus on breathing and to ground myself. I decided to include the alternate nostril breathing in my regular morning and nighttime routines going forward.

The gripping feeling of anxiety and the accompanying nervous stomach ache came over me several times in the time leading up to the trip, while traveling and especially right before my presentation, but I used belly breathing to calm my nerves and to keep myself balanced. The breathing exercises seemed to dissolve the feelings of stress and worry into softened thoughts of peace and calm.   When it was time for my presentation, I felt rather calm and collected and I believe the presentation went well and was much easier to conduct as I felt grounded and focused, without the distractions of excessive nervousness.  Anxiety sometimes makes me forget what I want to say or stumble a bit when presenting information.   Happily, I was able to make it through the presentation without any hesitations or issues.