“Please Tell Me you Didn’t. . . How to Keep Client’s Out of the Jailhouse, Poorhouse and Lawyers Out of the Nuthouse” -Blog
When I was a kid growing up in a Mississippi river town, we were scared of absolutely nothing. Long before the invention of “personal watercraft,” we would go behind the Yamaha Motorcycle dealer and grab Styrofoam packing crates, about the size of a closet door and use them for river rafts.
Our summers were spent fearlessly rafting with venomous snakes, fast currents, and other hidden dangers. It was just fun for us. Although, come to think of it, there were probably some pretty angry sea turtles in and around Mobile Bay, who might have tried to procreate with those abandoned motorcycle crates after they washed up on shore.
“Never let ‘em see you sweat.” I am not a kid anymore and like most professionals, I do have stress. (Instead of looking in the mirror for signs of aging, I now look for any signs of youth.) I also subscribe to the notion, “never let ‘em see you sweat.” Great, that’s one more thing to worry about just before trial.
But, I have always heard that deep breathing is a good way to combat stress, but never really tried it. Probably, because no one ever explained “why.” I am the kind of person who needs to know “why” something works, before accepting it. My teacher wasn’t amused in 9th grade algebra: “Given x, find y.” I didn’t understand why I would want to find y? Maybe y doesn’t want to be found? (It was the only D I ever got.)
But I did know, from swimming in rivers, that if you breathe in at the wrong time and take in water, you can be in big trouble quickly. That’s how good swimmers drown in lakes. Panic sets in when you can’t breathe normally.
Turns out, that’s also why deep breathing works with stress on dry land. I learned this from watching self-help videos on YouTube this month, and verified it from a study on the NIH PubMed website.
The answer is “carbon dioxide.” We breathe in oxygen and breathe out carbon dioxide. When too much carbon dioxide builds up in our system, we start to panic, hard.
The National Institute of Health tested this:
“We randomly selected six panic disorder subjects, using the Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-IV. All subjects went double-blindly through an inhalation of 35% CO2 and compressed gas (atmospheric air) on two occasions. At the first test five patients (83.3%) had a severe panic attack with high levels of subjective anxiety during carbon dioxide inhalation.”
This makes sense to me. Shallow breathing from stress, increases carbon dioxide in our blood, which sends a message to our brains, “this is the perfect time to panic.” And we do. Deep breathing gets rid of anxiety, by increasing oxygen and lowering carbon dioxide.
Now that you know why it works, maybe like me, you will be more likely to embrace deep breathing the next time you appear in court or present to a large audience.