1 More Approach to Relaxation: Breathing
Contributor: Ayana Best
I woke up on the floor of my job’s basement at 5 in the evening. I was groggy and had a headache and was pissed at the unceasing banging coming from upstairs. Then I put it together, I was at work! I jumped up and ran up the stairs to the door. One of our psychologists was standing there with a concerned look on her face. She asked if everything was alright, she and her client (also standing there), had been trying to get in for the past 20 minutes, I was the only one with a key. The client, an older black woman, took one look at me and said “Yep, she’s sick alright” and I was told to go straight home.
I was sick. Not from any virus or bacteria but instead panic and anxiety, which chose to hit me right at the height of my depression. I had passed out while trying to collect myself downstairs. I passed out because I wasn’t breathing and I wasn’t breathing because I was having, what I later found out was, a panic attack.
At the time of my panic attack, I was juggling two jobs, teaching yoga classes 4 times a week, helping to take care of my grandmother, and helping a friend with business projects. I thought I was superwoman and could do it all. But I wasn’t and I couldn’t.
Breath is the key element that both mindfulness and yoga utilize. “If you stop to breathe, it changes your life,” says Dr. Angela Grice. As a doctor who has studied the brain, Grice explained that the simple act of breathing affects how we respond to life’s challenges, allowing us the opportunity to accept who we are in a given moment. Healing can come from this. “If you don’t have anything else left to give, you have your breath,” says Dr. Grice. “Breathe.”
This is the second in a three-part series looking at ways to combat the effects of stress on black women. We previously looked at studies that proved the incidence of biological stress being passed on through the generations, leading to conditions such as hypertension. As a method of relaxation, we described the different branches of yoga and their benefits, as well as simple ways to bring yoga into one’s everyday lifestyle. Now we are going to look at another reason black women need to bring relaxation techniques – this time deep breathing – into their day to day.
Superwoman, Discriminated: Yet Another Reason You Need to Relax
In 2010, Dr. Cheryl Giscombé Ph.D. published a paper that firmly placed a theory she developed as a starting point for many studies looking at the impact of stress on African American women. The paper was called Superwoman Schema: African American Women’s Views on Stress, Strength, and Health.
To get into it, let’s first set down a couple definitions.
Superwoman Schema: a multidimensional culture-specific framework characterizing psychosocial responses to stress among African American women. It’s subscales:
a perceived obligation to present an image of strength
a perceived obligation to suppress emotions
a perceived obligation to resist help or to resist being vulnerable to others
a motivation to succeed despite limited resources
a prioritization of caregiving
Allostatic Load: the cumulative burden of chronic stress, biological stress, and life events.
Weathering: the accumulation of racial stress over Black women's lives contributes to an observed pattern of racial disparities in maternal health and birth outcomes that increase with maternal age.
Dr. Cheryl Giscobé’s paper described that the health disparities commonly affecting African American women – obesity, lupus, adverse birth outcomes, cardiovascular disease, psychological conditions – could be explained by stress and coping mechanisms. Her conceptual framework for the schema found that the Superwoman role had both negative and positive impacts. Benefits: self-preservation and the protection of one’s family and community. Liabilities: relationship strain, stress related health behaviors, and stress embodiment. Add this to black women’s overall allostatic load, along with black women experiencing weathering and decreased access to resources due to gendered racism exposures. While in itself a coping mechanism, can the self-identified black superwoman (strong, obstinate, self-reliant, motivated) perhaps be doing herself harm by exacerbating her social stressors?
To look into this, in 2019, Allen and Wang wrote a journal called Racial discrimination, the superwoman schema, and allostatic load: exploring an integrative stress-coping model among African American women. Their study sought to identify the impact of the Superwoman Schema on the association between racial discrimination, allostatic load, and the resulting health risks. In plain terms, they wanted to know if a woman who saw herself as a “strong black woman”, as a way to cope with racial stressors, was further adding to her cumulative load of stress. They found that the short answer to their question was yes. Women who felt obligated to present an image of strength and suppress emotions but also were motivated to succeed and obligated to help others (all part of the Superwoman Schema) had exacerbated health risks. Stress is making us sick.
Take A Breath
“Breathe”
Over at September Set we’ve recently started reading Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art by James Nestor. In it he talks about his journey to breathing the way humans were meant to and how it effectively healed a number of his chronic stress problems. While always wary of any man trying to explaining anything to me, I was taken in by the flawless storytelling backed by cold hard facts. Today, people are breathing in a way that doesn’t optimize their full lung capacity nor the true air passageways we were born with. This leads to dysfunction and adverse health effects. Luckily, the journey to get back to baseline is relatively easy and it has the added bonus of being a major stress reliever.
The above studies on stress in black women and the superwoman schema were not pretty. The effects of our intersectionality are not always positive and the way we show up in the world can either make or break us, in more ways than one. When it comes to our health we have to get serious. We are the backbone of several different communities and have to honor ourselves and our bodies as such.
So, breathing. Please use the below examples of breathing techniques as easy-start ways to weave relaxation techniques into your daily life.
Belly Breathing
What: Also called diaphragmatic or abdominal breathing, it is a way of taking air into your lungs and then expelling it. The diaphragm, a dome shaped muscle at the base of the lungs, creates space in your chest cavity on the inhale, allowing your lungs to expand, and then removes space on the exhale, allowing your lungs to constrict and expel stale air. We are all born with the ability to fully engage this muscle but we lose the habit as we age.
Why: Primarily, belly breathing encourages full oxygen exchange, the amount of oxygen you take in matches the amount of carbon dioxide you put out, leading to a slowed heartbeat and the opportunity to lower and stabilize blood pressure. Studies have found these other benefits to diaphragmatic breathing:
Reduced the physiological and psychological stress
Reduced cortisol levels
How:
Lie on your back on a flat surface (or in bed) with your knees bent. You can use a pillow under your head and your knees for support, if that's more comfortable.
Place one hand on your upper chest and the other on your belly, just below your rib cage.
Breathe in slowly through your nose, letting the air in deeply, towards your lower belly. The hand on your chest should remain still, while the one on your belly should rise.
Tighten your abdominal muscles and let them fall inward as you exhale through pursed lips. The hand on your belly should move down to its original position.
Make it easy: Practice this technique for five minutes three times a day. You can do this sitting up while at your desk, driving, watching the news, etc.
Slow Breathing
What: Slow breathing is just how it sounds. As opposed to breathing as deeply as possible, you are breathing as slowly as possible. 6 breaths per minute, to be exact.
Why: In a 12-week study on 100 individuals (50-control and 50-intervention) slow breathing techniques were shown to significantly reduce heart rate and blood pressure, and to have an extreme impact on perceived stress.
How:
Block the right nostril with your thumb and slowly breathe in through the left nostril for six seconds.
Block the left nostril with your index finger (both nostrils closed) and hold the breath for six seconds.
Release the thumb from the right nostril and breathe out for six seconds.
Breathe in through the right nostril (still open) for six seconds.
Block the right nostril with your thumb (both nostrils closed) and hold the breath for six seconds.
Open the left nostril by releasing your index finger and breath out for six seconds.
It is recommended to repeat this cycle for thirty minutes.
Make it easy: Practice a modified version of this technique at your desk for five minutes. Inhaling through your right nostril and exhaling through your left. Mid-way through switch to inhaling through your left nostril and exhaling through your right.
Upcoming @ September Set
In a few weeks part three of this series will drop with one last reason you, yes YOU, need to relax and how. We will be wading into the waters of meditation, a practice that’s not exclusive to just hippies and yoga teachers.