Breathing for calm

[Oscen]

I'm on a big physicality/positive thinking/mind-body connection drive right now.

One thing I'm looking at is breathing. I've always had issues with this - 1st asthma attack at age 4, trouble with swimming lessons and had to get a specialist teacher train me in bilateral breathing (breathe out less often), not much bodily awareness of my breathing and diaphragm even when training in singing at a conservatory, struggle to use breathing techniques to calm down. HAAAAAAAATE it when people tell me to slow down and "breathe". Don't tell me how I should be getting my oxygen, dammit!

I realised that when I do long exhalations, I feel panicky quite quickly and want to gulp in a fresh breath. Feeling restricted in how much I can breathe scares me. I try to slow my breathing when I exercise and it's the long exhalations that make me start getting asthma-like symptoms. Slow inhalations seem to be a good thing and stop my chest raising. An awful lot of calming breath exercises even exaggerate the balance between inhale and exhale and have in-breaths on a count of 4 and out-breaths on a count of 8 and so on.

I found this article which would explain a lot. Deep breaths out can contribute to panic, because the issue is not that you're not inhaling enough oxygen - you're exhaling too much calming carbon dioxide. Other than the paper bag trick, this is the first time I've ever heard this advice for calming. I'm going to give it a go because the received wisdom has not felt beneficial up to this point, and it's made me doubt my own perception of how I'm feeling.
https://www.livescience.com/9204-stave-panic-deep-breath.html

[D.]

Thanks for the info.  I tend to do weird sighing breathes to relax...maybe it makes things worse?  I was going off of all those exercises you mentioned with counted breating...I will look into this too.  And I totally get it about people telling you how to breathe in a bossy way.  Although personally I like meditations where someone simply comments on breathing to encourage a slower pace.