The average person can hold his breathe for 2-4 minutes. The world record is 17 minutes—recently documented and set by magician David Blaine.
How about the average 7 year-old struggling on a spelling test? Or the average 15 year-old responding to an essay prompt? The average 17 year-old giving a speech to the entire school?
It’s time to give breathing its due. There is no magic bullet in the world of teaching and learning, but breathing is such a tremendous tool for stress release that I am often left wondering: why not teach it to our kids? Sure, stress can be a vital tool of inspiration, giving us a boost of energy to meet a deadline or recall just the right bit of information to solve a problem. But too much of it is disastrous. You reach a difficult question on a test, for example, and you start saying “I don’t know this.” Unless you’ve adequately trained yourself to rewire your negative thoughts (and even that takes practice), panic starts to set in and you are left in a fixed, almost frozen-like state.
Without action in response to stress hormones, they stay in your system, eroding at your creativity and your ability to recall information – not to mention your blood pressure, immune system, and digestion. Breathing can be just the right type of “action” you need to get the stress hormones (such as cortisol) moving out of your blood stream. In test situations at most schools students have to sit in their chairs, so exercising to relieve stress isn’t an option. They can breathe though!
This Saturday we’re hosting a Breathing Seminar for Families. We’ll be teaching children (and their parents!) better breathing for Self Control, Anxiety Management, and Performance Enhancement. I’ll share video clips from the class on this blog…so stay tuned. You will not only learn what effective breathing exercises exist for children and teens (e.g. Holding Breath Tests, Alternate Nostril Breathing), but what it feels like to do these exercises and what you can do to model and teach them to your children so that they, too, can be ScholarFit!
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