Sleep Tips: Can 4-7-8 breathing really help you fall asleep faster?

Sleep Tips: The 4-7-8 techniques are intended to calm the body by allowing breath and relaxation and help people transition from stress-storming into a focused present self. Breathwork is an active meditation that helps reframe the nervous system’s response to trauma.

The 4-7-8 breathing method

If you have problems with sleep, so you wake up in the middle of the night or are thinking long before falling asleep, or you are nervous before the upcoming event and you can’t fall asleep, use the following method to help yourself.

This method is best remembered as 4-7-8. You need to do the following:

First, how to perform the 4-7-8 breathing technique

Settle into a lying position and make yourself comfortable and warm.

1. Close your eyes and take a deep breath through the nose. Inhalation should last full 4 seconds.
2. Then hold the air in the lungs for full 7 seconds.
3. Next, begin to let the air out through the mouth lasting for 8 seconds.
4. Then repeat the entire procedure 4-7-8.

It is very simple. This respiratory exercise slows down our heart rate and calms us down. In fact, all this happens very quickly in only a few repetitions.

When you feel stress, worry, or anxiety, the amount of adrenaline in the blood increases and breathing becomes shallow and rapid.

Retention of breath with particularly slow exhalation inevitably slows down the heart rate. This is physiology.

Read Also: Stress Management: Simple Relaxation Techniques To Reduce Stress

What are other deep breathing benefits?

Also, this method calms your mind, because you have to constantly count on yourself and be focused on breathing. At that point, you may not notice immediately, but your nervous system will slowly calm down, and feelings of worry disappear. As a result, your whole body relaxes. Method 4-7-8 has already been used for several centuries in Indian yoga. They have used it for meditation, to achieve complete relaxation.

In the beginning, it is recommended to apply the method every day, twice daily, so you can master it and use it effectively when you need it.