There’s a saying I come back to often:
“The breath is the string, the mind is the kite.”
I don’t remember exactly where I first heard it, but I’ve found it to be one of those simple ideas that becomes more true the more you pay attention to it.
Notice what happens to your breathing when you’re anxious. It gets shallow. Faster. Irregular. Your shoulders might rise. Your chest tightens. Your movements speed up. Your thoughts start jumping from one thing to another.
Everything accelerates together.
Now notice what happens when you intentionally slow your breathing. A slow inhale into the belly. An even longer exhale. Again.
Something begins to settle.
Your body slows down. Your thoughts tend to follow. A little more space appears between whatever is happening and what comes next.
The gap between stimulus and response widens. With it, so does your capacity for choice.
This is one of the most foundational things I work on with clients.
Before anything else, sometimes we just need to breathe.
The Body Leads
One of my first coach certification trainings with Tony Robbins introduced me to something he calls the triad.
The idea is that our emotional state is influenced by three things: our physiology, our focus, and our language.
Focus is what we’re paying attention to. Language is how we’re describing what’s happening, the language we’re using both in our thoughts and out loud. Physiology is what we’re doing with our body. Our posture. Our facial expression. Our movements.
And our breath.
Change one part of the triad and you begin to influence your state. Change more than one and the effect can become even stronger.
I’ve found the physiology piece particularly useful because the body gives us something immediate to work with. You don’t always have to reason your way out of an emotional state. In fact, that often doesn’t work, particularly when the reason or logic is at odds with our nervous system.
In other words, if you feel unsafe, telling yourself that you’re safe tends to have the same effect as when you say you love the desert your aunt made for Thanksgiving and it’s actually awful.
As a cognitively dominant society, we tend to overemphasize the cognitive part (e.g. the affirmation trend) and ignore what’s actually happening in the body.
So we can’t always think our way into a calmer emotional state. But we can breathe our way into one.
Slow Everything Down
I was working with a client recently who noticed that she was doing almost everything quickly. Walking quickly. Eating quickly. Responding to messages immediately. Moving from one task to another before the first was finished.
If something entered her awareness, whether it was a Slack notification or a thought in her own mind, she felt an urge to do something about it. There was this internal timer running in the background.
Hurry. Handle it. Respond. Move.
She had already started experimenting with intentionally walking and moving more slowly. And she noticed something interesting.
When she slowed her movements, her mind started to slow down too.
That’s physiology.
So I invited her to go one layer deeper.
Slow down your breathing.
Because the breath sits underneath so much of this.
When we’re stressed, anxious, overwhelmed, or rushing, our breathing tends to become faster and shallower. Our body is preparing for action. When we intentionally breathe more slowly, particularly with diaphragmatic breathing couple with a longer exhale than ingale, we send the body a different message.
We begin to downshift.
And when the body downshifts, the mind follows.
The breath is the string. The mind is the kite.
Creating Space
One of the reasons this matters so much is that many of the things we regret happen quickly.
The reactive email. The sharp response. The impulsive decision. The conversation where we say something before we’ve actually considered what we want to say.
There isn’t much space between stimulus and response.
Something happens. We react. Then, an hour later, we realize how we would have preferred to handle it.
Slowing down the breath can help widen that space. Not dramatically. Sometimes only by a few seconds.
But a few seconds can change everything.
A few seconds gives you the opportunity to notice what’s happening. Do I need to respond to this right now? Does this thought require action? Is this actually urgent? What do I want to say? Who do I want to be in this moment? What’s the most skillful response in this moment?
This is where breathing becomes more than relaxation.
It becomes a practice of conscious choice.
Slow Is Smooth
There’s another saying I love that I first heard years ago in a parkour fitness class I was taking (story for another time):
Slow is smooth. Smooth is fast.
The instructor would repeat it while we moved through obstacles because rushing usually created mistakes (and injuries). Move too quickly and you stumble. Move deliberately and you navigate the obstacle properly and fluidly.
And because you’re not constantly correcting mistakes, you often finish the circuit faster than you would have if you were actually trying to move fast.
I think about this all the time outside of obstacle courses. Especially with my clients.
A lot of the people I work with have significant responsibility. They’re ambitious. They’re building things. Leading people. Managing careers, relationships, families, projects, and ideas, all while stewarding expansive visions.
Their lives contain a lot.
So when I suggest slowing down, there can be an immediate resistance.
I can’t slow down. I have too much to do.
Which makes perfect sense.
But slowing down doesn’t necessarily mean doing less. Sometimes slowing down is precisely what allows us to do what matters more effectively.
Less scattered attention. Fewer reactive decisions. More presence with the task in front of us. More awareness of what actually requires our attention and what can simply be allowed to pass.
It’s an act of quiet rebellion, to slow down in a world that has conditioned a sense of urgency within us.
The result is a self-directed life, one that is rarely experienced by default.
Start With the Breath
Most of us were never really taught how much influence we have over our own state.
We experience stress and assume we need to solve whatever is stressing us. We experience anxiety and immediately enter the mind looking for an answer. We feel overwhelmed and start moving faster because there’s so much to do.
Sometimes that works, and is utterly exhausting in the process.
Sometimes it makes the very state we’re trying to escape more intense.
So I often give clients something much simpler to practice.
Pay attention to your breathing this week.
That’s it.
You don’t need to think about it every second of the day. You don’t need an elaborate breathwork practice. Let distress become the reminder.
When you notice yourself rushing, breathe. When you notice yourself getting reactive, breathe. When your thoughts are jumping between ten different things, breathe. When you feel the urge to respond immediately, breathe.
Let the belly gently expand as you inhale. Let the exhale be slow and easy.
Nothing dramatic.
You can do it sitting in a meeting, walking down the street, writing an email, having a difficult conversation. No one even needs to know you’re doing it.
And if you’re speaking, slow that down too. Slow your words. Slow your movements. Give yourself enough time to actually inhabit what you’re doing.
One Thing at a Time
There was another realization in that client conversation, the one that prompted this article, that I think is important.
We can only ever do one thing at a time.
Our minds hold twenty things at once. Our bodies cannot act on twenty things at once. Yet we can spend an entire day physiologically responding to everything we need to do as though all of it needs to happen simultaneously.
No wonder we feel overwhelmed.
The body is attempting to navigate twenty moments when only one moment is actually ever here.
Breathing brings us back to this one.
This task. This conversation. This person. This moment.
One thing at a time.
And there’s something much deeper here than productivity.
My client told me she regretted not being more present during her wedding. She had spent months preparing for those two days, but when they finally arrived, she found herself monitoring everything, more in her head than in the moment.
What was happening over there? Was this being handled? Was everything going according to plan?
In trying to make the moment perfect, she struggled to actually experience it.
I think a lot of us do some version of this.
We rush through the life we worked so hard to create. We’re physically in one place while mentally preparing for the next. We treat the moment as a means to an end. Our minutes, hours, days become something to “get through.”
And eventually we look backward and realize the thing we were rushing through was our life.
The Foundation
This is why I consider the breath foundational in my work, because it’s been foundational in my life.
My breathing is remarkable calm and steady throughout the day. As a result, so am I.
And although our breath can help calm us down, and that’s lovely, I’m most interested in what becomes possible from that calmer place.
We listen differently. We speak differently. We notice more. We make decisions differently.
We become a little less governed by whatever thought, notification, emotion, or external demand happens to appear next. We become more responsive and less reactive.
More present.
More deliberate.
More ourselves.
There are countless practices for personal growth. Books to read. Frameworks to learn. Patterns to understand. Beliefs to examine.
Some of those can be valuable.
But underneath all of them, right now, you are breathing.
You’ve been doing it this entire time.
Mostly without noticing.
So perhaps the next time life begins moving a little too quickly, you don’t need to figure everything out at once.
When the kite is turbulent, notice the string.
Slow it down.
And see what happens.