Pay attention to your breathing now.
How deep do you inhale? Is the exhalation too short? Don't you want to breathe again, a little more fully?
A minute ago you were fine and didn't think about such a thing. The brainstem was involved in breathing - it does it from the first second of your life, seven days a week, and I must say, without a single prompt from you.
All that had to be done was to ask three simple questions, and the process went into manual control. An inhalation suddenly seems incomplete, an exhalation seems somehow awkward, and you always want to fix something. Psychologists call this the centipede effect: she, if you remember, forgot how to walk as soon as she was asked in what order she rearranged her legs.
Now imagine the same thing before a conversation where a lot depends on it. Your heart is pounding, your breath is short, and someone nearby—or even you—says, “Take a deep breath. ".
Advice with the best intentions, but it does exactly what you did to yourself a minute ago: it puts your breath into the hands of anxiety. And anxiety is a bad trigger; It always seems to her that there is not enough air. A minute or two of such large breaths - and you exhale more carbon dioxide than the body had time to produce. Its blood level drops, the blood vessels of the brain narrow, the head floats a little and the fingers tingle.
For an anxious person, it is no longer just a nuisance. There was one concern - the upcoming call. The second appeared: something is wrong with me. And the person takes his breath even harder - checks each breath, corrects it, adds air. I mean, he does exactly what made him feel worse.
Significantly, even in the treatment of panic attacks, breathing exercises, as it turned out, are not the main thing. Another thing helps much more: stop being afraid of your feelings. A healthy person's breathing does not need constant supervision.
I am not calling to give up breathing exercises; They really help many. The limit here is simple. If paying attention to your breath relaxes you, continue.