It has been hectic in Ruckusland of late, lots of changes and life is a little more complicated than usual – turns out adding “open a pub” to your to-do list comes with a rather impressive number of subtasks.
Over the last couple of years, I have been working on my breathing. You are either a mouth breather or a nose breather – you want to be a nose breather, something I am learning by taping my mouth shut when I sleep. You sleep more soundly, it stops your mouth drying out, subdues snoring and is sexy as hell to boot.
On the back of the nose breathing, I came across “box breathing” as a stress regulator which is exceedingly simple to do, wonderfully effective at calming your nervous system and can be learnt in seconds:
· Sit upright
· Close your mouth and eyes and exhale all the air out of your lungs.
· Inhale slowly through your nose, while counting 1-2-3-4 in your mind.
· Hold your breath for 4 seconds
· Exhale slowly from your nose while counting to 4.
· Hold your breath again after the exhale for 4 seconds
· Repeat the above steps until you feel re-centred
Steven Kotler recommends 11 minutes a day but you can feel the benefits after only a few “boxes”. Given hospitality has potential stressful situations baked into it, I reckon we will replace the antiquated cigarette break with a more up to date “box break” to help our team deal disperse excess cortisol. Simply put, box breathing is one of those things I wish I had known about years ago.
Ant Ciavarella | Founder and CEO