Grounding & Breath Awareness Practice

• A simple 5-minute practice for the start of your day, before bed, or anytime you want to drop into present awareness.

• 1. Sit comfortably, feet on the floor, back upright.

• 2. Bring your attention to the contact points your feet have with the floor. Notice the sensations.

• 3. Move attention to your thighs, buttocks, and back — feel the contact with the chair.

• 4. Allow the floor and chair to fully hold and support you. Rest into that support.

• 5. Shift attention to your nostrils. Feel the breath flowing in and out.

• 6. Do not control the breath. Notice the cool air entering, the warmer air leaving.

• 7. Notice other places in your body where you sense the breath — shoulders, chest, ribs, back, abdomen.

• 8. Complete with one slow breath with a longer exhale.

Resilience is the capacity to prepare for, recover from and adapt in the face of stress, challenge or adversity.

Mindfulness is maintaining a non-judgmental awareness of what is happening within and around you moment by moment.

The idea of incorporating mindfulness into daily routines is not new to policing; in fact, the profession is directed to be mindful in many areas of your work.

The Law Enforcement Code of Ethics states:

I will maintain courageous calm in the face of danger, scorn or ridicule; develop self-restraint; and be constantly mindful of the welfare of others.

In the Cannons of Police Ethics there are several directives for officers to be mindful.

Article 4: Utilization of Proper Means to Gain Proper Ends

The law enforcement officer shall be mindful of his responsibility to pay strict attention to the selection of means in discharging the duties of his office.

Article 6: Private Conduct

Then law enforcement officer shall be mindful of his special identification by the public as an upholder of the law.

Article 7: Conduct Toward the Public

The law enforcement officer, mindful of his responsibility to the whole community, shall deal with individuals of the community in a manner calculated to instill respect for its laws and its police service.

Our Austin Police Department General Orders calls for mindful conduct in specific instances.

Officer Response to Calls

400.1 Purpose and Scope

The Department has a responsibility to protect life and property and to provide service to the residents of Austin. To fulfill this obligation, it must provide an appropriate response to calls. Officers should be ever mindful that they have a responsibility to use caution, good judgement, and due care when operating vehicles in an emergency capacity to ensure the safety of motorists and pedestrians.

420.2.1 Initial Interview with the Victim

(c) Officers shall conduct the interview of the victim with dignity and respect, being mindful that the victim has experienced a traumatic event.

(f) … Officers should be mindful that there are multiple crime scenes in a majority of sexual assaults; the victim, the suspect and the actual scene itself.

Functional breathing is the #1 pillar of health.

Dysfunctional breathing describes a pattern of breathing that is inefficient and does not effectively meet the body’s needs. It is a learned habit that can be developed gradually over time in response to stress, illness, anxiety or lifestyle factors.

The most common and extensively studied breathing pattern disorder ischronic hyperventilation, which means over-breathing, and it can happen when we habitually breathe too fast and take in too much air.

Unaddressed dysfunctional breathing patterns or chronic hyperventilation might impact you or your classmates during your time in the academy in the following ways:

• lower PT endurance & performance

• slower recovery between drills, scenarios, and fitness assessments

• impaired concentration during classroom instruction and evaluations

• heightened anxiety and stress reactivity during high-stakes testing and scenarios

• poor sleep quality leading to reduced learning consolidation and mood regulation

To shift out of dysfunctional/disordered breathing patterns and improve the BOLT score, it starts with changing your everyday breathing patterns so they become more functional.

If you have sub-optimal breathing in your normal everyday, those patterns are not going to suddenly fix themselves when you are doing physical training, or out on duty taking a stressful call for service.

Physical training will not train your breathing. But if you train your breathing, it will enhance your physical training.

According to research, the optimum breathing rate for humans is between 4.5 and 6.5 breaths per minute.

At 12 breaths per minute, the volume of air that reaches the alveoli is 4.2 liters. At 6 breaths per minute, it increases to 5.1 liters. This represents a 20% increase in breathing efficiency, meaning increasing blood oxygenation.

Our hearts respond to every breath we take. Small shifts in breathing speed, depth, rhythm and route (mouth or nose) can either increase cardiovascular strain or help the heart work more efficiently with less effort. Our breathing patterns influence nervous system balance, blood chemistry, and circulation, all of which shape how efficiently the heart performs its function.

As we breathe in, our heart rate naturally speeds up. As we breathe out, it slows down. This normal rhythm, called respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) is controlled by the vagus nerve.

When this rhythm is strong and flexible, it shows the nervous system is working well and the heart can adapt and change. When breathing is fast, shallow and irregular, this rhythm weakens and puts more strain on the heart.

Breathing is a power switch to our vast inner network called the autonomic nervous system.

The autonomic nervous system (ANS) is the part of the nervous system that controls the body’s internal functions, including heart rate, gastrointestinal tract and secretions of many glands. The ANS also controls many other vital activities such as respiration, and it interacts with immune and hormonal system functions. It is well known that mental and emotional states directly affect activity in the ANS.

The ANS has two branches. The sympathetic branch is our gas pedal -- fast and shallow breathing mobilizes energy, speeds us up, prepares us for action.

The parasympathetic branch is our brake pedal. With lighter, slower and deeper breaths, and longer exhales, we can activate the PSN and slow our body down to conserve energy and shift us into rest and recovery.

Our bodies are built to stay in a state of heightened sympathetic alert only for short bursts, and only on occasion.

The foundation of functional breathing is breathing in and out through your nose -- not just during daily activities and sleep, but also during a large portion of physical training.

Our bodies were designed to breathe through our noses. Breathing through the mouth (especially inhaling), chronic hyperventilation, heavy snoring/sleep apnea and other dysfunctional breathing patterns can lead to major health problems.

The nose is your immune system's first line of defense -- it filters the air and exposes it to immune cells in the nasal mucosa.

When you breathe through your nose, your sinuses produce a molecule called nitric oxide. When you inhale nasally, that nitric oxide is carried into the lungs where it helps redistribute blood more evenly, regulates inflammation in the airways, and defends against airborne pathogens.

The nose is your body's built-in regulator -- it allows adequate oxygen in and prevents too much carbon dioxide from being exhaled, maintaining a delicate balance of oxygen, carbon dioxide, and pH.

And nasal breathing warms and moisturizes the air, and recaptures moisture on the exhale, with 40% less water loss than mouth breathing.

Nose Unblocking (decongesting) Exercise

*Not suitable during pregnancy or with a serious medical condition.

* It is important no to force nasal breathing. If you feel quite uncomfortable after doing this exercise there may be a structural issue affecting airflow. If nasal breathing continues to feel difficult despite regular practice, it might be worth consulting an ear, nose and throat (ENT) specialist to check for any anatomical obstructions.

• 1. Sit upright.

• 2. Take a small, light breath in through your nose (or through the corner of your mouth if needed). Take a small breath out through your nose.

• 3. After exhaling, pinch your nose closed. Keep lips sealed.

• 4. Gently nod your head or rock your body until you feel a relatively strong need for air.

• 5. Release your nose and breathe in gently through it. Avoid taking a deep breath — keep your breathing calm. Tell yourself "relax and breathe less."

• 6. Continue breathing gently through the nose.

Rest with normal breathing for 30 to 60 seconds and then repeat up to 5 times if your nose isn't fully clear. With regular practice and improved breathing patterns, your nose will likely stay clearer.

Upon the foundation of inhaling and exhaling through the nose, there are three dimensions of functional breathing -- light, slow, and deep.

Light breathing -- taking in less air -- trains your body's chemistry and improves oxygen delivery to your brain and organs.

The Breathe Light Exercise

The Breathe Light exercise works by gently reducing breathing volume to create a mild, tolerable air hunger, allowing CO₂ to accumulate and the body to begin re-calibrating its sensitivity.

That subtle sensation of wanting slightly more air confirms CO₂ is building in the blood, which triggers hemoglobin to release oxygen to the tissues, relaxes blood vessels, and improves circulation. Nasal breathing during the exercise also draws nitric oxide into the lungs, further opening the airways.

Suitable for most adults and children. Not recommended for those with serious health conditions or women in the first trimester of pregnancy.

How to practice:

• Sit comfortably with an upright posture

• Breathe gently and quietly through your nose

• Gradually reduce the size of each breath, aiming for roughly 30% less air than usual

• Allow the breath to slow naturally, without force

• Maintain a continuous, gentle sense of wanting slightly more air

• Hold this tolerable air hunger for four to five minutes

• Practice four to six times throughout the day, with a focused session before bed.

If the air hunger becomes too strong, rest for 20 seconds and return to gentle, reduced breathing. Do not hold your breath or tense your breathing muscles. Let the breath slow through relaxation, not effort.

With consistent practice, resting breathing rate slows, and a natural pause begins to appear at the end of each exhale. Breathing becomes quieter and lighter throughout the day, exercise tolerance improves, and sleep becomes deeper and more restorative.

Slow breathing - calms the nervous system, eases emotional reactions, and shifts you out of fight-or-flight into a more balanced and focused state.

Breathe Slow Exercise

Sit up straight and close your mouth. You will need to pay close attention to your breath. If you are a beginner to slow, paced breathing, start off gently. The exercise is very simple.

Breathe in silently through your nose for 3 seconds and breathe out silently through your nose for 5 seconds. There is no pause between breaths.

If this feels very comfortable, you can try breathing in for 4 seconds and out for 6 seconds. A rule of thumb is that the exhalation should be one and a half times the length of the inhalation.

When you slow your breathing rate to between 4.5 and 6.5 breaths per minute, you help stimulate the vagus nerve to bring balance to the autonomic nervous system. Slow paced breathing also increases alveolar ventilation. Breathing is more economical when slow.

It is not necessary to breathe between 4.5 and 6.5 breaths per minute all the time. This is an exercise practice. If you practice paced breathing for 10 minutes daily, it is good. If you practice paced breathing for 10 minutes twice daily, it is great.

Paced breathing exercises with video and audio instruction are available on the Oxygen Advantage app.

Deep breathing -- which does NOT mean a large volume of air-- means breathing low, with good recruitment of the diaphragm. It improves core stability, supports the spine, and increases lung capacity.

Breathe Deep Exercise

This exercise helps to practice diaphragmatic breathing, which in turn enables slow breathing, calms the mind, improves oxygenation within the body, and has many positive effects on posture and breathing mechanics in general. The diaphragm is the main breathing muscle and is important for postural control as well as helping to foster functional breathing habits.

The emphasis is on improving the biomechanics of breathing. Try not to over-breathe.

• Sit up straight in a chair or cross-legged on the floor. Imagine a piece of string gently pulling you upwards toward the ceiling from the crown of your head.

• Place your hands on either side of your lower ribs. Apply light pressure to generate resistance.

• Silently breathe in, bringing the air deep into our lungs. As you inhale, feel your lower ribs expanding outwards, and, as you breathe out, feel your lower ribs moving inwards.

• There is no need to hear your breathing during this exercise.

• Continue practicing the exercise for three to four minutes.

• During the inhalation, as the diaphragm moves downwards, expansion is generated to the front, sides, and back of the trunk. Your diaphragm is producing intra-abdominal pressure, which causes the ribs to move outwards.

Oxygen Advantage free resources (app, podcasts, guided meditations, articles): https://oxygenadvantage.com/pages/free-resources

Sleep Health

Sleep deprivation has very real health consequences. It contributes to chronic disease, hypertension, heart disease, diabetes, and early death.

Most people require around eight hours of sleep to function optimally. When you consistently don't sleep well, your memory, moral judgment, and decision-making can be severely compromised.

For improved sleep quality, your breathing during sleep needs to be through the nose -- slow and low.

If you wake up with a dry mouth in the morning, you were mouth breathing -- and that's disrupting your sleep quality and your physical training recovery.

Myofunctional therapy is a neuromuscular re-education program that trains the muscles of the face, mouth, and throat to function optimally — particularly the tongue, lips, and jaw.

The core goal is to establish correct resting posture (tongue on the palate, lips sealed, breathing through the nose) and proper functional patterns for swallowing, chewing, and speaking.

It's used to address issues like mouth breathing, tongue thrust, low tongue posture, open-mouth resting posture, and incorrect swallowing patterns — all of which can contribute to sleep-disordered breathing, dental malocclusion, TMJ issues, and even postural problems downstream.

• Myofunctional Therapy and Nasal Breathing Exercises

• Sleep Apnea Exercises for Snoring

• SnoreGym - $10 one time payment

You might utilize some of the following resources to aid you in retraining your breathing during sleep:

- MyoTape: https://myotape.com/

- Nasal dilator: https://oxygenadvantage.com/products/nasal-dilator-for-sports

- Sleep Health Hub (includes guided audio practices for breathing exercises in English and Spanish): https://buteykoclinic.com/pages/sleep-health-hub

Resilience is the capacity to prepare for, recover from and adapt in the face of stress, challenge or adversity.

You can think of your resilience as the amount of energy you have stored in an inner battery — energy you have available to use not only physically, but also mentally and emotionally. Having greater resilience or a fully charged inner battery enhances your ability to remain calm, think more clearly and be in control of your emotions so you don’t overreact. You can more easily “roll with the punches” and flow through challenges rather than becoming stressed, which further drains your energy reserves.

Similar to a drained car battery, when your inner battery is depleted, there isn’t energy to draw from when you need it, making it difficult to be at your best and respond well in tough, and sometimes very ordinary situations. You may also end up draining even more energy. In the end, it also can affect the people around you.

Building your resilience capacity is a proactive way to reduce and prevent stress buildup, sustain your energy and feel and perform better.

Emotions are primary drivers of the activity in our major body systems and affect physiology more than thoughts.

Depleting and Renewing Emotions

We experience a wide range of emotions every day. Some emotions deplete us and others renew us. Whereas some emotions are easy to identify, others run in the background.

Whether or not we are aware of our emotions, they affect our physiology.

From an energy-management perspective, depleting emotions and attitudes are costly and inefficient and reduce our resilience capacity and our ability to think and communicate clearly. Renewing emotions and attitudes, on the other hand, recharge our inner batteries and rejuvenate us.

Building and sustaining resilience is based on our ability to manage our energy expenditures more intelligently and to recharge more quickly. In order to do this, we have to become more aware of where we’re draining our energy.

People often say that their job, not having enough time, a lot of traffic or relationships are stressing them out. These situations or people are called stressors.

The “negative” or depleting emotions such as anger, frustration or impatience that we experience in response to the event or situation is what people typically experience as stress.

The depleting emotions are what drain our inner battery, not the situation, person or issue.

Heart-Focused Breathing is an effective technique to help stop the momentum of stress energy and emotional reactions. It enables you to choose how to respond, rather than from usual reactions such as impatience, anger or frustration.

With practice, you will be able to neutralize stress reactions and take out some of the significance and drama more quickly. Practicing this technique regularly can help you minimize energy drains and build resilience.

Heart-Focused Breathing™ Technique

Focus your attention in the area of the heart. Imagine your breath is flowing in and out of your heart or chest area, breathing a little slower and deeper than usual. Find an easy rhythm that’s comfortable.

The heart sends signals to the brain via neural pathways that affect the brain centers involved in decision-making, problem-solving, creativity and self-regulation.

By practicing the coherence techniques you can learn to generate coherent or “smooth” heart rhythms by experiencing renewing emotions like appreciation, courage and patience.

Coherent heart rhythms actually help the brain process information more efficiently. You can think more clearly and make better decisions when you are coherent.

Quick Coherence® Technique

An in-the-moment self-regulation technique for creating alignment between the heart and brain that increases mental clarity, emotional stability and composure.

Step 1. Focus your attention in the area of the heart. Imagine your breath is flowing in and out of your heart or chest area, breathing a little slower and deeper than usual. Find an easy rhythm that’s comfortable.

Step 2. As you continue heart-focused breathing, make a sincere attempt to experience a regenerative feeling such as appreciation or care for someone or something in your life.

Suggestion: Try to re-experience the feeling you have for someone you love, a pet, a special place, an accomplishment, etc., or focus on a feeling of calm or ease.

Examples of emotions and attitudes that are associated with coherence. For example, you could activate the feeling of courage or patience.

Practices for Sustaining Coherence and Composure

These two practices serve as indicators of when you can use a coherence technique to help you more effectively regulate your energy, increase your resilience and have better outcomes.

Prep means getting coherent before situations, interactions, presentations, phone calls, meetings, etc. Prepping helps set the tone for the day and creates more composure before upcoming stressful situations. The value of Prep cannot be overemphasized. The benefits are well worth the time it takes to Prep by getting coherent.

Shift and Reset means shifting our emotional reaction and resetting to inner composure or calm. Doing this during or as soon as possible after a stress reaction or challenging situation helps save a lot of energy and in many situations, helps us avoid additional stress and wasted time. Do not underestimate how much your resilience is affected by regularly occurring stress reactions and the accompanying energy drain.

Baselines and Neuroplasticity

Your brain has the capacity to change and re-pattern itself. Repetition sets baselines — neural patterns that become automatic. Some baselines are optimal. Others are not.

The amygdala - part of the brain that processes emotions - receives input from your body's internal organs through the autonomic nervous system. It gets accustomed to the patterns it frequently encounters — and over time it establishes those as your baseline, whether they serve you or not.

To establish new baselines, the body has to participate. Heart coherence practices, breathing exercises, and visualization all give the brain new patterns to learn.

You'll know a baseline is shifting when you find yourself naturally calmer, more patient, less reactive — without trying. Or when someone close to you tells you they've noticed a difference.

Visualization

A practice that strengthens neural pathways for what you want to be able to do.

1. Sit in a position that allows you to breathe into your diaphragm. Become still.

2. Close your eyes. Take a couple of light, slow, deep breaths.

3. Imagine the scenario you want to rehearse — a high-stakes call, a courtroom appearance, a difficult interview. Place yourself in it as if it's happening right now.

4. Engage your senses — sight, sound, smell, touch. Notice your body's response.

5. Imagine yourself responding the way you want to respond — with the breath, the tone of voice, the body language, the inner state, the movement.

Regular practice strengthens the neural pathways associated with the response you're rehearsing.