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Pranayama Doesn’t Instantly Bring Me Zen, and Maybe That’s Not the Point
How the positive feedback cycle works against me if I’m already anxious.
As a teenager, I went to a therapist who told me that, in order to relieve an anxiety attack, I should take deep breaths and imagine I was on a beach. I took this to heart. During my next attack, I scrambled to picture that beach as I tried to beat down my anxiety with deep, manic breathing. This positive feedback cycle only added insult to injury—it seems deep breathing alone wasn’t a miracle cure.
The ‘Negative’ Positive Feedback Cycle
A positive feedback cycle occurs when the effect of an action also intensifies the original action, which then further ignites the effect. It can work in “positive” ways, but like my example above, it can also work in negative ways; my anxious mind causes my breath to be short and shallow, and then, alarmed by this physical reaction, my anxious mind is further inflamed, increasing the rate of my breath. And so on.
The reason my therapist’s simple advice didn’t work for me is because of this positive feedback cycle. When I tried picturing a beach, my mind was even more alarmed that I wasn’t calming down and my heart rate only increased. I needed something more than a…
