Teach your patients how to breathe
1. Sit comfortably with your hands in your lap and your feet flat on the floor or lie on the floor with legs straight out, uncrossed.
2. Put your hands on your belly, just about the level of your navel.
3. Inhale through your nose as deeply as you can and expand your belly at the same time, feeling your hands move outward with the movement of the abdomen.
4. Exhale through your nose and feel your belly deflate as the air is pushed out.
5. Continue for a minute or two.
6. Inhale and expand the belly and then fill the chest cavity with air as well.
7. Exhale, releasing and contracting the belly and then the chest cavity, pushing out all the air.
8. Continue for as long as you like, five or 10 minutes or more.
9. Practice this at least twice a day and gradually expand your awareness to breathe this way most of the time.
10. Take a break every hour or so and do yogic breathing for a minute or two.
When Migdow works with his patients to do yogic breathing and gives them relaxation suggestions, the systolic pressure can drop as much as 15 points and the diastolic pressure can drop as much as 10 points.
"Sometimes I give them some instruction and let them sit alone and practice it for a while," says Migdow. "Sometimes I just sit and talk with them, from time to time reminding them to breathe, and sometimes, I send them to the waiting room to do deep breathing for 10 minutes. It almost always has a dramatic effect on their readings."
He tells patients that if they remember to breathe deeply and slowly all the time, they will generally lower their systolic pressure by six to eight points and their diastolic pressure by four points.
Not only does the deep breathing relieve stress, it has the physiological effect of relaxing the blood vessels and, thereby, lowering blood pressure, says Migdow, who is also director of prana yoga techniques training at the Open Center in New York.
"I recommend they do this for at least two minutes an hour, especially if they have a sedentary job and for a minute or two every half hour if they work with computers," Migdow explains. "I also recommend they do this simple breathing for five minutes every morning and every night."
The effect has been so dramatic for some of his patients that they are able to stop taking anti-hypertensives, says Migdow. "They have learned to release the mental and physical stress, and they know their blood pressure won’t go out of control without the medications."
Deep breathing in combination with yoga postures may have even more beneficial effects, says Migdow, but he warns against attempting to instruct patients into complex postures with the head lower than the heart if they have hypertension. "Postures like the headstand, the shoulder stand, the camel or the plough take some time to release and a patient could be injured if he feels dizzy while in these postures."
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