Calming needs to happen in many situations. It's great if we can catch them right before they become upset. But then they can have anxieties. I teach a lot of younger children, so I've run across fears of things like different animals, puppets, or people in costume. One of my own children was afraid of flying insects. All insects aren't fun, but those flying insects would really escalate him.

We don't need to know the reason that they're escalating to be able to help them to calm, because sometimes we're not aware of their connections that are triggering. This could even be good for when they're afraid at night. If they can focus on their breathing instead of that unknown sound or the odd shadow in that dark corner, then this can really benefit them. It's just one tool or technique that you can use.

With either of these breathing patterns, you can inhale and exhale through your nose. Sometimes, if we have stuffy noses, colds, or other things, just do it all through your mouth if you need to. I like to inhale through my nose and exhale through my mouth, because it increases the regulation of my energy. I use breathing in through my nose to create or maintain positive energy, and exhale through my mouth to dissipate negative energy. The point is to breathe deeply in our belly and not to hold it in our chest.

Let's talk about the first method of breathing. I call it settling breathing (I don't know if there's other names out there for it), because that's how children settle themselves when they're upset. When children become upset and they've been crying a long time, their body automatically starts to do this to calm their nervous system. You'll see it when they're crying a long time. Our goal is to get them to do this breathing before they need their body to automatically kick in, to use this purposefully to calm their body.

The breathing pattern is two inhales and then a longer exhale. Repeat this breathing pattern multiple times, don't just do it once or twice. Try and do it four or five times in a row to really help calm the nervous system down. When you tell children this, the younger children particularly, they may not understand the idea of inhaling twice. They really have to think about it, which involves their mind. It helps their mind to calm down, not just through the breathing, but through the focusing on something else.

The second breathing pattern I want to talk about is one I've heard called triangle breathing (I don't know if it has other names). To do this breathing method, inhale for a count of four, hold your breath for a count of four, and then exhale for a count of four. I don't know if the magic number is four, but when I learned it, they said to use a count of four. When I do it with myself (sometimes I need to calm too!), I like to do it for longer than four. When we're teaching our children, and when I teach my students, I use four.

When it comes to breathing, you can add one more thing. One nerve that has a lot to do with our self-regulation and breathing function is called the vagus nerve. Your vagus nerve runs through a good portion of your body, but it runs through your throat and then branches by your ears. If you really want to help stimulate that vagus nerve using settling breathing, you can make a humming sound that vibrates your throat to help stimulate the vagus nerve. In other words, after I inhale twice, I make the sound when I exhale. The sound can be anything that vibrates your throat. I like to make a frustrated groaning sound when I do settling breathing. It can help dissipate that negative, anxious energy.

When you're doing the triangle breathing, one thing you can do to help stimulate the vagus nerve is to tuck your chin when you're holding your breath. Start triangle breathing with breathing in for a count of four. Next, tuck your chin down to your chest and count to four. Finally, exhale for a count of four. As with the settling breath, it vibrates your throat, which stimulates the vagus nerve.

These are just two techniques that you could use for breathing, but any type of deep, into the belly breathing works. You can be creative and come up with some fun things. For example, you could call it “hot chocolate” breathing. If you have steam coming off your hot chocolate, kids like to blow that steam away to help cool it. So, you could call the exhale hot chocolate breathing, or whatever you want to call it that is creative and gets your children's attention or helps them to understand. Doing that deep breathing, breathe into your belly so you have a lot of air. Now blow that chocolate and then breathe for longer than that. Anything that really helps them will begin to calm that nervous system.

There's a lot around breathing to do to help your nervous system start to regulate. It helps to focus your mind, and it's a really great way to connect. When a child is upset and we ask them to breathe and they're not able to breathe, promote choices. Do you want to breathe this way or that way? Do you want a cuddly pillow or a hug? We can give them choices, but if they're not able to make those choices, what I like to do is say, “That's okay, I'll breathe for both of us.” Then I start breathing deeply in whichever method that I choose. We have mirror neurons, that react to what we see. Children will automatically sense that calming energy from us and mirror it.

When using any breathing patterns, it helps if we are calm. If we're not calm, we're demonstrating the use of that breathing pattern to help calmness. But if we can be calm and still breathe this way for our children and for us, then it can help them begin to regulate because it gives them energy. They pick up on that energy. We're all energy beings and there's energy that they pick up on as well as their mirror neurons hearing and seeing us breathe that way.

There's always something we can do for our child. Even if our child can’t do it for themselves, that's okay, we can do it. We can tell them, “I can breathe for both of us.” We can do this for them until they're ready and it can really help to calm things down.