In this article, I want to show you how to take a supported breath and make it a habit

In order to learn to breathe with support, I want you to place your hands under your rib cage and cough. The muscle that kicked out at you is your diaphragm. If you have ever watched a funny movie and laughed for two hours, you may remember being sore in that region afterwards. Another time you may remember this muscle is when you have had a cold with a hacking cough and, by the end of the day, you were sore in that area. Aside from those few times, most people don't use that muscle for breathing.

In this article, I want to show you how to take a supported breath and make it a habit.

In this article I describe how proper breathing can effectively reduce stress

In part 1, I discussed how men and women are different in dealing with stress and also why there are differences. In this article I describe how proper breathing can effectively reduce stress and put an end to the sore neck and shoulders and improve health.

It is a medical fact that 99% of the population do not know how to breathe properly. Watch any other mammal breathe and you will learn something from them because all mammals have a diaphragm and all mammals use that muscular partition to support breathing.

As a voice specialist, I have found that 95% of my female clientele experience soreness in their neck and shoulder regions by the end of the day.

Some women complain of a sore jaw as well. Having worked with thousands of people, it is interesting to note that I have had only a handful of male clientele who complain of pain in these areas. Why the difference?

Because we business women carry our stress differently than men; and, we tend to become more aware of it by the end of the day. While I haven't done a controlled study on the subject, I have found that the stress men carry (if they carry any stress at all) is more likely to affect them in their digestive tract: it is a medical fact that men are more susceptible to peptic ulcers than women.

Learn to breathe properly and discover the best way to reduce the stress in your life!

Having heard Dr. John Gray, author of the best-selling Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus, talking about his book, Why Mars & Venus Collide, I found it interesting when he described the differences in how men and women handle stress as well as why the sexes treat stress differently.

If I can put this in a nutshell, men's brains, because of their limited number of neural receptors, have a sequential thinking pattern which means they think about one thing at a time. Women, on the other hand, possessing thousands more neural receptors than men, have expansive thinking patterns, which means we have a lot more on our minds at any one time.

Now add to that innate quality the fact that so many women are not only running the household but also being relied upon for part of the family income and you then have stress that is greater than has ever been recorded for women.