woman using breathing practice as a daily habit for ptsd
This entry was posted in Lifestyle, PTSD on by .
LinkedIn

Summary: Yes. Daily habits than can help PTSD include, but are not limited to, exercise and activity, mindfulness, breathing exercises, using your support network, and learning to recognize your triggers.

Key Points:

  • Anyone who experiences a traumatic event can develop post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
  • PTSD rarely resolves on its own and can escalate in severity if left untreated.
  • During treatment, you can learn effective daily habits that can prevent or reduce the impact of PTSD symptoms.
  • When practicing effective daily habits becomes your default routine, you improve your efficacy, meaning your ability to apply knowledge and skill to achieve a desired result.

What is PTSD?

Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a mental health diagnosis that can cause significant emotional, psychological, and physical discomfort and distress that may impair the ability to fully participate in typical daily activities.

Here’s a basic definition of PTSD:

“… a mental health condition that’s triggered by a terrifying event — either experiencing it or witnessing it. Symptoms may include flashbacks, nightmares, and severe anxiety, as well as uncontrollable thoughts about the event.”

The symptoms of PTSD typically appear within a month of a traumatic event, but they may appear immediately, or they may not appear for months or even years after the traumatic event. The most common causes of PTSD include:

  • Sexual assault
  • Physical assault, non-sexual
  • Serious accident or injury
  • Death of a loved one
  • Witnessing violence – small scale or large, i.e., witnessing domestic violence, or experiencing war or displacement by violence including terrorism
  • Natural disasters

In the U.S., the most recent data shows the following prevalence of PTSD:

  • Ever diagnosed with PTSD: 6% of population
  • Past-year diagnosis: 5%
  • Among women: 8%
  • Among men: 4%
  • Among veterans:
    • WWII/Korean War: past year – 2% / ever diagnosed – 3%
    • Vietnam: past year – 5% / ever diagnosed – 10%
    • Desert Storm (First Iraq War): past year – 14% / eve diagnosed – 21%
    • Iraqi Freedom/Enduring Freedom (Iraq and Afghanistan Wars): past year – 15% / ever diagnosed – 29%

We include the data on veterans not only because they make extreme personal sacrifices to protect our safety at home, and deserve our recognition, but also to point out that the prevalence of PTSD mirrors a social and cultural phenomenon in the U.S.: the recognition and destigmatization of mental health diagnoses.

For example, we doubt only 2 in every hundred WWII/Korean combat veterans had PTSD: the true rates were likely far greater. As we review that data, it appears those low reported prevalence rates reflect the low level of acceptance of mental health issues among the general population in the mid-20th century, and the unwillingness of combat veterans to acknowledge their symptoms and/or recognize their cause: first-hand experience of extreme violence and death.

We’re Making Progress: PTSD Treatment and Daily Symptom Management

Our acceptance of the reality of PTSD – for both combat veterans and civilians who have traumatic experiences – has led us to a far better place than we were, for instance, in the 1970s. When Vietnam veterans returned home and developed PTSD, many had no idea what they were experiencing, and no idea how to find help and support.

The progress we’ve made allows us to write this article. The information we share below on daily strategies to manage PTSD is the result of decades of work by mental health professionals, mental health treatment advocates, and PTSD survivors. Without their work, we wouldn’t be able to offer the tips below – some of which might have been ridiculed 50 years ago, when Vietnam veterans returned home to a country with scant resources to meet their needs.

The work and progress with veterans transformed into real techniques applicable to people in the general population who experience childhood trauma, relationship trauma, accidents, illness, and other traumatic life events.

Research now indicates the most effective clinical treatments for PTSD include:

However, people with PTSD don’t spend every day in treatment, and therefore need strategies to manager their symptoms on a daily basis. Let’s take a look at some of the most practical and useful approaches to managing PTSD, day in and day out.

Four Daily Habits That Can Help PTSD

1. Developing Repeatable Strategies

One important part of managing PTSD is to find a way to manage stress and keep your days as calm and peaceful as possible. While no one – or very few people – walk around in a perfect state of enlightened peace and bliss, there are things you can do every day to keep your body relaxed and your mind calm. If you maintain a default sense of tranquility as best as possible, you can minimize the impact of disruption related to PTSD symptoms. Helpful daily strategies include:

Exercise and activity.
  • Getting plenty of activity every day is an excellent way to promote a relaxed body and a calm mind. A hard workout or group exercise class can help you get out of your head for 30-40 minutes, while exercise/activity like yoga or tai chi can help improve concentration and relaxation. Choose what works best for you, and if you can, incorporate a little of both: intensity to work out your energy, moderate/light to improve concentration/relaxation.
Mindfulness/meditation.
  • Meditation, especially mindful meditation, is not the esoteric, hard-to-do, woo-woo thing many people think it is. You can adapt mindful meditation practice to virtually any activity you do. Yes, you can sit cross-legged on the floor and meditate like that, but that’s just one narrow aspect of mindfulness. You can learn mindful walking, mindful cooking and eating, or mindful gardening. When you slow down and focus 100% on what you’re doing, how you’re thinking, and what you’re feeling – all without judgment and with total acceptance – you practicing mindfulness, and you get the benefits of meditation.
Breathing techniques.
  • If you have PTSD, you likely have a dysregulated nervous system, which – in this context – you can quickly and easily enter fight-or-flight mode when exposed to PTSD triggers. One way to calm your nervous system down and prevent – or get yourself out of fight-or-flight mode is by specific breathing exercises. They’re simple, easy-to-learn, and once you learn them, they’re yours forever. You can get started with these resources provided by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (USVA):
      1. Introductory Focused Breathing
      2. Trauma and PTSD: Tips for Relaxation
      3. PTSD Coach Online: Breathing Retraining
      4. Simple Breathing Exercise for PTSD

2. Learning how to Handle PTSD Episodes

Evidence shows you can handle disruptive PTSD episodes with basic mindfulness exercises. Here are two simple and effective techniques you can apply right away, and use every day;

4-Count Breathing.
  • Ideally, find a quiet place where you can sit or stand, but you can actually apply this technique virtually anywhere at any time. Here’s how it works: breathe in slowly on a count of four, hold for a count of four, exhale slowly on a count of four, hold the exhaled breath for a count of four. Repeat. Variations include: not holding the exhaled breath, holding the inhaled breath for a count of seven and keeping the inhale/exhale at four, and gradually increasing the length of the inhale/exhale. Important: if you feel lightheaded, stop. Wait until it passes, then restart, identify what caused the lightheadedness – longer exhale? longer hold? – and adjust until you can complete the exercise without getting lightheaded.
Countdown/Five Senses.
  • This is one of the most well-known and effective techniques for managing PTSD episodes and returning to a place of calm during a panic attack. To do this exercise, stop what you’re doing, and then:
      1. Name five objects in your physical environment that you can see right now. Say them out loud, or name them in your mind: both work.
      2. Identify four things you can feel with your sense of touch right now. They can be anything: the texture of your clothes on your skin, the sun on your face, the ground under your feet, or your keys poking your leg in your pocket.
      3. List three things you can hear right now. Again, everything counts: appliances buzzing, traffic outside, your own breath, or music coming from the next room.
      4. Name two things you can smell right now. This one can be challenging sometimes, but you can include: the smell of your clothes, the smell of the cup of coffee that might be in your hand, or the smell of the hallway carpet that needs a steam-cleaning.
      5. Identify one thing you can taste right now. If there are no tastes worth noting at the moment – not even the aftertaste of your lunch – recalling the memory of a favorite smell – perhaps garlic and onions on a grill or fresh-cut grass after a rainfall – can work just as well.

3. Knowing How to Manage Flashbacks

  • Breathing and mindfulness. The breathing and mindfulness exercises we list above can help you manage a flashback. If you catch it soon enough, they can prevent a PTSD flashback. If one catches you off-guard, those breathing exercises can reduce the immediate symptoms and return your nervous system to a typical, calm state of function.
  • Use the phone. If you have PTSD, it’s important to have a list of safe and soothing friends to call if you have a flashback or PTSD-related panic attack. You can teach your friends ahead of time what you need to hear in order to manage your episodes, but if you haven’t done that, simply connecting to an empathetic, compassionate human can work to help you calm down and get though the flashback.

4. Knowing How to Recognize Your Triggers

  • This is a skill you develop during treatment that you can practice every day and make into one of your daily habits that can help PTSD. If you know what causes a flashback or a panic attack, or what precedes unwanted intrusive thoughts, you can use that knowledge to avoid your triggers or be ready to apply one of the flashback management techniques we list above.
  • Pay special attention to physical signs that may precede patterns of thought. A feeling in your chest, an increasing heart rate, dry mouth, nausea – any of these things can tell you that you body is ready for fight-or-flight. If you learn to identify those feelings before they become fully formed, you can then use mindfulness or breathing to prevent or mitigate the intensity and severity of a potential flashback/PTSD-related panic attack.

Putting it All Together

In combination with clinical therapeutic approaches like CBT, CPT, CT, PE, and EMDR, the tips above can help you improve your daily life and overall wellbeing. The main thing to learn from these tips is the importance of self-awareness. During treatment, you learn the techniques, but your personal work is to fine-tune your self-awareness in order to understand exactly how, when and why a PTSD episode might occur. Your increasing self-awareness also teaches you what you need and when. You’ll learn that not every technique works in every situation. To manage some triggers, exercise might be the key. To manage others, meditation or deep breathing may be what you need.

What matters most is you. You learn about your symptoms, their causes, and how you best respond to the treatment and techniques you learn from your therapist. In other words, you become the expert, and take ownership of your daily happiness and well-being, while also understanding that if you need to talk to someone to help manage an episode, that’s a sign of self-awareness, too. When you put it all together, and use an all-of-the-above approach, you can mitigate the disruption caused by PTSD symptoms, turn what could be a bad day into a good one, and over time, develop the skills you need to make most days good days.