How to breathe to improve morning sickness
Let’s talk about the elephant in the room straight up. This type of yoga breath for morning sickness looks pretty weird. BUT – it works! And when you’re feeling morning sickness #aintnobodygottimeforworryingaboutlooks
Nausea during pregnancy is often made worse by two things.
- Exhaustion.
- Heat.
Sitali pranayama (breath) helps to cool the body down and restore energy. It’s almost like you’re creating your own internal air conditioning.
How to breathe to improve morning sickness
- Sit comfortably with the spine long.
- Take three easy breaths to prepare yourself for this practice.
- Curl your tongue – see the picture above (or press the teeth closed and open the lips if you can’t curl your tongue.)
- Breathe in deeply through the curled tongue or the spaces between the teeth.
- Breathe out slowly through the nose.
- Repeat for at least 5 breaths and then take 3 easy breaths to finish.
Other ways to ease nausea
Rest Rest Rest.
I always found my nausea was so much worse when I was tired. Try to make sure you go to bed as soon as you start feeling tired in the evening. Even if this is WAY earlier than you’re used to pre-pregnancy. Your body is doing a lot of extra work at the minute building your baby. Give it the extra rest it needs and you’ll probably find the nausea eases a little.
Eat regularly.
So basically you’re like a toddler now. You need to have constant snacks on hand and sleep regularly. But in all seriousness – making sure you don’t get hungry goes a long way in keeping morning sickness at bay.
Make friends with ginger.
It doesn’t work for everyone but many women SWEAR by ginger and its tummy settling abilities. It’s worth a try anyway.
Carbs are your friend.
You won’t see this mentioned on most typical pregnancy health blogs but I think it’s worth noting. There is a reason your body is craving those high carb foods right now. Because it needs them! While I don’t recommend existing purely on potatoes and salt (or was that just me during pregnancy?!) – if adding more of these types of foods into your diet helps to improve morning sickness – then I say go for it!
What have you found helps your morning sickness?
If you’d like more yoga practices for pregnancy or birth start by downloading my free yoga guide.
I love this, thank you for sharing this breathing exercise! Have been dealing with morning sickness the past few weeks and trying to start doing some breathing exercises to help relax and manage it. I was wondering recently if getting overheated was making my nausea worse, so am glad to find confirmation of that here and a tool i can use to help cool down. Hope it’s okay I’ll be crediting and linking to your video and post in my next blog post I’m working on about morning sickness. Thank you!