Effectiveness of Breathing Exercises on Stress Reduction among Old Age People

Abstract

Stress is the tear and wears on the body reasoned by continual adjustment to an individual's changing environment. Anything that causes change in our life produces stress. Aging is a natural process. Old age should be regarded as a normal inescapable biological phenomenon. As people become aged, the ability to gain a relaxation response after a stressful event or meeting becomes more difficult. Aging may simply wear out the systems in the brain that answer to stress. It is a series of processes that begin with life and continue throughout the life cycle. Breathing exercises offer an extremely simple, effective and convenient way to relieve stress and reverse the stress response, reducing the negative effects of chronic stress. The objectives of the present study were to assess the pre-test and post-test level of stress, to find out the effectiveness of Breathing Exercises and to associate the stress level with selected demographic variables. Pre experimental with one group pretest-posttest design was used in this study. The study was conducted in selected urban areas at Kanyakumari District. The samples were selected by purposive sampling technique on the basis of their pre-test stress score. The tools used for data collection were Demographic Variables and Perceived Stress Scale. Totally 82 old age people participated in the study. Among them, 59 samples were selected according to the inclusion criteria. Among the subjects, 27.12% had moderate stress and 72.88% had high perceived stress in pre-test and 59.32% had low stress, 37.29% had moderate stress and 3.39% had high perceived stress in post-test. The study revealed that, the pre-test mean score of stress level was 29.42±3.88, the post-test stress level was 14.66±3.74 and the mean difference of stress level between pre-test and post-test was 14.76, ‘t’=21.038 and it was statistically highly significant at <0.0001 level. Hence, the study concluded that breathing exercises was effective in reduction of stress among old age people.