Figuring out how and what you are physically feeling is hard; especially when you’re feeling things like rage, sadness, disgust, and confusion for the first time.

“It’s kind of like if you had a jar, and your jar would be your brain and the glitter in your jar would be how you feel like…
When you shake up the jar, the glitter goes everywhere… that would be how your mind looks.”

Sometimes the best thing to do is just breathe.

Filmmakers Julie Bayer Salzman and Josh Salzman created “Just Breathe” by talking to their son, his friends and their families about how their emotions affect them and how they physically feel when they experience those emotions. The film is entirely unscripted – what the kids say is based purely on their own understanding of difficult emotions and how they cope.

The inspiration for “Just Breathe” first came when Julie overheard her 5-year-old son talking with his friend about how emotions affect different regions of the brain and how to calm down by taking deep breaths — all things they were beginning to learn in Kindergarten. She was surprised how significant their learning this information about their emotions was on kids so young so she decided to take a 6-week online course on Mindfulness, figuring if her son was learning about this, it only made sense that she should learn too.