You can check this lying down with a book on your stomach. If the book rises, the breath is going where you want it. If only your shoulders move, it is staying high and you will not feel much difference. Changing a habit this old takes a bit of practise, so give it a few days rather than a few breaths.

Smelling a flower and then blowing it out gives each half of the breath a picture. The bubble wand is better still, because it answers back straight away and turns a slow steady exhale into a game with a visible score. Birthday candles used to be the standard image and may be worth swapping now for something else.

This is not about the style being bad. It is about matching what you choose to the things you genuinely find hard. Dehydration creeps up quietly and you may not notice until you are already unwell. There are more kinds of yoga than anyone could work through in a lifetime, plenty of them free to follow at home, so you give up nothing by picking a cooler one.

Labels like calming or energising are a rough guide at best. What actually happens depends on how you usually breathe, what your body has been through, and where you are starting from that day. So try one, and give it enough attention to notice what it did, not what it was meant to do.

The count is scaffolding. Holding onto it too long turns the practice into something you can pass or fail, which is the opposite of the point. Handing the rhythm back to yourself also means you notice when it stops being comfortable, and can adjust before anything gets forced.

Keep the breathing light and unhurried, and after a while a mild hunger for air builds. Let it build a little. At some point the body takes a fuller breath on its own, sometimes as a yawn, and that is where the reset happens. A deep breath you order up from the top usually just leaves you breathing hard.

Sensors in the brainstem watch the level of carbon dioxide in your blood, and a pause, especially after breathing out, lets it rise a little. The body answers with a fuller breath, sometimes a yawn, and things rebalance. Knowing this is useful twice over: you can explain to someone why a pause makes them breathe better, and you can put a practice together yourself rather than only copying one.

Come back to normal breathing and check the body, the thoughts, the mood, the energy. Do not analyse it, just register it. Going round after round without stopping makes you good at the technique and teaches you nothing about your own responses, which is exactly what you need when you come to use it alone at three in the morning.

Starting with the mirror gives you something to do instead of an anatomy lesson about a part of the throat you cannot see. Once the mouth closes, the sound should soften until it is barely there. Following that fading sound is half the value of the practice, since keeping track of it asks for a finer and finer quality of attention.

The fiddliness is not a flaw in the design. Keeping track of which nostril and which stage takes up just enough of your mind that there is little room left for whatever you were chewing over. Ten rounds is a fair try. If the hand work irritates you, that irritation is useful information about what suits you.