How often have you stopped to consider how you breathe? How often have you thought about the relationship between the process of inhaling and exhaling and your health, your respiratory system, your energy level and your immune system? If you are like most people, the answer is “never”, which means you have probably also not become aware of the importance of breathing normalization.
How You Have Been Taught
If you think back on how you have been taught to breathe, you probably think of taking deep, deep breaths and regularly breathing in and out, in and out. However, this is not the way the human body was actually designed to breathe.
The healthy type of breathing, or breathing normalization, is light, shallow breaths that provide oxygen while maintaining the correct balance of carbon dioxide in the lungs. The presence of carbon dioxide in the lungs is important for transmission of oxygen into the blood the correct functioning of the cells.
When we are constantly breathing deep we are drawing in a lot of oxygen, there is no question of that, but we are also exhaling significant amounts of carbon dioxide. This creates a carbon dioxide deficiency in the lungs, resulting in poor uptake of oxygen and health problems throughout the body.
What You Need to Learn
The good news is that it is possible to learn breathing normalization techniques through the Buteyko® breathing method. This retrains your body to take light, shallow breaths to maintain the carbon dioxide levels needed for effective oxygen uptake in the lungs.
It will also assist for those with respiratory problems including asthma, allergies and other chronic conditions such as a COPD and bronchitis, to reduce the complications and problems associated with these conditions. Many people learning breathing normalization can actually eliminate the use of inhalers and steroids while others will see a dramatic reduction in the need to use these medications.
The key to breathing normalization is to learn to increase your control pause, or the amount of time you can go between breaths without feeling the need to take in a breath. Once you are able to do that, and the carbon dioxide and oxygen systems are working correctly in the lungs, you will notice you have better breathing, improved overall health, and a lot more physical energy on a daily basis.
