In a sense, you could say that your physiological system is part of your unconscious or subconscious mind, or an expression thereof. The task is to become conscious of what’s going on because your breathing habits may be unconsciously sabotaging your health.
“So, what we're really focused on in our work is observing and learning about breathing as a behavior,” Litchfield says. “We're not using breathing as a technique where you manipulate breathing so you can relax, or you manipulate breathing to achieve some otherworldly experience where you dissociate.
There are all kinds of reasons that people implement breathing techniques for presumed positive outcomes ... Our work isn't about breathing techniques.
Another thing that's very important, is that there is a trigger for every habit. Triggers are not there all the time. They show up at specific times. For example, in the statistics pointing the larger cities of the United States, like New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles, where surveys suggest that about 60% of the ambulance runs are a result of symptoms brought on by dysfunctional breathing.
And it's not as if this person is breathing dysfunctionally all the time. It's that at that particular moment, they breathe this way, that then precipitates these
symptoms.
They don't understand where these symptoms and deficits are coming from. They don't think of their breathing. They call 911, if you're in the United States, and they end up in [the] emergency [room] ... A lot of what our work is about is identifying these habits.”
What Is a Breathing Habit?
So, how do you identify a breathing habit? There are many components to look at, including the following:
Motivation — Behavior is motivated by something. There's motivation behind all habits, and any one of them can be tied up with your breathing.
Behaviors — You need to identify the exact behavior involved. For example, you may be aborting the breath, meaning you inhale before you’ve fully exhaled.
In most cases, it’s rooted in a subconscious fear about not getting enough air. Whatever the cause, there’s motivation embedded in the behavior. Aborting the breath and inhaling early may serve the breather by reducing worry or anxiety about not getting enough air.
However, when you inhale too soon, air hunger sets in — a feeling like you can’t get enough air — and that can trigger the very anxiety the habit is trying to avoid.
“It's nothing to do with oxygen,” Litchfield says. “It's about claustrophobia.
So, this person then develops a kind of claustrophobia that's now embedded in the breath.
You'll find some people constantly reaching, trying to get that one good
breath. They may suffer with air hunger for an extended period of time. As they breathe out, they abort [the breath] constantly, trying to get a
satisfying breath as soon as possible.”
Outcomes — What are the outcomes of your learned breathing behavior, and how are those outcomes serving you? For example, when you start taking larger breaths, you may think you’re going to get more air.
You may feel like you’re in charge and in control, and that keeps you going. But what happens is you lose CO2 without realizing it. You may experience symptoms that you and your healthcare providers may misinterpret and attribute to unrelated causes.
In reality, you need far less air than you think. For every liter of blood you can move through your lungs, you can move 20 liters of air. But you only need 1 liter of air. So optimal breathing is usually not about getting enough oxygen. It's about regulating the CO2 concentrations in your extracellular body fluids, like blood plasma.
What Deep Breathing Does to Your Body
Contrary to popular belief, deep breathing does not improve oxygenation. When you’re deep breathing, blood flow to your brain actually decreases as a result of a tightening of the blood vessels (vasoconstriction) in the brain.
Additionally, the cytoplasm in your red blood cells can become too alkaline and the hemoglobin carried by the red blood cells can become unfriendly, that is, less willing to give up the oxygen it carries to the tissues that need it. So, deep breathing actually contributes to an oxygen deficit already in progress as a result of vasoconstriction.
The vasoconstriction occurs because the primary vascular purpose of CO2 is vasodilation. When you have sufficient CO2 in your system, it will open your blood vessels much more effectively than nitric oxide, because nitric oxide has a dark side. It binds to Complex IV in your mitochondria and shuts down the electron transport chain. So, ideally, you want the vasodilation to be done by CO2 rather than nitric oxide.
So, the outcome of overbreathing is loss of blood in the brain, loss of oxygen, loss of glucose and electrolyte changes in the brain that then lead to setting the stage for lactic acidosis in neurons (brain cells). “Most people, lay or professional, have no idea that this is going on,” Litchfield says.
These brain changes, in turn, tend to trigger disinhibition where emotions — oftentimes anger or fear — are discharged. This release of emotions can serve you by allowing you to cope with a challenging situation or environment. Overbreathing (breathing that results in a CO2 deficit) leads to an outcome (a reinforcement) that serves you and is thus a “solution” to a perceived problem, a successful coping mechanism.
“Maybe they've come from a very traumatic kind of a background, and the only way they could really cope with it is to get angry,” Litchfield says. “But usually there is fear operating in the background ...
There are things like this that, when you overbreathe, you get a symptom, a physiological change, and people have learned to respond to that change in their own unique ways. Some people, for example, when they get dizzy because they lose oxygen in the brain, when they overventilate, feel like they're losing control and freak out. They can’t understand what's going on.
They can't focus. They don't remember what's happening. They feel unable to function. They're on the verge of a panic attack. The next person goes, ‘Hey, this is kind of cool. I really like this.’ They have a whole different response to it. So, one of the things we're always looking at are how people relate to the physiological changes brought on by breathing.”
Automatic Reflexes Regulate Your CO2 Level
As explained by Litchfield, your CO2 level is regulated by automatic reflexes. There are receptors in the brain and in the arterial system that are sensitive to CO2 concentration and to the pH of various extracellular fluids, such as blood plasma and interstitial fluids (surrounding cells). There are receptor sites in the arterial system which are sensitive to oxygen concentration but, surprisingly, not in the brain.
This system wasn't designed to get out of whack just because you get stressed.
Provided you haven’t learned bad breathing habits, your breathing optimizes respiration regardless of most circumstances., e.g., while talking.
As explained by Litchfield, breathing regulates acid-based physiology1 in extracellular body fluids. Your body must have the capacity to change your pH rapidly, almost immediately, because if it didn't, you would be in serious trouble and in could even die. Although bad breathing habits can quickly bring on fainting, for example, there are safety mechanisms that protect us.