Masters of Health Magazine March 2024 | Page 38

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.

 

“There's a simple little equation ... that addresses how blood pH is regulated by the relationship of carbon dioxide concentration with bicarbonate concentration; 'together they regulate acid-based balance from breath to breath.'

 

The carbon dioxide is controlled by the way you breathe. So as soon as you start to take over breathing, you take the control away from the reflexes, the result of which can be determined by doing a breathing behavior analysis.

 

You might be OK because in the background breathing and respiration are being coordinated properly, but maybe not, like when I'm eating and talking, I'm breathing. They have to be coordinated and linked. This is behavior. They get linked.

Sometimes they get out of sync and then people are really in trouble. They're struggling whenever they eat. Their breathing is all wrong. When they're talking, the breathing goes wrong.

 

They get real lightheaded when they're talking because they're overventilating. They're constantly trying to take another breath while they're talking to people ...

What's happening is that they're losing carbon dioxide. They're getting completely disoriented, can't function ...”

Optimizing Your CO by Relearning Better Breathing Habits

You can very accurately measure your CO concentration with a tool called a capnometer, the wellness-educational version of it known as a CapnoTrainer:

“Being able to measure carbon dioxide is obviously the best of all worlds. There are ways you can look at overbreathing without a capnometer, but it's quite limited. It may be that you're not aware of how you're being in􀂧uenced, so it's very di􀂨cult without a capnometer or CapnoTrainer.

But ultimately, the idea is not to need technology. The idea is you understand that you've learned habits and that you identify what those habits are, their components, their motivation, their outcomes, your belief systems and all kinds of things around it so that you can learn about who you are from a breathing perspective.

It's not about a breathing technique. This is about learning techniques, about how you become a different being when it comes to the way that you breathe, and your habits optimize respiration, your habits optimize acid-based physiology.

If you want to have your CO looked at from a perspective of habits that you may have learned, you can rent a device, which makes it affordable for many people. A CapnoTrainer is different in a certain way than a capnometer. A capnometer technically is used in medicine, in surgery and in critical care, emergency medicine and so on.

But a CapnoTrainer is used to learn about your breathing. How are you breathing? How is it affecting you? What habits do you have? How can you learn new habits? That kind of thing. So you can rent these devices and you can also buy them. There are different versions of them.

There are professional, basic and personal versions of them. They're all software-based, and you can operate these instruments on your cell phone and on tablets and Apple computers, PC computers, whatever, and really get to know your breathing in detail ...

What breathing behavior analysts do is they help you do that. Now, however, you can learn to do it on your own. We have a book out that can walk you through that ... The idea is to try to help you optimize your functioning. So many people just don't realize that they're breathing dysfunctionally and they attribute their symptoms to all kinds of other sources completely unrelated to breathing.

And so do the health care professionals because they don't know about it either. They're trying to 􀂦gure out where these symptoms are coming from, but they don't think about the breathing ...

The breathing techniques out there generally don't address habits. They may, by accident, address a habit and then give credit to the technique rather than understanding it's about some kind of embedded learning that has occurred in the process — that fear was addressed, for example.

But they may think, well, it's the slowness of breathing. Breathing slow is really good. And so it's [about the] parasympathetic nervous system, and that's why it worked, when in reality what it was about was that you lost your fear associated with the end of the exhale, for example, because of the technique they were using.

But people aren't focusing on it that way ... They aren't looking at the experiential side of it, which is key to understanding breathing behavior.”

Trust Your Body

Again, your body knows how to breathe. The only time you get into problems is when you unconsciously override it with a learned breathing habit that throws the system out of whack. So, trust your body.

Headache

Abdominal symptoms and bloating

Muscle pain and weakness, tetany, hyperreflexia, spasm, tingling in the hands and lips, numbness, trembling and difficulty swallowing

Cognitive changes, including attention deficit, difficulty learning, poor memory and brain fog

Emotional changes associated with the reduction of blood flow in the brain

Nausea and vomiting

Fatigue

Cardiovascular changes like palpitations, tachycardia, arrhythmias, angina, ECG abnormalities

Symptoms involving consciousness, such as dissociation, disconnecting from your environment, disconnecting from people, fainting and hallucinations

Personality and self-esteem changes

Do You Overbreathe?

Symptoms of low CO (hypocapnia), caused by overbreathing, include but are not limited to:

If you frequently suffer any of these symptoms, it is possible that you may be struggling with hypocapnia, meaning low CO levels, and the No. 1 reason for hypocapnia is a poor 2 2 breathing habit in response to all kinds of habit triggers, such as stress. The solution in this case is to identify the faulty habitual breathing behaviors and then correct them.