“That's totally fundamental,” Litchfield says. “That's what we work on — helping people build trust in that system. And that's what I was talking about at the very beginning about partnering with your body. That partnership is vital. You're not a victim of your body. You're in the body. This is who you are. You own this. You own your breathing. You're not a victim of your breathing. And that's often a problem. People think they're a victim of all of this.”
Why Most Breathing Techniques Don’t Address Your Health Problems
While we’ve already mentioned this, it bears repeating. What Litchfield is talking about is not learning a specific set of breathing techniques. It’s not about the technique per se. It’s about understanding why your breath gets dysregulated and how new habits can be learned. In regard to the Buteyko technique, for example, he comments:
“Most issues around breathing, when it comes to hypocapnia, are acute. It isn't chronic. Buteyko [breathing] is really limited to [chronic overbreathing]. Secondly, you have to ask yourself, where did that hypocapnia come from in the rst place? Why is this person breathing like that, that you now have to train them to habituate to a higher level of CO ? How did that happen? What's the history of that?
And if the history is that this is a way I can control my wife, if you're overventilating so you can get angry to control your environment, what good is Buteyko [breathing] going to do? That person isn't going to raise their CO level. They want it down so they can get angry.
So you have to address the motivation behind the behavior and what the outcomes are that sustain it. Just because you can habituate to a higher level of CO doesn't mean you've addressed the problem. The problem is the habit. You want to identify the habit, help the person through it, help them understand where it came from and what they can do about it.
And that may have a signicant philosophical impact on them as well, their belief system about their physiology, the trust in their system and so on. So the [Buteyko breathing technique is] limited because you're not addressing history of the breathing. You're not addressing any of these various factors that we've been talking about. You're just looking at the CO level — ‘My god, it's too low. We need to raise it.’
Another problem with Buteyko is that they don't measure it. Some do, but it’s not part of their curriculum. We have a lot of people who graduated from our program who are Buteyko workers and they measure it. When you think you've been successful with your client, you need to see that the CO actually went up.
If it didn't go up, you weren't successful. So it's very important to be able to assess it right from the start because Buteyko, when they do their assessment, they're looking at correlational ndings ...
On the other hand, they really do a great job because when people get ... comfortable with allowing the breath to sit out there for long periods of time, they can build trust, and they may nd the reex in it. Identifying the reex is what ultimately builds trust because you can feel it kick in. If you can nd that reex, then you've won a signicant part of the battle. And there's a good chance that can happen because of what the Buteyko people do. Desensitization to the transition time eliminates anxiety and air hunger during the transition time by doing Buteyko, so that's helpful.”
The Breathing Behavior Analysis Procedure
In the course I took with Litchfield, he provided many impressive practical examples. One was of a young woman, about 19 years old, whose CO level dramatically decreased when they began her breathing interview. Among the symptoms she’d indicated on the checklist was that she would get dizzy a lot, and when she gets these dizzy spells, she’d become frightened.
“So, we're talking and I see her CO level go down. I say, ‘Are you feeling dizzy right now?’ And she says, ‘Yeah, as a matter of fact, this is exactly how I feel in these kinds of situations.’ ‘Well, look at your CO level. Look what happened here.’
This is what we call transactional psychophysiology. We're interacting with the person around their physiology, and they're seeing what's happening while they're behaving in the way they are. So, we explore that together. And then we do all kinds of testing together depending on who the person is and what the issues are.
A good example might be, we'll have them overbreathe on purpose. Now, this isn't as simple as it sounds. You need to do it the right way. There's a real right way to do it, and there are wrong ways to do it. We have someone overventilate on purpose. And what happens when you do that, they start to get symptoms, and they start to get decits, and they're there and they're focusing on their experience.
They're not talking. I'm the one who's doing the talking. I'm asking them questions to think about the answers, not to interact with me, but just to think about the answers to the questions.
I'll ask questions like, ‘Are there any emotions coming up right now? Are there any memories that are being triggered right now? Does this remind you of anything in your current life circumstances? Does this remind you of something that happened to you in the past?’
And I have a lot of information before I do this. I have this form. So they're not just random questions. They're really specic. They're about that person and their lives and what we've uncovered together. And then what often happens is, they're trapped. They can't get out. They're breathing that way and the CO level simply does not come up no matter what they do. And this is what happens in their real life situation when they get trapped ...
As I work with them, I use certain kinds of experiential paradigms that I implement so they can raise the CO level. The symptoms go away and they're amazed. Someone will say something like ... ‘My God, it seemed like I wasn't even breathing. I feel so much better and I was hardly breathing at all. How can that be?’
It's because their belief system was that they weren't getting enough oxygen and couldn't possibly be OK breathing with these very small kinds of breaths.
In fact, this is what allowed the trap to break open so they could allow those reexes to operate, to trust the system so they get to where they need to be from a respiratory point of view. And this may all happen in one short session, if you know what you're doing.”
A Quick Rescue Method
A good test that can tell you if your symptoms are due to a CO deficiency is to breathe into a paper bag. If the symptoms disappear, you know hypocapnia and hence overbreathing is the problem. Never use a plastic bag, as it can cause suffocation. Always use a paper bag, about 6 inches by 15 inches. If it’s too small or too large, it won’t work.
Place the paper bag over your nose and mouth and hold it in place with your hands as you breathe into it. The CO will accumulate in the bag, thereby raising your CO level as you breathe it in.