JANET WINTER

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Five health benefits of breathing with your diaphragm

July 23, 2014 by info@breathingremedies.co.uk 4 Comments

shutterstock_128571824The diaphragm is a large, thin sheet of muscle dividing the thoracic (chest) cavity from the abdominal cavity (belly), and is the major muscle of breathing. As the diaphragm contracts, the lungs move downwards, expand and fill with air. Diaphragmatic breathing, along with breathing through the nose (not the mouth) is essential for healthy breathing. However, as a breathing educator I see many clients –especially those with ME/CFS/fibromyalgia or anxiety who make little or no use of this important muscle! Instead, they often breathe though the mouth, the breathing is obvious in the upper chest, accessory muscles in the upper chest and neck and shoulders do the donkey work of lifting the ribcage, and posture is often slumped.

Here is the best 3D video of breathing I have seen though take note, normal breathing at rest would be MUCH slower and MUCH smaller and less obvious than this.

 Why is it important to engage the diaphragm for breathing?

Five advantages of using the diaphragm are:

1)      Efficient gas exchange –the bottom third of the lungs is where about two thirds of the gas exchange takes place, so oxygenation is more efficient when you use the diaphragm

2)      Less tension and tightness in the neck and shoulders as the muscles here can relax

3)      Diaphragmatic breathing rebalances the autonomic nervous system, reducing heart rate and breathing rate and changing from sympathetic fight or flight to parasympathetic calm and relax

4)      Diaphragmatic breathing gently “massages” or moves the abdominal organs, aiding digestion and helping lymphatic drainage; much of the lymphatic system is located just below the diaphragm

5)      The diaphragm contributes to good posture and core muscle strength, so needs to work properly. In fact overdeveloped abs and sucking the stomach in can hinder proper movement of the diaphragm, and promote upper chest breathing

How do you breathe?

Check it out, put one hand on your upper chest, the other on the belly; which moves first when you inhale, which moves most?

A good way to promote diaphragmatic breathing is to lie flat on your back with legs raised, then bent at the knee right angles and calves supported on a chair. Check that the belly is moving up and down as you breathe – a book on the belly will help to feel this. This can be further encouraged by clasping your hands behind your head. Once you get used to it, make sure you still breathe with your diaphragm when sitting, standing and moving –don’t hold it all in!

Sometimes it is very difficult for people to use the diaphragm BECAUSE they breathe badly and there is poor blood flow and oxygenation of the diaphragm. As the breathing pattern starts to improve with constant nasal breathing, blood supply improves and it becomes easier to use the diaphragm.

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Filed Under: Better breathing and better health, ME/CFS Tagged With: abdominal breathing, chest breathing, diaphragm, fibromyalgia, ME/CFS

Comments

  1. Barrie Marshall says

    May 11, 2017 at 23:06

    I just watched a program on BBC TV about insomnia and sleep deprivation, it was an hour long, breathing was not mentioned once and some of the very short clips of people sleeping their mouths were open! they had lots of information from prominent people with remedies and experiments, they did work for some people so the program had some value, all I know is now that I have succeeded in keeping my mouth closed at night I sleep extremely well.

    Reply
    • info@breathingremedies.co.uk says

      May 12, 2017 at 15:29

      Thanks for sharing your experiences Barrie. I am glad that better breathing has helpe you get a good night’s sleep.

      Reply
  2. Deirdre Mac Gowan Lindfors says

    November 6, 2018 at 17:12

    Hi,

    Just want to say how I love your story because it’s similar to mine.

    I am a retired homeopath with an avid interest in nutrition, exercise etc. Through my own bad health, fibromyalgia and many other problems, I have learned so much and now use a program for helping my clients. It also includes breathing and visualization.

    Am at present studying hypnotherapy which is an amazing tool. I have discovered that in order to recover from a serious illness chronic or otherwise, you need to use various different tools.

    June 2016 I was admitted to the cardiac unit with a sub massive clot in both my lungs and two in my left leg behind the knee and in the thigh. It has been a long journey and I am now fully recovered without any heart problems and off all blood thinning meds since a year ago, in spite of the fact the medics told me I would need to take them for the rest of my life. I have never felt better…

    Thank you for sharing your knowledge, so glad you’re feeling well now and your son. Isn’t amazing how illness teaches us so much?

    Warm regards/Deirdre Mac Gowan Lindfors

    Reply
    • info@breathingremedies.co.uk says

      January 31, 2019 at 17:26

      Thank you for sharing your story Deirdre, so glad to hear that you have made a good recovery: indeed many angles and approaches may be needed, nutrition, breathing, postural work, mind work and more, depending on the person.

      Reply

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About me/ contact

You can sign up to Breathing Remedies newsletter here. Information on posture and breathing and how they affect health.

Or phone me 01663 743055 (Dr Janet Winter)

 

Hello, I am Janet,  a  Breathing educator, (Buteyko Breathing Method) and I help people recover from asthma, allergies, sinusitis, anxiety, sleep problems, headaches, IBS chronic fatigue (ME/CFS) and more, by improving their dysfunctional breathing. Both myself and my teenage son have recovered from ME/CFS, and I want to help more people with these devastating illnesses.

You can contact me here (please leave phone number, landline preferably: 

What I do

Louise Bibby - CFS Coach, Blogger, Author

Louise Bibby – CFS Coach, Blogger, Author

Here is a very brief (3.5 mins) audio introduction to the Buteyko method and DEEP BREATHING; part of an hour-long interview with CFS coach Louise Bibby in Australia – the full interview will be available on her “Get up and go Guru”
site
soon.

Breathing education gently retrains a disordered breathing pattern and helps people naturally recover from breathing-related health problems.

I trained to be a Breathing Educator with Jennifer Stark and Savio D’Souza. Jennifer has been teaching Buteyko for almost 20 years and conducted several of the successful asthma clinical trials of the Buteyko method in the West. (The Buteyko Method relieves asthma symptoms, and has been listed in the UK Asthma Guideline since 2008).
I am a member of the Buteyko Breathing Educators Association and am fully insured.

I am also a qualified postural alignment specialist (PAS) trained by Nicole Lourens of the Egoscue University. Good posture is essential for good breathing and proper function in general.

egoscue023You can find a great summary of Egoscue here.

My background

I had been involved in healthcare/biomedical research for 30 years although previously in a very different role: before training as a Breathing educator, I spent 20 years in drug discovery looking for new painkillers for a major pharmaceutical company based in a London Institute.
I worked as a neuroscientist and cell biologist, directing a team of bench scientists. (So I am not a medical doctor but I have a PhD in Neuroscience) I authored or co-authored more than 50 journal articles and reviews on my research. I have also worked as a medical writer, so have a firm grounding in evidence-based medicine. My professional profile can be seen here on LINKEDIN.

Why I became a breathing educator

If you are reading this because you have CFS/ME, I know what you are going through. I know what it is like to hold onto a job by my fingernails, worried about how we would feed the family if I lost my job, come home and eat and sleep and spend my weekend recovering.
I had no social life. I was lucky to quickly get to a consultant who diagnosed me with candidiasis, and anti-fungals and a yeast and sugar-free diet helped a lot, but not enough.
I felt I had been “written off” and had nothing to offer. I was a mum, partner and employee with massively reduced physical and mental output compared with previously. I suspected my symptoms were “stress related” but they did not ease when I left my stressful job and moved out of London to the countryside.
For me (after trying many different avenues, cranial osteopathy, chiropractic, mercury amalgam filling removal and more – I became a “fat-folder patient”), breathing education worked, it was a big missing piece of my health puzzle, and one I had frankly never considered.

Changing my breathing back to a more normal pattern really helped me. One definition of stress is “anything that makes you breathe more”. And I know now that breathing too much can actually deplete the body of oxygen. And stress can be emotional or physical. Looking back on my history I can clearly see my own physical and emotional stresses accumulating, from a very traumatic bereavement, on-going work and family stresses, then a really bad summer respiratory infection and cough that was not shifted by two different antibiotics (but they probably contributed to unbalancing my gut flora, hence the fungal overgrowth/candidiasis).

A cough seems to be one of the best ways to mess up your breathing pattern, and many of my clients tell me “I was fine until I had that cough/chest infection, and I never really got my health back!!” The breathing centre in the brain gets to think that big volume breathing is normal and unless you know about it, it is sometimes hard to recover. Luckily you CAN retrain your breathing by doing a series of gentle exercises and making some life style changes, and you CAN have hope of better health.
So that is why I do what I do and why I am passionate about it; I found a way to improve my chronic fatigue by better breathing and I trained as a breathing educator so I could help others with this devastating disease. There is so little help out there for them (you?).

Then chronic backache made good breathing impossible, and I discovered postural alignment therapy (Egoscue) to help with that. And I am still amazed at the progress I am making -it’s wonderful to have decreased pain and increased function when I had accepted decline at my age was inevitable. It’s not!



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