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I know how to breathe or I would be dead wouldn’t I? –5 Interesting responses I have had when I tell people that I am a breathing educator!

June 14, 2014 by info@breathingremedies.co.uk Leave a Comment

People are often rather amused when I tell them what I do –  5 Interesting responses I have had:

1)      “I know how to breathe or I would be dead wouldn’t I?” (this person was overweight and had diabetes but most certainly did not associate breathing with health) or another “I’m fantastic at it. I do it every day.  I’m that good at it I do it in my sleep!”  Ha ha…

2)      No comment, but immediately the person starts to gulp in huge breaths, in and out, filling and emptying their lungs! (I try to stop them before they faint, failing that I get them to move away from my better breathing info stall –doesn’t look good if they collapse there!)

3)      Old joke about well-know footballer (not known for his brains) who used to play for a major Manchester club–left his MP3 behind, someone picked it up to check what he had been listening to:  “breathe in breathe out, breathe in breathe out etc.” ie, he had to be reminded!

4)      “I am quite happy with my medication thank you, it controls my asthma” but I see the dark rings under their eyes and know that when I ask them “do you sleep well” the answer will be “no” and likely they will answer “yes” to sinusitis. The asthma medications can keep the airways open but do not address the dysfunctional breathing that contributes to other health issues/symptoms.

5)      Now this was an interesting response from someone who had asthma. He was happy with his medication, but he likened it to “turning the car radio up to drown out a rattle in the car rather than finding out what was rattling and fixing it”. He accepted that changing your breathing might help asthma, but chose the easier way, the quick fix with medication.

feather

People also find it amusing when I say it is important to breathe through the nose, all the time.  7 reasons to breathe through your nose are here, but there are more!

Two years ago there was an international breathe through your nose week! Again there was a fair bit of ridicule, it seems trivial right – the nose is just an optional extra stuck on your face?  In fact Dennis Lewis, the laughing philosopher, says “If you don’t breathe through your nose, in a sense you’re only half alive”.

Most people assume that breathing takes care of itself and it does to a great extent in healthy people, it is automatic; when you exercise, you need more oxygen and you breathe more without having to think about it.

But breathing can become disordered or dysfunctional. And it is such a basic function it tends to be overlooked as a source of ill health, but laugh at it at your peril! (However, a good belly laugh can be good for your breathing too, so it is not all bad! But I will leave that for another post!)

Most people also erroneously assume that “the more you breathe the better”, whereas you can actually starve yourself of oxygen by breathing too much by messing up the balance of your blood gases.

So there are consequences, you wouldn’t think  “the more you eat the better” – the diet industry is worth billions; the majority of the population have been on a calorie controlled diet at one time or another and I bet most people could have a good guess at how many calories you would have to eat on a weight loss diet!

So why on earth do we assume the more the better with breathing? Many people are greedy for air. They may breathe 3 or 4 times the norm. If you eat 9 or 12 meals a day instead of 3, there WILL be consequences, and you know what they will be. Less obvious are the results of over breathing /disordered breathing , which can affect every one of your body systems, listed here. 

The people who make such comments are not likely to ever be convinced and are unlikely to be interested in changing their breathing to improve their health. Nor are they are not the people I am looking for!  It takes a fair bit of dedication so breathing re-training is not a quick fix, not like taking a pill or an inhaler.

And to redress the balance here are the consequences of improved breathing for 5 clients who saw sense in the method and put in the work; nothing to ridicule here!

1) I have slept well and have more energy than I can remember for many years. I feel generally calmer, my hands and feet are no longer blocks of ice and my chill blains have disappeared!

2) I have been amazed at how much my whole quality of life has improved and the welcome sense of calm.

3) I have had no recurrence of sinusitis, which I had for 40 years.  In addition I have found that carrying out the breathing method helps to relax and calm my mind and this has definitely helped with my chronic fatigue.

4) I have no doubt that the Buteyko method was directly responsible for my cure from the ME/CFS as the effects were so dramatic. The method does take commitment and practice (and I’m still practicing!) but this is a very small price to pay for having your health, and life restored.

5) I feel calmer, more energised and I am sleeping better, without snoring. The Buteyko method has given me a daily support mechanism and an emergency medical kit when times get hard.

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About me, Buteyko breathing educator

Janet Winter breathing and posture educator (Buteyko and Egoscue)

Dr Janet Winter (PhD)

Hello, I am Janet,  a  Breathing educator (Buteyko), and Posture specialist (Egoscue).

I help people recover from asthma, allergies, sinusitis, anxiety, sleep problems, headaches, IBS chronic fatigue (ME/CFS) and more, by improving their dysfunctional breathing.

Listen to a client’s (Suzy Glaskie, functional medicine health coach at Peppermint Wellness) 15 minute podcast on how Buteyko helped her.

I teach natural health control with no drugs, gadgets or manipulation. You can sign up to my newsletter here.

Phone me 01663 743055 (Dr Janet Winter) or contact me here.

What I do

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

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) Egoscue method. Good posture is essential for good breathing and proper function in general.

My background

I was 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.  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.
For me (after trying many different avenues, cranial osteopathy, chiropractic, mercury amalgam filling removal and more – I became a “fat-folder patient”).

How I got sick

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.

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.

My recovery

Changing my breathing back to a more normal pattern really helped me. It was a big missing piece of my health puzzle, and one I had frankly never considered. 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.

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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