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How did we get a disordered breathing pattern/hyperventilation in the first place?

December 3, 2014 by info@breathingremedies.co.uk Leave a Comment

It is fascinating to note that before World War 2, the normal minute volume for breathing was 4-6 litres per minute, but this increased to ~12 litres per minute by the 1990’s.

hyperventilation-syndrome-c

Something has been going on:

20th/21st century lifestyle –all these factors can encourage you to breathe more than you should:

  • Overeating, eating processed foods
  • Sedentary lifestyle/poor posture encouraging upper chest breathing
  • Helpline type jobs –lot of talking
  • Centrally heated homes/”soft lifestyle” soft beds, oversleeping
  • Environmental pollution
  • Belief that deep breathing is good for you –breathing more and more when you feel breathless
  • Information overload –internet, gadgets –“screen time” linked with poor sleep
  • CHRONIC STRESS –the big one!

Dr Buteyko defined stress as anything that causes you to breathe more than you need to.

Stress can be emotional or physical.

A good example is someone I know who sustained a very nasty broken leg in a skiing accident. She had the initial physical stress and pain of the injury to deal with; suboptimal surgery in a non- state -of -the -art foreign hospital, of painful travel home; emotional stresses insurance to sort out, weeks off work, immobility, worry about the future, many, many visits to hospital for X- rays that showed lack of annealing of the fracture; the stress of expecting to see the consultant who could handle the complicated case but seeing  junior doctors who gave conflicting advice; further surgery and bone grafts; physical stress of more pain and 6 months of having to sleep on her back to keep the injured leg straight. (You can breathe up to twice as much sleeping on your back as your side).

Not surprisingly her breathing pattern suffered. You get the picture, chronic stress can lead to chronic hyperventilation/disordered breathing pattern.

And what are the symptoms of disordered breathing/hyperventilation? Numerous, including increased pain and panic, which can make you breathe more, depleting your body oxygen and causing a vicious cycle.

A client with ME/CFS described rather well the time leading up to her health collapse as “a decade of crises”- the breathing can slide into abnormality without you noticing, and stay that way as it is eventually accepted as normal. For some, ill health comes out of the blue or “I was fine until I had that cough, then I never really got better” but for many “I just didn’t feel right for several years” with IBS/anxiety e.t.c. creeping up on them.

So physical factors causing stress could include:  pain; illness and injury; infection; toxic environment/pollution, and emotional stressors  could be: work stresses (indifferent, bullying or inconsistent management); or not having a job; financial worries; toxic relationships; exams;  bereavement;  new baby e.t.c, e.t.c

Many women in their 40’s may find themselves sandwiched between the demands of teenage offspring and aging parents, also holding down a job, with their own needs being ignored. shutterstock_53154181

With today’s culture, many people put their job before their health, dosing up on decongestants when they have the flu and soldiering on rather than resting and recuperating.

The work/life balance is a difficult one, I heard someone say she doesn’t have time to look after her health while she is working –it’s OK for retired people!  Something badly wrong there….

Luckily a disordered breathing pattern is something that can be put right; surely it is worth it to safeguard your future health, or improve your current health…
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Filed Under: Better breathing and better health, hyperventilation, ME/CFS Tagged With: breathless, chest breathing, hyperventilation, ME/CFS

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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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