Breathing Remedies

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    • Postural alignment therapy (Egoscue): conditions treated
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    • Asthma allergies sinusitis
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Anxiety stress panic


Hyperventilation means breathing more air than your body needs at that time. There are two types: acute and chronic. Most people are familiar with the acute kind that is the normal response to stress. It:

  • Floods the body with adrenaline
  • Increases the heart and breathing rates
  • Puts the nervous system on red alert
  • Tenses muscles and increases sweating

“I now feel much better and am enjoying the breathing. I feel calmer and less tired than before undertaking the course” Anxiety, Didsbury.
All of which are useful to escape from danger. This is also known as “fight-or-flight”. However, acute hyperventilation also sometimes happens when you are worried about making a presentation, and instead of being useful it can cause a panic or hyperventilation attack. Long-term stress can also lead to the over breathing becoming permanent, i.e. chronic hyperventilation, and the list of symptoms may continue to grow. Anything can cause stress, be it physical (injury and illness) or emotional (bereavement, bullying, financial worries), and sometimes even when the source of stress is removed, or the person has recovered, it seems their symptoms persist. They don’t associate the wide range of symptoms with abnormal breathing, indeed the breathing pattern may not be obviously abnormal, so they don’t know how to get rid of the symptoms.
“Since learning Buteyko I have recovered my singing voice, have fewer headaches after singing, leg cramps and skin itching have subsided” Hyperventilation, High Peak.
Does this sound familiar?
You feel anxious over nothing. You know you shouldn’t get so wound up, you never used to. You often have a sense of “impendingness” you can’t relax, your shoulders are tense. It is getting really hard to concentrate, you feel “not with it” perhaps a bit light-headed or “whoozy”. You start to feel a bit panicky in new situations, it stops you doing things you used to enjoy. You need to go to the toilet frequently, get worried if you know there isn’t one nearby. Your heart seems to be pounding for no reason. Your world starts to contract. You have the opposite of a feeling of well-being. Maybe you start having headaches or even migraines. Perhaps you find it hard to get a satisfying breath, you feel tension round the throat, breathing is a bit of a struggle.
“Yeah, Buteyko really is working, everything is better and normalising, I’m so glad I got to the bottom of it. I was sick of analysing my thoughts”. Anxiety, depression Manchester.
You feel very unwell, you see the doctor. If you are very lucky, the doctor recognises chronic or hidden hyperventilation and suggests you need to control your breathing. If not you may become a “fat-folder” or “fat-file” patient, in and out of the doctor’s surgery, or even accident and emergency as you feel you must have something seriously wrong with you. Are you losing your mind? Perhaps the doctor will try you on anti-depressants. Perhaps they will tell you you have chronic fatigue syndrome/ myalgic encephalitis (CFS/ME), the diagnosis left over when they can’t find anything wrong in the standard tests and examinations. Other names for what might be the same thing or have the same underlying cause, at least in part, are tired all the time syndrome (TATT or TATTS) somatisation disorder, Da Costa’s syndrome (shell-shock of war time), hysteria, hypochondriasis, Briquet’s syndrome, Brissaud-Marie syndrome, or even burn out.
“I am a LOT calmer – not panicky at all, which is a real improvement for me. The best money I have ever spent on my health” Asthma, anxiety, Blackpool.
So now perhaps you start with the alternative therapies. In the meantime your symptoms may still be increasing in severity and perhaps some new ones creep in. Perhaps you feel you can’t get enough air, feel anxious and remember the instruction “take a deep breath”! Now you are really heading in the wrong direction. Perhaps you start dosing on vitamins. You are getting more desperate, perhaps you try some of the more outlandish therapies. And so it goes on…..
But there is good news, better breathing can very probably help easy all these symptoms safely and gently, and restore you to sanity!
“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” Hyperventilation, High Peak.
“Exellent progress -immediate improvement – which has continued in a positive way. Now feel in control of my breathing and on the rare occasions when it “dips” I can quickly bring it back to normal. I feel that the key has been really understanding the science behind the hyperventilation – I am NOT ill. Thanks Janet” Anxiety, Chorlton.
“Before I started buteyko breathing with janet i had been off work for a year with anxiety. The doctor tried me on two medications which only made things worse. I was at a dead end and thought i would never get any better. Then i worked for myself that i had chronic hyperventilation syndrome, anxiety being one of many symptoms of this condition which i was experiencing. Then i found janet’s site and booked on a course. Within two weeks i was off my medication, relaxed, breathing better than ever and ready to go back to work. At the time of writing ive been back in work a month, calmer than ever an wondering why doctors dont know more about this technique”. Anxiety Liverpool.
Take the test, if you score 3-4 in 6 or more symptoms, you are not losing your mind, you are not seriously ill, but you probably have hidden hyperventilation. This is good news as you can learn to normalise your breathing and get back control of your health, without medication, by learning the Buteyko breathing method.

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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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Asthma allergies sinusitis

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