Maybe too much inhaling, maybe not enough exhaling, maybe breathing way too fast. Due to any number of factors, very few people breathe to their full potential. I see this time and time again in the breathing classes I teach. A new client comes to me and reports that she’s eating clean, drinking more water, popping supplements, seeing the chiropractor, and using a heating pad to keep old injuries at bay while icing new ones. She’s doing everything right.
It speaks volumes that we all know what “fight or flight” is but we don’t know its opposite. Do you? It’s “rest and digest.” In order to live a healthy life, you need both. Right now, most people stay in “fight or flight,” as if they don’t have an alternative. No wonder they can’t sleep and have so many digestive problems: not enough “rest and digest.”
Then I ask her one simple question: “How is your breathing?”
And she points to her nose and tells me about her allergies.
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I’m sure you can relate. But did you know that just about anything and everything—from your age, to your health history, to your texting addiction—can have a powerful impact on your capacity to breathe optimally? In this chapter, I’d like you to assess how you actually breathe and to consider the possibility that you’re not breathing as well as you should—in everyday life, on the treadmill, at the computer.
SELF-EXAM: LET’S LOOK AT YOU
What’s messing up your breathing? See if you answer yes
to any of the following questions I ask my clients:
1. Do you sit in front of a computer or in a car or truck for work?
2. Do you wear compression garments, belts, support pantyhose, or a bulletproof vest?
3. As a child, did you live with any type of fear, anxiety, or worry over a period of time, even if you think you weren’t traumatized by it?
4. Do you text throughout the day?
5. Do you carry a bag, knapsack, or purse? How much does it weigh?
6. Have you ever had pneumonia or recurring bouts of bronchitis?
7. Have you ever smoked or lived with a smoker?
8. Have you ever lived or spent time in a city with high levels of smog or pollution, or lived someplace with noxious smells?
9. Do you have a deviated septum or do you snore?
10. Do you have or have you ever had neck, shoulder, or back injuries?
Oh, and are you over the age of twenty-nine?
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How many questions did you say yes
to? Even just one of these can lead to under-breathing, either by impairing lung function or laying the foundation for one or more of the abnormal breathing patterns to be discussed later in this chapter. If you’re breathing poorly—and you probably are—you could be doing so for any number of reasons, apart from those mentioned in the quiz. These may include:
Chronic stress, anxiety, or a history of panic attacks or other anxiety disorders. Before you dismiss these as “not me,” think about whether you’ve ever stayed awake worrying about money, your health, the stress of a divorce or breakup, your kids, or being the caretaker of elderly parents. If any one of these sounds familiar, chances are you’re stressed out.
Technology and poor posture. Think your posture is fine? How many times a day do you bend your head to text, to update your Facebook status, or to play a game on your phone? How many hours are you hunched over a laptop or desk? These positions put your head and shoulders into a position that impairs breathing and, consequently, your health.
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Long periods of time spent sitting down, whether while driving, working, or watching TV. The latest studies of how many hours people sit a day report an average of thirteen hours.
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Anything around your torso: a sports bra or just your average waistband that holds your pants or skirt around your middle.
Lung or nose issues. Broken nose, allergies or sinus problems, asthma, emphysema, and other respiratory diseases.
Your body. Beer belly, extra abdominal weight.
You used
to breathe right: Ask most five-year-olds to inhale and they expand their bellies without thinking twice. Ask most ten-year-olds, and the beautiful, perfect Horizontal Breath has disappeared: they’ll mimic a dysfunctional adult Vertical Breath. What happened? Someone teased them about their belly and they started the habit of gut-sucking. Then came the visit to the doctor, when a stethoscope was put on their upper chest and they were asked to breathe (ah, the lungs must be there, no?). They started sitting—a lot. Maybe they took a tumble that led to some kind of torso pain … and the combination of all these changes, encouraged by adult modeling of bad breathing, left them overusing their shoulders and underusing their diaphragm to breathe.
ABNORMAL BREATHING PATTERNS
Pause a moment and pay attention to your breath without trying to influence it. Now think about how you breathe in more challenging situations; e.g., during a workout or a jog. Are you using the right muscles to breathe? Are you filling just part of your lungs with oxygen-rich air? Chances are you’re stuck in one of the following abnormal breathing patterns. In the last chapter, you noted whether you were a Horizontal or Vertical Breather (breathing up and down or widening when you inhale and exhale). Now look more specifically: Which of the following types sound familiar?
1. Paradoxical Breather
(Gasper
).
Also known as “Reverse Breathing,” this pattern uses your muscles in a contradictory manner; this is to say, you draw your belly in during an inhale and relax it out during an exhale—the polar opposite of what you should be doing. Paradoxical Breathers take in significantly less air than anyone else, actually going against what their body wants to do, anatomically, with each inhale and exhale. Theory says that it comes from anxiety in childhood—try gasping in fear and see how you mimic that breathing.
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2. Breath-Holder
(or Periodic
or Hypoxic Breather
).
Periodically, throughout the day, you pretty much act as if you are under water. You hold your breath for seemingly no reason, and don’t notice except when it gets pointed out to you that you yawn and sigh a lot (or that you don’t seem to be breathing when you work out). This is another stress-fueled pattern. If you find this happening when you’re at your computer, it’s colloquially called “e-mail apnea.” This is caused by a predatory, stress-induced type of concentration while at the screen (a type of concentration that has the focused intensity of a hunter stalking prey).
This abnormal pattern is alarmingly common. My clients have reported being surprised to find themselves holding their breath for several seconds throughout the day for no apparent reason. This pattern throws whatever balance they may have out of whack, as their body continuously tries to compensate for the moments in which they’re not letting carbon dioxide out or oxygen in.
3. Over-Breather (hyperventilating).
Chronic ventilation at low levels results in an imbalance of carbon dioxide and oxygen. Although you’re breathing more quickly, you’re out of balance. The rate of breathing here is too high, and the pH levels are usually abnormal as well. There are two breakdowns here: your exhale is strong and your inhale is constricted, or the opposite—your inhale is long and your exhale is short.
4. No-Haler.
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No inhale, no exhale; this breather just “hovers,” sipping in air then barely letting it out. Your body doesn’t expand and contract, it barely moves at all. These people tend to brace their bodies and make very little movement at all, saying their breath feels stuck in both directions.
Due to the increased prevalence of Breath-Holders and No-Halers, I don’t focus on breathing rates owing to the fact that they’re hard to gauge correctly. All Vertical Breathers breathe too fast in general, since their breaths are smaller and less efficient than those of Horizontal Breathers. The general rule: Slower is better.
Now that you know the many different types of abnormal breathing patterns and the factors that can influence how you breathe, you can see why virtually no adult these days breathes optimally without proper training.
Watch any resting animal breathe, and you’ll witness the perfect breath: rhythmic, efficient, with the belly expanding and contracting. Young children, though still developing postural muscles, will usually breathe low in their bodies, using their diaphragms. Yet very few people sustain that Lower-body Breath to adulthood. Bad posture, injury, and just plain laziness lead them to the mediocre-at-best breathing they practice now. In essence, they’re breathing the way our ancestors did when they were faced with fear, anxiety, or other temporary
situations. Unfortunately, we’ve transformed these short-term solutions into long-term abnormal breathing patterns.
As a last part of your assessment, I want you to rank some of the health problems you have so that you can see how they change over the next two weeks, and into the future. Whether it’s your stress level, quality of sleep, back or neck pain, or digestion, give yourself a numerical rating on the sheet at the very back of this book. Keeping track of your progress makes learning—and sustaining your changes—easier.
I know what you’re thinking: Okay, so my breathing is terrible! Now what?
Well, now I’m going to show you why abnormal breathing patterns don’t have to be “normal” for you—and how you can make every breath count.
I had to laugh at myself. I’ve been breathing the opposite of most people, the opposite of the way my body is supposed to breathe, for as long as I know. It took a minute for me to understand that, but if I breathe with the muscle that’s supposed to be my breathing muscle, my diaphragm, it makes sense. On the inhale, it should be helping my middle, where the best part of my lungs are, to expand. Duh!
Meanwhile, all this time I’ve been squeezing the poor thing shut! And vice versa. While I’ve heard and understood that a belly breath is good for you, I’ve never had enough understanding or motivation to change my breathing. Now I do. It’s frustrating as hell, but by day five it’s getting a tiny bit easier every day. Especially when I tip back and start with the exhale. It’s funny how my brain now understands, and it’s just my body that has to get with it. But I figure if it takes two or three weeks, even a month, that’s okay. It’s worth it. I’ve been breathing wrong for decades; this is an important change and I’m going to do it. Funny enough, it’s like I have no choice—and now that I know the why, I’m determined. —Marty, age 40
Mary’s Story
At age seventy-six, Mary had been diagnosed with COPD (Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease) and came to The Breathing Class as a last resort. She was quick to list all the specialty breathing clinics she’d attended and how infuriating and perplexing it was to have a disorder often related to smoking when she’d never smoked a day in her life. Mary’s style of breathing was significant: she was a Paradoxical Breather; i.e., she pulled in her middle on the inhale and then relaxed it on the exhale, all the while working against her diaphragm. Due to her using her neck and shoulders to breathe, she also had intense neck and shoulder pain, which she had just assumed was something she had to live with. The first step was to have her understand how she was working against her anatomy, and why this might have happened sometime between childhood and young adulthood. Finding the analogy and movements that made the change click and made sense to her both intellectually and kinesthetically was my goal. Mary had to understand and experience a “good breath,” one she hadn’t had in decades, in order to be able to change. The sessions paid off: seeing the numbers on the spirometer and her Vital Lung Capacity improve fed her motivation. She’s back to walking on a daily basis and continues to raise the bar for the next goal for herself and her health with each appointment.
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For an easy read on everything you ever wanted to know about noses, check out http://care.american-rhinologic.org/nasal
, especially the article about nasal physiology by Jeremiah Alt, M.D., and Noam Cohen, M.D.
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Yup, even your age affects your breathing. It might be said that things improve with time, but lung function isn’t one of them—it naturally heads downhill after age twenty-nine.
21
I address posture and FHP (Forward Head Posture) and their deleterious effects on breathing and health in detail in Chapter 7
.
22
Check out http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/new-survey-to-sit-or-stand-almost-70-of-full-time-american-workers-hate-sitting-but-they-do-it-all-day-every-day-215804771.html
.
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When you startle an infant, his head, shoulders and hands will instinctively come up as his diaphragm sucks in. This is the startle response—or “Condition Red”—that is the body’s instinctive way of preparing for whatever happens next. The problem is that most of us live in this ready state, breathing shallowly from our chests, explains Lieutenant Colonel David Grossman, who has trained Navy SEALs, British SAS soldiers, Green Berets, and federal agents. He is the author of the Pulitzer Prize–nominated book On Combat.
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This is the term employed by Washington, D. C.–based martial arts and self-defense expert Thong Nguyen (personal correspondence).