Diaphragmatic breathing

[InterrogaOmnia]

InterrogaOmnia: The problem I have with doing gokhale is energy. It still requires energy to engage the core and I spend a lot of down time in a lazyboy, so I'm just not at a place where I can keep any momentum going with it. But, I agree that it teaches basically what posture should be and that alone is worth a lot. The little I do stretch-lying in bed and practicing other stuff a little when I have some energy to do so, has helped a lot. When I have more energy now, I tend to start automatically falling into a better posture, which was not the case in the past at all. I've grown about an inch in height, maybe a little more.

Belly breathing almost always feels like I'm not getting enough air.

I've personally found movements like the deadlift and clean and press to be powerfully corrective for this issue. Performing these exercises with intra abdominal pressure and ensuring that the xiphoid process remains down and locked in the core musculature has been my primary tool in fixing my low back pain and working torwards fixing my posture. Up until I learned to how activate my core in this way I would hurt my lower back any time I tried to lift weight, and as soon as I did, I unlocked significantly more strength. It trains the midsection in a way very different from things like crunches. It seems to hit that inner corset of muscle that Esther talks about very well rather than only the external part of the abdominals.

 

[tara]

Tara: Peat seems to say that, both the positive side of the metabolism and the negative encourage themselves. If so, more CO2 added with bag breathing, breathing exercises etc, should encourage the glucose to CO2 pathway and self perpetuate to an extent.

Yes, to an extent, but it seems that is not possible/enough for everybody, or maybe it just takes a lot more practice. But both Peat and Artour also point to other necessary factors, like adequate blood sugar levels and adequate calcium intake, to support good breathing and metabolism. I think Artour had some references showing that if you can raise CO2 levels for a period of time - varied from person to person, but of teh order of 10-20 minutes, the set point would stay higher for a while. My guess is that if all the other stress conditons that were contributing to the chronic hyperventilation in the first place are still at play, they will push the breathing and set point down again faster.

I just don't think that is happening for me usually. I have a lot more experimenting to do. I was put off by the DIY device after experiencing some slightly scary symptoms afterward, but I need to mess with it more when I'm felling better. When I start feeling better, everything seems to just fall into place. I can sleep better, breath easier (though not always less, it varies), and so much more. I'm still looking for the foot in the door to be able to make progress with the breathing stuff. I'm thinking about building a tent to sleep in that retains CO2, basically sleeping in a giant paper bag!

Sorry if you've read this from me elsewhere, but the low-hanging fruit for me improving breathing were:

1. Close my mouth whenever i thought about it during the day and tape my mouth shut at night. I taped my mouth shut for nearly two years, and now I seem to be able to breath nasally without tape, but I'll do it again as soon as I get another cold. Colds recovered faster since I started doing this. Charlie posted a link to a fairly cheap chinstrap, which is an alternative I haven't tried. I'd guess closing the mouth takes priority over diaphragm and other tactics.

2. Belt around the chest to require diaphragmatic breathing. I only had to do this 4-5 times to make a huge difference, and in the more than 2 years since I've only done it again a couple of times as a refresher. You get a belt around your chest, exhale fully, and tighten the belt as much as you comfortably can, and enough to stop much chest breathing. The diaphragm is likely to kick into action very quickly. Unlike breathing rate, doing this a few times seemed to help for a long time after. I did a couple of stints of an hour or two while doing something somewhat physically active, and I slept with it on for a couple of nights, all over a bout a fortnight. I wonder, but don't know, if this might be more effective than deliberately 'belly breathing', given some of the concerns expressed above about incorrect use of abdominal muscles in breathing. My experience was that the unconscious effect was to get the diaphragm itself moving, but not to cause the kind of belly protrusion or otehr odd stresses I sometimes felt when I tried to force it consciously. Maybe the diaphragm itself recognised and found it's own natural healthy rythm when the chest-breathing habit was interrupted.

3. Consciously hold my breath briefly once or twice as long as is comfortable after any sneezing, coughing, yawning, sighing. I agree that sometimes sneezing, coughing and yawning are sometimes natural, but I found that this practice reduced how much I wanted to cough, sneeze, yawn and sigh. The long drawn out coughing I used to have at the tail end of colds has since been much shorter. Raising CO2 really does seem to help get the proper musous and cilia action happening to keep airways clear most of the time.

4. Put a clean cloth over my head before going to sleep. This is much less effort than building a tent, but should give similar effects, at least enough for a trial. Just get a tea towel or pillow case or even just your sheet, and drape it over your head, leaving a gap for fresh air. Adjust the gap so you are rebreathing some air but it's still reasonably comfortable. I experimented with this for a fortnight and found it good. Now I don't do this all the time, but I use it as an extra technique if I'm not falling asleep quickly, or if I can tell my breathing is elevated when I'm trying to sleep. I allow slightly elevated breathing for a minute or two, after which I'm either asleep or if my breathing is still too big, adjust to let in a little more air.

I'd recommend trying any or all of these to see if any of them work for you. The advantages of all of them are that they do not take extended time, effort or expense. The first 3 techniques just counteract unhelpful habits. The cloth-over-head method - like the tent idea - is the only one I think might be usable to gradually reduce hyperventilation further, but I haven't been pushing it systematically to test this.
Unlike many people here, I got to Peat and Stone and Roddy after Buteyko (and have never done any seriously low carb dieting). So I got some improvements in breathing before I changed diet etc, but I got more improvements as I've learned to nourish myself more.
None of this was enough to make a big improvement in my CP, but I think it has helped avoid the more acute peaks of even higher hypervventilation that typically occurred during heightened stress, and has made me generally more relaxed. I've still got a long way to go, but I'm now more focussed on other ways to support improved metabolism.

Artour says that using the DIY device, or doing breathing exercises should make the hands and feet warm, lower the pulse and increase breath holding time. I"m not sure I've ever had any of those things happen to any noticeable extent. Peat usually says slow pulse is negative, but warm hands and feet I would think of as usually positive.

I never noticed such effects the few times I tried the DIY device either. Maybe my hands and feet would have warmed up more if my house were warmer. I would think, and I think this is consistent with Peat, that if the heart-rate is elevated and blood-flow to extremities is restricted by adrenaline, that raising CO2 could reduce adrenaline and lower the heartrate in a helpful way - more like just coming down to a resting rate, as well as allowing more circulation to warm the extremities.

Do you think lowering metabolism would increase CP by reducing oxygen used in cellular respiration?

I don't necessarily think this would always occur, but I speculate that it might sometimes. Peat referred to a hospital patient who had extremely low metabolism and a breathing rate of 3-4 breaths/minute.

 

[Dayman]

I have been occasionally taping my mouth with micro-pore tape, it seems to work quite well, though I don't do it every night. It's also good for your teeth keeping your mouth closed at night. I also got one of those chinstraps, only used it a couple of nights, one interesting thing about it is it seems to pull your chin in and elongate your neck, this feels weird to me but it noticeably clears the airway.
I also breath better when having good blood sugar, so +1 on nourishing self, no extra effort required.

 

[Steven e]

I learned to nasal breathe a couple years ago and it's slowly gotten easier. I no longer have the months of dripping nose that I used to get in the winter and the last cold I had I was able to nasal breathe right through the whole thing. I got over it in just a few days and none of the residual cough everyone around me had for weeks. I didn't have to tape my mouth in order to learn to nasal breathe in spite of decades of mouth breathing that started when I was a kid. I still can't keep my tongue in the roof of my mouth though, because there really isn't enough room, but I've made major improvements in my oral habits. I'm planning to get adult palate expansion using the ALF system eventually, if I can make enough progress in other areas first.

I was messing with shallow diaphragm breathing today and actually made some progress in reducing breathing to a quite low level, so that's encouraging. There are many times when I can't do it though because my diaphragm will spasm and it just doesn't feel right. I don't sleep very well, so I'm inclined to think that having something over my face, or touching my face will probably interfere with the sleep I do get. I may try though. sleeping under the covers doesn't work to well for me, but a sheet might be alright. I did think ofa tent like thing for just the head and shoulders. I like the idea of a small tent of sorts, but realistically, probably wouldn't get to a project like that for a while. I"m also interested in the idea of CO2 enriched rooms. I know there is hardware available to auto-regulate the CO2 content of green houses, so why not in a house or room? It would make an interesting experiment sometime at least.

I don't remember hearing about the belt trick before. I might give that a try. I do find myself doing long pauses spontaneously once in a while when hyperventilation spontaneously reduces. I know that pauses on exhale is one of the buteyko methods.

Mostly though, I feel like there are other things I need to sort out and then progress with breathing better will come more easily. I'm still trying to figure out what though. On the agenda are liver and kidney cleansing/support and detoxification in general. Already taking lots of stuff to encourage good metabolism, but something is hampering my progress.

A few times when i was extremely ill more than 10 years ago, my breathing mechanism seemed to sort of shut down. It was the weirdest thing ever. I had the ability to breathe deeply if I wanted, but something was keeping me from doing it. I felt like I was starving for air, but that if I breathed any more than the tiniest amount I would die I couldn't really move either. I think it was some mechanism to protect me by boosting CO2 levels. I met someone online on a CFS forum that told me she had the same thing and to get a rebreather mask with oxygen which is what Dr. Cheney the CFS guy told her to do. By the time I got that set up, it had mostly passed, but it lasted most of a day in the worst bout. Reading Buteyko and Peat stuff really shed some more light on that experience. Of course when I went to the ER, they said I had plenty of oxygen, so it was just a perception and not reality.

 

[tara]

Pranarupa's blogged on related themes in March. Lovely speculations.
https://pranarupa.wordpress.com/2015/03 ... on-magick/