30,000 ways to improve your health and well being
Greetings,
We all more or less know about eating right and exercising. And most of us are aware that getting stressed isn’t healthy.
But there is something we do twenty to thirty thousand times a day, that if ever we stop, we are dead within a few minutes. Breathing.
If we are overwhelmed by stress or become unfit due to a lack of physical exercise, the consequences might take years to develop into an illness. If we stopped eating, it would take a healthy person more than a month to die. If we went without water or sleep, it would be weeks. But if we go without breathing it’s minutes.
Most of us might believe that the sole purpose of breathing is to obtain essential oxygen. This of course is correct, but like many oversimplifications it often obscures more than it reveals.
The function of oxygenation within then human organism is actually facilitated by another substance, without which the transfer of oxygen from the blood into cells and tissue, cannot occur optimally. This substance is known as carbon dioxide and the principle by which it facilitates the delivery of oxygen within the organism is known as the Bohr Law. In other words, regardless of how oxygenated your blood is, the transfer of oxygen to cells and tissue, is dependant upon your levels of carbon dioxide.
Now strap yourself in for a paradox.
If we breathe above what is physiologically recommended, or in other words breathe too much, we loose carbon dioxide and thus impede oxygenation. This is because the levels of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere is only a fraction of the amount our organism requires. Fortunately for us, we make our own carbon dioxide internally, but if we habitually over-breathe, we will lower our levels and thus create an internal oxygen deficiency.
This leads to an obvious question. Don’t we breathe more during exertion as we require more oxygen?
Answer: Yes, but we also produce more carbon dioxide, when we exert ourselves physically, which compensates.
Given the fact that we breathe twenty to thirty thousand times a day, a slight amount of over breathing accumulates into significant losses of carbon dioxide and thus oxygen uptake. The organism responds with defence and compensation mechanisms according to our genetic predisposition and other factors. These defence and compensation mechanisms manifest as chronic diseases, being distinct from infectious or congenital diseases.
A simple test to see how the above principle works is to simply to start breathing as deeply and as fast as you can. Try it for a few minutes. As your levels of carbon dioxide lower as a consequence of your forced hyperventilation, the effects of oxygen deficiency will become obvious.
You can become dizzy, your pulse will begin to race, your blood pressure will increase and defence and compensation mechanisms like coughing, tight chest, angina, asthma, migraine and even a drop in blood sugar will occur.
To reverse these symptoms, just reduce the depth of your breathing, make it shallow and as small as you can. As your levels of carbon dioxide improve, so will the symptoms, provoked by its evacuation.
If you’d like to know more about Buteyko’s approach to reversing chronic health problems, you are welcome to attend a free webinar, which I will be conducting online at which I will be explaining how the common chronic health problems can be reversed with Buteyko’s Method.
The next up coming webinar dates are as follows:
Los Angeles - 8pm - Monday, September 19th
Sydney - 1pm - Tuesday, September 20th
Hong Kong 11am - Tuesday, September 20th
To join a webinar, simply go to the webinar section above.
Warm regards,
Christopher Drake
Senior Buteyko Practitioner
Dip. BM (Moscow), IAOBP (London)
learnbuteykoonline.net
