If you or your child suffers from asthma, breathing difficulties or anxiety, you will know how distressing it is when they can’t catch their breath. These symptoms have been linked to something known as “chronic hidden hyperventilation”. This is when we breathe a little bit too much all the time, for what our body requires. It might mean our breathing is constantly a little bit too fast, in our upper chest or is big breathing, which might not be that obvious – which is why it is known as “hidden”. It may mean you are breathing more than 12 breaths a minute at rest in the upper chest or mouth breathing due to a blocked nose. Our nose and airways can block just because our body is trying to slow the breathing down to regain balance in our body functioning.
The good news is that breathing is a behaviour and it is one of the easier behaviours to retrain. It takes a minimum of 4 weeks to retrain your breathing habit with practice 3 times a day. Breathing Mastery is designed for age 8 plus and for adults who are young at heart!
Each level will take you one step closer to achieving breathing mastery.
You will be guided through a series of daily exercises designed to move you and your child away from mouth breathing and upper chest breathing associated with asthma and anxiety to slow quiet nose breathing.
Through Billy’s quest into the dark forest, you will be guided to practice nose breathing and diaphragm breathing with short pauses at the end of the out-breath. With each level the pauses at the end of the outbreath are increased. This is designed to enable you to become comfortable with and relax into the feeling of a little bit of air hunger. Air hunger is the feeling that increases your desire to breathe more, but if you relax with it and soften your body, without becoming out of breath, you can start to retrain your breathing and improve your health.
The Science
By relaxing into the feeling of air hunger and quietening our breathing we can begin to breathe less. Quiet, calm, gentle breathing is very settling to our nervous system. Big and deep breaths can stimulate the fight and flight nervous system and in the long term throw our body out of balance.
Breathing less can also improve oxygenation when at rest. When we breathe in, oxygen is picked up by the red blood cells in the lungs. Oxygen is only released from the red blood cells where there is a higher level of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the body. If we have too little CO2, then the oxygen doesn’t get delivered to the tissues.
The drive to breathe is powered by the brainstem, which responds only to carbon dioxide levels and not oxygen. When we breathe a little bit too much, all the time, we blow out too much carbon dioxide. The brainstem gets used to lower level of carbon dioxide (CO2) and makes us breathe more.
The breath pauses are designed to allow the CO2 to build and train your brainstem to become comfortable with a slightly higher level of CO2. We do that by becoming comfortable with a little bit of air hunger. It takes daily training over a month to change this behaviour and often some continued practice to maintain improvements and make our body comfortable with reaching a higher more optimal level of CO2 for better oxygenation.
If there is not enough CO2 in the blood, the body cleverly makes changes to try and keep the CO2 higher, by constricting or narrowing blood vessels, constricting the bronchi and making more mucus in the lungs or nose. However, when these symptoms occur we often fight the changes our body is making to maintain balance, by breathing deeper, or taking medication to overcome the constriction either in airways or blood vessels. This only makes the situation worse, as it allows us to continue to overbreathe and throw out our blood chemistry even more. Headaches and blood pressure changes and heart rate can all be effected. Inflammation levels can increase and blood sugar can be effected.
Breath pauses are designed to enable you to become comfortable with more optimal levels of CO2 and to learn how relax in your body with a little bit of air hunger, reseting your breathing behaviour.
With each level, once you feel comfortable with the breath pause length you will gain a chakra empowerment stone as you work through all seven levels. Move on to the next level only when you are comfortable with the breath pause length in your current level. Level 8 is for your conitnued practice and to maintain your progress and can be done daily to keep you in the best of health after the end of your 4 week practice.
Healing Reactions
It is usual during the practice as you reduce your breathing and increase your breath pause time, that the body will have some cleansing reactions. This is necessary for your body to heal. During this time your breath pauses may be shorter. Keep practising with gentle quiet breathing during this time and don’t push the pause length.
After the elimination from your body, which may take the form of a cold or increased elimination for a few days, there is usually an improvement in your breath pause length time, like your body has had a reset. If you need support during this time, please reach out through the contact form on the website.
Daily Walk and Tape
Movement also helps to increase levels of carbon dioxide, so having a daily 20 minute walk with nose breathing if you can is helpful. Remember to walk at a pace that is comfortable for you, so you don’t get out of breath. Stop to regain your nose breathing if you do get breathless, and only continue once you have regained your breathing control.
It is also helpful to make sure you nose breathe at night. Buy some microporous surgical tape, so you can tape your mouth at night to help maintain your nose breathing. It is good to start with 20 minutes on an evening whilst reading for example to get used to this and to remind yourself to keep nose breathing when you are not thinking about it.
Practice one or two levels 2-3 times a day.
For each level you can time your breath pause or control pause length and this will be recorded on the dashboard. This will give you a measure of how well you are progressing.
For those age 7-9 you may prefer to practice the levels without the timing option. You can select the untimed option and play each chapter of Billy’s adventure, which will guide you through increasingly longer pauses, from 5 seconds upwards to 35 seconds. Remember you must be able to relax at the end of the pause and keep your lips together without taking any big breaths.
For each days practice you can add a comment to record how you are feeling and whether you have needed your reliever inhaler and how many times.
Best Practice
Practice on waking, before each meal of the day and before bed for best results. Practising after you have eaten will make increasing your breath pauses more difficult to achieve and diaphragm breathing will be tricky.
Don’t eat too much or you will also find your breath pauses are shorter. If you are eating foods that your body doesn’t like, try a breath pause before you have eaten the food and then 20 minutes after you have eaten a certain food and see whether the length of your breath pause drops. If it is significantly lower, this is a good way to see what things are not supporting your health.
If you mouth breathe all night, your control pause might be lower first thing on a morning. Taping can help you to wake feeling more refreshed. You can cut a slit in the tape to enable an opening in case you need it. Don’t tape your mouth if you feel sick or have sleeping medication. Sleeping on your left side can give you the best breathing position.
Rescue Breathing
If you are feeling a little bit short of breath, you can always use the rescue breathing exercise. The video on the right of this page will talk you through it. You will be asked to breathe in and out, and pause for 1 second. Then breathe in and out and pause for two seconds. Take a breath in and out and pause for 3 seconds. Breathe in, then breathe out and pause for 4 seconds, and breathe in and out and pause for 5 seconds.
Then you can reduce with each breath back to one, so breathe in and out and pause for 4, breathe in and out and pause for 3 and breathe in and out and pause for 2 and breathe in and out and pause for 1. This can help to start opening the airways and you gradually relax with a little bit of air hunger.
Day to Day Practice for Teens – it’s not Deep Breathing
Although the emphasis is on nose breathing, diaphragm breathing and slow breathing. Slow breathing can often mean deep breathing or big breathing, which goes against building up our tolerance to higher levels of CO2, which as it is heavier than the other gases, sits at the bottom of the lungs. The more we deep breathe, the more we blow out the CO2, which we are trying to build like tanks of CO2 in our lungs. CO2 will naturally relax the airways in the lungs which is why it’s good to have a reserve.
We start with slow abdominal breathing so you can switch from upper chest breathing, which triggers a stress response, to using your diaphragm, which can then get quieter and quieter, reducing the volume as you go, which is more calming.
So day to day when you are at rest, practice really quiet breathing, keeping your chest relaxed. So quiet that if you put a finger under your nose you would hardly feel a breeze on your finger. If you can hear your breathing, you are over breathing. Imagine reducing each in-breath and just taking the breath into the nose and no further and then letting your body relax as you breathe out.
All the pauses are done at the end of the outbreath and whilst holding your nose, so that you don’t have to hold any tension in your body in the pause.
You can have mini pauses, for a few seconds, throughout the day at the end of your out-breath, where you let your whole body soften and relax. Notice where you have to relax to pause for longer….
When we focus on our breathing, we often put more tension into the breath. In order to keep your breathing relaxed, in the pause at the end of your outbreath, just wait for your body to want to take the next breath in and then let it, don’t actively breathe in. This way you can watch your breath, breathe itself, rather than you breathing it.
If you have any further questions, click on the Frequently Asked Questions in the side bar to the right.
Disclaimer
This breathing training program is not designed to diagnose or treat asthma, but to enable better breathing habits that have been shown in studies based on the Buteyko method to reduce the need for asthma medication and reduce anxiety. Any change to your medication should be done in conjunction with a registered healthcare professional. If you have any of the health conditions listed on the contraindications list please seek further advice before using the Breathing Mastery for Kids and Teens.
Buteyko training recommends not making any changes to asthma medication until you can comfortably pause your breathing for 25 seconds or more at the end of the out-breath. Do not stop steroid medication suddenly as this can cause serious adverse effects.
There may be additional changes to diet and lifestyle required to enable a health improvement.
Chronic hidden hyperventilation has been well documented and associated with many chronic health conditions. For further guidance read Breathe with Ease by Alison Waring.
It is advisable to have an in person online consultation alongside this training programme to make sure you are practising correctly.
When you are ready, select Week 1 below to join Billy on his quest into the forest in…
A Dragon Breath of Fresh Air…..
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