by Dr. Joseph Mercola, Mercola:
STORY AT-A-GLANCE
- Dysfunctional breathing habits are typically developed in response to some type of emotional trauma. The trauma gets embedded in your brain circuits, and when you encounter triggers, they activate specific breathing habits, some of which may significantly lower your carbon dioxide (CO2) concentration level
- The higher the CO2 concentration you can maintain while remaining within the biologically normal CO2 concentration range, the greater the likelihood that your breathing is supporting your health and performance
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- Breathing techniques such as belly breathing, deep breathing and Buteyko breathing may not address breathing triggers or why you developed an inappropriate breathing habit in the first place
- When you overventilate you get numerous physiological changes. As a result, overbreathing can trigger a wide variety of physical and psychological changes, which can be reversed by implementing breathing behavior analysis learning techniques
- Breathing behavior analysts help you become conscious of your breathing habits, what’s triggering them and how to resolve them. This is important, as improper breathing habits can unconsciously sabotage your health
The interview above features Peter Litchfield, Ph.D., who is, in my view, one of the best breathing experts in the world. I’ve taken his breathing course, which gave me a deep appreciation for what he’s teaching. None of the breathing experts I’ve interviewed before compare to Litchfield when it comes to understanding respiratory physiology and its impact on your health.
According to Litchfield — who has decades of clinical training in both respiratory physiology and behavioral psychology — dysfunctional breathing habits are typically developed in response to some type of emotional trauma. It gets embedded in your brain circuits, and when you encounter this trigger, it activates them and lowers your carbon dioxide (CO2) level.
You may have been getting a hint over the last few months that I really value CO2. It’s probably one of the most important molecules in your body. I’m going to go deep into this in the coming year, as strategies to increase your CO2 are probably some of the best things you can do to optimize your health.
The higher the level you can get within the biological normal optimal range, the better. Most of us are not even close to that. And, if you think you’re already breathing well because you’re belly breathing, deep breathing, or doing Buteyko breathing, you’re in for a surprise, because there’s a lot more to optimal breathing than learning to slow down, lessen or deepen your breathing.
Behavioral Physiology
Litchfield has a long and varied professional history, but his primary interest is behavioral physiology, a field in which physiology is viewed as a programmable system. As he explains, your physiology self-regulates:
“It learns, in essence. It does something and there’s a consequence, and based on that consequence it changes what it does. Physiology collects information, stores information. It uses information on all levels, not just on the level of the brain, but even on a cellular level. It’s collecting and using data. That’s what we call learning, ultimately; that is, physiology is behavioral, it’s psychology in action.
Physiology really is psychophysiological because it’s a learning system … One of the things that’s important in the work that we do in breathing behavior analysis, based on this, is that people need to learn to form a working partnership with their bodies …
The body is a learning, living system. The day the first cell came into existence, psychology was born. That is really such an important thing to understand. It’s not just ‘you’ who’s doing the breathing. Your body is doing the breathing. These aren’t just genetic or organic considerations. The body gets programmed constantly by virtue of what it does, and what results from what it does, and breathing is no exception.
Look at the habits we learn in our lives. Look at my hands. I’m moving my hands right now. Look at my head and how I move it. I learned this unconsciously. I’m a whole collection of amazing habits, thousands of habits that come into play at just precisely the right place and time.
So, the right thing happens at the right time, and I don’t even have to think about it. That’s the nature of a habit. But they don’t always go well, they can go very wrong.”
Habits Serve a Purpose
As explained by Litchfield, habits always serve a purpose. You don’t engage in a habit unless it serves you or your physiology in some way. This is why it’s so important to form a partnership with your body, to explore your habits, and how or why you learned them in the first place.
In a sense, you could say that your physiological system is part of your unconscious or subconscious mind, or an expression thereof. The task is to become conscious of what’s going on because your breathing habits may be unconsciously sabotaging your health.
“So, what we’re really focused on in our work is observing and learning about breathing as a behavior,” Litchfield says. “We’re not using breathing as a technique where you manipulate breathing so you can relax, or you manipulate breathing to achieve some otherworldly experience where you dissociate.
There are all kinds of reasons that people implement breathing techniques for presumed positive outcomes … Our work isn’t about breathing techniques.
Another thing that’s very important, is that there is a trigger for every habit. Triggers are not there all the time. They show up at specific times. For example, in the statistics pointing the larger cities of the United States, like New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles, where surveys suggest that about 60% of the ambulance runs are a result of symptoms brought on by dysfunctional breathing.
And it’s not as if this person is breathing dysfunctionally all the time. It’s that at that particular moment, they breathe this way, that then precipitates these symptoms.
They don’t understand where these symptoms and deficits are coming from. They don’t think of their breathing. They call 911, if you’re in the United States, and they end up in [the] emergency [room] … A lot of what our work is about is identifying these habits.”
