I downloaded that article featuring Peter Litchfield, Ph.D. (who Mercola refers to as "one of the best breathing experts in the world") which Heather mentioned in post #7. Here it is in its entirety:
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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:
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.
What Is a Breathing Habit?
So, how do you identify a breathing habit? There are many components to look at, including the following:
• Motivation — Behavior is motivated by something. There's motivation behind all habits, and any one of them can be tied up with your breathing.
• Behaviors — You need to identify the exact behavior involved. For example, you may be aborting the breath, meaning you inhale before you’ve fully exhaled.
In most cases, it’s rooted in a subconscious fear about not getting enough air. Whatever the cause, there’s motivation embedded in the behavior. Aborting the breath and inhaling early may serve the breather by reducing worry or anxiety about not getting enough air.
However, when you inhale too soon, air hunger sets in — a feeling like you can’t get enough air — and that can trigger the very anxiety the habit is trying to avoid.
• Outcomes — What are the outcomes of your learned breathing behavior, and how are those outcomes serving you? For example, when you start taking larger breaths, you may think you’re going to get more air.
You may feel like you’re in charge and in control, and that keeps you going. But what happens is you lose CO2 without realizing it. You may experience symptoms that you and your healthcare providers may misinterpret and attribute to unrelated causes.
In reality, you need far less air than you think. For every liter of blood you can move through your lungs, you can move 20 liters of air. But you only need 1 liter of air. So optimal breathing is usually not about getting enough oxygen. It's about regulating the CO2 concentrations in your extracellular body fluids, like blood plasma.
What Deep Breathing Does to Your Body
Contrary to popular belief, deep breathing does not improve oxygenation. When you’re deep breathing, blood flow to your brain actually decreases as a result of a tightening of the blood vessels (vasoconstriction) in the brain.
Additionally, the cytoplasm in your red blood cells can become too alkaline and the hemoglobin carried by the red blood cells can become unfriendly, that is, less willing to give up the oxygen it carries to the tissues that need it. So, deep breathing actually contributes to an oxygen deficit already in progress as a result of vasoconstriction.
The vasoconstriction occurs because the primary vascular purpose of CO2 is vasodilation. When you have sufficient CO2 in your system, it will open your blood vessels much more effectively than nitric oxide, because nitric oxide has a dark side. It binds to Complex IV in your mitochondria and shuts down the electron transport chain. So, ideally, you want the vasodilation to be done by CO2 rather than nitric oxide.
So, the outcome of overbreathing is loss of blood in the brain, loss of oxygen, loss of glucose and electrolyte changes in the brain that then lead to setting the stage for lactic acidosis in neurons (brain cells). “Most people, lay or professional, have no idea that this is going on,” Litchfield says.
These brain changes, in turn, tend to trigger disinhibition where emotions — oftentimes anger or fear — are discharged. This release of emotions can serve you by allowing you to cope with a challenging situation or environment. Overbreathing (breathing that results in a CO2 deficit) leads to an outcome (a reinforcement) that serves you and is thus a “solution” to a perceived problem, a successful coping mechanism.
Automatic Reflexes Regulate Your CO2 Level
As explained by Litchfield, your CO2 level is regulated by automatic reflexes. There are receptors in the brain and in the arterial system that are sensitive to CO2 concentration and to the pH of various extracellular fluids, such as blood plasma and interstitial fluids (surrounding cells). There are receptor sites in the arterial system which are sensitive to oxygen concentration but, surprisingly, not in the brain.
This system wasn't designed to get out of whack just because you get stressed. Provided you haven’t learned bad breathing habits, your breathing optimizes respiration regardless of most circumstances., e.g., while talking.
As explained by Litchfield, breathing regulates acid-based physiology1 in extracellular body fluids. Your body must have the capacity to change your pH rapidly, almost immediately, because if it didn't, you would be in serious trouble and in could even die. Although bad breathing habits can quickly bring on fainting, for example, there are safety mechanisms that protect us.
Do You Overbreathe?
Symptoms of low CO2 (hypocapnia), caused by overbreathing, include but are not limited to:
| Headache | Nausea and vomiting |
| Abdominal symptoms and bloating | Fatigue |
| Muscle pain and weakness, tetany, hyperreflexia, spasm, tingling in the hands and lips, numbness, trembling and difficulty swallowing | Cardiovascular changes like palpitations, tachycardia, arrhythmias, angina, ECG abnormalities |
| Cognitive changes, including attention deficit, difficulty learning, poor memory and brain fog | Symptoms involving consciousness, such as dissociation, disconnecting from your environment, disconnecting from people, fainting and hallucinations |
| Emotional changes associated with the reduction of blood flow in the brain | Personality and self-esteem changes |
If you frequently suffer any of these symptoms, it is possible that you may be struggling with hypocapnia, meaning low CO2 levels, and the No. 1 reason for hypocapnia is a poor breathing habit in response to all kinds of habit triggers, such as stress. The solution in this case is to identify the faulty habitual breathing behaviors and then correct them.
Optimizing Your CO2 by Relearning Better Breathing Habits
You can very accurately measure your CO2 concentration with a tool called a capnometer, the wellness-educational version of it known as a CapnoTrainer:
Trust Your Body
Again, your body knows how to breathe. The only time you get into problems is when you unconsciously override it with a learned breathing habit that throws the system out of whack. So, trust your body.
Why Most Breathing Techniques Don’t Address Your Health Problems
While we’ve already mentioned this, it bears repeating. What Litchfield is talking about is not learning a specific set of breathing techniques. It’s not about the technique per se. It’s about understanding why your breath gets dysregulated and how new habits can be learned. In regard to the Buteyko technique, for example, he comments:
The Breathing Behavior Analysis Procedure
In the course I took with Litchfield, he provided many impressive practical examples. One was of a young woman, about 19 years old, whose CO2 level dramatically decreased when they began her breathing interview. Among the symptoms she’d indicated on the checklist was that she would get dizzy a lot, and when she gets these dizzy spells, she’d become frightened.
A Quick Rescue Method
A good test that can tell you if your symptoms are due to a CO2 deficiency is to breathe into a paper bag. If the symptoms disappear, you know hypocapnia and hence overbreathing is the problem. Never use a plastic bag, as it can cause suffocation. Always use a paper bag, about 6 inches by 15 inches. If it’s too small or too large, it won’t work.
Place the paper bag over your nose and mouth and hold it in place with your hands as you breathe into it. The CO2 will accumulate in the bag, thereby raising your CO2 level as you breathe it in.
Negative Practice
Another simple technique, which is part of the core of Litchfield’s program, is something called “negative practice.” Litchfield explains:
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More Information
To learn more, visit:
- Better Physiology Ltd. at betterphysiology.com for information about and purchase of CapnoTrainer instrumentation for personal and professional applications
- RespiMatters at www.CapnoLearning.org for information regarding online breathing behavior analysis services available worldwide
- Professional School of Behavioral Health Sciences at www.bp.edu and www.e-campus.bp.edu for information regarding professional training in breathing behavior analysis
- Breathing Science Inc., a nonprofit publisher, at www.theBSJ.org, where you can purchase the book “CapnoLearning: An Introductory Guide”
