Most politicians are trained to breathe through their noses because it makes them appear calmer and more balanced, according to Sasha Yakovleva of Breathing Center.com.
I invite you to watch some politicians speaking – with the sound off – to verify this. Those pauses in speaking are effective in delivery, but also a chance to breathe in through the nose.
Are you aware of how YOU are breathing when you talk?
How about when at rest?
Are you breathing through your nose nearly all the time?
My last blog was about breathing through your nose when exercising. Did you try it? How did it go?
Breathe through your nose
Our nose is specifically designed for breathing. In fact, an expert in the effect of breathing on our bodies, K. P. Buteyko, says:
Breathe through your mouth as often as you eat through your nose
Based on long-term work of Russian doctors and scientists, observation and medical trials, Dr. Buteyko developed methods to retrain our breathing through our noses with spectacular health benefits. He brought down his own high blood pressure.
In his forty-five years of research, he identified over one hundred and fifty diseases that were caused by over-breathing, or hyperventilation, and had a method to reverse them.
Something different happens physiologically when we breathe through our nose as compared to when we breathe through our mouths. When we breathe through our noses, we consume less air than when we breathe through our mouths. Breathing through the mouth can result in hyperventilation, which is not good for the body.
Anyone with a panic attack can tell you that hyperventilation worsens the anxiety. An asthmatic cannot resolve their airway-narrowing crisis by breathing deeper and faster.
Let me go into a short medical explanation of what is happening when we breathe. It might turn your ideas of breathing inside out.
How we get oxygen by breathing
I remember being surprised when I was learning physiology in medical school that our breathing is regulated by the amount of carbon dioxide in our lungs, not the amount of oxygen. The amount of oxygen released to our cells is determined by the amount of carbon dioxide in our lungs!
Carbon dioxide is the waste gas from cellular metabolism. The lungs get rid of it when we exhale.
However, the body reasoning is that when carbon dioxide levels are high, the metabolism has been revved up because it is a waste product. Therefore, there a lot of is a lot of metabolic need for oxygen. Thus, the signal is to absorb more oxygen from the air we breathe in.
When carbon dioxide levels are low, there is a very low level of metabolic processing, so less oxygen is absorbed from the air we breathe which is appropriate for a low level of metabolism.
When we breathe through the mouth, we over-breathe
The catch is that when we exhale through the mouth, we lose a lot of carbon dioxide, that is, more than we lose when we exhale through the nose.
When carbon dioxide levels are low in the lungs, the body responds by absorbing less oxygen from the inhaled breath. This most likely is the opposite of what is needed! We may need more oxygen, and don’t get it because of the way the body responds when too much carbon dioxide has been released through the mouth.
By breathing in through the mouth, we don’t get more oxygen either because the amount of air we breathe is NOT the regulating factor for how much oxygen we absorb. The regulation is related ONLY to the amount of waste carbon dioxide that has built up in the lungs.
Over-breathing, breathing deeper and faster, can never result in the absorption of more oxygen! In fact, it results in less oxygen to the cells.
Doesn’t that turn “what everybody knows” inside out?
Calm breathing through the nose
Patrick McKeown, the world’s leading expert on the Buteyko breathing method, produced this TEDx talk. He explains and demonstrates that breathing less will help with stress. Participate in his exercise by watching.
Please comment below about your experience from the breathing exercise that Patrick takes you through on this TEDx talk.
