Sometimes I want to stop thinking about my breathing; other times I am so grateful that I have this valuable knowledge and have the mind to appreciate its significance. There were so many times in life when I wanted to die by fading away in an all-consuming sleepy nothingness that would end the misery. Now, I want to live so I can fully claim victory over my feel-bad-and- hopeless demon. I want to live not only for myself but to be able to tell my story and help others like myself find a lasting, uncompromising, and enlivened peace. (From the post on Buteyko Forum)
As I am going through the Buteyko experience with my clients, I realize how much emotional state affects our health and healing.
Throughout history, asthma was questioned as a “real disease,” with implications that it might be “all in your head.” Why?
Before the 20th century, incidents of asthma were low and deaths from asthma were rare. Most asthma cases were mild, and people with asthma lived as long as other healthy individuals. The nature of the disease is such that, when mild, it exhibits only temporary symptoms, but between the attacks a person seems perfectly healthy. Even long term, asthma usually did not cause damage to the organs, and the condition seemed to not deteriorate quickly.
The implications that an asthma attack could be quickly brought on by a stressful situation or thought, added up to a view of asthma as asomewhat superficial condition. For example, it was known that asthmatic children could easily throw a tantrum that would then trigger a subsequent asthma attack to “punish parents” or to ensure attention. A few years back I talked with a psychologist, and she told me that among them (pyscologists) childhood asthma sometimes is called a “disease of neglected children.”
Folk asthma remedies, such as breathing into a brown paper bag and using distraction and relaxation at the first signs of asthma attack, all implied that the acute state of shortness of breath could be somewhat controlled psychologically.
It all changed with the recent “epidemic” increase of asthma in developed countries. In addition to the increase in incidents of asthma, and despite the introduction of new potent asthma drugs, asthma cases became more severe and deadly.
Asthma is indeed real. And because our emotional and psychological state directly affects our breathing, perception of asthma as a stress-related condition is easily justified by the Buteyko teaching.
Negative emotions increase our breathing and promote muscular tension, which in turn further increase our breathing. Moreover, throughout evolution, stress was meant to be relieved through vigorous physical activity, but modern sedentary lifestyle encourages none. Stress and chronic hyperventilation can be brought on not only by a current or recent stressful event, but by many modern life conditions, unnatural to our evolutionary makeup, and also by past emotional traumas.
Gradual accumulation of muscular tension (which can take seconds, minutes, or hours), caused by insufficient physical activity, gradually causes hyperventilation.
What are the causes of increasing muscular tension when the person does not experience any apparent stress and is busy with a book, computer, house errands, or friendly people around? When, how, and why do we get more stressed? Are our minds supposed to get anxious without a cause?
Roots of the stress and muscular tension
Obviously, they come from our past, negative, personal experiences. Which ones? Probably those which were most traumatic. There are very few people on Earth now who have never suffered because of an injustice or verbal, physical, or psychological abuse. Such emotionally-heated events often take place in childhood.
Often a child was hurt by somebody, or sometimes a child was exposed to a traumatic experience with relatives or other people. These old events remain imprinted in the nervous system. They can produce three effects. First, they provide a matrix, or framework, or cliché that can be used later in order to relate, judge, evaluate, and choose other people as friends, or even in choosing a spouse, while ascribing old roles to themselves. Second, conscious thinking about old traumas can result in a re-experience of the same emotions: anger, helplessness, guilt, resentment, alienation, and hostility. These toxic emotions can poison the well-being, breathing included, of the person years later. Often, the traumatic events may even be almost forgotten, but emotional and non-emotional clues and surrounding triggers of the past trauma (accompanying sounds, smells, shapes, mood, clothing, weather, and many more) can unexpectedly and unconsciously trigger past emotions. As a result, we again experience anger, helplessness, guilt, resentment, alienation, and hostility without realizing the roots of these emotions. (Artour Rakhimov, Ph.D.,Normal Breathing: The key to vital health)
Going back to asthma, there was evidence that adult onset of asthma, especially in women, is connected to chronic stress. (Chronic Life Stress and Incident Asthma in Adult Women study by National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI))
Fortunately, as Buteyko teaching points out, there is a reverse connection, too.
Chronic hyperventilation negatively affects our emotions, and reversing hyperventilation promotes a sense of calm and well being, and encourages more positive thoughts and emotions. It is not uncommon that people who practice Buteyko notice mental changes even before they notice physical ones. The changes include deeper awareness of body – mind – breathing connection, increased concentration and mental clarity, less mental fatigue, less agitation in response to minor negative experiences, decreased anxiety, an ability to quickly relieve muscle tension and keep the state of relaxation effortlessly.
Below is a citation from one of my client’s Emails
Even amongst many personal trials and hardships right now, I am calm, happy, and at peace; many blessings continue to occur each day… I am stunned that the horrible tension has left my body…especially my shoulders and upper back… I should be taking three or more bathes a day right now, at the least, trying to calm my extremely agitated mind and body…and I’ve not even thought of it!
Is there any scientific rationale? – might you ask
For those who are not quite familiar with the Buteyko theory, we should point out that the Buteyko therapy is about reversing the disease through reversing a chronic hyperventilation. Chronic hyperventilation is causing an excessive loss of CO2 (Carbon Dioxide) in human lungs, but we need to preserve a certain amount of it because of its significant physiological value.
The normal work of our senses, conscious thinking, decision making, and all other mental activities require stable transmission of electrical signals between nervous cells. Such transmission is possible when CO2 content in nerve tissues is normal. Logic, sense, reason, wisdom, focus, memory, concentration and many other qualities are based on this stability of signal transmission. The signal is passed from one nervous cell to another only when the strength or voltage of the signal is higher than a certain threshold value so that accidental signals will not be amplified causing disruption in the work of the CNS(*central nervous system). This threshold value is very sensitive to the local CO2 content. When we hyperventilate and CO2 content is suboptimal, accidental weak signals can be amplified and transmitted further interfering with the real signals based on senses, memory, logic and other objective factors. Hence, CO2 has a calming effect on excessive excitability of brain areas responsible for conscious thinking (e.g., Krnjevic, 1965). Other researchers (Balestrino & Somjen, 1988; Huttunen et al, 1999) also concluded that increased CO2 pressure generally reduces cortical excitability, while hyperventilation “leads to spontaneous and asynchronous firing of cortical neurons” (Huttunen et. al., 1999).
Hence, breathing too much makes the human brain abnormally excited due to reduced CO2 concentrations. As a result, the brain gets literally out of control due to appearance of spontaneous and asynchronous (“self-generated”) thoughts. Balestrino and Somjen (1988) in their summary directly claimed that, “The brain, by regulating breathing, controls its own excitability”. These effects of CO2 on brain cells are of special importance in understanding anxiety, insomnia, panic attacks, epilepsy and other psychological and neurological problems and disorders…Besides, this effect is important in order to understand the mechanism of the mind-body connection.(Artour Rakhimov, Ph.D.,Normal Breathing: The key to vital health)
Each of us is a universe of complex, sometimes irrational emotions.
I remember when, at one of my presentations, a man asked me a question that completely puzzled me. He said that his daughter has had mild to moderate asthma for many years, and he thinks that deep inside she doesn’t want to get better because it is something she grew emotionally attached to. As I thought about it, it might be that for some people who’ve adapted to living with such a chronic condition for many years, a change, even a positive one, could be feared. It might be that in some ways they feel their unique security is always having a proper excuse for something they are not up to, or guaranteed attention and compassion from other people.
On the other end of spectrum are people whose limitations because of chronic physical illness cause a deterioration of their emotional state. One research indicates that children with asthma have twice the likeliness of having the signs of depression and anxiety as their counterparts.
Being a holistic therapy at its core, Buteyko theory does not distinguish between physical, mental and emotional health. We strongly encourage you to take a closer look at what Buteyko is about, and besides physical health, what value of emotional health and healing might it bring into your life.
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Buteyko Clinic USA offers unique breathing rehabilitation programs that result in long term drug free control over asthma, allergies, COPD, rhinitis, chronic cough, snoring, sleep apnea, anxiety, panic, chronic hyperventilation syndrome and other chronic conditions. Contact us today for a free consultation.
Tags: anxiety, breathing, depression, emotional asthma, hyperventialtion