Do you or someone you know suffer from uncomfortable breathing, despite your doctor ruling out a serious illness? Maybe you’re taking medication for a chronic condition but still could feel better? Here are some ideas to consider:
- You may have poor breathing habits you’re not even aware of! This can be methodically improved by following a program to improve your breathing efficiency and stamina.
- Your respiratory system is out of shape, or was never trained in the first place to function optimally to fuel your activity level.
- You don’t cool down your respiratory system at the end of a workout so you’re continuing to breathe heavy afterward and that sets up an unhealthy pattern of over-breathing.
- You’re under stress and your body is responding the way it’s meant to – by stimulating the nervous system into fight-or-flight alertness – but that’s not helping address long-term modern problems like debt, fear of climate change and other dilemmas you have no personal control over.
- You’re allergic to food, pets or plants in your environment, setting off inflammation that affects the respiratory system.
Learning about the widespread symptoms of over-breathing and The 10 Healthy Breathing Habits to counter them can address all these, even your body’s typical reaction to stress and allergens. While it’s unrealistic to think you can completely eliminate your lifelong weaknesses/ weak links, you can increase your resilience and reduce the severity of episodes.
Breathing retraining is a self-management approach to improve breathing skills similar to personal, physical training at the gym. You can practice better-breathing tools whether you’ve got a medical diagnosis for a chronic illness and are taking medication or not.
