Do you suffer from any or most of the following symptoms: fatigue, abdominal bloating, brain fog, muscular aches and pains, pins and needles in arms and hands, feeling of anxiety, palpitations, muscular fatigue, and headaches?  Do you find yourself sighing or yawning a lot, gasping for air during speech, or breath holding and clenching your teeth? Then you could be experiencing a breathing pattern disorder. (Obviously you need to visit your GP to rule out other causes first).

Altered patterns of breathing have a profound effect of our body, if we over-breathe we arouse our flight and fight response and start to feel anxious, cortisol levels rise and blood sugar is released ready to reach our large muscles to enable us to run from our stressor.  Our guts receive less blood supply, the smooth muscle starts to constrict and we suffer from colonic spasm and abdominal distension - referred to as Irritable Bowel Syndrome.  When we are stressed we often swallow air increasing the bloated feeling. Over breathing leads to low levels of carbon dioxide and the pH levels of the blood change, causing some of the effects noted above.

Breathing is natural and something we do day in day out, without paying any attention to it.  We take our first breath on being born and don’t stop again until we die, and yet during our lifetime we may change the way we breathe in response to stressors, illness, anxiety and pain without becoming aware of our altered pattern. If you watch a healthy newborn baby breathing, you will note as they lie sleeping, that their stomach gently swells as they breathe in and falls as they breathe out.  So why is an Osteopath writing about breathing, I hear you asking yourself.  Well, altered breathing has an effect on the levels of pain.  Well known researchers in lower back pain have found correlations with paradoxical breathing and lower back pain, altered posture and neck pain.  So just by changing our breathing pattern, we can change our pain.

Take this opportunity to examine your breathing pattern:

1. Sit up with your dominant hand on your chest and your other on your belly.

2. Now take a deep breath in.  Which hand rises first? – The chest or the belly?

3. For many of you, it will be the chest, with the shoulders rising towards your ears. This is called paradoxical breathing.

4. It leads to a forward head posture and we over use the muscles at the front of the neck and possibly leading to neck pain and headaches.

5. You could change your posture just by breathing.

If you breathe like this, try the following:

1. Recline with your hands behind your head, and loosen tight constrictive clothing.

2. Start to breathe into your belly.

3. Breathe in through your nose as if inhaling from a beautiful rose and breathe out through pursed lips as if blowing on a dandelion.

4. Ensure that your out breath is longer than your in breath.

Now try breathing in a relaxed mode with your hands on your lap or your forearms on the arms of an arm chair.  Notice your breath pattern, don’t be harsh with yourself, just focus on the breathing and relax.  Notice how after a few minutes your muscles start to relax.  Now close your eyes and start to think about an upsetting incident which has happened to you recently, fully experience the incident – and then notice your breathing pattern.  Has it become faster, has the tension began to return?  This type of emotional effect may be a constant pattern in your life, especially if you are a woman and particularly if you are in a post ovulation phase when CO₂ levels naturally drop and then are exacerbated by stress, leading to faster breathing and even lower CO₂ levels.

Research has show that office workers' breathing rates rise as soon as they put their hands on a keyboard and that their muscle activity in the trapezius and neck muscles increases, and abdominal breathing reduces.  Sitting in general, produces poor breathing.

More about breathing rehabilitation can be found at www.breathingworks.com