This exercise can help stop asthma symptoms, but please get your doctor's permission to try it first. Then follow the following instructions below during the early stages of chest tightness, wheezing, coughing or a head cold. If you aren't able to stop your symptoms within 10 minutes, then take your reliever medication. If you are experiencing severe symptoms, of course, then take reliever medication straight away.
To stop asthma symptoms before they take hold, follow these steps:
- Take a small silent breath in and out through the nose.
- Hold your breath and walk for 10 to 15 paces.
- Stop walking, release your nose, and resume gentle breathing in and out of your nose.
- Wait for 30 to 60 seconds and repeat.
- Continue to walk while holding your breath for 10 to 15 paces followed by resting with nasal breathing for 30 to 60 seconds.
- If your symptoms are mild, you may hold your breath for more than 10 to 15 paces.
- Do this exercise for at least 10 minutes.
(Source: The Oxygen Advantage - Patrick McKeown)
The word asthma derives from Greek and means 'to pant'. While asthma has been around for a very long time, it affects more people today than ever before.
What causes asthma? The most common theories include the hygiene hypothesis, which rests on the premise that too much cleanliness means children are not exposed to enough germs, resulting in diminished immune capabilities later on in life. A second commonly cited explanation is an increase in pollution, but while this may well be a trigger, it is not necessarily the cause as areas with little pollution have been shown to have just as many cases, as high pollution zones.
Might there be another factor that plays a significant role in causing asthma - that of habitually breathing too much?
The prevalence of asthma increases relative to wealth. Increased wealth leads to a change in living standards; food becomes more processed, competitive stress increases, houses become more airtight, we perform less physical exercise and the majority of our jobs are sedentary. Fifty years ago, our living and working situations were quite different and asthma rates were significantly lower. During that time, we ate more natural foods, had less competitive stress, our houses were more draughty and most occupations involved physical labour. Back then our lifestyle was conducive to a more normal breathing volume and , as a result, asthma was far less common.
Normal breathing volume for a healthy adult is generally agreed to be 4 to 6 litres of air per minute, but adults with asthma demonstrate a resting breathing volume of 10 to 15 litres per minute, two to three times more than required.
There is a need to determine whether the increase in breathing volume is a cause or effect of the condition. As the airways narrow a feeling of suffocation is generated, and a normal reaction is to take more air into the lungs to try to eliminate this sensation. Either way it is a vicious circle: narrowed airways lead to heavier breathing that causes an increase in breathing volume resulting in the narrowing of the airways and on and on, worsening the condition and establishing bad breathing habits as a matter of necessity.
The only way to determine whether breathing too much causes asthma is to investigate what happens when a group of individuals with asthma practise breathing exercises designed to bring down their breathing volume towards normal.
A study at the Mater Hospital in Brisbane found that when the breathing volume of adults with asthma decreased from 14 litres to 9.6 litres per minute, their symptoms reduced by 70%, the need for reliever medication decreased by 90%, and the need for preventer steroid medication decreased by 50%. The study found a direct relationship between the reduction of breathing volume and improvement to asthma.
Triggers such as animal dander, dust mites, exercise, pollution, excessive hygiene and changes in the weather are often cited to be the cause of asthma symptoms, but it has been shown that the vast majority of sufferers can take back significant control of their condition, regardless of their triggers, by simply learning to breathe light.
BREATH OF LIFE - ASTHMA
The first step to addressing chronic overbreathing is to make the switch from mouth to nasal breathing. While nasal breathing is important to everyone, for people with asthma it is vital. When breathing volume is greater than normal, there is a tendency to open the mouth in order to allow more air to enter the lungs. People diagnosed with asthma often feel they are not taking in enough air while breathing through the nose, which causes them to breath through the mouth. Mouth breathing influences asthma in a number of ways:
- Air taken in through the mouth is not filtered of airborne particles, including germs and bacteria
- The mouth is simply not as effective as the nose in conditioning air to the correct temperature and humidity prior to entering the lungs.
- Because the mouth provides a larger space to breathe through than the nose, breathing volume will be higher, causing too much carbon dioxide to be expelled from the lungs. Carbon dioxide is a natural 'opener' of the smooth muscle in the airways. The loss of carbon dioxide therefore causes asthma airways to narrow even more.
- Unlike nasal breathing, mouth breathing does not allow us to benefit from nasal nitric oxide, which supports the lung's defensive capabilities.
Taking all these factors into consideration, it is not surprising that mouth breathing causes a reduction in lung function in people with mild asthma and plays a significant role in the exacerbation of asthma symptoms.
Researchers also studied the beneficial effects of nasal breathing on exercise - induced asthma. The authors found that mouth breathing during exercise caused the airways to narrow even further. In contrast, when subjects were asked to breathe only through their nose during exercise, exercise-induced asthma did not occur at all.