The more you practice calm and slow breathing routines that increase CO2, the more of it you should be able to handle, making every kind of exercise easier and panic attacks less likely. "If we are overbreathing, our breathing is heavy, more intense, and erratic, and we exhale too much carbon dioxide, leaving our body literally gasping for oxygen." "When we breathe correctly, we have a sufficient amount of carbon dioxide, and our breathing is quiet, controlled, and rhythmic," McKeown writes. If you're gasping for air in quick, panicky breaths, all you are doing is purging CO2 from your system. It's the ramifications that are hard to accept: We simply need to breathe more slowly. "Carbon dioxide works as a kind of divorce lawyer," Nestor says, "a go-between to separate oxygen from its ties so it can be free to land another mate." The effect has since been observed in every size of mammal, from guinea pigs to humpback whales. It's called the Bohr effect (Opens in a new tab), discovered by Danish scientist Christian Bohr in 1904. The only way to get us to absorb more is to add CO2, which lowers the pH levels in your blood, which is the only thing that dislodges oxygen molecules from hemoglobin and delivers it to hungry cells. In a healthy body, blood oxygen levels are somewhere between 95 and 99 percent we've already got all the oxygen in our hemoglobin that our bodies need. Weirdly, however, increasing the amount of CO2 in your lungs by a tolerable amount is actually one of the best things you can do to get more oxygen into your blood - more so than inhaling pure oxygen, which doesn't do a thing. Take a few breaths of pure CO2 in a lab, and your brain will immediately freak out as if it's being suffocated. It can also be dangerous to our bodies if inhaled in too large a dose. Get more CO2.Ĭarbon dioxide is, of course, hugely damaging to the health of the planet in the quantities emitted by human industry. How, you ask? Let me walk you through the main life-changing revelations - the most important of which is extremely counterintuitive. My average blood pressure has dropped, as has my weight, and I am running my daily 5K roughly 10 minutes faster than I did before. After several weeks of following it, I'm having better quality sleep (even as the number of hours I slept went down thanks to the never-ending election of 2020). He's a former student of Konstantin Buteyko, a Soviet doctor who pioneered a method of breathing now used around the world to help treat asthma and other respiratory disorders McKeown's book is much more of a how-to that helps you incrementally improve breathing health. There I inhaled other books on this fast-expanding frontier, most notably The Oxygen Advantage (Opens in a new tab) by Patrick McKeown. Instead of using its phenomenal power to heal, we're breathing in ways that do harm.īreath was only the beginning of my journey down the rabbit hole of respiratory research. Both point to the same glaring fact: We in the developed world have forgotten how to breathe. Nestor's book, one of the more surprising nonfiction hits of 2020, ties together a growing scientific movement with ancient wisdom that confirms it. I'd been breathing, and thinking about breathing, all wrong. Then I read Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art (Opens in a new tab) (Opens in a new tab)by journalist James Nestor, and discovered I knew next to nothing about the subject. I thought I had a pretty good handle on this thing our lungs do multiple times a minute. The Core meditation trainer introduced me to other breathing techniques for calm, energy, and focus. Andrew Weil's famous relaxation breathing exercise (Opens in a new tab) - inhale for a count of 4, hold for a count of 7, exhale for a count of 8 - helped me to sleep on anxious nights for nearly two decades. After all, watching your breath is the main activity in meditation, something I'm so gung-ho about that I started an annual high-tech meditation contest. For years, I've been focused on the most basic human activity there is: breathing.
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