Breathing to Live or Breathing to Die: The Life-Altering Power of Functional Breathing
Not just a catchy title, it’s just the truth. I witness my brother’s slow slide into dementia and death by suffocation from dysfunctional breathing due to uncontroable Parkinson’s disease. Sadly, not nearly enough oxygen was getting to his brain. His mouth was always drooped open because of no oral muscle control enabling him to keep his mouth closed and breathe through his nose. He was oxygen starved even though his blood was saturated with oxygen. Air hunger prompted rapid mouth breathing, making matters worse. Why? Because mouth breathing reduces lung carbon dioxide pressure essential for oxygen to exit blood into every cell in the body. Mouth breathers are committing slow suicide and on a journey of poor health, low quality of life and disease.
As an orthodontist, my profession has consistently verified that mouth breathing is the chief cause of malocclusion of the teeth and jaws, but only recently realizing just how many other health issues are adversely affected, like sleep, our immune system, hormone release, cognitive ability, athletic ability, behavior, stress, injury, heart, lung and gut function. This represents an eye opening, tsunami of destruction to our health and wellbeing. The simple fact is that eliminating mouth breathing and learning to breathe correctly will be the most significant improvement to your overall health, vitality and longevity that you could ever believe possible.
The training begins with realizing that if you are breathing more than 12 time/minute, you are already courting trouble from over breathing by getting less oxygen to your brain. Over breathing like mouth breathing blows off too much of the carbon dioxide pressure needed to release oxygen from the blood. Breathing slower preserves carbon dioxide pressure and gives more time for oxygen infusion. To make a point; someone breathing 6 times/ minute gets 20% more oxygen to their brain than someone breathing 12 times/minute. A good resting goal would be a relaxed rate of 6 breaths /minute with a slow exhale at least 2 to 3 X the inhale. A 3 second inhale followed by a 9 second exhale through the nose would result in 5 breaths/minute, easy to accomplish with practice. Next, you must increase your breath holding time to at least one minute to build up your tolerance for carbon dioxide so that your lungs have a pressure of 45mm Hg. to drive oxygen into cells. Mouth breathers and over breathers have a much-reduced carbon dioxide lung pressure of low 30mmHg.
The best training device is inexpensive 3M micropore paper tape to tape your mouth shut at night so that mouth breathing is prevented. That alone improves sleep and helps reduce snoring which must also be eliminated by functional breathing and an oral appliance if necessary. Nasal breathing 224/7 protects you from air borne viral, bacterial, fungal infections and inflammation because of the miracle gas nitric oxide manufactured in the nose and sinuses. Mouth breathing unfiltered dirty air inflames, congests and dries out airway tissue without any protection from our miracle nasal air purifier, nitric oxide.
Breathing controls oxygen delivery to all cells, slows heart rate, lowers blood pressure and regulates body chemistry within the narrow limits of blood pH and helps coping with stress and anxiety. Unfortunately, functional breathing has not gotten the attention in the medical community it deserves. We are an excellent source for information and education, if your breathing or sleep is compromised.
John B. Harrison DDS,MSc
