Breathing Through The Nose – The Additional Shield Of Protection For Our Body
Hillary Clinton stumbled badly as she abruptly left a 9/11 ceremony this weekend causing continued concern about her health. Her doctor eventually released a statement that she’d been diagnosed with pneumonia on Friday.
At the Breathing Center, we often work with people who have pneumonia or have a tendency to catch colds frequently. From the perspective of Dr. Buteyko’s approach, pneumonia is triggered by excessive breathing and could be stopped and prevented by the reduction of one’s breathing.
It is very difficult (unless you have been properly trained) to give public speeches and maintain gentle nasal breathing throughout the speech. If a person cannot do it, the speech will be accompanied by mouth breathing and therefore creating hyperventilation. This will lower the level of CO2 in the alveoli of the lungs creating respiratory trouble, which easily can turn into pneumonia. On top of it, the loss of CO2 can create fatigue and trigger other health issues.
It is normal for politicians to be exposed to large crowds of people; some of who of course carry airborne viruses. How to protect yourself? The easiest solution is by breathing through the nose! The majority of viruses cannot survive on the mucus membrane of the nose. The microbes in this membrane create a hostile environment for the virus. When breathing through your nose, you are in fact sterilizing the air that enters your body, and thus, creating a shield against disease. On the other hand, when one is breathing through the mouth, a person is basically creating a microbe highway from the outside environment directly into air passages.
Learning and applying the Buteyko method is essential for anyone who speaks for a living – politicians, actors, teachers, and business professionals. It turns talking from a huge risk factor for health to a firewall against respiratory problems.
