Hi all
As an NHS physio who has suffered anxiety/panic problems I am interested in how my profession can help understanding and recovery from anxiety problems and their symptoms - in partiular in relation to breathing.
There is a whole speciality of respiratory physiotherapy in every main hospital and some of the techniques are very applicable to many people here. I have just done a course on overbreathing/hyperventilation/dysfunctional breathing and at least 5 of the physios out of 15 on the course had some level of breathing dysfunction that could easily be retrained if it were causing symptoms in the future
Certainly a lot of our anxiety symptoms related to shortness of breath, pins and needles, chest pain, dizziness can be helped by retraining breathing and a lot of deep breathing exercises that get taught can add to the problem because, unless you have an underlying lung disease, it is probably overbreathing that is the problem.
Only 10 % overbreathing more than your body really needs can give symptoms, probably due blowing off too much CO2 that drops your blood pH and triggers a level of adrenalin response. In Chronic overbreathers - those who do it most of the time - they will be closer to their symptom level normally so an extra stress that pushes their breathing up a bit more will be emough to push them to symptoms, such as chest pains, which triggers more anxiety and so maintains all of the above - thats the theory anyway.
The practical bit is that it is easy to retrain breathing because nothing is usually structurally wrong its just the technique of breathing that needs to be reviewed
Check out my post in this section on physio retraining for hyperventilation
Some of our physios are also trained in the Buteyko technique that works really well for asthma sufferers and since it is thought that 80% of asthma sufferers are overbreathers it is one to try for anyone here with breathing related symptoms
check out a few of the sites
http://www.buteyko.com/
http://www.buteykobreathing.org/
http://www.buteyko.co.uk/
sorry if this has repeated bit of my last post but the course I was on yesterday was a bit of a revelation in how effective subtle breathing control in causing and managing many anxiety symptoms.
hope this was of help to some
jos
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