Tuesday 28 February 2017

Iiiiiiiiinnnnnn and Ouuuuttttt

I.... am not the best breather.

As in, I tend to breathe fairly shallowly most of the time.

When I focus on my breath too much (looking at you mindfulness class) I can actually get in that weird spot of overthinking and then getting kind of panicky cuz.... I like breathing!  Not breathing is bad!

A few months ago I noticed I was sometimes getting wheezy, often at night when I was reading.  It's probably positional or something but that, combined with sort of random coughing, and my acupuncturist suggesting I work on bigger breaths, I started to look into improving my breathing.

Now, I'm fairly sure I could have gone to my doctor, described my symptoms and gotten some sort of inhaler or something, but I'd rather leave steroids or whatnot for a last resort or bronchial infection or something icky.  So I wanted to do something a little more natural.

I looked up some yoga type breathing exercises but didn't get very far with that.

And then I remembered a breathing thing my Dad had when he had his heart surgery.  So, I looked it up and then ordered myself a spirometer!  (I think it's technically called an "incentive spirometer" and I found it on Amazon through a yoga thing... go figure!)

I thought it was a blow into capacity thing but it turns out it's a breathe in capacity thing.  I've been using it regularly for a month or so now and I've already improved my lung capacity!  YAY ME!

So I'm hopefully getting better breaths and cleaning out my lungs (or something like that) and yay for breathing and not wheezing, yay!

1 comment:

Jason Langlois said...

Breathing is very important... but if I think about it, I also start having trouble with it. My own fix is to sit/stand up straight and stop slouching. Not that this helps my snoring. :/

Please keep breathing, btw. I'd hate if you stopped.