Breathe How You Want to Feel by Matteo Pistono

Author:Matteo Pistono [Matteo Pistono]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hay House
Published: 2024-05-28T00:00:00+00:00

The Importance of Increasing Your Tolerance to Carbon Dioxide

Ensuring that you breathe nasally, low, and slow throughout your day reduces or eliminates chronic overbreathing and improves the body’s tolerance to carbon dioxide. Why do we want to increase our tolerance to carbon dioxide? If you recall from Respiration 101, hemoglobin in your blood releases oxygen when in the presence of carbon dioxide. With a higher presence of carbon dioxide, oxygen releases into your cells and tissues more readily.

The reason we want to increase our tolerance of carbon dioxide is because our brain, organs, and entire physical body receive more fuel! And consistently breathing through the nose, slowly and using the diaphragm, gradually increases our tolerance to carbon dioxide. As James Nestor wrote succinctly in Breath, “What our bodies really want, what they require to function properly, isn’t faster or deeper breaths. It’s not more air. What we need is more carbon dioxide.”

To increase your carbon dioxide tolerance, you can train during your day-to-day activity. When you are moving to and from your home, vacuuming, yardwork, dancing, or even speaking, try to keep your breathing low and slow through the nose. It takes practice. Even when that feeling of breathlessness comes on (because of the slight increase of carbon dioxide in your system from metabolic increase), instead of automatically mouth breathing, breathe slow and low. If you need to take that one big breath through the mouth, that is fine. Then return to low and slow nasal breathing. Draw the breath long and slow into the nose and feel the satisfaction of the breath wave. It takes a little mindfulness to stick with it, and you may feel a slight physical discomfort, but the benefits of the daily training are worth it! Build slowly, breath by breath.

You can also set aside five minutes each day to train in increasing your tolerance to carbon dioxide with the Breathe Light exercise, a practice developed by Patrick McKeown of the Oxygen Advantage. You need not be a professional athlete or elite performer, though those individuals too benefit from the Breathe Light practice. If you practice the Breathe Light exercise consistently twice a day, you’ll see your BOLT score notch up a few seconds per week—this has been the case with every individual I have worked with. You’ll see a reduction in day-to-day breathlessness and overall downregulation of felt stress and anxiety.

I use the Breathe Light exercise before I meditate because it creates an ideal chemical environment within my body for relaxed concentration and sets a baseline of mental resilience throughout the day. I also Breathe Light for a few minutes right before I speak publicly to reduce anxiety and increase focus. Breathe Light is suitable for everyone, except individuals with panic disorders or when pregnant.

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