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Your shortness of breath could be a laughing matter

His shortness of breath might be laughable, at least indirectly. Do you often find it difficult to take a deep breath? Do you feel like you can’t “catch” your breath? It may feel like ‘air hunger’ or a feeling of not having enough air. These are common symptoms of a disorder called chronic hyperventilation, or hyperventilation syndrome. One of the things that makes us laugh is hyperventilating. Laughter is unlikely to be the cause of your breathing problems, but it could make your symptoms worse.

Chronic hyperventilation occurs when the amount you breathe is greater than what your body actually needs to meet its metabolic demands. No one is entirely sure why this occurs, but some people seem to have a predisposition to overbreathing. It usually starts (or becomes symptomatic) after a traumatic event or when life itself has been very stressful. One of the first signs is a difficulty breathing; like feeling unable to take a deep breath.

If this is a sensation you are familiar with and it accompanies you most of the time, you may have acquired a disordered breathing pattern. Instead of breathing calmly at rest using the diaphragm, which is the main muscle of calm breathing, people with chronic hyperventilation tend to use the upper chest to breathe. Normal calm breathing is like this; breathe in and the belly rises (the diaphragm falls and this causes the belly to swell outwards); exhale and the tummy relaxes down. If you have the opposite breathing pattern; your belly sinks when you breathe; or your belly barely moves when you inhale but your upper chest rises, then you have a disordered breathing pattern. You will likely experience this as shortness of breath; specifically, a difficulty breathing.

You may notice this more when you are under pressure, worried, or anxious. Because you tend to breathe with your upper chest, your neck and shoulder muscles are working all the time. They are overworked because they help you breathe. Although one of the functions of the neck and shoulder muscles is to help with breathing, they are really only designed to be recruited for this purpose in peak demand conditions, in emergencies, or when you are working so hard that you need a lot of extra air. . You may not look or feel like you are breathing hard unless you really focus on the parts of your body that move when you breathe.

People who breathe into the upper chest also have a tendency to not empty their lungs properly when exhaling. The lungs are supposed to hold some air after an exhalation, but people who don’t breathe well through their diaphragm, including people with asthma, tend to have more air in their lungs after an exhalation than is expected. considered normal. The term for this is hyperinflation, and it is often progressive, meaning the lungs have more and more air left with each consecutive exhalation.

If this is how you breathe without knowing it, day after day, what happens when you really to do Need to take a bigger breath? Because you already have tension in your upper chest and abdominal area, and your lungs are already partially full, you experience this need to breathe more deeply as an inability to do so. It is a problem of both body mechanics and physiology. If you try to get more air into a balloon that is already full of air, the balloon will feel this as tension and resistance. You are experiencing the same sensations that the balloon would feel. “No more air please, I’ve had enough and the walls of my chest can’t accommodate any more.”

Chronic hyperventilation is not uncommon (affects 6-10% of the population), but is commonly misdiagnosed. This is because the symptoms are not well defined, vary from person to person, and are easily confused with other disorders. For example, common symptoms of chronic hyperventilation, such as dizziness and chest pain, can be mistaken for heart problems. If you have difficulty breathing, your doctor will want to rule out these other causes. If the tests do not reveal any other cause of your distress, you most likely have a breathing pattern disorder called hyperventilation syndrome.

Treatment for hyperventilation syndrome involves learning to breathe less and relearning a healthy diaphragmatic breathing pattern. This isn’t always easy because your brain has adapted to overbreathing and will try to maintain the status quo, even when changing things up is the best option. But with good training and regular practice you can overcome your body’s resistance and start breathing freely again.