Gout #5, Hyperventilation and Correct Breathing

Ever wake up from a full night’s sleep (say 8 hours) and feel terrible? You feel off in some way but can’t put your finger on it? Perhaps it seems that the moving parts in your head are sticking and grating each other? Well there could be many reasons for this, but one key issue is that you may have been hyperventilating during your sleep.
Other indications may be a racing heart; breathing with some exertion even though you have been close to motionless for past 8 hours; dry mouth, meaning you may have been snoring or mouth breathing (never breath through your mouth). 

Hyperventilation is too much breathing. When someone tells you to take a deep breath to relax, beware. Western society is gulping down too much air. What you really want to do is to slow down your breathing.

This valuable information comes from the Soviet Union, where doctors made in depth studies of breathing. Apparently, the Soviet Union didn’t have any money or pharmaceuticals to study drugs, and instead focused on other factors such as breathing. Much of this research is attributed to Dr Butekyo, who was the most famous doctor in Russia during the space race, since he was responsible for the health of the cosmonauts. 

Artour Rakhimov has placed a series of videos on youtube that explain this knowledge and contains much useful information, http://www.youtube.com/user/artour2006. Of particular interest is the relationship between the length of a “control pause” and the overall health of a human being. A control pause is the amount of time the body can remain comfortable without needing to breathe. It is a powerful indicator of your health for it is an indication of the amount of oxygen in the blood. A control pause of 40 seconds is an indication of an athlete, 20 seconds is considered healthy, and below 20 is a sign of disease. As the control pause lowers the list of diseases that manifest increases. Indian yoga gurus on the other hand, had control pauses that measured in the hundreds of seconds!

The control pause is done by breathing normally (don’t take in a big breath) and then stop breathing and hold your nose closed. Count the amount of time until you start to feel uncomfortable and have to breathe again. The subsequent breath should be normal, and not a large inhalation.

Here is how I understand the mechanisms surrounding breathing. Buteyko’s great insight or model is that CO₂ is used by the body as a hormone that regulates the retention of oxygen by the body. CO₂ is definitely not simply a waste product! Higher levels of CO₂ lead to higher levels of oxygen in the body! This is a surprising proposition, or at least it was to me, but I have come to give a high probability to the chance of this mechanism being correct.

The air is full of oxygen and has tiny amounts of CO₂, so we do not get CO₂ from air, we get it from respiration – breaking down food into energy for movement, thinking, feeling, and emoting. But if I breathe too much I breathe out too much CO₂. Perhaps I get scared or excited and started to breathe through my mouth like a subhuman, gulping in large amounts of air which is exhaled. But this exhales the CO₂ from within and leads to a lowering of O₂ (oxygen) in the body. This begins a vicious cycle where the CO₂/O₂ deprived state causes more panic and continued excess breathing/hyperventilation, continued CO₂ loss and more oxygen deprivation. Think about it: drowning oneself by excessive breathing! Unfortunately, everyone is too busy turning the wheel of life to be aware of this subtle process, and it may not lead to any significant short term symptoms.

There is a (rare ) related condition of a panic attack resulting from severe hyperventilation, which I experienced at high school after giving blood. I got spooked by the kid who was giving blood next to me, who freaked out and had to be restrained, with his eyes rolling in the back of his head and so on. A few hours later I felt dizzy, faint, and had spasms in my finger muscles, and eventually could not stay vertical. The solution to this alarming problem where I was sure I was dying: breathe into a paper bag. Well, how would that work? The doctor explained that I had hyperventilated and had changed my blood chemistry so that the pH of my blood had changed slightly giving rise to all these symptoms (note: pH affected but not by food!) This is Buteyko’s mechanism: I had breathed out my CO₂, thereby creating a lack of O₂ (oxygen) in my blood and the result was a major malfunction in the total system. The paper bag recycled the exhaled CO₂ back into my body and restored equilibrium.

Gout is a disease of too much (uric) acid and inflammation. Acid is low pH. Proper breathing is a way to oxygenate your body which provides alkalinity, for free! Breathing correctly solves all sorts of inflammatory conditions. 

So, how to solve the problem of hyperventilating when awake? To break the hyperventilation cycle the mind must intervene and slow the breathing down. The patient will probably still have to breathe deeply in this excited state until the body calms down, but breathe out slowly and create some pressure by either blowing out of pucked lips (but don’t breathe in through the mouth) or restricted throat (see reading #2 on ujiya breath). The paper bag method works in extreme cases and will also work in regular life. Alternatively, you can put your head under the sheets when you awake, breathing in your exhaust for 10-15 minutes, increasing the CO2 concentration in your body. This is something I used to do as a child before and after sleep without knowing why I was doing it.

But what about controlling breathing while asleep? This requires some training for the body.

1. Breathing exercises.

The king of breathing is Yoga, and if you practice yoga it will cure everything. To get started follow a yoga instructor that has a strong focus on slow measured breathing. Yoga that is not about breathing is not yoga. (Ironically, my Russian friend who introduced me to all this material about breathing thought that yoga was signing oneself over to some evil horned god, but yoga will deprogram and awaken observation.)

There is also a “Frolov” device, which works like a sophisticated paper bag. It was very effective and useful for experiencing the feeling of full oxygenation. It will alleviate a hangover, cure your nephew’s asthma, and get a friend’s mother with emphysema through the winter (these I have verified). A yoga session also produced this feeling, and a large part of the reason yoga will make you feel good is because it oxygenates the body.

I have come to use the following exercise: towards the end of a yoga session I sit and breathe in and out slowly, but I stay motionless after the exhale. During this pause I count x heartbeats, then repeat the cycle for 8 breaths. I started at x=5 heartbeats, then went to 8 or 13 heartbeats as I got stronger (Note: I have a “superstition” to do a Fibonacci number of repetitions).

2. Sleeping position and hyperventilation.

Buteyko showed that the best position for breathing and sleeping is upright in a chair. Since I could not do that, I tried the next best sleeping position, which is on the stomach like a baby sleeps. Snoring should be close to impossible in this position, and I find it gets more comfortable over time. The next best position is on the side, and the “suicide” position is on the back. In case you think breathing is an unimportant issue, Buteyko made a connection between the high incidence of death during the night, particularly around 4-6 am (early morning) and hyperventilation during sleep.

3. Calm mind and calm breath.

Cure the mind, cure the body. I had a yoga teacher who would always say, “The mind and breath are lovers. Feel that they are together, so they don’t get lonely.” This is true: thoughts and breath are symptoms of the same process, two self-reinforcing cycles.  I don’t know if one causes the other, but I have discovered that I can use my mind to calm my breathing or use my breathing to calm my mind. Meditation is the key to bringing the mind back to a calm intended state. I must admit that I went through many yoga instructors before I found some who actually knew something about meditation (these had studied Ashtanga Yoga in Mysore, India with Pattyba Jois). I finally got the simplicity of meditation from using Roy Masters’ concentration exercise at www.fhu.com. Meditation is the most important component of my journey, so I will write at least one whole blog about meditation in the future.

But the important thing is to notice your breathing, be aware of your breathing. Breathing will begin to hyperventilate when you get emotional. Don’t take big breathes to relax, instead slow down the breathing! Watch actors in movies and tv for how not to breath. If an actor wants to appear emotional they start breathing through their mouths with strong breath, even making noises with the breath.

I haven’t talked much about gout in this reading, but breathing is a vital tool that will alleviate your gout long term (of course, the gout will get worse initially, if you are getting healthier). You can breathe properly wherever you are, and it is better than free for you save your energy as well.

Note 1: Other symptoms of feeling awful after awakening can be due to the detox processes that run during sleep. If you interrupt these detox processes you will feel the effects of the detoxification chemicals, and going back to sleep is the best solution. A 20 minute nap does not invoke these detox processes so you should wake up refreshed, but a nap that lasts for more than 1 hour and grogginess will result when awakening. Probably 2 hours is worst as then the body is in the depths of a detox cycle and it may take hours to recover, making the benefit of that sleep dubious. However, lack of sleep is a gout inducing condition as you need these detox cycles to eliminate toxins.

Note 2: I am definitely a pro-CO₂er! The UN, which are the philosophical hUNs of this time, raping and pillaging logic and science for the advancement of enslaving people in a maze of antihuman rules and red tape, have a war against CO₂. As lack of CO₂ within people is one of the most pressing health concerns in Western society, the UN’s war is a war against humanity. Taxing CO₂, this basic component of the life cycle is a tax on life. There is no liberty if you have to pay tax on a molecule that you must have in order to live, and in fact, is the reverse of life: evil (reversed l-i-v-e).