How the Buteyko Method Helped Ease My Anxiety
I finally learned to breathe normally.
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After 54 years of waking up each morning with a sense of dread, it all went away.
I used to open my eyes, stretch and take a deep breath in (one reason we stretch), then exhale in a long sigh. I was not breathing normally.
But last year I learned how to breathe — and I learned not to sigh.
So let me tell you the story of how I became a convert to Breathing Normalization, how I learned the secrets of a Russian doctor who fought in WWII and lived a full life until 2003, and why it matters.
Alone in a cold place
A brief background: I moved, sans husband, last winter. As I’d lived in Arizona for 20 years, the winter in Arkansas was cold and wet. I knew no one and had little work to do. Most of my time was spent walking my dogs and searching Upwork for freelance writing jobs.
It felt like I was out of breath frequently. Especially awakening, I felt like I was almost suffocating. I’d also just gotten over a mysterious case of bloating that lasted for two months.
One day I suddenly realized that the bloating and the lack of breath were connected. I was gulping air, especially when I was rushing around — particularly when I was in the kitchen in a rush to cook a meal.
I was breathing through my mouth and it also made me feel panicky. But it had become my normal state over a period of a couple of years. Gulp air, panic, develop bloat.
I googled “breathing through your nose.”
Free videos!
It was then I fell into a very cozy, warm and wonderful rabbit hole.
The Breathing Center, with a tad of hippy-dippy but much heftier dose of common sense, came into my townhome. There were many free videos and I watched them all. Most of them were of Sasha, who was explaining the Buteyko Breathing Method of ‘breathing normalization.’
He famously said, “You should breathe…
