.png)
It is so important to breathe with your nose and not your mouth right now if you're in California or anywhere downwind of these massive fires -- whether you can see or smell smoke or not!
Increased nasal breathing repels airborne invaders. To reach the lungs, germs, pollutants and smoke have to evade two filters (cilia and mucus in the nose) plus a shower of sanitizing nitric oxide in the sinuses. Some things get through, but much does not. The mouth -- whose job is to eat, not filter air -- can't compete!
The nose can filter particles down to 0.5 microns (a micron is an invisible one-millionth of a meter), and fire smoke particles are 0.4-0.7 microns, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. So the nose doesn't filter everything, but it's sure better than the mouth that doesn't filter anything at all. (If you wear an N95 mask, it's supposed to filter down to 0.1 to 0.3 microns, per manufacturers.)
Almost everyone can probably understand the connection between inhaling particles and experiencing allergies and asthma, but what about sudden strokes in otherwise healthy people? The World Health Organization attributes a quarter of heart attacks and strokes to pollution.
What happens with a pollution-related stroke is that a particle is inhaled into the lungs and then can enter the bloodstream and create a block or inflammaton in blood vessels. Public health officials know that heart attacks and strokes increase during fires but it's unclear if they'd ever be able to say that a particular case was due to pollution.
You know that saying, "The best things in life are free?" Add breathing well to the list. It's an invisible and intangible, but extremely valuable, skillset and asset.
Breathing Retraining Center offers individual and group training and coaching on self-management techniques to identify and correct poor-breathing habits. Breathing Retraining Center's educational products, courses and coaching are designed to improve breathing skills for people whose issues may be related to habits that have the potential to be improved, as a self-care/wellness activity. Breathing difficulty may be a warning sign of a life-treatening heart or lung condition, infection or other illness. Always check with your doctor about your own situation.
The Buteyko Breathing Technique and other breathing-retraining strategies we teach are an alternative approach and are not the practice of medicine, psychology or a form of psychotherapy, nor are they a substitute for seeking medical or psychological advice from an apporpriate professional health-care provider. We want to make the important distinction between using the Buteyko Breathing Technique and other breathing-retraining strategies for health and well-being and the practice of medicine, psychology or any other licensed health-care profession.
Breathing classes, coaching and other services from Breathing Retraining Center are offered by teachers who are not licensed by the State of California as physicians or other healing-arts practitioners unless so noted. We offer alternative non-medical/non-psychological techniques and our services are considered to be laternative or complementary to the healing arts that are licensed by the State of California.