There are several reasons you might discover it's hard to breathe with your nose. Stopping mouth breathing can be more difficult than you think. Possible reasons include...
1. Your nose is stuffed.
2. You have a nasal obstruction.
3. You breathe with your mouth when it's already open for eating, talking, flossing, or even making cute facial expressions.
4. You're not thinking about how you're breathing. It's an instinct, run on autopilot by the reptilian brain. So you're just not aware how you're breathing, or how other people are breathing, and you don't take it into consideration at all.
5. Your body doesn't want you make any major changes, including transitioning from mouth breathing to nose breathing, too fast. Your system is used to the current, sensitive balance between oxygen and carbon dioxide and prefers to make even good changes slow.
6. You probably have to move more slowly than you're used to as you learn to breathe more efficiently with nasal breathing, and you're resistant to that.
7. Nasal breathing is more connected to emotions. If you're trying to avoid some uncomfortable feelings, breathing slow, steadily and gently is likely to bring them up.
These obstacles are real. Most can be changed simply over time by adapting to a new set of habits, whicch we cover in depth in our coaching and classes.
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.