FEBRUARY 22, 2024

3 Tips on Hyperventilation, Anxiety, Chronic Stress, and How to Restore Balanced Breathing

Hi, ,

Many of our clients are experiencing difficulties in taking deep, relaxed breaths; they feel like they “can’t catch their breath.” This is what we call disordered breathing or hyperventilation, also called overbreathing. It is the physical side of anxiety and almost always present to some degree in PTSD. Disordered breathing and hyperventilation often go unrecognized in our clients.

Fortunately, there are effective methods you can use to help your clients enhance and control their respiration, which is essential to mental and physical health. When we teach our clients how to make their breathing conscious—with specific exercises I tailor for their symptoms—they have a gentle yet powerful way to improve their mental well-being at any time of the day.

Here are 3 tips, a practical Worksheet, and a Breathing Method that you can use to help your clients:

Along with our beating heart, our breath is the governing rhythm of our lives. We tend to ignore it, yet it is a major automatic behavior that we can control, and it transforms our health and our mood.

Clients with anxiety and chronic stress use the neck, shoulders, and chest to breathe. Their breathing pattern is shallow and often rapid. Regular overbreathing, also known as hyperventilation, increases oxygen (O2) intake and CO2 output. CO2 is a blood gas that relaxes and induces a parasympathetic state. Excess O2 leads to a sympathetic or fight-or-flight state. Excess O2 is the cause of anxiety and even panic.

With chronic hyperventilation or over-breathing comes brain hypoxia, which contributes to depression and headaches. Hyperventilation can be challenging to detect because the signs are often subtle without the symptoms of a full-blown panic attack. While the client is often aware of symptoms such as chest tightness, tingling, excessive yawning, or gasping for breath, they may not understand these dysregulated patterns or why they occur.

How Do You Help Your Clients Restore Balanced Breathing?

Download my free Worksheet here. 

It will help you figure out if they are overbreathing. It can also be used as a guide for a breathing method to overcome disordered breathing and anxiety.

If you want to share these tips via text, social media, or email, just copy and paste this link.

Hearing from you is an awesome pleasure. I’d love to know what tips work best for you in your practice. 

Heartfully yours,

PS: If there’s a topic you’d like to see covered, send it along.