Asthma

what symptoms do you get with dysfunctional breathing disorder???

Anyone experienced this???

[Katinka46]

My understanding is that those with dysfunctional breathing disorder are breathing rapidly, often with the upper part of their lungs. I think they describe the feeling as “air hunger,” that they can’t get enough air into their lungs. This results in their “blowing” off too much carbon dioxide. A common remedy is to breathe into a paper bag. This restores the balance of oxygen and carbon dioxide in their lungs. Sometimes they have tingling in their lips and fingers. Does any of this make sense to you?

[Hidden]

With the caveat that I’m not medically qualified. Symptoms of DB vary, to some extent depending on the nature of how you’re breathing dysfunctionally. The ‘correct’ way to breathe is diaphragmatically, but DB can result from a variety of things including mouth breathing, simple over breathing, or primarily using the accessory muscles to breathe. Many people with DB complain of feeling breathless, or getting excessively breathless for what they’re doing (including sometimes ‘out of nowhere’). DB can also result in too little carbon dioxide in the body, leading to other symptoms including dizziness, and tingling. My daughter’s sats were actually dropping to below 90% as a result of her DB, which - aside from the breathlessness generally - obviously wasn’t making her feel great when it was happening as a result. Once we’d finally worked out what was going on, though, we were able to rectify the situation by training her to breathe properly again. In her case, simply knowing why she was feeling breathless went a long way to ultimately solving the problem. Hasn’t happened at all in the last 18 months or so, where it was happening almost daily at it’s worst. Sometimes multiple times a day.

[Hidden]

It’s really hard to change the way you breathe. Because of severe asthma, I grew up breathing through my mouth, too quickly, & not using my diaphragm. I was so desperate to get every breath in! However I worked hard to change this using a great website. You have to really practise, and I found it useful at first to set an alarm on my phone every 20mins to remind me to check my breathing.

This is the website, developed by Southampton University breathetrain.co.uk/

[Katinka46]

I was very lucky: my asthma started when I was seven, a few years later I was enrolled on a programme for children with asthma. We had ultraviolet treatment, which I have never heard of since but we were all taught excellent diaphragm breathing technique. And that training has stayed with me. And as an adult I found out a bit more about it. One thing I do remember from an article is that you never need to concern yourself about breathing in, that will always happen and look after itself but breathing out is much more important. Take your asthma medication and gently concentrate on exhaling, not forcing it, but trying to exhale more air each time. And somehow I have never been a mouth-breather.