Anyone interested in the topic should learn about the Buteyko technique and the work of Konstantin Buteyko. He was a Russian scientist who studied the negative

Anyone interested in the topic should learn about the Buteyko technique and the work of Konstantin Buteyko. He was a Russian scientist who studied the negative effects of chronic hyperventillation, the positive effects of healthy breathing, and developed a technique to restore healthy breathing. For example, he developed a way to measure the health of someone's respiration through a simple test called the "control pause." To measure your control pause, bring your attention to your breath and without changing your breath, stop breathing at the end of your next natural exhalation. Start a timer, and see how long it takes before your body generates any minor uncomfortable signal in an urge to breathe (an urge to swallow, any kind of muscle contraction, anything subtle expressing a demand to breathe). As soon as you reach such a signal, stop the timer. People who breath healthily (according to Buteyko's research) have at least 40 seconds on the timer. (This is NOT a breath holding test, and if your regular respiration gets faster or deeper after you complete it, you did it wrong.) Most people certainly are not even close to 40 sec. And that, according to Buteyko, is because most people severely overbreathe. The consequence of this dysfunction, of being in a constant state of chronic hyperventillation, is that the blood vessels contract, and surprisingly, less oxygen is transferred to the cells because CO2 is a necessary catalyst for the transfer of oxygen to the cells, and hyperventillation drains the blood of CO2. Healthy breathing, according to Buteyko, is minute and nearly visually imperceptible.