"Pranayama [yogic breathing exercises] are designed not to increase your oxygen levels but rather to increase your capacity to tolerate CO2."

~ Roger Cole, Ph.D.

Do your eyes glaze over when I mention "chemistry?"

I know. I get it. 

This post is short and sweet, I promise. 

So far, I mostly talked (written 🤔!) about breath mechanics. 

Well, what about oxygen-carbon dioxide exchange that happens in the lungs? What if altered breathing has a wide-reaching effect on all systems in the body?

In most compromised breathing patterns, the diaphragm - our principal breathing muscle just below the lungs - loses its ability to move fully and freely. 

This loss of movement range, in turn, reduces the space in the chest that the lungs can expand into. With the limited breath capacity, less oxygen is inhaled with each breath. We compensate for this lack of oxygen by taking more breaths.

Most of us know that our bodies need oxygen for survival. 

It turns out we need carbon dioxide just as much.

When we begin to breathe more often, we exhale more carbon dioxide than usual. The delicate balance between oxygen and carbon dioxide shifts, altering our blood chemistry and cellular respiration, among other things. 

My interest has always been chronic pain, so I am particularly interested in how low carbon dioxide levels affect our nervous system. It turns out that low carbon dioxide levels shift our nervous system function profoundly.

Low CO2 - carbon dioxide - increases our nervous system's "excitability,"   making it more sensitive to all incoming stimuli. The Journal Of American Medical Association linked low carbon dioxide levels to symptoms like general irritability, overreaction to minor problems, fatigue, heart palpitations, insomnia, muscle pains, cramps and stiffness, to name a few.

When the carbon dioxide levels are out of sync, our nervous system can become so "excitable" (a.k.a. sensitive) that it would automatically and repetitively activate without any stimulation at all. 

, if you've seen this "Understand Pain" video, you might remember that the repetitive firing of the nervous system without appropriate stimuli is the exact recipe for chronic pain.