More Info:
Sleep
A poor sleep pattern badly affects your whole life and those around you because sleep is so important to good health and wellbeing. Buteyko is a natural way of improving sleep patterns by reducing the incidence of snoring, sleep apnoea, insomnia, vivid dreams and nightmares. Buteyko enables you to sleep soundly, wake refreshed so that you start the day with vigour, and have more energy.
Hyperventilation
Breathing increases and decreases in line with changes in metabolism, and so when you exercise your breathing increases, becoming more noisy and forceful. When your metabolism is low, such as when you sleep, the breathing is quiet and gentle. To make the snoring sound, you need to breathe far more forcefully than is normal during sleep; in fact snoring is more like the type a person naturally does while exercising rather than sleeping. This means that snoring is the sound of hyperventilation, or breathing more air than your body needs, during sleep.
People who hyperventilate will be familiar with some of the following indicators of poor sleep:
- Repeatedly waking during the night
- Waking up tired instead of refreshed
- Vivid dreams and nightmares
- Night sweats
- Blocked or runny nose, especially on waking
- Snoring
- Waking to urinate, instead of sleeping right through the night
- Abnormal pauses in the breathing, or sleep apnoea
Snoring, or breathing heavily drags in extra cold, dry air laden with dust, pollen and other pollutants. Breathing like this tends to cool down, dry out, and irritate the delicate airway tissue, which responds by swelling and increased production of mucus. The swelling and mucus narrow the airways slightly, making it necessary to breathe with extra force than usual, compounding the problem.
When you are asleep the airways are more floppy than when you are awake and so they are more likely to vibrate, making the snoring sound if you breathe too forcefully. They are also prone to collapsing when the upper airways are narrowed because the forceful breathing creates a stronger vacuum in the lungs than gentle breathing does. This greater vacuum allows ordinary atmospheric air pressure to suck your tongue back and to collapse the relaxed, narrowed airway when you inhale forcefully.
The root cause of your abnormal breathing pattern needs to be addressed so that you no longer breathe with such force while you are asleep, and by breathing correctly your upper airway will no longer be abnormally narrow, allowing the free flow of air without any devices or machines. Buteyko is a wonderful tool for resetting the automatic breathing pattern to operate at the correct level for any activity, including sleep.