PLAY: DIAPHRAGM AND CHEST
Developing
familiarity and a sense of comfort with, and confidence and trust in, breathing
mechanics, is essential to learning good breathing. Learning to make diaphragmatic breathing the dominate
form of breathing is fundamental.
Chest breathing is
inefficient, labor intensive, and can make breathing seem difficult, even
exhausting. It usually requires faster
breathing, which may introduce a sense of urgency and anxiety about breathing. It makes completion of exhale difficult,
which can trigger breathlessness, chest tightness, and worry about getting the
next breath. It may create a sense of
feeling confined, restricted, and trapped, setting the stage for feeling
defensive and insecure. Chest breathing
makes breathing intentional, and “requires” that you “take” a breath! Intentional breathing, conscious or
unconscious, interferes with diaphragmatic control. It brings a sense of struggle to breathing, a
behavior that should otherwise seem automatic, effortless, and easy. Chest breathing is a quick and easy way to
deregulate chemistry.
Chest breathing often
triggers muscle posturing, even in muscles entirely unrelated to breathing,
which can result in tension and pain, including headache. Muscle posturing based on shifting from
diaphragmatic to chest breathing is known as dysponesis, and it shows up when people feel defensive in their
bodies, e.g., in muscles related to previous injuries. Muscle defensiveness, however, is only the
tip of the “defensiveness iceberg,” and is likely to be part of a much larger
defensive configuration embedded in other physiology and in personal experience,
including emotion and cognition. Experiencing the effects of chest breathing versus
diaphragmatic breathing is a part of the learning process involved in mechanics
play.
Diaphragmatic
breathing is essential to maintaining healthy body chemistry: chemoregulation
is achieved primarily through diaphragmatic control. Adaptive diaphragmatic breathing simply
“happens” in accordance with brainstem reflexes, and doesn’t need your
“help.” It is effortless, efficient,
quiet, slow, and gentle, but not deep. Self-defeating
forms of diaphragmatic breathing, however, may also be easily learned,
consciously or unconsciously, as a reinforced operant behavior. Unlearning these forms of diaphragmatic
breathing is also addressed through mechanics play. Here is an example:
Breathing for relaxation can go wrong.
A psychologist in gave
her corporate clients homework exercises for relaxation training, which invariably
included diaphragmatic breathing practice.
Not infrequently, however, her clients would report their displeasure in
doing the exercises, which she had interpreted as “Type A” discomfort with relaxation
and inner focus. Upon working with a CapnoTrainer,
however, she discovered to her surprise, that many of her clients had been
practicing overbreathing! Without
realizing it, deep breathing had transported them into severe states of
hypocapnia. During her initial
experience with the CapnoTrainer, she tested an executive in the office, who
had refused to continue his relaxation homework assignments, and found that
upon “relaxing” his PCO2 levels dropped for 40 to below 20 mmHg!
Copyrighted by
Behavioral Physiology Institute,