We spend an enormous amount of money on the quest for improving our health, our looks, our weight, our fitness, our sleep, our energy and our sex lives. But the fact is that we already have the key to this and more. What’s more, it doesn’t require you to spend a single penny. The key to better looks, greater sex, improved health, reduced stress, and a much trimmer and more energetic body lies in something that is such a natural and fundamental part of our lives that we rarely even think about it — namely our breathing.

Impaired breathing habits may produce many seemingly unrelated negative consequences for your health and wellbeing. Where the problem will arise in your body depends on what your individual weaknesses are.

The problem

1. Lack of insight. The problem is that we are not aware that our breathing is impaired, and we simply don’t know what constitutes good and poor breathing habits.

2. Where to turn? And if we’ve come to realize that our breathing patterns have room for improvement, where do we turn? If we have poor eating, sleep, thinking and exercise habits there is a wealth of information, experts and methods available to us. But when we want to improve our breathing habits the answer—until now—has not been that easily available.

3. Don’t realize the importance. And even when we find someone that can help us improve our breathing, for example, with the Conscious Breathing Retraining Program, we often don’t realize how important our breathing actually is.

Ten times more air than food

Life starts and stops with a breath. We survive without food for weeks, without water for days, but without air we cannot survive more than a few minutes.

Do you know that we take up to 1,000 breaths each hour, in other words 25,000 breaths in a single day. That’s 10-20 kg of air passing in and out of our system each day, which is ten times more than the amount of food we eat. This says a lot of how important our breathing is.

Intake of food, fluid and air during 24 hours

What is Conscious Breathing?

Conscious Breathing is not yoga, not meditation, not mindfulness and yet at the same time it is all of those and everything in between.

Conscious Breathing is about our daily breathing habits. It is about laying the foundation for better health and more energy and harmony and curiosity and creativity while at the same time reducing stress, pain, fear, worry and health problems.

Conscious Breathing is about oxygenating our body in a more efficient way by improving the way we take the 1 000 breaths we breathe every hour.

Conscious Breathing is about understanding how important our breathing is for every aspect of our life – our thoughts, emotions and bodily functions. In fact, our breath is the best stress, fear and pain management tool ever invented.

Twelve benefits of improving our breathing habits:

1. BOOST YOUR ENERGY

It is much more efficient to produce energy with the aid of oxygen than without it. Without oxygen only about 6% of the available energy is extracted, while energy production with oxygen can extract up to 100% energy from the same amount of nutrients.

In other words, up to 16 times more energy is produced with oxygen than without. You can read more in this article: LACK OF ENERGY – The Foundation for poor health.

2. LOSING WEIGHT

Fat can only be burned in the presence of oxygen. Impaired breathing habits deliver less oxygen to the cells and your ability to burn fat decreases.

In conclusion, poor breathing may lead to being overweight. This article may be of interest: – Increase your ability to burn fat with breathing retraining.

3. IMPROVING ASTHMA

Asthma is a disease that constricts the airways, making it increasingly difficult to breathe. Including breathing retraining should be obvious in all forms of treatment of this disease. More or less all asthmatics hyperventilate. In this article you can find out more: Improve Your Breathing – Improve Your Asthma

4. CALMING A RACING MIND

Our brain is a major consumer of oxygen and consequently the organ that suffers most from poor breathing habits. A brain with too little oxygen is a stressed brain, and it will go into fight/flight mode, focused on threats and survival. Read this article for more info: Calming a racing mind.

5. STRENGTHEN YOUR HEART

Your heart is situated right between your lungs, and how you actually breathe has a big influence on your heart. For example if you start to breathe faster, your heart will beat faster.

Tense, non-rhythmic and stressed breathing makes for a strained, non-rhythmic and stressed heart. Relaxed breathing, on the other hand, ensures a relaxed heart. So when we improve our breathing we also make the life easier for our heart. Get inspired by this article: Strengthen your heart with correct breathing.

6. DEVELOP STRAIGHT TEETH AND A NICE SMILE

The position of our tongue has a huge impact on facial development. In habitual mouth breathing the position is altered, which can cause changes in the way a child’s face, teeth and smile develop.

More information can be found in this article: Mouth breathing negatively affect children’s smile, teeth, face and airways.

7. ENJOYING A GREATER SEX LIFE

Did you know that there’s a close connection between the ability to breathe through the nose and both male and female sexual enjoyment and libido?

The sex enhancement drug Viagra could be developed thanks to the research on Nitric Oxide, NO, a substance produced in large quantities in our nose. The levels of NO has an effect on the ability to fill our genitals with blood.

Find out more in this article: Nasal Breathing Boosts Your Sex Life.

8. IMPROVE SPORTS PERFORMANCE

If your breathing is impaired, you can’t run, swim, bike or maintain your concentration, strength, and endurance optimally. But how many of us actively practice improving our breath for optimal oxygenation when we jog, bike, play soccer, golf, tennis or ice hockey?

Get inspired by this article: Conscious Breathing for Optimum Sports Performance.

9. SLEEPING BETTER

Mouth breathing at rest automatically means that we hyperventilate, which leads to oxygen deficiency and poor sleep.

Man is the only animal that sleeps with an open mouth. There is a very close relationship between poor breathing and poor sleep. Read this article for more information: Breathe better – Sleep better.

10. STABILIZING YOUR EMOTIONS

Our natural response to feeling scared and tense is to reflexively alter our breathing. We gasp for air and hold our breath in a way to wake up our body or we breathe high up in our chest in an attempt to “run away” from the unpleasant feelings often situated in our abdominal area.

Read more in theis article: Close connection between breathing, stress and difficult emotions.

11. REDUCE PAIN AND ACHES

What is your first reaction when stepping into a cold shower? You quickly draw in a breath, right?

When your body is tense your breathing become tense, and pain and aches will increase. That is why breathing is frequently used as a way to reduce pain during childbirth.

Read more here: Your Breath – A Powerful Tool For Pain Relief

12. ACCELERATING YOUR SPIRITUAL GROWTH

Respiration means reconnection to spirit. Slow, low and rhythmic breathing holds the key to connect with the core of your being and accelerate your spiritual growth.