The mechanism
It is not oxygen you are short of. It is carbon dioxide.
This is the single most counter-intuitive idea in breathwork, and once it lands, a lot of confusing symptoms start to make sense.
- Your blood is already full. At rest, the haemoglobin in your blood is around 97 to 99 per cent saturated with oxygen. Breathing harder cannot meaningfully add to that. There is no spare room.
- Fast, big breathing blows off CO₂. Carbon dioxide is not waste to be got rid of as fast as possible. It is the signal that tells your blood vessels to relax and tells haemoglobin to release its oxygen into the tissue.
- Low CO₂ means less oxygen delivered. Blood vessels narrow, haemoglobin holds on tighter, and less oxygen reaches the brain and muscles. You breathe more, and feel worse. So you breathe more again.
- Your system reads it as danger. Fast, shallow, upper-chest breathing is what a body does when it is under threat. Do it all day and the brain keeps the alarm on, because the breath is telling it to.
How to spot it
Over-breathing is quiet. It rarely looks like panting.
Almost nobody arrives saying "I think I breathe too much". They arrive tired, wired, waking at 3am, or never quite able to take a satisfying breath. These are the everyday signs.
In your breathing
Air hunger, the sense of never getting a full breath. Frequent sighing or yawning. Mouth breathing, or waking with a dry mouth. Your upper chest and shoulders doing the work instead of your lower ribs.
In your day
Wired but tired. Trouble switching off in the evening. Racing thoughts at bedtime. An afternoon flatness that coffee only shifts for an hour. Tension in the jaw, neck and shoulders.
In your numbers
A resting breath rate above 12 to 14 a minute. A BOLT score under about 20 seconds. A heart rhythm that stays jagged on the monitor even when you are sitting still and nothing is wrong.
What to do about it
The correction is small, and it is boring.
You do not fix over-breathing with a big breathing session. You fix it by changing your default, all day, in a way nobody around you would notice.
Nose, low, light and slow. Lips together, breathe through the nose. Let the movement happen in the lower ribs and belly rather than the upper chest. Make each breath quiet enough that someone sitting next to you could not hear it. Let the out-breath be a little longer than the in-breath.
That is it. The practices in your plan are structured ways of training the same four things, so that your unconscious breathing pattern slowly changes to match. The measure that tracks it is your BOLT score, and your resting breath rate.
If you have asthma, a heart or lung condition, are pregnant, or have low blood pressure, work through breath changes with your practitioner rather than on your own. Nothing here should ever feel like a struggle.
Next short read
What your BOLT score tells you
The Body Oxygen Level Test is a simple measure of how sensitive your body is to carbon dioxide.
Read this →
Why the out-breath is the brake
The fastest way to slow a nervous system down is to lengthen the out-breath.
Read this →
What heart coherence actually is
Coherence is not a good heart rate or a relaxed mood.
Read this →
If you have a Calm Plan
Nothing here is required reading.
Your plan works on its own. These pages are for the days when you want to know why it works, not what to do next. If something in yours is not landing, or your numbers have stopped moving, that is worth a conversation rather than more reading.
Book a session with RichOr reply to the email your plan arrived in. It comes straight to me.