Not getting enough air and breathing incorrectly can increase your anxiety and cause some damage to your health. It seems simple, but sometimes breathing well is an art. Breathing can help you calm down, but it's not always easy to do it correctly, or you develop bad habits that are difficult to correct, such as breathing through your mouth. For this reason, experts remember that not taking a breath and breathing correctly can cause some damage to your health and impair, for example, your rest. Inhaling and exhaling air seems like a simple, innate movement that we have learned by default, but not all of us do it as well as we think or should. Inhale through the nose? At what rate? «Breathing is something natural and instinctive, an activity that, in general, we do not do badly; but you have to remember to breathe through your nose, since the nasal filtering system allows us to capture higher quality air. And you shouldn't rush. A normal and healthy respiratory rate, at rest, is around 12 and 18 breaths per minute. The issue is complicated when you have a stuffy nose, go for a run or do other aerobic exercise outdoors. Then, it is difficult to breathe, it is more common to get confused and catch the air through the mouth. And that's where problems can arise. "If you breathe with your mouth open on the street and it's cold, the air doesn't have time to humidify and warm up properly, so the mucous membranes can get cold." The result: the chance of catching a cold increases. Beyond this precaution, the expert acknowledges, there are no major problems.
Of course, if you are overweight or obese, you should know that this condition increases the risk of you suffering from a nocturnal respiratory disorder, such as apnea-hypopnea syndrome, which impairs the quality of sleep. "This problem causes us to stop breathing at certain times and, in general, we capture a smaller volume of air, so we will not have a restful sleep and we will suffer from drowsiness in the morning," says the doctor. When the weight drops, the syndrome improves, even curing itself.
Low weight (BMI<18.5) can also be a problem and is present in 20-40% of people who suffer from a serious respiratory disease. The muscles responsible for respiration, together with the heart, are the only ones that do not rest for a moment throughout our lives and breathing consumes between 2% and 3% of the total energy used by the organism in the day to day. day, so it is necessary to have an adequate calorie intake so that breathing is not affected.
