Breathing: How to take control of your Brain and Blood
Dr. Jonathan Arkin
One of the worst stressors to our health is the concept of pH imbalance. If we go back to science class in school, we will recall the idea of homeostasis. Our blood is supposed to remain in a very limited range of a pH of 7.3-7.4 for us to have proper amounts of energy production and life-giving nutrient delivery to all our body’s tissues. Now most people are currently living with a very acidic blood level, this is due to many stressors in our lives, terrible nutrition, chronic stress, EMF exposure, and lack of activity. When our blood pH drops it is a contributing factor to many chronic diseases, our immune system can go out of control, we call these types of conditions autoimmune disorders, we can get chronic fatigue, poor digestion, brain fog, and many other horrible conditions that many of us have learned to accept as normal. Even more importantly, cancer cannot flourish in an alkaline (or high pH) environment.
Luckily in the infinite wisdom of mother nature our bodies have a fantastic method of helping us control and improve our pH levels. Now remember this is critical because it will lead to a reduction of the symptoms we talked about earlier (i.e. autoimmunity, brain fog, lack of healing, etc…). That method is breathing! When we exhale, we rid ourselves of CO2, or carbon dioxide, and when we inhale, we increase levels of O2, or oxygen. By controlling our breath, we can very positively influence the pH of our blood. Now this is very important to understand as many times your doctors will prescribe breathing exercises for you to do at home, this will help in your healing and will optimize the treatments you receive in office.
One of the best breathing methods to increase the pH of your blood (remember low pH =acidic and high pH = alkaline) is when we exhale for significantly longer than we inhale. Take a deep breath, use 4 seconds to fill your lungs completely, hold your breath for 4 seconds and then attempt to exhale for 8 seconds. Difficult right? Now if this is too hard, we will decrease the amount of time, so inhale for 3 seconds, hold for 3, and then exhale for 6 seconds. This will decrease the amount of CO2 and will increase the O2 in your blood. When this happens, we will create a more alkaline environment which will allow our bodies to heal and function much more efficiently. Now it is best to begin this practice by sitting down and performing the exercise for no more than 5 minutes at a time. You may feel slightly light headed when you are initially doing this exercise. Other common breathing techniques are called Wim Hof breathing https://www.wimhofmethod.com/ and Box Breathing https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/321805.php which have similar benefits but do differ slightly. If your doctor prescribes these exercises, please know it is vitally important to your health and healing.
Now that you are armed with more knowledge of how to take control of your own health and physiology lets get to work building a healthier life together.
-Happy Healing
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