Sleep, Beautiful Sleep part 2
submitted for The Blue Mountains Gazette, Wednesday, November 21, 2001
People who do not get enough sleep are endangering their health and seriously jeopardising their performance at work and play. Sleep deprivation leads to chronically under-functioning adults and children alike. Far too many road and industrial accidents are due to lack of quality sleep.
For some folk it is the over stimulating activities like late night television viewing, eating a large meal too close to bedtime or drinking too much caffeine that causes the insomnia. However, for an increasingly large number of people, their lack of sleep is due to sleeping disorders such as sleep apnoea, asthma, intense dreams, dry mouth, frequent trips to the loo at night and panic attacks.
Recently a television news programme featured a story on children with sleep apnoea and snoring. The solution was to remove the tonsils, adenoids or both. Why do some children develop chronic tonsillitis and other respiratory infections? It may well begin with incorrect breathing. If a child or adult breathes through their mouth while they are asleep they are likely to have one or all of the aforementioned disorders. When you breathe through your mouth you are exposing a tennis court size area of your internal tissue (your respiratory tract, lungs and throat) to unfiltered, dry, cold air full of bugs. In children, the upper palate doesn’t have a chance to form properly, plus a myriad of other orthodontic expenses from gum disease to malocclusion may occur.
Mouth breathing tends to make you overbreathe. Overbreathing causes a drop in carbon dioxide and therefore the loss of the efficient delivery of oxygen throughout the body. The drop in carbon dioxide results in more mucous, inflammation of the airways and spasms in the muscles of the bronchi.
Overbreathing is noisy, big breathing. If you can hear anyone breathing at night they are breathing more than their body needs to breathe for the correct balance of blood gasses. If big breathing was good for you then snorers should feels wonderful when they wake up. Ask someone who suffers from sleep apnoea how they feel each morning. Where snoring is the problem it tends to be people other than the snorer who suffer with insomnia.
If sleep loss is a problem in your home a course in correct breathing may well be the answer for you.
For enquiries about courses or private consultations for remedial breathing phone Jennifer Harris practitioner/member of the Buteyko Institute of Breathing & Health on 0414 833 857 or for more information take a look at http://www.pnc.com.au/~breatheasy which is Jennifer’s website.