Content
Discovered abdominal breathing I heard of “abdominal breathing” two days ago. It is essentially breathing by expanding your belly instead of your chest muscles and it results in higher oxygen intake because the lower parts if lungs are larger. It activates your diaphragm. I have had respiratory and cardiovascular problems all my life. Very severe shortness of breath and my heart beat is at least 100 every time they have measured it. It was 125 the last time that a nurse took my heart beat and I was just in a composed sitting position. It was so bad that the doctor sent me to the radiology lab to run some tests. Sometimes I feel like my heart is going to jump out of my chest when I’m about to go to sleep. I do Zero exercise and I’m a former smoker. My blocks are mainly on the words that start with A and E vowels. My stuttering isn’t that bad but it’s bad enough to make me conscious about it. After finding out what abdominal breathing is, I gave it a try while laying on my bed. I swear I had never taken a breath in my life like that. I always breathed with my chest which resulted in short and small air intake. I’ve been practicing it ever since in different postures and here is what I experienced: 1) my heart beat is normal. 2) no more shortness of breath. I can’t believe I walked from work to home for the first time this afternoon with a fast pace and it took me a solid hour. I had never thought I’d be able to walk such a long distance without running out of breath. 3) noticeable improvement in my speech. My blocks are mainly due to lack of output breath. Now I feel like I have a much larger capacity 4) abdominal breathing really calms me down and lowers the frequency of breathing 5) I feel like my diaphragm pushes air more vigorously now and it smoothes the flow of speech 6) there is less strain on my upper chest muscles and they don’t get involuntarily contracted when I speak There are two downsides though: 1) you have to constantly think about your breathing and be careful not to use your chest muscles. Otherwise, you’ll relapse. 2) it’s hard to maintain abdominal breathing when seated because it presses against your organs