Darth Vader, Laughter and Bubbles

I ran a workshop yesterday for very young children (2-4 years old) and their carers. Yesterday’s emphasis was on healthy breathing practices and I illustrated the teaching points with a Darth Vader Mask with voice-changer (a must-have for anyone who was a teenager when the Star Wars films were first released, I wish that I could have justified buying the version with the cloak and light sabre), the extensive use of bubbles and much laughter.

There is an intuitively attractive link between emotion and breathing that is reflected in everyday language. “The shock winded him”; “The sight of it took my breath away”; “She was breathless with anticipation”; “He sighed in frustration”; “He was panting in with excitement”. There is general agreement that breathing has a significant impact on our health and well-being but beyond believing that good breathing involves moving plenty of fresh air into our lungs and breathing out some waste products there is little understanding beyond that.

Carbon dioxide is both one of these waste products and one of the body’s most important bio-regulators. The level of carbon dioxide in our bodies directly influences our ability to take-up oxygen in all our of body’s tissues, both at rest and during intense activity, creating a state of oxygen starvation. Both in the short-term and the long-term the impact of this lack of oxygen manifests itself in a wide range of symptoms including headaches, dizziness,symptoms of IBS, feelings of fight or flight and many of the stress symptoms that are experienced by carers.

Every breath we take has an impact on our blood chemistry. We breathe between 16,000 to 30,000 times a day. Breathing has the most direct impact on our mind-body function and sense of well-being. Breathing affects our heart rate and blood pressure among many physical systems of the body: it has a profound influence on our behaviour, our cognitive performance and our emotional state.

For all healthy people, the level of carbon dioxide within our bodies needs to be maintained within a small tolerance level. We naturally develop a range of breathing behaviours that are appropriate to different circumstances. For example, when we are exercising heavily and producting up to ten times more carbon dioxide than normal then we need to be able to blow off the excess.

However, many people develop breathing behaviours that are inappropriate to their current circumstances. In the same way that we can experience strong fight or flight responses when faced with a nagging irritation rather than a life-threatening event, when we feel stress we can produce the breathing response that anticipates an imminent bout of activity. The physical activity doesn’t take place but the breathing pattern persists.

Over time, people may breathe in excess of their bodies’ needs and breathe out too much carbon dioxide even when they are at rest. This lack of carbon dioxide produces the state of hypocapnea. We are all familiar with the headache and sense of light-headedness that is caused by over-breathing when we blow up balloons. When we over-breathe chronically, although the impact is more subtle than dramatic, we develop a wide variety of symptoms.

Over-breathing for as little as one minute can reduce the oxgyen supply to the brain by 40 per cent; it also interferes with the supply of glucose to the brain. When this happens, the person can find it difficult to think or concentrate, they may become irritable. Over-breathing triggers changes in the body’s bio-chemistry that can lead to muscle or blood-vessel spasm. Depending on the underlying physiology, the consequences of this may result in a wide range of health complaints and symptoms including phobias and panic attacks, migraine attacks, high blood-pressure, angina episodes, changes in the normal rhythm of the heart, blood clot, low blood sugar levels, sleep disturbances, irritable bowel syndrome and chronic fatigue.

As well as these physical problems, hypocapnea caused by over-breathing is linked to attention deficit disorder, problems with remembering and recalling information and difficulty in using the imagination. It can make it difficult to co-ordinate actions and to perform detailed or complex tasks adequately.

During the workshop the adult participants experimented with a variety of breathing patterns that better matched their bodies’ current needs. The children were encouraged to breathe in time to music while resting and listening to a short meditation or story. Everybody learned about the importance of using the nose to breathe in and breathe out so that the air is properly warmed, filtered and humidified before reaching the lungs. Breathing out through the nose allows us to recover some of the heat and moisture before we lose it body, rather like a heat exchanger.

For most of our activities it is practical to breathe in and out of the nose and to keep the mouth closed to encourage good breathing habits. We experimented with techniques for managing typical situations like talking, coughing, eating and sneezing that can encourage over-breathing. Laughter can lead to over-breathing in many people. But laughter is so good for us that it is very rarely restricted on medical grounds. So we all took part in several laughter exercises (some of which will be used in the next Fun Federation event) and developed ways of restoring our breathing back to regular, healthy levels afterwards.

It was great to hear how much the noisy breathing of some of the children had quietened down by the end of the workshop. A couple of the children had also experienced relief from a cough that they had had when they started. By the end of the session, nobody sounded like Darth Vader!

The adult carers made very favourable comments about the event. They felt a lot of benefit from the techniques and particularly enjoyed watching the improvement in the children. And the mayhem that started when we blew bubbles for the children to pop by jumping up and running around while keeping their mouths closed.

A good, healthy day was had by all. And we laughed a lot along the way.

Copyright 2006, Tony Plant Happystance Project