About Breathing
	An Overview What is overbreathing? What are its effects? Overbreathing & performance Overbreathing & health Why do we overbreathe? What can you do about overbreathing?
Mission Organization Certification Workshops About Breathing Professional services Instrumentation Business Opportunity Downloads Links Contact us Are you overbreathing? Which brain is yours?	ARE YOU OVERBREATHING? Which of the above two brains is yours? WHAT IS OVERBREATHING? Overbreathing means carbon dioxide (CO2) deficiency, a physiological condition known as hypocapnia. You may wonder, “How can I have a CO2 deficiency? I thought CO2 was a waste product! Yes, CO2 is a “waste” product in the sense that it is a byproduct of metabolism, but CO2 plays a critical role in acid-base physiology. Although CO2 is excreted in the exhale, it is retained in the blood where it regulates pH levels vital to the distribution of oxygen to tissues such as the brain. In fact, while at rest, only about 14 percent of the CO2 that travels in blood through the capillary bed of the lungs is actually excreted. In a healthy person, arterial CO2 is precisely maintained, even during exercise when CO2 production may increase by tenfold. When TOO MUCH CO2 is being excreted by breathing too fast and/or too deeply, a CO2 deficit quickly develops resulting in alkalosis where the pH of the blood and other fluids is too high. The effects can be insidious and dramatic. The picture at the top of this page is an example of how dramatic the effect is on blood flow in the brain: the picture shows how one minute of moderate overbreathing reduced oxygen concentration by 40 percent! So which brain is yours? And, what effect could this loss of oxygen have on your ability to think, concentrate, and remember? Hypocapnia can result in profound immediate and long-term effects that trigger, exacerbate, or cause a wide variety of serious emotional, perceptual, cognitive, attention, behavioral, and physical changes in performance and health. ARE YOU ONE OF THESE PERSONS? (at the top of this page) Surveys suggest that 10 to 25 percent of the US population suffers from chronic overbreathing, and that up to 60 percent of all ambulance calls in major US cities may be a direct result of the symptoms triggered by overbreathing! For every person who shows up in emergency, how many more show up in physician’s offices with unexplained symptoms? For every person who goes to see a physician, how many more simply go to work? And for everyone who reports a “medical symptom” how many more suffer with performance deficits?