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Mission Organization Certification Workshops About Breathing Professional services Instrumentation Business Opportunity Downloads Links Contact us Are you overbreathing? Which brain is yours?	The potentially debilitating combination of cerebral hypoxia and cerebral hypoglycemia, resulting directly from deregulated breathing chemistry can result in profound psychological and behavioral changes: (1) deficits in ability to attend, focus, concentrate, imagine, rehearse the details of an action, engage in complex tasks, perform perceptual motor-skills (e.g., piloting vehicles), parallel-process information, problem solve, access relevant memory (e.g., test performance), think, and communicate effectively (e.g., public speaking); (2) emotional reactivity (e.g., marital conflict) that may trigger or exacerbate debilitating stressful states of consciousness, including, apprehension, anxiety, anger, frustration, fear, panic, vulnerability, and feelings of low self-esteem; and (3) personality shifts or dissociative states that result in social disconnectedness, emotional withdrawal, defensive posturing, emotional numbness, and inability to be present. Overbreathing is undoubtedly an insidious and debilitating response to everyday challenges, insidious because its presence goes unrecognized and its effects unidentified. In fact, 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 are the result of 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? Overbreathing is a behavior that precipitates changes in chemistry that can mediate these misunderstood symptoms and deficits. Breathing is a behavior that serves multiple objectives, such as communication (talking), yoga, relaxation, meditation, consciousness exploration, and respiration. The fundamental objective is, of course, “respiration,” i.e., meeting the oxygen requirements, under normal circumstances, of every cell, everywhere. Other breathing objectives must be ultimately subordinated to good respiration, and not the reverse as some would have it. For example, teaching good respiration through insistence on the mechanics associated with relaxation may create a problem rather than offer a solution. Optimal respiration means regulating chemistry, through proper ventilation of CO2, relaxed or not, such as during the acrobatics of talking, emotional encounters, and professional challenges. Chemistry needs to be optimal regardless of what we are doing, thinking, or feeling. Good respiration requires neither relaxation nor a specific mechanical prescription, save one: the varied melodies of breathing mechanics must ultimately play the music of balanced chemistry, e.g., while talking. The effects of hypocapnia are profound and deserve full attention on the part of virtually anyone doing breathing training. Continued