GRADUATE SCHOOL OF BEHAVIORAL HEALTH SCIENCES

BREATHING HABIT ANALYSIS

Breathing habits have profound effects on health and performance.

A Live, Interactive Webinar Lecture

With Peter M. Litchfield, Ph.D.

 

Dates, times: (register for only one lecture)

  • March 30, 2016, Wednesday, 3:00 – 5:00 pm Mountain Time
  • April 13, 2016, Wednesday, 3:00 – 5:00 pm Mountain Time

Place:

  • your office or home – wherever you have a high speed internet connection

CE credit:

  • 2 hours

Fee:

  • no charge

Transcript:

  • attendance required

Registration:

  • http://breathingsciences.webex.com
  • You will receive full instructions by email upon registration.
  • Registration restricted to 30 participants per session.
  • Additional sessions will be scheduled as needed.

 

For whom

Healthcare practitioners, human service professionals, performance consultants

Post-lecture recording

The event will be recorded and made available for listening and download only for program registrants.

Lecture description

Breathing is about much more than respiration. Conceptualizing breathing as behavior brings our understanding of its importance in health and performance to an entirely new level. We learn breathing habits that serve us in powerful and unconscious ways, but like any kind of habit they may work for us, OR against us. When they work against us, they can cause, trigger, exacerbate, and perpetuate serious changes in physiology, emotion, cognition, personality, and performance. Most dysfunctional breathing is a learning problem, not a clinical one.

How do we identify dysfunctional breathing habits? How do we identify their learned components, effects, triggers, motivations, reinforcements, and learning histories? This lecture will introduce you to the “breathing interview” and how together with our clients we explore their breathing and its effects based on the principles of behavior analysis that includes phenomenological exploration, guided breathing, awareness learning, customized testing, interview forms, and capnography instrumentation.  

Questions that will be addressed

  • Why are breathing habits such a big problem?
  • Why are they so common and we don’t know it?
  • How do they affect our health and performance?
  • Why are their effects so serious and insidious?
  • Why do we learn dysfunctional breathing habits?
  • What are they and how do we identify them?
  • When and where are these habits triggered?
  • Why don’t they just go away if they don’t work?
  • Why are popular prescriptive protocols not a solution?

 Learning objectives

  1. Why is breathing habit assessment so important in professional practice?
  2. How does understanding breathing as behavior change the way we help our clients?
  3. Why do prescriptive breathing traditions usually fail to effectively address dysfunctional breathing?
  4. What does a client-centered learning solutions paradigm offer you and your clients?

Peter M. Litchfield, Ph.D.

Dr. Litchfield is President of the Professional School of Behavioral Health Sciences and Chairman of the Board of better Physiology, Ltd. He earned his Ph.D. in experimental psychology from the University of Portland in 1972. His areas of expertise include: behavioral medicine, behavioral physiology, respiratory psychophysiology, behavioral pharmacology, placebo effects, psychophysiological monitoring instrumentation, and business planning. Respiratory psychophysiology and educational capnography have been his exclusive focus since 2000. He has lectured on these subjects for more than 40 years in person and by webinar throughout North America and in Asia, Australia, Europe, and Latin America to diverse audiences, ranging from medical societies to corporate groups.