Treating Migraine with Buteyko Breathing

Migraine headaches can truly disrupt your life. Doing a Buteyko Breathing course can help a lot: Over the course of a month or more you can attain real measurable progress, lessening the intensity and frequency of migraine attacks and the need for medications.

What is Migraine?

Migraine is a severe recurring headache, usually affecting only one side of the head, characterized by sharp pain and often accompanied by nausea, vomiting, and visual disturbances.

Cause of Migraine

Considering Buteyko theory, migraine (attacks) can occur when you generally breathe too much so that you exhale too much CO2 and the CO2 level of the blood becomes too low. The lack of CO2 causes the veins in the brain to be more narrow (CO2 is a vasodilator so a lack of CO2 causes veins to constrict).

When the veins become too narrow, your body counteracts it by releasing chemicals that make the veins wider again.
If, however, the veins are widened too much, the veins generate pressure on the brain and a migraine headache occurs.

When the body sees the problem of too narrow veins and less oxygen supply, it can decide to correct it by widening the veins by releasing chemicals. But this can go wrong when the veins become too wide and generate migraine headaches.

Revert migraine with a Buteyko Breathing course

Prof. Buteyko's solution to migraine is a long-term approach, focusing on the underlying cause of narrowing veins. The process of learning how to breathe less and getting results with migraine is a slow and gradual one. Proper managament of the process is very important to achieve good progress.

Therefore, when using Buteyko Breathing to treat migraine, a lot of contact and guidance from us is generally needed. Results are good if you keep practicing, are patient and keep in touch with us for additional guidance as you continue your Buteyko Breathing practice. Good results generally take 1 to 3 months, but even in the first week of practice, migraine sufferes can definitely experience concrete benefits from the course: Migraine attacks can become less painful or less frequent, before they really disappear. Results are dependent on:

Severity of symptoms
Students' dedication and effort in following instructions
The level of practice: basic, intermediate or advanced
Ongoing guidance and support after finishing the course.
Other factors: age, general health, other chronic diseases, medical history, medication usage, fitness and lifestyle activities.