Treating Sleep Apnea with Buteyko Breathing

What is Sleep Apnea?

Sleep apnea is a temporary suspension of breathing occurring repeatedly during sleep.

Cause of Sleep Apnea

Considering Buteyko theory, sleep apnea can occur when you generally breathe too much throughout the day. Exhaling too much CO2 causes low levels of CO2 in the blood. Since Co2 is such an essential molecule for the human organism, the body doesn't like it when CO2 levels become too low. So what happens with sleep apnea?

When people who overbreathe sleep, they start breathing even more than awake.
The body notices that CO2 levels are too low and doesn't like it. to stop the overbreathing and restore CO2 levels to a higher level, it temporarily stops your breathing all together.
When CO2 levels have risen to a very high level, you start feeling out of breath so the body starts breathing again.

When the body sees the problem of too much breathing and low oxygen supply suring sleep, it tries to correct the overbreathing by temporarily stopping breathing all together. Since this happens during sleep, it can severely affect the quality of your sleep and lead to other problems later on.

Revert Sleep Apnea with a Buteyko Breathing course

Since sleep apnea is the result of the body trying to correct overbreathing during sleep, we can revert sleep apnea by not overbreathing in the first place. The Buteyko Breathing approach to revert sleep apnea is a great natural solution to the problem of sleep apnea. It leads many people to being able to sleep without a CPAP machine, however the process to accomplish this is not always easy and some extra sessions to acomplish this is often required. Since sleep apnea is often accompanied by other health problems, it can take a while before sufficient progress is made and people are able to sleep well without any sleep apnea at all. In case there are no other health issues, it can often be accomplished within 1 month. Otherwise, it can take up to 3 months. 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.