You can if necessary survive weeks without food and days without water; but you can only last a few minutes without air. Breathing is your most immediate vital function; all the others depend on it. Efficient breathing therefore sets the tone and pace of everything else your body does.
Breathing and respiration
To turn your food into usable energy you have to burn it slowly at body temperature, converting the heat into biochemical power to drive your metabolism. This process needs oxygen and makes waste carbon dioxide, just like any other fire. Respiration is the internal way you carry oxygen from your lungs through your bloodstream to every cell in your body, and take the carbon dioxide back again. Breathing is the external movement you make to get air in and out of your lungs to support respiration. Respiration therefore determines how hard you have to breathe, but the way you do it is largely up to you. You can learn to breathe at three different levels — using your diaphragm, your lower chest muscles, or your upper chest. Each method fills stretches your lung into a different shape; all three together ensure that air gets into every part of it. The features of each method are:-
Diaphragm — your belly swells as you breathe in, and subsides as you breathe out. Check this with one hand on your navel, using the other to make sure your ribs do not move. You cannot do this wearing a tight waistband or belt.
Lower chest — your lower ribs spread out sideways to widen your chest as you breathe in, and sag back as you breathe out. Check this by feeling the ribs below your left armpit with the back of your left hand, and similarly on the right.
Upper chest — your upper ribs and breast-bone lift forwards as you breathe in, and sag back as you breathe out. Check how your breast-bone moves.
Breathe in with all three using your diaphragm, lower and upper chest in turn, then breathe out in the opposite order — like building a tower of three bricks and then dismantling it. You will be surprised how much this exercise increases your breathing capacity and soothes your nerves.
Your lungs
If you imagine a small tree with a hollow trunk and branches and tiny blisters of delicate skin instead of leaves, you have an accurate impression of how your lungs are constructed. The tree hangs upside down from your voice-box, and the trunk’s two main branches each cater for one lung either side of your chest. Everything about your nose and lungs is designed to get moist, clean, warm air to and from the big bunches of blisters at their business end, where gases can exchange between the air and your blood. These blisters are exceedingly fragile, and cannot bear toxic fumes anywhere near them. So a series of protective mechanisms exist to keep your lungs clean — sneezing, coughing, catarrh and muscle spasm (wheezing, Leaflet P13). The lining of your larger tubes even includes a conveyor belt mechanism — many thousands of muscular hairs that sweep mucus uphill, away from the blisters to be cleared from your throat. Provided these protective mechanisms are adequately supported with good nourishment and are not overwhelmed with air pollution, your lungs can stay clean and youthful throughout a long life. Otherwise the tubes gradually become chronically inflamed and thickened, and tobacco smoke paralyses the conveyor belt mechanism — chronic bronchitis. Inadequately protected gas exchange blisters burst one by one like bubbles, gradually and permanently reducing their workforce — emphysema.
What to do
Lungs are very sensitive to poor nourishment, poor ventilation and air pollution — so get these right.
1. Take at least a few really deep breaths in fresh air every day, using all three levels.
2. Ventilate your home and workplace adequately, and avoid or filter smoky atmospheres — ask to see equipment at any electrical store.
3. Eat fresh leafy vegetables every day, raw or scarcely cooked. Have onions or garlic regularly.
4. Vitamin C (Leaflet F04) and regular garlic lozenges (Leaflet P19) help to reverse chronic bronchitis.