22/minute

I had a very interesting doctor appointment the other day. It was for my whiplash injury from a car accident nearly two years ago, which is still giving me problems. So, I found myself sitting in a room, hooked up to a computer that monitored my breathing, heart rate and temperature. As I watched the colorful lines and balls on the screen in front of me go up and down, the Doc told to me all about the sympathetic nervous system, and how it triggers the “fight or flight” reaction in the body. While it was all very interesting, I was wondering when she would get to the point about why that had anything to do with the fact that my neck is still in pain.

Then she pointed at the blue ball going up and down rapidly on the screen, “That’s your breathing rate. When the ball goes up, you’re inhaling, when it goes down, you’re exhaling.”

Okay, I thought, simple enough.

Then she said, “Normal breathing rate is between 6 and 10 breaths per minute”, she pointed to a number at the bottom of the screen, which was flipping around somewhere between 19 and 22, “Those are your breaths per minute”.

She went on to explain that by breathing fast, I am keeping my body in the “fight or flight” mode, telling it constantly to be ready for something. This is keeping the trigger points in my muscles on hyper drive. So, every time I put my head/neck in an uncomfortable position, or move it just a little bit too quick, they trigger the muscles to tense up, causing pain.

She looked back at the computer and said, “Usually when I tell people they are breathing fast, they slow down… You’re not.”

I laughed and the little blue ball jerked around on the screen.

The next bit of information was about breathing with the diaphragm, or “belly breathing”. Which I don’t do. She explained how the muscle works to bring air into the lungs, which all sounded very elementary, yet when she told me to take a breath, my belly stayed still and my chest rose.

Wrong!

More explaining, and ‘watch me’ and then, “Well, your diaphragm is weak from never using it, so we will have to work on that, it will take some practice.”

So we started the practice. I was told to watch the yellow ball on the screen and inhale as it went up, exhale as it went down. It paced up and down the screen very smoothly... and so effing slow! I tried to follow it with my breaths and the red heart rate ball started flipping out all over the place. She had to speed up the yellow ball for me because she could tell I was about to pass out. Even the quicker one was kicking my butt. Apparently, I am hyperventilating all the time.

After a few more minutes of struggling, I was sent home with some homework. I read through the information about hyperventilation and found that it causes stress, anxiety, forgetfulness, exhaustion, contributes to PMS and muscular pain.

The answer to all my problems.

I’ve been trying to slow down my breathing and use my diaphragm at night and even a bit in the morning before I wake up. Yesterday at work, I installed the other piece of ‘homework’ on my computer. It’s a breathing exercise that you can set to pop up at different intervals throughout the day. Instead of a yellow ball, it looks like a tube filling with color. When the color goes up, I inhale, down I exhale. I have it set to pop up every 45 minutes, for a two-minute exercise. I like it so far, it makes me stop, breathe, and relax.

I’m not so sure how much I believe it will heal my neck, but I’m hoping that it will at least help me to be a more calm person. I wonder what that's like?

I just hope it kicks in before Old Coworker #1's wedding tomorrow. My banshee of an old boss will be seated at the same table as Croomie and I! At least I will have boyfriend with me to shield some of the rude side comments that occasionally spew out of her. I just hope that I can come up with some cool work related stuff to tell her. Even though she'll just nod with raised eyebrows in her, 'I really don't care, but I'm going to look like that's impressive anyway, so they'll think I'm impressed even though I'm about to say something snotty in 3,2,1 -' way.

Damn, where is that breathing-tracker?