Currently we require about 7.5 hours per day for sleep. This time, among adults, varies from 6 to 9 hours. With advance of chronic diseases (asthma, cancer, diabetes, cardiovascular problems, COPD, etc.), people generally sleep longer. Practical experience and clinical studies showed that voluntary sleep restrictions (e.g., only 3-5 hours) are impossible to maintain. Sleep deprivation experiments, conducted on animals, demonstrated loss of appetite, loss of weight, and gradual death.
Currently we require about 7.5 hours per day for sleep. This time, among adults, varies from 6 to 9 hours. With advance of chronic diseases (asthma, cancer, diabetes, cardiovascular problems, COPD, etc.), people generally sleep longer. Practical experience and clinical studies showed that voluntary sleep restrictions (e.g., only 3-5 hours) are impossible to maintain. Sleep deprivation experiments, conducted on animals, demonstrated loss of appetite and gradual death.
Meanwhile, clinical observations of 200 Russian medical doctors, who practice the Buteyko self-oxygenation therapy, revealed that humans can naturally sleep for 2 hours only, if they achieve superior body oxygenation. How and why?
Virtually all chronic conditions have tissue hypoxia (low body oxygenation) as a normal feature. In cases of cancer, heart disease, and COPD poor cellular oxygenation is the central factor that defines progression of the disease and the treatment methods used. At the same time, the unconscious breathing pattern of people relates or even defines body oxygenation.
In order to measure body oxygenation, after your usual exhalation, count your breath holding time in seconds, but only until the first signs of discomfort or first desire to breathe. What is the link between oxygenation and sleep?
Severely sick and critically ill people usually have less than 10 s of oxygen in the body. Most of these patients have long sleep (up to 10-12 hours) of very poor quality. The breathing pattern of these people is often visible and audible. It is deep and heavy. Minute ventilation is about 3-5 times more than the medical norm.
When these sick people practice the Buteyko oxygenation therapy (learning how to breathe for maximum body oxygenation), they achieve about 35-40 s of oxygen in the body and naturally spend only about 6 hours for refreshing and quiet sleep. Most people are satisfied with this level of health since they do not experience symptoms of their diseases and do not require medication at this stage. (Note that an average person has only about 20-25 s of oxygen these days, almost twice less than a century ago. This explains longer sleep for a modern man.)
However, hundreds of Russians continued to progress further and their GPs were monitoring their health. When these patients increased their body oxygenation up to 2.5-3 minutes (here again we are talking about stress-free breath holding test after usual exhalation), it was found that their sleep gets reduced, again without trying (!), down to 2 hours only. Doctor Buteyko and many his medical colleagues were among those who practically experienced this effect.
Remarkably, the same observation (about 2 hours of sleep in perfect health) can be found in old books about another breathing retraining technique “hatha yoga” (“hatha yoga” means “master of breath”). In fact, hatha yoga master were supposed to have about 3-5 minutes of oxygen in the body with 2 hours of natural sleep.
For both systems, hatha yoga and the Buteyko method, the goal is to reduce/restrain breathing using special breathing exercises and natural means. Physiologically, this goal makes perfect sense since thousands of medical studies proved that the more we breathe (at rest), the less oxygen our tissues get. Hyperventilation, or deep breathing, or any over-breathing, reduces body oxygenation. (Note that we are talking about unconscious breathing patterns or our breathing 24/7, not about some exercises that produce short-term changes.)
However, in comparison with hatha yoga, the Buteyko method is more specific and scientific. It was developed by Doctor Buteyko during the 1960s when he was the chief of the physiological laboratory and led the classified project funded by the Soviet Ministry of Aviation and Space Exploration. The project was devoted to study of optimum air composition in spaceships for maximum oxygenation of first Soviet astronauts. For almost a decade Dr. Buteyko studied interactions between breathing patterns, exercises, tissue oxygenation, and the work of the human body. He realised that over- breathing reduces body oxygenation and causes dozens of other physiological abnormalities.
There are several different mechanisms how breathing and body oxygenation influence our sleep. They involve oxygenation and relaxation of our brain and muscles, stability of the central nervous system (over-breathing destabilizes the nerve cells), blood flow, work of the immune system, activity of hormones, parasympathetic-sympathetic balance, and many other processes.
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