Five things you can do to improve your breathing and vocal control

Struggling for a deep easy breath? Find that you are chronically coughing? Finding that your voice is failing you? Having issues with your singing voice. Are you a mouth breather? Why does breathing hurt?  Can  breathing well help a cough? Lets consider those questions  and more as you discover 5 Alexander principles to assist you to improve.

Remember, it’s wise to see a medical practitioner when you have unusual pain or discomfort. Alexander Technique is not a replacement for medical treatment.  Pain can be an indication of infection or dis-ease. If you have done that but your breathing still hurts, you cough continually or breathing is laboured then learning about your breathing could help you.

1. Accurately map your breathing mechanisms

Many people have developed a very poor understanding of how their body breathes. Have you been told to breath in your belly? Suck in the breath? Hold the floor with your toes to breath? Use your diaphragm? Hold your breath? Breath through your mouth. Don’t breath through your mouth. Exhale longer than you inhale. Push all the breath out. All these instructions are meant well, but can lead to very wrong concepts around the breathing mechanisms. These can really interfere with your breathing in a big way.

If you have been told these things, you may benefit from correctly understanding where you lungs,daiphragm and ribs are and how they work. At Blue Mountains Alexander Technique, our experience is that almost all of our students have wrong information about their breathing mechanisms. This can lead to laboured breathing, over-breathing or under-breathing and all kinds of associated harmful habits.

If you wish to address these misconceptions, have a read of Anatomy of Breathing by Blandine Calais-Germain. Otherwise come and work with us at Blue Mountains Alexander Technique.

2. Reduce your stress levels.

Everyone is stressed these days. The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare estimated that 59% of Australians experienced at least one high personal stressor in the last 12 months. 15% of adult Australian experience high or very high levels of psychological distress. Stress is a response to challenging or new life events such as a job loss, exams, deadlines, finances, or divorce. While stress is not a diagnosis, persistent stress can lead to long term physical and psychological symptoms.

Anxiety causes muscles to tighten, including the throat and chest muscles, which can trigger a tickling sensation and coughing. This is particularly prevalent when the body becomes chronically stressed (hyperstimulated). Some people have developed a habit of coughing when stressed and/or anxious. It’s not that anxiety itself has caused a physical reason for the cough but the cough is caused by a psychological or emotional reason. Consequently, whenever they are in a stressful or anxious situation, they cough as a habituated response. ^1.

If stress is an issue with you there are many things that you can do to reduce that influence. FM Alexander talked about the influence of vicious circles versus virtuous circles on health and well being. Alexander Technique is about choosing the virtuous circle. You reduce stress by learning to recognise physical patterns and consciously preventing them. Alexander Technique is an effective skillset used by many people around the world each day. It puts you in the driver’s seat for minimising the influence of  stress. Also consider yoga, tai-chi, meditation. gentle exercise, walking .

3. Use integrated breathing movement.

Your body is a complex system of individual components that are called on to work together in a dynamic way for best outcomes.  When the component parts of you work at odds to each other this can negatively impact on your health and wellbeing. Alexander Technique teachers are trained to consider the movements that our clients use to breathe. It’s not unusual to find interference of the breath coming from over tensioning of muscles, misalignment of spine or ribs, over compression of spine and so on. 

Mouth breathing can be an outcome of discoordination on the breathing mechanisms. It can lead to all kinds of issues due to drying of wet internal surfaces and failure to warm and filter the inhalation. Have a read of James Nestor’s book, “Breath. The new science of a lost art.”

Try this awareness exercise. Find somewhere comfortable to sit where you won’t be interupted or distracted. As you breath in do your chest and your upperback move together or does just you chest move or just your upper back move? What does your neck do. Does it pull back or does it compress forward. Does the back of your head move down towards your tail or up towards the ceiling? What do your toes do when you inhale and then when you exhale? Does your stomach push out on the inhale or on the exhale or not at all?  What does your pelvic floor do when you breathe? When you breathe does your stature increase or decrease? 

At Blue Mountains Alexander Technique, we can help you track all the movements associated with your breathing. We can also assist you to integrate all the movements for a new experience of breathing.

4. Let go of effort

High levels of inappropriate effort are often referred to as muscular tension. Tension is not something that you have, it’s something that you are doing. It’s quite common to see vocalists compressing their head down onto their neck spine. The veins pop on their neck, their vocal cords work against a weight of pressure. You can hear them suck in air noisily and diminish their vocal quality through excess pressure on their larynx. Some vocalists make a living from this tension. Their voice sounds husky, smoky and bluesy. Problem is that at some stage their career is imperilled by nodules, laryngitis or other physical problems. Excess tension leads to physical problems at some stage.  

Excess tension can cause pain in breath from muscles getting exhausted or from excess pressure coming onto the breathing mechanisms.

Breathing is an activity that feeds us oxygen via the lungs. The amount of oxygen that we take in is in direct proportion to the amount of volume that we create within our breathing mechanisms. Excess tension can reduce the breathing volume by a significant amount. This can lead to stagnant pockets within the pleura that fill with mucous and become prone to infection. Medical treatment may address the infection but the conditions for continual infection remain a constant until the pattern of tension is addressed.

5. Be wary of breathing exercises

Breathing is a natural activity that your body carries out according to the brains calculations of levels of exertion, carbon dioxide levels, blood chemistry and the physical activty that you are engaged in. It’s a complex calculation that is being constantly undertaken by your bodymind to maintain an optimum balance. Unfortunately tension, stress and long held patterns of holding can  impede the calculations that you body must make.  Breathing exercises can also have the unwanted effect of throwing out the bodys complex calculations. In worst case scenarios people can develop very harmful habits of breathing by repeatedly doing exercises without expert supervision. Alexander  Technique Teachers take the stance that your body breathes itself. By helping you get out of the way of your body’s breathing mechanism through integration of movement, reduction of stress and effort our students learn to enjoy deep satisfying breathing that is easy, quiet and working with your body’s natural design.

Find an Alexander Technique teacher near you or if there is no teacher close by then organise an online Alexander Technique lesson with me from anywhere in the world that has an Internet connection.

You don’t have to put up with chronic breathing complaint. Learn what to do about it.