Breath holding

[BuffRockChick]

I stumbled upon this today, made me think of recent breath holding conversations:

"When under chronic stress, people tend to take shallow breaths and unconsciously hold them, what Anderson calls inhibitory breathing. Holding a breath diverts more blood to the brain to increase alertness — good if the boss is yelling — but it knocks off kilter the blood's chemical balance. More acidic blood in turn makes the kidneys less efficient at pumping out sodium.

In animals, Anderson's experiments have shown that inhibitory breathing delays salt excretion enough to raise blood pressure. Now he's testing if better breathing helps people reverse that effect.

"They may be changing their blood gases and the way their kidneys are regulating salt," he says."

source: NBC News

 

[Finnmin]

Wow,  once again excellent information! I will look into this. Thank you @BuffRockChick!

[BuffRockChick]

I was thinking that motorcycling posture would promote shallow breathing.  I wonder if your husband's blood pressure is more related to breathing than to posture.  I was reading studies today and noted that researchers used a metronome to standardize participant's rates of breathing.  I will probably play around with this later.  I started looking because I noticed my blood pressures were different on held inhale than on held exhale. I wondered is my slow breathing rate could explain variability in my blood pressure measurements.  Curious stuff.  

[pink1975]

Wow, this is interesting and makes sense.