Learning to calculate how much your lungs are over breathing is not that difficult. In fact, it is a simple calculation to work out by what factor you are overbreathing. Divide 60 by your pause and multiply by 100%.
For example a pause of 30 gives 200%. This means you breathing enough for two people. If your pause is 60, your factor is 100%, which is just right. If your pause is 5 seconds, your factor is 60/5 x 100% equals 1200% or deeply enough for 12 people. [Note that as the time gets really smaller ‘this estimation gets less accurate. Just be aware that whether it is 5 or 10 times too much’ it is far too much!]
If your pause is that low then you are very unwell, and if you are not suffering symptoms of asthma, then you need to look into other Effects Of Chronic Low CO2.
As a general comparison, if you were to eat two or four or twelve times as much as you physically need, what would happen to you? Would you be healthy? The truth is that if you ate that much, then it would not take long for you to be morbidly obese.
Yet another way to look at this is using the analogy that compares your breathing to a carburetor on a motor. A carburetor is the device which controls the mixture of gases for a motor. You will know that when the mixture is wrong, the motor will run poorly or not at all. If it does run with a non-ideal mixture, the power will be reduced, the economy reduced, backfiring will occur, and the life of the engine will be reduced. The only thing that can improve this is to correct the mixtures by adjusting the carburetor.
It is the same with your lungs. If you have the wrong mixture of gases in your lungs, your body will have low power, use too much fuel, will backfire, and will wear out much sooner. All you have to do is tune your carburetor. That is what Buteyko is going to teach you to do. Your respiratory centre or breathostat is the carburetor for your lungs.
