Hyperventilation – Causes, Signs, Syndromes & Treatments

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Notice how you are breathing. Do you breathe slowly or quickly? Is your breathing deep or shallow? Do you breathe from your abdomen or from your chest? If you are chronically anxious or experiencing panic attacks or phobias, odds are your breathing is quick, shallow, and from your chest.

The first indicator that you are anxious is your breathing. You gasp, suck in your abdomen, and breathe high into your chest with short, shallow spurts to ready your body for quick flight.

Once the cause of your stress has passed, your parasympathetic nervous system (PSN) kicks in and your body calms, returning you to a baseline of relaxed, regular breathing from your abdomen.

But if anxiety is your constant companion, your sympathetic nervous system (SNS) remains aroused, creating agitation, and prevents you from returning to a baseline of normal, diaphragmatic “belly” breathing.

Instead, you breathe routinely in a restricted chest-breathing pattern: upper chest projected forward, surface muscles tightened, and length of exhalation reduced.

How Anxiety & Stress can Cause Hyperventilation:

This prevents the diaphragm, the muscle that separates the lung cavity from the abdominal cavity, from descending completely in order to inhale. Unable to get the air you need, you may fight even harder on the next breath to suck the air in and set up a vicious cycle: The harder you try, the less air you get.

The more stressed you feel, the quicker and more shallow your breathing becomes. This breathing pattern in turn increases your stress level in a continuous negative feedback cycle. This is why you often feel hyper-alert – your breathing keeps you in a state of perpetual overarousal that you experience as tension or agitation.

Once chest-breathing becomes a habit, it affects your whole body. When you breathe only from your chest, you learn to rely almost entirely on your upper body muscles to breathe, which are weaker than the primary muscles that make up your diaphragm.

This results in:

• Chronic tension in the neck, shoulders and upper back
• Chronically tightened abdominal muscles from not expanding your abdomen, which in turn, prevents the organs in your lower body from getting sufficient circulation, which affects your digestion, assimilation and elimination
• Reduced blood flow to the heart, since during chest breathing the diaphragm is prevented from descending completely

Unfortunately, these aren’t the only consequences of chest breathing. Unable to breathe in fully, we can’t breathe out fully. To compensate, we start breathing more quickly: we hyperventilate.

Shallow Breathing and Hyperventilation:

When you hyperventilate, you breathe out too much carbon dioxide relative to the amount of oxygen in your bloodstream. Carbon dioxide is crucial in helping the body maintain the right combination of acid and alkaline that is essential for cell metabolism. When this acid-alkaline balance is off even slightly, there are marked changes in the rates of chemical reactions in the cells, slowing down some, speeding up others.

This imbalance can set up a whole chain of unfortunate events:

• Diminished blood flow to the brain and other parts of the body causes headaches and lack of concentration
• Less oxygen is released to the tissues, causing dizziness and a feeling of breathlessness
• An increase in alkalinity creates excess calcium in muscles and nerves, making them hyperactive and causing muscle tension
• Reduced blood flow to the extremities of the body causes cold hands and feet
• An overexcited nervous system causes irritability, overreacting, rushed reactions and inappropriate responses

Conditions Related to Hyperventilation:

If you experience panic attacks, many of the above conditions probably sound all too familiar. Hyperventilation and panic are frequent traveling companions, though it’s not always clear who invited whom. Some people over-breathe, which elicits the fear that they are having a panic attack and actually sets one off.

In this case, hyperventilation mimics panic, causing a state of anxious agitation that, colored by catastrophic thoughts like “I’m losing control,” or “Something terrible is happening to me,” sets off genuine panic. Others begin to over-breathe in response to the panic, breathing too fast or too deeply and taking in too little oxygen, thereby aggravating perturbing physical symptoms.

A host of other things can trigger hyperventilation: tension, depression, chest troubles, a stuffy nose, allergies, disease, wearing tight clothes or a spinal brace, folding your arms across your chest, holding in emotional pain, overreacting to stress, drug effects and withdrawal from drugs, or even just faulty breathing.

Signs of Hyperventilation:

How do you know if you’re hyperventilating? There are two kinds of hyperventilation—acute and chronic. Acute hyperventilation is easier to recognize than chronic.

Here are the signs:

• Your breaths are erratic, noisy, and rapid
• Your chest is heaving and your abdomen is barely moving
• You may feel the need to take an occasional deep breath
• You may find it difficult to breathe out and may sigh at intervals to relieve this
• You may feel dizzy

Are you chest breathing? Mouth breathing? If so, stop a moment and breathe slowly and deeply into your abdomen and through your nose.

Chronic hyperventilation, which can be subtle, can go unrecognized. You may be a chronic hyperventilator if the following describe your breathing pattern:

Upper chest breathing:

• Breathing through the mouth rather than the nose
• Breathing 18 or more breaths per minute (normal breathing is 12-14 BPM for men and 14-15 BPM for women)
• Frequent sighing, gasps, yawning, coughing or clearing the throat
• Moistening of the lips
• Apparent “heavy” breathing

If you feel you are a chronic over-breather, you must break this bad breathing cycle, especially if you experience panic attacks. If not, you will never achieve a comfort zone—the place where calmness and alertness are felt as a steady state. But don’t despair. You were once an infant in your mother’s arms, breathing deeply and peacefully. The memory is there and can be restored.

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