Most home heating and cooling systems simply recirculate the air that’s already in the house, including all the dust, dirt, and pollen. When the weather’s nice and pollen counts are low, open windows and doors to freshen things up. This is especially important if there are fumes from painting, cooking, kerosene heaters, or hobbies like woodworking.
Simple Cleaning Products
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Some cleaners have harsh chemicals that can cause breathing problems or trigger an allergy or asthma attack. Read labels carefully and stay away from ones that have volatile organic compounds (VOCs), fragrances, or flammable ingredients. You can make your own cleaners with plain soap and water, vinegar, or baking soda.
Your HVAC
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A dirty filter on your heating and air conditioning unit can keep air from flowing the way it should and lead to mold growth if it gets damp. Change it at least every 3 months and make sure it fits well. If you have asthma or allergies — or you have pets or a large family — you might want to check it once a month. It’s also a good idea for a professional to inspect the unit once a year.
Bathrooms
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If there’s mold in your house, the tiny spores can float into your nose and even your lungs. That can lead to allergy symptoms, like coughing or sneezing, or other breathing issues. The fungus loves damp areas, so keep bathrooms dry. Turn on a fan or open a window to help move air after you shower, and hang up wet towels and washcloths. If you see mold in the tub or other areas, you may need to clean more often to help keep it at bay.
Air Fresheners
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Even pleasant smells can cause problems. Some air fresheners have VOCs in them that may bother your nose and throat. Other aerosol sprays, including some health and beauty products, have VOCs, too.
Fresh Fruits and Vegetables
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If you keep them too long, mold can grow on them. Check stored fruits and vegetables often, and toss anything that has mold or slime on it. To keep them fresh longer, don’t wash them before you store them — do that just before you eat them. If you’re not sure if something is fresh, throw it away.
Cockroaches
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These bugs can cause problems even after they’re dead. When they die, their bodies break down into small bits, and those can get into the air. The same can happen with their poop. Those bits can get into sheets, pillows, and other fabrics, and may trigger asthma attacks or allergic reactions. If you know you have a roach problem, use roach baits instead of sprays.
Leaks
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These can happen with sinks, toilets, showers, dishwashers, or refrigerators — even your roof. Pooled water can lead to issues with mold and cockroaches, so any leak needs to be taken care of quickly. Call a plumber if you can’t find where it’s coming from or don’t know how to fix it.
Leftovers
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The only thing cockroaches like more than water is food. When dinner’s over, put anything that’s left in airtight containers. And if you throw food away, make sure it’s into a trash can that has a lid on it.
Pets
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Dander and other allergens that Fido and Fluffy bring in from outside can cause trouble for your lungs. As hard as it might be, it’s a good idea to keep them out of bedrooms and off beds. If that’s not an option, bathe them regularly and vacuum the areas where they spend time.
Forgotten Areas
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Cabinet tops and vent hoods are a couple of places people sometimes forget to clean, along with behind toilets and under bathroom sinks. Wipe them down every so often with warm, soapy water. Give your pets’ dishes a daily wash, too, and check around for other areas that might collect grease, food, grime, or water.
Linens and Rugs
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Wash sheets, pillowcases, blankets, and area rugs once a week in 130-degree F water to help get rid of dust, mold, mites, and other things that can affect your breathing. And get rid of throw pillows that don’t have zip-off covers. They collect dust mites and pet dander and can be hard to clean.
Furniture
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Fabrics can trap dust, pollen, and other allergens. The next time you give the living room a new look, consider leather or vinyl furniture instead of cloth. If you have issues with allergies or asthma, you also might want to hang blinds instead of curtains, and dust them regularly.
Flooring
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Hard surfaces, like wood, don’t collect things that affect your breathing the way carpet can. If you need some soft areas, use throw rugs you can clean in a washing machine or sink. If you can’t take up your carpet, vacuum it weekly with a cleaner that has a HEPA or small-particle filter. When it needs to be professionally cleaned, be sure to use a certified “asthma & allergy friendly” service.
Why nose breathing supports better health, and how to do it
Your body is designed to breathe through your nose. There are several benefits to those who do, and consequences for those who don’t.
If the past two years has taught us anything, it’s that our well-being matters. As we head toward the end of 2021, more of us are taking proactive steps to stay well.
At the same time, there’s a growing interest in optimization and performance. Across sports, fitness, education, and business, we’re looking for new ways to feel better and achieve our potential.
But behind these positive wellness trends, the story is a challenging one. Stress is currently a leading cause of illness worldwide, contributing to between 75 percent and 90 percent of all human diseases. And we’re still battling COVID-19 and the anxiety caused by related political and economic considerations.
As stress rises, a familiar adage springs to mind. We all need to “take a nice deep breath.”
Or do we?
As I explain in my book, “The Breathing Cure: Develop New Habits for a Healthier, Happier, and Longer Life,” the advice to take a deep breath is often misguided—if it doesn’t talk about how you take that breath. It can perpetuate stress and cause less oxygen to reach vital systems in the body. When told to breathe deeply, many of us take a fast, hard gulp of air through an open mouth and into the upper chest.
Unless you have a respiratory condition, such as asthma, breathing is something that happens in the background. Since it carries on without our help, we don’t often pay it much attention. But somewhere along the way, the stresses of modern life have created a situation where many of us habitually breathe in more air than our bodies need. Stress perpetuates a fast, shallow breathing pattern that disrupts vital blood gases. Once breathing is out of whack, it’s easy to get stuck in a vicious cycle. Your breathing becomes chronically fast and shallow. Your sleep is disrupted and stress sets in, increasing your risk of disease and stopping you short of your potential.
To correct dysfunctional breathing, you must first notice whether you breathe through your mouth or your nose. During the day, this is easy enough to spot. At night, it’s a little harder. If you snore or have sleep apnea, your partner may be able to tell you. If you sleep alone, there are signs to look out for.
If you regularly wake up with a dry mouth and bad breath in the morning, it’s likely that you mouth-breathe during sleep. After the age of 40 years, you’re around six times more likely to spend at least half of the night mouth breathing. Extra weight on the tummy, neck, and tongue also contributes to mouth breathing. And for women going through menopause, the risk of sleep apnea increases by 200 percent.
Nose breathing is vitally important for health and well-being. It improves the quality of inhaled air, filtering, warming, and humidifying it before it reaches the lungs. It provides a first line of defense against viruses, bacteria, and allergens. Your nose protects you against 20 billion particles of foreign matter every day. When it comes to breathing, the mouth really has no purpose except to serve as a backup, whereas the nose performs at least 30 functions on behalf of the body.
Breathing in and out through your nose helps keep your airways clear. The carbon dioxide and nitric oxide in the nasal airway both act to dilate blood vessels, preventing your nose from becoming blocked. Nitric oxide also works to open the blood vessels in your lungs, allowing more oxygen to get into your blood.
Nose breathing during sleep eliminates mouth snoring and makes sleep apnea symptoms much less severe. During mouth breathing, your tongue can fall back into your airway, essentially choking you. Mouth breathing involves a faster flow of air, which increases the likelihood that your airway will collapse. Scientists have proven that when patients with sleep apnea mouth breathe during sleep, they stop breathing more frequently and experience worse oxygen desaturation.
When you exercise, nose breathing supports the body in several ways. It prevents exercise-induced asthma by protecting the airways from irritation and inflammation. It engages the diaphragm, which, in turn, supports the spine and core, reducing injury risk and improving healthy posture and physical movement. It causes you to exercise at a slower pace until breathing is properly trained, reducing blood pressure and stress and protecting you from overtraining. Nose breathing also improves the oxygenation of your working muscles.
Although we generally think of oxygen as the most important breathing gas, the human body also needs a healthy balance of carbon dioxide to survive. Most of the oxygen you inhale travels around your body in the hemoglobin in red blood cells. Carbon dioxide is important because it’s the catalyst that releases this oxygen to your tissues and organs.
When you breathe hard and fast through an open mouth, you’ll tend to blow off too much carbon dioxide. That means that, although you’re breathing more air, there’s less oxygen available to your body. Nasal breathing helps normalize levels of carbon dioxide, and it slows down your breathing, so air spends more time in your lungs. That’s one reason why nose breathing provides better whole-body oxygenation.
Nose breathing activates areas of the brain that are essential for focus and concentration. It increases blood flow to your brain and helps you get in the zone. Conversely, mouth breathing can activate your fight-or-flight stress response, which switches off the areas of your brain that are involved in things such as problem-solving and memory. Long-term activation of the stress response kills brain cells, actively shrinking your brain.
By restoring nasal breathing, you’ll automatically begin to normalize your breathing volume and reduce the amount of air you breathe into your body. This is important because it promotes good health, keeping you well.
Nasal breathing naturally slows your breathing. If you breathe fast and hard through an open mouth, you’re breathing a higher volume of air. A bit like overeating, the body gets used to the excess, leaving you in a constant state of air hunger. When you breathe too much air all of the time, you create sickness in the body. Overbreathing is linked with conditions from cardiovascular disease to sexual dysfunction, chronic pain, dental decay, diabetes, PMS, and every disease in which stress is a contributing factor.
One problem with overbreathing—or to give it its medical name, chronic hyperventilation—is that it disrupts levels of carbon dioxide in your blood. Carbon dioxide has a very important role in keeping us alive. When carbon dioxide levels are low, the bond between the hemoglobin in red blood cells and oxygen becomes stronger. Even if your blood is fully saturated with oxygen, that oxygen can’t get to where it’s needed in the body. Imagine a delivery driver who’s driving to drop off a load of parcels and discovers that the lock on his van is jammed. He can drive to the shipping address, but he can’t deliver the package.
Healthy breathing shouldn’t be a fleeting trend. The task is to build new, healthy habits. The way you breathe affects your ability to focus on important tasks. It affects your sleep and your stress levels. You can use breathing exercises to enhance your performance in sports and at work and to directly counter stress. Healthy breathing supports your spine and strengthens your breathing muscles. It reduces anxiety and common symptoms such as headaches and back pain. Functional nose breathing improves your circulation and the health of your airways and lungs. It boosts oxygen delivery to your cells, and optimizes vital connections between your breathing system, heart, and blood pressure.
This runs deeper than integrating a breathing exercise or two into your day. If you want to restore nasal breathing for better health and longevity, this is a 24/7 commitment. But it doesn’t need to be difficult. Don’t wait until you get sick. The simple steps below can support your health, performance, longevity, and quality of life.
Techniques to Restore Nose Breathing
First, take time to notice when you breathe through an open mouth. It’s common to open the mouth to breathe during exercise, but you may also mouth breathe when you’re concentrating, whether you’re at work, driving, or watching TV. Each time you notice yourself mouth breathing, close your mouth and breathe through your nose.
If your nose is blocked, use this nose unblocking exercise:
Sit upright in a straight-backed chair.
Calm your breathing.
Take a small breath (two seconds) in through your nose if you can, and a small breath (three seconds) out through your mouth.
If you can’t breathe in through your nose, take a tiny sip of air in through the corner of your mouth.
After the exhale, pinch your nose to hold your breath. Keep your mouth closed.
Gently nod your head up and down or sway your body from side to side until you can’t hold your breath any longer.
Let go of your nose and breathe in gently through it. Your breathing should be calm and relaxed.
Repeat the exercise until you can breathe fully through both nostrils. If your nose won’t completely unblock, wait about a minute, and repeat again.
After the exercise, your nose should be clear. But if you continue to overbreathe, it will block again. As you work with breathing exercises and nasal breathing, this will resolve in time.
When you exercise, train yourself to breathe only through your nose. It takes about six weeks for the body to adapt, but it’s worth the effort.
If you have a small nose, a deviated septum, or some other nasal obstruction, try a nasal dilator. This will open your airways and make nose breathing easier.
Integrate breathing exercises into your day. I recommend exercises that reduce breathing volume and normalize tolerance for carbon dioxide. These delay the onset of breathlessness and help restore healthy breathing. You can find these exercises in my books.
Spend 10 or 15 minutes before sleep slowing down and reducing your breathing. This will calm your mind and reduce your susceptibility to snoring and sleep apnea.
You can also tape your mouth at night using a variety of products, including my own patented sleep tape, MYOTAPE. These products go around the mouth rather than sealing the lips. Tape is the only surefire way to keep your mouth closed when you’re asleep, and it will help prevent sleep-disordered breathing, snoring, and sleep apnea.
If you regularly notice yourself mouth breathing, you can also wear tape for periods during the day until you’ve built a new healthy habit of nose breathing.
A new system could create oxygen, nitrogen, and other crucial supplies from Mars’ atmosphere.
An international team of researchers has demonstrated a new way to produce oxygen on Mars — by blasting carbon dioxide molecules apart inside a plasma reactor.
The challenge: Future Mars astronauts will need enough food, water, and breathable air to last the duration of their missions, but the cost of shipping all the needed resources to Mars from Earth would be astronomical (pun intended).
Instead, we need to source as many resources as we can from the Red Planet — and conveniently enough, Mars has plenty of oxygen in its atmosphere. Inconveniently, it’s in the form of carbon dioxide (CO2), so we’ll need to split the compound and extract the oxygen.
“When bullet-like electrons collide with a carbon dioxide molecule, they can directly decompose it.”VASCO GUERRA
NASA has already proven that it’s possible to produce oxygen on Mars with MOXIE (the “Mars Oxygen In Situ Resource Utilization Experiment”), a gilded instrument on board the Perseverance rover that uses electricity to split CO2 into oxygen and carbon monoxide.
To work, a MOXIE-like machine needs to pressurize and heat the Martian air, though. That adds to its size, and bigger instruments mean higher launch costs and less room for other cargo.
Plasma power: There’s more than one way to split a molecule, though, and a new plasma-based system might lead to the development of a better, more compact life-support system.
Plasma reactors use electric fields to excite molecules in a gas, causing electrons to break free from atoms. For their study, the researchers demonstrated how an accelerated beam of those electrons could be used to split CO2 molecules in a reactor filled with simulated Martian air.
“When bullet-like electrons collide with a carbon dioxide molecule, they can directly decompose it or transfer energy to make it vibrate,” said lead author Vasco Guerra of the University of Lisbon. “This energy can be channeled, to a large extent, into carbon dioxide decomposition.”
“The natural conditions on Mars are nearly ideal to [in-situ resource utilization] by plasmas.”VASCO GUERRA
The benefits: The plasma reactor was able to convert about 30% of the air in it into oxygen, and unlike MOXIE, it didn’t need to adjust temperature or pressure to work, either — that means a Mars-ready version of the tech might be less bulky.
“The natural conditions on Mars are nearly ideal to [in-situ resource utilization] by plasmas,” Guerra told Gizmodo. “In particular, the atmospheric composition, the ambient pressure, and temperature all play in favor of a plasma process.”
The plasma-based system could also be tweaked to extract other elements from Mars’ atmosphere, giving astronauts a source of nitrogen for fertilizer, for example.
“This versatile system may one day play a critical role in the development of not only life-support systems on Mars but also feedstock and base chemicals for processing fuels, building materials, and fertilizers,” said Guerra.
Looking ahead: The researchers estimate that a 13-pound plasma reactor running for one hour on Mars could generate enough oxygen for 28 minutes of breathing for one astronaut. For comparison, the 37-pound MOXIE is designed to produce 20 minutes’ worth of oxygen per hour.
However, the team has only demonstrated that its plasma reactor can separate oxygen from simulated Martian air — it hasn’t developed a fully functional instrument that could actually be sent to Mars for testing.
Forget the detox pills, fasts and other painful cleansing techniques – instead, take a cue from the yogis of India and look to the breath. Using yogic breathing techniques, we can effortlessly detoxify, burn fat and increase metabolism. With the basic act of bringing in more oxygen, vitamins and minerals are more easily absorbed, white blood cells multiply and the lymphatic system is enhanced. Through the exhale toxins are removed from the bloodstream, which revitalizes the organs and clarifies the intellect. Techniques range from a few deep breaths before a meal to more complex practices. Either way, by using this free detoxification method daily, we can easily (and economically) cleanse the body and mind.
The time-honored art of breathing
Yogis of long ago recognized the merit in calming, cleansing and balancing the body and mind with the breath. Developed over 5,000 years ago, pranayama (Sanskrit for ‘vital energy’ and ‘extend’) is an integral aspect of yogic practice. Below are several examples of how to use the breath to keep the system healthy on all levels.
Simple breath
Before each meal, take three deep breathes. Inhale through the nose and exhale through the mouth. Although seemingly basic, this technique sharpens the senses of smell, taste and texture while promoting clarity. When we are clear and focused during our meals, digestion is improved and over-consumption minimized. The end result: efficiency of digestion and weight loss.
Relaxing breath
Lie flat on your back with knees bent together, bringing the feet close into the buttocks. Place hands on both sides of the naval region. Breath in a slow, deep rhythmic manner for 20 repetitions. Since the naval region is dense with nerves, relaxing this area calms emotions, strengthens the nervous system and fortifies the immune system – ultimately aiding in the removal of unnecessary thoughts and toxins from the body.
Bhastrika (Breath of Fire)
This technique helps to slim and tone the belly, boost metabolism and detoxify the body. Sit cross-legged on the floor and place both hands on the lower abdomen. Take a deep breath then begin to ‘pump’ the breath rapidly through the nose, expanding and contracting the entire belly. For visual instructions, see here.
Ujjayi (Victorious Breath)
Sitting in a comfortable position, inhale through the nose and lift the chest. Hold for two seconds. While exhaling through the nose, guide the breath to the back of the throat, creating a ocean wave like sound (sometimes referred to as the ‘Darth Vader breath’). When practiced properly, ujjayi pranayama should energize and relax. It also oxygenates the blood, builds internal body heat and removes toxins.
A note of caution: Pranayama is not recommended for those with high blood pressure.
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