CapnoTherapy

Oxygen fuels us, but carbon dioxide keeps us in balance. Capnography measures the carbon dioxide levels in your breath, providing insights into respiratory function and ventilation efficiency.

Breathing and respiration are different. Breathing is a behavior. Respiration is reflexive. We can learn good and bad breathing habits. Good breathing optimizes respiration and balances acid-base physiology. Bad breathing compromises our physiology and triggers debilitating outcomes. 

How is your breathing affecting you? Are your breathing habits aligned with respiratory chemistry? Is your breathing working for or against you? What can you do about it?

Behavioral hypocapnia occurs when you overbreathe, often due to stress, anxiety, or poor breathing habits. This leads to lower-than-normal carbon dioxide levels in the blood. Since carbon dioxide is critical in maintaining the body's pH balance and oxygen delivery, hypocapnia impairs sleep and brain function. 

Low carbon dioxide levels compromise the body's natural drive to breathe, worsening obstructive and central sleep apnea, leading to the pauses between breaths as compensation (i.e., apneas). Hypocapnia also constricts blood vessels and reduces blood flow to the brain, increasing anxiety, impairing cognition, and triggering panic attacks. The body perceives reduced carbon dioxide levels as a threat, provoking a fight-or-flight response. The heightened sympathetic nervous system activity impedes sleep initiation and fragments sleep. 

Behavioral hypocapnia reflects modern lifestyle and stress that can subtly but significantly impact health by reducing carbon dioxide levels. This condition can lead to physical, mental, and emotional symptoms that often go unrecognized or misattributed to other causes. Lower-than-normal carbon dioxide levels can contribute to asthma, allergies, allergic rhinitis, sleep apnea, panic attacks, anxiety disorders, migraine headaches, and hypertension.

Behavioral hypocapnia is reversible. CapnoTherapy recognizes breathing patterns and controlled breathing habits and then teaches you to restore normal carbon dioxide levels and prevent long-term health issues. Integrating personalized breathing exercises into daily routines or practicing them during insomnia or anxiety can reduce over-breathing, retrain the body to breathe more effectively, and normalize carbon dioxide levels. 

Capnography is a biofeedback tool that measures breathing parameters to diagnose and unlearn dysfunctional breathing.

You can test your breathing in various ways to establish how it reacts to stimuli and whether it is dysfunctional. Dysfunctional breathing habits may include irregular breathing, like sighing or gasping, aborted breathing, and deep inhales. Some of these habits may only be detected using capnography.

Capnography allows you to observe your breathing behavior in real-time. Biofeedback enables you to self-regulate your breathing, ensure you do the exercises correctly, and make your recovery efforts unconscious and effortless.

The capnometer is portable, with Bluetooth capability and an app that downloads onto a cell phone. It can be worn during triggering activities and sleep, allowing us to evaluate and change the carbon dioxide in these conditions.

CapnoTherapy concludes when your carbon dioxide levels are normal during effort, stress, and sleep. This is not a slow or yogic breathing course, nor will you be required to use breathing exercises forever. It is a program to restore essential breathing reflexes to support your active lifestyle.

Hypocapnia Effects

Frequently Asked Questions