Believe it or not, you can be an elite triathlete, and still have poor breathing habits. Athletes have an incredible way of ‘pushing through’ despite breathing challenges. The impact of optimising breathing habits though is well worth the exploration.

Thanks to Steven Bartlett’s interest in breathing and breathwork, The Diary Of A CEO has finally produced an episode on breathing habits and the importance of breathing retraining. James Nestor, a journalist, is considered a breathing expert having researched and written the book ‘Breath’.

Just like the frog’s water, imagine your breathing is deteriorating so slowly that you don’t notice the difference.

‘Use your nose or lose it’ is referring to: if you don’t breathe through your nose you’ll lose the ability to do so.

What you want to know though, is that although the saying “use it or lose it” does apply to your nose, you can also retrain your nose.

This was the vital breathing education I missed out on for 30 years.

You only have to listen to Steven Bartlett’s Diary of a CEO podcast to understand that fame or fortune doesn’t cure panic attacks. In fact it can bring them on for the very first time.

Having just read : “Just tape your mouth shut“ Can I unlearn the breathing habits of a lifetime? in The Guardian this week, I felt it was about time I wrote something on mouth taping, and why we shouldn’t JUST mouth tape during sleep and hope for the best.

I bet it wasn't so bad at first.

Annoying but merely a niggle.

Not serious enough to bother doing anything about.

This last week I've maxed out at the bottom and top of my emotions. “My editor has just tweeted the article” said my client, Emma Reed. My mission is to lead global education on healthy breathing & breathing retraining in an easy, accessible way.

Writing this article makes me laugh and cry a little inside. It takes me back to when I was a mouth breathing child, standing in a shop holding my first ever Swiss Army Knife…[…]…

A few years later, aged 12, I experienced my first ever panic attack. I knew what a panic attack was because my school friend had them. I just didn’t realise I was having one. I wasn’t the sort of child who got panic attacks.

My first reaction was- “There is no way I’m taping my mouth at night”. I now mouth tape for better sleep almost every night. It has revolutionised my breathing training and energy levels despite broken sleep with a child waking me up.

I have been religiously tracking my body and mind on a daily basis for a few months now. It is well and truly a habit and something I now feel uncomfortable not doing.

In a recent male awareness and breathing coaching session, we stumbled across the topic of menstrual cycles. You may think this strange, but actually it is this sort of awareness by males (and women because they are often almost as unaware) that could make all the difference in relationships and workplaces.

He told me that his son, almost 2 years old wasn’t at nursery because he was premature and had a lung condition. Being a breathing coach, I naturally asked him if the doctors had ever told him the importance of how his son breathes as he grows up. He said that they hadn’t. Tim said that they had mentioned he’ll probably develop asthma. I questioned him again, “they never advised to ensure that he breathes through his nose”. No, he was certain, his doctors had never mentioned how to breathe.

In our culture, if we were to say someone was uneducated, that could be deemed as offensive. The interpretation of education is also different across cultures.

For this article, I shall define uneducated as “having or showing a poor level of education.”

I’d like to challenge your interpretation of what you see as a poor level of education. Allow me to share 3 examples: