If recent events are making it harder for you to sleep, and you don’t find the meditation or a mindfulness approach helpful, then maybe this app could help, by distracting your brain with nonsense. This distraction technique is also a justification for, socialising, indulging in your favourite hobby, or going for a walk in nature, rather than pouring over every terrible detail of the endlessly depressing news stories.
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Mouth breathing reduces your ability to absorb the oxygen from the air you breathe into your body. This can increase fatigue, back pain and decrease performance. In kids it will affect the development of their jaws and teeth. So it is definitely something that needs to be treated if you want to improve your overall health. Often I see mouth breathing in association with poor breathing mechanics; that is using the neck muscles (often leading to chronic neck pain) and upper rib cage rather than the diaphragm and lower rib cage to breathe. Two-thirds of your lungs are in the bottom of your rib cage so if you aren’t breathing down to you are not getting the oxygen you need. Come in and get assessed if you think that your breathing may not be optimal.
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This short video shows how stress affects the processes and function of your body and why you really need to address this to avoid many common chronic diseases:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2j-ewV5dos8
A few tips on how to incorporate this incredibly useful practice into your life. This is essential if you suffer from stress and want to avoid the negative health effects:
Many of my patients suffer from stress and insomnia and so we often discuss breathing techniques or meditation as part of a package to deal with this. This is a link to a site challenging you to try mindfulness for the month of October together with downloads of a couple of sample meditations. Why don’t you try it for the month, and see how you feel, I’m going to. #31DMC
A clear explanation of why pain is not an indication of damage and how treatment needs to ‘turn down the sensitivity of the nervous system’
http://www.greglehman.ca/2013/06/10/your-cranky-nerves-a-primer-for-patients-to-understand-pain/
If you really can’t switch off your computer or phone late at night then try installing this to at least reduce the blue light emitted by your screens and give your brain a chance to secrete melatonin and feel sleepy.