225 - 25,000 Chances to Heal: Making Every Breath Work for You

We explore breath as a practical healing tool for Long Covid and ME/CFS, especially when breathlessness, air hunger, or panic keeps the body stuck in survival mode. I share why “appropriate breathwork” is gentle, flexible, and powerful enough to support both recovery and everyday health. 

• Why breathing patterns change during illness and can stay dysfunctional afterwards 
• The vicious cycle where breath discomfort signals danger and escalates symptoms 
• How better breathing supports efficiency and frees energy for healing and life 
• Nervous system regulation through functional breathing and micro moments of safety 
• Why a one-size-fits-all protocol can backfire and what “meet yourself where you are” looks like 
• What to avoid in recovery, including deliberate hyperventilation and breath holds 
• Easing into practices, adjusting dose, and using breath to support pacing and emotions 
• Resources for safe breathwork including courses, blogs, videos, and Insight Timer tracks 

Links: 

• Breathing for Long Covid & ME/CFS breathing courses: www.LongCovidBreathing.com 
• Breathing blogs: https://longcovidbreathing.com/blogs 
• Breathe with me on Insight Timer: https://insig.ht/mqSr1s0245b (or search "Jackie Baxter" on the app
• More info about working with me: www.JackiesRecoveryRoom.com/WorkWithMe 

Transcript

Copy Transcript Copied

Why Breath Matters In Recovery

Jackie Baxter 0:45

In this episode of the Recovery Room, I'm going to explore the breath as a healing modality. I'm going to explain what I mean by breathwork, why it is so important in recovery, as well as being a foundation for good health beyond recovery, and also give you some tips on how to approach it safely, finding a way that works for you. For many people, breathlessness or other discomfort around breathing is a symptom they experience. It might be breathlessness on minimal exertion, it might be air hunger at rest, unintentional breath holding, or indeed something else. It might even be something you've experienced further back than your current health challenge. Not everyone experiences obvious breathing symptoms. However, this doesn't mean that the breath can't be a powerful tool in recovery. The breath is something that comes up fairly consistently in recovery stories. And certainly for myself, the breath was the first thing that shifted my recovery and it underpinned everything else that I did going forward. Now fully recovered, I still start every day with a short breath practice. So let's dive in, settle yourself in as comfortably as you can, and let's get started.

Why Illness Changes Your Breathing

Jackie Baxter 2:20

So why does the breath change during illness? Well, it's actually normal for the breath to speed up during acute illness. The nervous and immune systems mobilize to fight infection, which usually causes an increase in heart and respiratory rate. And that caused me to panic, which made a bad situation even worse. And I've heard many people describe similar or even much worse. Many people recover from an acute infection, and the breathing pattern returns to a normal functional breathing pattern, and life goes on. What happened to a lot of people with lung COVID, MECFS, and other health challenges is that the breathing pattern didn't return to functional. The nervous system and immune system stay switched on and the body remains in survival mode. So in this state, the breath becomes both a symptom and a signal. The body experiences discomfort in the breath, which then signals the nervous system that there is danger, which then causes the breath to be even more dysfunctional. And this vicious cycle is created and it can be challenging to get out of. And exactly what it is that has caused that vicious cycle sort of doesn't matter once we get into it. It's how do we break that? What I've also noticed is as people learn more about the breath, many people discover that they may have been breathing suboptimally, some of the time at least, before becoming unwell. I was one of those people. Thinking back to life before 2020, I was often breathing dysfunctionally. So for many people it's relearning how to breathe well. And for some of us, it's learning how to breathe well for the first time. And there's no blame here. It's not like we breathe dysfunctionally, deliberately. The most important takeaway so far is that your breath isn't broken. It's responding to what you've been through, what you're going through. And your breath can return to a functional, supportive breath, which will help rather than hinder recovery. But it has to be done in the right way.

Efficiency And Nervous System Calm

Jackie Baxter 5:07

So can something as simple as the breath really help recovery? The simple answer is a big yes. However, if you're feeling any doubts, then I can completely relate. When I was just over a year into my own long COVID journey, somebody told me that the breath would help me, and I was sceptical to say the least. However, having found nothing else that helped and with no useful support from doctors at the time, I was also extremely desperate. And I am so grateful to this day that I decided to give it a go, despite my scepticism. The breath has two main purposes in recovery. Number one, efficiency. The better we breathe, the more efficient the body works. With better efficiency, the body is able to manage important tasks more easily and without becoming overwhelmed, leaving more energy for healing and repair, and also for things that are enjoyable. Number two, nervous system regulation. The more functionally we breathe, the safer the body feels. When the body feels safer, it moves back towards the state of rest and digest where the body processes function. The body is able to heal and repair, and where we actually feel good. So having tools to help regulate the nervous system is super, super important as the nervous system becomes gradually more regulated and more resilient. The body starts to heal and we start to recover. If we think about all the functions of our nervous system, the breath is the only one that we can learn to directly control ourselves, which makes it an incredibly useful tool, literally at our fingertips. And the reason that so many recovery stories mention the breath, it has the power to change everything. By changing the way we breathe, we are changing our biochemistry, we're changing our biomechanics, and we're changing our nervous system. So the breath patts quite a punch. However, it doesn't do it just like that. It does require a process. So put simply, we breathe around 25,000 breaths a day. How we breathe those breaths can either help or hinder recovery. However, what is really important is finding appropriate breath work. Doing exercises and techniques that are either inappropriate or too challenging will have the opposite effect or make us feel worse. So if you've had the experience that many people I've worked with have had, where they've tried a technique and it made them feel worse, it's not that the breath won't help you. Maybe you've worked with somebody who said, just do this and given you a protocol, and you've tried that, and why wouldn't you? Because this person seems to know what they're talking about. But I see this day in, day out. It's about meeting you where you are in each moment, finding the way forward for you. Working with a coach is a great idea, but I would always recommend making sure it's someone with both lived experience and training in the nervous system as well as the breath. Traditional programs will likely be too much. They were for me, and I see this every day. If it doesn't feel good, it's not doing you good. And we shouldn't ever let anyone else try to make us do something that doesn't feel good. It's about working with you. That's where we're gonna see that success. So the breath has huge power as a down regulation tool, a way to reduce sensory load, a way to create micro moments of safety, a way to help with challenging emotions, a way to anchor yourself when you need it, a way to build a foundation and rebuild capacity gently, and so much more. It's about finding your way through, it's about finding what works for you as an individual, not what someone tells you to do, and then building that consistently into your days. I mentioned already that the breath was the first thing that helped me, and it was. I took a chance and tried out something that I was deeply skeptical about, and it changed my life. That doesn't mean it was easy. I found a lot of inappropriate breath work, which actually made things worse. However, what I did find was something that started to make sense, and that made me persevere and try to tweak things so they did work for me. I still got it wrong a lot. There was a lot of trial and error, frustration, overdoing things. But despite the ups and downs, I am deeply grateful to the person who introduced me to the breath because they showed me something that I could do, and I was then able to sort of work it out for myself. As my breath started to improve, it increased my own capacity. It cleared the decks a little so I could see the wood for the trees, and it opened doors to other modalities which would not have worked for me before my breath had improved. It wasn't an easy journey. There was a lot of pain, mistakes, moments of hopelessness and wanting to give up. And that's one of the reasons why I felt called to build what I needed. Because having found my own way through, I had a really good idea of all the pitfalls of breath work in recovery, what people without lived experience don't understand, and what someone on a recovery journey such as this really needs. The breath is still my constant companion, whether it's my morning breath practice, taking a moment before a challenging conversation or important presentation, during exercise, or aiding my sleep. It's a tool that I learned out of necessity in recovery, but it is something that supports my body every day, and it's something that keeps me well.

Finding Breathwork That Fits You

Jackie Baxter 12:17

So, what do I mean by appropriate breath work? The most important thing is that it needs to feel comfortable for you. So when I teach, I always describe the practice. I'll talk a little bit about it, what it's doing, and why, and then give options because everyone is different. Each person is at a different stage of recovery, is comfortable with different things, and of course, every day can vary. So we need to learn how to tailor these things to ourselves. So, as a general rule, in recovery I say if it doesn't feel good, then it's not doing you good. No pain, no gain is not remotely appropriate here. If it's not making you feel better in your body, then it's not the right practice, or it's not the right amount for you in that moment. It might be in another moment, which is why learning your own body, your own nervous system, and your own needs is really important. But it's so important to meet ourselves where we are in each moment. What is it that you need just now? So we want to return to functional breathing. That is moving towards nasal and diaphragmatic breathing at all times, moving to a breath pattern that is metabolically appropriate. And I say moving towards because this is a process, and it's important to go at a pace that feels good for you, that feels comfortable. Go too fast or too hard, and the body will react. It will activate and it will feel worse, and it will have the opposite effect to what you're trying to achieve. So we want breathing exercises for when the body moves into survival states, for difficult conversations, for helping to regulate emotions, and for during activity, whatever that activity is. What we don't want are exercises or techniques that cause stress to the body. The body does not need additional stress. So this is why I advise against things like Wim Hof, for example, that deliberately upregulates the body. This is not what we want here. This is going the wrong direction. We want to downregulate. Anything with deliberate hyperventilation, breath holds, deliberate air hunger are not your friends here. These breath techniques have their place for some people, but that place is not here. What can also cause additional stress is doing a more appropriate exercise, but pushing it a little too hard for you in this moment or not easing yourself in. So start in a little bit too much. So I always recommend easing into a practice really gently, and then giving yourself the option of expanding if the body allows. Although, of course, if we do do that, backing off is always an option and it is always the right thing to do. So something like an extended exhale is only a good practice for you if the dose is right for the moment. So it comes back to why learning to understand your own body signals is so vital to this process. Sometimes the best practice is literally just sitting with the breath, giving yourself space to be, counting down to peace and to stillness. Or sometimes you need something else. But so often it's the simple things. We don't need big, we don't need complicated, we don't need sexy. Simple is so often what we need here, and almost always less is more.

What To Avoid And Why

Jackie Baxter 16:48

Starting to learn and understand is vital. Learning to listen, having a toolbox of techniques for different situations. The breath can be micro practices. It doesn't need to be a big, long practice. Usually small, consistent moments are actually more effective. Building in a few minutes each hour or several times a day. Make it something that you can stick to, something that feels doable to you, not something prescribed by somebody else. What feels right for you. Using the breath during flares or during overwhelm. Having those techniques for when you need them. It feels empowering and it helps to reduce discomfort when it happens. We can use our breath to support pacing. The breath is a great metric to how the body is coping and then supporting it. And we can also use our breath to meet difficult emotions safely when they come up. So if the breath feels like something you'd like to explore more deeply, I'm going to put some links into the show notes that you can check out. Over at Breathing for Long Covid and MECFS, Vicky Jones and I have written a course which teaches these things in a safe and connected environment. There are also a selection of blogs and videos with more information about the breath, which you can have a look at. I have a whole variety of free tracks on the amazing app Insight Timer, which you can access either using the app or through a browser. Insight Timer is a free app, and I used it so much during my own recovery that I really felt that I wanted to upload a load of my own tracks. And these are all tracks that are gentle, invitational,

Micro Practices For Pacing And Emotions

Jackie Baxter 18:49

and appropriate. And I do also work one-to-one with people as well. So you're welcome to explore any of these options if and when they feel right to you. And all of those links will go into the show notes for you to check out. One of the quotes about breathing that I love the most is when you own your breath, nobody can steal your peace. I don't know who this quote is attributed to. It's down as unknown. But I think it's beautiful. And it's so true. Your breath is something that you can come back to at any time. And once we learn how to harness it, the results can be incredible. And remember, you don't have to do this alone. If you do have more questions you'd like me to explore, whether it's related to breathing or indeed anything else, then please drop me a message either through the website, on social media, or through the fan mail function in the show notes. I always love to hear from you. I'll be back next week with more amazing guests and more insights from the recovery room. Until then, take care and I'll see you soon.