When You Feel Like You Can Breathe Again
At get-go, I thought it was a panic attack. I'd had those before. That all-too-familiar sensation of easily pressing on my chest, snaking around my throat, making each inhalation shorter than the last. I gasped for air. The room began to mistiness.
I tried to calm down, to exercise the one thing yous're told to do in difficult situations: breathe. Only every attempt sent hurting shooting across my chest. My efforts to fill my lungs felt futile. This wasn't panic. Something else was wrong.
Information technology took what felt like forever to subside. In reality, it was probably around 15 minutes. Panting, I reached out to feel carpet below my easily, realising I'd dropped to my sleeping room floor. I saw the clothes I'd been carrying strewn around me. The tear tracks down my cheeks told me I'd been crying.
This was in December 2020, at the summit of the pandemic. Simply it couldn't be Covid-xix. I'd had no other symptoms. I'd followed all the rules. I'd had two recent tests, in grooming for seeing family. Both clear. Merely the side by side day, I had some other attack. Hours after, another. They seemed to come from nowhere – otherwise, I felt fine. The attacks became more frequent, and somewhen sent me to hospital. There, tests confirmed my suspicions: the virus had found its style to me. Information technology was unusual, the doctors said, not to present any expected symptoms, but not incommunicable. I should get better over my 10 days of mandatory quarantine. But, for me, the effects persist, inextricably weaving themselves into my everyday life.
Information technology feels selfish to talk nigh my 'struggle', when so many have lost their lives. And then I don't really tell people I was unwell. I merely talk about my 'weird breathing'. Which is an odd affair to even discuss – I've never given much thought to my breathing earlier. We're not supposed to. We take around 22,000 breaths a day: our trunk'south wheel of taking in air, extracting oxygen, expelling carbon dioxide. Information technology's pivotal to our being and even so, nearly of the time, we don't even notice nosotros're doing information technology. But, of a sudden, the one thing that had always been effortless became the i affair I couldn't control.
Control is something that has, in a mode, ruled my life. I similar to have it. I like to exert it. I like to exist in accuse of my thoughts, my torso, work. I like being able to predict the results of my deportment, to prepare a target and achieve it. I program everything down to the tiniest detail – imagining every possible consequence so I'one thousand prepared for anything. My friends accept vowed never to throw me a surprise political party, because they know I'd rather take planned it myself. So to all of a sudden lose my treasured autonomy was tougher than I could have imagined.
Breathing became all I could retrieve about. Monitoring it was my new obsession: tracking my oxygen levels; testing how far I could push myself. I went from being completely contained to reliant on those around me. I spent months having meals made for me, but about moving from bed to desk to sofa and back again. Fifty-fifty walking to the bathroom left me exhausted; panting as if I'd been sprinting. I barely left the house. I didn't really want to.
Something strange happens when your trunk stops working as it should. Your heed shifts. You lot feel untethered, like you lot're drifting out to sea without any idea of how to get back. Physically, I was tired. Emotionally, I was exhausted. And it began to show. I got angry over the smallest things. I cried at Television shows (I never cry over Tv shows). I stopped returning letters. At that place are only so many times y'all can jokingly reply to 'How are you lot?' with a Spotify screenshot of The Corrs' Incoherent. The reality felt too much to type: I didn't experience like me anymore.
It took well-nigh six months for me to get a long Covid diagnosis. Co-ordinate to a study by Imperial College London, up to two one thousand thousand people in the Britain have had long Covid symptoms for at least 12 weeks. For some, that'south been breathlessness and extreme fatigue, like me, while others have had excruciating headaches, digestive issues and more. Why did it impact me so badly? I'yard still not certain. Information technology could exist my historic period (I'm 29) or perchance my gender – that same study found that long Covid rates were highest among those aged 25 to 34, and xiv.7% of women had ongoing symptoms after three months, compared to 12.7% of men.
Information technology'due south too possible that my feel was completely random. In reality, no one knows how the virus will affect them until they feel it. 'At that place's a trajectory of illness that tin can vary in different groups of people,' says Professor Gisli Jenkins of the National Heart & Lung Institute at Imperial Higher London. 'And there are a lot of ways that your breathing can be damaged by Covid. If you damage your diaphragmatic muscles, you won't suck as much air in. If y'all harm the alveolar membrane, you won't become the oxygen travelling into your bloodstream. And in that location could be then many other problems at play. It's something we are still trying to unravel.'
Not knowing anything for sure did non sit well with me. So while I waited for medical professionals to work out what was going on inside my body (still unknown), I turned to alternative methods, looking for something, annihilation that would give me relief. That's how I establish breathwork.
Co-ordinate to Richie Bostock, author of Exhale and founder of the breathing app Flourish, breathwork is 'whatever time you intentionally become aware of your breath and utilize it to improve your physical and mental health, your operation and emotional wellbeing'. 'The way yous breathe affects simply most every system in your torso,' Bostock says. 'When yous know how to use your breath purposefully, it tin can increase free energy levels, rebalance hormones, enhance focus, amend sleep, digestion and cardiovascular health.' This was exactly what I needed.
Luckily, breathing is the latest elemental homo practice to be co-opted by the wellness industry. 'Pre-2020, the interest in breathwork was already increasing rapidly,' says Bostock, who is oftentimes referred to every bit 'The Breath Guy'. Merely that'south not to say that a renewed focus isn't necessary – peculiarly now. 'A pandemic involving a virus that can significantly bear on the respiratory system has seen the number of people using breathwork for their physical wellness and emotional wellbeing explode,' he adds.
And, apparently, there is a 'incorrect' way to breathe: 'Most people aren't aware that they are breathing poorly,' says Bostock. 'The virtually common dysfunctional design I see is where people use their neck, shoulders and upper chest muscles (rather than the diaphragm) to aggrandize the chest to accept in air – as those muscles aren't supposed to be used 24/7, this can activate the body'south stress response and cause hurting.' So, by trying and so hard to breathe during my attacks, had I actually been stressing out my torso – and myself – more?
A visit to my chiropractor, Dr Bav Raindi of the Chiropractic London Grouping, confirmed that's what I'd been doing. I'd gone lament of more shoulder hurting than usual, and when I told him almost my chest pain, he wasn't surprised. 'Your posture has changed,' he said. 'The muscles along your shoulders, upper back and across your chest have tightened and become shorter, while the muscles in the mid back take weakened and elongated, causing y'all to "hunch" over. This is common in people with shallow breathing – those muscles are overcompensating, putting increased pressure on the joints and therefore causing that pain.'
Learning that my breathing was having a knock-on effect for the rest of my body made me even more determined to fix it. I looked up breathwork tutorials on YouTube. I read books. I downloaded Fly LDN's online app to remind me of the 'abdomen' breathing the yoga instructors tell us to practise during class. (Engage your diaphragm as you inhale, rather than those chest muscles, moving it downward and pushing the abdomen out.) I tried box breathing (inhale for four seconds, agree for four, exhale for four and repeat – ideally for four minutes), alternating nostril breathing, that technique from Dr Sarfaraz Munshi'south now-viral YouTube clip, where you cough equally you exhale to salvage fungus in the lungs. Some of those techniques worked, providing me with moments where I felt like I had some semblance of control over my body; that I could finally take in enough oxygen.
Over time, I began to meet small signs of recovery: I could walk that chip further, climb a few more stairs, inhale more deeply without those sharp pains flashing across my chest. Emotionally, notwithstanding, I was declining. Every time I left the house, the lingering fear of Covid followed. My mind swirled with ways I might catch information technology again. When we were immune dorsum inside restaurants, I notwithstanding made friends sit outside. I developed an expensive habit of taking taxis everywhere, after the confined, airless spaces of public ship caused panic attacks. I felt vulnerable. This was a fragility I wasn't used to.
City life began to feel claustrophobic. Parks were total of reunions and celebrations; groups gathered on every corner; queues snaked out of every shop I tried to visit. Everywhere I turned, there were people. People breathing in the same air every bit me, and potentially breathing out the virus that sent me into decline. The air seemed heavier, somehow: thick with pollution and weighed downward with the possibility of infection. Whenever I went out, I felt like my throat was closing upward. Even though I'd institute coping mechanisms for my attacks, the problem hadn't gone away: I still couldn't breathe properly. Peculiarly not in London. I needed space.
That's how I plant myself in a tent, wrapped in a duvet, listening to the rain hammer against the canvas. On a subcontract in Cornwall. At a retreat promoting nature's healing benefits. Bluntly, the last place you'd expect me to exist. But Cabilla'south slogan – 'We desire y'all to leave feeling meliorate than when you arrived' – appealed in its simplicity. That's what I craved. Non necessarily a physical transformation (doctors are working on that), but to feel meliorate.
At Cabilla, nada specific is required of you; no exercise regimes or forced activities. The point is to just spend fourth dimension outdoors. The farmland is a pollution-free site, and the lack of impurities in the air was palpable. I inhaled equally deeply equally the dull ache in my chest allowed. The air felt clean. Pure.
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Cabilla is ready in i of the U.k.'s only dark sky environments, which is obvious as night falls. The inky expanse overhead was completely articulate, littered with the brightest stars I've seen. It was on my third night, sat under those stars, that I realised I'd begun to change.
Acres of aboriginal oak woodland had enveloped me from the moment I'd arrived: twisted trees curving into a dense canopy, bluebells carpeting the forest floor and scenting the air with a delicate perfume. Without realising, I'd been practising the Japanese art of woods bathing, or shinrin-yoku – the act of mindfully spending time in nature. A recent report found that simply two hours of forest bathing tin lead to improvements in physiological and psychological health, plus a decrease in blood pressure.*
As I walked through fields and forest and along the river each twenty-four hour period, I suppose I was, without realising, practising box breathing – inhaling securely and taking my fourth dimension before exhaling slowly. Only I wasn't counting the seconds. I wasn't tracking my oxygen levels. For once, I let my body tell me how it wanted to piece of work. I felt energised, yet more relaxed than I had in months. I guess breathing 'well' tin do that to you. 'Deep, mindful breathing helps release endorphins, or the "feel-good" hormone,' says Fly LDN yoga teacher Kate Hiley. 'Our exhale is continued to our parasympathetic nervous organization, which is responsible for our body's rest and digest response. So taking deep breaths followed by a long, dull breathe can tell our body and mind that we are rubber and tin relax.'
Information technology dawned on me that the more I'd worked at breathing 'better', the less progress I'd made. Manifestly it'due south common. 'When Covid makes breathing difficult, you realise everything you took for granted is at gamble. You start thinking about breathing – and when you practice that, you exhale in a not-democratic manner,' says Professor Jenkins. 'As a issue, your diaphragm moves in the incorrect part of the respiratory cycle – when it should be going down, you might be trying to bring it up considering you're overthinking it. Yous start to work against yourself, which is where things tin become wrong.'
With the work I'd been doing, trying (and ofttimes failing) to 'win' at breathing, I'd lost sight of what was going on. I'd been trying to command the uncontrollable, so kept catastrophe upwards dorsum at square ane. But during those few days out of the metropolis, when I'd stopped counting and measuring and stressing, I felt recalibrated – after more than than half a year of feeling disconnected from my body, that synergy was on its mode to being restored. Information technology'southward time to stop being disappointed at my body for not working equally it should, and beginning appreciating how it has carried me through.
I can't command my recovery or speed upwards the procedure, simply I'yard but grateful that it's happening. Even though I nonetheless need breaks when I go for walks, and stairs often experience like climbing Everest, I'm slowly getting meliorate. My mind all the same swirls with 'what ifs', and I know it will never fully calm down, but it is quieter now. And when those fears begin to creep in, I know what to practise. Shut my eyes. Count to four. And breathe.
*Environmental Wellness and Preventive Medicine, 2019.
This feature appears in the September issue of ELLE United kingdom.
Source: https://www.elle.com/uk/life-and-culture/elle-voices/a37325979/breathing-long-covid/
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