Nicky McLeod’s Post

View profile for Nicky McLeod, graphic

Breathing Educator. Buteyko Practitioner. Speaker.

Talking is a significant hyperventilation event for many and can trigger breathing symptoms - breathlessness, tiredness, coughing, light headedness, trouble concentrating, feeling anxious/stressed after speaking, fear of public speaking etc. One of the 8 Healthy Habits that I teach in a breathing course is how to breathe when speaking to optimise blood flow and oxygen to the brain rather than dropping it which is what happens when we take gasping inhalations in through our mouth, speak fast, over use our secondary respiratory muscles and engage the sympathetic branch of our nervous system (fight flight mode). Here I share some relevant information on the subject of breathing fast while speaking and the integral link between breathing and the nervous system. It's written by Phil Parker (Neurolinguistic Programming): "The speed of your voice is naturally linked to the speed of your breathing. As a result, when we are stressed or anxious we tend to breathe faster, which naturally makes us talk faster, as we can only speak on the out breath, as you have probably already noticed. This works both ways, in that when we talk faster we increase our breathing rate, this in turn has a knock-on effect on our nervous system, actually changing our internal body physiology to release hormones and so we feel even more stressed. There is also a link between the speed of voice and the kind of thoughts we have; a faster voice will activate the stress pathways, and again it works both ways, activating stress pathways will increase the speed of your voice and your breathing rate. You can also notice that when you are stressed or wound up your internal voice will also be fast, and it too will have an effect on your breathing rate and your stress levels. Equally, if you have a slow, calm, relaxed voice, it slows down your breathing, it calms down your nervous system. The same applies to your internal voice, if it is calm, relaxed, it will guide your nervous system and physiology to do the same. So if you want to get yourself more relaxed, centred and focused start by noticing your breathing rate, the speed at which you’re talking, and the speed of the voice inside your head, and then simply s-l-o-w t-h-e-m d-o-w-n !" Yes, thanks very much Phil, but how? It's actually not that simple and in my experience this is easier said than done! I hyperventilated badly whenever I talked for decades and knew I did it and needed to slow down but it wasn't until I got the breathing knowledge of how to do this in a breathing course, first improving my baseline breathing pattern and then learning more advanced breathing for speaking skills, that I was finally able to do this. As a result of this knowledge I was able to go from extreme phobia of public speaking to regularly speaking on podcasts and to the public throughout NZ. To date my biggest audience was 300 and I enjoyed it thanks to what I learnt through the course.

  • No alternative text description for this image

Or as the Australians would say after listening to to Queen Elizabeth every Christmas, “learn to speak like the Queen”. Not mouth breathing after every sentence!

Like
Reply

To view or add a comment, sign in

Explore topics