"I MADE a very good choice," says Fiona Teudt.
One year ago, the speech pathologist and mother would wake up after nine to 10 hours of sleep a night still feeling sluggish and unrested.
She didn't know you were supposed to feel refreshed when you wake up in the morning.
After being diagnosed with sleep apnoea and being told by her partner that she was snoring at night, she began exploring alternatives to a CPAP machine (a mask with an air pump attached) or dental appliance that she would have to wear at night.
A friend had done a Buteyko course, where practitioners are trained to breathe slowly and evenly through the nose. The method, advocates say, can lead to "significant improvements" among those with asthma, sleep disordered breathing and other respiratory conditions.
Teudt chose to try the course herself and, the night after her first two-hour session that involved various breathing exercises, discovered how rest was meant to feel.
"For the first time in my life I felt like I had a proper night's sleep and actually felt refreshed. I didn't know we were meant to experience that so it has quite genuinely changed my life," the 55-year-old from Manly Vale said. "Now I'm quite happy with seven to eight hours. It's given me more hours in my day that I didn't have before."
As for her snoring and sleep apnoea, she says she hasn't done another sleep study because she hasn't felt the need.
"My partner tells me I do still snore some of the time – now, I snore through my nose instead of my mouth," she says chuckling, "but because I now feel so well, I don't mind that I snore some of the time."
The power of the breath
Dr Angelina Fong is a lecturer in the department of physiology at the University of Melbourne.
She says she doesn't know a lot about the Buteyko technique, which was developed in the 1950s by Ukrainian doctor Konstantin Pavlovich Buteyko. But, she does know that the breath is an underused tool in our mental and physical health.
"Breath is one of those things that we just do and most people don't ever think about – a lot of people underestimate the power of breathing and breathing properly," Fong says. "I say to a lot of people we don't know how to breathe properly."
This is because, Fong says, unless you're a singer or an athlete, a yogi or a freediver, learning breath regulation and deep, slow breath is not something most of us are ever trained to do.
"There's a lot of anecdotal evidence that it does have impacts on body systems, on health and physiology – for example, in pranayama [the yogic practice of breath control>[/embedp>
