How Breathing Deeply Can Reduce Pain
Breathing slowly could be as good as some medicines at banishing pain. Taking half as many breaths as normal not only reduces short-term pain from burns or cuts, but could help thousands who suffer chronic aches in their joints and muscles. In a new study people were able to put up with higher levels of pain and for longer if they practised controlled breathing sessions in which they halved their breathing rates. Most healthy adults take between 12 and 18 breaths a minute. But new research shows that slowing this down to as few as six a minute can have a powerful pain-busting effect. U.S. researchers studied a group of healthy middle-aged women and a group of women with fibromyalgia – a condition that causes pain and for which there is no obvious cause. February 4, 2010 Copyright © 2010 Daily Mail
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