Watch the video above to hear Sasha Yakovleva answer questions from Patrick Obolgogiani of Finland, co-founder of Alveos One.
Read the article below to explore some of the facts and ideas Sasha shared during the interview.
When people hear about the Buteyko Method, they often assume that it is a breathing technique. Maybe they have heard about reduced breathing, breath holds, nasal breathing, or some special exercise designed to calm the nervous system. This is understandable, because breathing exercises are certainly part of the method. However, the Buteyko Method itself is not a breathing technique.
Its goal is something much bigger: Breathing Normalization. This means gradually changing the way a person breathes automatically, twenty-four hours a day, and at the same time establishing a lifestyle that supports healthy breathing. Breathing exercises are tools that help us accomplish this goal, but they are not the method itself.
I came to understand this distinction only after I traveled to Moscow to study the method. And, ironically, I went there not because I was particularly interested in breathing, but because my husband was very sick.
How I Found the Buteyko Method
In 2008, my husband Thomas suddenly became severely ill. He had had asthma since childhood, but it had never prevented him from being extremely active. He was a strong, athletic man who worked as a clinical psychologist. Then he caught a strange and very severe respiratory infection, and within approximately six months his health deteriorated dramatically. Eventually, he could hardly walk. He developed severe allergies and constantly suffered from a shortage of air. An asthma attack could happen at any moment, and both of us understood that a serious one could be dangerous.
Because we were both involved in holistic healing, we used everything we knew. We also reached out to many practitioners we trusted. Some things helped, but nothing changed the situation radically. Eventually, out of desperation, Thomas began relying more heavily on conventional asthma treatments and rescue inhalers. Again, they helped, but his overall condition continued to deteriorate.
At that point, a friend reminded me about Dr. Konstantin Buteyko. The strange part of the story is that I already knew who he was.
Before moving to the United States, I had worked as a journalist in Russia and founded one of the first holistic magazines there. At some point, Dr. Buteyko called me and asked me to interview him. I asked what his method did, and he told me that Breathing Normalization could help with approximately 150 of the most widespread diseases.
I thought he was crazy. At that time, I knew almost nothing about breathing. I remember thinking that if he had told me his method could help with one disease, perhaps two, I might have believed him. But 150? Impossible. I declined the interview and went on with my life.
Years later, watching my husband struggle to breathe, I was suddenly willing to reconsider. I called the Buteyko Clinic in Moscow and eventually spoke with Ludmila Buteyko, Dr. Buteyko’s widow. By then, I had already learned that asthma was generally considered an incurable condition, so I was very careful with my question. I did not ask whether they could cure Thomas. I simply asked whether they might be able to help him.
Ludmila answered with complete confidence that they could. There were several moments during that conversation when my rational mind was waving red flags. Nevertheless, there was something so strong and sincere in her voice that both Thomas and I felt we should go. Fortunately, we listened to that feeling.
We flew to Moscow and began studying at the Buteyko Clinic. What we discovered there was completely different from what we had expected. As we learned the method, and especially as we began to understand the philosophy behind it, both of us gradually fell in love with it. Thomas’s condition changed tremendously. At the same time, while learning alongside him, I discovered that I was not nearly as healthy as I had believed myself to be.
Before leaving Moscow, we decided to go through professional training. Ludmila Buteyko and Dr. Andrey Novozhilov, who was the medical director of the Clinic at that time, asked us to represent the Buteyko Method in the United States and the West. We agreed. This is how breathing, somewhat unexpectedly, became my life’s work.
Why Buteyko Is Different From a Breathing Technique
Today, there are countless breathing techniques. Often, someone experiments with breathing, notices that a particular pattern makes them feel better, and starts teaching it to others. Sometimes these techniques are useful. Sometimes they are not. Different ways of breathing can create very different physiological effects, and I do not believe that changing breathing casually is always harmless.
The history of the Buteyko Method was very different. During the Soviet era, Dr. Buteyko was invited to lead a large laboratory in Akademgorodok, the famous scientific center in Siberia. He worked with a team of physicians, scientists, and other specialists who studied breathing for years. The method that eventually carried his name grew out of this investigation.
Dr. Buteyko did not begin by asking, “What interesting breathing exercise can I invent?” He was trying to understand what healthy breathing actually is, how breathing changes during illness, and whether unhealthy breathing patterns can be reversed.
This leads to one of the biggest misunderstandings about breathing today.
Is Taking a Deep Breath Really Healthy?
We are constantly told to take a deep breath. If someone is stressed, frightened, upset, or anxious, sooner or later another person will say, “Just take a deep breath.” But what do people actually do when they hear this instruction? Usually they take a big breath.
Their chest expands, their shoulders may rise, their abdomen pushes outward, and they pull in a large amount of air. We call this a deep breath, but from the Buteyko perspective, it is often simply an excessive breath.
For centuries, human beings made the same mistake with food. More food was associated with wealth, strength, and health. Today, we understand that more is not necessarily better. Eating beyond what the body needs eventually creates problems.
Breathing follows the same basic principle. We need air, of course, but this does not mean that pulling more and more air through the lungs must be healthier.
In fact, one of the most surprising things I learned in Moscow was what Dr. Buteyko considered healthy breathing to look like. He sometimes asked a person to imagine standing in front of a large mirror with their torso uncovered. If the person was quietly resting, nothing in the mirror should make it obvious that they were breathing. The shoulders should not rise. The chest should not visibly expand. Even the movement of the abdomen should eventually become very small.
Of course, healthy breathing is diaphragmatic. The diaphragm moves with every breath. But at rest, when breathing is truly calm, and the volume of air is modest, its movement can become so gentle that another person can barely see it.
This was very different from what I had previously associated with “deep diaphragmatic breathing.” From the Buteyko perspective, healthy breathing at rest is nasal, silent, relaxed, gentle, and almost invisible.
Why Buteyko Paid So Much Attention to Carbon Dioxide
Another aspect of Dr. Buteyko’s work that surprises people is his emphasis on carbon dioxide.
Most of us grew up with a very simple picture: oxygen is good, and carbon dioxide is a waste gas we need to get rid of. Dr. Buteyko considered this understanding dangerously incomplete. In his work, carbon dioxide was not merely a waste product but an important regulator of physiological processes.
When we breathe excessively, we can eliminate carbon dioxide faster than the body is producing it. Dr. Buteyko connected chronic over-breathing, or chronic hyperventilation, with a persistent shortage of carbon dioxide and believed that this disturbance could affect many systems of the body.
This is why the purpose of the Buteyko Method is not to bring more and more oxygen into the lungs. It is to normalize breathing so that the respiratory system works in a way appropriate to the body’s actual metabolic needs.
During the interview, I was also asked about the similarity I see between carbon dioxide and concepts such as prana in India or chi in China. I find this connection fascinating. Traditional cultures understood that breathing, vitality, mental state, and health were deeply interconnected, even though they described these relationships in a very different language.
I am not trying to say that an ancient spiritual concept can simply be translated as “carbon dioxide.” Life is more mysterious than that. But I do believe that people observed important truths about breathing long before modern respiratory physiology existed, and Dr. Buteyko looked at some of those same truths through the eyes of a scientist.
Why Do Modern People Over-Breathe?
A very reasonable question came up during the interview. If breathing is automatic and the body regulates carbon dioxide very carefully, why would so many people develop unhealthy breathing patterns in the first place?
Dr. Buteyko’s answer was surprisingly simple: lifestyle.
Our automatic breathing patterns do not develop independently from the way we live. Imagine an ordinary person living two hundred years ago. Most likely, this person spent large parts of the day physically active. People walked, carried things, built things, worked outside, rode horses, chopped wood, grew food, washed themselves in cold water, and lived in temperatures that changed with the seasons.
Now compare this with the life of a modern person. We wake up in a temperature-controlled house, sit in a car, sit in front of a computer, talk on the phone, eat more than we need, and spend much of the day almost completely sedentary. Then we may go to the gym for forty minutes and exercise so intensely that we start breathing heavily through the mouth.
From the Buteyko perspective, this lifestyle cannot help but influence breathing.
Physical activity is important because metabolism produces carbon dioxide. But this does not mean that harder exercise is always better. If a person’s breathing is already weak and they immediately push themselves into heavy mouth breathing and gasping, the intensity of the exercise may be beyond what their respiratory system can comfortably handle.
This is why I often tell my students that the Buteyko Method cannot be separated from lifestyle. Breathing exercises are important, but what we do with the other twenty-three hours of the day may be even more important.
Start With the Nose
If somebody wants to begin observing their breathing, the first step is very simple: notice whether you breathe through your nose or your mouth.
The nose is our breathing organ. It warms, filters, humidifies, and otherwise conditions the air before it reaches the lungs. Dr. Buteyko used to say, “Breathe through your mouth as often as you eat through your nose.”
It sounds funny, but it makes the point.
The mouth has another primary job. We are certainly capable of breathing through it, and this backup pathway can be extremely useful in an emergency, but habitual mouth breathing is not what our respiratory system was designed around.
The second thing to notice is sound. Can you hear your breathing while you are resting? Healthy breathing should normally be very quiet.
Then look at movement. Are your shoulders moving? Is your upper chest rising noticeably with each breath? Are you consciously trying to inflate your abdomen every time you inhale?
The goal is not to freeze your body or create tension. Quite the opposite. We want relaxation. As breathing becomes calmer and the amount of air decreases, respiratory movement naturally becomes smaller.
Eventually, breathing begins to look almost invisible.
Learning Not to Fear Mild Air Hunger
One of the most difficult ideas for beginners is the concept of air hunger.
We are conditioned to react strongly to the slightest sensation that we might want more air. The moment it appears, we instinctively take a bigger breath. The Buteyko Method asks us to become a little less frightened of this sensation.
During reduced-breathing practice, we deliberately create a mild and comfortable desire for slightly more air. Mild is the important word here. I am not talking about severe breathlessness, struggling, gasping, or forcing yourself through distress. I often compare this sensation with exercising a muscle. If you go to the gym and the following day you are in extreme pain, you probably overdid it. But a little muscle soreness tells you that the muscle was challenged.
Air hunger can play a somewhat similar role in breathing practice. We learn to stay relaxed while experiencing a mild desire for more air instead of immediately answering it with a large inhalation.
The relaxation is essential. Fighting your breathing defeats the purpose.
Breathing as if You Were Meditating
People who meditate often know exactly what peaceful breathing feels like, even if they have never studied respiratory physiology.
Toward the end of a good meditation session, breathing often becomes so subtle that it almost disappears from awareness. A person may say, “For a moment, I felt as though I wasn’t breathing.” Of course, they were breathing. They simply were not breathing very much.
This is one of the easiest ways to understand what we are trying to develop through the Buteyko Method. We are training ourselves to breathe more like a person in a peaceful meditative state, not only while sitting on a cushion but during ordinary life. It is gentle breathing without unnecessary force. It is relaxed breathing without constant interference. It is breathing that becomes quieter as the nervous system becomes quieter.
People sometimes become overly technical and ask exactly how they should exhale, how much air should remain in the lungs, or at what point the breath should stop. From the Buteyko perspective, this kind of excessive control can easily create tension.
We pay much more attention to inhalation. If the inhalation is excessive, the exhalation will naturally be excessive as well. If we inhale gently through the nose and stop pulling in unnecessary air, the exhalation can mostly take care of itself.
We are not trying to micromanage breathing. We are trying to normalize it.
The Exercise Is Not the Most Important Part
People frequently ask me how much time they need to spend doing Buteyko exercises.
Even ten minutes can be useful. Someone who wants to make substantial changes may practice several times a day. But the number of minutes is not really the heart of the method. The more important question is what happens after the exercise is finished.
If I practice peaceful reduced breathing for thirty minutes and then spend the rest of my day breathing through my mouth, talking nonstop, gasping during exercise, reacting to every stressful thought with a big breath, and sleeping with my mouth open, those thirty minutes are working against many hours of an opposite pattern.
Eventually, the entire day becomes the practice. You begin noticing your breathing while walking, working, exercising, talking, eating, sleeping, or becoming upset. You notice what happens to it when you are frightened. You notice what happens when you hurry. You notice when breathing suddenly becomes noisy or forceful.
In this sense, your breathing begins to act as a health coach that never leaves you.
What About Scientific Evidence?
During the interview, I was asked about scientific evidence supporting the wide range of conditions that Dr. Buteyko associated with Breathing Normalization.
This is an important question, and the answer is not simple.
Western research on the Buteyko Method, particularly in relation to asthma, has been conducted, and medical studies were also conducted in the Soviet Union. At the same time, modern research does not substantiate every broad therapeutic claim historically made within the Buteyko tradition. In the interview, I said very openly that it is difficult to discuss the evidence for the entire list of conditions attributed to Breathing Normalization.
What does exist, however, is an enormous body of clinical experience accumulated over decades by Dr. Buteyko, his physicians, his clinic, and generations of practitioners.
I do not think we have to choose between these two realities.
We can acknowledge that something has not yet been adequately established by modern research while still taking decades of clinical observations seriously enough to preserve them, examine them, and perhaps study them properly in the future.
For me, this question has become increasingly important. Much of the original Russian Buteyko knowledge has never been translated into English. Some of it was never formally published at all. It remains in old recordings, documents, and, most importantly, in the memories of people who worked with Dr. Buteyko personally.
This is one reason I have recently begun interviewing his original and longtime students. I want to preserve as much of this knowledge as I can while these people are still here to tell us what they saw, learned, and experienced.
Perhaps the Most Important Practice
After all these years of teaching Buteyko, if someone asked me for the most important exercise, I would probably tell them simply to start paying attention. Notice whether you are breathing through your nose or your mouth. Notice whether your breath is quiet or audible. Notice whether your shoulders and chest move unnecessarily. Notice what happens to your breathing while you walk, exercise, speak, or become stressed. And most importantly, stop assuming that more breathing must always be better.
Our relationship with breathing is very intimate. We can live for weeks without food, days without water, but only minutes without breathing. We breathe from the first moments of life until the last, and we do it approximately every few seconds without paying much attention to it.
What Dr. Buteyko taught me was to pay attention.
Breathing is not merely something happening in the background while we live our lives. The way we breathe is intertwined with the way we live, move, feel, react, and function.
Once you begin seeing it this way, breathing stops being just another technique.
It becomes a path to optimal health and well-being.
