AnnaB says: Is there a particular resource (website, book, whatever) that you would recommend for a good explanation?
http://www.normalbreathing.com
The books that seems popular are Close Your Mouth by Patrick McKeown, which Kaza mentioned, and Breathing Free by Teresa Hale.
I didn’t get either of those books – my understanding of it comes from Artour Rahkimov (www.normalbreathing.com) and from the practitioners at http://www.learnbuteyko.co.uk because I paid to consult with them.
The biggest differences I see are that Artour recommends a practice of Reduced Breathing, and then you take your Control Pause as a diagnostic tool. Whereas the learnbuteyko.co.uk people (who claim direct descendence from Buteyko) use the pauses as the practice itself. They have you hold your breath longer and longer.
Kaza says: My anxiety levels (uber high after my 3 years on a low carb diet) went up everytime I practised the breathing exercises.
I experienced the anxiety too, and I have a theory. At first, I was doing it just from what I learned online, and for about a week I was totally amazed at how I could stop a terrible CFS/ME brain-fry headache in its tracks.
But doing Reduced Breathing was making me tense up all my core muscles and maybe some muscles in my throat, too. Because you have to resist that message coming from your brain saying, “CO2 is too high, time to breathe now!”
I got so tensed up that I had a limited symptom panic attack! I was pretty desperate between this awful insomnia, headaches, and anxiety, that I plunked down a lot of money to the consultants, but then I was really super happy with the immediate results I got with them. (I mean, maybe I’m also doing that human thing where I justify what I did because I did it, but I was on the verge of losing my mind from sleep deprivation.)
They were able to stabilize me and get me sleeping pretty well immediately, and everything was going swimmingly for like 3 weeks until they tried to ramp up my practice and I started really losing my appetite, so that’s where I am right now, trying to balance the two.