Even though the heart gets a lot of attention, healthy lungs are also crucial for overall health — particularly in light of the coronavirus pandemic. Lung infections often develop as a complication of other chronic illnesses. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), exposure to air pollution results in 4.2 million deaths worldwide each year. Cigarette smoking is the cause of death for one in every five people in the United States. So, lungs should not be taken for granted. Though the body has a natural defense system to protect the lungs, there are some ways to keep your lungs healthy!
How To Keep Your Lungs Healthy
1. Practice Deep Breathing
Although lung capacity can diminish as you age, certain deep breathing exercises can help you breathe better. Breathing exercises can help healthy people as well as those with breathing problems. You can try these two types of deep breathing techniques to keep your lungs healthy.
- Diaphragmatic breathing helps in building lung capacity and helps people with COPD. Inhale through your nose for two seconds, feeling the air move into the abdomen and breathe out for two seconds.
- Pursed-lip breathing: Breathe in through your nose and then breathe out slowly through pursed lips.
2. Detox Your Lungs
Our lungs are mostly self-cleaning organs but there are certain simple ways which help cleaning lungs, so that they function at an optimum level.
- To break down the mucus, start your day with 1-2 crushed cloves of garlic in one tsp of raw honey.
- Drink 250ml of lemon water, add a pinch of cayenne pepper and drink it in the morning to loosen up the mucus.
- Drink fenugreek seed water and chew the soaked fenugreek seeds to break down the mucus.
- Steam inhalation with peppermint and eucalyptus oil for 5 minutes twice a day is an effective way to keep your lungs healthy.
- Castor oil has properties to destroy mucus, massaging your chest deeply with warm castor oil is good to cure congestion.
3. Get Fit & Stay Active
Exercise forces the muscles to work harder, which increases the body’s breathing rate, which in turn gives a good supply of oxygen to the muscles. It also helps in improving circulation and making the body more efficient in removing the excess carbon dioxide that the body produces when exercising.
4. Stay Hydrated
The best way to keep your airways moist is to stay well hydrated. Staying well-hydrated is very important if you have breathing problems because it helps the lungs to do their job better. It keeps the mucosal lining in the lungs thin and this thinner lining helps the lungs function better.
5. Prevent Infection & Avoid Exposure To Pollutants
Sometimes respiratory infections become very serious. To safeguard your lungs from various infections you should:
- Wash your hands often with soap and water or use alcohol-based sanitizer
- Maintain good oral hygiene, brush your teeth twice a day and see your dentist every six months
- Avoid crowded places during cold and flu season. Get yourself vaccinated against influenza and pneumonia every year
- Minimize exposure to outdoor air if the quality is not good and avoid exercising outdoors on bad air days
- Don’t exercise near heavy traffic to avoid inhaling polluted air
- Avoid exposure to indoor pollutants which worsen lung disease. Make your home and car smoke-free
- Dust the furniture at least twice a week. Keep your home clean as much you can, use natural cleaning products and make sure you have adequate air ventilation at home.
- Instead of using synthetic air fresheners and candles, you can use an aromatherapy diffuser, essential oils like lavender oil, peppermint oil, rosemary oil, etc.
- Stop smoking as soon as possible because it causes chronic inflammation in the lungs and destroys lung tissues which can lead to chronic bronchitis and lung cancer.
Apart from the above therapies, you can add some anti-inflammatory and antioxidant-rich foods to your diet which helps in reducing the inflammation of the lungs. Try adding turmeric, green tea, cherries, blueberries, olives, walnuts, beans and lentils, etc. to keep your lungs healthy!
We hope this article helps you. To know more ways to keep your lungs healthy, check out Healthy Reads or tune in to LIVE sessions by experts on GOQii Play.
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This posture fills the lungs with plenty of fresh air while we inhale and expands the rib cage and abdomen. All the alveoli in the lungs are filled with extra oxygen and this enhances the performance of the lungs.
This Asana opens up the chest cavity and lets the airways open for the lungs to get the air easily.
This posture expands the chest and lungs on both sides
Though there are many benefits through this pose, it expands the chest and lungs to improve the lung capacity
This is one among the easy poses that is easy for everyone. This is also called as child pose or Baalasana. It improves the lung capacity, expands the back part of the lungs, relieves upper and lower back issues and also spine issues
Have you ever wondered how many breaths we all take in our lifetime? On average we take about 675 million breaths in 80 years of life. Breathing frequency and type are different in different stages of our life depending on age, altitude, pollution levels, smoking, weather and other factors. Our lungs are the main organs of respiration as they are responsible for an exchange of oxygen (O2) and carbon dioxide (CO2) to keep the heart, brain, and other functioning of the body normal. Lung function and lung capacity are determined through the efficiency of exchange of oxygen (O2) and CO2 in our lungs. Any ailments with lungs can affect the health of the entire body. Have you ever thought about keeping your lungs healthy too? We can enhance lung capacity, which means the quantity of air a lung can hold. Certain breathing exercises can help the body make use of all the oxygen inhaled by our lungs in a better way. Here are three simple breathing techniques to strengthen our lung capacity.
