Blood Oxygen - A New Take

Your blood oxygen levels fall while you are sleeping. Especially between the hours of three and seven am, depending on your sleep schedule.

Blood oxygen is a measure of the amount of oxygen in your blood at any point. Measured as a percentage most of the time. Most people have blood oxygenation of 98-99%. A level below 90% is unsafe.

So why is your blood oxygen falling and can you do something about it?

Your blood oxygen rises and falls as an outcome of the number of breaths you take and the pulse at which your heart beats.

A majority of us have a shallow rapid breathing pattern. We breathe from the chest putting a machine gun to shame.

Such a breathing pattern creates low oxygen levels in the blood, though we get away because it does not reach levels that are alarming.

As we age, the muscles of our lungs and heart get weaker from lack of training. At some point, poor breathing and poor cardiovascular muscles create the perfect storm.

Our blood oxygen levels fall in the morning hours.

So what can you do to prevent this from happening.

Realize that the pattern of your breathing drives longevity. For all the biohackers out there, salivating on the latest compound isolated by celebrated scientists, take a look at the basics.

Practice slow conscious breathing until the pattern is part of your unconscious.

Train your heart and lungs. The older you are, the more you should train.

Test yourself frequently. Test for VO2Max, Oxygen tolerance and Carbon Dioxide tolerance. Measure your resting heart rate. Measure your heart rate variability (HRV). All of these are telling you how well you are breathing.

Your blood oxygen is just the indicator at the end of this spectrum of outcomes.

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