‘Breathing Thinking Functioning’

The Breathing Thinking Functioning model is an educational tool to help patients, carers, and health professionals recognise the normal emotional and behavioural responses to breathlessness, and understand how these can form a vicious cycle that makes symptoms worse.

The Breathing Thinking Functioning model can help you to take control and self-manage your breathlessness. This approach shows that it is still possible to improve breathlessness, even when the underlying condition cannot be improved. A small change to break a cycle has the potential to make a big difference, by generating a cycle of improvement.

Information, animations and images on this page reproduced with permission of the Cambridge Breathlessness Intervention Service.

Spathis A, Booth S, Moffat C, Hurst R, Ryan R, Chin C, et al. The Breathing, Thinking, Functioning clinical model: a proposal to facilitate evidence-based breathlessness management in chronic respiratory disease. npj Primary Care Respiratory Medicine. 2017;27(1):27.