Hi, I stumbled upon your post while searching for an explanation to my own breathing problems, which sound very similar to yours.
Nevertheless, in the past three years I have had almost no problems with breathing (until now, which is why I'm out here scouring the web for answers).

I am super fed up with this, and I don't want to have to go through this forever, so would love to compare and see if we can find similarities and share our findings and hopefully figure out how to make it better.

I have had them periodically since I was about 13, and I am 26 now. For most of this time they have come for a period of 1-4 weeks, about 3 times a year, but it varies, and the past three years they have been almost gone.

I was always told that it had to be something psychological, since the doctors could not find any answers when testing lungs, blood, etc. But I have never really known what to do with that information, as I can't really figure out how I am stressed, or see any correlation with my breathing problems and levels of stress, after having mapped the occurrences of breathing problems and my level of stress etc over many years. I feel psychologically pretty fine and robust really.

I have tried mapping out what has changed in my life, to see what made it change. Here are what has changed in the period with almost no breathing problems:
-I have started rock climbing a lot, and gotten pretty strong, and not long after I began climbing and strength training regularly the breathing problems got a lot less frequent, to the point where I almost forgot how much I struggled with it earlier.
-I used to suffer from a lot of backpain, since I have scoliosis (s shaped spine). This also got a lot better when I started climbing. The shape/degree of bent is still the same, but it hurts so much less now.
- I also went through architecture school, which was crazy stressful, but fun.

All of this has made me suspect that the way my back/ribcage/shoulders are doing could affect my breathing, since it all got better when I started getting strong and moving a lot in different ways.
It also got me even more confused about the idea that there is a psychological explanation, as it has been better than ever during a super stressful period in my life.

Has any of you had any problems with your back/ribs/scelet/muscles that correlates with your breathing?

It's just the best theory I have right now to explain my excessive gasping for air, but I am super open to other ideas 🙂