Why do other mood improvement habits seem more approachable, like making a cup of tea or exercise or a shower, while sitting and breathing seems harder?
You might try making it part of a broader routine. Lately (and unusually for me) I've been struggling with sleep. So I've explicitly adopted a bedtime routine that gets me to wind down. As part of that, I light a big candle when I start the routine. Then the last thing I do before blowing out the candle getting into bed is to sit down by the candle and use it as a medication focus. This way I feel like I'm getting the sitting for "free" in that I don't have to expend any willpower to make it happen; there are other positive associations that serve as the reward.
The critical innovation is doing ten minute rounds of different practices, so no practice is held for very long. This seems to help a ton with "mind wanders" and surprisingly doesn't seem to impair overall progress at all. If anything the rotation of practices seems to improve overall concentration and keeps people from hallucinating because they've been staring at a blank wall for six hours!
Whoever can accept the Gödel's incompleteness theorems and still use math, doesn't mind games, simulations and usage of different dimensionalities and topologies, also can practice both visual and sensory imagination - is perfectly capable of believing in Buddha, Shiva, whoever and whatever for the duration of the exercise if they chose to. Blieving in a diety with certain characteristics, an embodiment of certain archetypes/feelings/intentions during the practice can do night-and-day difference in efficiency and precision of intentional nervous system regulation.
Spirituality + Meditation/Mindfulness + Religion is definitely more colourful..trippy. I don’t know why. Can’t articulate.
The only downside is the random fanatic, but I guess they exist amongst the atheists too.
The poverty of imagination that marks spirituality without religion is debilitating to sustaining any kind of life long practice. Happily, the flavor of religion of my birth family affords me all the pagan goodness and room to explore freely. Life is good now. Better..rather.
I guess this technically wasn't stuck on YouTube...
After all, all of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone
Fighting is a bad habit that will send you down a blind alleyway in meditation. There should be no striving, no effort, just gentle persistence.
When you stop fighting your monkey mind, your monkey mind becomes your friend and ally instead of your opponent or enemy.
The stillness, I think. With adhd, that's my challenge anyway. The mind does not shut off, and 5 minutes can feel like forever. Even thinking about it makes me squirm. But I took a yoga class once that did breathwork, and with guidance, I found the ability to focus my entire attention on my breath; the action and the feeling of it.
This is true even of really low-effort things, like box breathing, or drinking a glass of cold water on waking.
I think habits are just hard to maintain as an individual, and historically we've leaned on communities to keep us on-track. The best workaround I've found is to subscribe to podcasts that regularly touch on the practices to keep them within my awareness, but that's far from perfect.
Concentration meditation. I used to do it as much as possible. Every day. Sometimes 2, 3, 6 times. I was kinda nuts. But my practice was strong.
Vipassana + concentration. My practice was extremely erratic.
Vipassana. Just vipassana. That's what I do now. My practice is very consistent. Haven't missed a day in a decade.
I think it's because vipassana is more compatible with the rest of my life than concentration. So there's no big transition. I'm basically doing vipassana, in varying degrees, all the time.
For what it's worth.
The Feedback loop is longer and impact more subtle so you don't correlate the effects with the action as strongly
The way I do it is still very relaxed and focus on a point that is somewhere in front of my forehead, and have very regular, simple breathing, without forcing it. It takes less than a minute of this for the hiccup to go away. I think the trick is to think about nothing instead of thinking about the hiccup.
1) cyclic sighing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rBdhqBGqiMc 2) box breathing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tEmt1Znux58
Couldn't find anything for hyperventilation with retention.
I have no idea if they match the exact mechanics that were tested so make of it what you will.
The paper describes 30x breaths with the inhale twice as long as the exhale, and a 15 second hold on the final exhale.
Wim Hof's method has 30x equal-length inhales and exhales, and a one-minute hold on the final exhale [0].
Aside from there being a substantial difference between equal length inhales and exhales and an inhale that's twice as long as the exhale, the big idea behind Wim Hof's method is that that minute-long hold is very difficult, and trying to do it supposedly builds a certain kind of mental (really, holistic) discipline that a 15 second hold simply would not. 15 seconds is not hard unless you're pretty out of shape.
Here is the way I was taught.
1. relax.
2. deep inhale.
3. pause (1 count)
4. say 'O' (2 or 3 counts, you can stretch it further if you can). Here you are basically exhaling through mouth.
5. slowly transition from 'O' to 'M'. for a brief period in the transition try to say 'O' nasally. might need a bit of practice but basically you are slowly transitioning from exhaling via mouth to exhaling via nose.
6. as you completely switch to 'M' your mouth is shut and you are totally exhaling via nose. Stretch 'M' as long as you can.
7. repeat this cycle. Once you find the rhythm its quite mentally relaxing.
3 Steps, to be repeated thrice in the order written.
1. Stretch O and keep M short.
2. Keep O and M equal length.
3. Keep O short and stretch M.
Coupled with the full body muscle engagement and cardiovascular training that comes along with it, it seems like the perfect exercise for those that have access to a pool.
1) Box breathing
2) Yoganidra (even if I’m not trying to fall asleep)
https://www.singwise.com/articles/correct-breathing-and-supp...
> "It is also important to note that, in voice pedagogy, 'breathing from the diaphragm' and 'breathing from the belly' are not viewed as being synonymous. The breath support technique that is widely referred to as 'diaphragmatic breathing', (when correctly executed), should not be confused with 'belly breathing'. Unlike 'belly breathing', 'breathing from the diaphragm' involves no pushing or forceful expulsion of air, and is the natural, correct, safe, gentle, internationally accepted method of supporting the singing tone. In diaphragmatic breathing, the tone rides on a minimal and steady stream of air, which brings stability and consistency to the tone."
Musicians and athletes practice structured breathing as a way of building cardio and increasing lung capacity. Your lungs don't change, you just learn to control airflow better. The way "ancient traditions" are frequently framed makes me avoid and treat them like pseudoscience. Framing it from the persepctive of an athlete helped me evaluate it more seriously. Mindful meditation is beneficial but completely indepedent from breathing exercises and you don't need the former to get benefits from the latter.
I am not arguing the value or validity of "ancient techniques", I am sharing my initial bias when I was first introduced to pranayama, and how it's taught as if it exists in isolation. This post doesn't mention sports or singing/musicians once.
There's many techniques but box breathing where you take extra air in after you feel like your lungs are full, and a longer period exhaling than inhaling, is the primary technique I was taught for marching band/trombone. The "cyclic sighing" described in the paper, but with a longer inhale and exhale. We did, at ~80 bpm, 4 counts for inhale, 4 counts of holding, and 8 counts of exhale, with whatever extra "sip" of air we could manage to inhale during the hold. If you're not used to breathing exercises, doing 4+4+8 a few times can leave you light headed. It's normal to cough from the extra sip of air.
I also regularly practice Andrew Weil's 478 breathing https://routineshub.com/public/items/fb2c75bd-4d6d-424e-925a...
That, and plunging and holding my face in the cold water to try to trigger the mammalian diving response, has really had a positive effect on me (ofcourse only n=1).
Think I'll add 5 minutes of these breathing practices to my routine as well.
For seals and other water dwelling mammals this is a controlled sophisticated mechanism that is deliberately used when underwater.
In humans it is a survival mechanism, triggered when the trigeminal nerve on our face gets submerged in water. And the colder it is the stronger the response seems to be.
Submerging one self in cold water up to your head seems to affect many parts of the human body, and in my case I am not sure which part it is that I am feeling the effects of. But it leaves me feeling more alert, awake and with less mindfog after doing an extended cold water dip (going to the pool without one in comparison leaves me sluggish).
Wikipedia has a good section on the response: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diving_reflex
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mH40wdhzUuM
Its based on solid research - test groups that hum in the specific frequency were found to have increased their nitric oxide production a dozen or more times. Whereas control groups and groups that did the meditation in another frequency either did not produce any different amount or comparably low amounts.
https://www.atsjournals.org/doi/full/10.1164/rccm.200202-138...
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1365-2362....
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/343237144_Role_of_N...
https://www.atsjournals.org/doi/full/10.1164/rccm.200202-138...
...
When you try doing it, you start noticing a strong smell that smells like early spring or the smell certain air purifiers make. This smell lasts as long as you keep humming.
It's such hard work that I decided to stop drinking for a year to make it more tolerable to exercise with the rowing machine.
One of my friends tried to beat my time on the rower and was so sore for 3 nights, he had nightmares about the rower ha.
Anyway, it obviously made me question should I be doing more for my body, including breathing exercises, but what this kind of thing also makes me really think about is how stupid air pollution is. What it would feel like not to have access to fresh clean air and how bad it would be to be suffocating. What a privilege it is to be able to breathe and it makes me feel like I want to go plant trees.
Has anyone else had similar thoughts during exercise / breathe training? If anything I think it's good to become aware of the breathe and air for this reason alone, it would make the world a better place.
I personally found that having physical markers for when to breathe in and out made it a lot easier to understand and practice. Tying yoga poses to the amount of time I hold air made is easier to track my improvements too. I imagine swimming similarly allows a more structured way to practice cyclic breathing. I was able to break an 8 minute 2k row when I did it with cyclic breathing. Nothing has improved my cardio as much as erg + controlled breathing, I use pretty short intervals.
Another place cyclic breathing was crucial was when I did marching band. I played trombone so it was mandatory that I have athletic lung capacity. I was told that the exercises aren't making your lungs bigger, you're getting used to having your lungs stay expanded for longer.
The most important thing was the extra breath you take after you feel like your lungs are completely full. Everyone coughs when you take in that extra bit of air after breathing in deeply, in the beginning. There's plastic ball valve things you can buy to observe your breathing but I never personally saw it as useful. A relative was given something similar after a heart attack in order to monitor lung strength during recovery.
It's also pretty common to recommend some type of cyclic breathing when handling anxiety. It helps control and lower the physical symptoms of anxiety like rapid heart rate.
Looking up box/cyclic breathing guides for athletes or music students might help, if you are looking for more structure guides. The cyclic breathing in this study is not the same as circular breathing.
Did your HRV increase, indicating better health? How are you measuring it?
> I was able to break an 8 minute 2k row when I did it with cyclic breathing.
Can you explain more? Search results for "cyclic breathing" return many varied results. Are you performing it while during the row, or in preparation for it? I can get 2k meters under 8 minutes, but I'm gasping at the end.
The "coherent breathing" work that popped up sometime in the last ~15 years is pretty interesting, too.
I only ask because there are several other commenters on here offering breathing tips, and you sound like an expert on this.
a) "Box Breathing", as mentioned in the article. Inhale, hold, exhale, hold. Same rate for each step. Ex: in for 4, hold for 4, out for 4, hold for 4. Repeat as long as you like. Very calming and "centering" (in the sense of moving you toward "neutral" physiologically). More effective if you can breathe through nose and use diaphragm/belly breathing, but that's optional.
b) "Coherent Breathing". Inhale, exhale, at the same rate. Ex: a good rate is 5 seconds in, 5 seconds out. Also calming/centering, with an observed positive effect on heart rate variability. This is box breathing without the holds, so experiment to see which is preferable. Again, using the diaphragm is optional.
c) "Gratitude Breathing", for lack of a better phrase. Inhale (explicitly diaphragm/belly breathing this time); think of something you're grateful for (thankful, happy, something positive); exhale slowly. The exhale should be twice as slow as the inhale. Ex: so inhale for a count of 4, think a happy thought, exhale for a count of 8. Repeat at least ten times (to overwhelm whatever was in working memory before you began), more if you like. This will calm, relax, and trigger a positive emotional/psychological state.
d) "Relax and pass out breathing". As c) without the "positive thought". So a deep inhale, then a twice slower exhale. This is more purely relaxing than the others, can lead to sleep eventually. This does not have the double inhale a la the "cyclic sighing" mentioned in the article.
e) "Panic and freak out breathing": short, rapid inhale and exhale, using the upper chest rather than diaphragm. Why do this? Anyway.
It's been bizarre to me how many people cannot easily breathe using their diaphragms, whereas I have to consciously force myself to do otherwise. Anyway.
There is all sorts of research on these, some good and most junk, but the main takeaway is that for some reason humans have the ability to consciously control our breathing, and the way we breathe has direct impact on our resulting physiological state.
There are endless varieties of "breathwork" (Wim Hoff's stuff, actual Tummo breathing, 3721 variations of pranayama) because humans like to complicate things, but these cover the bases for routine self-care.
So cyclic sighing can replace mindful meditation, except that it requires more use to reap the benefits.
So now Cyclic Sighing, Mindful Meditation and Binaural Beats are techniques I can call upon in times of stress.
Cheers
> Participants were informed they should sit down in a chair or, if they preferred, to lie down, and then to set a timer for 5 min. Then they were told to close their eyes and to start breathing while focusing their mental attention on their forehead region between their two eyes. They were told that if their focus drifted from that location to re-recenter their attention by focusing back first on their breath and then on the forehead region between their eyes. They were told that as thoughts arise, to recognize that as normal, refocus their attention back to their forehead region and to continue the practice until time has elapsed.
Is this a legit expression of mindfulness meditation? It lacks any sort of breath modification.
And yes, it's fairly basic stuff - but it's also laying the foundation for ongoing studies. And it's not like it's ignoring ancient practices, they're specifically referenced.
While we're on "how does this study help in any way", it's also worth calling out that it has conclusively shown that you can remotely administer intervention and monitor the physiological response. Yes, again, a small thing, but important going forward.
And finally, this study was intended as an exploratory study - what can we find when we look here. And it will likely lead to a clinical trial. Yes, more reconfirmation of "what we've always known", but in a way that makes it more likely it finds entrance into the Western medicine canon. That's a huge step forward, because it'll move it from the easy dismissal of "maybe just woo" to "proven practice", and so gives a chance to reduce the number of pharmacological interventions doctors opt for.
It’s something about something that’s too obvious. I got a science degree man, I believe in the scientific method, but the way it’s applied sometimes: too stupid. The scientific institution is so fucking flawed. The scientific method can’t cure humanity’s faults: reproducibility crisis, confirmation bias, wrong incentives in publishing, produce papers that mostly seek to advance careers rather than advance human knowledge.
You can’t handle that? That’s on you. I just think you should realize when a paper is published about something that’s too fucking obvious. You don’t need science to validate that meditation and pranayama and breath work exercises work.
Another way you could say it is it’s patronizing colonial validation of “savages superstitions.” You don’t need unnecessary validation, and to the extent you endorse that you undermine the pre-existing legitimacy: suggesting that without science’s spurious stamp of approval these things don’t pass muster. Which is totally toxic bs.
Also, the thing is if science is not gonna make itself capable of exploring the more subtle energies, if it’s going to actively penalize explorations of that nature, then certainly science should not be all that we rely upon. We shouldn’t penalize people who are not coming from the scientific tradition. We should trust her own experience. Our own instincts and intuition. We should listen to our hearts, and we should listen to these Indians telling us about this stuff that works for thousands of years and we should listen to ourselves because we know it works.
If you don’t think you can know something until some scientist in a journal tells you it’s true even if it’s based on your own experience, I got no words for you man. You’re lost and science isn’t gonna help you get found. Fix your head first. You can’t do science coming from the wrong place for it. And that’s the fucking point.
Also
(Since you are fond of the Indian approach, though, may I suggest you inspect your anger?)
Also, this will probably sound judgy so I'm sorry but I'm really curious: do you normally have trouble walking up stairs, get out of breath easily, or feel faint when changing body positions?
How would one learn how to do it properly? I don't think a random Youtube video has enough credibility.
Surprisingly, you don't need to learn it as much as you just need to do it and think about how your body feels as you do it.
When you exhale, just exhale like you were just relieved of something horrible... or like you're saying "whewwwwwwwwww" as in "whewww, that's a relief".
Don't worry about how many seconds it was, don't really count unless you like to, just breath and feel the feelings.
When you do that a few times, especially after a slow inhale... it starts to feel really good, really natural, and in a weird way when you think it's going to work and think it's going to feel good, it actually ends up feeling good and relieving stress.
It's sometimes best to work at this other way around, like with anger management, e.g. don't try to improve your breathing, but try to be more concious of when your breathing and mental state go to sh*.
Regarding the criticisms of this study;
Firstly, the small sample size is based on volunteers, so folks already believed there was going to be a payoff from something that is 75% breathwork.
Secondly, there is no "sham intervention" class to counter the placebo effects from this.
Thirdly, their mindfulness instruction is atypical; it should have been passive focus on breath rather than a visual/somatic cue on the forehead to be comperable with breath work vs breath focus.
Finally, their exclusion criteria makes it too restricted;
> For health and safety reasons, we excluded those with self-reported moderate to severe psychiatric or medical conditions that could be exacerbated by study participation, such as heart disease, glaucoma, history of seizures, pregnancy, psychosis, suicidality, bipolar disorder, or substance use disorders.
I find it annoying that the list is not exhaustive but we could reasonably assume they also had to exclude moderate and above depression and anxiety disorders, not to mention panic disorder[1]. Anxious folks are particularly sensitive to breathwork, and even 10% of their "healthy" population reported anxiety as a result of these practices (highest ingroup rate is 17%, in the favorite "sighing" group)
Besides the anxiety inducing vs reducing effect of all breathwork had more variance than the mindfulness intervention, which puts into question whether the cost/benefit of the intervention (not to mention it's wide scale applicability) is sufficient.
What Huberman is popular for is known as a "nutrientism" of sorts; as in assemble vitamins a, b, c..., this and that macronutrient plus this and that micronutrient and you will have a full nutritional profile. Not saying he is all bs at all, e.g his circadian light stuff is solid, but more often than not after the 50th episode these turn into bite sized oversold interventions mostly as an illusion of "doing something good for me so that I don't have to do anything else".
As a final note, mindfulness meditation traditionally has never been an emotion regulation tool, it is an education tool as a part of wisdom traditions, none of which had "good affect in one month" as the primary metric of their success.
[1] The panic disorder population is even more interesting. 50% of the panic disordered people do not suffer from hyperventilatory or otherwise respiratory phenomena. Not only that, the hyperventilators are suffering from hypocapnia, as in a drop in CO2 and not O2, which is completely opposite to Huberman's "dumping CO2 and therefore relaxing" magic/logic.
Then it is surprising that a reasonably robust journal like Cell Reports Medicine published it (presumably after peer review), and so many Stanford postdocs and associate professors put their name on it
How can you so sure that the volunteers believed that?
I have been doing it for a couple of years without knowing it was a thing. I have studied common Pranayama techniques, and I stumbled upon it via trial and error. I do it because I find it anxiety-reducing. I used to refer to it internally as "double inhale breathing".
After reading the OP article, and noting that they referred to "Yogic breathing", I decided to do a little research and discovered that this technique is called "Dirga Pranayama" or "three part breathing". The authors should have mentioned it in their article.
Read "Altered Traits" - two western scientists trying to pump up meditation self-report that they can't find any tangible benefits and resort to BP control meditation because they can't even reduce their BP, let alone anything else. "Anxiety and mood" are pretty subjective. Just sitting there drops pulse too.
I follow these simple rules for breathing
1. Breathe to stomach not chest.
2. Breathe by nose (unless swimming or underwater).
3. Inhalation time and exhalation time should be equal and gap between inhalation and exhalation should be sum of it. If it takes x seconds to inhale exhalation should begin after 2x seconds and should finish in x seconds
Retention (2x) = inhalation time (x) + exhalation time (x).* Yes, this is an odd sort of sighing, but it isn't that different from spontaneous sighing. And people also hyperventilate on their own, but mostly preparatory to diving or holding their breath for some other reason.
It's common for people to hyperventilate in the midst of a panic attack, and the common advice I've seen is to encourage a panicked person to take deep breaths. Strange to see it as a consideration for beneficial effects. As a kid I'd hyperventilate to feel dizzy because it was fun (oops was I getting high?)
So maybe it's consciously emulating a natural behavior matching a lower-stress state, to help shift to that state.
From personal experience, the deep inhalation preceding a sigh (extended exhalation) is also helpful.
I do sigh a lot in meetings, and am (perhaps mistakenly) believed to be very patient with people... Oh well.
"Breathwork improves mood and physiological arousal more than mindfulness meditation"
Headline states that it reduces physiological arousal.
> Both mindfulness meditation and breathwork groups showed significant reductions in state anxiety and negative affect and increases in positive affect.
> Breathwork produces a significantly greater reduction in respiratory rate compared with mindfulness meditation
Sure, mindfulness may help with anxiety in the long term, but during the first 30 days? Anecdotally, some folks I know felt overwhelming anxiety during their first few sessions.
I heard that somewhere before.
> Participants were informed they should sit down in a chair or, if they prefer, to lie down, and to set a timer for 5 min. Then they were told to inhale slowly, and that once their lungs were expanded, to inhale again once more to maximally fill their lungs -- even if the second inhale was shorter in duration and smaller in volume than the first, and then to slowly and fully exhale all their breath. They were told to repeat this pattern of breathing for 5 min. They were also informed that ideally, both inhales would be performed via their nose and the exhale would be performed via their mouth, but that if they preferred, they were welcome to do the breathing entirely through their nose. They were also informed that it is normal for the second inhale to be briefer than the first.
I'm not sure if there is a against this, but it feels kinda against the spirit of posting a title like this when it seems like the goal of the linked page is 20% to communicate the topic of the headline and 80% to drive you to other topics they have been posting about.
Breathing is a minute-to-minute vital life function. You can hurt yourself, perhaps seriously, with breathing changes. But wait -- holding your breathe is harmless and this is stupid that you warn me about it, one person wrote after a similar comment like this here on YNews. really? I don't know you but I guarantee you are not six years old right now.
Hold the breathe like a babe in arms, gently, with complete awareness... You tri-athletes, you too..
yes, I agree this is annoying to see Western Medicine "discover" this .. but please work with experienced people, not alone, not with a video or PDF from somewhere.. to health!
> Interestingly, those who felt the greatest boost in mood also experienced the biggest drop in heart rate variability.
A drop in HRV isn't generally good. So I check the paper, and found this:
> No significant changes were found in heart rate variability or resting heart rate over the course of the study in either of the groups (Figures 4C and 4D)
There was a reduction respiratory rate for those an increase in daily positive affect. Bottom line, unclear if this particular study points to a positive health outcome other than feeling happier.
Interestingly, change in respiratory rate was negatively correlated with change in daily positive affect (Figure S5; r = - 0.24, p < 0.05), suggesting that participants who showed the highest reduction in respiratory rate also showed the highest daily increase in positive affect over the course of the study (Figure S5).