"You're only ever 15 minutes away from peace" - a sticky note on my desk. I regularly slowly breathe in and count to 4 then out while counting to 4 for 15 minutes and find that it leaves me in a peaceful/content state.
If anyone is interested, I made an hour long mix of lots of waves and wind sounds, paying special attention to panning and levels to create a wide, enveloping, slow pulsing feeling that I use when doing heavy concentration work [0].
In my most stressful jobs I often found myself leaving the office and walking around the block while taking ten deep breaths. It sounds silly and simple but it really does help at least bring things closer to baseline.
We called these 'breathing exercises in 80'. We learned them in school. It was 4-4-4. 4 seconds or count breathe in, 4s hold and 4s exhale. There were no rules on timings. Do it as long as needed to come to 'normal'.
I think that's one of the reasons that smoking ciggarettes is such a popular addiction around the world: it's basically a breathing exercise that helps you relax.
Since March, I've slowed down my breathing, to the point that in public spaces, I don't breathe at all. I've travelled afar, in crowded airplanes, trains and buses and have so far avoided covid. Please send me $99 and I'll show you how.
Reading some blog spam and learning about 'Box Breathing' really helped me. Apparently it's used by Navy Seals, but it really helps me get to sleep if I can't. Or in stressful or sudden situations, it really helps clear your head.
Just a simple breathe in, hold, exhale, hold. Taking 4 slow seconds for each step.
I was very, very skeptic of breathing techniques and meditation. However after learning this technique things kind of 'clicked' and meditation started to make sense, and see why it's thrown around so much.
For those who are curious, it's called "Box Breathing" because, if it's helpful for you, you can picture a box and then trace the edges of the box in your mind as you're counting for each of the 4 steps (inhale, hold, exhale, hold). That visual can help take your mind off whatever is making you do this in the first place.
slow breathing is one of the things that helps with breath-focused meditation, but there are other techniques with varying intentions and benefits.
Broadly speaking, mindfulness-type meditation can make you aware of thoughts or emotions that you weren't previously aware of that could be affecting you. Has something ever bothered you, and you didn't realise how much until later on when you got irrationally annoyed at something else and thought "wait a minute, this shouldn't bother me this much"? Mindfulness practices can make you more aware of that emotion sooner so you're not carrying it with you all day. There's nothing inherently odd about it.
There are also other forms of meditation that are intended to increase your sense of love and gratitude (metta), to come to grips with your own mortality (maranassati), and surely other psychological exercises I'm not aware of.
We each have our own specific breath-rate, box breathing, 4-7-8 or other styles of conscious breathing attempt to slow down your breath-rate and calm your autonomic nervous system, and for many people calms them enough to fall asleep.
I have a very low breath-rate and find box breathing far too quick, and even 4-7-8 often feels fast.
We're building a sleep headband and one component is monitoring your breath-rate and learning what your breath-rate is as you fall asleep. Once we know what your optimal breath-rate for sleep is, we can then play sounds which you consciously follow with your breath, and this will guide you to sleep. It's almost like a personalized breath timing exercise.
Breath is only one of the ways we are working to improve sleep. If this is interesting to you, find out more at https://soundmind.co and sign-up for the waitlist.
I was taught this in my grappling sports as a child! We did it for 10 seconds each step, and it's just enough that it slows everything down and helps you fall asleep.
I am curious about the Navy SEAL connection because I was recently told by a scuba instructor never to do box breathing. Holding your breath while ascending from depth can cause over inflation of the lungs.
Regular deep, slow diaphragmatic breathing is what they recommend.
For some reason, I find this GIF really relaxing. I have it bookmarked and match my breathing to it every once in awhile https://i.imgur.com/Huou7Gh.gif
One thing I wonder is if the mechanism that underlies the physiological benefits of slow breathing is the same as caloric restriction.
This is very speculative, and I'm not even fully sold on slow breathing conclusively having benefits. But it's looking more likely, and there seems to be a deep parallel with the very well-documented benefits of caloric restriction. In both cases, a crucial metabolic input is being rate-limited to just above the baseline amount required for survival. Oxygen in one case, glucose in another.
Much of aging seems to be the result of oxidative stress caused by metabolic waste products. Sustainably reducing the total amount of metabolic activity seems to substantially slow the accumulated damaged accompanying aging. One way to do that is to simply set a hard limit on one of the critical ingredients in the process.
I don't know if it's just Baader-Meinhof at work, but I've seen more information about breathing in the past year or so than I did over several decades before that.
Am I imagining that or did something trigger the recent public interest?
HN had two Wim Hof-related submissions hit the front page recently: eight days ago[1] and six days ago[2]. This reinforces the impression that it's more prominent than before.
Well I know it may be cognitive bias as someone pointed out but I think it also had to do with the book Breath by James Nestor. Got pretty heavy press as it came out early in the pandemic. But mindfulness and meditation are being pushed pretty hard lately.
A bit off topic but I was wondering what you mean with Baader-Meinhof - don’t see the obvious link and curious if there’s an expression / connection linked to RAF
I've listened to a ex professional sportsman, turned trainer, and one of his big points in the talk was that by controlling our breathing we can influence our mental state. If you are overly excited or nervous you can slow down your breathing and do the exercises to relax. He claimed that the same can be done in reverse, if you are tired or wanting to improve your awareness you can do quick breaths.
I tried it, but didn't really see the benefit with quick breaths but maybe I didn't do it long enough.
Slow = “ we define slow breathing as any rate from 4 to 10 breaths per min (0.07–0.16 Hz). The typical respiratory rate in humans is within the range of 10–20 breaths per min (0.16–0.33 Hz).”
As a life long asthmatic who had a serious stutter as a child I've been practicing controlled breathing for as long as I can remember.
Recently I've taken an interest in fitness (again) and, via a garmin watch, I've learnt my resting heart-rate is ~42 most nights, some nights dipping to 39. I'm by no means exceptionally fit, but have to think the slow breathing techniques are the cause.
It's helpful (for many of us) to have guided breath meditation, if only to get into the right headspace needed for sustained "focus" on breath. Thanissaro Bhikkhu is perhaps the most chill human on the planet.
Brainstem structures located in the medulla are in charge of the automatic mode, whereas cortico-subcortical brain networks - including various frontal lobe areas - subtend the voluntary mode.
Patients suffering from central congenital hypoventilation syndrome (CCHS), a very rare developmental condition secondary to brainstem dysfunction, make themselves breathe consciously while awake, but require mechanically-assisted ventilation (MV) during sleep to overcome the inability of brainstem structures to mediate automatic spontaneous breathing (SB), which is unreliable.
This study used EEG-fMRI to compare patterns of brain activity between voluntary and autonomic ventilation during wakefulness. It found that the CCHS patient was more efficient in cognitive tasks requiring executive control during MV than during SB. Mechanical ventilation freed up the brain to perform other cognitive functions.
Anecdotally (sorry), my resting heart rate was sitting around 72-ish for a long time, according to my fitbit. I'm a pretty fit guy in my mid 30's, so I wasn't really happy with that number. I started working on trying to improve my breathing a bit, and after a couple months it's now sitting around 58 or so.
I mostly just tried to breathe through my nose as much as possible, with a lesser focus on breathing slower. At first it was difficult because it always felt like my nose was stuffy and hard to breathe through, but there are some techniques to clear it temporarily [0]. And over time my nasal passages became clearer to where I very rarely have trouble breathing through my nose.
Of course I don't know for sure if that was actually what brought my heart rate down, but the timeline fits pretty well. Plus I figure the cost and risks of just trying to improve your breathing are pretty much nil, so it's worth a shot.
If it's taken to the extreme: Are there then even more health benefits for long breath holds? Or is it the breathing that's the clue? I've been practicing holding my breath for freediving earlier, and got to 5 minutes. It's very relaxing, until it's not.
Some have mentioned the Wim Hof method here, but I’ll give it a shout out too. Have practiced the breathing daily, 1-3 times per day, 4 rounds per session (1.5, 2, 2.5, 3 minute breath holds) for a couple of months now and it’s had great effect on both my asthma and how winded I get from uphill sprints on my morning walks. Am also doing some cold showers and wearing only shorts and tshirt for my walks. I used to feel the need for pants and sweater if the temperature was around 10 celsius outside. The other day I was quite comfortable walking at 0 degrees. Did take a while for my hands and arms to recover full dexterity afterwards, but the kind of cold-to-the-bones freezing I would experience doing something like that didn’t happen. Walk is about an hour on forest trails
The breathing sessions are also an easy way to get meditation and body scan exercises into the daily routine. Definitely recommend it
> I used to feel the need for pants and sweater if the temperature was around 10 celsius outside. The other day I was quite comfortable walking at 0 degrees.
Your comment sounded good until that sentence, I sweat profusely in anything approaching normal temperatures and wouldn't want to lower my "starting to sweat" temperature (which now is at about 20 C) by another ten degrees...
Breathing exercises were a big part of the taoism books I studied. IIRC, because breathing is voluntary and involuntary at the same time. This is where the Spirit and the body meet.
Breathing exercises help move your "inner energy" through your body. The book I'd recommend is the Tao Te Ching if you're interested.
Recently a user submitted, 'Make me breathe properly'[1] after watching James Nestor's talk to my problem validation platform. I assumed, upcoming Apple Watch(then) would be able to measure breathing rate (i.e. Number of breaths/minute) with pulse oximeter and EKG (Apple has a patent for this) which should solve this problem as Apple watch already had a breathe app.
Needless to say, Apple Watch Series 6 doesn't seem to have this feature and I assume that the accuracy was an issue as off the shelf pulse-oximeters which claim to measure both SpO2 and breath rate do a bad job at the latter.
My daughter, who got her Masters in biology relatively recently, suggested that this appears to be the "expected" way that mammals purge stress. I was told during my meditation classes that, during slow breathing, the amplitude of various waves on an EEG change. Waves that are associated with sleeping/resting gaining amplitude, while those associated with stress decrease in amplitude.
I know from my own experience that it works for me to calm down stage fright prior to public speaking or important presentations :-).
They say in India, When we are born, we are given a certain number of breaths. The quicker we spend our breaths, the sooner we die. Tortoise breaths 4 times per minute and lives for ~300 years.
[+] [-] TheHideout|5 years ago|reply
If anyone is interested, I made an hour long mix of lots of waves and wind sounds, paying special attention to panning and levels to create a wide, enveloping, slow pulsing feeling that I use when doing heavy concentration work [0].
[0]: https://soundcloud.com/syn_nine/waves-and-wind-1-hour
[+] [-] arghwhat|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AlwaysRock|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] osrec|5 years ago|reply
I seem to get a lot of good work done if I think it's rainy and stormy outside!
[+] [-] helij|5 years ago|reply
They work for me when needed.
[+] [-] scrozier|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] p1anecrazy|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mamon|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sharadov|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dugditches|5 years ago|reply
Just a simple breathe in, hold, exhale, hold. Taking 4 slow seconds for each step.
I was very, very skeptic of breathing techniques and meditation. However after learning this technique things kind of 'clicked' and meditation started to make sense, and see why it's thrown around so much.
[+] [-] bonestamp2|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] n1000|5 years ago|reply
Edit: Learned it here on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13508038
[+] [-] beaconstudios|5 years ago|reply
Broadly speaking, mindfulness-type meditation can make you aware of thoughts or emotions that you weren't previously aware of that could be affecting you. Has something ever bothered you, and you didn't realise how much until later on when you got irrationally annoyed at something else and thought "wait a minute, this shouldn't bother me this much"? Mindfulness practices can make you more aware of that emotion sooner so you're not carrying it with you all day. There's nothing inherently odd about it.
There are also other forms of meditation that are intended to increase your sense of love and gratitude (metta), to come to grips with your own mortality (maranassati), and surely other psychological exercises I'm not aware of.
[+] [-] softwaredoug|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mseidl|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pedalpete|5 years ago|reply
I have a very low breath-rate and find box breathing far too quick, and even 4-7-8 often feels fast.
We're building a sleep headband and one component is monitoring your breath-rate and learning what your breath-rate is as you fall asleep. Once we know what your optimal breath-rate for sleep is, we can then play sounds which you consciously follow with your breath, and this will guide you to sleep. It's almost like a personalized breath timing exercise.
Breath is only one of the ways we are working to improve sleep. If this is interesting to you, find out more at https://soundmind.co and sign-up for the waitlist.
[+] [-] necrotic_comp|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mr-ron|5 years ago|reply
And I use it all the time for falling asleep. Works amazing!
[+] [-] ghostpepper|5 years ago|reply
Regular deep, slow diaphragmatic breathing is what they recommend.
[+] [-] hi41|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AtlasBarfed|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] xattt|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] setum|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lattalayta|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dcolkitt|5 years ago|reply
This is very speculative, and I'm not even fully sold on slow breathing conclusively having benefits. But it's looking more likely, and there seems to be a deep parallel with the very well-documented benefits of caloric restriction. In both cases, a crucial metabolic input is being rate-limited to just above the baseline amount required for survival. Oxygen in one case, glucose in another.
Much of aging seems to be the result of oxidative stress caused by metabolic waste products. Sustainably reducing the total amount of metabolic activity seems to substantially slow the accumulated damaged accompanying aging. One way to do that is to simply set a hard limit on one of the critical ingredients in the process.
[+] [-] criddell|5 years ago|reply
Am I imagining that or did something trigger the recent public interest?
[+] [-] akuji1993|5 years ago|reply
It might be because we have a global pandemic on our hands, where the virus is attacking the lung.
[+] [-] jml7c5|5 years ago|reply
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24772352
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24800947
[+] [-] spaceisballer|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwaway_pdp09|5 years ago|reply
Auto-correct, thinko, or something I'm missing?
[+] [-] Sebastian_09|5 years ago|reply
A bit off topic but I was wondering what you mean with Baader-Meinhof - don’t see the obvious link and curious if there’s an expression / connection linked to RAF
[+] [-] Angostura|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] coldpie|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] saberdancer|5 years ago|reply
I tried it, but didn't really see the benefit with quick breaths but maybe I didn't do it long enough.
[+] [-] m3kw9|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 5h|5 years ago|reply
Recently I've taken an interest in fitness (again) and, via a garmin watch, I've learnt my resting heart-rate is ~42 most nights, some nights dipping to 39. I'm by no means exceptionally fit, but have to think the slow breathing techniques are the cause.
[+] [-] crispyambulance|5 years ago|reply
It's helpful (for many of us) to have guided breath meditation, if only to get into the right headspace needed for sustained "focus" on breath. Thanissaro Bhikkhu is perhaps the most chill human on the planet.
[+] [-] wombatmobile|5 years ago|reply
Brainstem structures located in the medulla are in charge of the automatic mode, whereas cortico-subcortical brain networks - including various frontal lobe areas - subtend the voluntary mode.
Patients suffering from central congenital hypoventilation syndrome (CCHS), a very rare developmental condition secondary to brainstem dysfunction, make themselves breathe consciously while awake, but require mechanically-assisted ventilation (MV) during sleep to overcome the inability of brainstem structures to mediate automatic spontaneous breathing (SB), which is unreliable.
This study used EEG-fMRI to compare patterns of brain activity between voluntary and autonomic ventilation during wakefulness. It found that the CCHS patient was more efficient in cognitive tasks requiring executive control during MV than during SB. Mechanical ventilation freed up the brain to perform other cognitive functions.
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
[+] [-] mikenew|5 years ago|reply
I mostly just tried to breathe through my nose as much as possible, with a lesser focus on breathing slower. At first it was difficult because it always felt like my nose was stuffy and hard to breathe through, but there are some techniques to clear it temporarily [0]. And over time my nasal passages became clearer to where I very rarely have trouble breathing through my nose.
Of course I don't know for sure if that was actually what brought my heart rate down, but the timeline fits pretty well. Plus I figure the cost and risks of just trying to improve your breathing are pretty much nil, so it's worth a shot.
0. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mBqGS-vEIs0
[+] [-] thdrdt|5 years ago|reply
He explains that you can change the pH levels in your body with breathing techniques. And this alters how your nerves are working.
Very interesting: https://youtu.be/hJ7zbsRM0-c
[+] [-] matsemann|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Henk0|5 years ago|reply
The breathing sessions are also an easy way to get meditation and body scan exercises into the daily routine. Definitely recommend it
[+] [-] StavrosK|5 years ago|reply
Your comment sounded good until that sentence, I sweat profusely in anything approaching normal temperatures and wouldn't want to lower my "starting to sweat" temperature (which now is at about 20 C) by another ten degrees...
[+] [-] tacocataco|5 years ago|reply
Breathing exercises help move your "inner energy" through your body. The book I'd recommend is the Tao Te Ching if you're interested.
[+] [-] Abishek_Muthian|5 years ago|reply
Needless to say, Apple Watch Series 6 doesn't seem to have this feature and I assume that the accuracy was an issue as off the shelf pulse-oximeters which claim to measure both SpO2 and breath rate do a bad job at the latter.
[1] https://needgap.com/problems/155-make-me-breathe-properly-he...
[+] [-] ChuckMcM|5 years ago|reply
I know from my own experience that it works for me to calm down stage fright prior to public speaking or important presentations :-).
[+] [-] girishso|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jungletime|5 years ago|reply
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1205793/