I have often wondered if controlled breathing was actually a big part of what smokers find relaxing. When I gave up smoking I noticed sucking air through a small paper tube was also relaxing.
One hour of slow breathing changed my life
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Re: One hour of slow breathing changed my life
#32I started reading his book Breath, and he made the starting claim that, in essence, you could choose to be either energetic or restful by picking one nostril to breathe out of for awhile. (Naturally we breath out of one nostril at a time, and the body goes back and forth, but "it's a balance that can also be gamed").
I found this claim a bit... suspicious, and Googled, and didn't find much scientific evidence for this claim. I found a bunch of blog posts by yoga-affiliated people, and the like.
I asked about this on Biology Stack Exchange, unfortunately with no answer.
https://biology.stackexchange.com/questions/94651/
I would be very curious if any HN reader knows more about this. That said, my impression of Nestor (who is a journalist, and not a scientist) was that he was perhaps a bit too eager to jump to conclusions.
Re: One hour of slow breathing changed my life
#33i started this technique several years ago, and it's done wonders for both me mental state and attention and my meditation practice.
whenever annoyed or waiting, several deep breaths and then continued breath awareness for as long as i remember.
Re: One hour of slow breathing changed my life
#34I wonder every time I see things like this whether more conventional exercise will also do the same thing. I'm a recreational runner, and as I become more fit, I notice that my body is capable of entering deeper and deeper states of relaxation. When I go to sleep at night, my breathing and heart rate slow to rates that I never could have sustained before getting in shape. Being conscious and in control of my breath is important, especially at high altitude. And a long run out in nature definitely puts me in a meditative state.
I wonder if this kind of conventional exercise might provide more "bang for your buck" than just controlled breathing in isolation.
Re: One hour of slow breathing changed my life
#35Wasn't there a HN post somewhat recently about the scientific health benefits of breathing exercises? I can't find it.
I made a note to read it after I saw the post but forgot about it until now.
Re: One hour of slow breathing changed my life
#36"No breathing can heal stage IV cancer" I like how this sentence is true in two very different ways...
Give a man a fire, and he'll be warm for a night. Set a man on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.
Re: One hour of slow breathing changed my life
#37I started reading his book Breath , and he made the starting claim that, in essence, you could choose to be either energetic or restful by picking one nostril to breathe out of for awhile. (Naturally we breath out of one nostril at a time, and the body goes back and forth, but "it's a balance that can also be gamed"). I found this claim a bit... suspicious, and Googled, and didn't find much scientific evidence for th…
This is interesting and I'd love to hear some kind of real-science debunking (as I'm sure it would be the case)... or conversely, showing someone (via video and some kind of monitoring device) directing air in and out of one or the other nostril at will.
Re: One hour of slow breathing changed my life
#38> We’ve become conditioned to breathe too much, just as we’ve been conditioned to eat too much. How is one conditioned to breathe too much? We eat too much because there is so much available to us and it's engineered (by trial and error) to be as delicious as possible. That has not been done to air.
> people with anxieties or other fear-based conditions typically will breathe way too much. So what happens when you breathe that much is you're constantly putting yourself into a state of stress. So you're stimulating that sympathetic side of the nervous system https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/05/27/8629631... > you can over breathe when people at a gym or when people are jogging you see them really go…
That first one feels very chicken and egg - if you're anxious your sympathetic nervous system is going without the breathing. Can breath be used to relax you? Absolutely, but that's as much about focusing the brain on the breathing instead of the anxious thoughts as anything else.
Re: One hour of slow breathing changed my life
#39I started reading his book Breath , and he made the starting claim that, in essence, you could choose to be either energetic or restful by picking one nostril to breathe out of for awhile. (Naturally we breath out of one nostril at a time, and the body goes back and forth, but "it's a balance that can also be gamed"). I found this claim a bit... suspicious, and Googled, and didn't find much scientific evidence for th…
This is interesting and I'd love to hear some kind of real-science debunking (as I'm sure it would be the case)... or conversely, showing someone (via video and some kind of monitoring device) directing air in and out of one or the other nostril at will.
You use your hand to clamp down one nostril. Lookup Nadi Shodhana.
Re: One hour of slow breathing changed my life
#40Mental health Tangent- I wonder how far the American Medical Association/physicians have set back medical discoveries. The traditional solution is Drugs. Some recommend exercise (although a friend recently couldn't get a prescription for Physical Therapy until after trying steroids for 2 weeks). Even fewer recommend diet changes. Could this breathing method be a drug free solution to various psychological disorders?…
I mean diet and exercise can have profound effects on your health. My personal experiences have been that doctors I have been to are likely to prescribe something and then toss in “also you should exercise and lose some weight”. I herniated a disc and basically my options were steroid shots or surgery. I opted for the steroid shots just to get rid of the constant numbness and pain down my leg. But there had been no r…
Unless you sustained a back injury, the cause is most likely weak core and trunk muscles, which places strain on your spine. Therefore, strengthening your core and trunk is the solution.
I have had excellent results with reverse back extensions [1] and inversion table stretches and crunches.
Good luck!