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One hour of slow breathing changed my life

theguardian.com

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Re: One hour of slow breathing changed my life

#241

Post by kilroy_jones »

fsloth wrote: post #208
ekianjo wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As long as it does something beneficial You can't easily measure if something is beneficial. Which is precisely why a bunch of plants that people were taking before for different ailments were found to have absolutely no medical value when tried through a scientific method. And in the age of social media, individual confirmation bias and a megaphone is the best way to promote non-science to hordes of people.

Placebo can provide actual benefit to an individual. Easing suffering, thus reducing stress levels, which in turn help body to function better. But you are quite right, individuals with strong confirmation bias and a large social media following are harmfull. Still, that does not mean individuals should not perform harmless experiments. Individuals should experiment. But they should not claim their findings as univer…

Hard to determine if a certain practice is harmless or not.

Re: One hour of slow breathing changed my life

#242

Post by nprateem »

thecoppinger wrote: post #131
givan wrote: post #51

All Europe has gone mad about breathing exercises. For four or five years I have made money by treating people who had ruined their breathing by such methods! Many books are written about it, everyone tries to teach others. They say: "The more you breathe, the greater the inflow of oxygen," etc., and, as a result, they come to me. I am very grateful to the authors of such books, founders of schools, and so on. If, fo…

This, on the surface, seems to be a load of rubbish spread by a mystic who had a motivation to make things seem complex and difficult so that they can reel you in and teach you 'the right way', while parting with your money and/or attempting to recruit you into their cult. TL:DR; I'm skeptical, and don't think adding a quote in this manner with no other context/insight is of any value to the overall discussion of thi…

20 years of breathing practice here and it sounds like rubbish to me too. I think this guy had a conflict of interest.

Re: One hour of slow breathing changed my life

#243

Post by ekianjo »

fsloth wrote: post #234
ekianjo wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Placebo can provide actual benefit to an individual. It depends what you refer to when you talk about a placebo. What people call the "placebo effect" is in practice "regression to the mean" in most cases, which is the fact that you would get better over time even if you did absolutely nothing. You will notice that placebo 'effect' works best in contexts where the illness has a psychological component (mental illne…

"how can you prevent people from claiming..." Do I understand correctly that you oppose people searching holistic remedies to their ills because they might accidentally get better, and a percentage of these might accidentally turn into snake oil salespeople?

> that you oppose people searching holistic remedies to their ills

Nope, I am for individual freedoms as long as it happens in their private sphere.

> a percentage of these might accidentally turn into snake oil salespeople

the problem is that bullshit takes a lot more time to debunk that it takes to spread. So you end up with hoaxes, false claims, rumors, confirmation bias spreading through other people's minds with extreme speed because of how we communicate right now. And my point is that as long as you can't make people understand that "anecdotal evidence" means absolutely nothing, you can't stop this from happening: it means you will end up with bullshit spreading everywhere and good Science being ignored or simply drowned in a torrent of unfounded claims.

Re: One hour of slow breathing changed my life

#244

Post by nonbirithm »

gonehome wrote: post #210
brigandish wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm sure people believe they confirm 'profound changes in their own mental state' from energy crystals too. Not sure about you, but if someone tells me "I've been exercising lately and mentally I feel much better" I don't say "but does homeopathy really work" and wink at them.

There's a lot of evidence that exercising is healthy and helps people improve their mental state so that analogy doesn't work. The point is if someone says they're getting a benefit from something that doesn't have a ton of evidence around it - my first instinct would be to be skeptical but curious. When someone takes that skepticism and implies that the "far bigger and more pressing problem" is that I can't determin…

It's weird though, because exercising physically can increase stress in the short term and can greatly elevate heart rate. Exercising is really unpleasant to me and I would really rather not do so.

The only reason I choose to exercise anyway is because of the people online and the scientific evidence saying that exercise is better for you in the long term. I certainly don't feel like it in the moment, and in fact sometimes worry if my heart is going to give out as I exercise. But if I am going to believe that exercise is beneficial overall, but that you can't experience the benefits it brings until it's too late to change things, I don't really know what else to do except listen to them and keep exercising, while getting over the unpleasantness and complete draining of energy and motivation to do things I'd rather do that it causes.

Maybe that's what some things in life come down to. It either comes down to eating diets like ones with plants prioritized and getting over the fact that they don't taste as pleasant as foods with refined sugars, or accepting the impact on your health by choosing the latter. Maybe some people just make their own peace with the taste of such foods, somehow.

Re: One hour of slow breathing changed my life

#245

Post by gonehome »

andi999 wrote: post #232
gonehome wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess I care. Yes it's beneficial if something works, but I want to know why it works too and not just believe in random pseudoscience. Also, determining if something really works is hard. I want to understand the mechanism. If there's something true there then you may be able to use that directly, you can also avoid untrue things that are harmful (history is full of these harmful 'treatments'). [0] Without this pe…

Not knowing how it works does not make it pseudoscience. It is enough if you can show through double blind that it works. For quite a few established medications which work we do not known how they work. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/07/23/one-b... Pseudoscience is if you do not test it scientifically if it works.

I think we agree?

Just because you don’t know how something works doesn’t mean it’s pseudoscience. You just might not understand the mechanism.

There’s a greater risk that something you think works actually doesn’t though if you don’t test it.

There’s also a greater risk that claims people make about things in this untested space are more likely to be false.

Part of the reason it’s important to test and understand the mechanism is that people are good at deluding themselves with all sorts of biases and made up false explanations.

Re: One hour of slow breathing changed my life

#246

Post by acituan »

MetalGuru wrote: post #236
acituan wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> With a lot of these things I would highly recommend to just try it. If it works for you, good. If not, don't do it. It doesn't cost anything and you won't harm yourself. I strongly disagree with this line of thinking. If something is potent enough to deliver benefit, it can also be potent enough to deliver harm. You can't have it both ways. Turns out breathing is rather psychoactive, and without proper educational…

Source for second paragraph claim?

A good meta study is: Lindahl et al (2017). The varieties of contemplative experience: A mixed-methods study of meditation-related challenges in Western Buddhists. This vice article recaps it: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/vbaedd/meditation-is-a-po...

I'll list just the titles of select deep dive citations from the first study to give an idea, you can find detailed citations in the paper itself;

- "Meditation-induced psychosis" (several with this title)

- "Mania precipitated by meditation: a case report and literature review."

- "Adverse effects of meditation: a preliminary investigation of long-term meditators."

- "The unveling of traumatic memories and emotions through mindfulness and concentration meditation: clinical implications and three case reports."

- "Meditation in association with psychosis"

- "Precipitation of acute psychotic episodes by intensive meditation in individuals with a history of schizophrenia"

- "Psychiatric complications of meditation practice."

This is a citation tree from just one study on meditation.

To be clear, I know the term meditation is not strictly equivalent to breathing exercises but definitely a good chunk covers & includes them; e.g most frequently practiced meditation style (vipassana), breathing sensation is the most common object of focus.

If you're interested in non-meditation studies, the term "relaxation induced anxiety" will bring a wider selection of papers. If you are interested in studies about psychoactivity of breathing, search for "panic disorder breathing" which has again tons of studies that investigate the link (contents of which doesn't necessarily limit to panic disordered populations).

And to be clear, I am not saying meditation or breathing exercises are bad. But they are potent. They can create altered states. And as such I am against bold claims like "they can do no harm, just do on your own". As studies above demonstrate, even with a proper educational context they can backfire. Especially considering the fact that the population segment that would be most interested in trying these exercises would likely to be the people already suffering from stress, anxiety or mental health problems.

Re: One hour of slow breathing changed my life

#248

Post by acituan »

waihtis wrote: post #235
acituan wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> With a lot of these things I would highly recommend to just try it. If it works for you, good. If not, don't do it. It doesn't cost anything and you won't harm yourself. I strongly disagree with this line of thinking. If something is potent enough to deliver benefit, it can also be potent enough to deliver harm. You can't have it both ways. Turns out breathing is rather psychoactive, and without proper educational…

Breathing practice is the most simple thing in the world. Sit, breathe, relax - definitely doesnt need a license. Sounds like you’re confused of the purpose of it.

Just because it is simple in your experience doesn't mean that is universally true for everyone. Certainly not for anxiety disordered or PTSD suffering people for example.

See my reply to comment below which cites studies when these sort of practices backfire in a non-trivial fashion. Like I said, it is either too trivial as sit, breathe and relax which won't do much good, or it is potent enough to do some good in which case it also has the potential of doing some harm.

Re: One hour of slow breathing changed my life

#250

Post by bayindirh »

barrenko wrote: post #249

Breathing works, just as basic spirituality. But, further you get into cultish stuff and "spiritual" experiences because you're basically restricting oxygen. In Zen they even warn of it.

I practice Zen and, after certain point you don't even watch your breathing. You just become aware of it. So, you restrict nothing.

Unfortunately meditation and spirituality is a very sharp and two edged sword. You need to find the correct people alongside the correct path.

In our way, there's no Spiritual Experience (TM). You just become aware of the issues in your life and with yourself, then you try to solve them. We say that "something is useless if it doesn't improve your real life in a perceivable way".

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