Show HN: I'm a doctor and made a responsive breathing app for stress and anxiety

Well, first thing is, can you breath through your nose? Do you have that habit down? Fixing this is really important, for me at least. If a person can't breath through their nose, I suggest trying Afrin. This was such a huge lightbulb moment for me, and was my "AHA" moment. I really didn't know that the normal human condition is to nasal breathe. My mom has the same condition and I was raised by her so I didn't realize it and she didn't either to even notice it in me. It works instantly, within 10 minutes, and my world was opened up! And it still took me months to form the habit of nasal breathing, because I could never trust it enough when it worked (due to the nasal cycle). I definitely do Afrin just before bedtime too, every 12 hours or so. And I am getting surgery for the deviated septum too in February.

Second thing, do you have chronic pain? That will keep the body in a stress response. Chronic pain is actually easier to get rid of than I thought, and I tried a lot of things for 20 years. The new research at University of Colorado Boulder, using functional MRI scans in 2020 proves that much chronic pain can be eliminated in a short period with a very specific technique called Pain Reprocessing Therapy (PRT), which is a compassion-based therapy. This is a really, really hard thing to believe, and one doesn't have to believe it fully, they just have to believe it enough to be curious and learn more. And if one is curious, I recommend listening to a 15 episode mini-series podcast called Tell Me About Your Pain by Alon Gordon (Pain Pyschologist) and Alon Ziv (Neuroscientist), then after that listen to the audio book (not ebook) by the same people called "The Way Out" (2022). Then there are 6 specific meditations by Alan Gordon on an app called Curable that I used to eliminate my chronic neck and back pain, I can dig up the link to them if you like. This same technique is what I use to react to my shallow breathing and fatigue with deeper breathing. This got me sleeping through the night.

Third, the trauma therapy (it isn't if we have trauma, it is how much), I recommend starting with the film The Wisdom of Trauma. And if that is interesting then reading In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts. Myth of Normal seems like a great book too, I haven't read it yet though but it is on my list. I did start reading Gabor's AD(H)D book Scattered Minds a while back, way before this breathing breakthrough surfaced and need to finish it, but to sum up one thing I learned I have ADD-Like symptoms and this whole shallow breathing thing I have noticed is a large part of it. Once I start conscious breathing, by ADD-like stuff reduces. I've been more motivated to actually exercise and not fall asleep doing it, and I have been working on cold-exposure therapy (What Doesn't Kill Us by Mark Carney, investigative journalist who tried to debunk Wim Hoff, ended up drinking the Koolaid, and explains why). The cold-exposure increases the chemical called norepinephrine, which is one of the chemicals that Adderall increases (along with Dopamine). There is a quote from the film "My Octopus Teacher" (fantastic film) where he says "the cold really upgrades the brain" and references him diving into the ocean without a wetsuit almost every day for a year making friends with an octopus. I really like that quote. The cold does help me think when I do it, and I am still easing into it, and getting my brain back.

All in all, I feel at a really new phase of my life, and that includes this thing called "Hope". I no longer think my fatigue is caused by my diet, and in fact I know it isn't.

I'm happy to chat about this with you or anyone else. I'm also open to saying "hi" on a real-time communication (RTC) chat here https://cal.com/ElijahLynn.

I found the Apple Watch breathe exercise in the meditation app more useful and relaxing. Lungy was rather frustrating.

First off, your website and app are aesthetically breathtaking. You have a real talent with design.

I have not used the breathing app, so ultimately there may be some context to which I am unware, however, my first thought when hearing the description of the App is why? Why do we as technologists insist on making things more complicated? Breathing is as old as life, and though I concede that there can be tremendous depth to the study of breathing, particular in relation to disciplines such as singing, meditation, anxiety, couldn't you more effectively teach someone a technique by simply informing them rather than making an app to accomplish that same goal?

I apologize if in any way this feels as if I am criticizing your creative work. I am a software engineer and medical student and I appreciate when the two fields collide. I also never want to put any creative work down because I understand the effort and risk one takes when doing anything of the sort.

Nice but I believe that parody goes against the spirit of the comments section.

I can see how it can cause some anxiety. I suppose I was lucky that it didn't for me. The first two nights I work up in the middle a couple times, decently alert, and could tell my body was trying to say something might be wrong. I was able to fall asleep quickly though, which also was something I wasn't able to do before.

If you might have that anxiety, I'd say try putting tape on your mouth during the day at times to get used to it, and you might find you'll forget about it and that can ease the worry. It might be difficult, but we all can breathe only through our noses, even if that requires some practice and reassurance.