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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

#161

Post by konaraddi »

betenoire wrote: post #54
konaraddi wrote: post #15

This article is very relevant to what I've recently experienced. I haven't experienced the sweating but I've experienced the serenity that follows controlled breathing. I'm reading an English translation of Ramana Maharshi's Upadesa Sara with commentary and verses 11-14 talk about controlling the breath (pranayama). A few relevant points made in those verses: * Controlling your breath can help quieten the mind. * The…

I'm prone to anxiety, and find myself hyperventilating often. Is this what you mean by "harmful breathing patterns"? I've tried the "box breathing" with little luck, but have adapted a version where the exhale is 2-3x longer than the inhale. (inhale for 2 seconds, hold it a couple seconds, exhale slowly for 4-6 second, hold again). I've also found better luck at inhaling into my belly, instead of letting my rib cage…

> I'm prone to anxiety, and find myself hyperventilating often. Is this what you mean by "harmful breathing patterns"?

I meant "practicing breathing exercises incorrectly" (and I see now that's what I should've written in the first place, thanks for pointing that out). Upadesa Sara doesn't expand upon what it means to practice breathing exercises incorrectly or mention what the side effects are. Much of Upadesa Sara is concise so much is left up to the reader to reason or learn about.

After I read your comment, I spent too much time thinking about how I breath (whether thru the belly or chest) and started breathing weird haha. After a few hours, I figured out that I mostly breathe through the belly. I think. Anyways, genuinely happy to hear you found something that works for you.

Re: One hour of slow breathing changed my life

#162

Post by _they »

e40 wrote: post #79
dcuthbertson wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Naturally we breath out of one nostril at a time I don't understand how anyone can make that statement with a straight face. Unless one nostril is blocked, we use both simultaneously. There's no balance to be gamed.

That is totally not correct. I thought I was an anomaly until I heard a podcast by the Breathe author. I've noticed it for years, but I always attributed it to allergies (I attribute everything anomalous to them, because they are such a huge influence in my life). What is totally confusing is what causes the flip from one nostril to another. I have no idea what the mechanism is.

May want to check into nasal septum deviation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nasal_septum_deviation

Re: One hour of slow breathing changed my life

#163

Post by gonehome »

onemoresoop wrote: post #151
tines wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that you're biased - confirmation bias, expectation bias, selection bias, optimism bias, observer expectancy effect, the list goes on - and you end up learning all things except the truth.

As long as it does something beneficial who cares after all what the bias is? Placebo may play a role in it but once again, what do we care about here, whether something is beneficial or whether it can be explained why it is beneficial? For some the former and for some the latter, ofc depending on perspective.

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 people just end up wearing energy crystals, while dismissing real medicine for homeopathic nonsense that can lead to death [1][2].

Humanity has used the scientific method to barely rise above the collection of hocus pocus explanations. It's worth the effort not to fall back into that. [3]

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloodletting

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Jobs#Health_problems

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23882029

[3]: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/RgkqLqkg8vLhsYpfh/fake-causa...

Re: One hour of slow breathing changed my life

#164

Post by tedunangst »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #157
onemoresoop wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As long as it does something beneficial who cares after all what the bias is? Placebo may play a role in it but once again, what do we care about here, whether something is beneficial or whether it can be explained why it is beneficial? For some the former and for some the latter, ofc depending on perspective.

As long as it does something beneficial who cares after all what the bias is? I do. I hate being wrong about stuff.

Wrong about what exactly? I'd say I'm mostly a breathing skeptic, but if it makes you feel better, then... it makes you feel better and you aren't wrong for feeling better.

Re: One hour of slow breathing changed my life

#165

Post by magicalhippo »

voidhorse wrote: post #120
impendia wrote: post #32

I 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…

There’s an entire practice around this stemming from yogic philosophy called nadi shoodana —alternate nostril breathing—the theory essentially says doing this can regulate different male and female energies in the body, which are both responsible for different things, including energy levels (hyper vs relaxed). I can’t personally attest to any of the deeper claims of the theory, but I have used the alternate nostril…

Stumbled over this[1] paper while searching, says there's no correlation between forced-nostril breathing and performance in a verbal task.

However they mention their test subjects were not very uniform, and I'm not really in a position to evaluate their methods so...

[1]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3144611/

Re: One hour of slow breathing changed my life

#166

Post by kovek »

konaraddi wrote: post #161
betenoire wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm prone to anxiety, and find myself hyperventilating often. Is this what you mean by "harmful breathing patterns"? I've tried the "box breathing" with little luck, but have adapted a version where the exhale is 2-3x longer than the inhale. (inhale for 2 seconds, hold it a couple seconds, exhale slowly for 4-6 second, hold again). I've also found better luck at inhaling into my belly, instead of letting my rib cage…

> I'm prone to anxiety, and find myself hyperventilating often. Is this what you mean by "harmful breathing patterns"? I meant "practicing breathing exercises incorrectly" (and I see now that's what I should've written in the first place, thanks for pointing that out). Upadesa Sara doesn't expand upon what it means to practice breathing exercises incorrectly or mention what the side effects are. Much of Upadesa Sara…

I once ended up intensely enjoying my breath through the night (Did not sleep). I don’t recommend it. I wonder if that’s a type of discouraged breathing.

Re: One hour of slow breathing changed my life

#167

Post by sn41 »

rolleiflex wrote: post #125
Izkata wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (Note that a minority of people do not have this.) I'm probably one of them then, because I've tested this on and off for years whenever someone makes the claim, and it's never true for me. It's just really annoying how many people say with absolute certainty that everyone does it.

It’s more like one nostril is high-velocity and the other is low-velocity, not that one is completely blocked. The evolutionary reason is thought to be that it aids the perception of low PPM volatile organic compounds (i.e. bad smells = rot, toxic chemicals) because the ‘blocked’ nostril is used as a sense chamber which lets the air spend more time within, thus increase the effective sensitivity of your sense of smel…

Can confirm that I "smell" through one nostril at a time. I can smell more sensitively than others (for example, realise that milk is rotten before others do). I have noticed that when I try blocking one of my nostrils, my sense of smell is considerably lower, and it is not always the left nostril or always the right nostril. It kind of alternates, and I don't know the pattern. It might be that both nostrils alternate doing the task of smelling at different times.

Re: One hour of slow breathing changed my life

#168

Post by taneq »

isbjorn16 wrote: post #73
ivank wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

70-80% of adults have a alternating congested nostril https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nasal_cycle https://www.rhinologyonline.org/Rhinology_online_issues/2018...

It's weird how much we take for granted without ever expecting it to be different for others. I thought you guys were just screwing with me re: having an alternating congested nostril. Like, I only experience that during severe nasal congestion, and it seems mostly to stick with one side or the other depending on which side I'm laying on. It never even occurred to me that people would experience something like that _…

Same, unless I’m sick my nostrils stay even.

Re: One hour of slow breathing changed my life

#169

Post by mleonhard »

ivank wrote: post #49
dcuthbertson wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Naturally we breath out of one nostril at a time I don't understand how anyone can make that statement with a straight face. Unless one nostril is blocked, we use both simultaneously. There's no balance to be gamed.

70-80% of adults have a alternating congested nostril https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nasal_cycle https://www.rhinologyonline.org/Rhinology_online_issues/2018...

I went digging into that Wikipedia page and found a couple of interesting papers:

"The Ultradian Rhythm of Alternating Cerebral Hemispheric Activity" https://doi.org/10.3109/00207459309000583

"Effect of uninostril yoga breathing on brain hemodynamics: A functional near-infrared spectroscopy study" https://dx.doi.org/10.4103%2F0973-6131.171711

"Selective Unilateral Autonomic Activation: Implications for Psychiatry" https://doi.org/10.1017/S1092852900021428

My takeaway: The nervous system is super complicated and has various rhythms. For example the circadian rhythm makes you sleepy at night and alert during the day. There are a bunch of other rhythms that are not yet well studied. The nervous system alternates activity in left and right sides of the body on a rhythm of about 1.5 hours. The nasal cycle is part of this rhythm. One can influence this rhythm by forcing the body to breathe through one nostril.

"Klein, Pilon, Prosser, and Shannahoff-Khalsa (1986) assessed cognitive perfor- mance during different phases of the nasal cycle. They observed significant rela- tionships between the pattern of nasal airflow and spatial and verbal performance. Right nostril dominance correlated with enhanced verbal performance, or left brain activity, and left nostril dominance correlated with enhanced spatial performance, again indicating that the hemispheres alternate with the phases of the nasal cycle."

"Leconte and Lambert (1988) demonstrated that subjects who undergo a test of immediate memory every 25 min with two modalities (semantic and graphic) present a fluctuation in performance with a periodicity of about 100min. The two modalities were in opposite phase."

If breathing can reduce emotional problems for some people, then we could possibly predict this effect by measuring peoples' nasal cycles and hemisphere EEG rhythms. I imagine a typical doctors visit would start out with: 1) filling out the questionnaire, 2) measuring weight, temperature, heart rate, and blood pressure, and then 3) wearing the EEG helmet with nostril sensors for a minute.

Re: One hour of slow breathing changed my life

#170

Post by mensetmanusman »

tines wrote: post #148
eblanshey wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. The purpose of science is to discover the truth, not make the truth. You don't science to confirm everything before you try it. With things like breathing where you know it's not going to cause harm, just try it for yourself.

The problem is that you're biased - confirmation bias, expectation bias, selection bias, optimism bias, observer expectancy effect, the list goes on - and you end up learning all things except the truth.

We don’t even understand the placebo effect, there is little hope in learning the truth in regards to human biology as it would be too complicated, expensive, and unethical to try.
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