One hour of slow breathing changed my life • Hacker News Board

Re: One hour of slow breathing changed my life

#221

Post by cgag » Wed, Jul 29, 2020, 4:29 AM UTC

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.

I suspect you learn less by doing nothing. This kind of advice is probably good for normal people, but the people who need it least seem to be the ones most paralyzed by it.

Re: One hour of slow breathing changed my life

#222

Post by unishark » Wed, Jul 29, 2020, 4:34 AM UTC

lrnStats wrote: post #23

Mental 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?…

Mental health (particularly psychiatric illnesses) is something of an outlier among medicine in terms of how limited progress has been compared to other disease categories.

As for physical therapy, I have also experienced a degree of reluctance in prescribing it. But in my case my doctor has always been even more averse to drugs (aside from things like tylenol). I think I had to go through a couple doctors visits worth of suggesting alternative exercises or other lifestyle changes first. Maybe physical therapy is just expensive and they were trying to protect me from the out-of-pocket costs.

Re: One hour of slow breathing changed my life

#223

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Jul 29, 2020, 4:46 AM UTC

[deleted]

Re: One hour of slow breathing changed my life

#224

Post by rajangdavis » Wed, Jul 29, 2020, 4:56 AM UTC

yladiz wrote: post #218

deeblering4 wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At first, but once you reach nostril nirvana you unlock the ability to breathe with your third nostril

Can I consider my mouth my third nostril and reach nostril nirvana already?

You were always there :)

Re: One hour of slow breathing changed my life

#225

Post by krtkush » Wed, Jul 29, 2020, 5:07 AM UTC

rajangdavis wrote: post #224

yladiz wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can I consider my mouth my third nostril and reach nostril nirvana already?

You were always there :)

Only waiting to realize.

Re: One hour of slow breathing changed my life

#226

Post by baxtr » Wed, Jul 29, 2020, 5:11 AM UTC

r0rshrk wrote: post #194

tzot wrote: post #104

> Hindus considered breath and spirit the same thing It's funny, because I just realised that πνεύμα(pneuma)/spirit in Greek has the same root as πνεύμων(pneumon)/lung: the verb πνέω(pnéo), which means I breathe. This is not Mr Portokalos talking from My Big Fat Greek Wedding, people: πνέω is traced to the older Indo-European stem pnew- , and the whole point of my comment is that there is a lot of heritage in languag…

Atmen in German (breath) and Atman in Sanskrit (breath, spirit) have the same origin.

Fascinating. Indo-European languages share many word roots. Word that remain similar tend to be numbers and family members (mum, dad, brother etc)

Re: One hour of slow breathing changed my life

#227

Post by isoprophlex » Wed, Jul 29, 2020, 5:26 AM UTC

cwkoss wrote: post #154

voidhorse wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If anyone else was confused (I was and had to google), the practice of alternate nostril breathing entails physically obstructing alternating nostrils with a finger as you take breaths.

Not going to lie: "Naturally we breath out of one nostril at a time" had me looking very confused! I even tried contorting my face to get one of my nostrils to close, haha

Re: One hour of slow breathing changed my life

#228

Post by AnonHP » Wed, Jul 29, 2020, 5:27 AM UTC

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've made a conscious effort to observe the breath randomly throughout the day and it has a calming effect.

If and when you’re able to, do attend a free 10-day introductory Vipassana meditation course (see dhamma.org for locations and schedules). The practice starts with observing the breath, and then moves on from that.

This course requires the participants to be silent for the 10 days, and has some other restrictions too. Some people find that impossible to deal with. So do consider that and also any emotional or mental health issues/barriers that may be a deterrent to participation.

Re: One hour of slow breathing changed my life

#229

Post by metrokoi » Wed, Jul 29, 2020, 5:27 AM UTC

abendy wrote: post #9

martindbp wrote: post #4

> 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…

This concept that people breath too much when exercising never really made sense to me. I generally do believe it because I have experienced it myself, but why would the body default to a less effective form of breathing? Shouldn't we feel that breathing more steadily through our nose is more natural than trying to take big gulps of air when running?

Re: One hour of slow breathing changed my life

#230

Post by paulgerhardt » Wed, Jul 29, 2020, 5:28 AM UTC

Two minutes of 5.5 second inhales and 5.5 seconds exhales hyperventilates me to the point of dizziness.

There’s a lot of qualifications for this number and freedivers explore most of them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3aXxXCXptYA&t=12m10s

6 seconds in and 12 out is my ideal breath-up. Shallower breathes for meditation. The video above has a good exercise for finding your ideal breath-up.