Brief structured respiration enhances mood and reduces physiological arousal

And for only 5 minutes?

Cyclic hyperventilation with retention is the same as wim hof breathing https://youtu.be/tybOi4hjZFQ as I understood from Andrew Huberman

Very well said! Your comment reminded me of this video I saw a few years ago, "Understanding the Monkey Mind" -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-JiQubfMPg

When you stop fighting your monkey mind, your monkey mind becomes your friend and ally instead of your opponent or enemy.

This is an extremely weak study that basically launders Huberman's "mini interventionism" and abuses west coast's fascination with what is mostly "breath-themed magic". The idea of hyperregulation of breath is a cousin of hyperregulation of dietary intake, which is a western "top-down"ism, latter of which induced more disordered eating than it achieved/preserved health.

Regarding the criticisms of this study;

Firstly, the small sample size is based on volunteers, so folks already believed there was going to be a payoff from something that is 75% breathwork.

Secondly, there is no "sham intervention" class to counter the placebo effects from this.

Thirdly, their mindfulness instruction is atypical; it should have been passive focus on breath rather than a visual/somatic cue on the forehead to be comperable with breath work vs breath focus.

Finally, their exclusion criteria makes it too restricted;

> For health and safety reasons, we excluded those with self-reported moderate to severe psychiatric or medical conditions that could be exacerbated by study participation, such as heart disease, glaucoma, history of seizures, pregnancy, psychosis, suicidality, bipolar disorder, or substance use disorders.

I find it annoying that the list is not exhaustive but we could reasonably assume they also had to exclude moderate and above depression and anxiety disorders, not to mention panic disorder[1]. Anxious folks are particularly sensitive to breathwork, and even 10% of their "healthy" population reported anxiety as a result of these practices (highest ingroup rate is 17%, in the favorite "sighing" group)

Besides the anxiety inducing vs reducing effect of all breathwork had more variance than the mindfulness intervention, which puts into question whether the cost/benefit of the intervention (not to mention it's wide scale applicability) is sufficient.

What Huberman is popular for is known as a "nutrientism" of sorts; as in assemble vitamins a, b, c..., this and that macronutrient plus this and that micronutrient and you will have a full nutritional profile. Not saying he is all bs at all, e.g his circadian light stuff is solid, but more often than not after the 50th episode these turn into bite sized oversold interventions mostly as an illusion of "doing something good for me so that I don't have to do anything else".

As a final note, mindfulness meditation traditionally has never been an emotion regulation tool, it is an education tool as a part of wisdom traditions, none of which had "good affect in one month" as the primary metric of their success.

[1] The panic disorder population is even more interesting. 50% of the panic disordered people do not suffer from hyperventilatory or otherwise respiratory phenomena. Not only that, the hyperventilators are suffering from hypocapnia, as in a drop in CO2 and not O2, which is completely opposite to Huberman's "dumping CO2 and therefore relaxing" magic/logic.

Just noticed that Dr Andrew Huberman is one of the authors of this report.