You can practice regulating exhale rate in a pool or bath by blowing bubbles. I find it helps with freediving exercises where you fix the number of breaths in between reps.
Slow breathing is also recommended for novices before public speaking, as it helps speakers overcome irrational physiological fear of facing people, the risk-taking shift is useful as it helps you speak more confidently, not more cautiously. Slow breathing can calm nerves quickly; bottom-up regulation: body tells brain “you’re safe”.
Slow breathing (in yoga: pranayama) instantly down-regulates your nervous system by boosting vagal tone and lowering sympathetic "fight-or-flight" activity. When your breath lengthens, it signals your brain that you are completely safe, dropping your heart rate and lowering blood pressure.
I've been practicing coherent breathing (6 breaths/min, equal inhalation and exhalation) to help with anxiety. I'm mostly going off a study[1] where participants who practiced coherent breathing 20 mins a day reported significantly improved outcomes weeks later.
Does anyone have advice about HRV specifically within the context of anxiety?
I've been measuring my SDNN using a Polar strap, and it hasn't really budged. However, I'm not taking that too seriously. I think my HRV is already fairly good because I bike. Anecdotally, I think the coherent breathing helps, especially if I _remember to do it in stressful moments_, not just in the morning.
Parasympathetic nervous activation increased risk-taking behavior? That's interesting/unexpected (at least to me). Also, this part caught my eye:
> The selective impact of prolonged exhalation breathing on reward responsiveness has important implications for clinical contexts, such as anxiety, panic disorder, and depression, given their distinct autonomic signatures and maladaptive reward processing. By enhancing cardiac parasympathetic modulation through prolonged exhalation techniques, individuals may restore reward processing, a valuable pathway for emotional recalibration. Prolonged exhalation harbors the potential for a low-cost, low-risk, easily applicable intervention to be incorporated into therapy or rehabilitation programs, especially to support pharmacological treatments.
I agree it's counterintuitive, but it makes sense when I think about how, for example, it's the least neurotic people who do high-risk activities like base jumping or mountain climbing. Fear drives you away from threatening things, lack of fear allows you to move toward them more comfortably.
In general yes, I do climbing and I can say I only do it when I feel no fear, no adrenalin rush. When I feel fear I stop, otherwise danger of accident.
But I know a base jumper .. and he only does the jumps if he feels the fear and his kick is to overcome it and feel the adrenalin rush.
Yeah, I was expecting some sort of "slow breathing produces calmness/more considered behavior" conclusion. But, the exact opposite? Everyone knows what party monsters those zen meditators are? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
“If you feel jealous, talk about it, then we’ll figure something out”
In which one of the children wants the other one’s cool toy so the parent’s response is to encourage them to ask for it to be shared. Except they aren’t siblings and it’s the mom from the other family teaching their own jealous kid to go ask.
How about this?: Back off cat family, you fair weather commies — that’s Daniel’s bubble wand, not yours. At least share some of your own crap before asking for someone else’s:
”If you feel jealous: shut the fuck up, you can’t just have someone else’s stuff nor should you feel entitled to guilt them into sharing it just because you asked nicely.”
I mean Daniel Tiger in general just makes me cringe, it's just so extremely American. Absolutely zero stakes, all problems are resolved perfectly within literal seconds. Nothing is left "unfinished", never dares to leave the conflict unresolved for any meaningful amount of time. It's just such a stark contrast to, say, Peppa Pig, where the message is basically always some form of "shit is going to happen, find ways to deal with it." In DT, it is more of a papering over. Almost gaslighting. DT is not allowed to be upset that his birthday cake gets completely smashed? What? That is a healthy and normal response.
I've found breathing exercises to be effective for the duration of the exercise, but I'm more interested in the possibility of training myself to adjust my respiration patterns over sustained durations. Would it be beneficial -- or even possible at all -- to adjust my body's default/subconscious breathing patterns to match those mentioned in the article?
Tangentially related, are there any wearable devices that allow for high resolution respiration monitoring? I'm imagining some measurement of lung expansion over time (probably at least 10 Hz) so that I can quantify the deepness/shallowness of my breaths as well as the phase of inhalation/exhalation cycles.
Anectata, but I found that werables can help with initial motivation, but long term they become chore or even stressful when forced. Our brains trick us to breath on defaults adjusted to our surroundings.
What I have found working to slow down breath is 1st willful exercise repetition, 2nd changing surrounding environment and lifestyle, 3rd gaining awareness about trigger mechanisms. It is all self-regulating. And pretty much what mindfulnes, meditation or prayer brings.
> Would it be beneficial -- or even possible at all -- to adjust my body's default/subconscious breathing patterns to match those mentioned in the article?
Common physical reflexes, autonomous responses, and subconscious regulation, are there as aids to us. The fact that they are not universally beneficial is one of the purposes of having higher level control. Not to universally suppress responses, but to notice and cope when they misfire.
It would be interesting to have a map of breathing patterns across a wide variety of situations, to identify the range of situations where prolonged exhalation is adaptive.
My guess, based on the common reflexes of mouth clamping and breath holding before great physical exertion, is that prolonged exhalation is part of an adaptive psychological orchestrator for when we prepare to take on something difficult, risky (but necessary), or that needs a fast strong response.
Our fast acting emotions, and slower acting moods, are similar guides. Patterns of stimulus and response from our baseline physiology and psychological, that we absorb into our higher level operation, as generalized guides for analogous responses to contexts at higher abstraction levels.
With minor maladaptive responses inevitable, if we don't pay attention. And severe maladaptive responses often ingrained as overcompensation for situational or developmental traumas.
The craziest thing I noticed about a breathing pattern and risk taking was when a murderer was in an interrogation room with a police officer when after they couldn't find his gun; he had stowed it on his ankle. The suspect took a deep inhale after reaching for his gun while the officer was focused on the computer screen in front of him, exhaled and swiftly aimed at the officers temple and fired. Then he broke out of custody and was caught shortly after.
I have read that skilled mindfulness practitioners maintain constant awareness of their breathing pattern throughout all other waking activities. Something to aspire to perhaps.
There's also a level above that, where you're aware of what is aware. I find this mental state to be even more calming/grounding than being aware of breathing but I'm not always able to shift myself into it. Being aware of breathing feels much easier/natural to me whenever I'm able to remind myself of it, which already provides quite a noticeable effect on how I'm feeling and reacting to whatever is happening in that moment.
Additionally, there's a practice called "walking meditation" [0] that can also be useful to practice this area of skills.
Finally I understand why meditation hippies kinda seem aloof when you talk to them. Turns out they are trying to multi-task some kind of awarenessmaxxing while speaking to you. The more you know!
I always thought that was part of their weirdness and maybe even some personality trait that led them to this sort of thing, but knowing it's an active choice makes it even weirder somehow.
Awareness of breathing does not mean controlling your breathing, it just means noticing the sensations associated with it. Breathing can be incredibly pleasant!
Weren't 90s of deep breathing supposed to remove all cortisol in the blood? This seems like an opposite result. Also a single prolonged breath was supposed to reset autonomic nervous system. Which research should I trust now?
The title is inaccurate. The results are not about any kind of deep breathing or slow breathing.
The results are specifically about a breathing that is slower due to prolonged exhalation.
This kind of breathing is one of the many kinds of breathing traditionally practiced in yoga and also in many Asian martial arts, each kind for different purposes.
The experiments used in TFA have used a breathing rhythm of 2-second inhalation with 8-second exhalation, which is about the same as how I learned this kind of breathing as a child, from a yoga manual.
I have never heard about a single breathing of any kind to have much effect. For any kind of breathing rhythm you may need to use it from a large fraction of a minute up to a few minutes to have a noticeable effect.
As explained in TFA, this particular kind of breathing rhythm changes the balance between the 2 components of the autonomic nervous system, in favor of the parasympathetic nervous system.
This has the effect to diminish the influence that fear has on making decisions.
TFA is interesting because it provides a scientific confirmation about the usefulness of this kind of breathing rhythm, which has been traditionally used for centuries, if not even for millennia, in India, China and other Asian countries.
Also try to make decisions ahead of time too. E.g. figure out what your opinion is before the meeting. Think like a pilot, don't let the plane do something you hadn't anticipated 5 minutes before (or in case of life 5 days 5 weeks 5 months or sometimes 5 years!)
Cant do this for everything but examples are supermarket lists, home viewing (know your price, questions, decision criteria)
i developed a health issue that has affected my breathing over the past few years and i am cognitively and emotionally destroyed, it has made me realize that breathing is really important
The finding certainly chimes with my experience. A few deep breaths each with a slow release taking up to around twelve seconds almost always lowers my blood pressure sometimes by as much as 10 points with the attendant calmness thrown in. Although the BP effect is temporary, by habitually doing it, my BP even drops on a semi-permanent basis. Reports on this routine abound. If the goal here can be achieved, those with a BP problem will immediately appreciate the upside of this approach.
You can practice regulating exhale rate in a pool or bath by blowing bubbles. I find it helps with freediving exercises where you fix the number of breaths in between reps.
Slow breathing is also recommended for novices before public speaking, as it helps speakers overcome irrational physiological fear of facing people, the risk-taking shift is useful as it helps you speak more confidently, not more cautiously. Slow breathing can calm nerves quickly; bottom-up regulation: body tells brain “you’re safe”.
Slow breathing (in yoga: pranayama) instantly down-regulates your nervous system by boosting vagal tone and lowering sympathetic "fight-or-flight" activity. When your breath lengthens, it signals your brain that you are completely safe, dropping your heart rate and lowering blood pressure.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12858147/
Professional public speakers use a beta blocker like propanolol before going on stage.
Propanolmao, even
Propanorofl
I've been practicing coherent breathing (6 breaths/min, equal inhalation and exhalation) to help with anxiety. I'm mostly going off a study[1] where participants who practiced coherent breathing 20 mins a day reported significantly improved outcomes weeks later.
Does anyone have advice about HRV specifically within the context of anxiety?
I've been measuring my SDNN using a Polar strap, and it hasn't really budged. However, I'm not taking that too seriously. I think my HRV is already fairly good because I bike. Anecdotally, I think the coherent breathing helps, especially if I _remember to do it in stressful moments_, not just in the morning.
[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10719279/
Parasympathetic nervous activation increased risk-taking behavior? That's interesting/unexpected (at least to me). Also, this part caught my eye:
> The selective impact of prolonged exhalation breathing on reward responsiveness has important implications for clinical contexts, such as anxiety, panic disorder, and depression, given their distinct autonomic signatures and maladaptive reward processing. By enhancing cardiac parasympathetic modulation through prolonged exhalation techniques, individuals may restore reward processing, a valuable pathway for emotional recalibration. Prolonged exhalation harbors the potential for a low-cost, low-risk, easily applicable intervention to be incorporated into therapy or rehabilitation programs, especially to support pharmacological treatments.
I agree it's counterintuitive, but it makes sense when I think about how, for example, it's the least neurotic people who do high-risk activities like base jumping or mountain climbing. Fear drives you away from threatening things, lack of fear allows you to move toward them more comfortably.
In general yes, I do climbing and I can say I only do it when I feel no fear, no adrenalin rush. When I feel fear I stop, otherwise danger of accident.
But I know a base jumper .. and he only does the jumps if he feels the fear and his kick is to overcome it and feel the adrenalin rush.
> But I know a base jumper .. and he only does the jumps if he feels the fear and his kick is to overcome it and feel the adrenalin rush.
This sentence has beautifully crystallised the meaning of what it means to be an adrenalin junkie ^_^
Ah, that does make a lot of sense!
"Everything you've ever wanted is on the other side of fear." (George Addair)
It makes complete sense. Think about the opposite: When you don't feel safe, you'll want to reduce risk taking.
Makes sense to me. The only way I can dip in a snow melt lake is if I slow down my breathing, slow my thinking and dip.
Yeah, I was expecting some sort of "slow breathing produces calmness/more considered behavior" conclusion. But, the exact opposite? Everyone knows what party monsters those zen meditators are? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Zen party monster... Reporting for duty!
"When you feel so mad that you want to roar, take a breath and count to four." - Daniel Tiger's mom
My favourite of these is.
“If you feel jealous, talk about it, then we’ll figure something out”
In which one of the children wants the other one’s cool toy so the parent’s response is to encourage them to ask for it to be shared. Except they aren’t siblings and it’s the mom from the other family teaching their own jealous kid to go ask.
How about this?: Back off cat family, you fair weather commies — that’s Daniel’s bubble wand, not yours. At least share some of your own crap before asking for someone else’s:
”If you feel jealous: shut the fuck up, you can’t just have someone else’s stuff nor should you feel entitled to guilt them into sharing it just because you asked nicely.”
Slightly tongue-in-cheek. Slightly.
I mean Daniel Tiger in general just makes me cringe, it's just so extremely American. Absolutely zero stakes, all problems are resolved perfectly within literal seconds. Nothing is left "unfinished", never dares to leave the conflict unresolved for any meaningful amount of time. It's just such a stark contrast to, say, Peppa Pig, where the message is basically always some form of "shit is going to happen, find ways to deal with it." In DT, it is more of a papering over. Almost gaslighting. DT is not allowed to be upset that his birthday cake gets completely smashed? What? That is a healthy and normal response.
… or as Malcolm in the Middle put it: life is unfair.
I've found breathing exercises to be effective for the duration of the exercise, but I'm more interested in the possibility of training myself to adjust my respiration patterns over sustained durations. Would it be beneficial -- or even possible at all -- to adjust my body's default/subconscious breathing patterns to match those mentioned in the article?
Tangentially related, are there any wearable devices that allow for high resolution respiration monitoring? I'm imagining some measurement of lung expansion over time (probably at least 10 Hz) so that I can quantify the deepness/shallowness of my breaths as well as the phase of inhalation/exhalation cycles.
Anectata, but I found that werables can help with initial motivation, but long term they become chore or even stressful when forced. Our brains trick us to breath on defaults adjusted to our surroundings.
What I have found working to slow down breath is 1st willful exercise repetition, 2nd changing surrounding environment and lifestyle, 3rd gaining awareness about trigger mechanisms. It is all self-regulating. And pretty much what mindfulnes, meditation or prayer brings.
> Would it be beneficial -- or even possible at all -- to adjust my body's default/subconscious breathing patterns to match those mentioned in the article?
Common physical reflexes, autonomous responses, and subconscious regulation, are there as aids to us. The fact that they are not universally beneficial is one of the purposes of having higher level control. Not to universally suppress responses, but to notice and cope when they misfire.
It would be interesting to have a map of breathing patterns across a wide variety of situations, to identify the range of situations where prolonged exhalation is adaptive.
My guess, based on the common reflexes of mouth clamping and breath holding before great physical exertion, is that prolonged exhalation is part of an adaptive psychological orchestrator for when we prepare to take on something difficult, risky (but necessary), or that needs a fast strong response.
Our fast acting emotions, and slower acting moods, are similar guides. Patterns of stimulus and response from our baseline physiology and psychological, that we absorb into our higher level operation, as generalized guides for analogous responses to contexts at higher abstraction levels.
With minor maladaptive responses inevitable, if we don't pay attention. And severe maladaptive responses often ingrained as overcompensation for situational or developmental traumas.
The craziest thing I noticed about a breathing pattern and risk taking was when a murderer was in an interrogation room with a police officer when after they couldn't find his gun; he had stowed it on his ankle. The suspect took a deep inhale after reaching for his gun while the officer was focused on the computer screen in front of him, exhaled and swiftly aimed at the officers temple and fired. Then he broke out of custody and was caught shortly after.
I have read that skilled mindfulness practitioners maintain constant awareness of their breathing pattern throughout all other waking activities. Something to aspire to perhaps.
There's also a level above that, where you're aware of what is aware. I find this mental state to be even more calming/grounding than being aware of breathing but I'm not always able to shift myself into it. Being aware of breathing feels much easier/natural to me whenever I'm able to remind myself of it, which already provides quite a noticeable effect on how I'm feeling and reacting to whatever is happening in that moment.
Additionally, there's a practice called "walking meditation" [0] that can also be useful to practice this area of skills.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walking_meditation
Finally I understand why meditation hippies kinda seem aloof when you talk to them. Turns out they are trying to multi-task some kind of awarenessmaxxing while speaking to you. The more you know!
I always thought that was part of their weirdness and maybe even some personality trait that led them to this sort of thing, but knowing it's an active choice makes it even weirder somehow.
Indeed, a lot of aspiration there.
Sounds like hell.
Remember to blink!
Awareness of breathing does not mean controlling your breathing, it just means noticing the sensations associated with it. Breathing can be incredibly pleasant!
It usually becomes very pleasant, euphoric, and self sustaining, if done correctly.
It's possible to train your breathing patterns, look up Buteyko breathing.
But fear is often good. Breathing slow to counter your fear should only be done when you know it is an irrational fear.
There is a great episode of Invisibilia podcast series on this subject. They talk about rare case of a person without fear and she learns how to survive without fear. https://www.npr.org/programs/invisibilia/377515477/fearless
Fear is rarely good, surely? Maybe if you potentially have to literally fight for your life, yes, but that - I hope - is a rare occurrence.
Your argument defeats itself.
You say fear is good, presumably because it stops you from doing things you don't know are dangerous.
But then you say you can do a technique to defeat fear when you know the fear is irrational.
But your argument starts from the premise that you don't know a situation is dangerous or not without the fear so how would you know it's irrational?
In my experience it's the opposite, most fear is not useful.
Weren't 90s of deep breathing supposed to remove all cortisol in the blood? This seems like an opposite result. Also a single prolonged breath was supposed to reset autonomic nervous system. Which research should I trust now?
The title is inaccurate. The results are not about any kind of deep breathing or slow breathing.
The results are specifically about a breathing that is slower due to prolonged exhalation.
This kind of breathing is one of the many kinds of breathing traditionally practiced in yoga and also in many Asian martial arts, each kind for different purposes.
The experiments used in TFA have used a breathing rhythm of 2-second inhalation with 8-second exhalation, which is about the same as how I learned this kind of breathing as a child, from a yoga manual.
I have never heard about a single breathing of any kind to have much effect. For any kind of breathing rhythm you may need to use it from a large fraction of a minute up to a few minutes to have a noticeable effect.
As explained in TFA, this particular kind of breathing rhythm changes the balance between the 2 components of the autonomic nervous system, in favor of the parasympathetic nervous system.
This has the effect to diminish the influence that fear has on making decisions.
TFA is interesting because it provides a scientific confirmation about the usefulness of this kind of breathing rhythm, which has been traditionally used for centuries, if not even for millennia, in India, China and other Asian countries.
Also try to make decisions ahead of time too. E.g. figure out what your opinion is before the meeting. Think like a pilot, don't let the plane do something you hadn't anticipated 5 minutes before (or in case of life 5 days 5 weeks 5 months or sometimes 5 years!)
Cant do this for everything but examples are supermarket lists, home viewing (know your price, questions, decision criteria)
Something that yoga has propounded for centuries, been mocked and now science confirms it and the ignores the history and cultural practice.
who mocked breathing techniques though ..
mindfulness and meditation have been seeing broad adoption - with apps like headspace etc also getting good traction
i developed a health issue that has affected my breathing over the past few years and i am cognitively and emotionally destroyed, it has made me realize that breathing is really important
Cmon tell us what it is
condylar resorption https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condylar_resorption
its when the tmj sorta dissolves and ur jaw/facial structure collapses as a result. now my airway is like a millimeter
So doing this Sudarshan Kriya helps ? Or we should avoid it ?
https://www.aolresearch.org/published-research
like inhaling a cigarette and slowly exhaling smoke.
I wonder how much of the relaxation effects of smoking involve the long slow exhales. I understand the nic aspect.
The finding certainly chimes with my experience. A few deep breaths each with a slow release taking up to around twelve seconds almost always lowers my blood pressure sometimes by as much as 10 points with the attendant calmness thrown in. Although the BP effect is temporary, by habitually doing it, my BP even drops on a semi-permanent basis. Reports on this routine abound. If the goal here can be achieved, those with a BP problem will immediately appreciate the upside of this approach.
I've never found it to make a difference