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- Hacker News
- Japanese can oxygen.
Tokyo's Takashimaya store sold more than 300.
A five quart canister of 95% concentrated oxygen (weighing about six ounces) sells at 11 a can.
by rballpug - Slowed breathing with longer exhales makes a noticeable (5-10 bpm) decrease in HR during endurance bike rides. It’s interesting seeing it happen when the power output is the same.by AaronAPU
- 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 importantby k__o
- Cmon tell us what it isby jondwillis
- 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.by vixen99
- 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.
by tmach32 - I've done coherent breathing before bed, 20 minutes. Improves my HRV by 20-30%by seper8
- As demonstrated in an older article cited in the parent article, at the same pace of 6 breaths/min it matters a lot which is the ratio between the exhalation time and the inhalation time.
In the experiments, slow inhalation with fast exhalation was never helpful, equal inhalation and exhalation was helpful only in certain circumstances and fast inhalation with slow exhalation (i.e. 2-second inhalation followed by 8-second exhalation) was always efficient in stimulating the parasympathetic nervous system and inhibiting the sympathetic nervous system.
The results from TFA are specifically for fast inhalation and slow exhalation, not for slow breathing in general.
The negative results from the article linked by you are perfectly consistent with the other results, which showed that equal inhalation and exhalation was useful only in certain circumstances, which were not tested in the article linked by you.
In general, slow breathing by fast inhalation and slow exhalation (or any other kind of slow breathing) does not have effects when you are already relaxed and having nothing to worry about, but only when you are stressed, either by anticipating that something bad will happen or while something bad is actually happening.
by adrian_b - But fear is often good. Breathing slow to counter your fear should only be done when you know it is an irrational fear.by galaxyLogic
- I'm not sure if that's true. I don't really get stressed or anxious, and from the few times I tried to put myself into stress mode I've performed much worse.by xpct
- 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.
by vasco - 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.by toxik
- 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/fearlessby ocihangir
- 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)
by uberex - AOT what you can, JIT what can benefit from more information.by alserio
- 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?by storus
- 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.
by adrian_b - 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.
by ansk - It's possible to train your breathing patterns, look up Buteyko breathing.by zo7
- > 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.
by Nevermark - I have read that skilled mindfulness practitioners maintain constant awareness of their breathing pattern throughout all other waking activities. Something to aspire to perhaps.by RossBencina
- Anectata, but I found that active wearables can help with initial motivation, but long term they become chore or even stressful when forced. I use them only for passive long trends tracking.
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 (nature, decluttwring, idleness, peaceful eating, proper sleep)
3rd gaining awareness about trigger mechanisms (overcommitments, overexpectations)
It is all self-regulating. And pretty much what mindfulnes, meditation, prayer or forest walk brings.
by imhoguy - "When you feel so mad that you want to roar, take a breath and count to four." - Daniel Tiger's momby chopete3
- 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.
by gorgoiler - 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.
by cryzinger - 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)_/¯by gcanyon
- Yes, it's weird. It's like the authors did the experiments, analysed them, understood that their research suggested that slow breathing was having the exact opposite effect of all that the psuedoscience/wellness/psychobabble community have assumed ...
... and then just ran with "yay, slow breathing!! Transformative, amirite??"
And sure, "transformative" is not technically incorrect. But the linguistic implications of that word are almost always positive/beneficial, whereas in this case the transformation is overwhelmingly negative.
At best, the manuscript's language is sloppy; at worst, it's misleading. Very odd. The finding that this technique is actually bad in most cases (every situation where additional risk-taking behaviour is bad) is so interesting. Odd that they almost try to cover it up.
by epihelix - 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.by culopatin
- It seems counterintuitive on the face of it but when I imagined someone forcing themselves to breath slowly I immediaty saw they are about to do something stupid next.by scotty79
- I was confused when I first read it as well, but the implication is that the higher reward-seeking risk tolerance can actually be more rational than the well-studied loss-aversion bias that the authors mention.
Looking into this more, studies have found that we tend to rate the possible loss of $100 twice as painfully as the pleasure from the possible gain of $100. This can lead to irrational behaviors.
Increasing the weight we give to potential rewards is not necessarily a bad thing.
I think this can help explain the "calming of the nerves" that slow breathing promotes. If you need to speak in public and your heart is racing and you're shaking, this is an irrational reaction to what ought to be a very safe situation. By focusing more on the rewards (the acclaim for a good speech or whatever) and less on the imagined risks, you can calm down and speak naturally.
by SamBam