The following post is an ongoing-work-in-progress. The goal is for me to make sense of my learnings about breath and breathwork.
Disclaimer: I am not a doctor. I am not even some kind of athlete or knowledgeable person. I’m just some guy trying to figure this stuff out. There’s a very high likelihood that I’m wrong or not-even-wrong about most of what I’m about to explore here.
Let’s start with some backstory.
- I’ve never really had breathing problems or asthma or anything like that.
- I don’t snore.
- I have never really had any reason to be conscious or self-conscious about my breathing.
- I’ve also kind of always naturally been a belly breather, I think. I’ve never had that issue some people seem to have where they breathe only into their chests.
- I have vaguely kind of always known “yeah yeah deep breaths calm you down, take some deep breaths, meditate, blah blah” – but the habit never really properly clicked for me, I think largely because the effect never quite “hit” the right way
- I picked up cigarette smoking when I was about 17, and it has been a pretty strong and persistent habit for me until now. I’ve stopped smoking a few times during that time – I think my longest break was about 3 months in 2015 or so.
With hindsight, I believe that I picked up smoking as a form of self-medication. I had several friends who tried cigarettes around the same time as me, but it didn’t “stick” for all of us. I’m ~60-70% certain that almost anybody who becomes a Cigarette Smoker is using it for some sort of self-medication. That’s a whole separate blogpost that I don’t want to get into here, but chemically speaking, it’s about the relationship between nicotine and blood sugar. And there’s a second part that I’m only just starting to appreciate: slow exhales are relaxing.
It seems like such an obvious thing to say. Slow exhales are relaxing. Duh, right? Well, do you do it when you’re tense, or stressed?
Anyway let’s switch up. Let’s talk about the start of what made me want to write this. It all began when someone sent me a video on Twitter.
I know that breathwork helps me with anxiety symptoms.
This is the big one for me.
Okay so first of all… I don’t have good sleeping habits. I have a habit of sleeping really late at night, when I’m absolutely exhausted. There are several reasons for this.
I’m about 4 days into trying to sleep and wake early (in bed before midnight, no alarm). Cautiously excited. The change is pretty disruptive; my appetite and my energy levels etc are all out of wack. Feeling absent-minded, listless and body-anxious. But gonna persist
Still waking up body-anxious every time. Evan suggested box-breathing.
I know that breathwork helps me recover quickly from bad naps.
“I took a mid-day nap of about 1.5hrs and woke up body-anxious again – by this I mean my mind seems normal-ish, but I have a headache, a slight fever(?), elevated heart rate, my guts feel like they’re getting a little wrenched… actually quite a bit like the feeling before going onstage. I did box breaths for about 10-15 minutes and… I think it’s mostly gone? Normally this stuff leaves me cranky and lethargic for 1-2 hours at least. This is really promising. I’m excited.”
I think breathwork is helping me sleep better.
One of my goals for 2020 is to sleep better. I’ve long had a habit of staying up really late, only going to bed when I’m totally exhausted. Part of this is because it’s so fun to talk to my friends on Twitter who are on the other side of the planet. But I could talk to them in the morning if I slept and woke earlier, too.
A deeper reason, I think, is that I tend to have difficulty going to sleep at more reasonable hours to begin with. Why is that? I think a part of it has something to do with my childhood anxieties around school. I used to avoid doing my homework until the last minute, be exhausted, go to sleep, and then wake up tremendously anxious about the fact that I hadn’t done my homework yet. I don’t like to think about this too much, but I would be really nauseated every morning. No appetite whatsoever.
(2015 notes trying to troubleshoot sleep)
I think I might have been living in a chronic state of hyperventilation
I only recently discovered that I never actually understood what hyperventilation is. The instinctive model I had in my head was something like, “you’re panicking → breathing too fast → (?) not enough oxygen?? → bad??”
But it seems like the problem is closer to “you’re exhaling too much too quickly → there’s not enough CO2 in your system → bad.”
When you inhale normally, you take in oxygen into your lungs, and it enters your bloodstream
but for this oxygen to go from your blood to your cells, there’s a “trade” process. Oxygen is traded for CO2.
When you exhale too much too quickly, your blood might be full of oxygen, but that oxygen doesn’t make it into your cells- because there’s not enough CO2!
Excessive breathing reduces the level of carbon dioxide in your cells, and your cells eventually have little or no carbon dioxide molecules left to trade for the available oxygen (O2) molecules. If your cells have nothing to trade, then they can’t do business in the metabolic marketplace. The lower your cellular CO2 gets, the less oxygen you are able to purchase. Your blood may be bright scarlet because of all the oxygen bound to your red blood cells, but you will be unable to absorb that oxygen because your cells have no CO2 left to exchange for it.
– Is Holding Your Breath Good for You? by Lyam Thomas Christopher [2016]
This lack of CO2 produces the harrowing experience of hyperventilation. When asthma sufferers get excited, for example, they tend to hyperventilate, and that causes them to exhale too much CO2. A body with less CO2 is less capable of benefiting from oxygen. Therefore, they become more anxious and begin to breathe even more because they “can’t seem to get enough air!” — which, in turn, causes them to lose even more crucial CO2 and then breathe even more. By that point, they begin to develop dizziness and cramps from lack of oxygen in their cells, and they may even pass out.
The reason that “breathe into a paper bag” works as a remedy for hyperventilation symptoms is that you’re recycling the CO2.
It seems to me like you can also achieve this by holding your breath for a few seconds between inhales and exhales.
(This also helps me make sense of a slightly scary experience I had the first time I went scuba diving. I was trying to consciously breathe as deeply as I could, but somehow I still felt chronically out of breath. On retrospect, I suspect that I was hyperventilating. And that holding my breath between inhales and exhales might’ve helped.)
“Box breathing” has calmed me down tremendously in a way that “regular deep breaths” never did. The “secret” seems to be in the holds between breaths.
I think breathwork made my calves sore
I’m pretty certain breathing exercises made my calves sore. How is that possible? My hypothesis: (Hypothesis: Diaphragm → psoas → hamstrings → calves)
To be clear, I see this as a good thing. I’ve since stretched and massaged my hips, hamstrings and calves, and I feel a little bit more limber and buoyant.
I think breathwork made me more sensitive to my posture
For many years I would hear and read people say things like “it’s very important to have a strong core” but I never ~really~ appreciated what anybody meant by that
I’m starting to get it. It’s tied up with everything. Fun to experiment with the frame “you are your psoas”.
I’ve been paying more attention to posture lately- both my own and everybody else’s. I live in an estate with lots of old people, and it’s kind of sad to see how many people are chronically hunched over.
so – total noob here, but it seems plausible that… if you’re stressed/anxious → take slow shallow breaths → your psoas will get tight. which will probably lead to all manner of pains all over the body.
I’ve also been thinking about the social causes of bad posture. Standing up fully erect (yeah, yeah) feels a bit “scary” for me. I’m a very tall guy and I grew up hunching almost as a compensation for that. It feels “arrogant” to stand too tall, like I’d be imposing on people
I think breathwork has made me more sensitive to my emotions, to my physical body’s reactions to ideas
I noticed that once I’ve been doing more breathing, I’ve started becoming more sensitive to more nuanced feelings. For example, my physical body’s response to the idea of sitting down and going through my emails. I start to get this nervous, anxious buildup around my stomach that I believe is “below” my typical level of consciousness. think my week of experimenting with box breathing has allowed things to “settle” and “calm” in my body enough that I’m starting to notice these “subtler” sensations that I was not ~quite~ aware of before. was I? I can now point to it on hindsight, but I couldn’t then, not quite.
I would like to see some exploration/study into the relationship(s), if any, between smoking and/or vaping and breathwork
It would be pretty wild if people are really using smoking as a ritual to practice a clunky form of breathwork for self-soothing purposes. If true, I believe that practicing breathwork might be a simple, accessible way to help people get into a better position to subsequently quit smoking.
I think breathwork is getting me to live more “in my body” and less “in my head”
This feels good overall, in a rather subtle way that’s hard to really explain.
I will continue to update this blogpost from time to time with new learnings, findings, etc.
I really love the updates you’ve shared on breathwork. It’s made me consider trying a similar experiment with the box breathing, since I also struggle a bit with anxiety and have trouble sleeping. Keep us posted on how your thinking evolves on this topic!
Glad to hear it, Daniel! Would love to hear how it works out for you. ☺️