Lower energy state always wins unless chasing energy source.
As a young impressionable, I set out to understand and overcome performance anxiety as someone who suffered from it. After some reading, one of my conclusions was that I should do the most stressful thing possible to understand stress better and develop physical tolerance to stress. This culminated in me signing up for a series of Muay Thai interclub fights because getting punched (or kicked) in the head while pushing your heart rate to ~200bpm is definitely up there for “stressful circumstances”.
Turns out breathing really helps in that situation too beyond just taking in more oxygen - relaxation is critical for both technical execution and strategic thinking.
Slow breathing also really helps with freediving - another hobby of mine that I dabble with that happens to involve going deep (no pun intended) on conscious relaxation.
But sure, it’s just you taking in oxygen to moderate your heart rate. Here are some papers I surfaced for you and others who are interested
[0] https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aan1466
[1] https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aai7984
[2] https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/human-neuroscience/arti...
Your brain is attached to your inner skull with candyfloss like tendrils. They do not repair. Software engineering, even prompting, with a concussion or CTE is impossible.
Maybe some do, but I've never needed it. Often I actually find public speaking easier than small groups. In a small group my brain is trying to "model" what each person is thinking about my talk, as the groups get larger that becomes impossible and I tend to relax and let go. I also find the energy in a larger setting is a useful feedback mechanism. I might toss a small joke out and see if the audience is engaged, or I will ask a question and get a show of hands. The more I engage the calmer I feel and the more enjoyable the experience is for me and my audience.
Exercise increases heart rate. The more we exercise, the more the heart gets used to that adrenergic stimulation. This decreases the number of receptors to sense adrenaline in the heart, so whenever adrenaline rises again into the system, like in public speaking, we can handle it much better.
Exercise mitigates public-speaking anxiety. Particularly prolonged cardio.
But what a godsend propranolol has been for a contentious work situation causing extreme anxiety.
Wonderful to take ahead of a scheduled meeting that could have otherwise been an hour of physical panic that no rational thought (this will feel unimportant in a week, it's just job, etc etc) could quell.
Eventually, your body learns to adapt and understand that this thing you dreaded isn't so bad after all
using phones and laptops all day stuns your brain into shallow breathing all day.when i was kid i remember my dad taking naps in the afternoon and his belly moving up and down as he slept peacefully. i dont think anyone does that anymore.
i have a pet theory that this is what is driving high gastro cancers in young ppl.
> 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.
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 ^_^
I can identify with this “adrenaline junkie” definition, with qualifications. It’s probably different for everyone, but for me it’s more about “playing the edge”. I’ve crashed badly in the past going over that edge, but my-oh-my is it beautiful to approach, and get as close as you can, and look into the abyss for a moment. When the fear becomes too much, you back off. Over time (and survivorship bias!) you grow to have an immense respect for that edge.
Now, when I (rarely) go past the edge, I’m not flying past it to my death, my approach was appropriately calculated to produce a recoverable step-down or at worst a minor side-fall. I haven’t gone over the handlebars in years.
EDIT: People are a complex blends of emotions and motivations, so you're certainly right that can be another explanation for the same observable behavior. I really liked the comment about adrenaline junkies too. My point was only that on average it's low-sensitivity people who engage in those sorts of activities. Scaredy cats like myself stay home and read a good book.
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.
... 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.
“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.
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.
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.
People don’t like anxious people so it is part of charisma development like you do training for spiritual leadership or relational healing. Less anxiety means more tolerance for risk, ambiguity, etc. it is not “put it all on 7“
Additionally, there's a practice called "walking meditation" [0] that can also be useful to practice this area of skills.
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.
Remember to blink!
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.
Cant do this for everything but examples are supermarket lists, home viewing (know your price, questions, decision criteria)
Out of the emotions, the feeling urging us to avoid negative consequences seems pretty useful haha
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.
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.
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.
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.
I wonder if people practicing sports / exercise that puts you in a cyclic breathing cycle i.e continuous effort run / cycling would have the same gain or not.
its when the tmj sorta dissolves and ur jaw/facial structure collapses as a result. now my airway is like a millimeter
mindfulness and meditation have been seeing broad adoption - with apps like headspace etc also getting good traction
There is still resistance in India to teaching this in government schools.
The idiocy of thinking calmness leading to optimal results. Usually this comes from people who never accomplished anything.
The paper is the prime example of pseudo science masquerading as science.
That alone should make us skeptical of simplistic claims that calmer physiological states are inherently "more optimal" for complex cognition.
Even outside wartime great accomplishments come through obsession though, but I would say that the people who “make it” in academia are the ones who are kinda sanguine about the family business as opposed to the driven outsiders.