Breathing is the first thing I will try

It’s a bit flaky, yes, but I have to give it a fair shot because reasons

Before I announced this project, I had already been hard at work on increasing my overall health and fitness investment, on building a logging habit and a big-ass spreadsheet, and… breathing exercises?

Me? Mister Citation Needed?  Breathing exercises?

Yep.  I am going to “try everything,” and breathing is first in line, because I like it, it’s a relatively easy way to tinker with physiology, and because testing it will be slow so I’d best get that ball rolling early.

Slow deep breathing

I have spent about 15 minutes a day doing slow deep breathing.

The slow deep breathing (SDB) is all about relaxation, of course: four breaths per minute.  The pace is set by the excellent Breathe app on the Apple Watch, which it does in clever and surprisingly pleasant way with a distinctive gentle tapping on the wrist.  I can breathe slow without it, but it’s more easier with the watch, and more fun.

I don’t really think slow deep breathing is important to my health, but I’m doing it anyway.

Illustration by Shayne Letain, done for me about twenty years ago for a series of radio broadcasts I did for CBC radio, tips for coping with the rat race — including breathing, of course.

Fast deep breathing

This is much weirder, and the main thing I’m actually testing. I have an article all about this on PainScience.com if you want more detail about exactly what I’m doing.

FDB is much more alien to most people than SDB (although it has been greatly popularized by Wim Hof in the last decade). FDP is kind of like taking a cold shower: you will feel different coming out of it than you did when you went in.

And then I always feel really good for a little while afterwards, up to an hour or so.

So I’ve been spending just 6 minutes per day doing fast deep breathing, usually just a minute or two at a time, because it is much harder than it sounds. The first minute can be rough, and I find it nearly impossible to go on for more than 5 minutes at a time.  I get exhausted, emotional, sleepy, bored, or just too lightheaded… something always stops me.

There is a lot of tension between the short term pain and the temporary benefits.  I always think, “I feel so good, I should really do more of that!”  But when I try to do more, my discipline falls apart quickly.

So… why breathing?

I breathe because it’s pleasant, not because I believe it “works.”  (It’s a lot like stretching in that regard.)  Maybe it is helpful, but I don’t have any confidence in that.

Maybe it’s just about the nostalgia. I have a long history with breathing exercises, dating back to my credulous and flaky youth, especially many years of doing taijiquan and qigong, and my formative experiences at Haven on Gabriola Island. Many times in my youth I had experiences with breathing — especially vigorous breathing — that seemed profound.

Of course, I also still thought I might be psychic. 🙄

But the nostalgia is real, and breathing exercises are not voodoo. We really can tinker with our physiology by breathing — not necessarily beneficially, but there's a case to be made for that, and you can definitely change your state this way. And I seem to need a change of state.

I also needed something straightforward and familiar to try while I was getting organized with my logging.

And I was also already working on a bunch of new content about the science of breathing for PainScience.com (still a work in progress, though I have published some, like this piece about slow exhalations: are they an upgrade?).

So breathing exercises became my first official self-treatment experiment.

So, any lasting benefits? LOL, no

Oh, if only it were so easy.

Thanks to my symptom logging, I can easily see that the breathing exercises have had no obvious effect on my health so far. In fact, if anything, it looks like my symptoms worsened around the time I started breathing — which is probably just a coincidence, but also isn’t impossible.

Even if breathing for several minutes per day really is good medicine, it’s probably a subtle effect, a rather modest signal to find in the cacophony of many confounding factors.  So I’m not writing it off.  I think I need to test it quite a bit more — both longer phases of an easier regimen, and shorter bursts of more intense breathing exercises.

I can’t not test this one thoroughly.  I have to give it a fair shot, even if it’s a longshot. It’s just something I have to make peace with.