I can't test your app, since I don't have an iPhone, but I'm hoping you could answer a vaguely related question for me.
One of my COVID readings was Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art, by James Nestor. Its author says, "humans have lost the ability to breathe correctly". Like your app, it proposes a lot of breathing exercises. It explains their benefits in terms of increasing CO2 tolerance, and believes that we've all got too much O2 in our systems.
That smells like horse puckey to me, but I've been unable to find an informed review either way. I'm sure that slow, deep breathing as a focus for meditation is a very good thing, and I'm sure that your particular app is well founded. But I'm curious to know if you've read that particular book, and what your opinions are.
There is a feedback loop that characterizes the stress/anxiety response, where people breathe faster, which in turn increases the stress response, causing even faster breathing. People with chronic anxiety also develop decreased CO2 tolerance over time[1] from this rapid breathing, perpetuating the chronic rapid breath.
Breath exercises that increase CO2 tolerance like Buteyko breathing allow one to interrupt this process. It's not clear to me exactly what the increased CO2 is doing, if anything, but it's clear that this works to escape this chronic stress state, which is really unhealthy.
I recently came across this by accident and your explanation jives.
I noticed I would get fairly fatigued, and have to take a nap around 11am every morning, and eventually found that it was basically every 4-5 hours, even mid-day too. I would take a 10-20m power nap and usually wake up feeling really good, I would even hit REM in that time.
Then a few months ago, I noticed when I was having this feeling I was usually ruminating about something, and it was something like grappling or repressed anger, AND what this did was cause very shallow breathing and "breath holding" patterns. And I've been doing a lot of work around Gabor Mate, MD's work lately and processing trauma responses so I was able to identify this and feel the feelings in a more present way, and in doing so, start very intentional deep, slow breath and exhales.
Compared to my shallow breathing and holding, my breaths became like 3-4x longer. And... to my surprise, the fatigue would pass in about 5minutes or so and I would not need a nap, and get my brain back to an "alert" state, as opposed to that "foggy" state.
I have been doing this for months now, and it keeps working. And now, this was really blurry because sometimes I would be genuinely tired from sleep debt from pulling a late night, and it was a similar feeling. So when I get a solid nights sleep for multiple nights in a row, then the breathing works to keep me alert, and helps me get more in touch with my emotions and subconscious thoughts rise up and become concious. I can detect the shallow breathing/breath holding fairly well now, but not always, and it is still a work in progress to make these breaths the default. The breathing does help me move through life much better now, and I walk slower, and not so rushed, and am more at peace with doing things in the present.
This actually wouldn't really be possible though if it weren't for a discovery that I breathed through my mouth my whole life (40 years) recently too. I learned about the "nasal cycle" and in combination with a deviated septum I have, my nose would plug up every now and then with no rhyme or reason, I thought it was diet for a long time but eventually learned about the "nasal cycle" where the turbinates in our noses swap the swelling to change the airflow every 4-6 hours or so. And when it swapped to my non-blocked septum side, my airflow would stop and I would be forced to breathe through my mouth. What this meant is that I could never develop a habit of nasal breathing my entire life. I started using Afrin about 5 months ago, and then stopped because it says not to use it continuously and you get a rebound when you stop using it. But then I found a Ear Nose Throat doctor/surgeon and presented my hypothesis to him and he confirmed that the nasal cycle + deviated septum hypothesis was correct! And he suggested I use Afrin plus a nasal steroid (Sensimist) together and that will reduce the rebound effect and that enabled me to use Afrin long term to stop the natural swelling of the turbinates in my nose. And, so I've been using Afrin for 3 months now and can breath so good through my nose now, and it is so sweet, and so precious, I can't imagine going back to mouth breathing ever again. I do have increased sensitivity to cold with the Afrin and my nose drips like a faucet. Or maybe that was because I never breathed through my nose in the cold to begin with? Regardless, I need to bring tissues with me in cold weather wherever I go.
And that leads to the fact that now when I noticed the breathing pausing, I can take big deep breaths through my nose and it feels so good, and calming, I can break out of the trauma/anxiety cycle and self-regulate with breathing.
I think the breathing cycle issue is mostly a trauma response from a young age and then it turns into a learned habit. This is the result of a caretaker not being there for me/us to help us self-regulate at a young age. The Wisdom of Trauma film and In the Realm of the Hungry Ghosts book by Gabor Mate, MD. really was trans-formative in my understanding of all this and success here, combined with other things as I mentioned above.
Sleep debt is also super duper real, and from what I learned in The Promise of Sleep by William Dement, MD. is that if I miss 2 hours of sleep one night, it can take 4 nights to actually catch up on that, like 30 minutes extra a night. I can't pay it back in 1 night, and that I still need to take naps. If we don't have sleep we will be in a chronic stress state forever.
I also was recently diagnosed with sleep apnea, after going to the doctor for fatigue and mentioning how frequent and predictable my naps were, I thought I had narcolepsy. They had to do a sleep apnea test first for insurance reasons before narcolepsy testing could be approved. This was when I was still mouth breathing, and I was waking up like 10 times a night from chronic back pain, trying to find that perfect position, so never really slept more than an hour without waking. I was fatigued. So Sleep Apnea came back positive and one of the explanations for the waking up, (had to pee a lot too), was that when the airway closes the body releases adrenaline to wake up or do something with the airway, the adrenaline increases urine production, and so I was also waking up because of having to pee, not enough air, or back pain.
I finally got rid of all the back and neck pain (of 20 years) using Pain Reprocessing Therapy (Gordon) and Compassion-based trauma therapy (Compassionate Inquiry (Mate) + Internal Family Systems (Schwartz) and started sleeping through the night, without CPAP, and then I tried CPAP for a month and was still tired and fatigued during the day. So I stopped using CPAP and only later realized that I may have been getting enough oxygen at night but wasn't during the day.
This is all one giant hurried mess of a story, but I wasn't going to post anything and figured "perfect is the enemy of good" and that this could help some people connect some dots in their lives so I just blotted it all out here.
WOW this post resonates with me on so many levels. Thank you so much for writing it out!
-I have the exact same issue, I feel overwhelming fatigue that lifts with a 10 minute nap, and need to do it many times per day. I work from home, and can't really work in person because without a nap I just crash, despite getting a good nights sleep
-My girlfriend pointed out that I normally breath unusually fast and shallow, about twice as fast as her
-I've had some very traumatic experiences in the last few years that I still haven't dealt with fully. Around the time of these experiences I couldn't sleep well because I had to constantly get up to urinate, and also at the same time felt an "air hunger" where I felt no amount of breathing was enough
Could you recommend something specific to start working on with these things? I actually just started reading the Mate book "The Myth of Normal" but haven't gotten very far in it yet.
It seems like there are quite a few people here discovering these things, I wish we could form a discussion group or something.
My doctor didn’t think that it would be useful to test but I insisted, lack of sleep was making me desperate. I took at least three naps a day just to be able to function.
The results were surprising even to me, AHI of 23.
Well, first thing is, can you breath through your nose? Do you have that habit down? Fixing this is really important, for me at least. If a person can't breath through their nose, I suggest trying Afrin. This was such a huge lightbulb moment for me, and was my "AHA" moment. I really didn't know that the normal human condition is to nasal breathe. My mom has the same condition and I was raised by her so I didn't realize it and she didn't either to even notice it in me. It works instantly, within 10 minutes, and my world was opened up! And it still took me months to form the habit of nasal breathing, because I could never trust it enough when it worked (due to the nasal cycle). I definitely do Afrin just before bedtime too, every 12 hours or so. And I am getting surgery for the deviated septum too in February.
Second thing, do you have chronic pain? That will keep the body in a stress response. Chronic pain is actually easier to get rid of than I thought, and I tried a lot of things for 20 years. The new research at University of Colorado Boulder, using functional MRI scans in 2020 proves that much chronic pain can be eliminated in a short period with a very specific technique called Pain Reprocessing Therapy (PRT), which is a compassion-based therapy. This is a really, really hard thing to believe, and one doesn't have to believe it fully, they just have to believe it enough to be curious and learn more. And if one is curious, I recommend listening to a 15 episode mini-series podcast called Tell Me About Your Pain by Alon Gordon (Pain Pyschologist) and Alon Ziv (Neuroscientist), then after that listen to the audio book (not ebook) by the same people called "The Way Out" (2022). Then there are 6 specific meditations by Alan Gordon on an app called Curable that I used to eliminate my chronic neck and back pain, I can dig up the link to them if you like. This same technique is what I use to react to my shallow breathing and fatigue with deeper breathing. This got me sleeping through the night.
Third, the trauma therapy (it isn't if we have trauma, it is how much), I recommend starting with the film The Wisdom of Trauma. And if that is interesting then reading In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts. Myth of Normal seems like a great book too, I haven't read it yet though but it is on my list. I did start reading Gabor's AD(H)D book Scattered Minds a while back, way before this breathing breakthrough surfaced and need to finish it, but to sum up one thing I learned I have ADD-Like symptoms and this whole shallow breathing thing I have noticed is a large part of it. Once I start conscious breathing, by ADD-like stuff reduces. I've been more motivated to actually exercise and not fall asleep doing it, and I have been working on cold-exposure therapy (What Doesn't Kill Us by Mark Carney, investigative journalist who tried to debunk Wim Hoff, ended up drinking the Koolaid, and explains why). The cold-exposure increases the chemical called norepinephrine, which is one of the chemicals that Adderall increases (along with Dopamine). There is a quote from the film "My Octopus Teacher" (fantastic film) where he says "the cold really upgrades the brain" and references him diving into the ocean without a wetsuit almost every day for a year making friends with an octopus. I really like that quote. The cold does help me think when I do it, and I am still easing into it, and getting my brain back.
All in all, I feel at a really new phase of my life, and that includes this thing called "Hope". I no longer think my fatigue is caused by my diet, and in fact I know it isn't.
I'm happy to chat about this with you or anyone else. I'm also open to saying "hi" on a real-time communication (RTC) chat here https://cal.com/ElijahLynn.
> If a person can't breath through their nose, I suggest trying Afrin.
Be careful of the "rebound" effect with nasal sprays. Years ago I was "hooked" on Afrin. Not in a getting high sense but in the sense that I started to constantly need it in order to breath out of my nose, even after my cold went away. It was a terrible feeling and took weeks to wean off.
With a bad cold and miserable congestion, nasal spray like Afrin is like a miracle. I still use it in those instances but only for 2-3 days max and very sparingly.
If you really can't breath out of your nose well see a doctor.
This is very true! And my doctor/surgeon said that if you use a steroid like Sensimist with the Afrin then the rebound effect isn't as severe, which appears to be someone true so far. I do a spray of Afrin, then 10 minutes later do 2 sprays of sensimist. It isn't ideal and I am switching to surgery option now that I have tested it out for a few months now and would like to make it permanent!
i see you follow gabor mate and i see lot of talk about trauma and understand people's need for processing it and so on. ptsd is real, not denying that. having said that, in the past years i have actually been moving in the other direction, that sometimes trauma narratives tend to keep people stuck in the past. it solidifies certain types of trauma, makes it part of a person's identity and hampers recovery for some. one trouble is trauma is associated with lot of meaning and we tend to stick to things that are meaningful. i understand that too much thinking in this direction isnt correct and the truth lies somewhere in between. just saw that you have been aligning too much towards one direction so couldnt help but mirror that.
I worked with a trauma therapist and this was exactly what we worked on. The way out of trauma is to find out / realize that you’ve worked your way out of trauma. That the danger zone is gone.
I’m constantly blown away by the nuggets of wisdom I find on this website! Thanks for such a breath of knowledge, no pun intended. Going down a rabbit hole of chronic pain. Thank you
Yes, I forgot to mention but I have surgery coming up in February so hopefully I want need my Afrin dependency anymore! I wasn't sure about surgery at first, and was just super duper happy I could breath through my nose, after 40 years of not even knowing that it wasn't normal to breath only through my mouth. But after a few months of this precious nose breathing, and my mouth not drying out at night anymore which caused me to want to drink water at night, and would contribute to waking up to pee, getting shitty sleep, and putting me in chronic stress from sleep deprivation, I now am ready to take the next step and get surgery to fix the deviated septum and have my turbinates function as they were intended to again!
Good luck with the surgery! I'm looking at doing it next year myself. Anecdotally, everyone who I ran into locally who'd had his said the same thing: they wish they'd done it sooner—ergo, it sounds like a winner. Again, thanks for sharing your wisdom in your original post. All the best!
If you have poor nasal breathing you should consider EASE https://drkaseyli.org/ease . People in your situation often have narrow jaws which can result in a narrow nasal aperture and poor airflow
I'd never come across this, but it looks promising. I broke my jaw in the past, so I imagine I'm even more at risk of having jaw related breathing issues. Thanks for sharing!
As a permanent snorer and nose cold sufferer several tips in that book worked wonders for me. I already had a good set of lungs and low breathing rhythm thanks to swimming, but a few weeks of sleeping with my mouth taped shut and attention to my jaw posture solved quite some issues. (N=1 YMMV etc)
I read the book a week ago, said, why not. Instant improvement. Before, I'd have to wake up to go to the bathroom every night for the past 10 years, and when I woke up I'd have this eye pain every day leading to these giant eye bags. On top of those, if I didn't get that last sleep cycle in, I'd have to take a nap to get rid of this weird headache which made the time in the morning before nap seem pointless. In the book he mentioned how face skin can improve, and less bathroom in the middle of the night because apparently the body releases something to tell the body to hold water because we're sleeping. Mouth breating at night didn't cause this to happen.
I did the mouth tape and instantly, first night and every night in the past week, eye pain is gone, I don't have get up to use the bathroom, and the amount of consistent energy is absurd compared to before.
Seriously, I want to shout it out to everyone to tape their mouths at night.
I think I would staying awake at least the first nights just by the thought that I have my mouth shut, and "what if I cannot breath and I die", or "this is so uncomfortable" etc etc. How did you manage that?
Yeah, the first two nights I woke up decently alert a couple times which I took to be my body telling me that something might be wrong and I should check it out.
I never felt a sense of uncomfortableness, it felt almost comfortable for me as if the tape was making me feel more secure, maybe? Similarly I didn't have the worry about not being able to breathe and not know about it. In both those cases, don't feel weird about wearing some around when waking and you can get used to it.
The other mindset to have is remember that our bodies are really incredible at things after millions of years of evolution. Nose breathing especially is something we're able to do. That acknowledgement and trust can go a long way mentally.
You can actually cut a little slit in the mouth tape, so that you won't panic. Breathing a straw sized amount of air through the mouth if you need to, will prevent suffocation anxiety, but also limit your mouth breathing enough that your nose does most of the work.
I can see how it can cause some anxiety. I suppose I was lucky that it didn't for me. The first two nights I work up in the middle a couple times, decently alert, and could tell my body was trying to say something might be wrong. I was able to fall asleep quickly though, which also was something I wasn't able to do before.
If you might have that anxiety, I'd say try putting tape on your mouth during the day at times to get used to it, and you might find you'll forget about it and that can ease the worry. It might be difficult, but we all can breathe only through our noses, even if that requires some practice and reassurance.
It did cause some anxiety for me. But I use a soft tape that easily comes loose with just the back of my hand or a big jaw movement.
I especially enjoy how the nasal cycle with nose breathing just seems to physically “halve” colds. Even with a cold with nose breathing one nostril just opens up at night in order to let me breathe.
What kind of tape do you use? I've just started trying this and best I have found so far in my local grocery store is Nexcare Absolute Waterproof tape. It stays on all night, but I wondered if there was something a bit easier to remove.
One great thing with increasing co2 resistance is I can hold my breath for ~5 minutes and thus freedive / snorkel deep and stay long under water. But other than that I'm not sure, also curious about if it has any more health related benefits.
For practicing breath holding, "co2 tables" is the exercise to go for, btw. I find it very relaxing in a sort of meditative "ignore the burning pain" sense, but not sure I'd recommend it vs the app in the OP hehe.
My understanding from the book was that CO2 is an essential part of the mechanism that transfers oxygen to your muscles. If you breathe too much you have too little CO2, your muscles can't get enough oxygen and they don't work efficiently. I've no idea if this is true, but since I read the book I breathe less when exercising and it seems to help. Edited to add: I'd forgotten, when I first started breathing less during exercise it made a huge difference, like coming down from altitude. I recommend it.
One of my COVID readings was Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art, by James Nestor. Its author says, "humans have lost the ability to breathe correctly". Like your app, it proposes a lot of breathing exercises. It explains their benefits in terms of increasing CO2 tolerance, and believes that we've all got too much O2 in our systems.
That smells like horse puckey to me, but I've been unable to find an informed review either way. I'm sure that slow, deep breathing as a focus for meditation is a very good thing, and I'm sure that your particular app is well founded. But I'm curious to know if you've read that particular book, and what your opinions are.
Thanks!