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UniverseHacker 16 hours ago

I never knew that “acute intermittent hypoxia” was a known treatment for depression, but I’ve found both freediving and Wim Hof breathing to be effective at treating my depression- however never the two at the same time as that is extremely dangerous.

airstrike 15 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Completely anecdotal but I've found Ujjayi Breathing from yoga to have an enormously calming effect.

Long exhales in general with a short pause at the end, before inhaling, are also incredibly useful. I try to do this as often as I need.

UniverseHacker 10 hours ago | parent [-]

Interesting… I will look into that. Part of Wim Hofs teachings include breathing with an extremely long exhale while humming which sounds related. I’ve heard of research showing that any type of breathing with longer exhales than inhales activates a parasympathetic response, calming you down.

idontwantthis 15 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I’ve found wim hof no more effective than laughing gas. Very short euphoric high then back to where I was plus a slight headache.

UniverseHacker 10 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I suspect you’re missing something important- not surprising since Wim is a really unclear teacher. The low oxygen and/or high co2 causes your body to panic and you are supposed to use that as a stimulus to gradually train conscious control of your heart rate and stress response and calm yourself down. This is where the benefit comes from, not the short term physiological panic itself, whose symptoms you are describing. In fact, those symptoms should go away entirely when you learn to calm the panic and consciously control your autonomic nervous system. This then also primes you mentally to be able to go into ice water, which is also a large stimulus to learn to calm, plus trains your brain to more easily jump into anything difficult. All of this takes months or years of consistent practice to gradually develop a relatively permanent sense of calm and internal strength among other things, and is really just a simplified form of tantric tummo meditation.

fragmede 13 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Then again, Wim Hof costs you $0 and laughing gas gets expensive.

Towaway69 11 hours ago | parent [-]

How about just laughing without the gas? Ok you have to find something to laugh about. Nowadays turning on the news does that fairly effectively.