i remember that article from may (linda stone from this NYT article wrote that blog post). it really made sense to me then and it does now. i used to smoke 25+ cigarettes a day and i believe it was not uncommon for me to have a heart rate of 115+bpm while sitting around doing nothing after smoking a cigarette. i also have been mostly working from home for a decade or more and i barely moved for many of those years. i started getting into yoga a while back and learned a breathing technique called ujjayi. i also started going on a lot of long walks. and since 2018 i've been playing a wind instrument again. i quit smoking some time ago as well. my breath is so much deeper and my general health - physical and mental - is so much better than it used to be. i actually just did a deep inhale recalling how things were for me and reflecting on how much better they are for me now.
i'm curious if anyone has any experience with that butyeko thing in particular...
Personally I have noticed "File explorer apnea". When I need to navigate to a file or folder very deep into the hierarchy, starting from the root. I know exactly where it is but still need stepping into the hierarchy of folders, clicking on the right folder at each step as fast as possible.
I have almost completely moved away from clicking through folder hierarchies since I learned about Everything [1]. That little program beats the pants off anything Windows has built in for search.
Thanks so much for this recommendation, I've wanted something similar to this on Windows after falling in love with Spotlight on Mac, and the built-in Windows search function is just awful.
ShareX [1] is my other "must install" app. I never would have guessed how much my branch of engineering consists of "take a screenshot and draw lines, arrows and circles on it." Being able to customize my workflow to do all of that is really great.
Also, Notepad++ [2] is one of those unseen programs that really stands out.
I use AutoHotkey only for “paste by typing” to paste passwords at a controlled typing rate into paste-disabled password fields like bank websites.
ProcessExplorer is indispensable for me as well.
I use Sublime a lot for the multi cursor support (just highlight a repeating element and press Ctrl-D … there are more advanced controls but that covers 80% of what you need.
Meld is my favorite cross platform diff tool. I use it for git merge conflicts, but also just for so many general purposes tasks in life.
010 editor is amazing for editing very very large documents/files. Only app I know that can gracefully work with multi GB text files.
AgentRansack / FileLocator Pro I paid for a technicians license I loved it so much. Not sure if Everything is a complete standin, it might be.
* Bvckup for replicating data across different drives, not free but one of the best designed Windows tools and very worth the price https://bvckup2.com/
This one's part of windows, but in case you're not aware of win+v for clipboard history I'd probably put that at number one. (There are also some third-party alternatives with more options).
Aside from that:
PowerToys (I mostly use fancy zones and file locksmith, others are useful too).
Anything for getting recursive folder statistics (I use TreeSize, WinDirStat is also popular).
ClickMonitorDDC if you need to change on-board monitor settings a lot or want to automate it. Sadly seems to have been abandoned.
I use vscode for anything plaintext related (text editing, file/folder diffs, git history). It works decently as a terminal too.
WSL
A nice CAS calculator. wxMaxima is the closest I've found to what I want.
It has other niceties, like set everything greyscale or red (darkroom mode), exclude some monitors and other stuff. For me it is a must-have.
Together with Autohotkey and StrokeIt. StrokeIt lets me navigate back and forth with left/right mouse gesture (right mouse button), close tab/window (depending on application category) by gesturing up, minimize by gesturing down. I couldn't live without it.
I don't know about your file explorer, but doesn't it have a way to just input the path, maybe even with autocomplete? The Finder has ⌘⌥G, for example. Please ignore my comment if you are enjoying this kind of navigation, though!
I wonder if just tagging everything hierarchically would be a superior approach to this. Sometimes feel like I'm wasting my time doing so much "traversing"...
While not a perfect solution, I use Everything by voidtools - it’s search app that’s damn nice. I can just enter modellingreport *.xls and get to where I need to.
> Dr. Porges hypothesizes that the larger your screen, the less mentally taxing it can be. “As you narrow the visual field, you’re increasing the demand on your nervous system to exclude everything outside of it,” he said.
Scientific justification for my ultrawide. Fantastic!
Can't really read the article, but if they mean holding breath while doing things at the computer, I do this. Actually, I do this when I'm concentrating on something, doesn't have to necessarily be at a computer. I've been working on purposeful breathing lately to see if that helps.
Good advice in here. Once the body enters its so-called "defense cascade" -- including the flight or fight response -- then it's going to take 17-21 minutes to return to stasis.
It's not in the article. That comes from a research paper that I can't find easily at the moment. Here's a famous article that discusses the animal model and footnotes a study showing 20 minutes in rats, too. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4495877/
If you want to explore this in yourself consider getting a continuous logging SpO2 sensor. Wellue makes good ones, I had good luck using an O2Ring to understand my own obstructive sleep apnea. It logs your blood oxygen saturation every couple of seconds and is easy to export data from.
Note fast sampling is important. Most SpO2 sensors are designed to give a reading once every 30 seconds or so, at the best. They tend to average the sample taken over that time. You want to catch the momentary dips between breaths. (For instance I don't think the Apple Watch blood oxygen sensor can do this.)
Maybe I'm wrong (not a doctor), but I believe it is very unlikely that one off events of apnea lower your saturation to a level of clinical relevance to need 2s frequency; saturation drops only after a continued chain of such events or some sort of constant obstruction (COPD, asthma exacerbation, etc).
Also, though sample of n = 1, training for freediving my breath holding PR is 3m31s, and my SpO2 barely went down. The CO2 reflex kicks in before O2 goes significantly low.
In my experience with the O2ring missing a breath or three isn't really noticeable. but I was experiencing prolonged periods of obstructive sleep apnea and it was very visible on the SpO2 graph, I could see every (infrequent) breath.
Not clear from the article how serious "screen apnea" might be; the health threat it identifies is just the stress of it, not oxygen deprivation.
You're correct re: Apple Watch O2 sensor: it takes 15 seconds to generate a result AFTER you tap the icon. No continuous sensing. True, you can repeat the sequence ad infinitum but not only does that get old fast, but it also yields simply a graph of results reported every 15 seconds with inadvertent movement artifact hardwired in as opposed to a continuous trace.
I've noticed lately that I have a lot of jaw tension which is linked to stress and I think information overload which is related to this article. Has anyone else had this? What has worked?
Yes, habitual clenching is pretty common from what I can tell. It leads to gum recession and other dental issues, as well as headaches.
I have made progress on it by habitually doing "self-scans" for where I'm holding tension in my body. Jaws and shoulders are common areas. I then focus on clearing my mind and relaxing the part in question. It's worked well for me.
> Screen apnea is a manifestation of our body’s stress response, said Stephen Porges, a professor of psychiatry at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who specializes in the autonomic nervous system.
Is it really though? I have noticed that I do this a lot -- all the time when I am in a relaxed state. For example, I've observed this when I'm driving, reading, watching a movie, thinking, etc. Wouldn't my body signal if I wasn't getting enough oxygen?
I believe it’s less related to stress and more related to a predatory response.
Halting breathing is a great way to avoid movement when intently focusing on prey (look at cats who do the same thing, although they do have to wobble their heads a little to develop a 3d distance)
I know a lot of people want to dismiss our predatory past but it’s there, and I’m sure reading (especially emails, comments etc) specifically looking for information to “prey” on triggers that same response.
Surprisingly, the body does not signal a low-oxygen state, and the urge to breathe is stimulated by a rising carbon dioxide level. This works fine for healthy individuals in the environment we have evolved to live in, but it makes hypoxia an insidious killer in an environment where the oxygen partial pressure is substantially less than it normally is, as the victim does not notice that anything is amiss.
I tend to fall to this side. If you have anxiety while reading emails, you might also have anxiety while not reading emails. If your anxiety causes breathless-ness, you should focus on treating anxiety.
Really smacks of the you should be drink x amount of water per day, when in reality you should drink water when you're not thirsty or if you have a craving.
I would challenge this as well. I grew up swimming competitively. Regularly holding my breath feels maybe oddly comforting. But maybe that’s somehow bad for me?
I was scubadiving when I was young, and so trained myself to hold my breath for long periods of time underwater (multiple minutes). In parallel, I was taking improv classes and had a lot of breathing exercises to focus and relax.
As a result today, every breath I take is unconsciously a deep and long breath, so much that the noise of the air going through my nose sometimes bothers my wife, but also when I'm falling asleep, I sometimes unconsciously hold my breath for up to one minute and it relaxes me and helps me falling asleep... I also suffer from sleep apnea and have had a CPAP for a few months now, but that at least isn't linked to any of this.
What I guess I mean is that as far as I know, I breath healthily, don't suffer from anxiety (not more than any other dude at least), and unconscious apneas are for me a way to relax.
> I doubt you would feel good if your brain wasn’t getting enough oxygen.
Without getting into _too much detail_, I have decent amounts of experience telling me that, for a lot of people, it would in fact feel rather good. Not to me, but I also dislike (in a sensory way, not moral) alcohol and many other things that make the brain feel a bit "fuzzy," which I think might be the more uncommon thing, actually.
I help run a Myofunctional Therapy business (Happy Myo in NYC) with my mother and she's a huge fan of humming as a tool. Did you come up with this on your own? Good intuition! I'm glad to see more and more focus on breathing in the media lately.
Yeah, mostly just a thing I've been doing since I was a kid, but I've been paying a lot of attention to breathing lately (blood pressure...) and I get notably less negatives sitting at a computer if I'm humming along to music.
If I just sit here silently, I often notice cold hands/feet and a blood pressure spike. Often associated with intermittent sighs or irregular breathing.
Humming just forces me to breathe. I can't keep humming if I don't have air, and it's a good regulator to keep me breathing without having to really think about it.
Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art is bordeline quackery and it's interesting the extent to which it has wormed its way into every discussion. Nestor does not exercise enough skepticism and overlooks the placebo effect completely in reporting out that breathing deeply will essentially solve every problem in your life. As a clinician, I think pretty weak, and also overlooks that poor breathing or mouth breathing is a symptom of other underlying issues not the issue itself. Go exercise for 60 minutes a day and you'll breath just fine.
When I was diagnosed with sleep apnea, it wasn't the breaths per hour that was the concern, it wasn't waking up during the night, it was my blood oxygen would dip to the 60s.
So the researcher measured heart rate, breathing rate and not blood oxygen? Or maybe they did, and the headline of, "People hold their breath sometimes, blood oxygen remains in normal ranges", doesn't inspire me to learn how to breath.
I agree that Nestor's book should not be considered canonical but this sentiment goes way too far in the opposite direction. I have seen enormous improvements in my overall wellbeing since I started focusing on my breathing about four years ago. Prior to that I have both been a nationally ranked competitive cyclist and avid pickup basketball player so, in other words, quite fit. Of course my personal experience is inherently unscientific but it is also true. There are many, many positive effects that I have experienced that are directly related to my focus on the breath, but of course there have been other factors in my life too. I agree that just focusing on the breath alone cannot fix every problem (and wish some of the more zealous evangelists would dial back some of their claims) but I am quite certain that just exercising is not sufficient for many people. Conscious focus on the breath is important.
FWIW slowing your breath can also indicate positive metabolism change and is a core feature of numerous meditative traditions. Now what if we throw in laughing at cat videos while infinite-scrolling causing you to regress to active breathing. Laughing good. Breathing good. Slow breathing also good. Humans are complex.
I've noticed this.
Was pretty surprised.
While awake can you really forget to breath? I thought it was impossible, but guess if the brain is really focused on something, can happen.
In med school I was surprised at how long it takes for your oxygen binding to drop. Hemoglobin can hang onto oxygen really well, even with a low partial pressure of oxygen in the lungs.
Doctors aren't always right, of course, but my respiratory professors said that the desire to breathe is largely based on mechanical sensing with a lesser effect based on O2 and CO2 in the blood.
If you lower co2 levels and then use oxygen, your co2-triggered urge to breathe will be delayed. Sometimes it’ll be delayed until you’re hypoxic, at which point you could pass out.
This happens due to hyperventilation in free diving (and other reasons, though this is the most common). You exhale more co2 than you would while breathing normally, then dive deeper or longer than you should because your blood isn’t the correct chemistry to trigger an urge to breathe when it should.
We have receptors that are specific for both. I don't know of studies that compare the relative effects of each, but for example, the carotid bodies are more specific for the partial pressure of oxygen in the blood than CO2
If you’re very focused but also relaxed, I think the urge to breathe can be delayed a lot longer than most people realize. When free diving, a major component of extending your dives is not dramatically improving your oxygen capacity but learning to relax and utilize oxygen better. Concentration and relaxation go an impressive distance in improving breath holds.
So I don’t think people forget to breathe, but it could be that we substantially delay breathing sometimes and it seems out of the ordinary, longer than someone normally might, and therefor strange. But maybe it’s not? I’m not sure.
I don't think you can go all the way to suffocating from it. Even people with severe sleep apnea in very deep sleep will still be roused awake by their brains when their oxygen levels get very low.
All these articles read a bit like "well, just become the kind of person who doesn't need to be stressed by becoming so valuable to corporates that they will leave you in peace". Fuck all those beta's, become a look-like alpha (you can be a gamma yourself) and rest in peace, so to speak.
Maintaining awareness of breath throughout the day is not an easy task but when you try to bring awareness every now and then it definitely helps you to be in the moment and not get carried away with thoughts. Helps to reduce stress and anxiousness too. Many meditative practices can help bring this like Vipassana or Samyama
When doing some engrossing reading or coding I tend to start to get anxiety sometimes, probably related to not breathing while concentrating. This sometimes cascades into a full blown panic episode, sometimes it doesn't.
Putting a name to it helps me identify the issue in a better way.
I have taken up Brazilian jiu-jitsu and discovered I stop breathing when concentrating. That's somewhat ... counterproductive when you have a 150lb person on top of you and are trying to focus on a new move for sweeping them.
Possible for Apple to readily roll up the data for Watch and iOS users, but what’s the product angle? Take a break to meditate / breathe / do yoga is just another recommendation to use another app?
My partner stops breathing while deep into computer use. I just nudge them and they start breathing again. The watch could just vibrate and I'm sure it would help.
I have a hard time not putting this into the lineup of anti-technology moral panic aided by pseudoscience intent on gobbling up a new field.
Do we all remember how "internet addiction" was, at first, a joke in a newsgroup until a psychiatrist stumbled upon it and thought they could make a name for themselves by transferring - badly - existing elements of addiction discourses on internet use? And we're still suffering from their success, which, in psych terms, means that the found enough people they could convince that, yes, really, what they were doing were "sick" (usually because that was a good way to appease their families)[1]? And usually because "healthy use of time", in puritan-capitalist societies, is always magically time spent productively to make money or support the family, God forbid (literally) that it was recreational?
This smells somewhat related, in the line of "but really, it's stressing you. You don't realize, but it is. Trust me. The bill is in the mail."
Yeah I find it hard to take articles like this seriously. "Be cautious of intensely focusing on something for long, uninterrupted periods. Reduce distractions from notifications where possible. Stand up and take a walk every once in a while."
like this is just generic health advice with a catchy name and trendy, vague connotations with tech overuse.
It's 2023. We're way past doubting the existence of internet addiction, and other such negative effects of technology on our health and healthy habbits. Might as well doubt thermodynamics.
The reaction you have is in the long tradition of the naive "it's in the brain and concerns wetware, not material stuff we can measure, so it can't exist". Might as well argue that trauma doesn't exist, or conditional depression doesn't. Or any kind of mental pathology not seen as brain matter damage in a scan.
Not to mention that in this case, what they describe, unlike something more abstract like addiction, wwould be easy to objectively measure with people wired to some lab equipment too.
Yeah i read some of these articles and it sounds exactly like what 5G conspiracy shit or crystal crazies sound like, except with a veneer of respectability because of "tech"
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/21/well/live/screen-apnea-br...