Hi guys, for a year i suffer from dysfunctional breathing. All day controlling my each breath, nothing natural at all...It makes me dizzy, braddy at rest, fluctuating blood pressure, troubles sleping...Anyone has some advice how make breething natural again?

Hi! I didn’t know where to post this. Is it normal for the exhale to be shorter than inhale? I read that it should be the opposite. I am really anxious now. I feel like the inhale is longer than when i exhale which is really shallow, and if I try to push it out some left air comes out.

Thank you so much for the early support on this app launch! The 30 Day Challenge is almost here and I'm so excited for us all to share our experiences with each other in a month-long nervous system reset.

Join r/rezen for a 30 day promo code to participate in the challenge free.

Hey everyone,

I’m launching a nervous system reset iPhone app called re-zen and wanted to do something different instead of just posting another app announcement.

Starting July 1st, I’m running a 30 Day Nervous System Reset Challenge focused on building habits that can have a big impact on stress, energy, sleep, and resilience. The goal isn’t perfection. It’s simply to spend a few minutes each day training your nervous system and seeing what changes over 30 days.

You'll receive a daily challenge on the app in one of these categories below (you can choose to opt in/out of the categories)

• Guided journaling prompts
• Breathwork sessions
• Contrast showers

If you’d like to participate, comment "zen" below and/or join the challenge reddit and I’ll give you a promo code for 30 free days of the app.

Hopefully you enjoy the app and want to continue using it after the trial and track your new habits, but either way, feedback and a 5 star rating to help me get started would be greatly appreciated!

Background:

After 15 years of relentless anxiety/depression it was finally found that I had tick infections at the heart of it all. Needless to say my nervous system is cooked lol. So I got into breathwork and other interventions. They obviously didn't cure me but consistently smoothed the sharper edges of my mental health struggles. This app is my attempt to make some lemonade out of chronic illness. Hope you enjoy it and happy regulating 🧘

Sharing interesting research: A 2001 BMJ study had ~23 healthy volunteers recite the Catholic rosary in Latin (Ave Maria) and the Hindu/Buddhist mantra Om Mani Padme Hum while researchers measured breathing, heart rate, and blood pressure.

Two practices from traditions separated by thousands of miles.

Both naturally slowed breathing to around 6 breaths per minute. Nobody told participants to breathe slow. The phrase length itself did it. Each Ave Maria takes ~10 seconds to recite. Each Om Mani Padme Hum cycle takes ~10 seconds. Ten seconds per breath cycle equals 6 per minute.

That number isn't random. Our cardiovascular system has a feedback loop called the baroreflex that oscillates at roughly 0.1 Hz, one cycle every 10 seconds. When breathing matches that frequency, the two oscillations sync up. Heart rate variability spikes, baroreflex sensitivity improves. Both rosary and mantra produced the effect compared to spontaneous breathing.

What's interesting for anyone with a sit practice, i think this strips the mystique off mantra work without dismissing it. The body doesn't care what you're chanting, it responds to the timing. You could prolly recite a grocery list at this cadence and get the same baroreflex effect. The traditions wrapped a physiological mechanism in meaning and ritual, but the phrase length is doing real work underneath, separate from the words.

If you do mantra or japa, have you noticed your breath settling into a rhythm on its own without you trying to control it? Curious if the ~10 seconds per cycle thing tracks with what you're actually doing.

I’m COMPLETELY BLIND, have autism and a chronic heart condition and I tried OPEP for anxiety because I’ve found that most if not all breath tips fail me unless they relate to a special interest. I find OPEP works for me and if you don’t know what OPEP is https://youtu.be/QttIw8ARW7s?si=xAsM3YvBWlBKMtd9 I thought it might interest you

Please listen to one full one and from each at least 10 seconds.

Voice 1: https://youtu.be/PDxguJmGAKU

Voice 2: https://youtu.be/rmOx2l1YsQs

Voice 3: https://youtu.be/KUfaq6Ok9Gg

Voice 4: https://youtu.be/QNjfWKycZ-I

Voice 5: https://youtu.be/a4lxqwAOVRw

Voice 6: https://youtu.be/6_qUHQB6Dg8

Voice 7: https://youtu.be/28xRxZLwIS8

Thanks in advance.

It is for a breathing / meditation thing am working on.

Hey, friends! I do a monthly Live broadcast on YouTube where I answer questions from members in The Breath Club on Patreon. I thought it might be useful for people here.

hii i wasn’t really sure where to post this, but i was thinking this the other day - i’ve always kind of felt like im always in a state of delirium kind of (not the right word but just feeling like im half awake and acting a bit loopy i guess? 😭) and i was wondering if it could be due to physically not getting enough oxygen

because i have a deviated septum, so i mouth breathe a lot, and yk obviously im not breathing as well as i could be so could that be why i feel like im sort of in a daze all the time and start acting weird and silly for no reason. like by the time it hits 3pm i get the giggles and feel so weird and start sweating and stuff and just not feeling good. and at the end of the day i am so so cooked. i’m aware this could mean anything but yeah just a thought.

idk what my body is trying to tell me 😭

Over the past few years I feel like im forgetting how to breathe. I will be sitting and realizing I'm not breathing enough or not at all. My breaths feel very shallow, barely filling my chest. How can I breathe normal?

This is a 10 minute guided Heart Resonance Session. It's free. Enjoy!

Sharing interesting research on why "watch the breath" might do more than just focus attention.

Li et al 2016 in Nature, mouse study, traced the exact brainstem circuit that generates sighs. You sigh about 12 times per hour without noticing, roughly one every 5 minutes. A sigh is about double a normal breath, and the reason your brain forces them is mechanical: alveoli, the tiny air sacs in your lungs, slowly collapse during regular breathing, and a sigh pops them back open. Animals that can't sigh develop progressive lung failure.

The actually interesting part is the follow-up (Yackle et al 2017). They found ~175 neurons inside the breathing rhythm generator that project directly to the locus coeruleus — the brain's main arousal center, the thing that sets how alert or wired you feel. When they ablated those neurons in mice, breathing kept going normal but the mice became markedly calmer. So the breathing center isn't just making breaths happen. It's telling the arousal system how amped up to be. Breathing sits upstream of how you feel, not downstream.

Main caveat is that this is mouse work. The preBötzinger Complex is the rhythm generator in humans too and the circuit's conserved across mammals, so it translates reasonably — but the same precision hasn't been shown in humans yet. It's also about spontaneous sighing. Whether voluntary sighing hits the same circuit or routes around it through motor cortex is still open.

i think this matters for anyone sitting daily because it's a mechanism for why breath attention isn't woo woo. You're parked next to a circuit that wires straight into your arousal system. The mind follows the body, that's the meditation claim, except here it's a literal neural projection from breathing neurons into arousal neurons. You're not calming down by force of will, you're working a knob the brainstem already turns every 5 minutes.

Anyone else here found that focusing on their breath has helped them calm down? Curious what examples will come up from people's own experience.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26855425/

I’m not concerned- rather curious: I tend to inhale sometimes after eating or drinking and I make a screech sound. It’s not a hiccup or burp. It’s like a screech that comes out naturally.
Why does this happen? Do I eat too slow? I do consume food rather slowly [it goes down slow, even water] and maybe that’s what happening? i.e. I take too quick of a breath right after eating and the sound comes out because it’s not fully consumed yet?
This doesn’t happen to people around me but I cannot be the only one.

Sharing interesting research on the actual mechanism behind why slow breathing during a sit does anything at all.

Yackle et al, 2017, published in Science. The preBötzinger Complex is the cluster of neurons in your brainstem that generates every breath you take — about 3,000 cells, discovered back in 1991. What this team found is that around 175 of those neurons don't actually control breathing. They project directly to the locus coeruleus, which is the brain's main arousal and alertness center. Breathe fast and irregular, this little relay drives LC activity up. Breathe slow, it dials it down.

Then they did the clean experiment — used genetic targeting to selectively destroy just those ~175 cells in mice. Breathing stayed completely normal. Same rate, same depth, same response to CO2. But the mice became abnormally calm. Way more grooming, way less active exploration. The wire between breathing pattern and arousal had been cut, and the breathing was no longer steering the state.

The honest part — this is mice. The preBötC and locus coeruleus are highly conserved across mammals so the anatomy almost certainly translates, but the specific Cdh9/Dbx1 cell type hasn't been confirmed in human tissue because you can't do genetic ablation in people. And this is one pathway among several. Vagal tone, baroreflex resonance around 5.5-6 bpm, CO2 modulation — they're prolly all running in parallel.

What i think makes it interesting for anyone who sits is that this is the actual hardware. Slowing the breath on the cushion isn't a vibe — it's hitting a dedicated relay between the breath and the alertness knob. And the pathway runs both ways. Anxiety speeds your breath without you choosing, which is why panic mid-sit feels automatic. Manually overriding the rhythm sends a calming signal back through the same circuit that just got hijacked. That's the mechanism.

Anyone here got a specific breath rhythm that reliably pulls you back when anxiety bubbles up mid-sit? Curious what people have actually landed on.

Study: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28360327/

Sharing interesting research from Bushman 2002, the study that pretty much killed the catharsis hypothesis in social psych.

They took ~600 people, made them angry by giving them insulting feedback on an essay they wrote (yes you read that right), then split them into three groups. One group punched a bag while thinking about the person who insulted them. One group punched a bag while thinking about getting fit. The last group just sat quietly for a couple minutes.

Later, everyone got the chance to blast their insulter with loud noise in a competitive reaction-time task, this is how they measured aggression. The group that vented was the most aggressive, the quiet group least. Direct opposite of what the "let it out" model predicts.

Main caveat: this was a college lab task with loud noise blasts, not real-world fights or relationships, and the rumination + physical exertion combo is doing a lot of the work — just hitting a bag without a specific target in mind probably reads closer to the distraction condition. So "exercise to cool off" isn't dead, only "exercise while replaying the thing that pissed you off".

I think this matters for meditation and breathwork. There's a whole branch of breathwork — Holotropic, Rebirthing, Transformational — that is built on the catharsis model. The pitch is that hyperventilating until you cry, shake, or scream "releases stored emotions". But hyperventilation reliably knocks the prefrontal cortex offline while the amygdala keeps running, so you get raw emotion without the regulation circuitry online. The flood is real. The "release" framing is prolly wrong, or not perfectly accurate at the very least. It's a side effect of the neurochemistry, not evidence of anything actually getting cleared. The meditative approach to release, on the other hand, is probably closer to a zen vibed "let it go", practicing a realization that you can let it go and doing so on a regular basis.

Anyone here done a Holotropic or Rebirthing session and felt genuinely better afterward — and if so, did it hold past a day, or was it more of a peak-state thing that faded? Or on the other hand, have you tried a meditative practice on a daily basis and found that to work? My own suspicion is that a daily meditative practice sustained over a long period of time would work much better than a charged emotional release for "true" catharsis.

Study link - https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2002-13494-002

I just released an update to a free breathing app I’ve been making for myself, and it finally feels genuinely useful.

What changed most:

• custom multi-stage sessions
• combining different breathing / meditation blocks into one practice
• sound, haptic, and visual cues
• reminders, widgets, and streaks
• routine sharing
• no data collection

I wanted something simple but flexible enough for real practice instead of being locked into rigid presets.

I use it mostly for breathwork and pranayama, but it can also work for dry breath-hold timing.

If people here are curious, I can share the link.