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Comment by origami777 | Hacker News Reader

I've been going through challenging times and have been confronted with somethings I've never had to deal with before. There are a couple of things that trigger anxiety in me on a daily basis now. I wake up in the middle of the night with little anxiety episodes. I'm unfocused at work because of what feels like underlying emotional issues.

The only thing that's helped (I am trying to fix without medication) are the tools from HeartMath. Their "Transforming Stress" book has been a god send. It's not a get well fast type thing, but I've been practicing the sessions daily for a month now and am in much better control of my stress and anxiety.

I have practiced Tai Chi, meditation, and visualization via NLP techniques in the past. I'm not a novice when it comes to the types of techniques that HeartMath teaches. However, the way theirs are structured are the most effective I've found for dealing with these issues.

If you're going through hard times I highly recommend using their tools.

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If I go through a tough time where anxiety is already impairing my life, sleep, communication then my first aid method is concious breathing twice a day for five minutes. It works immediately and levels down my stress significantly after about three days.

You breathe slowly in for about 15 seconds, hold breath for about 10 seconds and breathe out for about 35 seconds - mileage may vary. For five minutes.

The impact is not as fundamental and profound as with dedicated daily meditation but it does the trick and actually builds the basis required for actually sitting down and doing more subtle mental work.

Cheers

I wonder if the Apple Watch app is effective. You can set how many breaths you want per minute, but no option to hold a breath for 10 seconds like you mentioned.

It's a good first step but the app definitively needs improvement!

If you think like me that NLP means NonLinear Programming, in this context it means Neuro-linguistic programming[0]: "Neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) is an approach to communication, personal development, and psychotherapy created by Richard Bandler and John Grinder in California, United States in the 1970s. NLP has since been overwhelmingly discredited scientifically, but continues to be marketed by some hypnotherapists and by some companies that organize seminars and workshops on management training for businesses."

Homoeopathy has also been discredited, the mind is full of corners the science cannot really explain.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuro-linguistic_programming

To be honest, the very first books - The Structure of Magic - are much better than later "practical" and manipulative stuff. The notions of "patching reality" - what we call today the Confirmation and Self-serving biases (deletion, distribution) and "framing effects" are correct in general.

Programming, or what they call "re-framing" works to some extent, by "unlearning" some wrong concepts acquired through social conditioning and biased perceptions, by re-framing (transforming) them into more closely related to actual reality. Anchoring is already crap (but use of amulets and "things of power" is exactly this). So are the supposed correlations between looking patterns and modes of thinking (while naive people (children) some times show such correlations).

The core ideas of early NLP, including re-framing, were nothing new. The prophets of old times seemingly did exactly this - they succeeded in re-framing of traditional views and beliefs.

The later "technique" stuff, is nonsense. It apparently worked because hypocrisy, manipulations, reading and use of so-called body language are as old as humanity. Again, priests of any kind are famous practitioners of such manipulative techniques. Nowadays businessmen and politicians are using similar tricks, as if we are still in ignorant middle ages.)

At its core NLP is basically little more than a notational system for mental processes which is a pretty hard thing to discredit scientifically.

It's true that that most of the NLP community revolves around cargo culting a few of these processes though (which most likely indeed aren't scientifically valid.)

Saying that that discredits NLP as a whole is roughly equivalent to saying a programming language is inherently bad because a lot of shitty software has been written in it though.

From the referenced WP page:

By the end of 1980, the collaboration between Bandler and Grinder ended. [...] In July 1996 and January 1997, Bandler instituted a further two civil actions against Grinder and his company, numerous other prominent figures in NLP and 200 further initially unnamed persons. [...] On this matter Stollznow (2010) comments, "[i]ronically, Bandler and Grinder feuded in the 1980s over trademark and theory disputes. Tellingly, none of their myriad of NLP models, pillars, and principles helped these founders to resolve their personal and professional conflicts."

It may not be a very scientific rebuttal, but I always find that interesting. (Kinda similar to how psychics never win the lottery.)

Don't listen to what people say, watch what they do.

Combine this with any form of endurance exercise to build red muscle for maximum benefits.

It's been shown¹ that red muscle takes away kynurene, which is produced by stress, can enter the brain, and appears to be able to trigger depression and other mental health issues if it is at elevated levels for longer periods:

> “Our initial research hypothesis was that trained muscle would produce a substance with beneficial effects on the brain. We actually found the opposite: well-trained muscle produces an enzyme that purges the body of harmful substances. So in this context the muscle’s function is reminiscent of that of the kidney or the liver,” says Jorge Ruas, principal investigator at the Department of Physiology and Pharmacology, Karolinska Institutet.

> The researchers discovered that mice with higher levels of PGC-1a1 in muscle also had higher levels of enzymes called KAT. KATs convert a substance formed during stress (kynurenine) into kynurenic acid, a substance that is not able to pass from the blood to the brain. The exact function of kynurenine is not known, but high levels of kynurenine can be measured in patients with mental illness.

Recently the same research group also discovered that kynurenic acid turns white fat (the unhealthy type) into beige fat (more similar to brown fat, which is healthier).

¹ http://ki.se/en/news/how-physical-exercise-protects-the-brai...

Thanks for the post and pointer, had not come across any stuff on red muscle etc before!

I came across this article a few minutes before reading this http://www.inc.com/melanie-curtin/neuroscience-says-listenin...

'listening to that one song -- "Weightless" -- resulted in a striking 65 percent reduction in participants' overall anxiety, and a 35 percent reduction in _their usual physiological resting rates'

I prefer this version.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HEBb3GxubAc

This is even better https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zo6EkXHu5AI

This song brings more calm to me than Weightless did: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pX_jySkFIK4

Alternative viewpoint: http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/17/heartmath-considered-in..., "HeartMath Considered Incoherent"

Normally I wouldn't attack something that someone else feels is helping (even placebos can be helpful for some people), but this is the top comment.

HeartMath sounds like a good base with a lot of esoteric bullshit thrown on top.

Maybe breathing in a consistent rhythm to get a coherent heart rate variability (HRV) is the sole magic behind meditation, HeartMath, etc?

Here is a good TEDx talk by Alan Watkins on HRV: https://youtu.be/Q_fFattg8N0 (there is also a part 1, but part 2 has the good demo)

The whole Heartmath thing seems to me like an exotic way to teach and practice consistent slow, regular, deep breathing (which is definitely worthwhile thing to learn!).

I believe the "coherent" HRV curve they claim brings all these benefits is simply the effect of respiratory sinus arrythmia (why your heartrate decreases when you breathe in) while breathing at a very regular interval—the HRV curve just happens to be a good indicator of how regularly you're breathing.

Do you drink coffee? Try 100% cutting out caffeine!

I strongly second this. I got into the habit of consuming lots of caffeine and assuming my anxious state was baseline. Aggressively cutting out coffee was a really interesting and useful experience.

Any strategies to cut? If I don't drink my morning cup, I get bad headaches around the evening and basically stop functioning.

The painful way is pretty simple! Wait until you have a few days you can be "down" and just go cold turkey. I find I do OK the first couple of days, then get a pretty bad headache. When that's gone I'm back to normal.

This. The withdrawal symptoms of coffee usually last for about a week. The thing that is perhaps most surprising is that after that week you'll also feel less tired. Turns out that while most people consider coffee as a remedy to tiredness, it's the coffee itself that actually makes you more tired, so you need more and more of it, just like any other addictive drug.

I'd like to point out that gradually decreasing the amount of caffeine intake works very well and is a lot less painful.

Drink a lot more water, consistently throughout the day just before cutting and after. It won't stop the headaches completely but it will help.

As with any drug lower your dosage over time then quit.

Also, your morning fog may simply be early withdrawal symptoms.

I cut down my caffeine intake to one shot of espresso per day. (A single cup of coffee has quite a bit more caffeine than a shot.) Also, decaf helps!

green tea matcha is a good alternative. 1 cup of green tea matcha has 1/3 of caffeine as a coffee cup. Since it is packed with L-theanine, it will also delay ingestion of caffeine, and you will feel less the typical crash

Wrote a quick post about coffee alternatives https://dailyhealthpoints.wordpress.com/2016/10/24/healthy-a...

Caffeine is a mild stimulant, but in the evening the main effect is probably blocking your adenosine reuptake sites. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caffeine#Pharmacology You can probably get a similar effect by drinking a small amount of caffeine in the early afternoon instead of a large amount in the morning. I mentioned this in another comment, but slowly decreasing your caffeine intake over time lets your body adjust with pretty minimal symptoms.

It will suck a lot for a few days, bad headaches, might even throw up. For me, I was in slowmo for about a month. I normally work on stuff when I get home and for about a month I would go home and just sit around. After that I was over it and feel much better because of it. This was going from drinking 4+ of the Mexican Coca Cola bottles each day. That stuff is just a trap.

I gently titrated down by replacing coffee with a pre-workout drink (powder mixed in water). This allowed me to tightly control my caffeine intake and reduce it gently every few days until it was almost zero. I have been off of caffeine entirely for almost 15 months now. It has really improved my sleep.

Try cutting down gradually, eventually getting to a single cup in the morning. Supplement with decaf. Then just decaf. I've found I miss coffee more than cafeene now so I still drink decaf. Difference is I can sleep and don't feel the awful stress anymore.

When I was doing more physical jobs than now (also very stressfull), my collegues were amazaed at how I could handle the fatigue and anxiety that well without taking coffee. I still believe that actual abstinence from caffeine is the answer to many like issues

I second this. When I am under stress, the caffeine heightens the feeling of anxiety and on really stressful days, I can feel my heart pounding...

If you love coffee and don't want to remove it from your life, try taking some L-Theanine with your morning cup of coffee. For me, it eliminates anxiety and jitters without tempering the cognitive benefits of coffee.

Or enjoy a cup of sencha or gyokuro which comes with caffeine and L-Theanine. It is a lovely combination indeed. :)

Cannot recommend this enough! Upton tea carries really a really good sencha called 'Japanese Super Sencha Kamakura' and their Gyokuro is brilliant too.

Never hurts to carry around a few 200mg L-Theanine capsules though.

I got some theanine from a a bulk sit because it was cheap, but probably has a low portion of L-theanine vs D-theanine... may need to look into fixing that since the effects don't seem to be as good as when I tried Suntheanine...

Worth noting that Coffiest (Soylent's latest drink product) contains both caffeine and L-theanine. Their ratio is questionable (150mg caffeine, 75mg L-theanine), but subjectively I have found it to be a great way to boost my productivity in the morning, and I've never noticed jitters or anxiety despite the (relatively) high dose of caffeine. I also prefer the taste to regular Soylent -- no "wet cereal" aftertaste, and you can add a bit of sugar or chocolate syrup if it's too bitter for you.

One thing I like to do is with anything addicting/I deem as necessary, every now and then I cut it out of my life for a duration. It helps increase my independence by avoiding decisions based on what I misbelieve are necessary.

I'm not sure if it's applicable to all, just something that I feel helps me a lot.

I did this for a while but got sick of withdrawal symptoms (my body seems to be hypersensitive in this regard), so I just stopped all together. Most recently cut out sugar. I feel so good now. I can't believe how many foods I was eating that had direct negative effects on my body.

You say "foods" - plural. Did you cut other things out besides sugar?

Yea, a ton. Turns out I'm celiac, so gluten was the first thing I cut (to solve digestion issues and sinus headaches). My nose cleared up significantly, but not totally. Years of eating gluten messed up my small intestine so I have digestive issues with high fructose food (HFCS and some fruit), so I cut out HFCS soda, that helped a lot. Next was caffeine to try to correct my sleep schedule, it helped and it also helped clear up my nose. I was still getting sinus headaches with all that and tracked it down to pepperonis in a gluten free pizza I was eating (from a dedicated restaurant), turns out it was sodium nitrite which is found in many deli meats and smoked foods. Most recently was sugar once I noticed withdrawal symptoms, sinus headache, vomiting, etc. when cutting it out. I was on and off it a few times, but the last time was a really brutal headache, so I just said no more.

I've given up and started again on all of these multiple times to confirm each one. My body seems to have a sensitive withdrawal reaction. I notice symptoms if I eat most of those foods too regularly and then mess up the schedule, and a bad reaction if I stop all together within a day or so. I'm super curious about it medically but don't really have time to work with a doctor and learn why all these foods cause similar reactions. I'll just chalk it up to celiac.

Given other people's stuffy noses and bad digestion, I believe a lot of people have foods that are no good for them. I highly recommend elimination diets. The less I eat, the better I feel. I discovered decongestants a year or two ago, which makes life a lot more bearable when I mess up and eat the wrong thing, but I don't want to rely on that stuff to feel normal when I could just not eat the garbage I was eating.

Can you try kickboxing/muaythai/mma/boxing ? It requires physical & mental coordination, and is very taxing on your muscles and will leave you exhausted and in a state of ~high after training. Though don't do sparring if you're not completely ok.

You can also get hurt though..

Don't spar then.

Many places wouldn't accept that. Do you just sit out that section?

They may say "come on, we'll go easy, it's not a big deal" but they won't force you or something.

But if they do, or if they give an ultimatum,then those places/trainers suck. If you have valid reason to not spar and they still say "come on" leave the gym because it's not healthy.

My place did suck then. And I did get hurt..

Usually the gyms I've been to, they spar only a full day/week so I just don't show up that day. Other times I just sit out and watch. Though that only happens when I don't want to, I've sparred many times.

I'm curious why you felt the need to deal with the stress through a new set of tools? You clearly already have a lot of skills for dealing with this kind of situations, namely meditation and Thai Chi. Why didn't you fall back to those?

Wow thank you so much.

I began reading Transforming Stress and in two days it has already changed everything my life. I have been going through post-traumatic stress and my abilities to concentrate and function have been crippled. Horrible panic attacks, painful migraines, irrational fear and despair are beginning to wane.

I received the emWave2 today, best $250 I have ever spent. I am bringing up my coherence and the horrible chest pains have been going down in just 3 20min sessions of using the device. I might finally be able to program after all.

One of the pages [1] on The HeartMath site references Dr Bruce Lipton.

If you're interested in understanding more about the interplay between experiences, emotions, physiology and genetics, I can strongly recommend his book, The Biology of Belief [2], and his many interviews and presentations that can be found on YouTube.

His research and writing focuses on the notion that subconscious beliefs are the major influence on our perceptions, which is why for some of us, experiences can trigger pathological health conditions like anxiety and depression, along with auto-immune illnesses and other chronic illnesses that result from chronic stress (which can include cardiovascular disease and other serious conditions).

Inspired by this book, I've had great success improving my emotional and physiological health by undertaking practices that focus on subconscious beliefs. They all seek to achieve similar results to NLP (congruence, non-reactivity, etc), but I've found these ones to be more effective:

- Self Clearing [3]

- Holotropic Breathwork [4]

- Dolores Cannon Hypnosis [5]

All this stuff draws contempt from curmudgeonly skeptics (of which I used to be the worst kind), but from painful experience I've found these techniques to be far more effective than any of the more conventional approaches I'd tried previously.

I can also recommend Stoic Philosophy [6], but for me these practices are tools and systems that enable concepts from stoicism to be implemented most effectively.

[1] https://www.heartmath.org/articles-of-the-heart/personal-dev...

[2] https://www.amazon.com/Biology-Belief-Unleashing-Consciousne...

[3] http://clearyourshit.com/self-clearing-foundations-1/

[4] http://www.holotropic.com/about.shtml

[5] http://www.dolorescannon.com/about-qhht

[6] http://fourhourworkweek.com/2009/04/13/stoicism-101-a-practi...

>All this stuff draws contempt from curmudgeonly skeptics (of which I used to be the worst kind), but from painful experience I've found these techniques to be far more effective than any of the more conventional approaches I'd tried previously.

Yes, throwing away your critical eye towards the world in favor of starry-eyed credulity can certainly kick the placebo effect into overdrive. If you're constantly questioning whether something is working, it will probably not feel like it's working, whereas if you wholeheartedly believe, you will likely carry that through into your perceptions. This of course has nothing to do with the actual efficacy, it's just that you're selectively perceiving so as to confirm your pre-existing notions; when the object of all of this effort is your own mental state this can be confused with the technique itself being effective. In reality, people like being successful, and feeling like you are winning at one thing makes you more likely to think you can win at other things. Rinse repeat. Confirmation bias is lovely when you can weaponize it like this. The sad thing is you have to kill the most valuable part of your human self in the process. RIP.

Interesting points. Can you expand on your last sentence? What part is being killed?

I would say Temporal is not far off in saying "commitment to the truth," but I would go further and say that the core of humanity, of being human, is striving towards bettering ourselves through the application of intelligence. Intelligence is the human superpower and when harnessed it can create incredible things.

Doing the reverse of empowering your intelligence, and empowering your confirmation bias (as comment parent), tribalism (as Donald Trump/neo-nationalists everywhere), or credulity (as meditationists/"everything is connected maaaaaan" types), is worse than suicide. You're using the power of your brain to enhance its flaws and create a perverted version of a human, progressing, but in the opposite direction; becoming stronger, but in a domain that should be avoided at all costs.

This is somewhat like the process of building a good military sniper by progressively dehumanizing them, stripping them of their empathy and agency in order to use them as an efficient killing machine. But worse, because you can think yourself out of that -- you can't think yourself out of a totally broken mind, and the more intelligent you are, the better you are at keeping yourself broken.

What part is being killed?

Commitment to the truth. You have to successfully lie to yourself to pull off what GP described.

One could also say that many people who suffer with certain issues /only/ do so because they've already successfully lied to themselves, and believed these less healthy lies.

Sometimes there are no exits, the commitment you mention doesn't take you anywhere good, you find yourself at the edge of mental sanity. Out of experience I can say there are periods where commitment to truth is literally life-threateningly dangerous.

You're welcome to suggest measures I should undertake to be more effective at getting to the truth in these matters.

Here's what I'm doing so far:

- Reading a wide variety of scientific sources across the spectrum of thought on these matters: Dr Bruce Lipton - pioneering stem cell biologist, now author and speaker; Rudy Tanzi - Professor of Neurology at Harvard Medical School and researcher behind some of the biggest recent breakthroughs in Alzheimer's research; Lissa Rankin - mainstream physician and author; Bernardo Kastrup - PhD scientist, philosopher, author; Sir Roger Penrose - Physicist, mathematician and philosopher of science; Sam Harris - Neuroscientist/Atheist/Skeptic movement icon; Richard Dawkins - biologist & father of the modern Skeptic movement; Jerry Coyne of https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/; http://www.quackwatch.com/; https://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/; Rupert Sheldrake, Ph.D. - Biologist and Author. Karl Popper - philosopher of science and leading contributor to The Scientific Method. Comparing points of view from all these sources with each other and with my own experiences and what I can establish from publicly available studies in science journals and papers published via NCBI.

- Conducting a variety of lab tests of physiological metrics over almost 10 years, including: blood pressure (was consistently high for a few months about 10 years ago, went low for an extended period around 5-6 years ago, and has been consistently optimal for the past 2 years); cholesterol (improving), blood sugar (normalising), iron & zinc (improving), hormones eg adrenaline, cortisol, thyroid (normalising), inflammation (reducing), white blood cell count (improving).

- Collaborating with acquaintances who have been afflicted with similar illnesses (chronic fatigue, auto-immune illness, depression, etc), particularly those who are strongly scientific/rational in their worldviews. Admittedly my own scientific background is merely limited to high-school chemistry/physics/advanced math, a career as a software developer (self-taught), several years working in the fields of agricultural science and secondary science education, and an upbringing by an electronics engineer father and a mainstream medical practitioner mother. But my most trusted fellow travellers in this journey are minimum Master's-degree qualified in science (one in biotech, one computer science), and are widely reputed as being among the best in their field.

But I sincerely want to be as effective as is humanly possible at avoiding delusion and finding truth; my qualify of life depends on it. Please be forthcoming with any suggestions.

By the way, your challenge is to refute anything I've said without succumbing to the "beg the question" fallacy. Ideally you'll avoid all the other fallacies too (particularly Ad Hominem), but "beg the question" is the trickiest and most important to avoid in this debate.

> You're welcome to suggest measures I should undertake to be more effective at getting to the truth in these matters.

I notice you don't mention double blinding any of these interventions. Have you tried that? How would you try that for something crypto-religious like meditation?

"Curmudgeonly skeptics" love to think about themselves as realists. Skeptic is not a realist, however - when you think about yourself as a skeptic, you already set the limit to what you can experience and how your mind and skills can change and evolve. "Mindset" by Carol Dweck comes to mind.

Most of what I would need to say in response to the allegation of "throwing away your critical eye towards the world in favor of starry-eyed credulity" can be read in this comment below: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12873531.

The placebo effect is certainly relevant in this discussion, and unfortunately it partly comes down to definition. Some try to claim the placebo means there is no tangible improvement in physiology, just an imaginary feeling of wellbeing. If that's your definition, then I'm guarding against that with thorough lab testing of all accessible physiological indicators, as described below. If your definition of the placebo effect is that there is a real physiological improvement brought about by emotional processes, then I agree with you, and the techniques I've used are just tools for bringing about a more profound placebo effect, which is fine, as long as it leads to a physiological improvement, which seems to be happening for me.

> If you're constantly questioning whether something is working, it will probably not feel like it's working, whereas if you wholeheartedly believe, you will likely carry that through into your perceptions.

For me it's sometimes been the opposite; techniques that I hoped and deeply believed would be effective turned out to do little, and techniques that I had little expectation of effectiveness turned out to make a big difference. Not always though. There's not really much of a pattern. And there's no pattern to this that aligns with practices being "mainstream" or "alternative". I've had positive and negative experiences with treatments/practices from both sides.

But the core point – that employing effective techniques to change unhealthy subconscious beliefs can reduce unhealthy emotions (including anxiety/depression) in the short term and reduce stress-related illness in the long term – has rung true for me and many others. And it doesn't take much reading through scientific studies on the topic, or even just thinking about it from an evolutionary point of view, to realise that it's unsurprising and uncontroversial that this could be the case. The only question is, what techniques are effective. I've listed the ones that worked for me. Different ones work better for others.

> The sad thing is you have to kill the most valuable part of your human self in the process. RIP.

It'd be worth your while to contemplate what motivates you to say something so mean-spirited.

Thanks for the recommendations! I will investigate further. I'm amazed at how powerful these activities can be. And I'm glad that I gave them a chance. It is really easy to be dismissive of stuff like this. Having an open mind, giving them a chance, has made a world of difference for me.

Going through hard times, and seeing how fragile mental wellbeing can be, has given me a great appreciation for the work that these doctors are doing. I'm grateful you took the time to share.

> His research and writing focuses on the notion that subconscious beliefs are the major influence on our perceptions,

I think there's definitely some truth to this. Here's a concrete example from my life: I have anxiety in crowded grocery stores, which hampers my ability to shop for food and eat healthy. On the surface, thats "social anxiety", but digging deeper, for me it's about some deeper baggage I have about being ignored. The people intruding my space at the supermarket are activating this subconscious fear/pain because they seem to "ignore" my physical presence.

Very fascinating how the layers of psychology/physiology meet. I will look into Liptons work some more.

Thank you very much for this.

I have some very deep-seated subconscious beliefs that have really affected my life for the worse.

Meditation has helped me be aware of them and their nature, but I still need to figure out how to fight back.

Link for the lazy: http://store.heartmath.org/Books-Stress-Solutions/transformi...

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