At first, it did indeed caught me off guard... why was Apple, a company whose products I equate to be the pinnacle of principled UI design, so pushy and so annoying with notifications that I take a moment to breathe.
But then I observed something truly remarkably: it wasn't just randomly, aimlessly spamming me with the notifications... it was giving me these notifications at very key times. It gave notifications during times of acute distress, times when I was feeling off one way or another. And by golly, when I did then stop and take its suggestion to stop and do its guided breathing exercise, wow, it helped.
There are some situations of acute stress where one can’t take a 1 min pause, but in most scenarios it helps.
Thats good. The world isnt run by yoga gurus and zen monks for very good reasons. Not all stress is bad.
And people who dont have life experience or the right people around them can easily be misled by receiving the wrong signals about how to cope with stress.
"They told me to move to the back of the bus. I got so angry but my apple watch told me to breath and I calmed down..."
But overall, being able to focus on your breathing (and control your anger, and control the consequences of your emotions) is a good thing, and it doesn't demand that you ignore whatever it was that made you feel stress in the first place.
Hint: the goal of Buddhism is to reduce suffering in the world. It’s not a bad idea to start with yourself.
Kind of like the whoop minus the 30/month subscription...
Child post posed question about what measurement is being used to decide whether or not to give breathe notification, I googled around and saw that it's not documented as you say, but I think it's Apple being coy and secretive here, there's definitely something going on here.
My guess is it's some combination of pulse reading and lowered blood oxygenation level. The blood oxygenation measurement is probably more highly weighted.
When we are stressed out, we start taking shallow breaths, and taking shallow breaths is bad because it's then we start to lose a balance of oxygen/CO_2, and when that happens we're not at your best, we feel dizzy, we feel tired, our judgement is perhaps not optimal, so this is the right time to take a moment to relax and inhale deep to get some good air in, and exhale exhaustively and repeat a couple of times.
You make a very compelling point that an option of choosing how many times you get notified is suggestive of it being random/unrelated to vital signs, and I actually didn't know you could set this (I see now mine is set to 2 times a day).
But I still maintain it's more than that, it does use some measurement to trigger a notification, and the max limit exists so as to not burden the user with these notifications lest they start becoming a source of stress themselves.
The reason I'm so strongly convinced of this is that I seem to almost be able to trigger it in a sense, this all first got to me when I realized that notification would appear when I thought about something particular in a certain way during a rough time. Anyway, I'll be paying extra attention to this now and will report back with results after a couple of days! :)
> Having more than three drinks in one sitting temporarily raises your blood pressure, but repeated binge drinking can lead to long-term increases.