Screen Apnea

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...

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"...

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!

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.

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.

[1] https://www.voidtools.com/

I started using broot a while ago because I was fed up with file explorer.

How to get anxiety 101

I can't find this information in the article. Could you share the source?

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.

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.

How accurate is it?

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.

Have you looked into wearing a mouth guard while sleeping? Life changing.

Massage can be good. Ask them to focus on neck + jaw stuff.

Otherwise, ergonomics stuff: Standing desk, padded floor mat, kinesis, sideways keyboard, getting your monitor at the right height.

Strengthening core muscles can be good, too.

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?

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.

One thing everyone will do regardless is a physiological sigh, about every 5 minutes. That may be what you're noticing. That's completely natural.

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.

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 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.

Same here, but with muttering profanities

You're that noisy colleague that I hate!

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.

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.

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’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.

Yeah, this isn't some new technology-caused phenomenon. This happens whenever we pay attention to something, including books.

Just get a roomba

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.

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"

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.