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Comment by unrealp | Hacker News Reader

Sounds counter intuitive but breathwork reduces o2 to brain. Basically due to reduced co2, blood vessels in the brain constrict.

Having said that, I worked with a breathwork teacher for a while, creating narrative for the session, for mental imagery and guidance. It also had music as a backdrop. Fun times. And it was definitely altered state for a lot of people.

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EXACTLY! That's why you breathe into a paper-bag (or smoke) to increase CO2 so that the filters open and you get to a point where you feel O2 tingles all over your brain. This is extremely powerful; I practiced that and underwater held-breath swimming and hanging out underwater for a long time to obtain permanent changes that have made me far more effective. Based on work first published by W.Wenger out of a Maryland Think-tank some 50? years ago.

What kind of changes?

I think they are referring to this: https://winwenger.com/books/books-online/two-guaranteed-ways...

"For accumulating 20 hours of held-breath underwater swimming within 3 weeks from start to finish– 10 or more points I.Q. gain; better span of attention; better span of awareness; better awareness of the interrelatedness of things and of ideas and/or perceptions; finding yourself way better at winning arguments or disputes!"

It should go without saying this is nonsense.

This is probably nonsense for a healthy person but for someone who doesn’t get enough o2 it probably has the same benefits of a person who does.

That's the kind of inference that allows these claims to proliferate.

This article makes a lot of claims about I.Q. scores before and after holding breath (specifically underwater, for some reason), but there are no links to studies, no mention of who or how many people participated, etc.

This is the definition of a baseless claim.

Not defending the overall claim, but there's a plausible reason why being underwater matters: the mammalian diving reflex. Holding your breath on land is not the same.

That too is the kind of inference that allows these claims to proliferate.

Perhaps being under water makes it harder to “cheat”.

So wim hof method, by breathing a lot, deprives you of oxygen, reducing brain functionality and therefore giving you a drug-like pleasure, whereas recycling air in a bag ends up giving you more oxygen and increasing brain efficiency? May sound like sarcasm, but honestly, do I need a diving gear to test it on myself or is a paper bag enough?

Any pointers to read more ?

My GP friends only pointed me to respiratory alcalosis, which doesn’t appear to be about O2 levels at all - it’s the pH being out of the narrow “acceptable” band (too low in the case of hyperventilation) appeared to cause a lot of effect.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperventilation - This leads to hypocapnia, a reduced concentration of carbon dioxide dissolved in the blood.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypocapnia - Acute hypocapnia causes hypocapnic alkalosis, which causes cerebral vasoconstriction leading to cerebral hypoxia

Though not acute, you can see the effects very easily. Within couple of minutes of deep breathing we could create peripheral numbing and tingling effect. (yoga folk say you are feeling energy moving though body and that kind of stuff haha)

Thank you! The second link was the missing one for me ;-)

I did a breath work session once out of curiosity, but it was so much voodoo talk and so much obvious exploitative power dynamics from the “guru” after the session, I could barely hold my disgust. (But yeah, I got both tingling and cramps on top of that)

Deliberately reducing the oxygen to the brain sounds like a not so good plan to me, regardless of what it is caused by…

I recently acquired the pulse oximeter that can be worn during sleep, and the correlation of oxygen levels during the night with how I feel in the morning is seemingly pretty strong.

Was the narrative something like, "you're on a mountaintop. You look around and see..." Or was it more abstract than that?

So the narrative was emotional/trauma release. When people get into altered state, the narrative said that their unresolved emotions would come to surface and be felt into their body and then they accept those things from the past and then the emotions would dissolve and there will be a 'release'. Its a common narrative, I wrote and organized the content so that a first timer would get impressed to expect a release. It worked for several people.

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