Your diaphragm is used when you belly breathe, not just the little muscles of your rib cage, so you move more air. According to my music teacher.

Yeah, what Moby said. And when you're moving more air on each breath, you can breathe slower, which is more relaxing and less stressful.

He was more about being able to sing longer and louder without a "whooosh." It worked, but I was still really off key.

Can't you do both? I can't check how I breathe when I'm not paying attention but I feel like my chest can expand while my diaphragm also lowers. Under exertion there's no question my chest is moving too, so why shouldn't that be the resting norm too?

I think the issue isn't that you should not move your chest but that you should be sure to move your belly too.

Also, there's like one specific note you are supposed to be singing at any given instant.

5 is fair, especially given the cultural pressure to suck in the gut at all times.

Isn't it most likely that when we have two systems, it's not just a back-up in case one breaks, but also that each one has certain contexts in which it really excels? I'm really opposed to the idea that the entire animal kingdon breaths wrong, unless there's a study showing that chimps actually belly breathe until we put them in a zoo and feed them a western diet.

Or are there cultures where children are raised to automatically belly breathe? I would also find that convincing.

I want you to breathe through your eyelids.

I think babies do breathe with their belly, but I don't have one around just now.

Babies also suckle from their mother's teat and have extra airway paths in their throats.

I didn't know about the airways thing.

A dog using abdominal muscles to breathe is something to be concerned about. In a normal, healthy dog, usually the chest muscles are mostly used for breathing so to effectively inflate the lungs. This article is mostly a guide about what signs denote trouble breathing in dogs and should not be used as a substitute for veterinary advice. If you notice labored breathing in your dog, the best course of action is to see the vet immediately.

MM-HMM

My sister's dog was breathing fine but not eating much. Then he started running head first into walls.

That's just diaphragmatic walking. The ancients understood that it held the key to serenity.

Oh. She assumed he was dying and had the drug put down.

Drug s/b dog.

I'm becoming more and more adamant that this is not a thing we need to be doing 24/7. Would I believe that pausing and taking deep breaths can help lower stress? Sure. I bet you could also train people to focus heavily on their eyelids and blink intentionally and slowly and get at least some of the same results.

I actually have a less jokey reason that I care about this: my own private "focus on a mostly-autonomic system" to calm myself down is to sit so quietly that I can find my pulse, without putting a finger on my wrist or neck or something. Just to find it in my body, and then focus on it.

It's very personal and private to me, and so I am a sensitive flower and take it as a personal insult when someone inadvertently implies that their meditative focus on breathing is the one true path to vagal stimulation and harmony with the universe.

Poisoning dogs?

Who are we to judge?

Can't you do both? I can't check how I breathe when I'm not paying attention but I feel like my chest can expand while my diaphragm also lowers. Under exertion there's no question my chest is moving too, so why shouldn't that be the resting norm too?

Also this!

Now I'm all agitated*. If only there were some way I could quietly release some agitation-inhibitors from the comfort of my chair. OH WELL.

*only for comic effect. Don't breathsplain me.

I'm really opposed to the idea that the entire animal kingdon breaths wrong, unless there's a study showing that chimps actually belly breathe until we put them in a zoo and feed them a western diet.

Just to play devil's advocate, most mammals aren't bipeds. Even non-human primates spend a lot of time on all fours. This could impact what muscles they use to breathe. Most birds are bipeds but they're different enough from humans that I wouldn't assume too much similarity.

I Googled "belly breathing vs. chest breathing", and this was the third hit, which is surprisingly non-woo, if only in an "it's Harvard so it can't be too bad" way.

I'm surprised to hear that belly breathing is better but rarer. Obviously it's hard to judge this when paying attention to it, but belly breathing seems easier or more natural to me, especially when sitting down.

I tried to control my blood pressure by doing deep, relaxing breathing for like minutes in a row. It didn't work.

I've spent the last 70 years being told that chest breathing is healthy and belly breathing is all wrong, and now this!

No wonder the empire faded away.

This has reminded me about the "dive reflex" thing of sticking your face in cold water, as an anti-anxiety-ish tactic. Which seems to be a bit "one weird trick" but has at least some reality behind it?

This all sounds like bullshit. I need to see an ultrasound or some imaging of the distinction before I'm willing to believe that this isn't just "deep breaths" vs "shallow breaths." Surely you use your chest muscles and diaphragm with each breath.

5: Right, it isn't that you shouldn't move your rib cage; that's fine. It's that your lungs have a much larger space in which to expand downward when you belly breathe. This is standard advice for (e.g.) COPD patients.

It's also a good way to maximize how high you get for a given amount of pot.

But maybe cancer?

It's that your lungs have a much larger space in which to expand downward when you belly breathe. This is standard advice for (e.g.) COPD patients.

Sure, and also yawning. Or diving underwater. I'm just contesting the quasi-virtuous status of woo that it's attaining.

29 was me, which is amusing in light of 30.

I feel like it's edging into something parallel to the "You're chronically dehydrated and didn't know it!" cry, ie a "you're chronically sub-oxygenated and didn't know it, you Western Diet Shallow Breathing Jerk."

You sound like someone who has only had six cups of water so far today.

Energy drinks are primarily water, so I'm probably safe.

33: I learned it from watching you.

Belly drinking is much more important than belly breathing.

I've never been able to do breath-focused meditation, because focusing on my breathing makes me forget how to breathe, and then I get panicky and hyperventilate.

I recently talked to my doctor about my anxiety (which I think is mostly non-pathological, and an entirely reasonable emotional response to the Times We Live In). She advised that I look up "4-7-8 breathing." It's fine, but I'm not sure I'm doing it right. Consciously transitioning from inhale to hold, or from hold to exhale always entails some fumbling on my part, and I also don't know how to hold my breath for seven counts without tensing up. Maybe I'll get better at it over time, but you'd think by this age I'd know how to breathe. This practice has had no noticeable effect on my anxiety. I really wish she would just prescribe me some pills.

I'm annoyed on your behalf. Why not just let you have some anxiety pills? I've heard it called 5-7-9 breathing in the context of all this SEL stuff that's channeled into the public schools. I think it's ideal there: indoctrinate kids with some self-regulatory tools for them to hopefully call on in the future. It's not actually going to cure anxiety.

3-6-9 breathing is supposed to make you fine.

That would be funny to have a UB40 party for someone's 40th birthday.

Except the music would be annoying.

i once super annoyed the people doing that scan where they slide you into a tube & there's lots of noise, bc they told me to stay really still & i did but it turned out i was *too* still & the machine thought i was dead so then i breathed slowly & steadily but then they were like at this rate the scan will take hours & hours so i made them give me the tempo of breathing they wanted & then they were ecstatic & said it would be their best scan ever.

Maybe you should try taking a few deep breaths.

45 was supposed to be to 43, but it's funny to 44 and possibly applies to every comment on the internet.

You know, a thing I've never done is to go to the backend of the site, and manually copy comments around to rearrange them so that my jokes line up perfectly.

44: If they complain about how long it's taking, tell them they have a shitty magnet.

47: Good, let that bit of perfectionism go. The accidental implied responses keep things more lively anyway.

I wouldn't fix anyone else's malatimings.

40: Non specialists are loath to provide benzos. The others are mostly anti-depressants that you have to take every day. You could ask her about propranolol, but if she's saying it's not pathological but an appropriate reaction to crazy times, maybe that's *why* she didn't prescribe.

I'm just saying that I'm on antidepressants despite having neither depression nor anxiety, and I'm kinda enjoying them nonetheless and therefore think that everyone ought to be so lucky.

40, 51, 52. It's fine. When breathing exercises don't work, I can always drink until all my feelings go away.

I'm not willing to recommend that, but it's what I do.

Honestly, exercise really does help a bunch. I don't like to recommend it because it's something real tools do. Also, it's basically admitting my body rules my brain and that is sucky.

I really do feel better if I eat five servings of fruit and vegetables (exclusive of fries) a day. But I still resent being reminded of this.

56: I used to eat a lot more fruit. I found that I was spending most of my life sitting on the toilet. Maybe that was a healthy lifestyle, but I got tired of it.

Not that vegetable help with anxiety. Unless you're anxious about pooping.

58 before seeing 57.

I run and play tennis and eat vegetables. So far it hasn't changed my parents' increasing frailty, the climate crisis or the fact that our government is hijacked by corporate interests.

I tried a 5 servings of fruit or vegetables a day as a New Years resolution a year or two ago, and immediately ran aground on defining a serving. How much lettuce is a tangerine? What's the conversion factor between raw and cooked spinach? And so on.

I accumulate donated kidneys.

A kidney isn't even one serving of vegetable.

The watching parents decline thing is rough. I drank enough that I got gastritis both times.

A month or two ago I was in a fair amount of pain -- joints and back -- and it had persisted over a number of months with no relief. I stopped my daily exercise routine and now I feel great. So don't let your doctor tell you exercise is good.

Non specialists are loath to provide benzos

Given stories about coming off of benzos I've heard from friends, I'd be hesitant too. Sure sounded unpleasant.

Honestly, exercise really does help a bunch.

I've never noticed this. I guess I don't exercise hard enough or something. I don't know when I'd find the time for it, though.

For like 2 and a half months over the summer I tried jogging regularly. I worked my way up to 2.8 miles in half an hour (probably could have done more if I really tried, but that was a convenient loop) before stopping due to school-year-related schedule changes. For the past couple weeks I've been getting the kid to school by bike, which is a 2.6 mile round trip. That's less total exercise than I was getting in the before time, when I commuted 3.2 miles by bike most days, but it's more than I was getting for the first 15 months of the pandemic, which was nothing at all. Yay me, I guess.

63: words to live by

I had just dragged myself up to jogging very slowly for a couple of km when the fucking GP rang up to say they had discovered a serious heart murmur and I needed to see a cardiologist at some unspecified point in the future -- knowing the state of the NHS at the moment, that will be two months at least and then another month till I get his response. This is not good for my hypochondriac tendencies.

Well, that sucks. All the inbreeding.

I'm not sure how much self-deception goes into "I don't have time to exercise". Like, I find the time for tons of not-productive-at-all stuff during the workday. But most of it takes place in front of my computer, so in theory I could respond to an email or otherwise start working at any time. I could log off work earlier but then I'd feel bad about all the not-productive-at-all stuff (and increase the odds of actually having problems). I have free time after the kid goes to bed, but who wants to exercise then?

good lord, "everyone is breathing wrong and this consumer choice can fix it" is the ultimate NYT Styles take. unfortunately at some point Unfogged stopped routinely dragging the Styles page and with that the last line of defence against everything going NYT Styles-y collapsed.

69: Take care. I hope they get you a visit soon.

Every time I see the title of this post in the sidebar, that 1990s Duncan Sheik song starts playing in my head. This is causing me some distress.

Best wishes, King G.

66: I didn't say it was unreasonable.

Catty answer: athletic training is 95% woo and 5% electrolytes.

More seriously, 28 seems right. It might be good advice for a singer or yogi who is attempting to take in more air to learn to control how to relax the belly muscles in order to take in more air. But it's not like it's a separate secret way of breathing.

When I had a vasectomy they gave me one pill of some good anxiety medication, and damn that was some good shit. I don't usually like drugs, but I liked that one enough that the whole surgery is basically a fond memory.

"chest breathing" ? I decided to google around, and found no link that had any sort of explanation of the *mechanism* by which one might move without moving the diaphragm. By contrast, I found many links which confirmed what I learn when was in 5th (and again, in 7th, then again in 11th) grade, about how breathing involves moving the diaphragm up-and-down.

I guess it would be interesting to learn that there's some way that chest muscle movements alone can change the volume of the ribcage enough to breathe. But I'm not holding my breath.

It seems like "belly breathing" is just "fully use your diaphragm to fully inflate-then-deflate your lungs".

If you lock up your stomach muscles so your belly can't move you can still breathe by moving your ribcage. Shallow breaths, not real comfortable, but possible.

Toxins, but make it musculoskeletal.

Like you're holding in your stomach for a picture.

Assuming it's not just a picture of your face.

Or your feet.

chill: what isn't clear to me (and why I'm asking) is that it still isn't obvious that the motive force is chest expansion by chest muscles, or simply that the diaphragm can move less distance. Does it make sense what I'm asking? Does "chest breathing" mean that the diaphragm is held unmoving, while chest muscles somehow expand and contract the chest cavity? Or does it mean that the diaphragm just moves less up-and-down, and that the rising-and-falling of the ribcage is just due to lungs inflating and deflating?

B/c when I do belly breathing (which is the only kind of breathing I know), my ribcage rises and falls.

I'm only asking b/c I'm curious, and couldn't find anything by searching. And I don't remember anything from my classes.

OK, sorry, I take that back, I finally found something on this.

it appears the intercostal muscles expand-and-contract the ribcage, in opposite action to the diaphragm. So when the diaphragm pulls down the intercostal muscles expand the ribcage, to keep it from contracting down (under the action of the diaphragm).

It all makes sense now. and I can see why there is this distinction between chest breathing and belly breathing. It never occurred to me that you could breathe holding your diaphragm constant. Learn something new every day. I tried to do it just now, and boy howdy it's uncomfortable.

I have found belly breathing to be incredibly helpful for heartburn / indigestion. As in: has stopped it happening more or less completely. If I do feel a bit of heartburn starting, I focus on some deep diaphragm breathing for a while and it goes away. My hypothesis is that this sort of breathing gets circulation going there. By contrast, crouching anxiously over the laptop trying to munge an .xls or whatever, suppresses gut circulation.

My last PT said I should breathe more with my *back*, which... if I ever figure out how to do it I'll know if it helps. Probably I need to be able to relax my shoulders first.

OTOH, I've done the galop in a corset, which means breathing a lot with hardly any torso-volume change. Nice for holding enormous skirts while you're whirling very fast, but terrible as an actual blood-oxygen strategy.

I've been reading the Herman Cain awards more often than is good for me. I think they must make the patients take off any corsets before they give them oxygen. When they have pictures of the people in the hospital, they don't look very trim.

I kind of want to adopt a Chihuahua-terrier but the people listing the dogs want like $300 and to verify my employment.

Before the internet, you had to go face the judging glare of some clerk to buy a corset for your Chihuahua.

There's no "I'm drunk so confirm this stuff in the morning" box to check on the dog adoption form.

On topic because breathing: The U.S. is just a hair away from passing Italy in the covid deaths per capita count. A few weeks ago, I didn't think we would have the momentum to pass Belgium, but I'm less sure of that now.

Also, I closed the dog adoption tab just now.