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u/dviolite

▲ 31 r/breathing+5 crossposts

Sharing interesting research on the actual mechanism behind why slow breathing during a sit does anything at all.

Yackle et al, 2017, published in Science. The preBötzinger Complex is the cluster of neurons in your brainstem that generates every breath you take — about 3,000 cells, discovered back in 1991. What this team found is that around 175 of those neurons don't actually control breathing. They project directly to the locus coeruleus, which is the brain's main arousal and alertness center. Breathe fast and irregular, this little relay drives LC activity up. Breathe slow, it dials it down.

Then they did the clean experiment — used genetic targeting to selectively destroy just those ~175 cells in mice. Breathing stayed completely normal. Same rate, same depth, same response to CO2. But the mice became abnormally calm. Way more grooming, way less active exploration. The wire between breathing pattern and arousal had been cut, and the breathing was no longer steering the state.

The honest part — this is mice. The preBötC and locus coeruleus are highly conserved across mammals so the anatomy almost certainly translates, but the specific Cdh9/Dbx1 cell type hasn't been confirmed in human tissue because you can't do genetic ablation in people. And this is one pathway among several. Vagal tone, baroreflex resonance around 5.5-6 bpm, CO2 modulation — they're prolly all running in parallel.

What i think makes it interesting for anyone who sits is that this is the actual hardware. Slowing the breath on the cushion isn't a vibe — it's hitting a dedicated relay between the breath and the alertness knob. And the pathway runs both ways. Anxiety speeds your breath without you choosing, which is why panic mid-sit feels automatic. Manually overriding the rhythm sends a calming signal back through the same circuit that just got hijacked. That's the mechanism.

Anyone here got a specific breath rhythm that reliably pulls you back when anxiety bubbles up mid-sit? Curious what people have actually landed on.

Study: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28360327/

u/dviolite — 5 days ago
▲ 24 r/Anxiety

Sharing interesting research from Bushman 2002, the study that pretty much killed the catharsis hypothesis in social psych.

They took ~600 people, made them angry by giving them insulting feedback on an essay they wrote (yes you read that right), then split them into three groups. One group punched a bag while thinking about the person who insulted them. One group punched a bag while thinking about getting fit. The last group just sat quietly for a couple minutes.

Later, everyone got the chance to blast their insulter with loud noise in a competitive reaction-time task, this is how they measured aggression. The group that vented was the most aggressive, the quiet group least. Direct opposite of what the "let it out" model predicts.

Main caveat: this was a college lab task with loud noise blasts, not real-world fights or relationships, and the rumination + physical exertion combo is doing a lot of the work — just hitting a bag without a specific target in mind probably reads closer to the distraction condition. So "exercise to cool off" isn't dead, only "exercise while replaying the thing that pissed you off".

I think this relates to meditation and breathwork for release. There's a whole branch of breathwork — Holotropic, Rebirthing, Transformational — that is built on the catharsis model. The pitch is that hyperventilating until you cry, shake, or scream "releases stored emotions". But hyperventilation reliably knocks the prefrontal cortex offline while the amygdala keeps running, so you get raw emotion without the regulation circuitry online. The flood is real. The "release" framing is prolly wrong, or not perfectly accurate at the very least. It's a side effect of the neurochemistry, not evidence of anything actually getting cleared. The meditative approach to release, on the other hand, is probably closer to a zen vibed "let it go", practicing a realization that you can let it go and doing so on a regular basis.

Anyone here done a Holotropic or Rebirthing session and felt genuinely better afterward — and if so, did it hold past a day, or was it more of a peak-state thing that faded? Or on the other hand, have you tried a meditative practice on a daily basis and found that to work? My own suspicion is that a daily meditative practice sustained over a long period of time would work much better than a charged emotional release for "true" catharsis.

Study link - https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2002-13494-002

reddit.com
u/dviolite — 15 days ago
▲ 7 r/breathing

Sharing interesting research from Bushman 2002, the study that pretty much killed the catharsis hypothesis in social psych.

They took ~600 people, made them angry by giving them insulting feedback on an essay they wrote (yes you read that right), then split them into three groups. One group punched a bag while thinking about the person who insulted them. One group punched a bag while thinking about getting fit. The last group just sat quietly for a couple minutes.

Later, everyone got the chance to blast their insulter with loud noise in a competitive reaction-time task, this is how they measured aggression. The group that vented was the most aggressive, the quiet group least. Direct opposite of what the "let it out" model predicts.

Main caveat: this was a college lab task with loud noise blasts, not real-world fights or relationships, and the rumination + physical exertion combo is doing a lot of the work — just hitting a bag without a specific target in mind probably reads closer to the distraction condition. So "exercise to cool off" isn't dead, only "exercise while replaying the thing that pissed you off".

I think this matters for meditation and breathwork. There's a whole branch of breathwork — Holotropic, Rebirthing, Transformational — that is built on the catharsis model. The pitch is that hyperventilating until you cry, shake, or scream "releases stored emotions". But hyperventilation reliably knocks the prefrontal cortex offline while the amygdala keeps running, so you get raw emotion without the regulation circuitry online. The flood is real. The "release" framing is prolly wrong, or not perfectly accurate at the very least. It's a side effect of the neurochemistry, not evidence of anything actually getting cleared. The meditative approach to release, on the other hand, is probably closer to a zen vibed "let it go", practicing a realization that you can let it go and doing so on a regular basis.

Anyone here done a Holotropic or Rebirthing session and felt genuinely better afterward — and if so, did it hold past a day, or was it more of a peak-state thing that faded? Or on the other hand, have you tried a meditative practice on a daily basis and found that to work? My own suspicion is that a daily meditative practice sustained over a long period of time would work much better than a charged emotional release for "true" catharsis.

Study link - https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2002-13494-002

reddit.com
u/dviolite — 15 days ago
▲ 9 r/breathwork

Sharing interesting research from Bushman 2002, the study that pretty much killed the catharsis hypothesis in social psych.

They took ~600 people, made them angry by giving them insulting feedback on an essay they wrote (yes you read that right), then split them into three groups. One group punched a bag while thinking about the person who insulted them. One group punched a bag while thinking about getting fit. The last group just sat quietly for a couple minutes.

Later, everyone got the chance to blast their insulter with loud noise in a competitive reaction-time task, this is how they measured aggression. The group that vented was the most aggressive, the quiet group least. Direct opposite of what the "let it out" model predicts.

Main caveat: this was a college lab task with loud noise blasts, not real-world fights or relationships, and the rumination + physical exertion combo is doing a lot of the work — just hitting a bag without a specific target in mind probably reads closer to the distraction condition. So "exercise to cool off" isn't dead, only "exercise while replaying the thing that pissed you off".

I think this matters for meditation and breathwork. There's a whole branch of breathwork — Holotropic, Rebirthing, Transformational — that is built on the catharsis model. The pitch is that hyperventilating until you cry, shake, or scream "releases stored emotions". But hyperventilation reliably knocks the prefrontal cortex offline while the amygdala keeps running, so you get raw emotion without the regulation circuitry online. The flood is real. The "release" framing is prolly wrong, or not perfectly accurate at the very least. It's a side effect of the neurochemistry, not evidence of anything actually getting cleared. The meditative approach to release, on the other hand, is probably closer to a zen vibed "let it go", practicing a realization that you can let it go and doing so on a regular basis.

Anyone here done a Holotropic or Rebirthing session and felt genuinely better afterward — and if so, did it hold past a day, or was it more of a peak-state thing that faded? Or on the other hand, have you tried a meditative practice on a daily basis and found that to work? My own suspicion is that a daily meditative practice sustained over a long period of time would work much better than a charged emotional release for "true" catharsis.

Study link - https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2002-13494-002

reddit.com
u/dviolite — 15 days ago