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Your words are my food, your breath my wine

I’ve been doing it all my life as far as I know; I think I’m pretty good at it, actually. I admit that in contests at primary school, I seldom gained notoriety with it or anything, but as I aged, the competition dwindled and had I not done the same, I’m fairly certain I would have surfaced from my unconscious stint on the ground as a winner.

Breath-holding eventually went out of fashion, though, so I suppose it would only have been a pyrrhic victory had I snatched a prize from a non-participating group of worried onlookers. Still, a triumph is a triumph, even if I had to wait till I was well past puberty to capitalize on it.

I only mention this trifling jejuneness because I was reminded of the questionable value of breathwork by an essay[i] into which I was rabbit-holed by a photograph of a man lying in an ice-bath and (presumably) holding his breath -or praying for someone to lift him out; it wasn’t immediately  obvious. I suspect the image is copyrighted though, so I’m depending on your imagination to re-create it.

The essay disputes the value of many of the claims of the professional breathers apparently widely distributed on social media; they were clearly not the crowd that populate my media bubble so I was intrigued. The question asked in the article was whether we really need breathwork gurus to tell us how to breathe. The author, Oriana Walker, a medical historian with a PhD in the history of Science from Harvard, discusses the influence of Wim Hof (I’d never heard of him either) on breathwork: ‘Appearing in bamboo forests or near freezing rivers, these ‘breathfluencers’ make big promises, claiming that intentional breathing grants access to the ‘control panel’ of the body and mind, which modulates the immune system, releases tension, improves focus, balances emotions, heals trauma and awakens our inner vitality. According to Wim Hof, one of the world’s best-known breathing teachers, learning to intentionally inhale and exhale can allow us to ‘control the life force’ and make us ‘the alchemist of life itself’.

I wonder if my childhood exploits along those lines were what ultimately allowed me to make it through university (alas not Harvard, however). Anyway, likely the mere fact that I was able to breathe at all -whether or not at a championship level- might have had some influence on my actually finishing school; my overweening pride at finally (okay, once) winning a post-pubescent breath holding contest and then retiring as a one-time champion, may only have cinched it for me. But I digress (I sometimes wonder if  the brief periods of youthful anoxia have influenced these irrepressible tangents). Food for thought, I suppose…

At any rate, hyperventilating was part of the stuff I did as a prepubescent acolyte of nobody in particular (it was 1950ies Winnipeg, eh?). The rules, as they were explained to me at the time, were that you keep taking deep breaths until you were dizzy, then hold your breath and be rapidly spun around by your ‘friends’.

What seemed to bother Walker, however, was a variation on a similar theme: she claimed there ‘was [a] long history of research showing that overbreathing could be dangerous or even deadly when paired with water immersion by creating the conditions for shallow-water blackout, sometimes called underwater hypoxic blackout.’ Apart from the family garden hose in my halcyon prairie summers, there was little danger of being immersed in water in my backyard, though.

The three pillars’ of the special Wim Hof Method of breathing, as I understand them, are : #1.(hyperventilation 30–40 times then holding the breath voluntarily at low lung volume); #2. cold exposure (often in ice baths); and finally, #3: ‘commitment’. Walker felt it would be ‘easy to understand why some people are tempted to use breathing techniques to make long breath-holds in water…  The risk emerges because breathing too much, paradoxically, does not get more oxygen to the body, brain and tissues. It does exactly the opposite.’

‘Hyperventilation causes another strange effect… In some cases, a hyperventilating person would temporarily lose the desire or impulse to breathe… One answer was carbon dioxide: the key that unlocks the release of oxygen to tissues and serves as an important breathing trigger.’ Apparently, ‘Large inhalations and exhalations blow off precious carbon dioxide, making it hard or impossible for the body to use oxygen, while meddling with the very drive to breathe itself.’

And further, ‘In Hof’s method, there’s the additional matter of cold, which can intensify such dangerous effects by negatively impacting the heart. Mike Tipton, a veteran physiologist specialising in the body’s response to cold water, told The Times that the synergistic effect of hyperventilation and cold exposure is ‘an incredible way’ of causing arrhythmia (an abnormal or irregular heart rhythm) in healthy people.’

In what was no doubt meant as an apologia for us regular breathers, and a caveat to those tempted to stray from the well-respired path, Walker goes on to say that ‘breathing is an intimate reflection of your own body, mind, metabolism and emotional state… Paying attention to your own form of breathing is the safest way to respect the tight synergy between breath and all that it governs in the body. If you want to maximise the benefits, you might start by thinking about how simple, calming practices such as box breathing or timed breathing could be tailored for you based on an understanding of your habitual breathing patterns. Likewise, an understanding of your own breathing might lead you to take up gentle breathing practices intended to reflect the way you want to breathe on a regular basis. Such practices might help you dial physiological stress down rather than up.’

I should stop reading stuff like this. I thought I’d put my youthful competitive hyperventilatory ambitions to rest; like the famous biblical King James version of 1 Corinthians 13:11 that was drummed into me in the Winnipeg United Church Sunday School when I misbehaved (I swore at the teacher once): When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.

Perhaps, though, an octogenarian like me has permission to play with his childhood memories every once in a while. After all, I survived childhood without ever hearing of Wim Hof; he wasn’t even born until 1959, so it’s no wonder our bathroom collection of Readers Digests were not big on breathing stuff. I mean, we all breathe, eh? What’s to write about…?

[i] https://psyche.co/ideas/do-we-really-need-breathwork-gurus-to-tell-us-how-to-breathe

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