Notes on arousal breathing

I’m aware of a number of different breathing techniques that have the effect of increasing physiological arousal, such that I’m not actually sure which I should use.

Namely

• Bellows breathing (a variation of Breath of Fire)
• Hyperventilating
• Inhale for a 6-count, exhale for a 2 count
• Breathwrk’s “Awaken” pattern (which is hyperventilating, alternating with a breath hold)
• 4 sniffs, exhale
• Tony Robbins’ 1-4-2 breathing 

As I was walking today, I thought up some measures for comparing them. And more importantly, I realized that I have different use cases, and different desiderata for each one.

Gap jumping

When I’m slow or sluggish or unfocused or tired or otherwise low energy, I may want a way to immediately spike my arousal as a boost to get over the activation energy gap, of getting going and getting momentum.

The key criteria for this is that it’s as easy as possible to do. It needs to be close to effortless, like a keyboard short-cut, to be effective at bridging low energy and high energy states. That rules out anything that entails standing up or using my body, anything that requires my phone, or anything that uses complex counts.

My current best guess is that the thing to do here is simple hyperventilation. 

Energizing before exercise
Sometimes, when I go to strength train, I’m low energy and “don’t feel like it.” In this situation, I want to use an arousal breathing pattern to boot up into a high energy high exertion rhythm.

I think the criteria that I want to use here is “which pattern maximizes cellular oxygen absorption?” (which may or may not correlate with measured blood oxygen), or possibly “which pattern spikes adrenaline the highest?

I want to do some scholarship here to better understand what leads to cellular oxygen absorption (I hear that it’s gated by CO2 or something?), and then (if the scholarship bears this out at all) experiment with a blood oxygen monitor and see if there’s a noticeable effect from any of the above breathing patterns. I’d also like to do similar experimentationto check for impact on adrenaline, but that seems harder to do.

My current best guess for the thing that improves oxygen intake the most is Breakwrk’s awaken pattern, so I’m going to make that my default. But if I find that it doesn’t work well enough, I’ll switch back to bellows breathing.

Amping up arousal to compensate for sleep deficit 

Sometimes I slept badly. I’ll plan to nap later in the day, but I don’t want to sleep in because that will disrupt my sleep schedule. I want to get momentum on work, boosting my arousal (which is known to partially compensate for deficiencies due to lack of sleep).

This one seems like it has the most ambiguity about which pattern is best. Bellows breathing seems like the most natural choice.

…

Additionally, I want to try doing most of these for a full two minutes just to check which ones I’m able to keep up for that long, and for which ones I run out of breath (or some equivalent “can’t keep it up”. Possibly the most important factor is “which of these will I be able to maintain for several minutes at a time.”