Never Shut Yourself Into a Wardrobe

Eglantine (on the internet, anyways). 35. She/her. I dump my thoughts here sometimes.

[eglantinewynne-baugh]

Hi hello I would like to not have hypermobile knees anymore please and thank you

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

[headspace-hotel]

I wonder WHY breathing exercises have always been such a dogshit "coping skill" for me.

It just feels so incredibly wrong to try to force my breaths to be a certain length. Usually, when I've tried them, it gives me the sense that I'm not getting enough air or I'm starting to suffocate, which slowly increases the longer I do the breathing exercises, and it's a very stressful feeling.

Last time I tried doing breathing exercises to relax, my back and torso became slowly more and more and more tense and locked up and tight until my back was very painful. It was like I was clenching down with all the muscles of my body to try to make the breaths start and end when they were supposed to.

It sucks because therapists usually think "breathing exercises" are the gold standard for anxiety coping skills, and I had one therapist tell me that it was impossible that they didn't work because scientifically, you Cannot have a fear/stress response if you're doing breathing exercises. Lady, if it was that easy no one would need therapy. Also I guess I'm some kind of alien or something.

In yoga class, I think I finally "got" some of the benefits of what breathing exercises were supposed to do from paying attention to breathing in different poses and feeling how that biological cycle affects the parts of the body that are holding the pose. That isn't trying to control the breathing though.

Also, it's engaging the whole body: trying to focus on my breathing while not doing anything else I think causes that tension to build in my muscles.

I'm just thinking like. I notice that my breaths become faster and shallower when I'm stressed or afraid, but when I try to force myself to breathe slowly, it's like my body is wrestling against me.

I think it's much easier and less pain- and panic-inducing to do breathing exercises when I'm already calm?

I kept trying to do breathing exercises for years after I knew they didn't work for me. I think I had the idea from therapy that coping skills weren't necessarily supposed to feel good or different or helpful at all, and that I had to keep doing them to "get better" which was something independent from "feeling better."

[fluffyhummel]

ive been wondering when id have my bananas arent supposed to be spicy moment but i cannot fucking believe this

what do you mean breathing exercises arent supposed to make you feel out of breath???? what???

also why the fuck did i need to be told the feel better exercise is supposed to make me. feel better? what went wrong here. genuinely asking.

jesus. what a revelation.

[texasdreamer01]

Reading everything above, I am having... several questions. Mostly about how exactly breathing techniques are taught, and also how these instructions are interpreted.

There's a few reasons why breath control is considered a gold standard in calming people down: 1) requires no additional tools or outside intervention, 2) a practice prevalent in many cultures and thus something most patients are already familiar with the idea, and 3) a solidly-proven and well-researched quickest method to regain homeostasis.

It is not supposed to make you feel worse, emotionally or physically, because it's acting directly upon your nervous system to change feedback patterns - I'm going to link as reference the following Wikipedia articles for anyone to read at their leisure:

Conscious breathing

Control of ventilation

Hyperventilation syndrome

I have no idea what anyone is telling a patient to make this literally painful for them, but you're supposed to slowly ease into a completely controlled state of breathing - not a single person is able to go from panicking to calm by ordering themselves to do so, regardless of general mental health. If that were the case then it would not be a state of panic.

Secondly, sometimes therapists are far too by the book, and I'm not sure if it's been recommending to purposefully tense your muscles from head to toe before attempting to regulate your breathing. This helps some people but does not help others; try it out and see if it helps you, because then at least you'll know.

The reason why yoga class was helping to make it click is because regulating your breathing is often done in conjunction with regulated movement, i.e. martial arts. (Yoga is a type of martial arts, for clarification.) The entire point of martial arts is to have good command over one's body, so at least a good third of it is learning exactly that before you get to any of the stereotypical martial part of martial arts.

[headspace-hotel]

See, this is more of the stuff I've always been told and never understood. I "get" the physiological basis of how it "should" work, but the way it feels in my body is distressing.

okay. pausing in typing this to sit up straight and do the breathing exercise thing for a few cycles so I can vividly describe what happens.

Breathing in deeply feels like I'm filling up my lungs too much, like I'm trying to engage the wall of my abdomen to get my breath to deepen but it feels wrong. I'm trying to feel that expansion in my stomach, but it just does not feel right. Sometimes there's a "locking up" that happens in my shoulders here.

Holding my breath is just against what my body instinctively wants to do. I feel myself tense up trying to stop from breathing out too soon, and sometimes there's this kind of locking-up feeling in my throat and it's like I almost swallow air trying to stop the exhale from happening. I keep accidentally skipping the hold breath part because the urge to exhale is too strong.

Breathing out for longer than my inhale makes me feel like I'm just trying to wheeze air out of my already airless lungs at the tail end of the breath, which also tenses up my body. It feels wrong to try to empty out all the air from my lungs to that extent, and there's kind of a "gulping" feeling or a spasm in my throat. Like I'm trying to actually flatten all the air out of my chest.

Then of course it seems like the problem is I need to exhale more slowly, but trying to control the length of my breaths more consciously makes the muscles of my back, stomach, ribs etc. lock up because I'm trying to stop it from going too fast and my whole body tenses.

Like, at every part it feels like I'm fighting and wrestling with my body against what it wants to do, and it increases more and more because it feels like I'm not even absorbing oxygen from my breath, like my brain has this panicked feeling of "not enough air" and I have this increasing, reflex-like urge to gasp that I also have to fight against.

Jesus Christ, I only did this for like 3 cycles for the purpose of this post and my neck already hurts.

[texasdreamer01]

I appreciate you taking the time to duplicate the steps you've been taught, and to describe the effects - please take care of yourself!

You're not required to do a longer exhale, if I'm being really honest - the goal is to extend the length of your inhales (and not even necessarily breathing deeply, just regularly and more smoothly).

Speaking partly from research and partly from personal experience, you can experiment a bit and see what helps you best. Some inhale-hold-exhale patterns that I've seen helping people are 7-5-4 (i.e. seven seconds inhale, five seconds hold, four seconds exhale), or 4-5-4, or similar ratios.

Personally, sometimes doing a long exhale as a start is often more helpful, because it's a good way to trick the brain, but any method works so long as you're slowly increasing how long it takes you to inhale (this is the main part of it). However long that takes you to accomplish, that's how long it takes.

If it hurts to immediately do a large inhale, then uh. Don't do that? You don't have to? If someone's telling you to, they might be more concerned with following their education than looking at the person in front of them.

One thing I would say is that you don't have to correspondingly increase how long you hold your breath with how long it takes you to inhale. A rhythm of, for example, 2-1-3 can be good to start off with, but only if you find it helpful.

Additionally, sometimes squeezing something in time with your breathing will be a better assist than counting - can be your own shirt, or pants, or someone's hand, anything at all that encourages your brain to focus on something other than your breathing (this is one of the reasons why yoga is so popular). Stress balls, fidgeting toys, necklaces, etc, are also helpful but sometimes completely overlooked by people like therapists.

[headspace-hotel]

Huh. I thought the exhale being the longest part was supposed to be what was important.

It doesn't hurt to do a large inhale, it just feels weird and wrong. The hurting comes in as I struggle more and more to breathe slowly enough and my body tenses up.

The pattern I learned was 6 seconds inhale, 7 seconds hold, 8 seconds exhale. When I learned about "box breathing" it was 4-4-4. There isn't much consistently. Box breathing feels really bad to me too though.

So, I'm hearing that people count out seconds in a certain pattern. I'm also hearing that you're supposed to slowly lengthen your breaths more and more. If that were the case, the cycles would get longer, right? So counting would only make it confusing? It seems really hard to mentally keep track of 3 different counters as they increment upwards.

I guess I'm overthinking this. But like, how do I know if I'm doing it "correctly" would be my question.

[the-shade-system]

I'm gonna be 100% real with you, breathing exercises straight up do not work for everyone, and with the descriptions you've given about how your body reacts, I doubt that they'll be helpful for you in general.

For context, hi, we're actively studying psychology, specifically because we intend to go into psychiatry. This is very much within our area of expertise.

Breathing exercises are something of an exploit in your autonomic nervous system. You're effectively attempting to forcibly tell your body that things are okay by forcing your breathing to mimic how it would be if things were okay. For a large chunk of people, doing that works just fine, because their autonomic nervous system doesn't FIGHT THEM at every step of the process.

From the descriptions you've given, I would take a guess in saying that your autonomic nervous system is more active/resistant to conscious influence than most people, which means that techniques based on effectively Forging Signals like this just. Will not work for you.

[headspace-hotel]

...hmmm

I mean yeah it does feel like my body is struggling against me the entire time...

[what-even-is-thiss]

This might not help you but in case it does, what works for me is not counting seconds but just focusing on making sure I’m not doing shallow breathing and hyperventilating. Counting stresses me out about doing it right so just slowing down for a second and making sure I’m getting proper lungfuls of air and not starving myself of oxygen is a lot more helpful for me.

When my anxiety disorders were less controlled than they are now I used to hyperventilate so much that when I took a moment to breathe properly I got dizzy from actually getting a proper amount of oxygen because my body had adapted to running on low oxygen and that also freaked me out at first.

[eglantinewynne-baugh]

So, below is my two cents, for whatever it’s worth:

1) Breathing should NOT, ever, even when you’re trying too hard to control it, be painful. If breathing is painful I really strongly recommend trying to see a medical doctor about it (if that is at all feasible for you) and *demonstrating to the doctor the thing you are doing that hurts* because asthma isn’t always wheezing (sometimes it’s just pain, and sometimes it’s only pain when you’re pushing to the edge of your normal range of activity. Breathing exercises count as activity). Allergies can also cause chronic low-level inflammation in the respiratory system (ask me how I know), or you may have had an injury at some point that your body thinks it still has to protect (physical therapy could help with that).

2) Breathing exercises are entry-level mindfulness meditation stuff. Other entry-level mindfulness exercises have equally good evidence for providing similar benefits, and may work better for you—I personally like a Body Scan guided meditation (which, while it does ask you to pay attention to your breathing, doesn’t require the counting stuff and is generally more about observing your body than controlling it).

3) If you’re aiming for a quick hacking-your-nervous system trick rather than mindfulness, doing the cold wet washcloth on your face while tilting your face up thing activates the mammalian diving response and works infuriatingly well.

But seriously if it is at all within your reach I really recommend seeking medical advice about pain with breathing exercises. Please.

[itsfelixiguess]

[tpwrtrmnky]

*cracking open your moral intuition systems* ohhh i see, there's the issue, you're running secularism on a kernel built for protestant morality.

Tricky one cause the kernel's built around creating the need for salvation from a higher power, and you'll have to change up a lot of the systems for evaluating your own and others' moral worth to avoid operating with a deficit when there's no inbuilt release valve.

You haven't been going around making up ad-hoc solutions for redeeming sinners instead of trying to patch out the notion of sin, right?

[spin-the-wheel-polls]

You have just lost use of this random kitchen item/ implement how screwed are you in terms of cooking?

https://wheelofnames.com/ry4-3s4

The wheel is completed but if you the mod want to change it at all feel free and I couldn't figure out how to get the link to work properly even un-anoned.

Thanks, have a nice day and drink some water

You have just lost use of this random kitchen item/implement!

how screwed are you in terms of cooking?

I'm not screwed at all surprisingly!

I'm fine because I never use this

It'll be annoying but I'm fine

I'M SO SCREWED. SO SCREWED.

results/other

Voting ended onAug 15

[eglantinewynne-baugh]

Anyone got any advice on getting one’s Boomer relatives to go to therapy?

[elumish]

I honestly think Gen-Z and younger simply does not understand how recent widespread smartphone adoption is.

I am not that old, and I didn't have a smartphone until probably late high school. For most of my life, many if not most people were not walking around with a magic internet machine in their pocket that they pulled out and used constantly for everything.

[sandumilfshous]

reblog if you remember having to ration your text messages and accidentally opening the internet on your phone was the end of the world

[post-to-poll-pipeline]

How old were you when you got your first smartphone?

Younger than 10

10-13

13-16

17-20

21-25

26-30

31-40

41-50

51-60

Older than 60

Never had a smartphone

Voting ended onJul 22

[bamfspock]

Happy Fucking Moon Day

[windsweptinred]

For those who've always wanted to delve into the works of Tanith Lee but have found them hard to get hold of, Humble Bundle is currently offering 26 of her novels for £13.59!

[parrishsrubberplant]

@allthefoolmine

[fanfiction-psas]

Fanfiction PSA:

[toastyglow]

see also

sheath > sheathe

[bluberimufim]

I love that opera sits in this limbo where it's extremely well-known but not really beyond a surface level recognition, so you get commercials for makeup or whatever to the tune of the I Hate Women So Much It's Unreal aria

[forthegothicheroine]

#in the first bridgerton book daphne describes her crush feelings as if her heart is playing the queen of the night aria from the magic flute#which i can totally see if you have never found out what the words mean. very high and fluttery.#but the lyrics are along the lines of THE VENGEANCE OF HELL BOILS IN MY HEART. IF YOU DON'T MURDER THAT MAN I WILL DISOWN YOU.#and i laughed so hard i had to put the book down

via @tophatandboots

[jackironsides]

oh my god??

@lymeandcoconut

#lmaooooo #my fave is that episode of white collar where neil is doing a theft #and the music they play over it is leporello's 'here's the list of all the hundreds of women my boss has fucked' aria from don giovanni #it's supposed to just sound grand and sophisticated but the guy is singing about how DG fucks tall women short women #fat women skinny women princesses and peasants he fucks them all! #and here's the numbers broken down by nationality! #he's fucked over 1000 women in spain you know!

#oh and he's singing all this to a former conquest who tracked DG down because he promised to marry her then ditched her #anyway it's a lot

[notformywings]

[eglantinewynne-baugh]

So anyway this is the I Hate Women So Much It’s Unreal aria. Not a direct translation but he gives you both the spirit of the song and its context.

[millenniallust4death]

I’m paying to force seven thousand strangers to see a photo of my late husband having fun with his dog. Tumblr Blaze is totally worth it. XD

[millenniallust4death]

Thank-you to all of my new Internet stranger friends for being so gracious about having my post shoved onto your dashboards. I loved reading all of your kind tags and comments! Both Martin and Bosco have been gone for several years now but for 24 hours, they felt very present in my life. I greatly appreciate this gift. ❤️

[psycorax]

Reblog to have your dashboard be visited by the spirit of joy that death can end but not erase.

[millenniallust4death]

Thank you to everyone who commented in their tags or messaged me. Indeed, today is “Martin and Bosco Day”. I originally whimsically blazed this photo on 13 July 2022. I never expected Martin and Bosco to travel so far and make so many new friends. The experience has been such a gift for me.

[depsidase]

[grimandghoulish]

reblog if you remember what it felt like to walk into blockbuster

[willowofthehearth]

If you’re reblogging this maybe also do a couple stretches. Gods know our back and shoulders could use it.

[lilisonna]

The aging of the Tumblr userbase does more for my stretching routine then anything else.

Thank you, my generational cousins. I will go and stretch now.

[hasdrubal-gisco]

Stealing this from twitter but I liked the concept: put in the tags where were your 8 great-grandparents from (given modern borders) ?

[this-is-trans-joy]

I didn’t realise this had to be said until I came across a reel of someone in hospital but dear GOD if you’re in London during this heatwave do not swim in the fucking Thames PLEASE do not even touch the Thames I can name like five different ways you will be violently killed just off the top of my head STAY AWAY FROM THE THAMES and for that matter stay away from lakes/rivers in general and stick to safe, supervised areas of water such as swimming pools because the heat isn’t worth the risk of drowning, strong currents, harmful microbes, cardiac arrest with no help in sight etc. etc. PLEASE stay safe in this weather, especially if you’re not used to it!!

[the-elf-witch-from-space]

I love how humans are all like "NO we polluted our water! Do not swim in nature, swim in the approved chemical containers"

[this-is-trans-joy]

The undercurrent from the Thames is so strong it will literally drown you get your annoying ass tags off my post

[this-is-trans-joy]

Also, a lot of people have misunderstood this post as me saying that all lakes and rivers are bad to swim in, as opposed to the fact that there is currently a heatwave in a country that is not used to high heat and the risk of getting into complications or having a cardiac arrest while swimming with no lifeguard around is a huge cause of heat-related deaths in the UK. Seven people have already drowned in the past week. I’m not interested in “wow people in the UK are so soft everyone should swim in lakes” tags anymore because you’re missing the point.