Episode 67: Breathing and Your Future Self

Transcript

Quite a while back on this show, and I'll link to it, I don't have the number off the top of my head, I did an episode, well the premise was kind of that I had started doing a small handful of mindfulness sorts of things.
Now I'm not, just to be clear, this isn't a main thing I do, or even a particularly focal piece to my day.
What I have found useful is a few things, as I'm going to bed at night, many days I will put in some AirPods and listen to anywhere from a 5 to a 15 minute little thing that could go through any number of things.
And I found that through, there's an app called Insight Timer that has a bunch of free stuff, and it's just kind of a, mostly just a way to kind of come down at the end of the day, I don't know, center a little bit.
So anyway, on that episode I went through a few phrases that I had stumbled into that I thought were either interesting or useful or helpful phrases to kind of keep in mind.
Things that I hadn't heard before necessarily, because, you know, mindfulness, meditation, that sort of stuff is just not an, it's just not an avenue I've gone down much in my life.
So over the last, I guess almost a year at this point, it has been interesting to go down this road just a little bit, right?
Again, this is not a thing I'm doing regularly, not that I'm disparaging people that do or really do go into this, I think that's great.
It's just not what I do often throughout the course of the day.
I thought I would do a little bit of follow-up to this, well, not a follow-up, an expansion on.
There's a couple things I've bumped into since then that I've also, again, I've found kind of useful and interesting.
And things that I've kind of kept in mind or kept as part of sort of my mental repertoire from day to day.
One has to do with breathing.
And this is another thing that I always knew that there was some kind of, I don't know what's the right word, discipline or subculture or something.
I'm not sure what the right word is, but that there were people and there was research and there was ideas around breathing and not just breath control, but mindfulness of your breathing and all that kind of stuff that then has various impacts on you psychologically, physiologically, those kind of things.
So, I thought I'd share two of these that I've kind of bumped into on the way.
One of them I use quite frequently.
The other one, I guess I haven't much, but I'm not sure that I'm doing the sorts of things where it's useful, where I, you know, need to or whatever.
So, the one that I don't use very much, well, let me start in the other direction.
The one that I have found very useful, and I'm not, and there is a name for this, this is the 4-7-8 breathing.
And, you know, ChatGPT tells me that a physician, Dr. Whale or Weill, came up with it.
I have no idea.
Anyway, 4-7-8.
So, the idea is that you breathe in while counting to four.
So, you're breathing in for a four count.
Then you hold your breath that you've just breathed in for a seven count.
And then you breathe out for an eight count.
So, the in comes in through your nose.
The hold is for a count of seven.
And then out through your mouth for eight.
This does a couple things.
It's supposed to have, this particular pattern is supposed to be a relaxation pattern, a sleep aid pattern, which I can see to some extent.
Oddly enough, one of the places that it has really helped me.
So, I have seasonal and other allergies.
Seasonal dogs, cats.
You know, I went to an allergist at some point and they were like, you should have been here ten years ago.
So, sometimes, even though I get allergy shots and I take allergy pills and all the rest of it, sometimes, you know, you're just feeling that kind of like, I don't know, histamine-y feeling in your nose.
And the more you sniffle, the more the internals of your nose get swollen.
And then it becomes harder to breathe.
Not that you're choking or anything or you're running out of breath, but just like, it's like a vicious cycle, you know.
You sniffle so you get swollen and the swollenness kind of makes you want to sniffle more and back and forth it goes.
And I've found that, particularly when I lay down at night, sometimes, I don't know, that action, I guess, maybe of all the blood kind of moving to my head or whatever.
From laying down, I think, can start that cycle sometimes.
So, anyway, I found it useful that using this kind of 4-7-8 will actually settle down any, like, nasal swelling allergy kind of stuff.
I'm not saying it fixes it completely, but sometimes if I'm having a hard time getting to sleep, because I'm sitting there, like, sniffling or something,
I do this, like, 3-4-5 times, you know, 4-in, 7-hold, 8-out.
And it's just been, it's been really great.
Also, if I'm just kind of, like, aggravated about something or whatever, you know, that 4-7-8 tends to...
It's amazing how counting while breathing, it takes your mind and assertively focuses it on breathing.
And you can't think about anything else, because your brain, like, you're thinking about counting and breathing.
And that's enough for your brain to think about.
And everything else kind of flies out of your head, at least for a few seconds, right?
And sometimes that's all it takes.
So, anyway, 4-7-8 breathing.
But that was, I found that to be really useful.
The other breathing that I bumped into but don't use is this box breathing thing,
which I guess is, like, a Marines thing or a Navy SEALs thing or something.
And so, that's, like, a 4-in, hold 4, 4-out, wait 4 kind of thing.
That's supposed to help you, I guess, get control over your breathing if you're, like, panting a lot or something or out of breath.
I haven't really used this one, but more people, I think, are familiar with the box breathing thing.
I hear a lot of people talk about box breathing.
I don't hear a lot of people talking about 4-7-8 breathing, so I thought I'd share that piece.
The other sort of mindfulness thing that I've bumped into that I thought was an interesting exercise,
and I don't have a super concrete, like, conclusion to this or piece of advice in here or anything.
So, I think it's almost a thought experiment that I'm still working out in my head of, like, what it means to me and how it might go kind of thing.
Anyway, I bumped into this through, like, some sort of mindfulness meditation, again, like, 10-minute kind of talk before going to bed kind of thing.
But I almost think it's an interesting thought experiment outside of that.
The idea goes like this.
And the meditation kind of walks you through, like, oh, you're in a room and you walk through the door.
It's always lead-up.
But once you get through all the lead-up, where it takes you is that it says, you know, you walk up to someone, you know, sitting down.
And it's your future self.
And then it kind of went through, like, what would you ask your future self?
What would your future self tell you?
And I thought this was a really – and not – what advice might your future self give you unprompted, you know?
And I thought this was a really interesting thing because so often I think we think about how our past self might have reacted to things.
But this kind of thought experiment of what if you could really meet your future self, what would they look like, what would they be doing?
This isn't like a – I don't know.
This is where it's weird because I'm trying to articulate the way I'm thinking about this.
This is different for some reason to me than, like, oh, where are you going to be in five years, right?
Like that kind of, like, dumb interview question.
This is, like, more profound than that.
It's like you walk up on yourself from 10, 20 years from now.
What do you think that person looks like?
Like, what is your image of yourself in the future at a knee-jerk level?
Because when I was going through this, I had a very concrete knee-jerk reaction of how I thought I might look and what I might be doing.
I struggled a lot more with what my future self might tell me.
But in terms of the image of, like, what I think that could be snapped to me oddly quickly.
And ever since then, I've been thinking quite a lot about based on that.
Because the image wasn't just an image.
It also brought with it certain connotations of, like, kind of what my personality might be fast forwarded.
So, using that personality or that idea of the personality as then a platform to, like, think about what I might say to myself.
That's where I've been, like, thinking, like, what would that be like?
And I've been going back to this well of just sort of thinking about this a little bit.
And I think it's been a really interesting thought experiment.
So, those are my two things that I've bumped into, again, with, like, the very minimal amount of mindfulness sort of work that I've been doing over the last year or so.
Something I've never really done before and something that I'm, you know, just doing the smallest amount of these days.
But these are sort of the two things that I've gotten out of it recently is this 4-7-8 breathing and this idea of talking to your future self and what they might look like, be like, and say back to you.
So, I encourage you to try either one of these things.
I found the breathing thing, again, to be a very practical down-to-earth sort of thing.
And I found the future self idea to just be kind of a fascinating thought experiment, if nothing else.