the wim hof breathing method. There is so much confusion online about it.
In: Biology
It’s still under investigation, but scientifically, it’s [currently known](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4034215/) that if you breathe quickly in ways that activate your body’s stress systems, you can get your body to postpone some of the things it would normally do to respond to illness. A lot of “feeling ill” is your body’s process of fighting illness, so by intentional and frequent hyperventilation, like a controlled panic attack, you can make your body feel like it has more important things to deal with than being ill.
There may be more to it than that, because what I called the “stress system”; the sympathetic nervous system, and the hormones adrenaline and cortisol, which are raised by this method, might not be the only thing involved in stress:
There’s also a hormone that’s recently been discovered to have an [influence](https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/09/hormone-secreted-bones-may-help-us-escape-danger) on the stress response called osteocalcin, and natural stress seems to raise it, but as far as I’m aware Wim Hof’s techniques haven’t been tested against that.
It’s also possible that intentionally stressing yourself out biologically in a controlled way, while actually being relatively calm and controlled about it, means that it operates in a different way to normal stress, but “controlled panic attack meditation” strikes me as a pretty reasonable eli5.
It’s confusing because we’re still studying it.
It wasn’t created by a scientific researcher who was looking for ways to help people resist disease. It was created by a person who does daredevil feats involving swimming in ice water who wants to make money selling exercise courses.
Medical science looked at it and decided to study it because why the heck not? They already determined it seems to help the body resist cold, and it generally helps people swim in ice water (except the practitioners who drowned.)
But to sell his courses, Hof also claims it can treat diseases like Parkinson’s and even cure cancer. These are complicated illnesses and our known treatments take years. So to give Wim Hof a fair shake, we have to study the technique’s impact for years. However, the papers I’m seeing about the smaller effects were published in 2017, so there really hasn’t been a reasonable amount of time to figure out if Wim Hof has greater impact.
And like many similar situations, even if the research concludes in a few years the claims are baseless, it’s likely people who make money selling Wim Hof courses will insist the research made some kind of mistake, the people being studied didn’t do it correctly, etc. In the worst cases, people might argue science was worried it’s wrong about immunology and falsified the study, etc.
That part works because it turns out if you stick with just about *any* disciplined exercise regimen you’ll see health benefits. Going from “no exercise” to “some exercise” is a big deal for your body, and after a few months you’re going to feel a lot different no matter what methods you adopt. More people are in bad shape than great shape, so it helps exercise programs “hook” people. When they hear their regimen can’t do some of the outlandish things it claims, they think about how much they’ve improved (because they’re exercising) and assume the study is wrong.
But if we took someone else who is already a pretty dang good swimmer like Michael Phelps and asked him to start using Wim Hof, it’s likely he wouldn’t notice much of a perceptible difference and definitely not the kind of improvement the average person might have.
So some people make wild claims about it without evidence. They do so because they make money (at least indirectly) or gain power from promoting it. Other people say it’s hogwash because they’re biased against the idea a breathing exercise can impact your body. Somewhere in between is the truth: it affects the body in a measurable way, but we haven’t finished studying the impacts of those effects so the only thing we know for sure is it helps your body resist cold short-term and also has a short-term effect on your immune system.
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