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.
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