question to the void: does anyone know much about breathing practices/breath holds for stress/anxiety management? most of the techniques I know focus on breathing itself- breath rate control, nasal breathing as a mental point of focus, etc.
these are really helpful, as it's one of a couple of places you can hook into your autonomous nervous system
but freedivers put a lot of emphasis on stress/arousal control during a breath hold, and that seems really interesting as well.
Follow
I've been doing 2-2:30 breath holds lately- just focusing on arousal control, not doing deliberate CO2 tolerance training (no apnea tables) and I'm getting better at relaxing deliberately, without the breathing cue
subjectively it feels like a relaxation of tension, something moving downward from my solar plexus to my diaphragm