Edit: if you are going to do this by yourself, please do let us know in this thread how it went for you! I hate to be an anecdotal n = 1 'experiment'.

Note: this technique has some risks. Especially when you practice by yourself. The biggest one is that scientifically speaking, experts are a bit unfamiliar with it. I can only offer anecdotal experience. There are some articles written about it [1], but I wonder if they go into the risks of the technique (I don't think so, I was one of the people in the experiment).

Yea, it's exactly as described there. The tinnitus will be temporarily gone in step 3 (when you hold your breath). Or at least, that is the case with me. It'll come back after you took your breath in step 4. So it's a temporary relieve, unfortunately.

In any case, there are a couple of checks you can do to see whether step 3 is working as intended.

1) You are capable of holding your breath for more than 1 minute and 30 seconds. Note: if you go over 2 minutes, you might want to have someone by your side who can shake you a bit. I sometimes faint around 2 minutes and 10 seconds, I wake up without assistance as well though, but better close of small risks. Shaking works quite well (there was one case where I saw it almost fail, the person was unconscious for 3 minutes and then got to consciousness after 3 minutes of being shaked, normally it takes about 10 to 20 seconds, except for this one case).

This is a hard requirement.

2) You feel a tingling sensation in your hands, feet or body. This is not only my experience, it's almost everyone's experience who did this. So this is a semi-hard requirement.

3) After doing this for 2 rounds, it is my experience that my body naturally understands how this type of breathing works. I naturally get into a flow of things. In a sense, I can only describe it is "my body is breathing like my life is depending on it". It's a very rare sensation, and definitely not similar to swimming under water and almost running out of air.

This is not a hard requirement at all.

[1] https://www.pnas.org/content/111/20/7379

> Note: this technique has some risks. Especially when you practice by yourself. The biggest one is that scientifically speaking, experts are a bit unfamiliar with it. I can only offer anecdotal experience.

I will also offer an anecdotal experience. I went to a "breathwork" seminar once that involved doing a form of hyperventilation (but without the breath holding part which is what Wim Hof also incorporates I believe?). I've always been a severe skeptic about this sort of spirituality woo woo, but of 10 people in the room, a significant number experienced what could only be described as full on psychedelic experiences, and my experience was similar enough that I don't doubt for a second that what they were saying was true, it was an eye opening experience to say the least.

That said, after the session was over, the instructor quietly mentioned that during the process, I had gone into some sort of a mini-seizure, and for over a month after that I had pretty severe and constant migraine headaches, as well as significantly elevated blood pressure.

I never bothered to research it afterwords, and I certainly will not be engaging in that practice again (as much as I would like to), but has anyone else ever heard of such a possibility for some minority of people?

I went once to a session like this out of curiosity. I had cramps. A friend who’s just finished Uni being a GP told what is going on:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Respiratory_alkalosis Is the medical term.

Note this is not the “excess of oxygen” that you feel the effects of - but the lack of CO2. Human body keeps the Ph of the blood in a really tight band - and if it swings outside of it one or the other direction - “bad” things happen. (The opposite condition is called acidosis)

Note that this exact thing also happens during the panic attacks; so my running theory is that the “gurus” create a positive feedback loop in the weaker people that are in need of support.

Maybe there is some self-impact by the placebo effect; but most usually these “sessions” are just a brilliantly evil way to earn money by getting people high on thin air! (There is no legislation that prohibits deep breathing while with drugs of course there is).

Again, the feedback from a person who actually finished a uni to become a doctor: do not do this. If you are looking for spirituality, try meditation instead.

Hope this helps.

Okay, so this tinnitus thing is an informal experiment that I'm organizing for people who are interested. Which is a thing that is perhaps worthy of discussion.

But I feel you're mixing too much new age stuff with hard science. Let's get some facts here and see where we agree and perhaps diverge.

Fact 1: the WHM gets you high on adrenaline [1]. It's actually higher than peak adrenaline during bungee jumping. In [1] it is also stated how the WHM is different than hyperventilation (neurobiologically at least).

Fact 2: The alkalosis thing is correct [2]. The doctors that I talked to (Radboud Nijmegen, The Netherlands) said that it was seemingly fine since every other indicator was fine. According to my conversation with them alkalosis happens when a person is dead, for example, but if it's the only thing that's negative, then it's probably fine. These doctors were also the authors of [1] as I was one of the research subjects.

I can see the medical community disagreeing about something like this (and again, I'm not a doctor, so if one wants to be on the safe side, assume it's bad, safety first).

> If you are looking for spirituality, try meditation instead.

I agree. The WHM is not something to be done on a whim.

[1] https://www.pnas.org/content/111/20/7379 -- quote: Epinephrine levels in trained individuals were even higher than those reported in a recent study in which acute stress elicited by a bungee jump was found to suppress cytokine production by leukocytes ex vivo stimulated with LPS (13).

[2] same paper -- quote: and an increase in pH (reaching up to 7.75 in individual subjects; Fig. 2 and Movie S2), indicating acute respiratory alkalosis, which normalized quickly after cessation of the breathing techniques.

Ah, my comment was only my experience/opinion about the “spirituality by a half an hour long hyperventilation”, not WHM. Sorry for not making the context clearer.

As for WHM itself, and experimenting with it - why not, if going into it carefully and with clear conscience...

On the experimentation topic - I am curious - did you also try the link posted elsewhere in this discussion - https://github.com/generalfuzz/acrn ?

Thank you for the link to the paper, very interesting!

> It's interesting how differently we all think about the world.

Absolutely. I am convinced that difference in the approach also affects the view of spirituality as well.

> I saw absolutely no sign of this being true in my session. Everyone enjoyed themselves immensely and there was a strong sense of bonding and peace...

The group I was in was a mix - probably 40% of people who definitely were going through a tricky time in their life (if wearing a T-shirt with “nobody loves me” may be any indication of that). And most of the remaining ones were the happy looking bunch.

The debrief felt okay and fine, but one of the participants explained he needed help during the exercise and he wasn’t given it, and the “teacher” had a kinda uncomfortable interaction with that person at that point.

> Did you get any results out of your session? Characterizing this as a scam or a placebo effect makes me think it didn't work for you?

With my “effects” of the hyperventilation being the cramps, and the “funny” moment during the debrief, I didn’t get any enlightenment :-)

I won’t really call it a scam - since most if not all of our perception of the world is defined by the brain chemistry, much like with drugs, I can see how this may have some effects - especially with some preconditioning. If it helps someone - why not. Placebo is a powerful mechanism.

> I don't see how being a GP would equip someone in any way for having superior insight on such topics, unless they are speaking only to the qualitative medical risk aspect?

Yeah, precisely. The feedback was basically “there is no conclusive research that this is good for you. Meditation does have such research”.

As for spirituality: In my view no one is qualified to tell another person about it in an assertive fashion. Any representation of a higher order system within a lower order system will be necessarily slightly different - that’s why it is everyone’s personal journey. :-)

> The group I was in was a mix - probably 40% of people who definitely were going through a tricky time in their life (if wearing a T-shirt with “nobody loves me” may be any indication of that). And most of the remaining ones were the happy looking bunch.

My session felt similar, the older people in the group seeming to be dealing with ongoing issues from past experiences, whereas the younger people while very sincere about the whole thing seeming to be mostly there more for spirituality as a lifestyle reasons. They all seemed happy and extremely supportive of each other.

> With my “effects” of the hyperventilation being the cramps, and the “funny” moment during the debrief, I didn’t get any enlightenment :-) I won’t really call it a scam - since most if not all of our perception of the world is defined by the brain chemistry, much like with drugs, I can see how this may have some effects - especially with some preconditioning. If it helps someone - why not. Placebo is a powerful mechanism.

I'm very curious, have you ever taken a significant amount of psychedelic drugs followed by sitting in a quiet dark room for several hours? My intuition suggests not.

The worst I have seen is that one person was unconscious for 3 minutes. We were doing it with medical staff and they started to get the oxygen masks. Just before the mask was on he gained consciousness. As far as we all could tell, he didn't have a single issue. This guy could go crazy long without oxygen though, more than 3 minutes and 30 seconds. He was out for almost 7 minutes.

I asked the doctors how it could be that he didn't sustain damage. They offered the following conjecture: since we're not in water, you still get some oxygen. So your oxygen count is very low, but not zero.

I also have to note that, everyone has been fine with the breathing part of the technique. I have trained 4 people myself, and have seen about 10 others being trained (with doctor supervision). The part where it gets a bit exciting is only during the holding your breath part.

I think there's a huge difference in sort of/kinda 'hyperventilating' for 30 breaths (it is slightly different [1]) and then stop breathing at all versus 'hyperventilating' for 20 minutes straight.

[1] The bulk of the WHM breathing technique looks like hyperventilating. There is one huge difference though: you breath out as you normally do. In hyperventilation you breath out as fast as possible to breath in again as fast as possible. So the WHM breathing technique, while fast on the in-breath, is on average not super fast because of a normal speed out-breath.