Analysis of Howard Cooper air hunger videos

Howard Cooper has two videos about anxiety-based air hunger and how to overcome it. I think the first video is great (although it doesn’t mention all the details I consider essential), but the second video is pretty misleading (although it tries quite hard to fill in the details missing from the first video in a way that is not scary to non-technical people). On this page, I will analyze both videos and explain exactly what I think the videos get right and wrong.

This page started out as a subsection in my air hunger document. You can read the document here.

honestly this section might be way too much detail for most readers. i’m only very passionate about this topic because it took me so long to understand what was going on.

Short summary

What does Howard Cooper’s explanation get wrong?

• In the initial video, he doesn’t give any mechanism for why people with air hunger are more sensitive to CO₂ buildup. He just says that it’s like people who are sensitive to alcohol, which gives a suggestive analogy but doesn’t explain why CO₂ tolerance works like that. Why does your level of CO₂ affect how sensitive you are to buildup of CO₂? It’s completely mysterious.
• In the second video, he tries to give an explanation in terms of the bicarbonate buffer model. The problem is, in his analogy with the water levels, everything is on an additive scale. The inferred version of the Henderson-Hasselbalch equation becomes $-pH=-pC{O}_2+\left[HC{O}_3^{-}\right]$ ($\text{water level}=-\text{water leaving}+\text{water entering}$). A healthy person and a chronic overbreather will both have the same buildup of CO₂ when they hold their breath. So why does the chronic overbreather have a lower Control Pause? His model can’t explain this. You need to look at the real Henderson-Hasselbalch equation, with the log and fraction, to understand this.

Video 1

video 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XliOGg8Tl98

(why am i making such a big deal out of his videos? it’s because it’s the first resource that really made things click for me. it’s what got me to start doing breath pauses and nasal breathing. but it wasn’t sufficient because it got the theory a bit wrong and also didn’t have a good solution other than “do some breath pauses” which i now think are not the most effective way to cure air hunger. so, i want to take the good stuff from this video while also correcting the stuff it got wrong.)

Here’s the sequence/flow of the first video as I see it, with the fluff and humor removed. My commentary is in [square brackets].

• this video is about air hunger and anxiety
• cooper personally had air hunger, and it was real bad
• but people told cooper to do breathing exercises: this just made it worse! being conscious of his breathing made it worse.
• there is a physical cause of air hunger; it’s not in your head.
• caveat: but make sure you get checked out by a doctor. the rest of this video assumes you have nothing obviously medically wrong.
• carbon dioxide: cells take in oxygen and release CO₂. when CO₂ builds up, you get an urge to breathe.
• anxiety -> overbreathing. “take deep breaths”.
• if you have overbreathing for a long time, your CO₂ levels go down. your body makes adjustments to the low levels of CO₂, and one of these is to become very sensitive to any increase in CO₂ [this is WRONG. it’s the low level itself that makes you sensitive (because a lower baseline CO₂ means your pH changes more quickly in response to additional CO₂ buildup), not due to any adjustment, as far as i know.]
• alcohol tolerance analogy.
• so what’s the cure? gradually expose yourself to more and more CO₂, so your body gets used to it.
• “take a deep breath”: the worst advice you can give.
• Strategies for dealing with air hunger:
  1. Sit with the feeling of air hunger, and do shallow breathing.
  2. Breathe through your nose. You can even tape your mouth. Shoutout to Buteyko method.
  3. control pause test introduced. [unfortunately, he doesn’t explain it very well. in particular, he doesn’t mention that you shouldn’t breathe any differently AFTER the test is completed. lol and he even does it wrong in the video by doing an audible inhale after the test!!!] control pause as a marker of your CO₂ tolerance.
  4. reduced breathing exercise: you want a manageable amount of air hunger for “a period of time”. halve your CP, then do a breath hold for that many seconds, take in some normal breaths, repeat. [i think buteyko people distinguish between reduced breathing and breath holds, and this is a breath hold exercise.] 20 second CP as a marker of normal. exercise while reduced breathing is mentioned. anxiety also improves as CP increases.
  5. avoid ruminating. tell yourself that mild air hunger is ok.

Video 2

video 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RLMjvDYJL6Q

sequence/flow of the video:

• this video is about air hunger.
• check with doctor first.
• CO₂ isn’t all bad – but doesn’t elaborate.
• urge to breathe comes from increase in CO₂.
• The “sciencey bit”:
  • pH of blood is very important. so important that body will prioritize keeping pH in a certain range over keeping you comfortable with your breathing.
  • CO₂ causes blood to become acidic -> carbonic acid. the big reason your body breathes is to regulate pH.
  • water tank is analogy for pH level (it’s actually the “strength of acid” or $-pH$). water flowing out is CO₂ being breathed out; 1 tap means normal breathing; 2 taps means you’re overbreathing.
  • [he then says a confusing thing.] he says the water coming from the sink is “a bunch of systems the body has in place to maintain equilibrium”.
    • [i think this is wrong. what’s going on instead is that your body produces more CO₂ as part of normal metabolic functioning. so that should be what the sink water represents. if you overbreathe, the second tap in the tank opens. water level (acidity) starts to go down. water pitcher = bicarbonate buffer (makes blood more acidic). actually this is the other confusing thing in this analogy. it’s not that more bicarbonate is being dumped into the body to make it more acidic – that would be the opposite, since bicarbonate is alkaline. instead, the body is getting rid of more bicarbonate in the urine, so as to make it less alkaline, aka more acidic. the water level analogy is just too primitive to be able to get all the signs right and i haven’t even begun to critique the additive nature of it… But then he shows that if you turn the second tap off, then water level goes up (because the pitcher water is still coming in, as kidneys take time to adjust) = your blood gets more acidic, aka you get air hunger.]
  • and THEN he says, after all that, “in other words, your body becomes hypersensitive to any increase in CO₂”.
    • [this is the part that is most wrong about this video, although i’m still a bit confused about this. it’s true that if the overbreather holds their breath, their water level increases faster than the normal breather’s because the pitcher is pouring in extra water. but i think this is not what’s happening. the other incorrect interpretation i had was that the inflow and outflow are the same, it’s just the bicarbonate levels being different, so both the overbreather and normal breather should have equivalent buildup of CO₂ in the same amount of time, which wouldn’t explain why the overbreather is more sensitive to that same amount of CO₂ buildup. hmm so actually the water analogy may be more correct that i thought – the chronic overbreather has to overbreathe to maintain the pH, which means more bicarbonate has to be leaving; the bicarbonate isn’t just a static thing, it’s also the rate that matters. BUT the bicarbonate levels are essentially static wrt a single breath. so i’m confused. the water analogy is wrong because it shows everything on a similar timescale and on the same additive scale. chronic overbreathing seems to change the bicarbonate levels to a certain extent, but then the bicarb level settles after a while. why? ok maybe what’s going on is that each style of breathing has an “equilibrium CO₂” level that i goes to. so my old breathing style would go to 25–30mmHg, but breathing in this style forever wouldn’t actually lower CO₂ more and more, it just asymptotes for some reason. if that’s the case, then if you breathe like a normal person or you hold your breath, then it’s still not because of the bicarbonate level that you get air hunger more easily; it’s still because of the CO₂ levels. so the howard cooper video is still wrong.]
• need to gradually increase CO₂ levels.
• anxiety cycle – being hyperfixated on breathing. anxiety causes you to overbreathe, and you maintain your air hunger, and the air hunger makes you more worried about breathing. so there’s a vicious cycle. so need to treat both breathing and anxiety.

See also

• perspectives on focusing on the breath