Perspectives on focusing on the breath
Warning: I’ve barely ever meditated in my entire life (I’ve maybe done like 10-100 hours total of focusing on my breath over my whole life, mostly during anxiety attacks where I am too anxious to actually do anything like what meditation books tell you to do), so everything I say below is just my own naive observations.
Over the course of the last few years, I’ve encountered and adopted a few different perspectives on focusing on one’s breath (the kind of thing you do in some forms of meditation). Here I’ll list these perspectives and comment on them.
- Initial/default perspective (until maybe as late as 2021 or 2022): Paying attention to the breath is boring. Maybe it has some positive effects on the body and can calm you down. But I clearly have too much ADHD or whatever to do this for more than 5–10 minutes at a time. And whenever I try to do square breathing or 4-7-8 breathing or whatever, it sure seems to dysregulate my breathing, although when I use an HRV monitor I can get nice sine waves. Meditators must have no ADHD or have high conscientiousness or a strong belief that focusing on the breath is useful, or something like that that allows them to keep doing this for hours and hours.
- “Focusing on the breath as training for the attention span” perspective (until mid-2023): The idea here is to admit that “yes, focusing on the breath is boring for everyone, and that’s the point”. By paying attention to the most boring thing ever, you gradually improve your mind’s ability to pay attention to boring things. You can draw analogies with physical exercise: by deliberately doing things that are hard for your body, you signal to your body to build more muscle or increase bone strength or whatever. Andy Matuschak’s “Dullness and distraction in creative work may arise from the same causes as in meditation” has a pretty good description of this.
- “Breathing is really interesting and I could study it for hours and
hours” (mid-2023 to ???): Maybe the right way to think about breath
meditation is instead to figure out what is so interesting about
something so simple-seeming as breathing, that you keep focusing on it
(out of pure curiosity) for hours. Here
is an example of this: I had a naive model of breathing, and it turned
out to be wrong. This is now an interesting puzzle for me to
investigate. Further, there’s quite a few “knobs” to play around with
when it comes to breathing: nose vs mouth, the speed/intensity of both
inhales and exhales, the amounts of time for each, any
pauses/breath-holds, jagged vs smooth, breathing consciously vs trying
to “automatically” breathe while watching the breath, plugging up one
nostril at a time, whether to move the diaphragm vs the upper
chest/intercostal muscles, action of turbinates or mucus production,
etc. That’s a lot of combinations of things to try, enough to keep one
busy for quite some time! Some of these things will, in my experience,
produce quite noticeable changes within a few seconds to minutes (and if
you hook yourself up to an HRV monitor, you know that you aren’t just
imagining it). Of course, I don’t think I’d be so interested in
breathing if I didn’t have persistent shortness of breath, so there’s
the “trying to solve a genuine problem I have” aspect as well, which
makes it more motivating to play around with breathing.
- At times, this turns into “I wish I could stop obsessing over my breath. I just want to stop thinking about it.” I find that I have to go through periods where I focus too much on the breath, until finally my mind gets bored of it and can chill out and just let the breathing happen on its own.
- (most of January 2024) Building on (3), getting access to a capnometer supercharges curiosity… now here is a device that can actually show me, objectively, what is going on with my breath: the quality of my inhales/exhales generally, whether I have aborted breaths, whether my breaths are jagged or smooth. Imagine what introspection would look like if you were hooked up to an advanced lie detector that pointed out all the convenient stories you tell yourself! That is what it feels like to breathe while hooked up to a capnometer (at least, for someone who has been suffering from shortness of breath for many years). (I realize that analogizing the capnometer to a device that does not even exist may be the opposite of useful. I’ll try to think of a better analogy at some point.)
- (late January 2024 to ???) I am sick of paying attention to my breath. I just want to breathe like a normal person and not have to think about it all the time. I want to stop thinking about breathing, but I can’t.
- (at some point in the future, definitely not yet today): completely automatic perfect breathing. all of the consciously-executed techniques have percolated down into the domain of subconscious habits. everything is perfect, i have no shortness of breath. i lose the ability to explain breathing to people.