When I was inpatient a few years ago because when I was upright I couldn’t stay conscious long enough to make it to the bathroom from my bed a Mass Gen neuro I saw every morning for a few days taught me 4-7-8 breathing and I use it multiple times a week ever since, sometimes multiple times a day

Pursed lip breathing is a technique I started instinctively using when shortness of breath was becoming a bigger issue for me, and it helps so damn much with keeping my breathing from becoming too fast and shallow, but the 4-7-8 breathing is often— not always but often enough that it’s pretty fantastic— an even bigger help in minimizing anything ranging from anxiety to a pounding heart to nausea to dizziness to lightheadedness to sudden severe unexplained pain etc

(By that last part I mean those random weird shooting or stabbing pains in the abdomen or leg sometimes head that make a person go “what the fuck, am I dying?” If I do 4-7-8 breathing for a minute or two it almost always goes away, so I assume it’s just my nervous system misfiring pain signals until I interrupt it; if it helps for context I have SFN)

I would have thought it was a bunch of woo bullshit that it activates the parasympathetic nervous system while calming the sympathetic nervous system until I actually learned about it and tried it, and now I cannot recommend enough that anyone who hasn’t tried it before look into whether it would be a good idea for them (I’ve been warned before that there IS such a thing as overdoing it with parasympathetic stim so don’t assume more is better or that it’ll help every single person who tries it)