I've recently been trying out box breathing, and because I have already noticed a few benefits I thought I would share them with the stacker community.

Box breathing is something I have heard of on and off, but never really took the time to practice until now. It's quite the simple protocol that requires one to create a box with their breath meaning, inhaling for a certain number of seconds, holding the breath for the same number of seconds, exhaling again for the same time, and holding your breath again for the same time after the exhale. The count I've been working with has been 5 seconds, so a 5 second inhale, 5 second breath hold, 5 second exhale, and 5 second breath hold. I don't necessarily do it for a specific amount of time, I just do a few every so often throughout the day, and always make sure to do a few rounds right before I go to sleep.

Initially, box breathing I could tell would activate my sympathetic nervous system, because at first it's a bit uncomfortable. I would feel slightly out of it after doing a few breaths, and my extremities would start getting cold. This experience was quite similar to what I experienced when doing the Wim Hof Method the first few times of my body getting cold. However, although my extremities do still get slightly cold post box breathing, I no longer experience feeling out of it, and quite the opposite, my mental clarity has improved.

The biggest difference and benefit I have experienced though has been with my breathing during sleep. Now obviously I can't consciously tell how exactly I'm breathing during the night, but I can tell if I was breathing efficiently during sleep based off how I'm breathing the moment I wake up as well as through the metrics on my Whoop. I've always been a notorious mouth breather during sleep even though I'm very careful to nasal breathe as much as possible during the day. I would wake up with my pillow being pretty wet from my mouth being open the whole night. I played around with mouth taping but it just never felt comfortable to me so I would try it on and off but never be consistent with it, and even when I would keep it on regularly for a while, I felt it never really solved the problem of mouth breathing during sleep, because as soon as I went back to sleeping without mouth tape I would mouth breathe.

But I may have finally found the solution to my mouth breathing habit! Still early days, but I have noticed, one my pillow is less soaked, and two I wake up and am easily able to breathe through my nose, whereas in the past, I would wake up and have a much more stuffy nose and it would take a bit of time until I'm able to efficiently breathe through my nose.

Basically, box breathing has helped with teaching my body to breathe correctly during hours in which I cannot consciously control or keep track of my breathing.

I'm honestly so hyped that my nocturnal mouth breathing days may soon be completely behind me! So if you are like me and tend to mouth breathe during sleeping hours, give box breathing a try!