37 days into quitting smoking and breathing exercises have been a huge help for the craving spikes. a simple terminal tool for paced breathing actually makes a lot of sense - when the craving hits at 3pm and youre staring at a screen anyway, having it right there in the terminal is way less friction than pulling out a phone app. starred.
I've long wondered if a big unsung part of smoking is the way it gets normally high-strung, fast moving and shallow breathers to slow down and inhale deeply for 3-5 mins at a time. They might not get that kind of air any other way
Very nice. I have no heart issues but have been experimenting with extended breathing/longer exhales to calm down my sympathetic nervous system. I believe intentional breathing is a big, mostly underutilized tool all of us have to be generally more relaxed and healthier and also to calm ourselves down in stressful situations
I love the zero dependency implementation. I do this style of breathing during specific time periods of practicing Qi Gong. I will try your script when I get to my laptop. Thanks.
This is cool, I have SVT and usually am able to stop an episode if I do slow breathing like that; although sometimes if that doesn’t work the modified reverse valsalva manoeuvre does it every time.
I've been running this a bit with a Polar chest strap heart monitor. I'm thinking about forking it to add some audio cues so that I can have it running in the background while I work and try to keep my heart variability up. I find that I tense up when I'm intent on the work which leads to a lot of problems. I'm hoping having something like this app that uses audio cues for breathing but only comes on when my heart variability drops into the red could get me into a continuous state of low sympathetic nervous system activation while working, which is very much not the norm for me for historical reasons.
The author of this tool eventually created a heart rate monitoring hardware product and an app to go with it to do HRV training. I think `every-breath-you-take` may have been an early prototype that he generously open sourced(?)
Nice work on the zero-dependency approach. I'm building a similar tool for Windows (voice-to-text) and the "no account, just run" philosophy resonates — friction kills daily habits.