I've never been more conscious of my breath while computing than when I was playing Subnautica[0], which proffers a (notoriously tense) game loop significantly involving running out of air and coming up for breath. Additionally, I would take swigs of water when my character was getting thirsty. A surprisingly embodied video game.
[Spoiler Alert] Subnautica is amazing! I remember the first time I discovered the huge turtle whales - it was such a surreal feeling. The world design of the game does such a good job of offering a guided exploration that feels completely natural. The contours of Subnautica's world guide you into specific areas and every area has something new to offer - it truly feels like exploring another planet.
Moreover, the sense of fear that I felt when I saw a dangerous looking creature was quite stronger than what I have felt playing several 'horror' games.
Unfortunately, I stopped playing when progressing became too dependent on farming and building - two things that I do not like. I would love to play an exploration only version of the game.
The game actually does a pretty masterful job of tricking players and convincing them to go way, way overboard in their preparations. The submarine/mobile base and the robotic mining suit aren't even necessary to finish the game. The final levels of the game can actually be finished just by swimming freely with the seaglide. The rare material that's only available in those levels can be picked up as broken pieces laying on the sea floor, and IIRC you only need 6 pieces of it to finish the game.
When I was playing Subnautica for the first time, several years ago, I got immersed to the point that 1) I really felt like being underwater - my mind was recalling feelings from various swimming pool experiences; and 2) it changed my relationship with water. I found myself having a desire to swim, a kind of pull I don't think I experienced before.
Didn't get that when I picked up Subnautica: Below Zero a few weeks above. I'm guessing it's because I'm now used to the beautiful vistas and underwater gameplay, so the game wasn't such a full-sensory shock to me anymore.
I started playing for the first time a few days ago, and in VR. I've never really looked at any information about the game, so I pretty much went in blind. I'm having an absolute blast. Just this morning I got to watch my rescue ship get blown up, and enjoyed every second of it.
That reminds me of playing games like Gran Turismo, where I start leaning left and right depending on how I'm steering in the game. Interesting that you get a similar effect but with your breathing in Subnautica.
There's a moment early in Resident Evil 7 VR where you're up to your neck in water in a tight space. You completely fool yourself, you feel the mass of water on your chest, and you start breathing like you're in a pool.
One of the things you quickly discover when you start meditating is how deeply your breath is connected to your mind and body. You can literally detect a thought forming before it does simply by sensing subtle changes in your breathing. You'll also notice how the most trivial thoughts also have a physical manifestation in your body, e.g., mild tension in your eyelids, or a tingling in your abdomen, etc.
This reminds me of how from an early age, when driving with my dad, I could sense when he was about to say something just because he breathing changed for like 3 seconds before he started.
When playing close-up games with one of my cats, I observed that her pupils would dilate about a quarter-second before she struck. This was true 100% of the time after I knew to watch for it.
A lot of people in my life who love to meditate teel me that meditation indeed offers a unique perspective on the connection between the mind, body and breath.
So learn it. It is one of life’s greatest secrets.
What the original commenter said is correct, meditation helps you see how thoughts arise in the moment, and with practice you can get to a point where there is very little noise and instead you have a broader view of ideas and your life in general.
It is also calming, for your entire system. Learning to monitor and control your breathing consciously is a serious mental workout. If you have never sat down to practice it, you might surprise yourself as to how much is going on in your own mind and how the wheels and cogs just keep turning.
It definitely helped me fix my road rage. E.g. getting cut off in traffic would usually cause me to inhale and brace my core, it's not hard to get angry from there, but by recognizing it as primarily a physical reaction, I was able to short circuit the secondary emotional reaction.
What do people from english speaking countries (I guess mostly from US) mean when they say this?
It's such a frequent phrase, but I don't think I ever thought about it as a distinct concept, nor spoke about it as such to any of my friends, and we've all been driving for many years.
1. sit down somewhere, a relatively quiet and dark place is nice but you can do it wherever, maybe set a timer, maybe don't
2. close your eyes, pay attention to your breath
3. when thoughts appear in your mind, note them but attempt to keep your attention on your breath, not on your thoughts
4. when you notice that your thoughts have wandered away from your breath, congratulate yourself for noticing this, and go back to step 2
important: do not berate yourself for getting caught up in your thoughts, do not worry that your head is too full of thoughts to ever be able to "stop thinking" - your brain has been thinking for most of your entire waking life and disengaging from this is hard at first! it gets easier.
"the mind illuminated" is a nice book on the subject IMHO.
If you don't mind spending money, waking up has been pretty good so far, or you can try out the beginner course during the free trial to see if it fits you, I started meditation when I first watched headspace series on Netflix, it was world changing for me, remember, it's an exercise, it's not about meditating for a long period each time but gradually build up the habit of meditating, hope you enjoy the benefits and the journey of this!
ps. if you think the app is helpful, don't rush into the subscription, check out its scholarship
There are lots of meditation apps out there, but most monetize with a subscription plan before you can access any meaningful amounts of content.
Recently I found an app with a pretty large following called "Insight Timer" that has a spectacular free library. It has single-handedly helped me build a habit after only meditating once or twice in guided settings.
A lot of great answers here, and I would add the book "10% Happier" to the list. There is also a worthwhile companion app, but I prefer Insight Timer for an app.
Is it specific to screens tho? How does it compare to reading a book, writing a letter by hand, sewing, cutting vegetables for lunch, curiously disassenbling an alarm clock or any other activity that requires focus and concentration?
I don't think it's very specific to screens, but it is specific to situations where you've got incoming stressful content and especially a time deadline.
Which perfectly describes when you're trying to deal with all your e-mails before 10 am and a lot of the situations don't have easy resolutions, or you're trying to debug something that just won't work and you have no idea why and it's going to mess up the entire rest of your day if you don't get it fixed in the next 30 minutes.
So just a lot of our time-pressure stress situations happen via our screens now.
The situations you're describing seem very much the opposite of stressful.
Oh, I never considered e-mail as generally stressful. Certainly there are e-mails that can raise my blood pressure, but that usually happens after reading them. I see e-mail mostly as a letter, that I open when I see fit and answer when I can. The red dot indicating a direct message on Teams or Slack is much more stressful.
One of the main issue is sitting for extended periods of time with no physical activity whatsoever. This is one of the worst position for breathing (compared to laying down or standing up at least). Unless you're consciously reminding yourself to breathe normally you will default to shallow breathing.
Virtually nobody sits 8+ hours a day reading books, writing letter, sewing or cutting veggies
Computers are like these magic devices to get us into potentially a fight or flight response with zero physical danger. People’s heart rates rise when they get an email from work. I can’t imagine its good for the health, mating these mental responses that are designed to go along with a physical response with just sedentary behavior instead. And doing it every day all your working life no less. What does this mean in terms of the underlying chemistry, are there neuortransmitters or hormones perhaps that aren’t getting processed or turned over by the physical response when they ought to? Maybe we should experiment running to the hills when we get an email from the boss and see if that changes things.
Email apnea - was an article linked here a while ago. It's a big problem - the ridiculousness of the proposition makes it most likely less talked about...
Damn.. I wish I could feel good when jogging. At best it is excruciating, at worst one time in Bristol I could not take it anymore and started punching a tree from the frustration until I bled.
I love walking, but it does not do anything significant for my cardiovascular health :(
I used to have a really big problem with holding my breath when I played League of Legends. I'd routinely get dizzy after long teamfights and I was completely unable to communicate with my teammates over voice chat during fights/skirmishes because I couldn't make myself expel air (which is worse may depend on your point of view).
In the anime Demon Slayer, breath control (and specifically breathing while moving) is the primary method of performing spectacular feats in battle which is cool
Say that someone was measuring their own brain data at home using an EEG headset. What DIY/low-cost clinical solution might be able to provide biomarkers (AKA data that you've timestamp-synced to brain data to help a multimodal model) for breath rate/depth? Anyone familiar with the research or relevant companies, or have a wacky MacGyver proposal to get it done on the cheap? My first guesses:
1. Wearing a sticker on the chest seems right out, but a fannypack/messenger-bag like device that fits under a shirt could work. Could also be a good addition to an overall mobile-monitoring setup for EEG data -- you could even move the batteries and bluetooth components from your head/belt to the square of your back. This would obviously only work over a shirt though, which seems like it would make getting high quality breath data harder.
2. I mean... dare I just ignore the physical sciences and aim a high quality camera at myself? To what extent is a microphone in your glasses + footage of your chest rising and falling enough? Sorta doubting anyone here has experience here but you never know!
3. I vaguely know that people measure things with lasers -- this could be enough for measuring breathing while seated at a desk perhaps! And surely the most accurate by far, disregarding noise from clothing.
If I ever get to this point, I look forward to trying all these before hitting up google scholar for the boring easy answer...
For what purpose? If you just want to know your respiratory rate, respiration belts are simple and very effective. You should be able to MacGyver your own with limited electronics skills: https://www.instructables.com/Quick-and-dirty-Respiration-Se....
> To what extent is a microphone in your glasses + footage of your chest rising and falling enough?
I'm sure a skilled computer vision engineer could make this work, but I'd argue it's the wrong approach. Lasers might work as well, but I think your best bet is radar. I know there are companies making doppler radar-based systems for tracking respiratory rate. Can't dig for them at the moment but here's an article about the method: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10172641/.
By the way, heart-rate variability correlates strongly with respiratory rate. As far as I understand, this is because inhalation raises your blood pressure which increases your heart rate. Using a pulse oxymeter, you should be able to extract respiratory rate from the raw PPG data. Should be effective if you're otherwise healthy and reasonably young. HRV decreases with age and illness. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34024811/
When I started meditating, one of the first things I noticed was how I would stop breathing the moment I got on a computer. Kind of mindblowing that this issue is effecting many people!
Does anyone track their stress levels whilst programming?
Anecdotally and non-scientifically I’ve noticed that my health (stress related illness) has vastly reduced since moving from being a staff engineer to engineering management.
It’s not that I’m less stressed but the stress is a different pattern.
Whilst programming I noticed that my day was a series of spikes of frustration and stress and then a severe drop off once I solved a problem.
Essentially a dopamine - serotonin feedback loop all day every day.
My stress now is generally a more flat and smooth line.
I often thought it would have been interesting to actually track it using a medical device but was unsure if anything like that even exists.
I had the opposite experience. Frustrations whilst coding could be severe but were mostly things within my control. Sure, we had major failures and outages which spiked stress, but these were rare and we learned and grew from them.
As a manager, I was constantly dealing with things way outside my control with much more severe consequences: other people's emotions, people quitting, budget cuts, layoffs, political posturing. At one point I was told to layoff an entire team of very talented, very productive Ukrainian engineers because Russia had decided to invade their country and my company didn't want to deal with the _possibility_ that they'd become unproductive.
I know it's entirely dependent on the type of work and the organization, but from a stress-reduction standpoint I'll take staff engineer over people manager every time.
Same. The two big stresses as an IC are "I have a difficult problem and I might need to ask for help or admit I can't do it, but there's no deadline closer than the end of the day" and "Production is on fire, which means I get to feel like a hero for a few hours and then do a writeup begging for time to fix our stupid problems." Stressful, but not too scary since there were no other humans involved.
When I briefly tried to manage my own team the problem was, "The whole team is staring at me during this boring-ass meeting and it turns out the company's problems are not something I can solve as quick as I thought I could"
Letting down customers is stressful, too. When we had big customers quit I took it kinda personally.
I’ve been trying to improve my mindset when coding. I find myself worrying about solving the problem correctly, and I’m trying to change that so my focus is more on slow,
correct practice. Easier said than done, but the idea is that it will be less stressful and reduce the frustration peaks you mentioned
This is something I have been thinking about a lot since moving from programming into management. Some sort of device to measure the data on this would be really interesting, if only just to see that other people in the same position experience the same thing.
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0. https://unknownworlds.com/subnautica/
Moreover, the sense of fear that I felt when I saw a dangerous looking creature was quite stronger than what I have felt playing several 'horror' games.
Unfortunately, I stopped playing when progressing became too dependent on farming and building - two things that I do not like. I would love to play an exploration only version of the game.
Same for me. The micromanagement of storing stuff needed for new things to build and organizing it all put me off.
I must have been too dense to figure this game out. I gave it like 4-5 hours and couldn’t establish a sense of “ok this is the next goal” sense.
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Didn't get that when I picked up Subnautica: Below Zero a few weeks above. I'm guessing it's because I'm now used to the beautiful vistas and underwater gameplay, so the game wasn't such a full-sensory shock to me anymore.
Guessing you mean "a few weeks later", right?
What the original commenter said is correct, meditation helps you see how thoughts arise in the moment, and with practice you can get to a point where there is very little noise and instead you have a broader view of ideas and your life in general.
It is also calming, for your entire system. Learning to monitor and control your breathing consciously is a serious mental workout. If you have never sat down to practice it, you might surprise yourself as to how much is going on in your own mind and how the wheels and cogs just keep turning.
What do people from english speaking countries (I guess mostly from US) mean when they say this?
It's such a frequent phrase, but I don't think I ever thought about it as a distinct concept, nor spoke about it as such to any of my friends, and we've all been driving for many years.
2. close your eyes, pay attention to your breath
3. when thoughts appear in your mind, note them but attempt to keep your attention on your breath, not on your thoughts
4. when you notice that your thoughts have wandered away from your breath, congratulate yourself for noticing this, and go back to step 2
important: do not berate yourself for getting caught up in your thoughts, do not worry that your head is too full of thoughts to ever be able to "stop thinking" - your brain has been thinking for most of your entire waking life and disengaging from this is hard at first! it gets easier.
"the mind illuminated" is a nice book on the subject IMHO.
ps. if you think the app is helpful, don't rush into the subscription, check out its scholarship
Also, the "Waking Up" app, which has a fantastic collection of guided meditations, dharma talks, theory, etc.
"The Mind Illuminated" is a really good book too, with a very specific (and effective) technique taught in a lot of detail.
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Depending on your preferences you may want to ignore some of the more religious/spiritual parts in it.
Either way, it has had a big, positive, and lasting influence on my life (even though I haven’t been meditating much lately anymore).
[0]: https://a.co/d/08L5nc8t
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2yEorY8UH30&list=PL5B1627ADA...
It's a systematic, well structured and holistic approach. No commercial background. Just teaching. Follow these simple 8 steps. Don't use an app.
Recently I found an app with a pretty large following called "Insight Timer" that has a spectacular free library. It has single-handedly helped me build a habit after only meditating once or twice in guided settings.
The Smiling Mind app is excellent.
I'm sure there are plenty of Podcasts and YouTube guided meditations to be had as well!
Which perfectly describes when you're trying to deal with all your e-mails before 10 am and a lot of the situations don't have easy resolutions, or you're trying to debug something that just won't work and you have no idea why and it's going to mess up the entire rest of your day if you don't get it fixed in the next 30 minutes.
So just a lot of our time-pressure stress situations happen via our screens now.
The situations you're describing seem very much the opposite of stressful.
Virtually nobody sits 8+ hours a day reading books, writing letter, sewing or cutting veggies
Deleted Comment
I love walking, but it does not do anything significant for my cardiovascular health :(
1. Wearing a sticker on the chest seems right out, but a fannypack/messenger-bag like device that fits under a shirt could work. Could also be a good addition to an overall mobile-monitoring setup for EEG data -- you could even move the batteries and bluetooth components from your head/belt to the square of your back. This would obviously only work over a shirt though, which seems like it would make getting high quality breath data harder.
2. I mean... dare I just ignore the physical sciences and aim a high quality camera at myself? To what extent is a microphone in your glasses + footage of your chest rising and falling enough? Sorta doubting anyone here has experience here but you never know!
3. I vaguely know that people measure things with lasers -- this could be enough for measuring breathing while seated at a desk perhaps! And surely the most accurate by far, disregarding noise from clothing.
If I ever get to this point, I look forward to trying all these before hitting up google scholar for the boring easy answer...
> To what extent is a microphone in your glasses + footage of your chest rising and falling enough?
I'm sure a skilled computer vision engineer could make this work, but I'd argue it's the wrong approach. Lasers might work as well, but I think your best bet is radar. I know there are companies making doppler radar-based systems for tracking respiratory rate. Can't dig for them at the moment but here's an article about the method: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10172641/.
By the way, heart-rate variability correlates strongly with respiratory rate. As far as I understand, this is because inhalation raises your blood pressure which increases your heart rate. Using a pulse oxymeter, you should be able to extract respiratory rate from the raw PPG data. Should be effective if you're otherwise healthy and reasonably young. HRV decreases with age and illness. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34024811/
Anecdotally and non-scientifically I’ve noticed that my health (stress related illness) has vastly reduced since moving from being a staff engineer to engineering management.
It’s not that I’m less stressed but the stress is a different pattern.
Whilst programming I noticed that my day was a series of spikes of frustration and stress and then a severe drop off once I solved a problem.
Essentially a dopamine - serotonin feedback loop all day every day.
My stress now is generally a more flat and smooth line.
I often thought it would have been interesting to actually track it using a medical device but was unsure if anything like that even exists.
As a manager, I was constantly dealing with things way outside my control with much more severe consequences: other people's emotions, people quitting, budget cuts, layoffs, political posturing. At one point I was told to layoff an entire team of very talented, very productive Ukrainian engineers because Russia had decided to invade their country and my company didn't want to deal with the _possibility_ that they'd become unproductive.
I know it's entirely dependent on the type of work and the organization, but from a stress-reduction standpoint I'll take staff engineer over people manager every time.
When I briefly tried to manage my own team the problem was, "The whole team is staring at me during this boring-ass meeting and it turns out the company's problems are not something I can solve as quick as I thought I could"
Letting down customers is stressful, too. When we had big customers quit I took it kinda personally.
A lot of hubris involved I guess
I’ve been trying to improve my mindset when coding. I find myself worrying about solving the problem correctly, and I’m trying to change that so my focus is more on slow, correct practice. Easier said than done, but the idea is that it will be less stressful and reduce the frustration peaks you mentioned