Breathing better
How to breathe better
Next to sleeping and eating, breathing is often overlooked as an area of self-improvement. Many articles have been written about breathing techniques such as Wim Hof (the ‘Ice Man’) recommended by Naval Ravikant.
Not much attention has been given to:
1. Quantifying breathing quality
2. Measuring indoor air quality (which ‘air purifiers’ fail miserably at - albeit their great industrial design) and
3. Using air to make you feel better and more productive.
This is why I was interested taking a closer look.
When I think about breathing, I want to know three things:
- How to best use breathing techniques? And what tools are there to measure my resulting breathing quality?
- What is the ideal air quality at home and how to get it? This includes looking at what tools there are to measure air quality. And as a result - what can be done to improve air quality?
- What are psychological aspects about air like scent, movement, temperature that subjectively make me feel more productive?
I always imagined to connect an oxygen tank to my air conditioning to create air conditioning like in a casino. In my mind casinos are suggested to use oxygen enriching tools for air quality - but that seems more like a street myth and would also likely not be legal (explosive! 🧨 ).
Which brings us back to the topic:
Breathing
The problem with breathing is also what is great about breathing: It happens automatically and we don’t think about it. The best tools can’t help if you don’t control your breathing.
This leads to the biggest issue with breathing: The breathing frequency is often too high with 12-20 breaths per minute while it should be much lower - about 6-8 breaths PER MINUTE. Imagine that you breathe probably twice as fast as you should right now.
Breathing techniques
Breath training helps to become more conscious of breathing and adjust it for the better. Most important is to become aware of your breathing and focus on slow and deep breathing which increases oxygen in the blood stream. Recently breathing techniques like Wim Hof have gotten very popular which make you aware of your breathing and extend your ability to control it.
Some of the most well known breathing techniques out there are: deep breathing (also called diaphragmatic breathing), lion's breath, pranayama breathing (used in yoga), circular breathing and more - however I found it most useful instead of focusing on the technique focusing on a breathing guru or instructor like Belisa Vranich, Gay Hendricks, Monier-Williams or Yogi breathers like David Garrigues. Hold your horses though - it gets philosophical, almost religious very quickly.
Measuring breathing quality
90% of our energy comes from oxygen. In the end, breathing serves to enrich the blood with oxygen because we need energy. SPO2 measures the oxygen level in the blood stream and a normal level is about 94-99%. The easiest way to measure breathing quality is to measure the oxygen in the blood.
To measure blood oxygen, respiration sensors (e.g. finger pulse oximeters) are used. The most affordable ones are finger oximeters like this one for $15. Probably the easiest device (however also likely pretty inaccurate) is the Apple Watch which can measure blood oxygen SPO2 levels.
After looking into blood oxygen a bit more, I found breathing is not the only way to enrich the oxygen level in the blood. Time for a detour:
Enriching blood with more oxygen
The biggest factor influencing how easy or hard it will be to get oxygen into your bloodstream is how oxygen-rich the air is you breathe in the first place. But there are more beyond that! Here are the five factors I found influence blood oxygen the most:
- Choose to live in a clean air city (if you can!)
- Go outside or open the window. In large cities we can only do this when our air quality is below 50 AQI (US). I set up a standard air oxygen measurement devices like this one: CO2Meter AZ-0004 that sounds an alarm when oxygen levels are concerningly low.
- Drink water. Lungs need to be hydrated and we loose about 400 milliliters of water everyday. Look at one of the gallon bottles to motivate you drinking more water!
- Eat iron rich food. Red blood cells transport oxygen. You can support red blood cell up-build with more iron. Or consider the environment and just eat iron pills.
- Exercise frequently. During exercising we breathe deeper and bring up our oxygen levels measured in VO2 max (maximal oxygen uptake).
The ideal oxygen level in your blood (SpO2) should be 95% upwards. (source)
While we know now that the air you breathe should be oxygen rich (and adding oxygen tanks to your air conditioning is very illegal), that breathing and blood oxygen levels matter - the next question is: How healthy is the air you breathe - aside from the oxygen level?
Air quality
Typically “good air” is defined by the Air Quality Index (AQI). For indoor spaces, there is an indoor air quality (IAQ) measurement. Factors of “good air” read like you are never going to find out if your air is “good” or not. But let’s take a look at it first:
The ideal air is low in:
- Carbon Monoxide: No standards for CO have been agreed upon for indoor air. The U.S. National Ambient Air Quality Standards for outdoor air are 9 ppm (40,000 micrograms per meter cubed) for 8 hours, and 35 ppm for 1 hour. (Source) CO can be measured with some relatively high-cost infrared radiation adsorption and electrochemical instruments do exist. Moderately priced real-time measuring devices are also available.
- Lead
- Nitrogen Dioxide
- Ozone
- Particulate Matter (PM10 and 2.5)
- Sulfur Dioxide
If you are interested in the state of our air on a national level, read more in these EPA provided statistics about air pollutants and trends.
The issue with the air quality is that the absence of these pollutants doesn’t mean the air is “good”. It should also have at least 19.5% oxygen, ideally more than 20%.
Either way, most people install air purifiers to improve air quality. A common popular brand is BlueAir and some newer, much more expensive air purifiers are Molekule. The good news about those is that they remove pollutants, bacteria, mold, viruses and allergenes.
But actually we wanted to reduce carbon monoxide and increase oxygen. An air purifier doesn’t really help with that. This is where things get really messed up. The main two things I want to do with the air I breathe is to reduce CO2 and increase O2. With both an air purifier DOES NOT HELP. So what to do?
I installed a CO2 meter (the instruction manual is here) that sounds an alarm if the CO2 level is above a certain threshold. This happens for example when you are sleeping. I always wondered why I wake up a bit tired although I slept a lot and high CO2 levels are a big factor.
Parking Garages have this problem of CO2 measurement and they have CO2 monitors built into their air conditioning, e.g. from Honeywell. Ideally I'd love to add this CO2 monitoring function to my normal home control of the HVAC (I have this thermostat in my room that you might have seen). Unfortunately none of the more expensive models have this function I'm looking for, so maybe I'm the only person interested in a CO2 measure functionality.
Psychological aspects about air
Lastly I want to emphasize that you can use air as an active interior design element. The scent of air and movement of air is natural for us and because it’s natural it relaxes passively. Adding scent aspects and moving air to your home setup might give you an overall relaxing feel.
By the way: For many people, the smell of clean air is the scent of the air outdoors after a thunderstorm. If you don't want to overthink it, a cedar spray might be just fine. Many people are very into scented air and using candles, sprays and other purchasable products. Make no mistake - it doesn't make the air itself better. But you probably already knew that.
Analysis
It seems like when it comes to breathing and air quality, really two things matter:
- How oxygen rich is your blood?
- How to enrich air with oxygen when needed?
It would seem most straightforward to just wear an Apple Watch and connect the SPO2 level to some sort of modern air filtration system via the cloud. Given outside air is the only source for oxygen in a regular home, it could then send on-demand pre-filtered outside air. An alternative to using the Apple Watch might be to install an oxygen monitor which should be part of the air filtration unit. Unfortunately also this doesn't exist.
Advanced air filtration
When researching for this article, I came across a few interesting technologies that could be used in future home environments. For example airocide (developed by NASA).
Oxide Electrolysis
On a more advanced level, NASA designed a device which converts carbon monoxide into breathable air which would be perfect for city habitats where you can’t or don’t want to use outside air. This would be perfect - and also looks really nice!
And here is a more technical view:
The technology used is solid oxide electrolysis which splits the CO to produce pure Oxygen.
Would be great if we could install some sort of air conditioning that 1) makes the air better and 2) enriches the air so we can feel better indoors!