The Truth About Generation Snowflake is Even Worse Than We Feared

Hey, after living in and driving on the at times MadMax interstates within the DFW Metroplex; eating, drinking, smoking, changing the radio station, traffic weaving, ect., all while cruising at 70, I didn’t develop a driving anxiety until moving to the Blue Ridge Mountains. Not from driving in the mountains, which btw, is pretty dangerous when you’re distracted with non-driving tasks, but driving on busy highways and interstates occasionally in Chattanooga and Knoxville. Especially on bridges. Near panic attacks crossing high bridges like the Thrasher (Heck of a name) Bridge in Chattanooga. It’s getting better. I don’t why it began or really why it’s receding.

When shtf we will not have time or resources for the weak especially those who have made that choice. If they are on the other side ,F them. On our side wish them good luck.

So, what have you discovered, figured out, that helps you?

First time I read about this (below) I rooted about, found a little info on setting up a home-brew rig.

Then recently there was yet another piece here @TBP on the promulgated perils of C02 which prompted me to pull the book back off the shelf, re-read, & do another root.

More info out there now, & offerings, like a $2k suit that you pressurize with C02 & then just laze about & soak it in. Or that the baths @Royat can be approximated to whatever extent by filling a bathtub, pouring in baking soda & citric acid – to create, or release, C02 – & soaking in it.

Of course I love the idea that “C02 bad!” means it’s fantastic & everybody should get more of it.

The following is a long transcribe. A project of mine & a PSA for any of ya’ll so inclined (or if you’ve got snowflakes you’d like to see maybe crystallize into something more like diamonds)… por la C02 causa:

“As far back as the first century BCE, inhabitants of what is now India described a system of conscious apnea which they claimed restored health & ensured long life. The Bhagavad Gita, a Hindu spiritual text written around 2,000 years ago, translated the breathing practice of pranayama to mean “trance induced by stopping all breathing.” A few centuries after that, Chinese scholars wrote several volumes detailing the art of breathholding. One text, A Book on Breath by the Master Great Nothing of Sung-Shan, offered this advice,

Lie down every day, pacify your mind, cut off thoughts & block the breath. Close your fists, inhale through your nose, & exhale through your mouth. Do not let the breathing be audible. Let it be most subtle & fine. When the breath is full, block it. The blocking (of the breath) will make the soles of your feet perspire. Count one hundred times “one & two.” After blocking the breath to the extreme, exhale it subtly. Inhale a little more & block (the breath) again. If (you feel) hot, exhale with “Ho.” If (you feel) cold, blow the breath out & exhale it with (the sound) “Ch’ui.” If you can breathe like this & count to one thousand (when blocking), then you will need neither grains nor medicine.”

Today, breathholding is associated almost entirely with disease. “Don’t hold your breath,” the adage goes. Denying our bodies a consistent flow of oxygen, we’ve been told, is bad. For the most part, this is sound advice.

Sleep apnea, a form of chronic unconscious breathholding, is terribly damaging, as most of us know by now, causing or contributing to hypertension, neurological disorders, autoimmune diseases, & more. Breathholding during waking hours is injurious as well, & more widespread.

Up to 80 percent of office workers (according to one estimate) suffer from something called continuous partial attention. We’ll scan our email, write something down, check Twitter, & do it all over again, never really focusing on any specific task. In this state of perpetual distraction, breathing becomes shallow & erratic. Sometimes we won’t breathe at all for a half minute or longer. The problem is serious enough that the NIH has enlisted several researchers, including Dr. David Anderson & Dr. Margaret Chesney, to study its effects over the past decades. Chesney told me that the habit, also known as “email apnea,” can contribute to the same maladies as sleep apnea.

How could modern science & ancient practices be so at odds?

Again, it comes down to will. The breathholding that occurs in sleep & constant partial attention is unconscious – it’s something that happens to our bodies, something that’s out of our control. The breathholding practiced by the ancients & revivalists is conscious. These are practices we will ourselves do.

And when we do them properly, I’d heard they can work wonders.

It’s a muggy Wednesday morning & I’m sitting on a rumpled sofa in Justin Feinstein’s office at the Laureate Institute for Brain Research in downtown Tulsa, Oklahoma. Across from me is a window that looks out over a cardboard-colored sky & a paisley landscape of red & orange leaves. Feinstein is seated below it, flipping through a stack of scientific papers on a doublewide desk that has not one inch of vacant space. He’s wearing an untucked button-down shirt with the cuffs rolled up, flip-flops, & baggy khakis with crayon stains, compliments of his three-year-old daughter. He looks the way you’d imagine a neuropsychologist to look: brainy with a touch of funk.

Feinstein has just been awarded a five-year NIH grant to test the use of inhaled carbon dioxide on patients with panic & anxiety disorders. After his experience administering the gas to S.M. & the German twins with Urbach-Wiethe disease, he’d become convinced carbon dioxide could not only cause panic & anxiety, but it might also help cure it. He believed that breathing heavy doses of carbon dioxide might elicit the same physical & psychological benefits as the thousand-year-old breathholding techniques.

But his therapy didn’t require patients to actually hold their breath or block their throats & count to one hundred with clenched hands like the ancient Chinese. His patients were far too anxious & impatient to practice such an intense technique. Carbon dioxide did all that for them. They’s come in, think about whatever they wanted to think about, take a few inhales of the gas, flex their chemoreceptors back to normal, & be on their way. It was the anxious art of breathholding for people too anxious to hold their breath.

Breathholding hacks, or, as Feinstein would call them, carbon dioxide therapies, have been around for thousands of years. The ancient Romans prescribed soaking in thermal baths (which contained high levels of carbon dioxide that was absorbed through the skin) as a cure for anything from gout to war wounds. Centuries later, Belle Epoch French gathered at thermal springs at Royat in the French Alps to wade in bubbling waters for days at a time.

“The study of the chemical composition of the four mineral springs at Royat will show that we have several powerful agents at our command, & that much is available for the treatment of many morbid conditions, which resist the usual pharmaceutical applications we make use of in daily practice,” wrote George Henry Brandt, a British doctor who visited in the late 1870’s. Brandt was talking about skin disorders like eczema & psoriasis, along with respiratory maladies like asthma & bronchitis, all of which were “cured almost with certainty” after a few sessions.* key word “carbon dioxide” following link for some studies:

https://www.mrjamesnestor.com/bibliography

Royat physicians would eventually bottle up carbon dioxide & administer it as an inhalant. The therapy was so effective that it made it stateside in the early 1900’s. A mixture of 5% carbon dioxide & the rest oxygen made popular by Yale physiologist Yandell Henderson was used with great success to treat strokes, pneumonia, asyhma, & asphyxia in newborn babies. Fire departments in New York, Chicago, & other major cities installed carbon dioxide tanks on their trucks. The gas was credited with saving many lives.

All the while, blends of 30% carbon dioxide & 70% oxygen became a go-to treatment for anxiety, epilepsy, & even schizophrenia. With a few huffs of the stuff, patients who spent months or years in a catatonic state would suddenly come to. They’d open their eyes, look around, & begin talking calmly with doctors & other patients.

“It was a wonderful feeling. It was marvelous. I felt very light & didn’t know where I was,” one patient reported. “I knew something had happened to me & I wasn’t sure what it was.”

The patients would stay in this coherent, lucid state for about 30 minutes, until the carbon dioxide wore off. Then, without warning, they’d stop mid-sentence & freeze, staring into space & striking statue-like poses or sometimes collapsing. The patients were sick again. They’d stay that way until the next hit of carbon dioxide.

And then, for reasons nobody quite understands, by the 1950’s, a century of scientific research disappeared. Those with skin disorders turned to pills & creams; those with asthma managed symptoms with steroids & bronchodilators. Patients with severe mental disorders were given sedatives.

The drugs never cured schizophrenia or other psychoses, but they didn’t provoke out-of-body experiences or feelings of euphoria, either. They numbed patients, & continued to numb them for weeks, months & years – as long as they kept taking them.

“What’s interesting to me is that nobody disproved it,” says Feinstein of carbon dioxide therapy.” “The data, the science, still holds today.”

He tells me how he stumbled upon some obscure studies by Joseph Wolpe, a renowned psychiatrist who rediscovered carbon dioxide therapy as a treatment for anxiety & had written an influential paper about it in the 1980’s. Wolpe’s patients shared stunning & long-lasting improvements after just a few huffs. Donald Klein, another renowned psychiatrist & expert in panic & anxiety, suggested years later that the gas might help reset the chemoreceptors in the brain, allowing patients to breathe normally so they could think normally. Since then, few researchers have studied the treatments. (Feinstein estimates there are about five researching it now.) He just kept wondering if the early researchers were right, if this ancient gas might be a remedy to modern ailments.

“As a psychologist, I think, what are my options, what is the best treatment for these patients?” Feinstein says.

Pills, he tells me, offer a false promise & do little good for most people. Anxiety disorders & depression are the most common mental illnesses in the US, & about half of us will suffer from one or the other in our lifetime. To help cope, 13% of us over the age of 12 will use antidepressants, most often SSRI’s. These drugs have been lifesavers for millions, esp those with severe depression & other serious conditions. But less than half the patients who take them get any benefits.

“I keep asking myself,” say Feinstein “Is this the best we can do?”

Feinstein had explored various non-pharmaceutical therapies; he’d spent a decade learning & teaching mindfulness meditation. A wealth of scientific research shows that meditation can change the structure & function of critical areas of the brain, help relieve anxieties, & boost focus & compassion. It can work wonders, but few of us will ever eeap these rewards, because the vast majority of people who try to meditate will give up & move on. For those with chronic anxieties, the percentages are far worse. “Mindful meditation – as it is typically practiced – is just no longer conducive to the new world we live in,” Feinstein explains.

Another option, exposure therapy, is a technique that exposes patients repeatedly to their fears so thatthey become more accepting of them. It’s highly effective but takes awhile, usually involving many long sessions over weeks or months. Finding psychologists with this kind of time, & patients with the necessary resources, can be a challenge.

But everyone breathes, &, today, few of us breathe well. Those with the worst anxieties consistently suffer from the worst breathing habits.

People with anorexia or panic or obsessive-compulsive disorders consistently have low carbon dioxide levels & much greater fear of holding their breath. To avoid another attack, they breathe far too much & eventually become hypersensitized to carbon dioxide & panic if they sense a rise in this gas. They are anxious because they are overbreathing, overbreathing because they’re anxious.

Feinstein found some inspiring recent studies by Alicia Meuret, the Southern Methodist University psychologist who helped her patients blunt asthma attacks by slowing their breathing to increase their carbon dioxide. This technique worked for panic attacks, too.

In a randomized controlled trial, she & a group of researchers gave 20 panic sufferers capnometers, which recorded the amount of carbon dioxide in their breath throughout the day. Meuret crunched the data & found that panic, like asthma, is usually preceded by an increase in breathing volume & rate & a decrease in carbon dioxide. To stop the attack before it struck, subjecys breathed slower & less, increasing theirt carbon dioxide. This simple & free technique reversed dizziness, shortness of breath, & feelings of suffocation. It could effectively cure a panic attack before the attack came on. “’Take a deep breath’ is not a helpful instruction,” Meuret wrote. Hold your breath is much better.

We leave Feinstein’s office & stroll through a labyrinth of elevators & staircases until we enter through soundproofed double doors. This is Feinstein’s lair. Through the door to the right, he & his team conduct research on flotation, a therapy that involves lying in a salt-water pool in a dark, soundless room. Through the door to the left is Feinstein’s newest project: a carbon dioxide therapy laboratory. It’s a tiny windowless box that looks as if it might have held HVAC equipment at one point. We squeeze into the space like clowns ina phone booth. On a folding desk is the usual array of monitors, computers. Wires, EKGs, capnometers & other stuff I’ve grown accustomed to wearing over the past few years. A beat-up yellow cylinder that looks like a Cold War-era Russian missile sits in the corner. Feinstein tells me it holds 75 pounds of pure carbon dioxide.

For the past few months, as part of his NIH research, Feinstein has brought in patients suffering with anxiety & panic to this lab & given them a few hits of carbon dioxide. So far, he tells me, the results have been promising. Sure, the gas elicited a panic attack in most patients, but this all part of the baptism-by-fire process. After that initial bout of discomfort, many patients report feeling relaxed for hours, even days.

I’ve decided to throw my chemoreceptors into the ring. I’ve signed up to see what a few heavy doses of carbon dioxide would do to my own body & brain.

Feinstein sticks a piece of white foamy material with a metal sensor on my middle & ring fingers. This device, called a galvanic skin conductance meter, will measure small amounts of sweat released during states of sympathetic stress. On my other hand a pulse oximeter will record my heart rate & oxygen levels.

The mixture I’ll inhale is 35% carbon dioxide, & the rest is room air – about the same percentage of carbon dioxide once used to test schizophrenics, sans the oxygen. Feinstein administered this same dose on S.M., who panicked & hated it. He also tried it out on a few patients early on, but they too suffered heavy panic attacks. Some patients were so freaked out they refused to take another hit, so Feinstein now reduces the dose to 15% – enough to give the chemoreceptors a good workout, but not enough to keep patients from coming back for more. Since I didn’t suffer from panic attacks or chronic anxiety, not yet at least, he offered to crank up my dose to the S.M. level to see what happens.

He calmly explains, for the third time today, that any suffocation I might feel after inhaling the gas is only an illusion, that my oxygen levels will remain unchanged, & that I’ll be in no danger. Although he means to calm my fears, the constant disclaimers only make me more, well, anxious.

“You good?” Feinstein says, tightening the Velcro straps on the facemask. I nod, take a few last, sweet inhales of room air, & sink deeper in the chair. We’ll begin takeoff in two minutes.

As Feinstein walks over to a computer & futzes with cables & tubes & wires, I’m left to sit, stare at my cuticles, & reminisce a bit. My mind wanders to last year, when I first visited Anders Olsson in Stockholm.

It was just after our interview in the co-working reception hall, & Olsson took me into his office, a little hovel filled with research papers, pamphlets & facemasks. A beat-up carbon dioxide tank stood amid the rubble. Olsson told me that he & a group of DIY pulmonauts had been running their own experiments with carbon dioxide over the past couple of years. They weren’t interested in the megadoses used to treat epilepsy & mental disorders. Olsson & his crew weren’t sick. They were interested in exploring the preventive & performance benefits of the gas, flexing their chemoreceptors even wider so that they could push their bodies further.

The most effective & safest blend they found was a few huffs of around 7% carbon dioxide mixed with room air. This was the “super endurance” level Buteyko found in the exhaled breath of top athletes. Breathing in this mixture had none of the hallucinogenic or panic-inducing effects. You hardly noticed it, & yet it offered potent results. Olsson shared some reports from pulmonauts in the field.

User#1: So I’m in Toronto now & I decided to go for a rollerblade. I’m a big rollerblader & have done this route by the water on lakeshore many times before. But get this: No matter how hard I pushed it, & I pretty much gave it 110% the entire time … I not once needed to open my mouth to pant!

User#2: I did sdome carbondioxide treatments threetimes yesterday, about 15 minutes apiece. And today, I went canoeing & then when I had sex with my girlfriend … by the end of it she was panting & tired, & I wasn’t even out of breath at all! I felt like I was superhuman!

User#3: Holy fuck! … I was breathing … & I started to feel fricking AMAZing. Euphoric even. To the point where breathing felt automatic.

Olsson hooked up the tank & offered me a few huffs. I felt a slight spaciness, which was soon followed by a slight headache. I was unimpressed.

Back in Tulsa, Feinstein is about to administer something else entirely. It’s several times what I’d had before & several thousand times more than my chemoreceptors are normally exposed to.

He reaches over & points to the big red button on the desk. It switches the air hose from room air to the carbon dioxide in a foil bag hanging on the wall. The bag is a precautionary device. I’ll be huffing from it instead of directly out of the tank, in case there’s a malfunction in the system, or in my brain. Should a faucet stay open or should I start panicking uncontrollably, I’ll only be able to breathe the contents inside the bag, which works out to about three big huffs.

Next to the big red button is a stress dial. It will record my perceived anxiety. It’s currently set to 1, the lowest level. When I start feeling anxious after inhaling the gas, I can crank the dial as far up as 20, marking an extreme state of panic.

Over the next 20 minutes, I’ll need to take three big inhales of carbon dioxide. I can take all three breaths one after the other if I’m feeling comfortable. If I’m not, I can wait several minutes between hits. The amount of time patients wait provides insight into how intense the experience was.

Strapped in & ready, I’m trying to calm myself, watching the live feed of my vitals on the computer monitor. As I inhale, my heart rate increases, then decreases with every exhale, making a smooth sine wave across the screen. Oxygen hovers at around 98%, & exhaled carbon dioxide holds steady at 5.5%. All systems are go.

It feels like I’m a fighter pilot on a stealth mission, hissing Darth Vader breaths through a facemask, my hand on a missile-release button. Not the kind of scene I’d ever associated with mental health therapy. But Feinstein’s goal isn’t to change the way a patient feels on an emotional level. It’s to reset the basic mechanics of the primitive brain.

Chemoreceptors, after all, don’t care if the carbon dioxide in the bloodstream is generated from strangulation, drowning, panic, or a foil bag on a wall in Tulsa. They set off the same alarm bells. Experiencing such an attack in a controlled environment helps demystify it, teaching patients what an attack feels like before it comes on so we can prevent it. It gives us conscious power over what for too long has been considered an unconscious ailment, & shows us that many of the symptoms we’re suffering can be caused, & controlled, by breathing.

One more slow & deep inhale, a thumbs-up, & I close my eyes & push all the air from my lungs. I punch the red button & hear the hose engage to the foil bag, then take in an enormous breath.

The air tastes metallic. It oozes into my mouth, zinging my tongue & gums with the sensation of drinking orange juice from an aluminum cup. The gas pushes deeper, down my throat, coating my innards with what feels like a sheet of aluminum foil. It cracks through the bronchioles, into the alveoli, & into the bloodstream. I brace myself for the hit.

One second. Two seconds. Three. Nothing. I feel no different than I did a few seconds ago or a few minutes before that. I hold the stress dial at 1.

Feinstein said this might happen. He’d given this heavy dose to a Wim Hof practitioner months earlier, & the man barely felt anything. After so much heavy breathing & breathholding, Feinstein hypothesized this subject had already flexed his chemoreceptors wide open. Meanwhile, I had just come off ten days of forced mouthbreathing followed by ten days of forced nasal breathing. I’d raised my resting carbon dioxide levels by 20%. I too have probably flexed my chemoreceptors as far as they could reasonably go.

Amid these thoughts I felt a slight constriction in my throat. It’s subtle. I take in a breath of room air, push out an exhale. This requires some effort. The red button is switched off; I’m no longer breathing any more of the carbon dioxide mixture, but it feels like someone has jammed a sock in my mouth. I try to take another breath, but the sock keeps growing.

OK, now there’s a pounding in my temples. I open my eyes to check my levels, but the room is blurry. A few seconds later, I’m viewing the world through what looks like cracked & dirty binoculars. I can’t breathe. Every sense feels as if it’s being torn from my control, vacuumed out.

Maybe 10 or 20 seconds pass before the sock shrinks, there’s a cooling at the back of my neck, & the whirlpool of anxiety reverses & floats off. The color & clarity of my vision ripples outward, like a hand clearing mist from a window. Feinstein stands a few feet from me, staring. It all comes back to life. I can breathe again.

I sit there for a few minutes sweating, kind of laughing, kind of crying. I’m trying to prepare myself for two more inhales of this ghastly mixture of gas over the next 15 minutes. Any self-talk I can muster – This choking is just an illusion; relax, it will only last a few minutes – does nothing.

After all, the fear I had just felt & would feel again with the next hit won’t be mental. It’s mechanical; & conditioning the chemoreceptors to widen takes a few sessions, which is why Feinstein’s patients come back to re-up over the course of a few days. This is, at its core, an exposure therapy. The more I expose myself to this gas, the more resilient I’ll be when I’m overloaded.

And so, in the name of research, & for the sake of my own future chemoreceptor flexibility, I push the red button & take two more hits, one after the other.

And I panic, again & again.” ~ Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art – James Nestor

Good thing you have unlimited, taxpayer paid health care.

Try to get off the psychoactive stuff … see an acupuncturist — most likely one practicing Five Elements … they can be an immense help with non-physical issues …

The psychoactives are not going to cure anything … get out in the sun and fresh air … get exercise … get on a good diet … all of these steps can help …

I remind my kids about my parents living through armed occupation and bombs falling on building around them, almost killing them. they were starving and ill by the end of ww2. While life now has some issues it’s pretty dam good.