The other very interesting exercise that might surprise you is that we breathed from a bag of carbon dioxide. Apparently, many patients are “chronic hyperventilators”; perhaps due to chronic, low-grade anxiety, they don’t breathe as deeply as normal and instead do so in a choppy, shallow manner. Breathing as such disrupts the proper ratio of oxygen to carbon dioxide in the body which can contribute to uneasy feelings leading to panic. All that hippie crap about taking slow, deep breaths to relax isn’t just annoying mumbo-jumbo; there’s a medical explanation for why that feels good.
