Never really thought a subject like breathing could be so fascinating. We do it all the time and mostly without thinking, but in reality there is so much to it. Both when we do it correctly as well as when do it incorrectly. If you are remotely interested in the subject, I highly recommend the following book. I for one am intend on applying many of the learnings and have in fact seen a drop in my blood pressure just by focussing on nasal breathing (don’t know whether the drop will last, but I have never seen these levels since I starting measuring it some 6 months ago).

The book I have read is Breath: the new science of a lost art by James Nestor.

And before you decide whether it is worth reading, please find below my 13 main take-aways. Surely some of it is interesting for you.

1. Billions of years ago, the atmosphere on earth was filled with carbon dioxide. Early life forms used carbon dioxide as an energy source and oxygen was the waste product. Little by little the level of oxygen increased.
2. Oxygen produces 16 times more energy than carbon dioxide.
3. Newer life forms used Oxygen as their energy source and could become more complex beings, because of the increased energy obtained from it.
4. Humans also use Oxygen as their main energy source and it is inhaled and then absorbed in the cells of our body through our longs and blood stream.
5. Humans have become worse breathers throughout their history due to the changes in diet “thanks to” the advances in cooking.
   • Cooked food releases more easily energy, which has allowed us to have a larger brains, which left less space for sinuses, mouths and airways
   • And more importantly, cooked food is softer. Less chewing led to changes in our facial structure, which in turn also reduced space for airways.
6. In order to improve our breathing, firstly we need to breath “exclusively” through the nose:
   • It increases nitric oxide sixfold. Nitric oxide plays an essential role in blood circulation and delivering oxygen to the cells.
   • When breathing through the nose, the body can regulate which nostril is used more for breathing, which in turn influences the 2 parts of the autonomous nervous system: right for sympathetic nervous system and left for parasympathetic nervous system.
   • If necessary, apply sleep tape at night.
7. Lung capacity is one of the best indicators of expected life span. A typical adult only engages as little as 10 percent of the range of the diaphragm when breathing. Focus on fully exhaling to extend this range, at least during some time of the day.
8. The best way to prevent many chronic health problems, improve athletic performance, and extend longevity is to focus on how we breathe, specifically to balance oxygen and carbon dioxide levels in the body. To do this, we’d need to learn how to inhale and exhale slowly.
9. Cells will absorb oxygen from the blood stream and release carbon dioxide. In fact, the amount of oxygen absorbed by a cell is determined by the amount of carbon dioxide in the cell. As a result, even when breathing more quickly then necessary, we don’t absorb more oxygen. However, the frequency of breathing does influence the level of carbon dioxide in our cells and blood stream (and exhaled breath), which is critical for other aspects such as pH level of the blood, blood vessel dialation.
   • There is a benefit to breathing slower and less and keeping carbon dioxide levels up (in the cells), so that oxygen absorption is optimum. The optimum amount of air we should take in at rest per minute is 5.5 liters and the optimum breathing rate is about 5.5 breaths per minute.
10. One of the culprits of our poorer breathing was food and eating, well, the first step to improving airway obstruction isn’t orthodontics but instead involves maintaining correct “oral posture”. It just meant holding the lips together, teeth lightly touching, with your tongue on the roof of the mouth. Hold the head up perpendicular to the body and don’t kink the neck.
11. Furthermore, we need to chew more. The more we gnaw, the more stem cells release, the more bone density and growth we’ll trigger, the younger we’ll look and the better we’ll breathe. Tools like the Homeoblock can help with this, if necessary.
12. The author argues that there are illnesses and afflictions that are not easily solved by our current healthcare system: tingling fingers, chronic diarrhea, rapid heart rate, diabetes, autoimune disease, erectile disfunction. He argues that what they often suffer is from communication problems along the vagal and autonomic network, brought on by chronic stress. Fixing the autonomic nervous system can effectively cure or lessen these symptoms.
13. Breathing allows us to intake oxygen, our source of energy. However, breathing is also a power switch to this autonomic nervous system: Willing ourselves to breathe slowly will open up communication along the vagal network and relax us into a parasympathetic state. Breathing really fast and heavy on purpose flips the vagal response the other way, shoving us into a stressed state.
    • Techniques for getting into both states are useful for this. It is the flip-flopping that is possibly key to obtaining the benefits. One of the techniques mentioned frequently regarding entering the stressed state is Tummo (inner fire medition). Check out Wim Hof on YouTube if interested.

Health trackers are very popular gadgets. They come in at different price ranges and have different functionalities, but they clearly serve a purpose: people wish to track aspects of their activity and health, and the knowledge obtained can help stimulate making changes for the better.

Apple is especially active in this area with the Apple Watch. Initially, the positioning of the Apple Watch was all over the place, but very quickly Apple narrowed in on the Health functionalities of the watch. Every year, Apple expands on the information it can gather about our health through different sensors, as well analyse it in new and useful ways:

• Sleep
• Heart health notifications
• Blood oxygen
• Exercise and activity tracking
• Ambient noise levels
• Tracking menstrual cycle
• Fall detection and gate analysis

Changes observed in my running through my watch

Personally, I have been using a smartwatch for many years now and have tracked my activity and other health aspects for that time. Admittedly, I have done so on different platforms (Withings, Google Fit, Samsung Health, Huawei Health, …) and don’t have years of information in one centralised place, but I continue using it actively.

Since last year, I am fully into the Samsung ecosystem and I have a Samsung Galaxy Watch Active 2. Samsung’s health app has very nice stats for running, which I happen to do. In part, in fact, that is the reason I wanted to go with this watch.

I wish to share a very illustrative example of what this type of technology enables and which I think is pretty powerful. When running, it tracks of course your route, heart rate, steps, distance, speed and many more things. However, it also does an analysis of your running “technique”: assymetry, contact time, flight time, regularity, vertical, stiffness.

Now, generally speaking, I score Good on 4 of these aspects and Great on 2 of them. I am far from a great runner, so no surprise here.

Since reading the book Born to Run, I have always had an interest in the idea of letting the foot do the work it was designed to do rather sticking it in a shoe that limits its movement. As a results, in the summer, I like to run in a pair of Luna running sandals. The idea is that your body is much more atuned to the ground and its feedback and that you change - without active effort on your part - your running style: smaller stride, higher cadence, landing more on the midfoot to front foot, … Which is supposed to be beneficial.

In any case, to my surprise when I checked these advanced running metrics after running several times on my sandals this year, I could actually see that it registers a difference, where all of a sudden I pass to Great for contact time (which means it is reduced) as well as stiffness.

There is still so much potential and areas for growth

Of course, this is just anecdotal evidence, but I think this is the transformative power of these tools: allowing you to see the positive impact of changes you make in your life.

Now, tracking consistently and continuously information like sleep, weight, body composition, activity level, heart rate, blood pressure, oxygen level, blood sugar levels, movement data (for fall detection and gate analysis) is a powerful tool for preventative health care, I am sure.

New sensors are being developed, existing ones get better and cheaper and the processing of the raw data is something that is under continuous development for better diagnostics. All of this will make this more and more useful.

Looking at the future and the role this can play, as a user:

• I want one central place where all information is stored, from all of my health devices.
• Ideally speaking, existing devices such as the watch, earbuds, or even glasses, will add new sensors that allow recording more information.
• But more than just information, the health solution should take the next step to giving diagnostics based on Big Data analytics.
• And, crucially, all this information should be safely stored under the sole control of the user, where he/she can share it with their health professional safely as interpreting results and making sense of it often still requires the help of professionals.

So, is this the sort of tech you are enthousiastic about? Have you made any changes in your life based on the information measured? Hit my up on Twitter or Mastodon if you want to chat about this.

Signal has just designed a pretty brilliant marketing campaign for themselves, showing why people should potentially care about the privacy message that Signal so strongly pivots their product around and probably having the foresight that the campaign could lead to free PR.

If you don’t know Signal, it is a messenger app/service that prioritises privacy and wants none of your data (link to their web site).

Signal designed a marketing campaign on Instagram, where they created individualised ads incorporating some of the information that Facebook (Instagram’s parent company) has about the specific individual.

Facebook, though, didn’t like the campaign and quickly disabled the ad account that Signal has, stopping a campaign they were apparently uncomfortable with.

Well, this already smart ad campaign, will now benefit from some interesting free PR. Very smart, all together. In the source link, you will find the Signal blog post with some additional info.

Just for your interest, a few other examples of the ads:

Source (Signal blog): The Instagram ads Facebook won’t show you

Amy Webb is a Quantitative Futurist that started the Future Today Institute. I have listened to her many times on the TWIT network’s podcasts where she discusses future trends and have read her book The Big Nine, which I reviewed here.

Every year she (and her team) come out with a Trends Report that makes for very interesting reading. Make sure to check it out if you want to know what’s up with AI, Blockchain, Biotech, Tech regulation, Data Privacy and so much more. Here is the link to the landing page for The Future Today Institute’s 14th Annual Tech Trends Report.

In my push to leave behind me as much of the data-tracking-web as possible, I have been using DuckDuckGo as my search engine rather than Google for the last 6 months. I can honestly say that, based on search results alone, I feel no need to go back. That being said, I wasn’t always very happy with the speed of the site. Sometimes it was fine, but other days, it was really slow.

So, I went looking for an alternative search engine and came across 2 that struck a cord with me: Qwant and Ecosia. For the last week and a half I have been using the latter, Ecosia, and I have to say I am satisfied. I haven’t seen it load results slowly yet and results have been good - and I am planting trees when using it :-). The only thing is that it doesn’t integrate on my mobile phone browsers very well (I think), so there I continue to use DuckDuckGo.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not saying it is better than Google, but I do encourage you to look beyond the go-to search engine if you are at all concerned with data tracking.

As a person with no accessibility restrictions, I find it is sometimes difficult to really understand the world of hearing impaired, seeing impaired or those with reduced mobility. However, it is important to be aware of it and sensitive to it, primarily as a person but also for companies/brands that develop products and services.

If you feel equally curious about this as well, I have 3 recommendations of things to watch or listen to:

1. First of all, in 2020 a movie called Sounds of Metal came out about a musician that loses his hearing. The film is not light-hearted, believe me, but it’s very much worth seeing.

2. Secondly, on Netflix I saw a documentary called Rising Phoenix. It’s about the Paralimpic Games. If you can’t get inspired and/or be humbled by the stories told in this documentary, I think you may be a droid ;-). Absolute must-see material.

3. Lastly, I listen to a podcast about mobile tech (the Phone Show Chat). Ted and Steve, the hosts, talk about their personal experiences with tech. Every now and then, they invite Steve Nutt, who is blind, to talk about how he uses mobile tech. In the latest episode (621), you can hear him explain how much technology can help him and also reinforces how incredibly important it is for tech companies to be working on Accessibility features to ensure it is inclusive.

Anyway, I hope you can set aside some time to check any or all out. There is something for everyone, and they are all enriching in their own right.

I have not been much of a Facebook fan for data privacy reasons. A couple of years ago I deleted my Instagram and Facebook accounts, in fact, and am now only connected to them via WhatsApp. However, living in Europe, it is a lot more difficult to get rid of that, so I have been very hesitant.

WhatsApp was supposed to stay independent and separate when it was purchased by Facebook in 2014, but users will have noticed lately that they need to accept a new privacy policy where data from Whatsapp will be shared with Facebook. Chats are, supposedly, still end-to-end encrypted, but it is a new step towards integration.

This new Privacy Policy together with people seeming to sign up for Telegram lately (I get notifications about that as I have the app installed), has made me review my intention to delete WhatsApp once again. However, although there are certainly technical alternatives that are basically just as good as WhatsApp, there is a real issue with the user base, making the services practically useless.

In my particular situation, for instance, I have 220 contacts on WhatsApp including all 14 of my adult close family members. Naturally, also all of my friends are on WhatsApp. So what about alternative solutions?

• When looking at Telegram, I do see that 73 of my contacts are on the chat service which is not a bad stat at all, however, only 2 of my adult family members are amongst them, indicating that my crucial contacts don’t actually use it.
• Signal, probably one of the most secure and private messaging services , only covers 12 of my contacts, including 2 adult family members.
• And lastly, RCS is activated on 37 of my contacts' phones, including again 2 adult family members.

As you can see, Telegram is certainly best positioned for me to become the alternative chat service in my life, but I do need to convince first many family members and friends to jump over and we all know how difficult that is. At least, it appears in my circle that Telegram has a little bit of momentum, so I am keeping my fingers crossed.

RCS gives me some hope for a couple of reasons. Firstly, people don’t actually have to install a new service and sign up for it. We “just” need to wait for their operator and phone manufacturer to support it (which unfortunately Apple probably never will). And, secondly, it always has regular text messages as the back up.

My personal preference would be to use Signal, but at this point I just don’t see how that can become a mainstream solution given that it has been available already for many years and is a feature rich solution, but to little avail.

So, come February, I am afraid that I will have to accept the conditions in order to continue using WhatsApp as I just don’t see how I can reasonably leave it behind at this point.

To be continued…