Wim Hof Metod Experiment for Post-op Pain

Description

After my shoulder surgery, I experimented with various mental methods to manage my pain. Here is how I used the Wim Hof breathing to great effect.

Update: It is the morning, two days after my operation and I feel pain-free with no drugs of any kind.

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Tags: Kenton Whitman,ReWild University,Human Rewilding,personal rewilding,mindfulness,how to,bushcraft,survival,wilderness survival skills,how to survive in the woods

Video Transcription

greetings my friends I just got back from a shoulder surgery and yesterday I got that and I wanted to talk a little bit about a technique I used based on the wim HOF method last night and the difference that it made in my pain management

so before I start this off most of you if you're a regular watcher of this channel you know that I really make an effort to answer all comments I'm a one-handed typer for a while now so my ability to answer comments is going to go way way down and I will be reading everything I will be back to regular comment replying as soon as I can but for this video and maybe some of the next ones I'm really not going to be answering comments in the same way I do if at all so please forgive me for that and I still really want to hear your thoughts and your ideas so they sent me home with a big bottle of oxycodone cordoned the prescription opiate that people get addicted to and worse if you know me I have not taken any of those and do not desire to take any of those I've been working up and on my other channel I'm probably going to go deeper into this and some upcoming videos I've been working on some meditations some mental ways to shift the mind as far as pain management goes but last night for some reason I felt inspired to use the wim HOF method breathing and so today I'm gonna share what I experienced last night and a twist that I put on to it that really made a difference Eukarya haven't told you about this what I'm not going to go into in this video is how to do that wim HOF breathing there are plenty of videos out there on how to do it so I'll be referencing different the different parts of the wim HOF breathing if you want to know how to do it go and check out some of those videos now those videos are usually going to walk you through the physical part of it so there's the deep inhales and exhales and then there's the exhale and the breath retention where you're holding your breath out for you know until you feel like you need to breathe often it's a surprisingly large amount of time then there's the inhale and you're holding that inhale for 15 seconds so I'm kind of gonna be talking about these three different sections the breathing the exhale retention and then the inhale and the shorter attention now there's other videos as I said they're gonna explain how to do the breathing but often what they're not talking about is the importance of the mental aspect so this breathing is really a meditation and as I'm doing the breathing breathing in and out choosing a focus point and often the suggestion is to focus on your your third eye area kind of up here or you can focus on your bodily sensations and so yeah you've done some of this hop reading before and so I might focus on sometimes people's lips will feel kind of Numb or tingly or you'll feel a sensation through your limbs your extremities

and so really going into those sensations are going into that that point of focus between you're kind of up in your forehead and the reason for this is that it's not just about the breathing this is about a mental training of holding your focus and being able to hold our focus on something mentally is key if we can't hold our focus on something mentally a mind is gonna run around with us all the time and so last night and I have to say that this was less a sobering experience for me because so bring that means that it was well not quite this was the worst pain I've ever experienced in my life and by sobering I mean that I realized last night that this amount of pain which seems like a lot to me it's really just a little bit of pain and there you go a little bit of pain in the sense that there's a lot of people that are dealing with chronic pain where they're feeling pain like this way intensified over their whole body every single day I think of burn victims I think of a soldier has been hit by a bomb there are people in so much greater pain than I am that well so it's been a very good experience developing compassion for me as I can think about other people that are suffering much much more pain and so so last night started doing that that breathing meditation remember that's gonna really hat on your back there honey

doing that breathing meditation and I found that the breathing you know in and out deep breaths was pretty painful to do yeah

it allowed me to focus and that focus helps to remove my mind from the pain I'm gonna go deeper into what I'm about to explain on my other channel I think in some upcoming videos but basically I began to realize that there are three stages that my mind goes through as it moves towards a temptation if you can imagine pain being a temptation in this instance I think if it makes sense here in a second the first thing that happens is what I call the lure so I'm laying in bed trying to just be there with the pain there's a lure and this is rather a soft sensation it's just a little calling it says look over here look over here here's some pain look over here and this lure is is calling me to look that way direct my attention if I direct my attention towards that pain then there comes a pull it says okay come inside really feel this and it urges my mind to to get deeper into that pain and then there's what I call the mire and the mire English is not your first language you may not have heard of this word mire is a swamp real muddy place where your feet get stuck and you can't move then you get kind of locked down into that you could use the example of a piece of cake

there's the lure oh that looks good there's the Paul you know what I've been eating so healthy I deserve a piece of cake then there's the mire pulling it up towards my mouth notice that the lure is relatively easy to get out of right it's that first initial movement in that direction so it's that pain saying Here I am it's fairly easy with some willpower for me to move my mind away from that and the wim hof breathing was allowing me to do that

so my mind could come back to that sensation here and often you're seeing a little bit of lights kind of or I could come into the sensation of my extremities trying to keep my mind away from this and the tingling and my fingers and my toes and so that's that lower part what happened to me last night is over time my willpower started to break down willpower studies show us that willpower is much like a sprint so when I sprint I I go and I go in my sprint power

doo-doo-doo-doo diminishes diminishes diminishes until I have to stop the next day however I am stronger same with willpower as I use my willpower short-term it shrinks down shrinks down the next day it's growing a little bit bigger and stronger so when I experienced last night is my mind was pulled was lured again and again and again and at first in the beginning of the night it was very very easy for me to put my mind elsewhere put my mind elsewhere there's a little active will every time I do that then I got a little bit weaker my mind just pulled I'm gonna draw more and more into the pain eventually I got mired into the pain and it was quite about 3:00 or 4:00 in the morning quite a painful experience so so the so the wim HOF method coming back to that at first breathing in and out breathing in and out gave me a focus and allowed me to move my mind away from it then there's the exhalation and here's where I added a little bit of twist because during the exhalation there is space in which to think and our mind is in a very receptive state at that point and I use that receptive state to do a little placebo action because well the placebo action placebo is when we believe that something will help us if we believe something will help us it tends to help us yeah sometimes remarkably so and this isn't quite placebo because the studies with the wim HOF method show that it for instance is alkalizing my body and it's also reducing inflammation which is really good so I took that time in that space and you know for me there's probably two and a half three minutes after I've exhaled breath retention I'm just sitting in a no breath state and I took the first half of that and I really spent that thinking my body is alkalizing there's any illness disease infection all that is being driven out by the alkaline environment I'm thinking all the inflammation is easing down it's speeding the healing so giving myself those positive placebo effects which again are quite placebo but but adding the placebo mind state to it to really really help us out as much as they could then the second half of the breath retention what I did is I use a little bit of self-hypnosis and this is where I really took it to my own place what's that

so he's like giving himself his own love because love is definitely healing he's believing that love is you yeah you can helping me out a lot so so the help self-hypnosis is again I was taking advantage of the mind being in a very calm relaxed receptive state and remember after this or tension so let's see at the end of the three minutes I feel the urge to breathe breathe n get a I get a strong burst of light and my mind goes into a state of being where there literally was no pain yeah for about 20 seconds each time I did that there was a state where there was absolutely no cognizance of pain and and so what I did is I i'm the second half of the retention part of that three minutes I thought I said to myself Kenton when you inhale you're gonna go into that painless state and that painless state is going to spread out into your shoulder and it's gonna make it so that you have no pain over the next two to three days and you can add placebo to the self hypnosis for instance because sometimes I would say Canton your doctor said that when you go into this when you inhale and you go into this painless state this painless state is gonna act as an analgesic it's gonna move into your shoulder and you will not experience any pain for the next two to three days yeah the studies are showing that if that I can pull my mind away from pain and that's gonna help in the moment but hypnosis or a little bit of self-hypnosis extends things a little bit further and that may be why today has been I won't say it's relatively painless today but it's pretty darn good and so my experience of pain is fairly low and I'll be doing the same thing again tonight they're familiar with the wim HOF method what I did last night is I did more breaths than usual so usually I do twenty to thirty breaths I did forty breaths each time and instead of doing usually I do about three cycles I did five cycles that allowed me to go deeper into it and again I used the first stage the breathing to bring my mind away noticing when there was that lure I'm pulling my mind back to here or back to the sensation in my extremities I used the second part I divided it into two halves the first part I just used as a general place to affirm a placebo effect of inflammation going down any infection being eradicated the second half I used self-hypnosis I really affirmed to myself that when I took that breath the third part and went into that painless state that that painless state would move into my shoulder and would be a lasting effect it would reduce my pain significantly actually said I'd have no pain for the next two to three days I wanted to share this because I'm I think a fair amount of you have heard of the wim HOF method and this is an application of it that just kind of came to me last night so I added some things to it but I I took his breathing method and added that the placebo addition and the self-hypnosis addition and I would say it helped significantly with my experience of pain again there was a period after the wim HOF that I kind of crashed my willpower I was trying other methods my willpower kind of crash and I went into a deep pain State I tried the wim HOF method again when I was in a lot of pain and it helped to bring me out of it so if you if you're someone who is currently experiencing pain or going into pain because you have an upcoming surgery or something I'd urge you to experiment with this check out online how to do that wim HOF breathing and practice it beforehand so you have a feeling for it and then maybe try this method it's it's experimental so you're being a a guinea pig if you do try it I don't know anything about the long-term effects this is you know kind of pioneering something here but I feel really good today and it's made a big difference again on my other channel I'm gonna be going deeper into some other methods that I've been using to manage this pain and and it goes much further than just pain management it goes into being able to take our mind and put it where we want it to go this is this is important stuff I think for all of us even today you know regular lives if we have access to pay medications many of you I'm sure will vouch and say that doesn't matter how many pain pills you're on you're still in a lot of pain and so the more we can learn to harness our mental energy then it can just be in addition to the pain medications that we're on it can be helpful there if you have been dealing with pain or you've dealt with pain in the past and you found some mental methods that really were helpful for you please share in the comments and your insight your wisdom yeah

it's really gonna help other people because there's a lot of people in the world probably a lot of people watching we're dealing with some high levels of pain any help we can give each other is so appreciated and again please remember that I'm not going to be able to answer comments like usually please go ahead yeah friends you just do the best and you're gonna be great you are so encouraging my god that's what everybody needs is just a little encourage or like you thank you my friends thank you for watching and I look forward to seeing what you have to say in the comments all right take it