HubermanBreathing
Reanalysis of this Cell Reports in Medicine paper on breathing:
Brief structured respiration practices enhance mood and reduce physiological arousal
download from here:
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.xcrm.2022.100895
Summary of reanalysis
- I cannot reproduce a key claim in this paper (Figure 3), that cyclic sighing improves positive feelings compared to mindfulness meditation.
- Surprisingly, about half the data consists of subjects who did not even do the exercise they were assigned. It seems the authors just included these cases, even if the key breathing or meditation task was not carried out.
- Including a predictor that indicates whether the participant did the task or not has no impact on the outcome---it seems to not matter whether the participant even did the task.
- A key interaction reported in Figure 3 cannot be significant (it even has two stars), because the reported confidence interval crosses zero.
I suspect that the data provided is not the data used in the published analysis.
I think it is likely that this entire analysis is bogus and in my opinion, this paper should be retracted.