u/krol-Julian

Stress ruined my life and at certain point of searching for help i turned into breathing techniques. As i started to practice, I understood that it is not only a matter of breathing technique itself that one has to practice but several other factors. Breathwork doesn't work as strong as pill, in order to achieve measurable results - repetition and consistency is key factor for success.

I started with box breathing because it's the one everyone recommends. It helped, but only when I already had enough presence of mind to actually do it, during a real spike it was the last thing on my mind. What actually changed things for me was making it a fixed part of my day, same time, whether I "needed" it that day or not, until it stopped being something I had to remember and just became normal.

Then i started with hyperventilation, which helped me (among many others things) to deal with chronic inflammation caused by the chronic stress. Hyperventilation gives a lot of satisfaction because one can feel that day by day capable of doing stronger, deeper breaths, longer holds that directly translates to body endurance and is able to observe it on breathwork time measurement. Hyperventilation is intense, energizing kind of breathwork so it is definitely not while in the middle of heavy stress.

That pursue for discovering of new breathing techniques got me building my own breathing app (Breather) on the side as solo developer. I am improving it on weekly basis with new features and was wondering what worked for others here. Not just which technique, but what made it actually stick for you, was it the technique itself, a routine around it, tracking it somehow, or something else entirely? Still figuring out what's actually worth building next, so genuinely want to know.

https://preview.redd.it/fzps4g0f9f9h1.jpg?width=1638&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=39ad04d52c2e874c48a86586031998ff2c9ebb34

One technique that finally made things stick for me: instead of repeating a word or term over and over, you turn it into a picture — and the more absurd, funny or awkward the picture, the better it sticks. Our brains are bad at remembering abstract strings of letters but great at remembering weird images.

The trick is breaking the thing you're learning into sound-alike chunks — words you already know that sound like it — and then building a ridiculous scene out of them.

Example with a foreign word — Italian mangiare ("to eat"). It sounds like man + jar. So picture a man tries to jar the lid off a giant sandwich. Now it's not an abstract word, it's a stupid little scene you can't un-see.

But it works for anything you have to memorize, not just languages:

• Anatomy/bio terms, drug names, legal definitions — anything where the word itself is hard to hold onto
• Names, dates, numbers (you assign sounds to digits and do the same thing)

Then you review the cards using spaced repetition so they come back right before you'd forget them.

You can do all of this with pen and paper or Anki — no app needed, and honestly it's worth trying by hand first to see if the method clicks for you.

Full disclosure: I'm a solo dev and I built an app (ElasticMemo) that automates the annoying part — it suggests the sound-alike breakdown and generates the image for you, on top of a normal spaced-repetition flashcard system. The flashcards and spaced repetition are free; the AI association/image generation is the paid bit since the generation costs me per call. Mentioning it because it's relevant, but the technique above stands on its own whether or not you ever touch it.

https://elasticmemo.com/

I noticed that many people do not trust AI when it comes for language learning, so (as a solo app developer) i came up with idea of using AI in such way that turns its weak point hallucination into advantage. One of the techniques to learn some word is that you need to create its visual representation, the more absurd, strange, funny or awkward it is, the more it sticks to our memory. Not everybody has imagination so flexible to do it for each and every word, and this is where AI comes with unlimited number of ideas to build visual associations. So I have created an app that helps with that. First it helps to convert word into sound alike chunks and then builds visual story and image upon them.

For example for English speaker that wants to learn Italian word 'mangiare' that means 'eat' turns into 'man' + 'jar' (mangiare → man + jar ) and makes a story around it: "A man tries to jar the lid off a giant sandwich, clearly intending to eat it."

App works like a normal flashcard app otherwise — spaced repetition and all — plus this association feature. App also handles memorizing numbers. The flashcards and spaced repetition are free; the AI association/image generation is the paid part since the generation costs me per call.

Curious whether people here find made-up visual associations help, or if you prefer learning words in real world context?

https://preview.redd.it/te38ux02we9h1.jpg?width=1638&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=11ea3d8b875da5c2a561a1634fed0c04bf7d8b85