Script:
I am a pretty stressed-out guy. Between work and the rest of my life’s duties, I feel like I have no time to accomplish what I need to get done in a day. Literally, my to-do list is always like sixty items overdo. I have a hole in the wall I’ve been meaning to fix for like six months now that I just don’t have time to fix. Everybody knows you must take at least three trips to Home Depot for each project, and I don’t have time for that. At work, we are twenty projects deep, with the end-of-the-year deadlines coming up fast. All these things compound into a stressed-out Jack, who is very cranky and tired. I just need some time to forget everything and breath. I am in luck, as that’s what Breathwrk aims to do.
[Intro]
Breathwrk is spelled like this: That’s right, the O is missing on purpose. It is an app available on iPhone and Android devices. Like most apps, the basic minute-long classes are free, with the premium ones with coaches, and the challenges come at four dollars per month or thirty-nine dollars per year. The app acts as a breathing coach that forces you to make different breathing patterns to wake up in the morning, fall asleep, calm anxiety, or energize. These options are listed in the app through the yellow, Blue, Green, and Red-colored classes in that order.
With each category are two class types you can choose from. The two types are Coach taught and non-coach-taught classes. With non-coach-taught classes, you can choose pattern types, such as a circle, line, or sleeping monkey, for fun and then follow along with the breathing prompts. For example, in line one, when it goes high, you breathe in. When it goes low, you exhale and hold your breath when it stops. It changes things by going up or down at different time intervals representing how long you breathe. Coach-taught classes, on the other hand, will just play audio from a coach. From there, you inhale, breathe or hold when the coach tells you to. Sometimes the coaches will tell you to visualize things to calm you down or excite you. For example, coaches will tell you to breathe in a while imagining the sun rising to help wake you up in these classes.
When opening the app, you get recommended to complete a seven-day challenge for each category. That gives you twenty-eight days of breathing goodness. From there, you can complete your daily recommendations, which give you classes during a certain time of day. You can also change this up and do even more classes throughout the day with the discovery tab. With the challenges, you can expect to spend one to fifteen minutes within this app. After you complete them, your schedule will take you to do about twenty minutes of breathing every day.
With the basics of the app covered, it’s time for me to make my goal. My overall goal was to become less stressed over the thirty days by doing Breathwrk. My secondary goal was to complete almost all of the four challenges. See, I take a few days off in my schedule to have enough time for everything I complained about at the beginning of this video. That gives me around twenty-six days for the actual thirty-day challenge. Since it takes twenty-eight days, I won’t be doing the daily schedule since my time will be spent completing the challenges. And I also want some time to complete a few lessons from the discovery tab. Lastly, with all this breathing, it would be cool to see if I can increase how long I could hold my breath, so I also measured that in the app.
Below is the template for this challenge. Of course, you can visit my website and download this yourself to complete it. When starting this challenge, my stress level was an eight out of ten. It was just crazy with everything going on at work. That would put my stress level above average. I was also able to hold my breath for thirty seconds. According to a study titled “sports related to study,” the average person can hold their breath for thirty to ninety seconds. That puts me at the very bottom of the average. So far, the statistics in the beginning are not looking good, so any results would be great.
That first day I began the 7 days to lower the Stress challenge since that’s what I needed. From there, I worked on the seven days for better performance since I needed to increase my lung capacity and the seven days of sleep for bedtime. Lastly, The seven days energized the last challenge that I started, and I didn’t complete it, or the sleep bounced between the two. The energize challenge is my favorite among the four, as it probably had my favorite coaches in that category. I want to specifically shout out Terrell Carter, who has the perfect voice and energy for this. Here I’ll play a clip from a yellow class:
[TerellCarterClip.mp4: Start Clip in the begging for thirty seconds]
I would say that I also prefer having a coach for the classes rather than not having one. As I said in the beginning, there are coachless classes where you follow the line, circle, monkey-like you’ve seen behind me. There are also the ones with a coach that direct you on how you should breathe and add more information, such as visualizations or words of encouragement. Of course, how good the coach classes are depended on the coach, but so far, I didn’t find a bad one in the bunch. Spoilers, I still use this app occasionally, and I still like all of the coaches.
Besides the classes, there is the stat tab which shows you how many challenges you have done and how many breaths you have completed. This is also where you can start the tests for your Max exhale and, more importantly for this video, your max breath hold. The app contains Ranks based on how many times you breathed. I didn’t really engage in this functionality or the whole social part of it, but it’s nice that it’s there to act as a leaderboard for those who like these sorts of things.
Now it’s time for the negatives of this app. Surprisingly I don’t have very many negatives to speak of. My only one is that the coach-led classes could be improved in two ways. First, they should also have the line or circle that the non-coach-led classes have to help users follow along. Secondly, the subtitles for the audio are sometimes just completely wrong. I am unsure if it’s being outsourced or using some text-to-speech software, but they need a second review of all the mistakes.
Overall, I would say that I really like this app and had a blast doing it. It gave me time to get calm during the day, forget all the shit I had to complete, and breathe. Suppose you can do that on your own. In that case, you may not need this app but for someone who is kind of disorganized and chaotic like me, having the reminders and challenges helped tremendously. I know everybody likes the results so let’s get into those. I went from a stress level of eight to a stress level of five. Some of that is a few work projects being finished and me trying to get more organized, but I will say a decent chunk of it is breathing through this app. With these results alone, I would try the app for thirty days. With it being four dollars, the price of a Mcdonald’s cheeseburger is worth it.
My breath holds also increased a lot from thirty seconds to forty-two. It’s still on the lower end of the average, but hey… I will take any results I can get. Some interesting stats from my results page is that I have done almost sixteen hundred breaths and spent a hundred and ninety-seven minutes breathing. That gives me seven point five minutes per day spent on this app with the challenges. Doing both the challenges and daily workouts will increase that number significantly, so keep in mind if you want to do both. I think completing the challenges and then doing them through the daily workout is best as it gets you used to the app.
So guys, thank you so much for watching this video. If you liked it, then please give it a thumbs up. If you have any critiques or challenges you want me to do, then please leave them below. I will do pretty much any challenges that are requested. Subscribe to my YouTube challenge to be notified of any new videos. I try to release one every single Friday. Follow me on Twitter and Instagram @truejackjenk. Visit my website jack-jenkins.com. Lastly, I hope everyone watching has a great rest of your day.