Rich Low of Madison served as an infantry officer in the Army in Iraq in 2005 and 2006, leading some 280 combat missions. When he came back from the service, he didn?t think his experience affected him in any major way. He had nightmares, and he startled easily, but he chalked that up to just something veterans live with. Then he enrolled in a study he initially wrote off as “just some hippie thing,” where he learned about yoga breathing and meditation. A year later, Low, 30, sums up his experience with two words: “It works.”
That?s the idea behind the study coming from The Center for Investigating Healthy Minds at the Waisman Center on the UW-Madison campus. Researchers there, including associate scientist Emma Seppala, believe something as simple as breathing can change the lives of veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, even those who don’t think they have post-traumatic stress disorder.