About Dan Kristoffer Holmstad

I served in Afghanistan with ISAF rotations 8, 12, and 13, doing IED disposal in Helmand. It is a job where adrenaline is the constant baseline. You never fully come down, because the next routine task could be the day it goes wrong.

When I came home, I brought severe PTSD and complex PTSD (cPTSD) with me. I spent more than ten years looking for tools that actually do something in the body, not just talk about it. The breathing techniques that helped me were never the spectacular ones. They were the quiet, trainable ones: a long exhale, a physiological sigh.

We were trained in peacetime, not for the situations we ended up in down there. That gap, between what the body is prepared for and what it meets, is the thing I have spent years trying to close. Vaken came out of that work: a breathing app built around protocols your nervous system actually responds to, not the one a wellness influencer says is best.

I write here at Off Overdrive about the science of breathing for an overloaded nervous system, drawing on peer-reviewed research and on what people describe in their own words. If anything here is useful to one person at 3 in the morning, it was worth writing.