I'm a bit confused; do I need to combine a breathing pattern 'with' a mental countermeasure or do I just pick one countermeasure? The way it sounds I have to combine breathing with one of the other types of countermeasures, and if I combine all the countermeasures it would be over kill. Please clarify for me, Thanks.

Good question rawform,

There are two types of breathing that you are going to want to practice before going to the polygraph. There is your "normal" breathing, a constant pattern of a breath every 2-4 seconds. The normal breathing is probably going to be a bit shallower and tiny bit faster than your actual normal breathing.

During the polygraph examination you will talk to the examiner for a while without any sensors hooked up to your body and then eventually it becomes time to get hooked up. One of the things he will hook you up to will be a breathing monitor. He will hook up a long springy wire around your chest - it reminded me of the old cords that used to connect telephone handsets to the base before we got cordless phones. From the very moment he hooks that cord around your chest, to the moment he unhooks you at the end of the test you are going to be counting and controlling your breaths. You want to have a very steady breathing pattern on the machine. 

Before the test - breathe your set pattern
During irrelevant questions - breathe your pattern
During relevant questions - breathe your pattern

The only time you should alter your breathing pattern is when you are asked a "control question." This is a time to make it appear that you are stressed by the question, so you will augment your response. There are several suggestions for how to alter your breathing pattern in "The Lie Behind The Lie Detector." After using the altered breathing pattern for a few seconds, go back to your "normal" breathing pattern. 

When a polygraph examiner is looking at the results from his test he will notice that every time he asked you a relevant question (such as: "Did you steal the money?") He will notice that you kept right on breathing normally after you answered, as if the question did not bother you at all. And when comparing it to the way you answered your control questions (such as: "Did you ever lie to a loved one?") he will notice that you did respond to that question more. He will conclude that you are more worried about possible lies to loved ones than you are about stealing the money and will say that he did not detect any deception, and you probably did not steal the money.

Just remember - breathing is important, but there are other augmentations that you should use along with the breathing to enhance your response to control questions, such as thinking scary thoughts, biting your tongue, imagining an awful scenario (like getting stabbed! yikes!). These augmentations will make your pulse, blood pressure, skin sweat etc have more noticable spikes with the control questions than with the relavent questions, which is how we get a non-deceptive result. 

Here is a story I wrote in the post-conviction polygraph section talking about how I used breathing and other countermeasures to pass my polygraph:

https://antipolygraph.org/cgi-bin/forums/YaBB.pl?num=1300331378

I wish you the best of luck with your test. Keep on studying "The Lie Behind The Lie Detector," and this website. Remember that some of the people on this site are polygraph examiners themselves. They make a living lying to people everyday about how they have a 98% accuracy level and 20 years experience working for the CIA or whatever. Half the battle is learning not to listen to their manipulations and threatening bullshit. I love that video where the guy hooks a copy machine up to the person and tricks them into thinking that his lies are being exposed. (It's on the front page of https://antipolygraph.org/ ). That is essentially what a polygraph machine is, no wonder so many polygraphers get angry when their secretes are pointed out.

I dont want to say what its for at this time, but I will say it is most likely a probable lie test . I have no reason to lie but I also know that polygraphs are not scientific and  I would hate to fail because I didnt educate myself.

stefano, 
thank you, I've actually read TLBTLD about 4 times and I've read chapters 3 and 4 six times now. my confusion when trying to understand everything is if breathing alone will be enough, just wanted to clarily if a mental countermeasure and modifying my breathing at the same time is the right thing to do. for a while I thought modifying my breathing was going to be enough. Ill keep on practicing.

Thank you stefano,
I have another question regarding my breathing. Upon practicing I am concerned that my breathing pattern might be to deep. what kind of breathing pattern would be considered to deep? I find it necessary for me to have a breathing pattern that involves an almost normal inhalation of breath if I don’t fill my lungs with enough air it is to difficult to recover after deploying the countermeasure breath. It seems the only way I can recover comfortably from the countermeasure is if my breathing pattern is close to normal which I'm concerned might be too deep. I am not taking large breaths and my breathing pattern is within the 15 to 30 breaths. What is too deep?

rawform

Think about how things turned out for Cool Hand Luke...you'll do fine.