My cough is back, 2

I guess I already told you this, a month ago. (https://hoseasblog.blogspot.com/2020/03/my-cough-is-back.html) Yes, it's the same damned cough it always is. It started in the middle of last month, and now it's just chronic.

Or almost. I may have discovered a way to allay it temporarily. 

You see, the frequency of the cough seems more or less proportional to how active I am. When I'm asleep, I don't cough. In the first few minutes after I wake up, I don't cough. Then as I come fully awake, it starts up again.

So this afternoon, after lunch, I sat down on a sofa and held as still as possible. I breathed slowly and shallowly. I pretended to be asleep. In fact, more than once I genuinely started drifting off to sleep. But you know what I didn't do? I didn't cough. When I got up to get this tablet to write this post, I walked slowly and didn't cough. In fact, it wasn't until I got really into what I was writing -- and tried a bunch of ways to link a phrase to a URL (thus getting wrapped up in what I was doing, and no longer breathing slowly) -- that I started to cough again.

Of course, knowing this is of limited use. It doesn't help me when I am around others. It doesn't stop me from coughing whenever I try to talk. So this week, when I am visiting relatives for Thanksgiving, I'll end up coughing whenever I try to socialize. That's hardly great.

But in a way it's progress. I wonder if I can make this a mindfulness exercise?