Afterthoughts: The Neurobiology of Breath and Emotion

All right, welcome to Flow Radio. I'm Ryan Wicks, chief of staff of the Flow Research Collective. Today I'm joined by my co host, FRC executive director and best selling author Steven Kotler, and our Chief Science Officer, Dr. Michael Menino. In this episode, we're introducing a new segment called Afterthoughts. We really have two goals here. First, we want to dive deeper into our conversations that we had with our prior guests, explore the practical applications for unlocking flow states. And second, we're inviting you to send in our questions for our guests and we'll answer them in the next Afterthoughts episode.

Now, Ryan, I think you want them to send in their questions. We could send in our questions too, and we can answer our own questions. But I think maybe for this segment, it's just an idea, they might want to send in their questions. So I was thinking they would listen to the podcast, for example, with Dr. Jack Feldman or Dr. Joanne Coynes, and they would have questions and they would send them to us. And we of course, would not be able to answer them, but we might be able to call the people who we talk to and ask them to answer them, or we'll answer them ourselves or we'll make up answers. All three will be amusing this days.

This stays so, yeah. Steven, you introduced our guest earlier this month, Dr. Jack Feldman, professor of Neurobiology at UCLA. Dr. Feldman's a renowned neuroscientist for his groundbreaking work in the neural control of breathing. And one thing that stuck out to us in this conversation is that some of the flow related questions you had, Stephen and Michael, didn't get answered. And Stephen, as we're getting ready for this recording, you were explaining how it reminded you of the early days of studying the neuroscience of flow and the conversations you would have. A scientist then. Can you pick back, pick up that thread again for us?

Yeah, it's. It was one of the, sort of like the, one of the. As a journalist coming in, you hold scientists in sort of such high esteem. Perhaps at least I did, and I had a really sort of mistaken assumption about science. And I'll actually, I'll tell you a weird story that drives this home. So the assumption I made is that you go and you listen, you read their current research, and it raises a lot of sort of like basic questions, really fundamental stuff that, you know, with Jack, I was asking him complicated questions about comparative altered states. How does this breathing technique worse versus that breathing technique affect consciousness, emotion, possibilities, getting in flow, and he didn't have any answers. And the reason was there's a lot of basic research that doesn't get done. And sometimes it's because you really current cutting edge research, you think you're going farther. And what it actually does is it uncovers a basic question that hasn't been answered. The one that was most shocking to me is I was reporting a story for Wired. I was covering the Everglades Restoration project. It's an $8 billion, the most expensive public works project ever done to restore the health of the Everglades. The their metric, they were trying to get to sheet flow, which is when the whole top of the Everglades moves as a single layer and flows as a single layer, it's known as sheet flow. And that's how they measure the health of the ecosystem. So if you want to determine if anything is successful with the ecosystem, one thing you might measure, and this is really foundational, is keystone predators. So whatever is the apex predator that sits at the top of the food chain, that animal or reptile, usually determines the health of the entire food chain for a lot of the different complicated reasons. But basically, if the apex predator is dying off, everything else that's underneath it will start to flourish. And this is so wolves die out, deer run rampant, and what you have is massive defoliation, right? That happens because the wool population has dropped, so there's no predators for the deer. So the deer eat all the food, and then all the animals underneath the deer start starving, and you have what's known as a tropic cascade, or all this is besides the point. I'm doing the Everglade Restoration Project, and we're out there in the Everglades at midnight in this boat, and we're measuring alligator size. We're trying to measure the health of the ecosystem. We're doing a baseline alligator survey. You have to do it at midnight because you use flashlights, you get the eye shine from the alligators. And as soon as you get eyeshine, you get a measuring tape and you, like, stand on the surface of the water and try to measure the alligator and not get bit. And in the middle of the night in the swamp, in the Everglades, where everything can kill you. And night after night after night. And after like a week of this, I finally turned to the guy in charge and I was like, why are we doing this? What's the point? Why are we doing this study? He's like, well, we have to. We have to count the number of predators there are to determine the health of the ecosystem. And I just stopped And I was like, well, wait a minute. This is the largest public works ever project ever undertaken. It's $8 billion of taxpayer money. And the only way to determine if it's successful is to know how many alligators were there before you started versus how many are after. And nobody bothered to measure beforehand. So, like you're telling me we can't even measure the success of the $8 billion. And it was. It was true. Nobody had bothered to do the research ahead of time before they put through this public works project. It was only after the fact. And I was. I was shocked by it because I was like, oh, my God, like, okay, how do you even tell the taxpayers that we, well, spent their money or not? And that question never really got answered. But this same thing was flowing through my head when we were talking to Jack because we were asking him really foundational questions about respiration, consciousness and emotion and flow. And this is all really new. And one of the things. And this is where I want to kick off the next question. I'll pass it over to Michael. He said something that really sort of shocked me, which is we were trying to figure out why there's such tight connection between emotion and breath. And he said, well, one reason is because you've got the brainstem controls breathing, and you've got the parasympathetic and the sympathetic nervous system wired in there, and they're all very close to each other. And I was like, is. That doesn't sound like an explanation to me. That sounds like, you know what I mean, like. Or it doesn't sound like a deep level explanation. It sounds like, holy crap, this is brand new information. And these three systems that are so tied to emotion all sit next to each other, but we don't actually know how they impact one another. Is that. Was I wrong, Michael? Is that. But that's what he said, correct?

I think that's what he said. The anatomical connectivity, like the adjacent. A lot of these systems work together. They're near each other, especially in the brain stem, I think. But wait. Backing up to. About the basic science research issue is one of the things. One of the evidences, I guess, that he said was ask me in 10 years, like you said, right? Ask me 10 years and we'll have answers to these questions, which is like, very, you know, I think he's. He's a great scientist in terms of having that, you know, humility, that intellectual humility about where the research is. What the questions that are still unanswered are how we go about testing Them where the research really sits. I mean we're, you know, and it's.

Well, it's, I mean it's. Michael, I'm going to interrupt you for half a second because I just want to put some, I want to, I want to take that. One of the things that's so I agree with you me is an awesome scientist, an excellent researcher and he's really hard nosed. But like what's amazing to me, I always talk about one of the things that people seem to miss in science is always a great story. It's a mystery story. It's always a mystery story, right? Somebody had a question, they set out to answer the question. It took forever. And what amazes me is Jack is in like the August period of his career and he started his career, right? He's not an undergraduate. I think he's a postdoc at this point. Maybe he's a grad student. And he wants to know where is respiration localized in the brain? Is there a master switch? And he talks about that probably. You go back to his old interviews, they really sort of thought they would solve it within a year or two. Ten years later, right? They've discovered the pre bot's in their complex and suddenly they discover oh, this is the master regulator for respiration. But wait a minute, no, it turns out no, it's only the mass respirator for inhalation. There's a whole different set of, right. Neural, neural funk, neural property, neural mechanisms that govern exhalation. That takes another 10 years, right? And that's sort of like. And now he's 25 years into this research and he's just probing at the fact that oh wow, respiration has a deep impact on meditation or on, on emotion, cognition. Move, right? It's, it's really like, it's a really great example of one. How far down a mystery you can crawl, you know what I mean? How easy it can swallow your life. I didn't know when I crawled into the world of flow back in 1996 or that I was 35 years later or whatever. 30 years later I'm still here. I'm still banging around asking really dumb questions sometimes that's.

But that's also good about the scientific mindset or scientific attitude is that you manage your expectations about, you know, these questions that are going to be you, you, they're going to be lingering a lot longer than you think.

I always take the best, the best language for you. Michael, you're trained as a philosopher, so you know this in philosophy people have Projects. Right. The Ubermensch was Nietzsche's project, and they're meant to last a lifetime. Right. So I always thought that, you know, flow is sort of my project in the same way that, like, the Uber Bench was Nietzsche's project, as that could.

Be distinguished in a scientific view from hypotheses. Right. You test hypotheses. You don't just, you know, I think.

The project is the thing you start having hypotheses about, which. Exactly right.

Exactly. Right. Yeah. Yeah. And the project gets larger and peeling away at the onion kind of thing to be, so to speak. But he was talking in another conversation about, like, experiments that were done, like, in the 50s on cats, about the relationship between respiration and. I think it was like, emotive responses. But that. But we didn't know. You know, we didn't know. No one was really interested in pursuing those kinds of things. And that's also an interesting point, is like, what questions do we actually pursue and grab onto that will turn out 60 years later to be super relevant? And then we find out those things in humans, like the relationship between breathing and cognition and breathing and emotion, is really recent. It's very recent. I mean, I think it was another study that came out that I've talked about before by Zelano and her team at nyu. They looked at the rhythm of breathing and fear and looking at fearful expressions in other people's faces. And they found that on. She found that on the inhalation through the nose, but not through the mouth. People are quicker to recognize fearful expressions in other people's faces on the inhalation through the nose, not through the mouth.

Do you think that's because. Do you think that's it? Do you think that's because the olfactory bulb. Do you think it's because the olfactory bulb is so tied in? And so one of the things that's interesting about. For those listening. But olfaction is every other signal that comes in through our senses, even through, like, our interior receptive senses, I believe gets routed through the thalamus, except for olfaction, which bypasses it. And it's because we fear certain things, especially. It's discussed. Right. We need to know very, very fast if something's rotten and poisonous, so we don't put it in our mouth. And I believe that's originally where that came from. I'm not mistaken. So I wonder if that's that. Let me ask you a related question that Jack was.

Hold on, hold on. Wait, wait. Before you ask that related question, I just Want to say from a very, very high level in neuroscience. People are still discovering, like, new neurons, new types of neurons. And like, it's, it's, it's super crazy about when you take a really big step back in terms of where the field of neuroscience is in general. I mean, we're still discovering things like, oh, my God, we didn't discover that like 60 years ago. No, we just discovered that yesterday.

It's like, wow, you know, Michael, I don't know if you remember this, we canceled the practice, but it used to be if you, if I hired you at the collective, I made you watch, among other things, Robert Sapolsky's. He did a class on neuroscience at Stanford. But it was episode number 12. And episode number 12, I believe, I think it was the right one is the one where he talks about neurochemical receptors and how they relate epigenetically. And the point is basically like, whatever we think we know about neurochemicals in the brain, receptors are a relatively new topic. And it turns out they multiply and go away and disappear completely, unlike the order of days because of epigenetic factors and genetic factors, and they pop back up and they atrophy again. So even if you want to say something like dopamine does this in the brain and you've got you specified like which dopamine and which receptor, it still doesn't matter. You're still like, you're not specifying how much of there is in a receptor cluster. And I always say that one of the reasons I think I'm good at flow research is I have low functioning dopamine receptors. So I have to get a bigger reaction than a lot of people to get anywhere with this work. So it allows me to like. Because I'm not an easy test subject when I run experiments on myself. It gives me a little bit of an edge to just as the first, like, help me develop my hypothesis thing, because I'm not reactive that way. But I always think about that stuff. And I was thinking about when Jack was talking. If we know that endorphins are involved in breathing on almost a moment by moment basis, we then have to start talking about endorphin receptors and how they're being impacted by epigenetics and what role does respiration play in that? And is there a feedback loop, a feed forward loop? All those questions were going through my head. I know there aren't answers to those yet, but that's what I was thinking about while he was talking.

Yeah, 100%. A lot of the questions that, by the way, I think, like, he answered in a way that were like, okay, this is the best of our knowledge. And then this is the best of my knowledge. Right. In terms of my research. But yeah, another point that I wanted to like, pursue that we didn't get a chance to in the conversation was this idea of interoception. Because I get asked all the time how interoception, what it is. Right. And how it relates to well being and how it might relate to better getting into flow and increasing performance and so on. And so I don't think he.

Yeah, so one interoception for anybody who's listening is our ability to detect internal signals. So balance, proprioception, mood, you got a stomachache, you got a gut instinct, your hair is standing on end and you can do all that stuff is interoception. And there's a lot of what we've learned so far at the basic practical level is interoception. Good, right. The better your ability to detect internal signals from a flow perspective. I've always said that the most important thing we can learn is how to detect fear levels inside. Because the challenge skills, balance is such a tiny little sweet spot for 1% to 4%. Basically, difference between talents and skills. And anxiety is really anxiety levels is the major determinant factor. And if you can't sort of moment by moment tell how scared you are, it's really hard to tune your nervous system, as that's all interception. But what, yeah, you, you go, no.

No, I want to. I want to. I want to take this down the rabbit hole here. So we and you especially Stephen, talk a lot about William James. And the great thing in education is to make our nervous system our ally, not our enemy. You talk a lot about how peak performance is all about getting your biology to work for you, not against you. Right. And that is. So here's where this fits into this part of the conversation. So William James and I think it was like Michael Lang had this theory of emotion which he wrote about in Principles of Psychology or whatever.

Principles of Psychology. It's the Lang James theory now, right?

Yes. The Lang James theory of emotion. Yes. So I wanted to bring this up in our conversation about the James Lange or Lang James theory of emotion. He asked the question, if you come across a bear in the woods, do you run because you're afraid? Are you afraid because you run? And normally we think we run because we're afraid. We get afraid, we have fear, then we have this physiological response and then this physical response of getting out of there. Turns out we now know, and some of this is Based on Joseph LeDoux's work as well, and other neuroscientists, that it's actually the opposite, right, that we actually get afraid because we run. So we have this physiological response first, the autonomic nervous system response, the sympathetic response, the pupil dilation, all these internal signals, and then we get afraid later on. So our brain interprets all of those signals coming up partially through the vagus nerve, you know, all of these signals coming up from the viscera. And then the brain creates a story, right? It makes a prediction about, okay, why are we getting those physiological signals?

Yeah.

Michael, let me pause you for a moment. There's a peak. There's a very practical thing here that I want to talk about that people miss a lot. We hear a lot these days about trauma. Trauma dumping has become really routine, right. Everybody seems to want extra credit for having gone through their trauma. And so you hear a lot of people retelling their traumatic story. And one of the things that always happens is because of the Lang James connection, right? They reactivate. You're reactivating all that trauma again, and you're getting more worked up, and you're actually making it worse. So when, by retelling these stories, it's not so much the story, it's that you reactivate all the emotions, which brings it all back up again even bigger. And you're recoding the memory. You're laying in the neural pattern, and you're locking yourself into that even more because of that.

Yes. So interoceptively, Right? Interoception. Being more aware of what's going on inside your body affects, we all know, all of these cognitive processes like learning, decision making, working memory, and so on, and emotion. So that's why I think, like, being able to use breathwork to regulate your autonomic nervous system can then help your brain create a better story or retell a better story. Which is why I think breath work lowers default mode, network activity. Psychedelics do the same thing, but it can. You can use to. And we write about this in our first few seconds.

It was one of the questions I had off of Jack's stuff, right. He was talking about this, and this was the question I asked him. Is breathwork opening a neuroplastic window, or is it giving us what you're talking about? Which is sort of like. It builds space in between emotion when the sensation arise interior, receptively, and feeling, when we can name it and put up and, oh, this is this that I'm feeling. Right. There's a gap in between and it lengthens the gap. That's what allows reappraisal and reframing. And I know Jack's worked on that stuff along with respiration because I've seen it on some of his charts and some of his studies. But I'm interested in like, is that because he was saying something really interesting, which I never. Which I don't know if it's true. According to him, if you're getting in this neuroplastic window that's tied to breathing, it would mean that reframing actually is not just a technique for changing your perspective in the present moment. It's actually training the brain to think that way differently over time.

When.

Right. That's what he. Then there's. There's a difference. I always felt like reframing doesn't actually change thought. It's a good tool in the moment. But I haven't seen studies. There's some cognitive behavioral stuff, maybe that's okay, but where it has really lasting change. And I've talked a lot about how like the, the stoic technique of negative visualization seems to work better than reframing because it gets in. In there. Be in the chain earlier. So I, it was. I could be totally wrong. Like what Jack is saying is right. Then everything that I just spouted out of my mouth is actually, is actually wrong. And there's actually neuroplastic windows off of respiration all the time. Which is really. It means you could retrain the brain all the freaking time just by breathing is Exactly.

So that's that. And, and here. And so there's evidence of that. I think at least I have an data evidence of that or anecdotal evidence of that is like think about. So I think the better you get. So breathing is training, right? You can train yourself to breathe better, to breathe more consciously with an online practice or something, an offline practice, so to speak. But I think that that has neuroplastic effects. Right. So you can get better at breathing and then that has downstream synaptic plastic effects. That's what we're saying. And I think that's right. You can get better at it. And over time it really has these large scale plastic changes rewiring your brain over longer periods.

Let me ask you a weird question because I've always wondered this and this is a really strange. This is a very strange question. But you're going to know what I'm talking about. So if you've experimented With a lot of different psychedelics, especially with psychedelic therapy and whatever, you will know that breath work has often been used to mimic different psychedelics. Right. And holotropic breathing, right. With Stanislav drives attempt to produce an LSD reaction. One of the things I've noticed with WIM HOF work especially is you get a, you get a reaction on the back end usually after your breath hold is very similar to ketamine. And here's my question. So out of all the, out of all of the psychedelics, it appears that ketamine opens the largest neuroplastic window. So after a psychedelic experience you get neuroplasticity opens back up again. Right? You get heightened neuroplasticity on the back end of psychedelic experiences. It allows you to do a lot of faster predatoring. It's why it's so good for therapy. Ketamine seems to open the biggest window for whatever reason, which is odd because it's a totally synthetic molecule. Right. There's nothing in nature that mimics ketamine that we can find so far. I don't think that's actually true. I think sooner or later we'll find something. Otherwise I don't think we'd react so strongly to it. But that's totally besides the point. My question is, do we think that different breathwork techniques, first of all, do you think there's any like, is there any credence here? Is it, am I, is there any way to work back from the reaction to what the psychedelic it'll mimic? Does do you think there's different breathwork opens different windows in the way that different psychedelics. Right. And by the way, ibogaine, which is the South Africa or this, the African psychedelic that produces the 24 hour trip that they use to treat heroin addiction because it blocks the opiate receptors afterwards, right? You get this huge. It's the 30 day block of opiate receptors after ibogaine. So they can basically use it to treat heroin addiction because people don't detox and it opens this enormous neuroplastic window. So you get those two advantages and it works really well. So that may be greater than ketamine, but anyways, I'll shut up now.

No, I think that there's. My suspicion is that different breathing techniques have differential effects. Neurobiologically.

I do too.

So I mean, I mean it's kind of definitely on the peripheral nervous system, right? But on the central nervous system, I think that different breathing techniques have. Even from like alternate nostril breathing, for example, I think And I think Jack Feldman's actually mentioned this before that.

Let me ask you a related question to what you just said, because you got right where I wanted to go, which is the question I asked Jack and I've always wondered about, which is, as I said in the podcast, we have this one study, right? Orhan Mazano did this one study that we love, the flow and piano study from 2010, where he found that basically that we just breathe more slowly and deeply in flow. This was for piano players. And 1. Let me point out why that makes some sense and then let me raise my questions. One, it makes sense from a effortless effort perspective. We know you're using automated learning, you're using less of the brain. We know that happen. We can see that happen, right? As we learn, we actually end up using less of the brain to reproduce the result. So learning is very energetically efficient. This is one of the reasons why Elkavan Goldberg, in his work on wisdom and how wisdom is neuroprotective against cognitive decline, same thing with skills, right? Both expertise and wisdom are neuroprotective. And his point was, it's because as we learn wisdom skills and expertise skills, we need less and less neural real estate and less and less energy to reproduce them, right? So there's a benefit there. So that would, that links up with this finding that, oh, you're going to breathe more deeply, you're going to be calmer, less energy, less energy expended. That said, my deepest flow states are always or mostly, sometimes they're writing based, but if they're not writing base, they're action sports based or their activity. I'm dancing, I'm skiing, I'm mountain biking. And I always note, I mean, like, in those situations, the deeper the, you know, oftentimes I'm panting, like, I'm panting, I'm skiing bumps or, you know, coming down a really steep cliff face, and I'm like, my breathing is really shallow and fast. And that would, that's the exact opposite of the flow findings. So that says, oh, wait a minute, there's, there's differences. And here's the other question. There was something my wife asked me yesterday. We know that like slower breathing, you're calmer. Does faster breathing correlate? We know it correlates with anxiety, but does it correlate with productivity at all? Is there a certain level of breathing that we're more awake, alert and productive? And by extension, you know, what the blank do we think is happening in flow with respiration? Those are the two questions yes, great questions.

I don't know. But I think, number one, I think, yes, well, that's being into, I mean, I'm a scientist, we're scientists here. I think that there is some evidence to suggest that the activity matters, right? Number one, I think, I think, right, we know flow is contextual. It exists on a spectrum. And there's one sense, there's a universality to it, like flows, flows, flow, but different kinds of cognitive flow, physical flow, sort of athletic flow. It exists in different contexts and those different breathing, different respiration, respiratory, whatever you want to call it are associated with different kinds of activities. Like one of my biggest flow activities is table tennis, right. As you know. So I'm definitely not, you know, having a slow, parasympathetic, upregulated calming effect, by the way, that's the same thing in, you know, again, if you see a bear in the woods, if you calm your nervous system, are you going to make better decisions about maybe what to do? Or do you want to have like that higher level sympathetic panting and then just let me get out of here. But that happens first.

And let me ask. Okay, so let me ask you a related, Let me ask you a related question that I've always wondered about that.

But I didn't answer your question, by the way.

I'm like, let me, let me, let me just interject a point and, and you can. And I'll let you go. Could be the bear in the woods thing. We know flow. Like if you're going to run away from a bear, your best chances of survival are either like a pure fight or flight response or a pure panic. Just go. And probably better chances if you're in flow. So one of the things I've always wondered is we know there's that U shaped cortisol curve, right? You need some cortisol in the system, you need some sympathetic response from the nervous system, a little anxiety to prime us for flow. You need the norepinephrine to prime us for learning all that stuff. So it could. One of the things I always wondered about, like when we see the bear in the woods, one, if you see a bear in the woods, does it make a noise to. We say when we see a bear in the woods, right? Are we actually trying to upregulate ourselves towards flow rather than panic? And panic is the, like, you know, the, the, you know what I'm trying to say?

No. And so maybe, maybe it might be helpful to couch this in terms of the flow cycle. And we know. So we know in flow there's just decent evidence from like Karina Pfer, who we've interviewed at the. Here at the Collective and Manzano, a co activation of a sympathetic response and a parasympathetic response, right? Where we're alert but calm, you know, and in the release phase, right? So in the struggle phase, release flow, then recovery. In the struggle phase, there's this. There's, let's say, a sympathetic response, right? There's psychophysiological evidence to support that, behavioral evidence as well to support that as this is what your work is on. Then in release, there's a parasympathetic, right? You're calming, you're letting go. There's a phenomenological sense of letting go, whether that's like, however you do that. And then in flow, there's a co activation, right? So I don't know. I think that maybe there's different sorts of breathing techniques that can modulate or facilitate a better cyclical, you know, a better. A better flow cycle. That's what you just made me think of there.

If only we knew somebody who could study that question. That's a great question. That's a really great question. That's a real. You're. I think you're probably right about that. That's really interesting. That's a really interesting question.

Yeah, but I think. I don't know where we were going with this.

I forgot.

We need to phone a friend. We need to phone a friend. Hey, just for sake of time here, I've got one really practical question. Jack shared with us. How often he's answering questions about breathwork. Right. We know that as it just continues to be shared all over social media, more and more people are going into it. One of the things that he said he encourages people to do is crawl, walk, run, right? It is a slow ramp into breathing protocols, right? Start with something simple so you can get to the more sophisticated techniques. Is the same for flow? Do we. I mean, is the recommendation. When you are starting to train flow and peak performance, are we looking for a slower ramp in. Do we want to start with the basics so we can get more proficient, better at the work?

So, Michael, I'll let you answer as well, because it's probably going to be a different answer than me. Ryan, the thing that most jumps out to me about that question is so one, there's the. Where do you start? Flow training is a really complicated question, right? Because on a certain level, you want to meet people wherever they are. And so I'll give you an example. The collective Two of our core sort of clients, we tend to train a lot of very powerful, high powered women in their 40s and 50s. And often they have had some break from their career, often children, right. Raising a family. And they're coming back into the workplace and they're really fired up. They have endless amounts of motivation, gusto, and they're diving in. I don't need to start them on recovery or even basic motivation stuff because they like, they're already fired up, they're not burned out. The other client that we tried to train a lot is executives, right? Leaders, C suite executives. I think 60, 65% of our clients are probably business people in the C suite, right? CEOs or that level at the company. And most of them, the vast majority, are completely burned out. Right? They want peak performance. They're peak performers. But they're like, they've been going as far as they. And where you start training them is totally different. Right. Then it really is a crawl. Walker on. Because you want to start with recovery. Are you getting seven, eight hours of sleep a night? Are you doing an active recovery practice? Rather right. That sort of stuff. The thing that I got that was so cool from Jack is so I've got a. I've got a chart that I use when I train up companies, and sometimes with individuals, but always with companies where we talk about distraction management and active recovery. When I talk about active recovery, it's a map. If you have five minutes, do a daily gratitude practice. If you have six minutes, read fiction. Because reading six minutes of fiction actually has a bigger impact on your nervous system than mindfulness. If you have seven to 11 minutes, my understanding was that's where breath work starts to become effective. What I learned from Jack is, hey, wait a minute, there's data that says if you have five minutes, you might be able to try breath work. That was new to me. I haven't heard that. That's a shorter I've heard. But you know, if you go with Jon Kabat Zinn and all his research off of mindfulness based stress reduction, which I think it shrunk at the smallest intimate chunk, it was seven minutes. I had a friend who created a program or 11 minutes. And I had a friend who created a seven minute meditation practice that I looked at that was interesting to me. And I often taught people because seven minutes is literally the time frame between television commercials. We get seven minutes of television and then we get commercials, often in most series. So the human brain, because we watch tv, we can focus for seven minutes because we've got this built. If we watch tv, you've got this built in slot for. I know how to focus for seven minutes. So it's often easy to train people in breathwork in seven minute cycles because they've learned how to focus that long from watching tv. So I played with that seven minute cycle and found that, you know, with really deep breathing, especially if you're slowing it down as a parasympathetic thing, you can usually that's enough to sort of. And then you go up 20 minutes, you actually go for a walk in the woods 40 minutes, you go to the gym and exercise, you know, that sort of thing. Depending on your time for recovery. What I got from Jack was, holy crap, you might be able to do this in five minutes. And another five minute tool, which is a big deal.

I agree with everything you said. I just want to add a couple of minor points. Is one, you know, we interviewed Richie Davidson and he talked about any level of conscious breathing is going to be. To be helpful and then building the practice you get better at it is going to be even more helpful. And there's probably a diminishing returns that I don't think there's so much research on that. But I will say, Ryan, to your question, I think number one, flow is more complex than conscious breathing. With any technique like box breathing, you can learn that right now, like learning how to get into flow, understanding your triggers, your environment, all of these kinds of things. It's a more complex state of consciousness. Right. And therefore probably takes more work to be able to learn how to facilitate and make on demand. The other thing, I'll say that massive amounts of people, let's just say, don't have never tried conscious breathing.

Right.

And don't understand its effect. Right. Like, you know, it's like that's just, I think, you know, I don't know the date on that, but it's probably just a fact. It's like massive amounts of people, we're all over breathers, you know, unless you read about some sort of breathwork technique or something like, like that, and then actually sit down to try it, it takes a little bit of effort. Whereas maybe, in contrast, almost all of us have experienced something sometime during our life where we're in a micro flow state, right. Or a macro flow state, we're doing something we're relatively good at that's somewhat challenging. We have an activity that we enjoy, we have a hobby. So we've probably all had an experience of it in one sense or another. Right. And Stephen you talk a lot about this, but with breath work, probably not. So it takes a little bit more maybe of a conscious effort to, okay, I'm going to try this, see how it makes me feel. And then here's another breathing technique. I'm going to try this and see how it makes me feel and so on.

And Michael, there's one thing for anybody coming in cold, it's worth knowing there's a while breath work. And breath work strikes me as always, always meditative, right? Meditation, when you're just focused on your breath is very different from breath work. Breath work usually involves changing the rate of breathing, breathing on certain counting patterns, etc.

Etc.

And the point I wanted to make is that I was, look, I've been meditating since the 90s, following my breath in and out, in and out, in and out. When the Wim HOF breathwork revolution started, I was really certain there was nothing that it was going to add to it. Like, I played with box breathing when we trained the Navy seals. I did some box breathing, and that was about as far as I got. That was very resistant to a lot of stuff that was going on around me. I just like, I was like, yeah, yeah, yeah, I've been doing this forever. Whatever. You're getting neat effects. I've never had those. And then I started actually doing actual breath work and changing respiratory. And what I found is, holy crap. One, breath work is so much easier than meditation because there's so much more shit to keep your mind occupied. Two, you get much bigger results faster, right? If you're interested in physiological shifts, emotional shifts, if you're looking for faster results, right? As a gateway. And I found that breath work is actually a much better gateway into meditation than meditation is a gateway into breath work. And all I, you know, when I was sort of done with my first round of experiments, I was like, why didn't somebody teach me this? 30 years. You could save me so much time. So much time, right?

Yeah, that's a good point. Jack made the point also about disentangling breath work and mindfulness. Like, you know, he talked about wiggling your finger and you get the same thing in yoga. There's a lot of research about how yoga changes the brain and changes physiological responses and increases vagal tone and all of these kinds of things. Increases your or decreases your pain tolerance, increases your pain tolerance, decreases your pain sensitivity when you're looking at negative images and increases working memory and all of these kinds of things. Is it the breathing in yoga? Is it the asanas? The movement in yoga, is it some complex interplay between.

I mean, let's also not kid ourselves. It's probably. Especially if you're getting a pain response, you're looking at microflow to get a pain response, right? For delayed pain, you're either talking about anandamide or you're talking about endorphins. And the minute you've been like doing physical activity or breathing long enough, once Anandamide is showing up, that's probably the microflow borderline, right?

It's a great point.

Going back to his work at Georgia Tech, I mean, I think this study is 2001 or 2002 or 2003, right? Where he was looking at these questions around anatomy for the first time. So that's the other thing is when I look at the yoga studies, I'm like, okay, but this is very, very flowy. And you haven't yet separated it out. There's four categories to me, that need to be parcelated apart. One, breath work. Two, the physical movement from an embodied cognitive perspective. Three, yoga is all about if you're good at interoception, so you've got absolute interior suppression. And yoga is super flowy. So, like, how do you. If you're looking at yoga and you're trying to say, okay, this causes this, how the hell do you start pulling those things out? The compounds get really confusing to me every time I look at those studies, I'm like, I wish we knew more. And it's funny because I have a bunch of friends who run yoga studios. I've done Ashtanga for 30 years at this point. And they always, they're like, have you studied yogi yet? Have you studied yogi yet? And I'm like, no, here's why. Like, I don't, like, I don't even know how to do it and start taking it apart. You want to talk about basic research, right? And it's because, as you pointed out, like, we both. You studied under Scott Kelso. And you know, we've worked with him and Kelso, who did so much of the foundational work on neurodynamics, started with finger moving, right? Like when you go with your fingers out of sync, they will naturally get into sync, right? In a sync of headed rhythm and. Right. Sick of it, you'll. You'll start sicking. And that's how we figured out coordination, dynamics and everything else. So, like, my point is doing this right, you're actually getting a huge neurobiological reaction so big that it unlocked it into all of social neuroscience, right? The entire field of social neuroscience comes out of like this, right? Like people doing this.

The explanatory power of that model and how it extrapolates to explain and describe and make predictions about so many other things, about so many other things, so powerful.

But when you want to talk about like any physical activity, understand that, like, okay, yoga, great, it's really cool. But like when you do this, that and the neurobiology that, an entire field of neuroscience, right? That's sort of like what happens when you do really basic research and you think something's really easy to study. You get in there like, oh crap, like the littlest thing produces this giant reaction. And what do we do from there is really interesting.

I love that. And I will also say, I mean in terms of the relationship between respiration and. Not respiration, but breathwork, right? Conscious breathwork and flow and performance. So much research needs to be done. You reminded me of a study, they looked at inhalation and exhalation and they actually showed that making voluntary body movements is more correlated with exhalation. So when you're making voluntary body movements, whether that's in your flow activity or just in general, you're doing those voluntary movements. And that correlates with a higher propensity for exhalation.

I wonder if you could use that as a lie detector.

Maybe, Maybe. So inhalation is more about the cognition and exhalation is more about the movement. In non conscious breathing, I should say. So inhalation is correlated with cognition as we talked about with Jack Fear, working memory, learning, decision making, cognitive processes, whereas exhalation is more correlated with movement.

Let me throw something in there too, that makes this even weirder. As you probably know from breath, work and mindfulness, if you want time dilation, it's the gap between inhalation and exhalation, right? Like that's where the most time dilation time stretches out. They're always taught in all the meditative traditions. They're like, stretch out the moment between inhalation and exhalation. So it's not even just inhalation. Exhalation. There's something very special about the transition between the two and what that does to the brain that I think is going to probably because time dilation or time passing strangely doesn't just have to slow down, can speed up, is so right. It's baked into flow's definition. So like, I've always wondered about, like how that's going to actually map out, you know, 20 years from now when we actually have those answers.

I think if you're like a master at your autonomic nervous system, you're a master of your, of your, of breath work. I think like that could seriously, this is like what more research needs to be done. Hello. About mastering breath work and getting into flow and increasing your performance.

And it could be my, my alter ego Yogi barking up the wrong tree.

Yeah. Hey.

Hey, gentlemen.

Thank you.

I think that's a perfect place to end this episode, folks. Send in your question questions for Jack Feldman and we will answer them on the next afterthoughts. Thanks for joining us today. Take care.

Or we'll make up answers to them on the next afterthoughts.

Either way, we're scientists. That's what we're.

Thank you for hanging out with us, everybody. This has been another edition of flow radio. Dr. Manino, thank you. Ryan Wicks. Thank you. Stephen Kotler out.