Episode 267: The Power of Breath with Campbell Will

Hi and welcome to episode 267 of the Untethered Podcast. Today we have Campbell Will joining us. Campbell is an integrative physiotherapist with a primary focus on the role of breath on human health and performance. His experience spans ICU's, neurosurgical wards, elite athletes and private practice. Across the spread of clinical settings, he's noticed a widely unaddressed commonality, breathing. When done correctly, it elevates and enhances performance. When done poorly, it drives dysfunction. Campbell utilizes his diverse background and experience to help individuals shift from disease and dysfunction to health, happiness and freedom. His holistic, multidisciplinary approach focuses on restoring balance to body, mind, emotions and energy. Campbell sees the breath as a tool that's accessible to all and provides the foundation of optimal health and well being. Quick Disclaimer all information, content and material of this podcast are the opinions of the speakers and is for the informational purpose only and not intended to serve as a substitute for the consultation, diagnosis and medical treatment of a qualified healthcare provider. Welcome to the Untethered Podcast. I am your host, Hallie Balkan. I'm a certified myofunctional therapist, feeding specialist, podcaster, business owner and mentor. This podcast is all about getting your questions answered and collaborating with colleagues to bring you the most up to date information in the orofacial myofunctional therapy, airway, Tetradoral tissue and Pediatric feeding therapy space. If you're new here, I challenge you to keep an open mind and join my mission to spread this message far and wide. If you've been around since June 2019, thanks for being a loyal listener. As we jump into today's episode, remember to listen with correct oral rest posture, tongue up, lips closed, teeth apart, breathe through your nose. Let's get started. Campbell welcome to the podcast.

Holly, I'm super excited to be here.

I'm excited to have you. I know you are a integrative physiotherapist and you're also a breathwork educator. And so we're going to spend a lot of time just talking about breath today. And so that's like one of our big topics here. So I always get very excited to have someone who really specializes on the podcast talking about this because admittedly in my areas of specialty and where I focus, this is one of the areas that I am not the most knowledgeable on. So you know, before we jump in, I would love to know like how did you. How did you get into this, like specialty? And I know you educate on it now like how did that come to be?

Yeah, it was honestly this really interesting kind of collision of two worlds. As I kind of graduated from physiotherapy, I went into icu, so I was a respiratory physiotherapist for the first kind of year. And then I had an interesting role that was kind of filling all of the other physio roles. As people went on holiday, I'd cover neurosurgery, and then I was in the cardiac ward. And so I got this beautiful kind of year and a half of like every clinical setting in the inpatient kind of surroundings. And I just came to kind of kept bumping up against this idea that we don't really look at the thing that keeps us alive until it's a little bit too late. You know, I see you as a respiratory therapist. It's kind of like now we're looking at helping someone breathe when they're intubated, or we're helping them mobilize when they're really, really unwell. And as I kind of moved from the inpatient setting and I started to travel and I worked in the uk, I worked with sporting teams, and I just kept coming up against it that, like, why aren't we focusing on this thing that really is the determinant of health in a lot of ways? And I even thought back to, you know, the five years of schooling I did outside of, you know, auscultation and listening to the lungs. We did like one lecture on the diaphragm, and it was on neurological injuries. You notice if someone has this nervous severed and their diaphragm doesn't work. Like, we weren't talking about breathing as the function that happens 20, 25,000 times a day. And that was like this little thing under my skin that was bugging me. And around that kind of similar time, I came across this guy called Wim Hof, who is kind of hiking mountains in the snow and doing some pretty incredible stuff. And that was like these two opposing ideas. And so I went and I went and trained with Wim and did the cold exposure and hiked a mountain with him. And it really kind of like blew my mind as to the potential that I saw. You know, I'm a boy from the tropics in Australia and I have an aversion to cold. And here I was hiking this mountain in a pair of board shorts and it was minus 15 degrees Celsius. And it wasn't like, grit your teeth and you weathered your way through it. It was like I was comfortable. It Was. It was really incredible. And so much of that came back to the state of the nervous system. And so that kind of put me down this rabbit hole as to why breathing is so important. Is it because it's this kind of interaction between all of these different systems in the body? And so my kind of mission over the last five, six, maybe seven years is to kind of, like, take what I think is missing in the breath work space, which is assessment and treatment, and really looking at breathing through this kind of functional, dysfunctional lens, but also take the potential for intentional breath work and bring that more into a clinical setting and kind of meld those two worlds, because I just found that there was a missing piece in each. And so kind of my mission has been like, how do we bring those two worlds together and get the best of both?

Yeah, and I love hearing that, because I feel like that's happened even in my own practice, in my own world, where there was so much attention on, like, the lower airway, but not enough on the upper airway. And I found that a lot of these babies that are struggling to feed or children who are not getting good sleep at night, they've got sleep disorder breathing, or, you know, there's a lot of airway issues that weren't being discussed. And so when I kind of fell into that space, I was like, I mean, I always say it's, like, a little morbid. I'm like, if you can't breathe, you're dead. So we kind of should start paying attention to, like, our two biological needs, right? We need to breathe and we need to eat. Like, those are two of our, like, top needs in life, guys. Like, why are we not paying more attention to that? And it just became very, like, very fascinating area to study because, like you said, we're not taught these things in school. Like, it really falls upon us, like, post grad, to, you know, learn about our body systems in these integrated ways and in ways that are also probably completely opposite of what they are teaching in a lot of school programs. But, you know, in your opinion, like, why do you think breath is so overlooked?

It's. It's something that keeps me up at night, honestly. And I think in this so often. And the conclusion I've come to is, I think because it is this more or less automatic function that everyone is doing, we assume it must be taken care of itself, you know, but that fails to recognize the, you know, plasticity of humans. Like, we adapt and we compensate and we learn bad habits and our posture and our pain and all of these things can influence the way we breathe. And then we have this, like, bidirectional loop, right? That maybe it was initially back pain or it was initially a postural kind of impact that changes my breathing, but now my breathing is changing my nervous system and my physiology and my emotional state. But we don't look to breathing. We're kind of looking back at, like, well, what was the initial cause? Maybe I need to fix my back. And so I think we just, like, sweep it under the rug because it's like it's happening all the time, you know? And I can kind of say that because I have this response from so many people that are like, breathing, why do I need to think about that? I'm doing that all the time. I'm like, yeah, but that's the point. You're doing it all the time, and you might be doing it incorrectly all of the time. And so that this accumulative kind of load of a dysfunctional breathing pattern, I think is one of the causes of this disruption that's less objective and it's less measurable. But we see it as it comes out in someone's state or their sleep or their energy or their mood. And I think the secondary thing that I'm more exploring at the moment is most people that have issues with their breathing don't present with issues with their breathing. They might come to me and they're really anxious. And my job is to kind of link that back to perhaps a disrupted breathing pattern. So because people aren't being like, oh, I have struggles with my breath, I think they fail to recognize that might be the root cause. And they're like, oh, it's a mental health thing because I'm really anxious, or it's my stress tolerance because I'm not coping or I'm reactive. And so there's that kind of, like, piece where breathing's not looked at because that's not the symptom that people are presenting with. But I find it's very often not always the cause, but very much correlated.

Oh, 100%. Yeah, we do a lot. I talk a lot on here with different providers, just about, like, regulating one's nervous system. Right. And staying out of fight or flight, which I feel like so much of our society lives in on a regular basis, like getting into the whole rest and digest, which we use a lot in the feeding space. But it really applies to just humans in general and trying to, you know, you can't exist in that regulatory state if your breathing is not regulated. And so I think that it's a very fascinating conversation and also applies here. You know, we always say like, okay, you're compensating, but you're compensating well. And sometimes until you're no longer compensating well, your body starts to fall apart. That's when you start to get other symptoms. It's sort of like that snowball of symptoms start to build and build and build, finally to the point where you're like, I need help. But now you think it's something else. Like you said, people come to you for like other symptoms. And tying it back to breathing like breath, you know, is probably so far fetched for some of them that they're like, what are you talking about? Like, how is this related to my breathing? We get those questions in my practice. We'll be like, well, because we're very like root cause based. So they'll say, well, okay, I came to you for X and now we're talking about Y. And we're like, yeah, but X is happening because like, I'm thinking it's because of Y. Like if we address Y then X is just miraculously going to kind of like, you know, improve too. And they're like, huh, like trust the process.

Yeah. And I mean, I have the exact same conversation with many of my patients and many of our students that, you know, our job is to draw that link. And I think, you know, we've just started this conversation, but I think you'll resonate this based on the way that it seems you work that instead of symptom management, let's look at health creation. You know, and that seems like a small distinction, but it's massive. Right? If I use your symptoms as your diagnostic criteria and then I treat based on those symptoms, I might miss the actual root cause of that or the initial disruption. And so when we say, okay, you've got these symptoms, let's look at this little back door as to can we support your physiology, your nervous system, your biomechanics? And lo and behold, those symptoms often go away. Not because we beat them back with a stick, or we suppress them or we manage them because we supported the body and the body has this innate capacity, you know, and obviously there are some limitations to that particular when think of like structural dysfunctions. But so often we come in and we give the body what it needs in terms of sleep and parasympathetic activation and, you know, much more than that. But like, all of that comes together and the body is now able to deal with whatever that kind of stemming dysfunction is. And. And something else you said there that I'd love to kind of pull on this thread. The body is so incredibly resilient, you know, and so it can take a lot of that compensation or a lot of that dysfunction for a really long time until the proverbial straw that breaks the camel's back, you know. And so I'm often dealing with people that maybe have had really dysfunctional breathing patterns for a decade, you know, and only now are they developing these mysterious symptoms. And it's like, well, when we actually go back across that timeline, and you told me about that car accident that you had 10 years ago, and then the slow increase of your anxiety, and we start to kind of, like, put the piece of that puzzle together, I think it's fascinating that how long people can go before they have the breakdown, you know, and they haven't been functioning optimally, but they've been getting by until it gets to a certain point where it is just like, oh, now everything's kind of in the red zone.

Yeah, yeah, it was very fascinating. I have, like, my own little story of my own experience where I, you know, between, like, having children, I was kind of like, okay, last time with my child, like, I had sciatica pain, and I went to a chiropractor, and they were very helpful. It was like, towards the end of the pregnancy, I was like, but I want to get ahead of it, and I want to make sure that my body, whatever led to that symptom, like, if I could get ahead of that now, like, let's just prep everything so that everything is flowing, functioning, you know, all the things, right? And so at that point, I also had done some adult expansion of my palate and had, like, was wearing, like, expanders at night, upper and lower removable ones. And as part of that program, the holistic dentist that I was seeing had this physical therapist in their office where basically everybody in expansion was also coming when they came in for adjustments on their appliances, was also getting an adjustment, if you will, like, from the physical therapist basically having a session with them.

And.

And so this PT he's trained in, so he. Well, he. He's trained in all kinds of things, but he calls what he does, he calls it modern counter strain technique, because he's like, it's not your typical counter strain. But I always tell people, I'm like, it's like he barely touched me. And I leave feeling like my whole body's just functioning and working better and everything's flowing. And like, if something Felt locked up. It's like he unlocked the fascia and the blood is just. I mean, he would actually, like, put his finger somewhere and be like, do you feel that? And I'd be like, yeah. He's like, do you feel the pulse? And I'm like, yeah, right? And I would feel the pulse change. It's like things would start flowing again. Like, fluids would start moving that were locked up. It was wild. And he. He told me, he's like, most people can't actually feel this or like, you have to be really in tune with your body to, like, sometimes feel things like that. But I would, like, thrive on, like, these appointments. So I started seeing him outside of, like, just the dental adjustments because I was like, this is really good for me. And in working with him too, he was like, your breathing is off, right? He was like, we need to work on your breath. But part of that too is related to some fascial strains that I have noticed in your body. So he would deal with that. And we did a lot of work before I got pregnant with my second one on releasing some of the fascial strains in my chest. I was just very tense and holding a lot of tension and had some strain patterns through my upper body. And I'm like, I don't know what magic you worked, but I was like. I told him, like, manny, I don't know what you did, but I really didn't have the same, like, discomforts or issues carrying a second child that I did with the first one, because I feel like I was, one, able to breathe a lot better. And so that was very eye opening to me. And two, just everything was kind of working the way it was supposed to, to support my body going through all these changes. And so, you know, I always tell everyone, I'm like, you don't get it until you experience it firsthand. Like, and when you start to work on some of these things and you start to see, see and feel the changes, like, you can't always describe them really well, but they're absolutely incredible. And you'll never go back like it. It's amazing. So I always. I wanted to share that because I'm like, I've talked plenty and actually just talked about him on the last recording that I did. I, like, plug him all the time, but I never think really identified or really, like, spoke to the change in breath. Right. And the breath work that was kind of related to. And we did. I did some other breath work as well. But just being able to have those fascial Strains kind of, like, released and have my blood flowing properly. And, like, you know, the cerebrospinal fluid and just everything working together the way that it was supposed to was so beneficial and supportive to me and allowed me then to also breathe properly, which was so eye opening.

It's. I mean, it. Like, I. I'm just fascinated by that whole, you know, story because it's common in my world, right. But people have this experience where it's just like, I just feel like I'm functioning better, you know, And I always like to kind of, like, break down that. But, yeah, but why? Like, what's going on there? And, you know, if you think of this thing that we do 22 to 25,000 times every single day, from the moment we're born to the moment we die, right? Imagine doing that with additional effort against additional, you know, resistance or restriction, whether that's rib cage mobility, whether that's fascial strain, and we kind of start to free that up. Like, how much energy does that liberate in the body, like, of this thing that's happening, really moment by moment all the time? And we've just, like, decreased the effort by 10%. Like, that might seem, like, consequential, but it's just like, whoa, there's so much there. And then when we kind of go beyond, like, the more the biomechanical lens, and we start to look at how the body actually produces energy, and it's this relationship, you know, that the more tolerant that I can get of carbon dioxide, for example, that helps me kind of shuttle oxygen from the blood into the cells where they can interact with mitochondria. And so I find, particularly in the kind of chronic fatigue community that I work with a lot of them, you know, and this is more anecdotal, right. I don't think the research has been done yet, but when we're really intolerant of CO2, and I have a high respiratory rate, I'm breathing out my carbon dioxide all the time. That causes the oxygen to stay bound to the hemoglobin when it's in my blood, you know, and oxygen, when it's in my blood doesn't really do anything, you know, and so we can look at someone's oxygen saturations, and it's 98 or 99%. But how much of that's getting to the mitochondria where it actually needs to be involved in cellular energy production? And so when we start to think of, like, oh, well, we've just freed up, and now my Breathing's more efficient and more effective, and perhaps now, physiologically, I'm actually able to create more energy and remove more waste. And now my blood flow and i3 but, you know, as you go onto all these different systems, it's like, okay, I kind of do understand why I feel so good now because there's these tendrils that just go out from breathing into every other system.

Yeah, yeah, well, and I think that kind of goes back to, right, like, what are the top two things we need in life? The number one thing is we need to be able to breathe, and we need to be able to support our systems to do that. Right. So it's such a fascinating conversation because, like you said, I hadn't really thought about it in the way that you described it in the very beginning, where you're kind of like, well, we do this automatically all the time anyway. So everyone just kind of assumes, like, I don't need to worry about that. Like, I don't need to focus on that. But as you talk more, it's, you know, I'm even sitting here going like, wow. Like, it really is so interconnected to literally how every single thing in our body functions. It's so much more evolved beyond, you know, just the conversation of, oh, everything's interconnected. But anyway, so kind of going into, like, the breath work that you do, are there different types of. Like, is there a certain. You mentioned WIM hof, But, like, are there certain types of breathwork or approaches you take or terms that are common in the work that you do that would be helpful to describe to our listeners that are maybe newer to this topic?

Yeah, absolutely. So I kind of make a pretty clear distinction. On one side, we have kind of experiential breathwork, and that's kind of like the WIM HOF and these types of breathing where we're kind of intentionally breathing typically faster and deeper for an extended period of time for a particular outcome, you know, and that might be based on, you know, emotional release. It could be trauma, it could be, you know, mindset or breaking through plateaus. But it is more that kind of experiential nature. The opposite end of the spectrum, which is where I do a lot more work, is more the restorative side of breath work. Right. The functional restorative. Like, how do we address dysfunctional breathing patterns? How do we restore breathing to its optimal state? How do we. And the impact that that has on the nervous system. And so through that lens, I really like to focus on three kind of primary pillars and that's biomechanics, right? Movement, physiology, or chemistry, and the nervous system or electricity? You know, I like to break it down to those kind of, like, distinctions, because most people understand movement, chemistry, electricity. It's really how our body functions. You know, we look at nerve impulses, we look at cellular processes. Like, we look at our movement of our body through space. Like, if we're not moving, if we're not addressing physiology, and if we're not addressing nervous system, then I think we're kind of working downstream of that. Again, root cause. And so through that kind of, like, how do we restore breathing? I typically work in that order. The first thing that we can impact with someone is how they breathe. Using your nose or your mouth, are you breathing up into your chest and your shoulders or down into the lower part of your rib cage? How does your posture impact your breathing? And everyone that's listening, if you're not driving a car, you can experience this. If you kind of round your shoulders and round your back and drop your chin down and you compress that space, how easy does it feel to breathe? Really nice and deep. Whereas if you open up and the chest opens and the shoulders come back and you grow tall, all of a sudden there's more space. That directly impacts physiology. The part of my lungs that I'm breathing into, there's different density of alveoli. So, like, where I'm exchanging the oxygen and carbon dioxide. And so we have this, I would almost argue, epidemic of poor breathing because we're sat on our phone, we're sat at a desk, we're eating at a table, we're driving a car. We're in this position all of the time, you know, and it kind of, like, causes people's diaphragm to move a little bit less efficiently. And it's easier for my body to kind of breathe into the upper chest, where there's less alveoli, there's less blood flow. And so again, now my body's struggling, you know, and slightly. It's not like it's this massive thing, but all of a sudden, this 20,000 times a day, I'm working less efficiently and less effectively. And then the kind of final flow on effect of that is when I do breathe more vertically or up into my chest, that's very sympathetic nervous system. You know, when we talk about why breath work can be so stimulating for the parasympathetic sympathetic state and it's vagal tone, a lot of that actually comes from the movement of the diaphragm. There's nothing in my mind that's so magical about breathing when we're like, oh, extended exhales stimulate the vagus nerve. How do they do that? Well, the vagus nerve goes straight through the middle of the diaphragm. And it's that mechanical stimulus that's giving me that response. And so if I'm stuck breathing 25 times shallow up into my chest, my diaphragm's not really involve. Then I'm not going to get that wonderful benefit of how breathing stimulates my nervous system. And so that kind of leads me back to we need to address mechanics, right? Your posture, your movement. And then there's this just beautiful. Like, the better you get in terms of your capacity, the more you can impact your physiology, the more energy you can produce. And then we have a greater access to the state of the nervous system.

Yeah. I'm like sitting here just like taking notes, learning from you. I'm like, this is so fascinating. And I'm sitting here also thinking about, you know, like. Like I do Pilates Reformer classes, right? And so there's such a focus on breath work during Pilates. And I also, you know, prior to starting that. And this has just been a couple of months now that I've been doing it. Cause I once actually had a PT who was like, you need to do Pilates Reformer. Like. Cause I'm low tone, he's like, please do Pilates Reformer. Like strengthen your core. It'll help support your breath. Like, there's all these things that'll be really beneficial for you because like you said, it's sort of like that tech neck, like so sitting forward, having those like rounded shoulders. Like my posture is something I'm constantly paying attention to for various reasons, trying to keep myself upright. And it's exhausting when you don't have a strong core to do that. But it's very fascinating too, because I've noticed myself in the past couple months paying greater attention, especially when working out to my breath and how much easier something can be when you're inhaling versus exhaling. And they'll guide you and they'll say, okay, when you're, you know, going into this position, like on the exhale, do this, on the inhale, do that. And it's been very fascinating to me, probably because I'm kind of in the airway space that I pay extra attention to this and how truly how much easier a hard thing can be to do when you're breathing properly and when you have full access to do so. So that's been interesting. The other thing I had a question. This is totally random thought, but I feel like in the exercise space, I'm wondering if you have an opinion on this. We often are told, right, like, inhale through your nose, exhale through your mouth. And that goes against just everything I've been told in the air space. In terms of, like, no, let's always nasal breathe and keep our tongue in the roof of our mouth and keep our mouth closed. Is there any merit or any reason to exhale through the mouth or.

Yes and no. You know, to your point, I completely agree we should be nasal breathing all the time if we can. The kind of caveat to that is, is this intentional, right? If I choose to open my mouth to exhale, right, the keyword there being choose what I'm kind of doing or the reason I'm finding that that is useful is I'm offloading carbon dioxide. So particularly when we're exercising, right, my body's working. I'm actually just producing more CO2 from my cells. My brain's got a pretty tight set point of what it likes in terms of the amount of CO2. And so as I'm running up the stairs or I'm on the treadmill or I'm on the bike, right, more CO2 than usual, my brain is saying, let's go back to homeostasis, right? Let's get rid of the CO2 because it's acidic in nature. And so my PH is changing and my brain's like, no, we want to kind of like keep our ph at 7.35, for example. And so the fastest way to do that, you can offload way more. You can dump the CO2 out, out of your mouth. That's a little bit slower when it's coming out of your nose. And so if I was intentionally thinking I'm going to recover, you know, it's like, that might be useful, or it would be useful if it's intentional. The kind of problem with that for a lot of people is it's unintentional. I start exercising, I start moving, I start working out whatever it is, you know, and that is more of a. I'm intolerant of that state. And so my body's having to compensate once more. It's like, I can't maintain nasal breathing whilst I'm under this amount of load. I need to compensate, open the mouth and get rid of the CO2 that I'm not tolerant of. And so there's a wonderful opportunity there. People don't like doing it's. Not very comfortable. But if you were to maintain nasal breathing, you'll feel it's a lot harder, but you will adapt, right? There is a beautiful adaptation phase that occurs that all of a sudden I can work at those higher loads and I can maintain nasal breathing. And so I continue to get all those benefits, right? The humidification of the air, the nitric oxide that we add to the air, right? The stim. Like, it's far more effective to use your diaphragm when you're breathing nasally, just because the resistance of the air than it is when we're breathing through the mouth. And so all these kind of like, other little things that happen, and perhaps we can go down this little rabbit hole, because I think it's really fascinating, and this is more of a human nature slash culture, slash society thing. We are so driven for intensity, right? More is better. Got to go as hard as I can, as far as I can, as fast as I can, lift as much as I can. And so we let the breathing compensate. You know, it's like, my goal is to run this fast. I'll do whatever I can to get there. But if my goal was to exercise in a way that supports my nervous system, we might look at that really differently. You know, instead of smashing myself to do the 5K or to do the workout, the CrossFit, it's like, what do I need through this lens of my nervous system? And I think this is such an interesting conversation because I work with so many people that come to me with, I want to stop having panic attacks, I want to be less anxious, I want to regulate my nervous system. And then we get into a conversation like, well, what are you doing? They're like, I do high intensity interval work three times a week, right? And I know for a fact they're there. Like, which we consciously know I'm exercising, but my nervous system's like, am I running from a tiger again this week? Right? Again, you know, so, like, you've told me, your goal is to regulate your nervous system, yet here you are doing this thing that is dysregulating your nervous system. And I'm not saying stop exercising, right? I'm saying stop using intensity as your goal, right? And use, what can you control and what can you regulate? So maybe I need to dial down the intensity so I can breathe in a way that supports my nervous system, because that meets that big goal, you know, that I want to stress less or I want to sleep better or I want to be less reactive. But we're all caught with this idea that unless I'm going as hard as I can, my heart rate's through the roof and I'm sweating, then it's not worth it.

Yeah, I feel like, like, Pilates Reformer would be really good for those people because they also teach you, like, you know, they're like, less is more, like, smaller movements, more controlled, like your body is being. And honestly, like, I feel like my nervous system is more regulated when I do those classes because I am having to, like, focus on form and focus on breath work and focus on, you know, getting the burn without moving my body in, like, these insane ways. Because I used to do, like, P90X and insanity and, you know, T25 and all those workouts. And then I had kids and I tried to get back into it and I was like, I just don't have the energy for that anymore. So, you know, but like, to that point, when you're doing those, like, those hit workouts or those, like, really high intense workouts, and not to say that nothing that we do at, you know, the Pilates studio. Cause they have TRX and they have, like, other stuff too. Like, some of them are more like a higher intensity kind of workout. But I find myself. I find it's easier for me to focus on that. And I've challenged myself to nasal breathe and not open my mouth, you know, during those workouts, which I feel like is a little bit easier because it's not typically high intensive. And occasionally they'll say, like, okay, breathe in through your nose and out through your mouth. That's usually towards the end of, like, a really challenging exercise or. Or towards the end of the workout. It's not like a constant thing they're saying, but it just. It stays in my mind. And I'm like, well, is there a reason for this? Like, should I be doing it this one time, even though it's not? So I'll do it because it's, like, more rare than common that they, like, suggest you don't. Like, maybe there's a reason for it. So I'm just gonna go with it. So I love the distinction that you made, because I do think that it is, you know, if it's not something you're doing habitually and, like, you're controlling it, that's one thing versus, like, dropping into mouth breathing. Because your body has to. In order to compensate for, like, what you're, you know, what state you're currently existing in, whether you're working out or whatever the case may be. So that was that Was very helpful, thank you.

And I, and I think that brings up a bigger question that I always get confronted with. You know, is like, is mouth breathing bad? And you know, the easy answer is like, yeah, but the bigger question is, is it intentional or unintentional? Am I consciously choosing to do it for a reason or is it happening as a compensation or in the background I'm unaware of? Because when we look, you know, if I'm, you know, and this, the second question that I often get is like, well, what's good breathing? I'm like, depends, what are you doing? You know, are you sitting on the couch? Are you sprinting up a hill? Breathing? Good breathing is adaptable, right? It's meeting the demands that you're under. And so when someone says like, mouth breathing is bad, I'm like, yeah, it is, you know, if it's happening all the time. But hey, if you are sprinting up a hill and it's a short little acute burst, then you're going to get more air in and out of your body using your mouth. And if you choose to do that because you know the sprint's going to end in 10 seconds, well, I would say that's a good use of your breath. And when we talk more about the experiential aspects of breath work, you know, the impact that we can have in kind of decreasing activity in the prefrontal cortex and increasing activation the limbic system and getting people into these so called non ordinary states, right? Which can be incredibly cathartic and transformational. That happens a lot faster with mouth breathing, right? And so if I'm again choosing, hey, I'm doing this breath work practice with this specific outcome in mind, and mouth breathing is going to facilitate that, then I think that's okay, you know, and if we think of 24 hours in the day and I'm doing 20 minutes of mouth breathing in an intentional practice, but Then the other 99.9% of the day I'm breathing nasally, low, slow with my diaphragm. Then I think that's again, it displays good control of breathing rather than this rigid framework of like, I can never open my mouth, right? It's got to always be this way. And the final kind of thing I add to that is like, try and, you know, laugh through your nose, try and cry through your nose, try and verbally express yourself. You know, it's like, I think we sometimes demonize an aspect, right? And the part of it that is so bad is when it's chronic, right? Is, is the the amount of time that I'm spending doing that thing, rather than is it good or bad? And that's beyond breathing. You know, we could look at exercise. I'm like, is exercise good? And people are like, yeah, of course. I'm like, all right, run for 24 hours and tell me how good you feel. You know, it's like all of a sudden it's not good because the load exceeds too much of capacity.

Yeah, yeah. No, that's. That's a very. I love that. That visual. I started to run for 24 hours. I'm like, I wouldn't make an hour, but okay.

People do that.

You know, it's always good when you can have, like, that kind of, like visuals, you know, in your mind to kind of go, oh, got it. All right. Point driven home. Thank you for that. Are there other, like, common mistakes that you see people making, like, when it comes to breathing or things that, like, we should be aware of, like, outside of some of the things we've talked about?

Oh, yeah, definitely. The biggest one. Right. The intention is good, but when we tell someone to take a deep breath, I think it's. It needs to go. Because again, coming back, if we think through this lens of mechanics, physiology, nervous system, most people. And this isn't an opinion, this is kind of, you know, well researched. Most people have pretty poor breathing patterns. And so someone's a bit stressed, overwhelmed, you know, they're a bit flustered, and we say, just take a deep breath. And what do they do? Right. Mouth, upper chest, over inflation. Very sympathetic. Right. It's activating that branch of my nervous system. Yet my intention was to help someone calm down, you know, and so if someone doesn't have really good control of their breathing, the idea of big, right, we use lots of effort, and that's going to push me more into a sympathetic state. Complete opposite of what I want, you know. And so I encourage people, like, instead of taking a deep breath, let's take a slow breath. That reduces, again, this idea of intensity being my goal. It's like slow, steady, you know, like expansive. Yeah, that's going to help with our goal. But big breath or deep breath, I think people tend to just lean into that. Like, why didn't it work? Why am I still stressed?

It's my least favorite thing. If you're at the doctor, right, and they're like, oh, they're like listening to your chest with the stethoscope and they're like, take a deep breath. And you're like, I'm like, how fast Do I need to breathe? Like, every time you move the thing around, I'm like, I can't keep up with you. Right.

And I feel like hyperventilating.

I've always wondered if that's actually like a good practice because I'm like, do. Is it me or do other people struggle with this too? Because I can't breathe fast enough. And take a deep breath like you're telling me to. As you're moving, like the thing around my chest or my back.

Yeah, I feel your pain. I find the exact same thing. I'm just now, like, I kind of ignore the move. And I'm just like, I'm just breathing. You can hold it there a little bit longer if you need to do that.

Yeah. I'm like, I guess they're moving because they're ready to move, but like, okay, whatever. Oh, my goodness. Are there any other mistakes? I know I kind of like jumped in with that thought.

Yeah, I wanted to come back. I think the biggest, and whether there's a mistake that we make or just a little bit of work we need to do is a lot of people hold their breath unintentionally. Right. And whether that's. They're under cognitive demand, emotional demand, physical demand. You know, it's not always just one cause for often it is, you know, I'm feeling stressed, I hold my breath. I'm a little bit overwhelmed. I hold my breath. And that causes people to often go through this kind of hyper hypoventilation cycle. I hold my breath unknowingly. That's the key here. I'm not intentionally, like, I'm gonna hold my breath now, but my breathing stops. CO2 starts to build up, my brain responds and it offloads it through hyperventilation. Right? So I breathe faster for a little bit, and then my CO2 levels drop down. I hold my breath because I'm feeling a bit stressed. And we just get. And if you again, think of my nervous system's always listening to my breathing. You know, it is this kind of interaction between out there and in here. Because if we think evolutionarily, you know, before we had conscious control or volitional control over our breathing, it only ever really changed when something in the environment cued it to, right. The tiger steps out of the bush or I start running, you know, and so these little. What we think are insignificant changes to our breathing is responded to in a very predictable way by my nervous system. And what message is, stop, start, stop, start over, breathe under, breathe, right? What is that? Sending it's sending a message of, I don't know what's going on out there. It's chaos. You know, there's no. Is it something threatening? No, it's gone. Oh, it's something threatening again. And so that idea of, like, developing a little bit more awareness of my breathing is the first step. You know, it's hard to say to someone, hey, don't hold your breath, if they don't know they're doing it. And so to not leave people hanging as to, well, what do I do about that? You know, I love this framework that I teach to people of kind of like walking upstream. And so people usually won't notice that they're holding their breath. They'll notice when they take the big. I have been holding my breath, right? And so one step upstream of that, once I start noticing that big gulp of air that I take, I'm going to become a little bit more aware of that. And then we start to kind of like, go a little bit upstream. I'm going to catch myself when I am holding my breath. Okay, what's my emotional state? Am I stressed? Am I thinking about something in particular? Am I in a certain environment at work? Is it. You know, there's something going on there to cause you to hold your breath. You just haven't noticed it yet. So now when I'm like, oh, I'm holding my breath, it's like, what's going on? Okay, I'm stressed again. Why am I stressed? You know, and in this way, we start to kind of like, work our way upstream as to what is the initial disruption. And when I do that, right, let's say it's like, I always get worried about the job. The meeting I have to go into at work, once I've kind of walked upstream, now I'm going into that meeting, I can maintain this awareness of, like, I'm going to breathe at a cadence. I'm going to count in my head. I'm going to breathe in for four and out for four. And then for four. And I'm not going to let myself go unconscious and hold my breath because that's the thing that's causing my stress and anxiety. It's not necessarily I don't like being in this meeting that I don't like being. This meeting is causing me to disrupt my own physiology. That internal disruption is what I call anxiety, you know, and so that feels a little bit less objective, but it can be really empowering for people because we're saying anxiety is not happening to you from some external Thing. Right. And we even think about the language people use. Oh, that thing makes me anxious. It makes me. Right. It happens to me. Whereas actually what's going on is that thing causes me to internally disrupt what's going on. And that disruption is what makes me feel anxious. And so if I can kind of catch that and not let myself become a breath holder. Right. When I'm stressed and anxious and actually like, oh, I'm just going to maintain that self awareness and I'm going to keep breathing slow and steady whilst I'm in the environment that I know usually triggers me to feel a bit stressed. All of a sudden I don't hold my breath. I don't feel as anxious. Now we're kind of like making a bit of progress.

Yeah, yeah. My. In my house, I'm always having these conversations of like, things don't happen to you. Things are happening either because like, you know, you've put yourself into a certain environment or I'm like, you know, we have a lot more control over how we respond to things. Like that person doesn't trigger you. You are having this internal trigger for a certain. You know what I mean? So I love that you kind of speak to that in a sense of, you know, when you're entering into an environment where, you know, your body may start to feel a certain way and your breath then changes as a reflection and then we start to feel anxious. Right. It's sort of like this. There is an antecedent to that, that feeling. It's not just magically happening because this person said something to you or, you know, I think it's really turning inward and being very introspective with ourselves, which a lot of people don't like to do.

Yeah.

But I love that you do encourage that and you kind of coach people through that. Because when we can start to recognize those environments or those situations where we start to breath hold or we start to have anxiety or, you know, we start to feel a certain way, we can then also in on this other side, as you kind of shared, it's like we can change our response to that. And it sounds like breath work is such a powerful way to, you know, just breathing how you're breathing can really change that experience for you and how you're feeling in that environment, which I think is very powerful.

Yeah. And the part of that to kind of, you know, give people a little bit of grace, you know, because we breathe 20, 25,000 times a day, the brain kind of relegates that sensory experience to the background. Right. Imagine if you noticed every breath you took, you wouldn't get anything else done. It's the same way that, you know, right now as people are listening, they can't feel clothing touching their skin. Until I just said that, right now they're like, oh, now I feel my T shirt. You. It's because it's there all the time. The brain's like, not important information. I'm scanning the environment for other stuff. And so it requires us to intentionally attend a bit of a tongue twister to our breathing. But that's just like a muscle. You know, the more that I consciously focus on my breathing, the more aware I become of those subtle changes. And this, you know, we'll go down another little rabbit hole, if we may. There's this fascinating research that was done on people that have out of the blue panic attacks. And I put that in quotation marks is because what this study found is they're not out of the blue at all. They put these people on, like a biofeedback monitor that measures all of their kind of metrics, right? Heart rate, sweating, skin conductance, all these things that are good measures of someone's autonomic arousal. And when they have a panic attack, they press this little button and it took a snapshot of the previous 60 minutes and compared that to the previous 24 hours. And then they subjectively ask these people, so what was happening? What happened when you had the panic attack? Nothing just happened out of the blue, just hit me. And then they look at the data. 60 minutes before you started to breathe differently. Right? We start to have these incremental changes, but that person's not aware of it. So they don't notice that they just started breathing faster, that they just opened their mouth, that they just started breathing up into their chest. All these things are pushing their nervous system towards panic, but they don't know. And then they cross a threshold and they have the panic attack. And so when we can start to flex that muscle and become a bit stronger with noticing these changes in our breath, then we can catch ourselves before we have the panic attack. And it's far easier to stop myself having a panic attack than it is to stop having a panic attack whilst it's happening. You know, tell anyone that's having a panic attack, I'll just slow down your breathing. It's like, worst piece of advice, I.

Think they're dying right now. That's. Yeah, that's a really easy feat when you kind of feel like your life is just ending in front of you because you're having a band attack, right?

But if that person noticed an hour before, it's like, my breathing is getting a bit shallow, it's getting a bit faster. It just got higher in my chest, My chest is feeling tired. What can I do about that now? Rather than I wait until it's too late and panic attack being this kind of pretty big example. But that's true of all these little shifts in our emotional state. Again, less of an opinion and more kind of backed research now that emotional states and respiratory patterns are very closely correlated. And again, no one needs me to explain this to them. How do you breathe when you're frustrated? Right? You don't choose to do that. That happens as a response of your emotional state. And that's true of anger and frustration and gratitude and happiness, you know. And so if I can start to notice my breath changing rather than my emotional state changing, then I can do something about it. And I'll tell a little story. I did this self experiment, you know, over the period, I think it was about four or five weeks, I stopped every breathwork practice that I have. And I have lots of different ones at different times. I stopped everything. And the only thing I did was breath awareness. So I'd have like a formal practice. I would sit down for 10 minutes, two, three times a day and just observe my breathing. And people, when you first do that, it's like, what are you noticing? You know, there's not much going on other than like, I'm breathing. But you do that for a month and you notice these little subtleties and these tiny, like, you get so much more aware of that. So formal practice, but then also informally, whenever I was feeling a certain way, I'm feeling a bit overwhelmed, I'm feeling a bit tired, I'm really excited, I'm super, you know, whatever it is. How am I breathing? How does my breathing tie to this emotion that I'm experiencing? And after a month, something really interesting happened. I would notice my breathing change before I would experience the emotion. So instead of I'm excited. Oh, there's my breathing. I'd be like, my breath is starting to move a little bit. Oh, there's the excitement. And so that's a really. And it's not always what, you know, it does take a lot of an investment of time, but it was really interesting to me. It's like there's this preceding thing, you know, is my emotion driving my breathing or is my breathing driving my emotion? And if it's the latter, which it is, then when I'm feeling stressed or anxious. I just need to breathe like, I'm calm. But if I don't know what my calm breathing feels like, that's a challenge. You know, you're throwing a dart in the dark and hoping that it lands. Whereas if you've practiced calm breathing because you've. Every time you felt really calm, you've really embodied what that feels like, and you've noticed how you're breathing, and then you practice that, now you've got a much more reliable way to navigate your emotional state. It's like, I want to feel calm. I'll just do that breathing pattern that I've established. I want to feel a little bit more energized. I'll do that breathing pattern that I've established. And so it becomes this really interesting, like, tool of self regulation, you know, in its truest form.

I love that. I was, like, super frustrated, actually, yesterday about something because somebody basically put me into, like, a lose, lose situation that I never should have been put in, like, within one of my businesses. And I was just so frustrated because I don't. Like, I'm someone who's usually very regulated. I'm a happy person. Everyone's like, oh, you're always so happy. And I'm like, well, I know. You know, I just. I'm good. You know, I'm good. I don't let things shake me. I've done a lot of work and, you know, over the years to basically get to the place of where I am and focus on trying to maintain my inner peace. And I. But I noticed I'm like. Because it takes a lot for my nervous system to feel dysregulated. And I was like, my nervous system feels dysregulated. Like, that was like. Those were the words I was using. Like, everyone's like, are you okay? I'm like, my nervous system is wrecked right now. Like, I need to get back to, like, my homeostasis. Like, this doesn't feel good, but I'm having a hard time moving out of it, which is so unlike me, which also tells me this is just a crappy situation. But I was like, I'm gonna let myself feel it. I'm gonna move through it. And one of the things that I did, because this morning I woke up and I was, like, still bothered by the whole thing. And I was like, oh, this is so. This is so unusual for me. So I'm like, walking, you know, through my house this morning, and I'm just going like, just like. I'm like, maybe if I just try and move it through my body in a different way. And I was, I found myself experimenting with like different breathing patterns to see like what felt best in the moment. Because I was like, I know when I slow down and I know when I'm like talking slower because I'm also like, I always say I'm a very well regulated person, but I can also get to the point where I talk very quickly and I'm very high energy and that ADHD neurodivergent side of me just kind of like takes over, right? But I can also very quickly come back down to like, so speaking slower and breathing slower. And I'm like, but I've done a lot of work around that, right? So like I can kind of match people's energy, but then I can also bring myself back down afterwards. And when I used to like work with kids a lot more, like I would in my car, I used to travel a lot. I would literally sit in my car, close my eyes and just like stop thinking for a moment. I would sit in a moment of silence and like, it was so regulatory for me, which at the time I didn't realize it, but it was also regulating my breathing. And I just would feel so re. Energized. And then I'd get up, I'd go back into like the next house, I would do that treatment session or that school. I would leave and I would do the same thing again. And I could never explain to people other than like having a mentor who was like, do this because it's really good for you. I could never explain why it felt so good or why I felt so good. I was like, everyone just needs to learn how to do this. So, you know, drop into some silence. People are like, how do you do that? Like, I don't get it. How do you just. They're like, so your brain is literally not thinking a single thought. I'm like, no, it's completely blank. And they're like, what? And I'm like, listen, this is, this is coming from like a recovered, like overthinker, perfectionist, like high strung type a business owning mom of two kids. Like, I'm like, I could just keep, you know, the list going. I was like, but when you learn how to do these practices, like the inner peace it brings you and how good it feels is like better than anything else in the world. I'm like, and you just want to always get back to that, right? And so, yeah, for like me to like have this like yesterday and today and to have like this feeling. Feeling. I was like, I don't like it. I don't like it. We got it. We got to change this, like, fast. And. And I will say that walking through my house and, like, breathing, it really brought me back to a state of regulation where I was like, okay, all right, I'm good. I can now continue on with my day. This is not going to. And I hadn't even honestly thought about the whole thing until, like, we were talking and I was thinking about regulating my breathing this morning. And I was like, oh, I haven't thought about this since then. And it's only really occurring to me because that's. That's basically what I was doing with even really, like, hourly recognizing that I was regulating my breathing intentionally. I was just, like, trying to slow down and, like, process through the thoughts and everything and, like, move them out of my awareness for the rest of the day. But. Yeah, so is there, like, anything else that. And I don't know if you have any thoughts about that, but well.

Into that, because there's two incredible points that you brought up there that I don't know if you brought up, you know, But I think the first thing is people assume that the parasympathetic state means I'm tired and relaxed, right? It's just like, vroom. But what you just described is it's this well of energy, right? It's just a different type of energy. Their sympathetic energy is this, like, adrenalized. Go, go, go. Fast, fast, fast. And we assume that the opposite being the parasympathetic is like, oh, I want to go to bed, you know? But it's not. When you. When you learn to really access, like, a true parasympathetic state, it's like a recharge of your battery. And so I think just having people, like, think on that a little bit, that it's not always like, parasympathetic means I'm tired and I'm relaxed, I want to go to bed, and I want to switch off. Like, it might be just me dipping into this well of energy, which is exactly what you're doing. The second thing that I think is fascinating is this research was done, right? We have these little nerve endings that come down into the roof of the nasal cavity that are measuring the velocity of air. And the faster the air is moving through the nasal cavity, the more activity in the brain, the faster, the more chaotic, right? It's just like, the slower we reduce the velocity of the air, which sounds like what you're doing. I sit I close my eyes and I start to read slowly, that starts to increase the connectivity of the brain and slow down brain waves very, very reliably. And so when people say, like, how the hell do you just sit there in silence? You know, it's like, my brain is going 100 miles an hour. Yes. But if you sit and breathe slowly, and it's not immediate, right? It's not take one slow breath, and then it's all bliss and peace. But we do have this tool, right? It's not just, like, sit and hope that the mind slows down. It's like, use the breath to slow the mind down. And we've got that kind of, like, evidence there that, okay, slow nasal breathing increases connectivity and slows brain waves. And so that becomes my. Instead of just sitting. And I think this is really interesting because so many of the people I work with are like, meditation, never couldn't do it. I hate it. You know, it's like, okay, let's try slow nasal breathing. Forget about the word meditation, right? Like, if we can instruct you. And part of this comes back to, do you have the physiological capacity for that not to be stressful? Right? You get some people to breathe really slowly. It's like, you know, they're so sensitive to that buildup that that's not calming, you know, so perhaps there's a bit more work to be done on that side. But instead of thinking of quieting your mind, you think of slowing your breath, the result will be your mind will start to quiet down because of that.

Yeah. As you were, like, saying that because I do business coaching also with other business owners, and I sometimes have taken them through some of these exercises. The person who taught this to me, he actually had people. He didn't give any, really, instructions other than, you can't take your phone, you can't take a pen and paper, you can take water, go sit in a room completely unattached to everything else for three hours, and do not talk. Do not. You know, he's like, you just have to be with yourself. And so most people will say, like, for the first, like, half an hour to an hour, it's like their monkey mind, right? As he called it. Like, it's like, it's just going and going and going and going. And you're like, oh, I wish I had papers. I can write all these things down. And I wish I had my phone so I could do this. He's like. And then finally, like, 45 minutes to 60 minutes into it, people's like, people will start to like naturally kind of drop into it and like things will start to shift. And he's like, by like the second hour, like well into it, people start to go like, oh, I get it now. And for me, and that was me, like I, I tried to go through like, you know, different types of like subconscious, like meditations or like the subconscious reprogramming. I'm trying to think of what they call it where like someone's talking and you're like dropping in and anyways, I like couldn't do it. Like I went to somebody in person and it worked really well there. But like I couldn't do it with like a audio guide or like a person virtually. It just didn't work for me. And I like now recognize, I think a lot of it was like my breath and the tension I was carrying as a result. Because being in person with somebody, I think the energy was also different and I was able to more easily drop in. But like I didn't sit for three hours. Admittedly my first time we did it because within like 15 minutes everything was quiet and I felt so much calmer and I was like, after a while I was like, I have no idea how long I've been sitting here, but I feel like it's been a really long time. And I just started taking that and using it as a tool where I could like drop in for a minute, right? And so I always said, quiet the mind. And that's the instruction I've given to other people. And I've said, hey, if you struggle with it, try the three hour thing. Right? I'm not saying you have to, but might be, might be helpful. But I just wrote down as you were talking, use the breath to slow the mind down. And because you said that and I was like, that is genius. Like, yes. Especially for people who are struggling, it's probably because they're also, you know, not paying attention to what's happening physiologically. They're just so focused on like, stop thinking, stop thinking, stop thinking. Which, what are you going to do when you say stop thinking? You're going to keep thinking and you're just stressed about it, right? So, and then your breath is obviously going to change in response, response. So I was like, that's genius. That makes sense.

It's this physiology psychology loop, you know, that we, when you try and use psychology, the mind to control the mind, like, it's very ineffective. Like you just said, oh, I'm going to stop thinking. Like, I'm thinking already about stopping thinking. Like, but physiology and Psychology interact with each other, and they influence each other. You know, if your physiology is all stressed out, as too will be your mind. You know, that's a given like, that we can't have the adrenaline, the cortisol, the heart rate. My mind's just like, chill. That just doesn't work like that. And so, so often when my mind is so busy, it's like I need to calm my physiology down and let my mind be impacted by that. I'll let my psychology be impacted by that. But you bring up, I don't know if you've ever seen this research that was done, but it kind of just ties in so nicely to what you're talking about. They put people in a room with no devices. The only thing that was in there was a button that would give themselves an electric shock. And more people chose to electrocute themselves than sit in silence with themselves. Right. It was something like 63% of women, and I think a little bit less of men that over a period of time, they would choose to shock themselves rather than just sit quietly. Wild, right? Like, and I think that tells us so much about, like, this constant stimulus that we're bombarded with today that, like, if I can't pick up my phone, if I can't text someone, if I can't do the thing, like, oh, I just shock myself because it, like, I'm lacking this, like, sensory input that I'm so used to that I'd rather not sit and listen to my thoughts. I'm just gonna electrocute myself.

Like, I'm over here. I'm over here. Like, I refuse. I have an Apple watch. I refuse to wear it. I mean, the whole WI Fi thing is a different conversation. But I don't want people to be connected to me all the time. So, like, I'll walk away from my phone. I'll put my phone down for a couple hours, I'll come back, and people are like, are you alive? And I'm like, you guys, I literally just put my phone down for a couple hours. Like, yeah, I'm fine. What's the problem?

It's. It's crazy how quickly that's changed, right? Like, go back 10 years, 20 years, 30 years, 50 years. Like, we weren't contactable. You know, I listened to a podcast the other day.

I want to go back to that. Can I go back to that Movies.

And no one thought I was dead. I was just watching a movie for two hours. Like, I wasn't. You know, it's like, why are we so. You know, it's like, if someone hasn't replied, we assume the worst. It's like, I. I'm trying to get better at that. It's just like, my phone is just not with me some periods of time. But there's also this learning curve of the people around me that are like, oh, Campbell's not dead. He's just, like, not on his phone.

Yes, exactly. I mean, I feel like I have to, like, tell my family, hey, guys, like, I'm going to, like, record for two hours if I don't respond. Like, I'm good. Don't worry, and please be quiet. Like, yeah. Oh, that's amazing. So you mentioned a couple different ways, like, of where people can start, like, if they're new to this. Do you have, like, like, any other, like, last tips to basically, you know, someone's like, okay, like, I heard some of the tips you said. You said, is there somewhere that you typically, like, tell people, like, hey, this is a really good practice that you can try out if you're new to this.

Yeah, definitely. So the first one that I think everyone skips over, and we've touched on it a couple of times today, is awareness. It feels that there's less outcomes, there's less goal, you know, Like, I think that's why people find it really hard. But without it, every other practice becomes less effective, right? If you're not aware of how your breathing's contributing to your anxiety, you won't know when to do the breathing exercise to reduce your anxiety, you know? And so actually, and I love this idea and what I teach is kind of like, have a formal practice and have an informal practice, right? So set a time of five minutes, sit down, and just try and observe your breathing. And the thing I always like to explain to people is, like, becoming more aware of your breath is like learning a language. You know, let's say you trying to learn Spanish, you're listening to someone speak Spanish, you have no idea what they're talking about. It's just noises, you know? But as you start to pick up, right. Some proficiency in that language, you're like, oh, he just said dog, and she just said cat, right? They're like. And then you start to kind of get a theme, and then eventually you can communicate, right? There's an interaction there. Your breath's no different. So the first time you sit and you set a timer for five minutes and you notice your breath, you're like, what am I noticing? You know, it's like, yeah, there's air moving, but, like, you don't know the language yet, you know, and so the more you do that, you're like, oh, I'm starting to pick up on more and more information. And so that, that is kind of the return of investment, of becoming aware of your breathing is tenfold. You know, it's not in the immediate future, but it will serve its purpose. You know, it'll pay dividends over the time. The second thing you know, without being able to say, you know, well, you need this because there is. What I think is missing in a lot of the breathwork space is personalization. You know, it's not one size fits all. Your nervous system is very different to mind. So you might need different practices than I do. So I try and steer away from kind of one size fits all. This works for everyone. But there is pretty good research, right? A rate of breathing known as resonance frequency breathing, which for most people is between about four and a half and seven and a half breaths per minute. Of the general population, the greatest percentage fall at about six breaths a minute. So that could be our kind of, let's start here. 40% ratio inhale, 60% ratio exhale. Easy way to say that. Inhale for four seconds, exhale for six seconds. If I do that right, it's likely it's not exact right. And we want to have a bit of self awareness of how is this making me feel? But that's this kind of like lovely way to kind of sync up the systems in the body. My breath is talking to my heart, my heart is talking to my brain, and everything's kind of coming to the same page. And so sitting down and doing that ideally for about 10 minutes, ideally twice a day, will be one of the fastest ways to start to support the nervous system, start to recalibrate the nervous system in a way because you're kind of manually overriding and being like, here's the parasympathetic state. Get used to it. Because so many people like we touched on are unfamiliar with their parasympathetic state. They live in the sympathetic nervous system system. And so sitting and doing that, number one, it's going to be a little bit uncomfortable, right? The mind is going to be busier than ever. I've got to clean the house, I've got to call my friend. That's my nervous system being like, what is this over here? We don't like this. Let's go back to what we know, right? It loves familiarity, so it wants to go back to the do, do, do, go, go, go action, right? And so if I Know that's going to happen and be like, this doesn't mean I'm doing it wrong. I've just got to kind of adapt to this. And I sit and I do 10 minutes twice a day. Arguably in my mind, one of the most powerful practices you can do for your nervous system, if you sit and say breathe in for four and out for six and it feels terribly slow and it's uncomfortable, then you might try and speed that up a little bit. Maybe I'm breathing in for three and a half and I'm breathing out for five and a half. If people are quite keen to work it out, is you just work out. So 60 seconds in a minute we work out our respiratory rate. If I was breathing seven times a minute, 60 divided by seven is going to give us a number. Times that by 0.4, that's my inhale. Times that by 0.6, that's my exhale. This feels a very like. It's like, what difference does 0.1 of a second make? It makes all the difference. And they've done this with biofeedback. They did a really interesting study where they worked out people's resonance frequency. They split two groups and then they got people to breathe one breath per minute faster than their resonance. And they did not get the same outcomes. Right. In terms of perceived level of stress, like HRV was the other measurement, like didn't. So that little bit faster didn't give them the same impact. And so actually, you know, having a pacing app, you know, or a timer that like gives you four seconds and six seconds, or there are some that are a little bit more specific. Right. I can go down to 0.1 of a second, but finding your rate of resonance and then sitting down and doing that for 10 minutes twice a day.

Amazing. Awesome. Well, thank you. I mean, this has been fantastic. I appreciate you joining me. Tell us where they can find you. And I know you have a course as well, so share where they can find your course.

Yeah, so I'm most active on Instagram at Breathbody Therapy. I just try and share as much as I can. I see it as a wonderful kind of educational platform for the health practitioners out there. We run a 12 week certification. You know, much on what we spoke about today, you know, the functional restorative side, assessing and treating breathing and then also using some of those experiential practices when indicated. And then for the individuals that are maybe looking to deepen their own kind of understanding and practice of their own breath, we do have a five week self paced course that introduces you. Here's your diaphragm and here's your rib cage and here's how you start to impact your physiology. So I'll send kind of all those links to you, Hallie, if people are interested, they can kind of jump in that way.

Absolutely. Thank you. And I know we will. We'll tag you on Instagram and, you know, on, on socials and put the link and everything underneath this episode. So if anybody's driving, don't worry about writing things down. You can click it later. But thank you so much, Campbell, for joining me today. This was so informative and I've loved this discussion because I'm just, I'm like sitting here taking like so many of my own notes.

Well, it was a pleasure. I really appreciate, you know, your time and energy and attention and it was an awesome conversation.

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