Heroic Interview: Anxiety Free with Patrick McKeown

You're listening to Anxiety Free, a special Optimize presentation with Patrick McKeown and Brian Johnson.

Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to Optimize. Today we have part two with Patrick McKeown. Very excited about it. In the last one we talked about the oxygen advantage. If you haven't listened to that one yet or watched that one yet, please do. It's amazing. Tons of practical advice and wisdom there on the importance of breathing. Today we're going to do something a little different.

We're going to use Anxiety Free, another.

One of Patrick's great books, as a jumping off point. But Patrick has suggested that we actually walk through a little presentation he has and I thought that sounded like a brilliant idea. So let's do that. Patrick, thanks again for taking the time, not only in this chat, but over the last X decades in mastering this super important aspect of our lives.

Sure, you're very welcome, Brian. It's good to be here. I think it's, you know, it's, it's a very good angle to share in terms of the benefits that a simple, you know, kind of lifestyle change and what it can do to our quality of life and ultimately our happiness. So I think the presentation would be useful in connecting it together. A lot of people talk about meditation, they talk about breathing. And what I'm trying to do is just to give my own angleage. It's something that has been very dear to me. I started incorporating this into my way of life about 20 years ago and it completely changed my life in every way. My concentration was better, my stress levels reduced, I was more productive, I was more successful. Not that it's, you know, but at the same time you like to produce a quality of work. And the quality of work is produced when the mind is able to concentrate and when energy levels are good. So because for 20 years before that I was more stressed, poor energy levels and unable to give my work, even school, university, the attention that it deserves. So that's what I, what I hope to walk through here.

Thank you.

So Steve Jobs, you know, we have to consider that he's brought some of the most powerful inventions into the world. And he was actually very intuitive. He was a college dropout, he went to India, he traveled India and he brought meditation into his way of life. And it's no coincidence that some of the top executives are bringing mindfulness, breathing into their way of life, but also into their employees way of lives. Because the mind is the organ in the human body. Through our quality of life is perceived everything that we perceive on life is filtered through the mind and yet we don't actually stand back and ask the question, well, what's going on in our mind? You know, the word awareness means to know what's going on in the mind, to be aware of the thoughts that are going on on the mind. And oftentimes the other word that you will hear is that people are asleep. I was asleep for many, many years and from time to time I'm still asleep, but from time to time I'm paying a lot more attention to what thoughts I have. And there's two types of thoughts that we have. So there's practical thoughts, which are absolutely necessary. They're vital to. As human beings. You know, what differentiates us from animals is our ability to think. And practical thoughts are very helpful. You know, you could be deciding to a course of action, or you could be deciding to go somewhere you need to have, you know, what direction do you take to get there? Or if you go to a supermarket, what food or whatever you want to buy. They're all practical thoughts in general. They occupy a small amount of our time and they don't drain us of energy, so they're actually useful. But a lot of the thoughts that we have are not practical. They're repetitive thoughts. And the repetitive thoughts, like a goldfish going round and round in a bowlfish in a bowl. The same old thoughts day in, day out. We're given out about those nearest and dearest, or the neighbour or the boss. And we're running these thoughts through our mind over and over and over and over. And they occupy these thoughts. Repetitive thoughts occupy a large amount of our time. This thing is the same. It's really a habit, you know, it's the habit of. As Oscar Wilde, you know, he says, he said, thinking is a disease and people die, but just like any other disease. And thinking is a habit. You know, when we're born into this world, we don't think we're very much in the present moment. We're very much that the mind is completely immersed in what we are doing and we're not stuck in our head. Whereas as adults we're often stuck in our head, but we don't even realize it. If you're stuck in your head, you can't really relate to what you're doing because your attention is in your head as opposed to what you're doing. So repetitive thoughts is when we're on that stream of thought. And the stream of thought isn't very helpful to us. But the whole thing about thoughts is that how do we know what goes on in our mind unless we stand back and we pay attention to it and we ask ourselves the question? And the University of Southern California, it says, you know, that the average person is about 70,000 thoughts every day. And psychologists estimate that 80 to 90% of these thoughts are repetitive and useless. So, again, there's a lot of thoughts that we're having. Which ones are good and which ones aren't so good, or how do we know if those thoughts are good or if they're not so good? So it's only by paying attention to the mind. This is when we sit back a little bit and we ask ourselves a question throughout the day. What am I thinking about at this moment? And initially, you might be on this train of thought, and you're giving out about the boss and you're feeling very tense, and you keep continuously going down the strain of thought. It might be some time before you realize, oh, my God, here I'm thinking about this. But the more you ask yourself the question throughout the day, the easier it is that you become aware of what you're thinking about. And the interesting thing about the mind is that the brain cannot tell the difference between something that's real and something that's imagined. This is why we have to be very careful about what we're thinking about. Because if we're constantly worrying, it's stressing out the body. And we could be worrying about an event. You think the event is going to happen? Well, to the body, the event is happening because the body doesn't know whether it's real or imagined. The brain is worrying. The brain has all these thoughts, you know, the mind has all these thoughts going through it. The body is getting tense, almost as if it's real. And you know, this is correct because if we were to bite into a lemon, we could taste, you know, the bitterness of the lemon, and, you know, we react to the bitterness of it. But we could even just imagine biting into that lemon, pushing our teeth down into it, and the kind of the bittery liquid is running into our mouth. And some of you would be scrunching your faces or cringing at the toss of that. But there's an example. How can the body or how can the brain know the difference? So it's really important to pay attention to our thoughts and realize that, yes, our thoughts can be stressful to the body as well. So the whole objective is even to reduce our negative thoughts or our worries, even reduce them by 10, 15%. That's going to make quite a difference. And the key to this is really to observe what's going on. You know, observe your thoughts periodically throughout the day. What am I thinking about? Are my thoughts there to help me or are my thoughts making me tense? What effect is my thinking having on my body? For years, as I said earlier, I was just completely stuck in my head from the moment I woke up in the morning to the time I went to sleep at night, my mind was racing. I was constantly jumping to the future. Goals, reach goals. You know, go to school, go through high school. Your goal is to get into university, get into university. Your goal is to get out of university. Get out of university. Your goal is to get a job, get your job. Your goal is get promoted, get married, get the girlfriend, get this, get that. And all we're doing is running to the future. And that's where I was and I totally stressing myself about running to the future. And when I look back at university, I should have had a far happier time because I spent four years trying to get to the future. And also the quality of my work was suffering because I wasn't having attention of what I was doing. I was too busy running to the future. So nowadays I set goals, I decide, yeah, go to try and you know, this is a goal, I want to achieve this by a certain time. But I occupy my attention as much as I can in the present moment and then I have my attention on what I'm doing, my attention on what I am doing. I and my quality of work is better as a result, I reach my goal and I'm happier. So we have to observe what we're thinking about. Remember, the mind filters everything that we perceive in life. Our entire quality of life on earth is determined by the mind. So we have to pay attention to how is the mind operating. And one study in the Journal of Clinical Psychology has shown that focusing on the breath, mindfulness is simply focusing on the breath and paying attention to what you're thinking about. It increases happiness and well being while it also helps regular meditators. So people who do it consistently live longer, healthier lives. And it's shown that focusing on the breath improves memory, it improves creativity and it also improves reaction times. So there's quite a few benefits. You know, it's not just one of those things. Focus on the breathing and something might happen. Just quite a bit of science now behind it. So mindfulness, originally it came from the eastern world and it was John Kabat ZINN in the 1970s, he looked at Buddhism, he looked at vipassana and These are just basic. You know, he looked at the basic following of the rat, and as far as I know, it was John Kabat Zin that came up with the term mindfulness. And what does it mean? To be mindful means, you know, what's going on in your mind. And also by taking attention out of the mind and onto the breath, we can literally change our brain. So neuroplasticity that different regions of the brain can change as a result of focusing on the breath. So, for example, this study here, Massachusetts General Hospital, that physical structure of the brain is altered for the better. That's better cognitive function just by following your breathing. So there's many, many things. The amygdala, for example, it shrinks. So we're less likely to overreact. We're more likely to be able to stay positive in a stressful environment. And we're also more likely to be able to stay focused and to reach a better decision. So you kind of, you know, a few different people, if you were to hand them a situation, and I hand this situation to this person. But if this person has an overactive mind, they're likely to react quite strongly to the situation. Whereas if somebody is focusing on mindfulness, they're able to maintain a steady head and they're able to come up with a better decision that they're not going to be clouded by the event taking over. And this is what differentiates people who can operate in a stressful environment. That's why soldiers were often, you know, studied. Because if you put a soldier into a combat situation, that's a lot of stress. And how can you help the soldier maintain focus and also to maintain calmness in the face of pressure? Well, mindfulness helps there. Why does the executive focus on their breathing? Because, of course, they can be subject to stress. And if the executive is doing breathing exercise looking at their breath, it also will help their stress levels. And they're able to maintain focus, they're able to make better decisions, and they pass this on to their employees. So it's a better culture within the organization. And the other thing about us, as our thoughts reduce, so once we start becoming aware of the negative thoughts and we start reducing them, as our thoughts reduce, our focus increases. And as our focus increases, our productivity increases. And as our thoughts reduce, our anxiety reduces and our stress levels reduce and our happiness increases. Because if we train the brain to be able to hold its attention on something for a period of time without distraction, well, that means that our concentration is improving. And most people don't have Control over the mind. If you ask them the question, well, I often say to my clients, well, I'd like you now to stop thinking, and I'd like you to stop thinking and see how long does it take for a talk to come into the mind. So even your listeners at the moment, just even the next couple of seconds, what I'd like you to do is to stop thinking from now. So, you know, probably by now thoughts have come back into the mind. So the question is, do we have control over the mind or does our mind have control over us? And by focusing on the breath, we do take back control of the mind. Not 100%, but even if we reduce our tone activity by 20%, it's going to be very positive. And in terms of happiness, it's really important. You know, this Harvard professor, Daniel Gilbert, he says human beings like we're unlike other animals because we spend a lot of time thinking about what's not going on around us. We're contemplating events that happened in the past. So we could be regrets over what we've done in the past, and we're anxious over what's going to happen in the future. Or even we're anxious about events that may never happen at all. So that differentiates us from animals. You know, if you look at the cow in the field, the cow in the field isn't worried about tomorrow. The cow in the field hasn't got regrets over the amount of grass that it ate yesterday. And even an ugly cat or an ugly dog. They don't really care about how they look. They're not constantly looking in the mirror, analyzing themselves. You know, they get on with it. And humans, yeah, we're often caught in our head. So animals don't wake up on Monday morning saying, oh my God, I have to work today. I hate Mondays. They just live life. They do their job as they're supposed to do, whereas we've developed the habit of thinking. But it's with this. This research is quite interesting. It's trackyourhappiness.org and then 5,000 people from 83 countries, 250,000 data points. And basically the question was, are you thinking about something other than what you're doing at this moment? So the whole survey was to find out how distracted are people really. And they found that people's minds wandered considerably. And they also found that the people whose minds wandered were less happy. So somebody with an overactive mind with lots of thoughts going through their head are less happy than somebody with control over their mind. And I think that kind of makes sense, because think of the individual with anxiety, they can't stop thinking. The person who is highly stressed, they're not able to stop thinking. And a lot of people aren't able to stop thinking. But how can we learn the tools to be able to quieten the mind? Oftentimes we go down to the pub and we'll have 10 pints or a lot of vodka or a lot of Guinness or whatever we drink. And of course, that quietens the mind. But the next day, the mind is ten times more active or they watch tv. So Western society goes generally Western person run down to the pub, get drunk, the mind quietens. Watch a lot of tv, they feel that the mind quietens. Take prescription drugs for quietening the mind. A lot of people are on prescription drugs, a lot of people are on illicit drugs. Again, to quieten the mind. And all of these things are to get out of the head, to escape the torture, the mental torture of the mind. But you can quieten your mind, but just over time, over a little bit of time, focusing on the breath. And now you're naturally quietening the mind and you're not dulling the senses. Now, I'm not saying that, yeah, it's nice to have a drink of wine or whatever, but it's not nice when we become dependent on it. So that's what we're looking at. Focusing on the breath is man's and woman's, of course, way of harnessing their own true capabilities and learning to be happier on this earth. And that's really what it's about. Don't worry and be happy. So as we go through life, we've got two different choices. We can be completely stuck in our head. So I live in a lovely part of Western Ireland. It's got lovely scenery, nice, nice scenery, fields, stone walls, really nice place to walk. So many people will take a walk and beautiful scenery, but they don't even see the scenery because they're stuck in their heads. And they walk down the street and they don't even see the street. And if you were to ask them from one end of the street to the other, what did they see? They won't remember any of it because they weren't. They were there in body. So they walked physically, they walked through the street, but mentally they weren't there at all. They were completely stuck in their heads. And how can you live life if you're stuck in your head? How can you relate to life if you're stuck in your head? So we have to get out of Our heads. We can't be just constantly dwelling and dwelling and analyzing and dwelling. You know, we have to get out of the head. And education, it teaches us how to think, and it teaches us how to break information into tiny pieces and teaches us how to decipher information, to reason, to analyze. And it's brilliant Western education. It teaches us how to think, but it's not teaching us how to stop thinking. So the mind is being developed into this sharp analytical tool, but yet we've no control over it. So if you teach somebody how to think, it's also really important to teach them how to stop thinking and how to quieten the mind. And there's three ways to do it. The first way to quieten the mind is connect with the breath. That you're following the breath as it comes into the body, and you're following the breath as it leaves the body. So, for example, you may feel slightly colder air coming into your nose and slightly warmer air as it leaves your nose. And it's not to think about the breath because we want to get out of the head, but it's just to simply follow the breath. Follow the breath as it comes into the body and follow the breath as it leaves the body. So when we follow the breath, we stop thinking. Because when we have our attention on the breath, we don't have attention on the mind. So we're taking attention out of the mind. And it helps quieten the mind. The second way to do it is to connect with the inner body. Not to have our attention completely in the head is to merge your attention with every cell of your body. If you're going for a walk, walk with every cell of your body. If you go for a jog, walk, jog with every cell of your body that you're not just ahead. Take your attention out of the head and, you know, feel your body being supported by the chair, feel the ground underneath your feet, feel the subtle inner energy sensations of the entire body from the top of your head right down to your toes. And the third way to quieten the mind is to bring your attention completely into the present moment. So as human beings, not to live in the past, not to be constantly thinking about the future, but to bring our attention fully into the present moment. But when you connect with your breath, it's probably the easiest place to start. And by doing that, you also connect with the inner body. Because, of course, you have to have your attention in the inner body to be able to feel the breath. And when you connect with your breath, you also bring Your attention into the present moment. So connecting with the breath will actually harness all three. And when we look at the breath, we have to ask is, how do we breathe? When we get stressed, People realize that our breathing gets faster. It's often through the mouth, it's upper chest, it's heavier, it's noticeable. So in order to bring the body down from stress state into relaxation, we want to do the complete opposite to stress. So instead of breathing faster, we gently soften and slow down the breath. Not by holding the breath, not by freezing the breathing, but just gently feeling the airflow as it comes into your nose and feel the airflow as it leaves your nose. And to feel the airflow as it comes into the nose, and to feel the airflow as it leaves your nose. And to gently soften and quieten the breath. And by doing that, of course, it should be through the nose and that through the mouth. But by softening the breath, our breathing becomes more difficult to see, so it's invisible, it becomes lighter. And we want to soften the breath to the point that we feel a tolerable need for air. So could you gently slow down your breathing to the point that you feel a need for air, but not by holding the breath, just by completely softening the breath. So when we get stressed, our breathing gets faster. When we get angry, our breathing gets faster. When we're anxious, our breathing is faster. And could you get angry if your breathing was slow? So if you feel anger coming on, what happens when you slow down your breathing? Well, when you slow down your breathing, it helps to diminish the anger. When you breathe fast, you activate the sympathetic response, the body's fight or flight response. When you completely slow down your breathing, you dampen the sympathetic response. But you also promote parasympathetic, which is the body's relaxation. So people who breathe fast, does that have an effect on the emotions? Yes, it will. The emotions affect our breathing, but also our breathing affects our emotions. So emotions, of course, is going to have an effect on our breathing. But you're going to have to counteract this by, by changing your breathing. But you have to be aware enough to be able to do so. And oftentimes when emotions set in, we get so caught in our heads that we don't feel, we don't realize that we're stuck in this state. But maybe five minutes later, you might realize it and then focus on your breathing. It doesn't matter when you do it. If you focus on gently slowing down and softening the breath, you'll Be able to recover quicker. You know, it's not that you won't get angry, of course you get angry. It's a normal human trait to get angry. It's a normal human trait to get a little bit stressed depending on the situation. But we should be able to recover from it a little bit quicker. And also we can get back on the horse that it doesn't have the same kind of impact on us. So something positive to be able to do. Good breathing is quiet, it's calm, it's invisible. It's breathing in and out through the nose and not good breathing through the mouth. Not good breathing would be regular sighing or snorting or sniffing. Our not good breathing is when our breathing is visible. You know, it is relatively noticeable movements of the chest and tummy. That's not really good breathing. Not good breathing is noisy breathing during rest. So the rule of thumb is that we're breathing less is more. Breathing is soft, light and calm. And when we breathe gently and softly, and when we completely slow down our breathing, the amount of oxygen delivered to the body improves. So when we slow down the breathing, it dampens the sympathetic nervous system and it promotes parasympathetic nervous system. So it has an effect on the autonomic nervous system, which is very powerful because our modern lives can be so busy and everything is taking our attention, the mobile phone, the computer, the family, the finance work, everything. So we never give ourselves attention. It's really important for you to give yourself some attention. When you slow down your breathing, your blood vessels open up. So you can literally influence your blood circulation through your breath. Do the opposite to the big breaths. You know, if people take five big breaths, take a deep breath out, and they take these big breaths and then they feel lightheaded. Well, that's telling you that big breathing isn't good for you because taking a big breath is causing your blood vessels to constrict. So the whole thing about taking that big breath, people believe that they think it's going to bring more oxygen to the brain, but it does the opposite. Causes our blood vessels to constrict and less oxygen delivery to the brain. So the big breathing is having a detrimental effect. When you breathe less, carbon dioxide increases, nitric oxide increases. And these two gases play a big role in human health. Oxygen is released from the red blood cells in the presence of carbon dioxide. And carbon dioxide as well, opens up the blood vessels. Nitric oxide improves the arterial oxygen uptake. So by breathing, less oxygen delivery increases and oxygen is king. Airway trumps everything. In the human body. So how can you breathe to genuinely impact your oxygen delivery? Well, the whole thing is don't breathe more, breathe less gently. Soften your breathing and breathe through the nose. And of course, when you're breathing through your nose and you're softening the breath, you're going to take your attention into the present moment. And that famous book that was brought out years ago by Eckhart Tolle, the Power of now. Of course, a great book to read and great information about taking your attention out of your head and living in the moment. Because as human beings, we communicate through our senses, through our sense of smell, through our sight, through our hearing, through our tasting, through our feeling. And this is how we communicate with life. You know, any elemental school kid or kindergarten kid, they understand what are our senses. Yeah, it's our smell, it's our sight, it's our hearing, it's our taste and it's our feeling. Kids understand that. But how often are you fully communicating with life using your senses? Or, you know, you're listening to a beautiful piece of music and you hear the first three or four notes and bump. Your attention is in your head. And then you miss the rest of the song. Or you go out for a nice meal and you look at the meal and it looks really nice, smells beautiful, There's a great atmosphere in the restaurant. And you have three bites of the meal and bump. You don't even remember the taste of the rest of it. Why? Because our attention, the mind has taken over. Our attention goes straight into the mind again. So we don't really, you know, we don't really keep our attention in the present moment. We're often living in our heads. As I said earlier, we go for that walk and that beautiful scenery, but we're not even there. We're walking in body. We arrive at the end of it and we don't even realize what did we see in the journey. So if you go into the scenery, you go into a beautiful place, look around you, but really look with a soft look here, Listen. Listen to the sounds. Birds, children, taste. What taste is in your mouth, what smells are going on around you. Can you feel the sunlight on your back? Can you feel the sunlight on your head? And all of these things are really wonderful at bringing your attention into the present moment. Because when our attention is through our senses, our attention is in the present moment. And the other thing is, don't be in such a rush to get to the future. You know, the painter here there are focuses on the outcome. They want to produce a beautiful painting, but they have so much focus on the outcome that they don't have focus on the painting. And that's why they're making plenty of mistakes. Or the carpenter who's putting up a lovely door frame. If the carpenter is in such a rush and so, you know, such a rush to get to the finish of it, he's not going to have the attention of what he's doing. So the quality of work is going to be diminished. Any work that you're doing, don't focus on the outcome of it. Focus on the process. Bring your attention into the present moment. And by doing that, you can have a hundred percent of your attention on what you're doing. Because we don't reach, you know, as soon as. If you're continuously rushing to the finish line. Well, as soon as you reach it, the goalposts move and then you're rushing again. And the goalposts move and you're rushing again. We really want to produce quality of work, and quality of work is produced by having our attention on what we're doing on the present moment, on the breath or in the now. And this was an interesting study that was commissioned by Microsoft, and they looked at 3,000 people and they asked the question, how long was their attention span? And they found out that in 2002, the average attention span of a Western person was 12 seconds. And in 2012, the attention span had reduced to 8 seconds. So that's quite a drop. It's a drop of 25%. But what's more worrying is that a goldfish, who has notoriously bad attention span has an attention span of nine seconds. So I'm afraid the goldfish is ahead of us in this one. And part of it is down social media. You know, we all have smartphones. Mine is switched off, though. I learned that after day three, I didn't want my phone to be coming in with emails or I didn't want to be alerted. I didn't want to be constantly taken over by technology. I use technology, but I also want to have control over it. So when I'm on my laptop, I work, but as soon as I shut it down, that's it, end of. Because we're constantly distracted and we're constantly. The brain is being trained to be distracted. Well, the problem with this is the more active the mind, the less control we have over affects our creativity, it affects our productivity, it affects our ability to enjoy life, and it increases anxiety, can increase stress levels. So there's actually a negative to all this. Don't spend your life lost in the screen. Get out of your screen. Like, I see kids coming into me now. I'm 43 years of age, so I was, you know, a generation that probably missed all of this. And it's great. But I see 15 year old children coming in and they come into my classes and they're constantly distracted, sticking their hands into their pocket, pull out the mobile phone, pull out the cell phone, look at what's going on and then putting it back again. So they're taken over by their phone. And just as I talk, of course mine is ringing here in the background. So interestingly, don't spend your life lost in the screen. It's really important that you've got control over technology as opposed to technology control over you. Meditation the benefit of it Stroop test How quickly and accurately can you focus on the task at hand? It's a very interesting study. The Stroop test was a test that was created back in the 1930s. And basically there's different words and they're all of a color. So say the word will be red, yellow, green, blue. However, each word is in a different color. So the word red might be in the color blue. And there's 120 mismatched words. And the whole objective is that you name the color of the word and not the word itself. You have two minutes to do it and there's usually somebody saying faster, faster, putting you under stress. So generally when people do the Stroop test, their blood pressure increases adrenaline and cortisol increases, the fight or flight response increases, their heart rate increases. But people who did following the breath, people who followed their breath when they did the Stroop test, they were able to answer more questions and less errors. So it suggests that they've got greater attentional control, they've got carefulness, they've got cognitive flexibility and quality of performance. And these are really essential, you know, these are essential tasks for good performance. So your ability to hold your attention on what you're doing, producing less errors and a better quality of work is applicable to focusing on the breath spend. You know, whenever you think of it during the day, get your attention out of your head onto your breath and your ability to harness your full potential will improve. And of course, with focusing on that is ask yourself the question during the day, what am I thinking about? And is my thinking useful? So if you're constantly worrying about something, worrying it over and over and over in your head, ask yourself the question, is this helping me? Is how I'm thinking at this moment, is it helping my situation? Am I reaching a conclusion? Or is it just thinking out of habit? And the more you ask yourself the question, you'll be able to isolate and to differentiate between the practical thoughts which are helpful and reach a solution and the repetitive thoughts which are primarily out of habit. We have to observe what's going on in the mind and determine, is my thinking at this point helpful or is it purely out of habit? And the other question is, things happen, you know, do you have any control over it? I remember I was watching a documentary. It was about a famous Irish rugby player who was born in San Diego and he was a hooker for Ireland. So he used to get very nervous before games. He wouldn't sleep the night before. He'd be really, really anxious. And I was surprised because he was playing rugby for about 25, possibly 30 years. So you think he's kind of got used to all this pressure. But I was then thinking about, you know, what's he thinking about? Well, he's probably worried about the referee, or he's worried about the fans or maybe the state of the pitch or maybe his teammates. So he's a lot of things to be worried about. But what does he have control over? None of those things. He's no control over his fans. He's no control over the referee. He's got very little control, if any, over his teammates, how they play. The only thing he has control over is how he plays and muscle memory. He's been playing rugby for 30 years. His mind, his brain will have developed a muscle memory and will know exactly what to do. All he has to do is get out of the way. Just as the martial artist, just as the guy doing karate. They practice one move over and over and over and over and over. The reason that they practice the move over and over is to develop muscle memory. So when they need that move, they don't have to think about it. Muscle memory kicks in. But in order for muscle memory kicking in, we have to get out of the mind. So we have to let the body do it, let the brain automatically do it. The brain has the intelligence to do it. We have to get out of the way anything that we don't have control over, what's the point in worrying about it? So ultimately, and I'm almost done, it's really about get out of your head and relate to life. Don't spend your life stuck in your head. Many of us, you know, we have the habit of being completely stuck in our head. We're not living life. Get out of your head, relate to life and see how life unfolds for you. So that's my presentation. I hope it's been helpful and I'm going to pass you over to Brian.

Thank you, Patrick, that was astounding and I really appreciate you taking the time to give such a thoughtful presentation. I know you've given this talk at different places and honored to have you share your wisdom in this context. So thank you.

You're very welcome. Thanks very much. You know, I think it's. It's again, very simple information and it's so simple that many of us have overlooked it. But I relate to this. I went through the whole education system. I attained a pretty high level in terms of education. But if I was to give the be given a choice, the capacity to have control over my mind or my education, I'm going to choose the capacity to control my mind because it has given me more benefits. It's been an incredible in terms of the quality of life, you know, we need to have control over the mind, what we're thinking about and also to enjoy life, not to be stuck in the head. So thanks.

Yeah, I love it. The being taught how to think. But we also need to be taught how not to think.

For sure.

Such a great insight. Well, we shared the URL in our last chat, but oxygenadvantage.com is one place for people to find you. Then it was Bottega. Boteyo clinic.com.com.

Yes.

And what's spelled that?

Yeah, how do you spell. So Buteyko is B U T but E Y, K, o. So it's buteykoclinic.com. perfect.

Patrick, thank you so much.

You're very welcome, Brian. Thank you.

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