PNTV: The Oxygen Advantage by Patrick McKeown (#352)

Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to another episode of Philosopher's Notes. TV today, another great book, The Oxygen Advantage by Patrick McGown. The Oxygen Advantage subtitle the simple, scientifically proven breathing techniques for a healthier, slimmer than, faster and fitter you. Patrick McGowan is one of the world's leading authorities on optimal breathing. He's also a really cool guy. He and I have spent some time connecting in addition to the interviews we've done together. He's done some coaching of me and my breathing for both meditation and some sports performance with the Spartan races I'm doing and my life has changed from this book. Another book we'll do called Anxiety Free. I'm a huge fan of Patrick and his work. Highly recommend the book and highly recommend we think more about breathing, which is the focal point, of course, of this episode. As always, we've got a philosopher's note and a bunch of big ideas there. Five of my favorites here. First, let's talk about breathing and the fact that we can live for weeks without food, we can live for days without water, but we can live for only minutes without oxygen. You yet we don't think a lot about breathing vis a vis eating and obviously drinking water and moving our bodies and other fundamentals. So for me, as I got into breathing, I realized, okay, we've got to eat, move, sleep, then we've got our focusing of our mind. We need to add breathing. And in fact that perhaps should be the first and most essential thing, breathing. We take it for granted, but we don't breathe the way we used to, both when we were born and 100,000 plus years ago, due to a lot of different factors. So here's the number one obstacle according to Patrick. He says that we, in short, breathe too much chronic over breathing. Here's a hint to see if you potentially chronically over breathe. Do you breathe through your nose or do you breathe through your mouth primarily? What do you think? Can you tell if you snore at night, you're breathing through your mouth. You may know pretty obviously, but that's the basic thing that we want to think about is the fact that we are chronically over breathing. Patrick tells us that we think about both the quality and the quantity of what we eat and what we drink, but we don't think about it with what we breathe. We think about the quality of the air we breathe. Of course, right? We don't want to breathe in toxic poison, polluted smog, infested air, right? Or other toxins that might exist in an indoor environment. But we're not thinking about the quantity of oxygen we breathe, the quantity of air that we breathe, right? And he says we should be thinking about that because just as overeating, eating too much food, we all know isn't a wise thing to do, breathing too much air is not a wise thing to do. And it might sound a little weird even saying that out loud, yet he tells us why. So that's the number one obstacle, is chronic over breathing. One of the biggest things you can know, or biggest indicators you might be doing that is breathing through your mouth. We're going to talk about that more in a moment, but for now, that's your number one obstacle. Remember, we're thinking about whether we're eating the right amounts and high quality. We're thinking about what we're drinking, the right quality of water and the right quantity. We need to think about the air that we're breathing. Here's why. We know oxygen is in our blood, right? It is in our bodies. When we breathe in oxygen, we exhale carbon dioxide. What I didn't know, and what my hunch is, you don't know unless you've studied breathing, is that the amount of air that we breathe doesn't dictate how much oxygen actually gets into our tissues and our muscles and our organs. Right? And what actually dictates whether the hemoglobin, which is what carries our oxygen, releases that oxygen into our muscles and organs and everywhere else we want it is the amount of carbon dioxide in our bloodstream, right? So the carbon dioxide in our bodies is actually what triggers the oxygen release from the hemoglobin. And what we need to know is that the more we're breathing over breathing too much and too shallowly, which we're going to talk about again when we get to the number one tip, the less carbon dioxide we have in our bodies, we're constantly breathing it out. We don't have enough carbon dioxide in our bodies to trigger the hemoglobin to release the oxygen into our organs and muscles. So there's a paradox here. The more we breathe, the less oxygen we're actually getting in the places we want to get it. That is oxygen and carbon dioxide 101. A little paradoxical there that you need to breathe less to breathe, right? And when you breathe less, you have the proper amounts of carbon dioxide, which triggers the hemoglobin to release the oxygen. Now, how do we go about doing that? Well, our number one tip is to move from being a mouth breather, which is almost always associated with shallow breathing. So you can do it right now and breathe through your mouth and notice what moves when you breathe through your mouth. Your shoulders are going up, your chest is coming in and out, right? That shallow breathing, the only time that we breathe through our mouth back in the day, before we had such a sedentary lifestyle with chronic stress and bad posture, the only time we breathed through our mouth, back in the day, right, when we were camping out in caves, was when we were in the most heightened fight or flight state. It was a very high pitched, physically active state of stress. Now we're constantly breathing through our mouth. We're going about this deep, not getting the proper amounts of oxygen into our bodies in the first place, which is only going to be accomplished when we go deep. And we need to change that. How do you change that? Very simple. Use your nose for what it was made for, which is to breathe. So let's take a deep breath through our nose now. And we also want to make a distinction between a deep breath into our diaphragm and a big breath. Most people think, oh, okay, well, if I want to get oxygen in my body, I need to take a big breath. And what they do is they breathe through the mouth, right? And they expand their chest, but they didn't get any oxygen and air down here, right? So we want to take a deep, light breath down into our diaphragm via our nose. Our nose warms the air, it filters the air, it humidifies the air as it comes through. None of which happens when you breathe through your mouth. And it also is associated with breathing deeply. When you breathe through your nose, you naturally work out your diaphragm, you make your belly come out kind of like you're blowing up a balloon and go back in. And that's what we want to do. So let's take a deep breath through our nose now. Deep, light breath through your nose. Patrick tells us that the ancient Taoist teachers taught, taught that you should breathe so lightly that your nose hairs don't even move. They're still. That's how lightly you're breathing in through your nose, expanding your diaphragm lightly and then back out through your nose. Super simple rhythmic process. Thich Nhat Hanh says you should breathe as slowly, so slowly and quietly and simply and rhythmically that it's almost like a water snake gliding on the surface of a river or on a lake. You shouldn't be chugging away. If someone can hear you breathing, you're not breathing properly. And that takes training. This is a practice I've been working on. Something that I talk about in the note that we'll talk about, more on breathing 101 that Patrick recommends in the book of actually training yourself to breathe less to breathe. Right? So check out the notes for more on that. But now know that you want to. For now, know that you want to breathe through your nose. You want to. You want to breathe lightly yet deeply. And keep your chest kind of in a stationary position. It shouldn't be going crazy as you breathe through your mouth. That's our number one tip here. And the benefit of that is that breathing through your nose induces a calming response. Breathing through your mouth super quickly, you're basically unconsciously telling yourself that you're stressed out. So simply getting into a rhythmic breathing pattern through your nose and is a great way to calm yourself. We have a bunch of these notes coming up on great breathing books, and we'll talk about breathing counts in different ones. The breathing count that I do all the time is inhaling to six, holding for one, and exhaling to eight, which is a really nice, slow, deep, rhythmic breath. We'll talk about that as it relates to something called resonant breathing rates that might be a little bit too long and extended for you, but you want to find a tempo that works. It's nice and rhythmic. You're inhaling whether it's to four or to six, and then you're exhaling for a period that's slightly longer and a little slower than your inhale. That longer exhale induces a state of calm as well. More on that going forward. I just told you number four here, which is the how to. So we'll leave it at that. And then the fifth big idea here is we have a prop. Very exciting when we have a prop. This is another one of the ideas that has most significantly changed me. So I've been practicing and literally making it a practice to breathe through my nose exclusively since I read this book and another one of Patrick's books I mentioned called Anxiety Free. I'm sold on this idea that we should be breathing through our nose basically nearly exclusively. I do that while I'm working, obviously, while I'm training. I've trained myself to work out, even at high intensity levels, exclusively through my nose. When I first started doing that, I thought I was going to suffocate. Felt like I was breathing in, like, through a straw. But as with anything, you show up and you do it and you build both your diaphragm muscle and just the capacity to Be comfortable with more carbon dioxide in your system, which releases that oxygen from the hemoglobin. And paradoxically, learning how to breathe that efficiently, you don't need to pant and gasp to get the oxygen, the air into your body, then the oxygen out of your hemoglobin into your muscles and your recoveries much faster, et cetera. But for this idea, we're going to talk about sleep. So Patrick makes the point that we want to breathe through our nose while we're sleeping. As I said in the little first idea or kind of introduction, if you're snoring at night, that's one of the greatest and quickest ways to know the that you are almost certainly breathing through your mouth. The way to handle that may sound super weird. I thought I was anyway when I first read it, but I'm all in. You guys pay me to test these things and be a professional optimizer. So I immediately went online and I bought what Patrick recommends, which is a 3M surgical tape. Right. I think there's a few different sizes. He may even recommend a smaller one. I don't know how thick this one is, maybe an inch, inch and a half. But basically, you take this tape and you put it over your mouth. I will do so now to show how ridiculously absurd it looks. I do this every night. So you put it over your mouth, Nice and tight. That might freak out some people. I didn't really have a problem putting this on. When I'm all into something, I'm all in. Caveats. Don't do this. Your kids need to be older than, I think, six years old. Don't do this if you're drinking. But if you have significant respiratory issues, obviously think about it. But this is something, a practice that I've done that's been amazing. Alexander does it, and we have fun with it. So putting tape over your mouth is basically, Patrick says, the only way to know whether or not you're actually breathing through and to get yourself to consistently breathe through your nose. He still does that. I'm almost certain he shared that with me in our last chat. He still does this every night. But I do this every night since I read the book. And it's tough to track the things that I do and which has the biggest impact on my wellbeing. But I am absolutely certain that training myself to breathe through my nose has resulted in a deeper level of calm, a deeper level of comfort and confidence. And it makes sense. As we discussed, we just didn't evolve to breathe through our mouth. And that Level of kind of chronic over breathing is unconsciously eliciting that fight or flight response. So simply breathing through your nose triggers your vagus nerve, which we're going to talk about in a few notes From now in Love 2.0 to calm your overall system. Highly recommend the practice. Excited to share more. Again, we've got the goofy tape if you want to go all in. 3M surgical tape, micro tape I think they call it. How to through your nose lightly, deeply, rhythmically. Remember that water snake. Don't move the little hairs in your nose. If you're really all in. And that's hard to do as I train myself, it's hard to breathe that lightly and that deeply. But again, with anything, as you do it and you practice, you strengthen the capacity to do it. Our number one tip was breathing through the nose, getting out of the mouth, O2 plus CO2. Paradoxically, you want to get oxygen out of your hemoglobin into your tissues and your muscles. You got to have the carbon dioxide levels at the right level. If you are over breathing, you're not going to be able to do that. So remember, when we think about the quantity of the foods we eat, we need to think about the quantity of the air that we breathe to breathe. Right? Breathe less, Patrick tells us. And there you go. So take another deep breath through your nose and go out and have an awesome day. See you. Isn't it a bit odd that we went from math to science to history, but somehow missed the class on how to live? For some wacky reason, optimal living 101 never made the schedule. Of course, it's too late to go back and change that and you're too busy to read full time to catch up. But if you're like us, you're all about optimizing your life so you can actualize your potential. So imagine this. Imagine having someone read the best books on how to optimize your life and pull out the big ideas that can really change your life. You know those sections, you underline an asterisk and mark all up. Then imagine that guy me connecting those awesome ideas to other great books and helping you actually apply the wisdom to your life today. Well, that's what I do with something we call Philosopher's notes, where I've distilled hundreds of great books into 20 minute super practical summaries. Then imagine me taking the absolute best big ideas from those great books and sharing them with you in hour long Optimal Living 101 classes on everything from productivity, purpose and confidence to nutrition goal setting and conquering Procrastination. 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