Top Breathing Techniques To Ease Your Mind, Heal Your Body & Change Your Life! EP 1176

We have the access to the most powerful regulator of stress through our breath.

This is episode number 1176 on the power of mastering your breathing. Welcome to the School of Greatness. My name is Lewis Howes, a former pro athlete turned lifestyle entrepreneur.

And each week we bring you an inspiring person or message to help you discover how to unlock your inner greatness. Thanks for spending some time with me today. Now let the class begin.

Today we've put together an incredible episode about the importance of breath work. And we've had so many powerful guests and experts on the show about diving deep into the conversation about the power of breathing and how it affects your body to reduce stress, decrease inflammation, and how you can learn to regulate your body's response to anxiety with a few simple techniques. So stick around to hear from the incredible James Nestor, Andrew Huberman, Wendy Suzuki, Nicole Lapera, and Wim Hof. And make sure to share this with someone that you think would find it empowering and inspiring to help them improve the quality of their life. If you've got a few friends that you know might be struggling or just want to take their life to the next level, then send this to them right now so they can listen along with you. And a quick reminder, if this is your first time here, make sure to subscribe to the School of Greatness over on Apple Podcast right now. Click that subscribe button. Leave us a review and a rating and let us know which part of this episode episode you enjoyed the most. And a big shout out to the fan of the week. Who is Darcy Sisson, who left a review over on Apple podcasts about episode 1172 and she said this was a very powerful interview with Dr. Phil with so many life changing takeaways and I'm so proud of you, Louis for asking such wonderful questions. You truly have a wonderful way of connecting with your guests and getting them to be real and also vulnerable. I love all the wisdom that is shared and I feel like I'm truly a part of the conversation as I'm listening. Keep up the great work and thanks for helping us as listeners enrich our own lives with your beautiful content. So big thank you Darcy Sisson for being the fan of the Week for leaving a review. So if you guys want a chance to be shouted out as a fan of the week, all you gotta do is subscribe, leave a review, and we do this every single week. Okay, in just a moment we'll dive into the power of breathing and mastering your breath. Are you ready to level up your business? Intuit QuickBooks has got your back. Forget stressing over unpaid invoices or tracking expenses.

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In this first section, you'll hear from author and journalist James Nestor. He believes that the world has lost the ability to breathe properly. And after spending years in laboratories and ancient burial sites, working with researchers at Stanford, University of Pennsylvania and other institutions to figure out what ren wrong with our breathing, he's learned how to fix it.

So I've talked to dozens and dozens and dozens of these people. People who had had asthma for 50 years, who had been on bronchodilators, oral steroids. If you stay on oral steroids for too long, it starts impacting your bones, which is why increased risks of osteoporosis, autoimmune diseases, I mean it worsening asthma. It's bad news. And again, this is no, no controversy about this. But what do you do? You can't get off this stuff because then you'll die of an asthma attack. So this story was written about in the New York Times about how someone he was a violin maker in Vermont, just started breathing in this different way. Breathing within his metabolic needs. Instead of over breathing, Asthmatics over breathe all the time. They breathe through their mouth. He was able to get rid of oral steroids that he'd been on for decades. And he was going from 20 pumps of a bronchodilator to I think two a day. And I read this in the New York Times. So this is not a sketchy journal. And I said, what is going on here? So I spent months and months talking to the top researchers in this field. And a lot of people think that asthma, oh, I inherited it. There's nothing. It's an incurable disease. I can't do anything about it. I have to stay on these drugs. That is not true. If you look at the scientific literature and if you look at these people who have done NIH studies into asthma and breathing and what a huge impact it's going to have. I want to be perfectly clear. I am not a doctor. I'm not a breathing therapist. Okay? I'm not saying go ditch your bronchodilators. No, I'm saying that you should. If you have asthma, it would be worth your time to explore how breathing can help benefit you, how it can help blunt the symptoms. But don't do anything per this advice. I, Justin, put that big label on there.

Of course. And what would you say are some best practices from your research?

Surge.

When our nasal passages are congested, how do we. We can't breathe through your nose for five days for whatever reason. What's the strategy there? Have you, have you heard anyone share that?

So some people, their noses are so messed up they need surgical interventions. Absolutely. But for the majority of us, including me, I was a perfect candidate for surgery, right? Broken this nose about four times, Basketball, surfing, like, I'm a complete mess, but I wanted to see what my body could do. And I was able to restore so much of that damage through breathing to open up these passageways. So a nice trick if you are congested is to exhale and you hold your breath and you hold your nostrils and you move your head back and forth. You move your head up and down until you feel a significant need to breathe. Then you calmly exhale through your nose and inhale again and then wait about 45 seconds to a minute and do that same thing over again. So what you're doing is you are increasing that magical molecule, carbon dioxide, which is a vasodilator, which helps to open your nose. So there's a lot of YouTube tutorials on this, and it's free.

So first close your nose, then Exhale or exhale, then close your nose.

You can exhale, then close your nose.

Get all the air out of first and close your nose. Go up and down side to side, then exhale more or then inhale.

Can inhale through your nose from that.

Then inhale through your nose if it's.

Still congested, just be very calm about this. Don't just calmly inhale and try that again. Patrick McEwen, who's been doing this stuff for 20 years, has a lot of free tutorials on YouTube.

He seems pretty fascinating with his research.

Yeah, this guy is someone who had severe asthma, severe health problems, was getting no help from anyone, figured out how to breathe, now has zero symptoms of asthma and is teaching thousands of asthmatics. What he did. He was a business guy, right? He had no intention of doing this in his life. Took a hard left turn into this world. So he's scientific, he's a great practitioner. He healed himself through it. So it's worth listening to him.

For those who struggle with extreme anxiety or panic attacks, it seems like more and more people are dealing with anxiety and panic attacks. What's the easiest way to calm down using breathing that you've discovered?

Slow your breathing down. So there was a study about 10 years ago, NIH study by Alicia Mirette down at Southern Methodist University. She went to Harvard and Stanford and she gathered a bunch of different people who were suffering from panic, and she just had them slow down their breathing and increase their CO2 levels. I know I keep saying CO2, but this is the stuff, people. And something like 96 of these people a year after the study concluded said they were much improved or very much improved. The majority of them stopped having panic attacks. Because what happens when we're panic? Okay, I'm sitting here with you. Oh, I feel claustrophobic. The more you breathe like that, the more you're going to exacerbate and hasten that attack. So when you feel it coming on, you don't stop and take a deep breath. You stop and take a slow and light breath into your lungs. Right. And control your body and control your breathing. And this is such a profound effect on people. And again, that study, it was published top scientific journal, it's available for everyone. It just, I find it so bizarre. And I should mention that my father in law is a pulmonologist, my brother in law is an ER dog. I'm a huge fan of western medicine, but it's so bizarre that people with panic, people with asthma, no one's looking at how they're Breathing, Right. They're given these pills and powders and put on their way. And the science is very clear on this stuff. It can have a really profound effect.

Does the mind or thoughts, when we're in a panic or stressed or fight or flight moment, does the mind or thoughts influence the breathing or does the breathing influence the mind?

Great question. It goes both ways. So what you're thinking is going to influence how you're breathing. But the wonderful thing is sometimes you can't take control of those thoughts. Right. You get nervous, you can't turn that off. But you can take control of your breathing. And 80% of the messages are coming from the body to the brain, not to the brain, not from the brain to the body. So just by allowing yourself, think whatever you want to think, but slow down your breathing to the way that you would be breathing when you're calm. And you will start shooting calming messages into your brain.

Interesting.

Take control of those states. And this is something that Huberman has been studying for years down at Stanford, right? With the phrenic nerve and the way that the diaphragm moves, how that diaphragm moves is gonna affect the signals that your brain is gonna get. And it's gonna affect how you're gonna.

Be processing things, how the diaphragm moves.

So the diaphragm is this amazing muscle that sits underneath the lungs. The lungs don't inflate and deflate themselves. Right. They need something to do it. So we have this crazy muscle, it looks like a parachute or an umbrella, that when we breathe in, that diaphragm goes down. And when we breathe out, that diaphragm goes up. So this rhythmic motion of this diaphragm, the diaphragm works as a pump. Some researchers have said the heart is a secondary pump. The diaphragm is the main pump. So when your diaphragm is going like this, it is sending panic signals to your brain. This is like red alert. Things are bad. But if your diaphragm is going like this, this is sending calming signals, right?

So it's almost like you could be stressed out in your mind, but the moments or moments you start to slow your breathing, it's going to send signal back to your mind that everything's better. You don't need to stress as much. So you, if you can control your body, you'll control your mind.

So guess what Navy SEALs do before they go in for some black ops mission? Really intense stuff. They start breathing in a box. Pattern 4 in hold 4 exhale 4, hold 4. 4 in, hold 4. Imagine a box. If you look at what's happening there, you're in for four. But you are holding or exhaling for three quarters of the time. So the longer you hold and the longer you exhale, the more you're going to be eliciting that parasympathetic, that calming response. So these guys aren't going to sleep, right? They're trying to focus themselves to be the biggest badasses on the planet to go take care of in an efficient way. They can't have their brains just all over the place. What are you saying? Panic? They can't panic. They're dead. So this is a technique that anyone can use. I mean, the vast majority of us aren't going to be in that scenario, but we can breathe the way that they breathe and that so many other people do to focus our thoughts, to take advantage of our breathing, to take over certain states, anxiety or anger.

Can you explain why the diaphragm is sometimes referred to as the second heart?

So the diaphragm again is this huge pump. It's almost like the heart is a sump pump, right? It's just doing all the other work, just the additional work. But the diaphragm is enormous. And as you're breathing in and out, it is pumping blood. Okay, it is helping to pump blood, but it does something else. A lot of people view breathing as just a biochemical act, right? Getting oxygen in, getting CO2 out. It is a biomechanical act. So when the diaphragm goes down, it also softly massages the organs, which helps us leach out more lymph fluid. So it is the pump for lymph fluid. So everything in the body should be moving. You know, you can think about it like a pond gets scummy, right? And a lot of stuff starts growing it because it's still water. That's not what happens with a river. And our bodies want to act like a river. Things are static for too long. Does not like that. That's where problems occur.

What's better for the body and your health? Chest breathing or lower belly breathing? Like, where is the diaphragm sitting? Is it in between the two? Is it a mixture of both?

So a lot of us are chest breathing throughout the day, and when we chest breathe, this is associated with, with a sympathetic or fight or flight response. What happens when you get scared? But instead, people are doing this all day. So when you breathe like that, a sympathetic response, it's amazing. This is what has kept Our species alive. It focuses us. It shifts blood from less important organs to the heart and the skeletal muscles. So we can, like, fight or we can run. But it's meant only to be in that state for short amounts of time. So if we stay in the sympathetic chest breathing state for too long, we are cutting off other organs. And a bunch of problems can happen in those organs because of that. I won't go down the laundry list. Just trust me on this. So to answer your question, you want to breathe lightly, fluidly, and deeply. This does not mean you have to just go for it every breath and push out your stomach. It means you should be breathing through your nose. Nasal breathings are deeper. Okay. These go to the lower lobes. At the bottom of the lungs is where we have the largest profusion of blood. So that's where oxygen exchange can happen much more efficiently. So light, slow, and deep. That's how we should be breathing.

And less.

Ordinarily you would say breathe in line with your metabolic needs, but I'm saying for the vast majority, less is that's your metabolic effect.

Gotcha. And is it true that our lungs get smaller as we age? And if so, can breathing practices prevent this from allowing us to have more expansive lungs?

So what happens? From ages around 30 to 50, you're gonna lose about 15 to 16% of your lung capacity.

Oh, man.

After 50, it just goes down very, very quickly. That sucks. The problem? Well, there's good news behind this. I'm going to depress you, then I'm going to inspire you back towards. So the problem is our ribs get a lot less flexible, our intercostals get less flexible. But what's great about this is you can reverse that damage. Guess what yoga does. I'm going to have you reach your arm like this. Breathe into this lung and be flexible. And now breathe into this lung. So yoga is essentially just allowing us not only to maintain our lung capacity, but increase it. I've worked with free divers who have doubled their lung capacity.

Doubled.

Average adult male, six liters. This guy had 12 liters. So I think he had. He was abnormally large. I won't say quite doubled. Maybe 40, you know, 70% larger. So it's not uncommon to increase your lung capacity 30% by including these exercises, by breathing properly. And especially when we get older, this is so important. We don't want to go down that entropy. Right. And we at least want to sustain it. If we can increase it, great.

What's the benefit to increasing our lung capacity?

It's the same benefit of having a larger gas tank in a car. Right. So if you're driving cross country, do you want to stop and fill up every hour, or do you want to stop and fill up every six hours? By having larger lungs allows you to take fewer breaths and to get more oxygen with those breaths. It's about being efficient. So when we're breathing slower and when we're breathing deeply into our lungs at our metabolic need, our heart can work so much more softly. We aren't overworking it when we're breathing twice the amount into our chest. Just feel your heart rate when you do that. The heart hates this. Why do you want to overwork your heart? It should just be doing what it needs to do, not compensating for your bad habits. And that's what this larger lung capacity, this softer, lower breathing allows you to do.

Is there anything that you've learned and that doctors or scientists are saying is essential for us as human beings to practice that you don't practice? For instance, I know sugar is horrible. I know it's the root of all evil in the body and developing cancers and all these things, but I love sugar. You know, I'm better at it. The more I know how horrible it is for me, I'm better at balancing that. But I still love to eat sugar. You know, is there anything that you're like these things I should never do, but I still do it because it's just a bad habit.

Well, you're talking to a guy who just had a big old chunk of chocolate before I hopped on.

Good thing you don't have it. Good thing you're not with me right now because I'd be sharing that with you.

I'm with you on that. I think it's a little ironic. In a lot of wellness circles, people are so stressed out about doing the right thing all the time that they're miserable. To me, the point of wellness is to live a happier and longer life. So why do you want to spend all your time beating yourself up for eating a piece of chocolate or drinking a beer? So I think in moderation is key. These breathing practices, like Wim Hof Method, Sudarshan Kriya, they've been found to be so effective for people with autoimmune problems. Asthma, anxiety, depression. But just breathing those slow and easy breaths, there's so many benefits to that. And psychologists and psychiatrists have used this for people with anxiety and depression as well. So having said that, as long as you have this foundation of healthy breathing, just like with with diet, as long as you have a foundation where you're eating a lot of vegetables, right? You're not eating a lot of of highly processed carbs or not too much sugar, you can have a piece of cake, you can drink a beer, you can have a glass of wine. That's all fine. The same thing with breathing. If you're laughing really hard and you're breathing out of your mouth, who would tell you that's a bad thing, right? I'm talking about the habits, habitual breathing, the 90% of the day, even 80% of the day, if you adhere to healthy habits there, it's going to have a downstream positive effect on your health and the science, the studies, the data has really shown us that Maine, where.

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In this section you'll hear from neuroscientist Dr. Andrew Huberman, who is a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford and runs Huberman Lab, which primarily studies brain states such as fear, courage, anxiety and calm and how we can better move in and out of them through practices like visual cues, breathwork, movement and supplementation.

We talked about a tool to calm oneself. The reason I like the physiological size. We are all equipped with the pathway. If people want to know if there are some medically oriented folks out there, if you want to teach this to other folks, there's a nerve called the phrenic nerve P H R E N I C that goes from the brain down to the diaphragm that controls that and then controls the lungs. And so when you decide, okay, I'm going to use the sigh, the physiological side to calm myself in a way, you're engaging top down control because you're taking control of your internal landscape rather than trying to take control of your thinking, which is very hard.

You can't fix your mind with your mind.

Sometimes trying to control the mind with the mind is like trying to grab fog. It's just gonna keep moving, right? If you've ever tried to grab or smoke, it just moves. It's vapors. You're never gonna grab it. The key is to take Control of the system by taking control of a real physical entity, this phrenic nerve. And the reason I describe this stuff is not to put a lot of unnecessary detail, but I think when people realize this isn't something that you build up over time and then are able to do that, you literally have a wire, set of wires that goes down to your diaphragm, this muscle in your abdomen that can move your lungs. And then as you blow off carbon dioxide, when you do that, exhale, your brain starts to calm down and then your mind, the top down control of the cortex, can start taking control of the limbic system again. It's almost like you're losing control of the automobile and you're trying to steer, but really there's another lever that if you just pull it, then the steering wheel will stabilize for you. So that's the way to think about the physiological sigh on the other side of things, when you're feeling overwhelmed and fatigued, there are two ways to approach that. First is the kind of foundation of fatigue, which is almost always poor sleep and scheduling of sleep. This is something that doesn't get discussed a lot. I don't think I've discussed this on any podcast previously. But getting better at sleeping is a whole set of practices. But sleep is a slow tool. It's not a real time tool. Because if you're feeling exhausted and you have to get up and have your day, deal with children, deal with work, deal with life, we can talk about how to get better at sleeping. But in real time, what you want to do is you want to bring more alertness into the system. Focus, Focus and alertness. The way to do that is to take advantage of a very well established medical fact. All medical students learn this, all MDs know this, which is that there's a direct relationship between how you breathe and your heart rate. And so I'll give a little bit of the background and then I'll give the specific practice just so that people understand where this is coming, coming from. So when we inhale, when we inhale, it almost feels like everything's moving up, but actually what happens is our diaphragm moves down. Okay? So when we inhale, our diaphragm moves down. When that happens, our heart literally gets a little bit bigger. The volume of the heart gets a little bit bigger, which means that whatever blood in there is moving per unit time, a little bit slower. And there's a set of neurons in the heart called the sinoatrial node that sends a signal to the brain and says, hey, blood flow is slowing down, and the brain sends a signal back to the heart and says, okay, let's speed up. And speeds up the heart rate. So the short, concise way to put it is when you inhale more vigorously or longer, you're speeding up your heart rate. There's a name for it in the medical community, but the important thing to understand is as you inhale, you're sending a neural signal to your heart to speed up. And when you exhale, the diaphragm moves up, the heart gets a little bit smaller, literally, because there's less space there. Then there's a signal sent to the brain, and the brain sends a signal back and says, slow down the heart rate. And so.

So this is happening quickly. So if you inhale, it's speeding up.

That's right.

If you exhale, it's slowing it down.

That's right. So if you want to become more alert, you actually can just simply make your inhales a little bit more vigorous or a little bit longer than your exhale.

So let's say you get up longer inhale, shorter exhale.

That's right. To speed up your heart rate and to be more alert.

Not longer exhale, double intake.

Right. So longer or more vigorous inhales will speed up your heart rate and make you more alert. Longer or more vigorous exhales will slow down your heart rate and make you less alert. And this has a name, which is. It's a certain kind of arrhythmia, but that makes it sound bad. This is actually what's happening all the time. This is the basis of heart rate variability. When people talk about heart rate variability is good. You don't want your heart rate to be one level all day, high or low. A lot of people don't realize that. They think, oh, I got a nice slow heart rate.

You think, all day long we were asleep.

That's right. Well, slow heart rate is better than high heart. Artificially high, you know, Sorry. Excessively high heart rate. But you don't want your heart rate to be like this. You want your heart rate to go through these fluctuations. Heart rate variability is good.

Why?

Because heart rate variability reflects the activation of what's typically called the parasympathetic nervous system, which is the brain's ability to slow down and calm the nervous system. So when your heart rate is going like this, it means that your heart rate is speeding up, and then your brain is slowing it down, your heart rate is speeding it up, and your brain is slowing down. And that's what's happening all day long as you're moving through things in a kind of calm, alert way. But when you get that troubling text message or you see a post or a comment and you go. And all of a sudden your heart rate just goes, and you feel like you immediately want to respond, or you're going to say the thing that maybe you shouldn't say, or you're going to do the thing that maybe you shouldn't do, or you just want to be more thoughtful and more targeted in your response. The key is to slow down the heart rate by making your exhales longer or more vigorous. So it could simply be. And then shorter inhales, longer exhales, or do the physiological sigh. Or if you wake up in the morning and you're experiencing the other kind of stress when you. Which is you look at your phone in the news, the world is overwhelming me. My life is overwhelming. I don't know what I'm going to do. I don't even know what sequence I'm going to do things in. You're just discombobulated. And a lot of people struggle with this. The key is to do a few breaths, even while you're getting out of bed and preparing your morning coffee or water or whatever it is, and just start breathing in a way that's inhale emphasized. Which sounds weird, but basically what you're doing is you're speeding up your heart rate at some point, usually within only two or three of those breaths, you're going to feel more alert. And then you can just go back to breathing normally so you don't have.

To do this for hours, you do this for a few moments or minutes.

That's right. And while I'm a fan of breathwork as its own thing, because breathwork can teach you how to operate these levers in your brain and body, so to speak. Breath work is a dedicated practice that you do away from these stressful events. Whereas learning to control your heart rate and thereby your mind, using your breathing. So it goes breathing, heart rate, mind in that sequence. So if your mind isn't where you want it to be, don't start with the mind, start with your breathing then, which will control your heart rate, which will then allow you to control your mind.

So don't think your way out of a. A moment of stress. Breathe your way out of his moment of stress.

That's right. And one of the things, and I'm certain there are going to be people out there listening to this saying, wait a second. The yogis and the yogic community has been talking about this for centuries. What are you doing? This is just a recasting of what we already know. I agree, I agree. Within the science community, these things have been given crazy names like arrhythmias and heartbreaking rate variability and the diaphragm and the phrenic nerve. And so the language of science has known all about this for many centuries also. But it's been shrouded by language. And the yogic community has known about this for a long time, but it's been shrouded by language. So by bringing this discussion forth, I just want to be clear that I'm not trying to reinvent the wheel or pretend that I invented the wheel by any stretch. I'm trying to say that, that we all have these circuits, these levers in our body that we can pull and push and people learn how to do this intuitively, but we're never really taught the underlying mechanisms. And I do believe that yoga's not big on mechanisms. They're very good on naming. And on yogis in different areas of the world, when they say something, they usually know what the other one is talking about. Scientists do as well. But mechanism. If people can just understand a little bit about why the heart slows down when you exhale more than you inhale or why the heart speeds up when you inhale more than you exhale. I do believe that having that knowledge in the mind allows people in a moment of stress to say, oh, I understand what's happening to me and therefore I should go to this particular tool. I do understand that one doesn't need to understand how an engine works in order to drive a car car. But you do need to know how the control panels work. Right. This is why we send people to driving school and why we don't let 10 year olds drive. Although I'm sure there's some out there.

On a farm somewhere.

Yeah, well, actually there was this one news thing. I don't know if you've seen this, where a state trooper pulls or a CHP or somebody pulls over a car that's kind of weaving through the lanes on and they pull over and I think the kid was 6 years old.

Oh my God.

He actually managed to get onto the freeway and he was driving the left hand lane and his driving was pretty bad, but he was below the.

That's crazy.

Well, that just tells you that the young mind is eager to steer things and press pedals and things of that sort of explore. We are definitely not recommending that but this is very different than driving a car in the sense that all the panels and all the controls are there. We have. We're all. Most people are taught how to drive a car. Most people are not taught how to drive their nervous system. And so a lot of what I'm talking about here is just one language, one version of the language of how to drive and control your nervous system.

And you can't drive your nervous system with thoughts and controlling your mind alone. You have to connect the whole vehicle is what I'm hearing. You can't just steer thoughts. You need to also use the brakes or also use different levers, which is the entire car.

That's right. It's very hard to control the mind. With the mind, it can be done. There are people that get better at that.

Right. Maybe it's a practice over time, but using.

I say when in moments of stress, either excessively alert stress or excessively fatigue stress, look to the body, because there are mechanisms that have been built into the body for hundreds of thousands of years designed to do this. Now, the reason I can say that is that the physiological side, the double inhale, exhale is controlled by a specific set of neurons in the brain stem that Jack Feldman's lab discovered. When children or adults have been sobbing very hard or when they're out of air in a claustrophobic environment, they naturally do that to reopen these little sacs in the lungs. Now, inhale emphasized breathing can be practiced in a way, sort of away from stress in a kind of offline approach that can be beneficial for raising what we call stress threshold. So there's a whole other way to look at stress stress, which is to say, how do I get calmer in the mind when my body is freaking out?

There you go.

And I think people will recognize some of what I'm about to describe as kind of wim hof like breathing. It has also traditionally been called tummo breathing. Some people call it super oxygenation breathing, Although then there are other people like Patrick McEwen and company that will say, well, you're actually blowing off more carbon dioxide than you are bringing in oxygen. And so the naming again now is a mess.

Yoga nidra breathe breathing.

Yoga nidra is exhale emphasize. But tummo breathing, wim hof breathing. And what sometimes is called super oxygenation breathing involves doing a lot of inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale. It's hyperventilating. It's deliberate hyperventilating, followed by exhales and breath holds, followed by inhales and holds. Now the repetitive breathing more quickly and deeply. This kind of thing or some variant of that, all through the mouth or all through the nose, brings up the heart rate and causes the adrenal glands, which sit right above the kidneys, to secrete adrenaline. They make you more alert. And we know this. My lab has been looking at this with a number of different measures, exploring the nervous system and the periphery like the heart rate. And you see these big inflections in heart rate when people do this. Typically it makes people feel agitated at first. They feel a little bit agitated. And then when you exhale and hold your breath for 15 seconds or so or longer in some cases, if somebody's skilled at this, what you're doing essentially is you're learning to be calm. As your body is flooded with all this adrenaline and the heart rate is.

Going, you're learning to calm your mind.

That's right. So you're learning actually to separate the mind, body.

Your body might be shaking, vibrating, and.

You'Re learning to suppress that.

And you're just.

And that is 100% top down control. What you're doing in those moments is you're learning to take your forebrain and say, fight the temptation to move, fight the temptation to breathe. Now I don't want to suggest anyone do this to the point where it's unsafe. You should never do this anywhere near water, even in a puddle. Because people have drowned, people have died. Doing high oxygenation breath packing type and passing out. Passing out, it can be quite dangerous. So people need to take the appropriate precautions before they do it. If people have pulmonary issues, it can be problematic. If people get trained in how to do it properly, it can be relatively safe. My lab has been doing experiments. Now we have more than 100 people doing different types of breathing and exploring how it affects the mind and the body. This particular pattern of breathing 25 or 30 times, followed by an exhale and a hold, and then a big inhale and a hold, sometimes doing more inhaling and exhaling type repetitive breathing. That is really somebody training themselves how to self induce stress. And we know from some good literature and some emerging science that's still ongoing that it is possible to get comfortable in these agitated state so that your mind is okay, feels okay when the body is feeling like it wants to tremble or move, that you can learn to suppress that activity. The ice bath is another good example of this. Some people go straight to the ice bath because cold water will almost always induce a low level of stress in people. You have to you have to kind of fight it. Even if you learn to love it.

You still have to every time jumping in there. Okay, I gotta control the mind essentially to calm.

Exactly. So the body is saying, this is really cold, this is really cold.

Get out now.

And you're pushing back on that. It's top down control. It's pure top down control. And you could do this any number of ways. There's actually something called the hour of pain, which is. Before you jump to conclusions, the hour of pain was actually described to me by a friend of mine, former military special operations guy who said that they place you. This wasn't through military, but this is a kind of outside the military extracurricular activities. Extracurricular activities. Placing you into one position on the floor and you have to stay there for an hour, which can be excruciating. There's so much limbic friction where you want to move so badly because the stabilizing muscles of the body and the feedback in our muscular skeletal system says move, move, move. I just want to move the tiniest bit. And so. So all that practice is. It's just a different version of the ice bath. Yes, it's. You're learning top down control. So, you know, we started off with a question about trauma.

Yes.

And we'll get there. But I think it's very important just to kind of summarize that people understand, to just ask themselves the question, am I feeling too much agitation or am I feeling too much exhaustion? If it's too much agitation, emphasize exhales and do the physiological sigh. Yoga Nidra is also a wonderful practice that is kind of the mirror image of superoxygenation breathing. It involves long exhale breathing, lying down on your back, completely relaxing your body and learning to completely turn off thinking, which sounds hard, but you can learn how to do it very quickly. If you do that practice for about 10 minutes a day. It literally means yoga.

And probably the most commented thing we have on the previous interview is where are the links for this yoga nidra stuff? So we're going to get that.

So before I leave today, there are several, but people can go on YouTube some of the better ones out there, these are all cost free. Kamini Desai has a really wonderful one that she. I also just happen to like her voice, so it works for me. There's a guy named Liam Gillen who has one. If you like a male Irish voice, there's. There's that. You have to pick a voice that works for you. So I'll make some suggestions. But if people don't like the particular voice that's walking them through the yoga, natural, find a different voice.

That's cool.

So that's a practice that you can do offline, meaning not in the moment of stress. That will allow you to learn how to relax more. Then on the fatigue side, if you're in motion in the morning or in the afternoon and you need to keep going, you need to keep studying, you need to drive to the airport to pick someone up and you're exhausted, please don't drive if you're really, really exhausted. But inhale. Emphasize breathing. Making your inhales just a little bit longer or more vigorous than your exhales will speed up your heart rate, will make you more alert.

So deeper inhale, shorter exhale.

Yeah, so it looks something like.

That'll speed it up.

Yeah. And even two or three of those and you'll notice your heart rate will pick up because there's a neural signal from the brain stem sent to the heart to speed up the amount of blood flow.

But at the end of the day, what I'm hearing you say is you can control the body or the mind with the mind to an extent for moments or even extended periods of time, hours maybe. But really we need to be thinking the mind and the body connection at all times. Because if you stop breathing or if you're only doing short breaths the whole time for a whole day, it's going to affect the body and the mind. And if you're. So it's using the body, using the breath, using it, where it's connected to the brain, to constantly support you throughout the day. But if you're just like all day, it'll help you get to a certain point, but then it'll be detrimental to your health.

Right. So these breathing practices are about shifting the gears, but they're not something that you continue doing throughout your day, all day. Really. What I've described here are hardwired, meaning we were all born with these neurons and connections in our body. We were all born with these organs to be able to do these things. There's not a lot of learning involved. Once you know how to do it, it works the first time, it works every time. Yes, but it's sort of like shifting gears. There aren't too many manual transmissions these days. But let's say you're driving down downhill, it's going too fast. You would. If this is like taking it into a lower gear so then you slow down, you're not going to constantly be riding the clutch. Right. You're not going to constantly be in the shifting motor riding the brake. Some people do that, but that's not good, right? You don't want to have to Maine.

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Do that just like if you're going uphill, you might have to hit on the gas A little bit. Otherwise you're not going to get up that hill. But at some point you switch gears and then you're just cruising up.

Yeah, exactly Right.

So it's a transmission system rather than you're supposed to breathe this way all day or breathe that way.

This is smart.

And the fast breathing followed by exhales and breath holds, the super oxygenation tummo wim hof type breathing. I look at that as learning how to drive on a slick pavement. It's self induced stress. It's like taking your car to a parking lot when a kid's learning.

Drive.

I was teaching a kid to drive recently. You teach them to drive, you go through the neighborhood, you do things. But when you really want to learn how to, for instance, drive through puddles or drive in fog or drive in heavy rain, you kind of want to be in a parking lot or a safe environment. Safe environment for that. You don't want to be on a, you know, on the autobahn. Right. So these are ways in which you can teach yourself how to navigate the bad weather of the nervous system.

So you're prepared for when it comes.

That's right. And I, and I have to say from personal experience and from some emerging data, when I say emerging data, I mean studies in my lab and other labs that are still ongoing, it does appear that when people self induce this stress, it can be beneficial for. I'm going to quote a colleague of mine, my colleague David Spiegel, who's our associate chair of psychiatry, says it's not just about the state that you're in, the state of mind that you're in, it's how you got there and whether or not you had anything to do with it. So when you self induce stress and then you say, oh, I can calm my mind even though my body is feeling agitated, that's a very positive experience for many people. Whereas when someone else is causing your stress and you're trying to calm down, it feels like you're battling 25 different things. So these are skills that anyone can develop. They are skills that essentially require information of what to do, but zero training. I mean, so it's like, I'm sure you played football. I didn't. You can probably. I'm certain you can throw a football way better than I can. That took some, some learning.

Yeah.

It would take me a long, long time, maybe forever to be able to try and approximate that skill level. But these are things that we can all do right away.

Yeah, yeah.

And so now I think we've kind of spelled out a two tools on either side. Physiological size for calming down in real time. Exhale. Emphasize breathing of the yoga nidra sort. Maybe even doing yoga Nidra 10 to 20 or 30 minutes a couple times a week daily. If you want to teach your nervous system to calm down. And then also having tools that emphasize inhales. So longer, more vigorous inhales or doing an offline practice of some point during your day, you decide, I'm going to do five or ten minutes of this more rapid breathing followed by some breath holds. And provided those are designated safe for you, the super oxygenated breathing you decide is safe for you. I'm not aware of any dangers of the exhale emphasized breathing at all, but people should always approach any new thing with caution, of course. But once you have those four tools in hand, you've really learned how to press on the accelerator. So that's inhaling more than you exhale. You've learned how to drive faster, be comfortable at higher speeds. That's kind of like the Wim HOF type breathing. You're comfortable at high speeds. It's like, oh, I can drive 65 and feel calm. I'm good here. Whereas previously you couldn't. As well as learning how to slow down by with the physiological side, that's sort of a break. And then the yoga nidra is sort of like coming off the accelerator to slow down. You're just turning off your system. The beauty of having these different tools and practicing them now and again is that there's this other phenomenon which is neuroplasticity, which is that then you start doing it reflexively without even realizing it. You start doing physiological size when you're too stressed.

Automatically.

Automatically. And even before you start to hit the alertness threshold, people just start to engage these things. And so it's kind of like when.

You see a dog who's just tired, it automatically does this sigh when it's like panting and it'll do like a big stick sigh. And then it's like almost like it's relaxed.

That's right.

And it's just like it goes to sleep.

That's right.

I see this with my dog all the time running around panting. And then it's just like.

Exactly. And that little extra inhale. I know we've talked a lot about this before, but I don't think we can overemphasize the power of the physiological sigh. Because that little extra inhale is what opens up those little sacs in the lungs just a little bit more. And that when you exhale, it pulls a lot more carbon dioxide out of the system.

Which, when you pull carbon dioxide out of the system, what does that do?

You feel calm.

Wow, there you go.

You feel calm.

In fact, this is a physiological mechanism to make you calm.

That's right. And in fact, you know, in claustrophobic environments or God forbid, if you're, you know, you're drowning. The reason you're stressed is because you have neurons in your brain stem that sense carbon dioxide in the bloodstream. And as that goes up, it says you need to find air, you need to offload this carbon dioxide.

Oh man.

So it's, it's a, these are all real physiological mechanisms that are really about balancing the oxygen and carbon dioxide in your system. And when we see these really extreme feats of breath holds and people doing all these really wild things, usually it's because they're learning to manipulate the oxygen, carbon dioxide packing or ratios or how they manage them. Free divers, get rid of this. There's air packing, there's all sorts of dangerous stuff that should only really be done by highly trained, highly skilled people. But once people have these tools in hand, they can start coupling to the tools that involve the mind. I mean, it's fine to do a physiological sigh and to tell yourself to calm down. We're not saying don't think or be mindless, but what we're saying is it's powerful to look to these mechanics of the body mind relationship. And you said the body and the mind are connected. It's really a two way street. You know, the mind controls the body, the body controls the mind. It's a loop. I just think of it like a loop. I don't even think of it as one controlling the other. It's just if one of those things is out of whack you, you need to control the other one. You're not going to try and just think about. Trying to control your mind again is like grabbing at fog or at smoke. It's, it just moves away. So that most of the time.

In this third section, you'll first hear a quick clip from Dr. Wendy Suzuki, an award winning professor of neuroscience and psychology at New York University. And then we'll go directly into a conversation I had with clinical psychologist Dr. Nicole Lupera about why breathing is the most powerful stress regulator.

So love is a natural counteraction to the stress that you were talking about. And in fact, so the part of the nervous system that is controlling all of those stress responses that we talked about, the blood going to the Muscles, the high heart rate, the high respiration is called the sympathetic nervous system. Luckily, we have an equal and opposite part of our nervous system called the parasympathetic nervous system. Not stimulating love specifically, but it helps calm everything down. It decreases the heart rate, it decreases respiration, it brings blood back into our digestive and reproductive systems. And called the rest and digest nervous system.

Parasympathetic.

Parasympathetic.

Rest and digest.

Parasympathetic. Rest and digest. Sympathetic fight or flight.

Okay, so we want to be more in the parasympathetic.

Yes.

Yeah. You want to be able to control.

Be in that state so that when we need to stress, when we need to take on something scary, we lean into the sympathetic.

Exactly.

But we're not staying in the sympathetic all day long.

Right, right. And the best way to lean into parasympathetic when you start to feel that really bad anxiety. Come on. Is deep breathing. Deep breathing. Because that is the only thing in that list that I gave you that we have conscious control over. I can't make my heart rate go down, I can't bring blood into my digestive tract. But I can breathe deep and long. And people would be. If you haven't tried this before, just deep four part breath where you breathe in for four counts, hold it for four counts, breathe out for four counts, hold it out for four counts. Easiest way to bring some of that calm back in. Because you are actively stimulating the parasympathetic nervous system.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

So.

But love can also stimulate the parasympathetic nervous system in the sense that it decreases your heart rate. But mainly it's kind of a different animal.

We have the access to the most powerful regulator of stress through our breath. We can learn two things. First, to be just present to or a witness around our body's just regular breathing patterns as well. Simple as this sounds, the way our body breathes. If we can cultivate a very full, deep breath, very calming breath, chances are our body in that moment is in that state of relaxation, is receptive to the world around, is feeling safe to express. The large majority of us aren't breathing in that very calm, rhythmic way. Most of us have evolved, become chest based, very shallow breather. And the reason why I even just talk about our natural rhythm is because our mind is constantly scanning our body and its processes. Breathing in particular, because for our mind, that's a marker of how aroused we are, how stressed our body is. So what I noticed when I dropped into my body was that I always breathed very shallow from my chest and at times I would stop breathing and that correlate it with stress. The more stressed I am, the more more I'm actually holding my breath throughout the day. So just that simple act of witnessing to me showed evidence of wow, Nicole, your body is stressed out day in and day out. Regardless of what's happening in the actual current moment, your body continues to send signals of stress. And the reason why listeners who might struggle with anxiety or panic, as I once did, why this is problematic is because like I said, our mind is scanning down and it's going to begin to then think stressful thoughts. It's going to scan the environment for what's wrong. And as we all know, we're very good at identifying what's wrong in that moment. And then before we know it. The reason why I offer this is now we're caught in a loop because now I'm thinking stressful thoughts, further activating my body. So dropping in, noticing our body's natural rhythms can give us some clues as to how activated we are. And then of course the next action step we can take if you're living in an over activated nervous system as I am, is to begin to harness intentional breathing. Beginning to either direct my breath down into my belly if I am in that shallow, stressed out, activated state, or if you're like I described earlier, having no energy, almost feel like you're not here energetically, we actually want to cultivate that chest base. The more wim hof shallow activate it Tool of breathwork to activate to get energy to actually up our energy into our system so we can use breath work in either direction to control our body's responses. And while this is great for the body and why I talk about it is it can build body balance back in as many of us need it. It's also so empowering. Now right through an intention, through doing something differently, I can actually create change. And I speak as someone who did suffer from debilitating anxiety and panic attacks and I know how overwhelming and out of control that can feel. So I mentioned that last piece of empowerment for all of those suffering with anxiety out there, because that can be the steps back to actually creating change and saying, hey wait, I can control my body and my body doesn't have to control me. When it hits that peak of panic.

What is happening when someone is in a panic attack? Like what were the feelings? Like how long did it last and how does someone get out of a panic attack moment?

So panic. And again, I'm just simplifying it for understanding purposes. It's that ultimate state of nervous system activation when your body is literally geared up to fight, flight, or flee, which is usually what happens next. We go into that old coping tool or that old resource that we once used. It feels very different for each of us. Some of us actually think it can feel, as I once did, like a heart attack. I describe an episode in my book where I had just gotten home. I was in a psychoanalytic training program. And as part of my training, every Saturday I would sit in courses to learn how to be a practitioner of the work of psychoanalysis. And one of my courses was a group model where I was a participant in group psychoanalytic therapy. So anyone listening who's been in any therapy, a lot of feelings can come up. So it was a particularly emotional group I had had that morning, and I came home and I was with my partner at the time. And long story short, I started to have symptoms. I started to feel sweaty, I started to feel clammy, I almost turned gray looking. And my heart in particular started to beat, problematically or of concern, it was pounding. It just felt weird. And I'm someone who had had panic attacks before. I know a panic attack can mimic a heart attack. Yet I was in my down, puffy coat, curled up in a ball with my cell phone in my hands, just waiting to call 91 1, because I was convinced that this must be something that's physiologically wrong with me. So some of us, it can feel like a heart attack. Some of us, it's just that elevation where my heart feels like a. It's through the roof. I might get that panicked feeling like I'm crawling out of my skin. And it's very, very scary. And what it is, again, it's an extreme state of that nervous system activation. So the best tool is to help our nervous system go back into that peaceful, calm, safe place. Now, this is where I want to acknowledge that those of us who are in the throes of a panic attack and have never practiced intentional breathing or breath work probably aren't going to be successful. And this is, of course, what we want to do. We want to use the tool only when we need it. This is where we really want to learn how to cultivate that balance in our bodies. Outside of that 10 moment, outside of that acute where panic is crashing down around me. We want to consistently learn how to drop into our bodies, take a temperature check. How safe is my body? Am I in activation mode or am I calm? And when I'm not Calm, learning how to balance my body then, so that when as I feel my panic obviously increasing over time, I can learn how to downregulate myself.

Is the panic attacks. What's the root of that? Is it someone not being aware of their body and breathing? Is it allowing stressful thoughts to come in? Is it all of it stacking up over time? And then there's a breaking point. What is the root of panic?

I could tell it becomes all of it over time. Because our nervous system works outside of our awareness, we have a function. It's called neuroception. It's essentially where we're constantly scanning the environment, energies even included.

We're not even aware of it.

We're not even aware of it.

Our body, our mind, our eyes.

It's prime to look for threat. However, threat gets defined based on our past experiences. This is how we can't kind of extricate the two. So something that felt overwhelming back to here continues to color my world in my now moment, even if it's not really happening outside of my awareness. Right. So that's really important to consider. That's the feeling that many of us get when we maybe walk into the room or up that alley and just something feels off. We're responding. Our nervous system is always responding to everything in the moment. However, it's doing so based on our past moments. So we could be throwing ourselves, an unbeknownst to ourselves, into nervous system activation. And some of us are living in it all day long.

Crazy. When we feel stressed, is it affecting the actual brain or is it affecting the mind? And how do we regulate the two of the thoughts, the ideas, the mind, the consciousness? I guess the awareness or the brain, the physical brain itself. What is stress going up into the brain or is it actually attacking the mind kind of like outside of the brain?

It can affect both. It affects the brain structure in two ways. The first way is through actual inflammation. Stress, the cortisol that typically is associated with stress, activates our body, activates immune system response, where inflammation is the predominant response. Our brain is actually covered by a very thin film, a blood brain barrier that's very penetrable things can get through. And one of the issues is when inflammation actually lands within our brain. So that can begin to cause structural changes in our brain, as can our mind. The way we think, the way we process our brain can actually change the brain pathways, the systems, areas that we're firing up more frequently than other areas with the most predominant one. So many of us are living from our emotional brain Our amygdala, our hippocampus, all of those deeper centers, as opposed to our prefrontal cortex. So this is why it gets complicated. And there are very many brain scans out there of depressed individuals, of anxious individuals, of individuals diagnosed with ADHD or add, of autistic. Right. All of these diagnoses map onto the brain, showing changes, though it's the chicken or the egg conversation, because those changes, my argument is, occur as a result of the human's functioning. I believe, as far back as in utero. I know that my system was impacted by my mom, by the hormones raging through her body, because I was sharing. I was sharing a blood source. I go as far to believe my mom's beliefs, her thoughts about herself, about me as a baby in her belly, about what my future would be, were impacting again, my developing. So our environments, I believe, begin to shape us. So hypothetically, I could have came out as a baby infant, showing, like I likely did, structural changes in my brain, possibly even an up regulated nervous system. Hard to differentiate whether genetically that's just what it was for me. Or again, whether my earliest environment shaped, and I believe in the science of epigenetics, that our environments are always shaping ourselves down to our physiology, our genetics.

Our environment is shaping our environment, is.

Our genetic DNA shaping our DNA and then shaping our systems, shaping how our brain looks and functions, shaping how our body looks and functions.

Yeah.

Well, what's that study where they put, like, love and anger on water bottles? Did you ever see. I can't remember.

The ice?

Yes.

Yeah, the ice.

And then it's either like dark crystals, like dead crystal, you know, or it's like these beautiful snowflakes. I can't remember what that study was.

Or that test.

Yeah. Where they did the frequency of different emotions and had that ice that would freeze, I guess, ultimately, and it would crystallize in different structural. And it's beautiful because what I see is that shows evidence of how impactful the things that we can't see are. And I think the collective is waking up to the reality that there are a lot of these things that we can't see. There are energies, there are inner knowings, there are messages of all sorts that, again, we're responding to outside of our awareness that are there even though we can't see them, or the science isn't showing it in the graph that fits very comfortably into our human mind. Anytime we're in that expansive unknown, it's very uncomfortable.

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In this final section you'll hear from the extreme Dutch athlete Wim Hof, who is convinced that everyone can tap into their highest inner Potential through cold therapy, breathing and training the mind to have full control over your body.

I'm a dropout from school, but now I'm teaching the professors and the doctors in all the world that we have an ability to tap into the deepest part of the brain and solve all the matters related to mental disorders. And having no control and there is no pill, no medicine involved. It's your own awareness, your own power. And then you get into the cold and the breathing and we, we skip the breathing and the cold. At a certain moment we get in our innate control by our mind. The way the establishment doesn't like it, but the way we should have to confront ourselves with any stressor happening in the world to take care of our beloved.

Yeah, well, the establishment doesn't like it because it's not making them money. If you.

That is the disease. That is the big disease though. Withholding and I think making money. Very nice, great. But I don't want pills, I don't want medicine. I want happiness, strength and health. If you are happy, how much money do you need? You see? How much cars do you need? How much of this? If you're happy, you're happy. So if you are able to regulate your own mood. And we found compelling evidence of the key components of the autonomous processes in the brain related to emotion itself. I want it out there. I want professors and doctors. Prove me wrong, guys. Because we got it approved already in the science, but now we are with the establishment. So the establishment is there. It's very nice. You can make bridges and big buildings and all that and shoot people to the moon. Let's begin. And start guaranteeing happiness, strength and health. Because it's there. Boom. Yeah, there. Your work and my work collide positively.

Absolutely, man. Can we do a three minute breathing exercise?

Yeah, together.

Where you just guide me and tell me what to do. And if someone's watching and if they only have three minutes a day to do some type of breathing exercise or.

Mindset in four minutes.

Four minutes.

Okay, you got a push up exercise. This is what we do. And the push up exercise vacuums the oxygen out of you. But first we go into oxyenergize. We're going to alkalize the muscle tissue. And thus when the muscle tissue is alkalized, it is the right chemical environment for the neuro performance neurotransmitter to keep on going. Chance to show it to yourself. Besides of that, you get deeply into the autonomic nervous system within four minutes.

Do it. And we try. Yes, let's do it.

I'm gonna ask you to do push ups.

Okay.

Without air in the lungs.

Without air in the lungs.

Yes. And that is because before we are going to alkalize the blood. And that goes into the muscle tissue. And that will will create the right chemical environment for the neurotransmitter performance to keep on going. What's the matter? I'm not breathing. Get no air in my self and keep on going. What is that? That is the alchemist. That's you. Within four minutes. Thus you get so fast in your biochemistry. And you hold your breath, which is consciousness. And thus the consciousness goes into the nervous system. Into the depth thought of by science. It's not possible. It's the autonomous nervous system. Within four minutes. I think you have four minutes every day. And you know what? You're gonna feel great.

So what do I do? First we breathe first. Do we do push ups first? Do we? No.

You know how many push ups you normally do? Okay, keep that. And now that is your baseline.

Okay.

And now we're gonna do more push ups without breathing. Is that possible? Hey, be the alchemist. He's going to show and you're going to feel okay. Relax. Relaxed body is able to store up oxygen. Four minutes. Four minutes.

Do we sit or stand for this?

Does it matter if you stand? You know you can go directly into push up exercise as you wish. As you feet relax. Okay, there you go. Pulling in. And let it go. Fully in. Let it go. Fully in. Letting go. Get him up. Fully in. Let it go. Keep on going. Fully in. Letting go. Fully air. Letting go. Fully air. Have one thing in mind. You give the best, you get the best. Here we are. Brilliant. Lightheadedness, Losing body. Tingling. Whatever you feel, make it stronger. Breathe done to it. Okay. 19, 18. We are synergizing the body. Alkalizing the body. Muscle tissue is becoming alkaline. Don't go.

40.

Julie. Go. Juliet. Go fully go. Get it in, get it in. 4, 10, 9, 8. There you go. One thing in your mind. Give it all, you get it all. Be a mean machine. You are the alchemist. 4, 3, 2, 1. Here comes the last one. Let it go. Stop and go. No breathing. Let's go. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine.

Go.

14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19.

No.

And the locks. 20. One, two, three, Four, five, six, seven. Whenever you feel the urge to breathe, you can take them in and keep on going. 35, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine. Okay, 15. Right off.

Oh, man.

Well, Done. This is the way you get deeply into the autonomic nervous system and re regulate the adrenal axis. It's all, all happening because he was not breathing and he became vacuum within. Suddenly you got to survive. What a thing we never do. And it's good for you.

You feel.

Hey, you tell what you feel. Easy does it, easy does it. Well done. Well done, well done, well done, well done.

Oh, man, I wish I didn't do chest this morning, but I did a full like, chest.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, sure.

But it feels good. Yeah, Yeah. I was feeling like tingly and lightheaded doing a breathing. Yeah. But then I felt like I had a lot of energy when I was, when I breathed all the way out. I was pushing. I felt like I had a lot of energy.

That's him, that's him, that's him. That's the alkalinity in the muscle tissue and the performance neurotransmitter acetylcholine is able to go. And normally when it becomes sore, acetylcholine is not able to go anymore. This could be also for football or anything.

Sure. Do you recommend people do that four minute exercise every day?

Yes, yes. Everybody has four minutes. No excuse.

Should they do the exercise with push ups or just the breathing?

No, no, with push ups. A lot better because you, you get the out of your system.

Really? Yeah. I'm like sweating, toxic. Yeah.

And you are. The adrenal axis is on and that resets the body.

Yeah.

And that means you get into this natural biochemical state.

It's like a high.

Right on. Yes.

I hope you enjoyed this powerful episode with some of the masters on breathing and optimizing your breath to optimize your body and your mind. Make sure to check out the show notes in the description for a full rundown of today's show with all the important links. And also make sure to share this with a friend and subscribe over on Apple Podcasts as well. I really love hearing feedback from you guys. So share a review over on Apple and let me know what part of this episode resonated with you the most. And if no one's told you lately, I want to remind you that you are loved, you are worthy, and you matter. And now it's time to go out there and do something great.

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