5 tips to help you breathe better that you can apply right away with Sachin Patel

Well, my friends, it's Sachin. Hope you're doing awesome. I trust that your day is going amazing. Mine is. And I wanted to connect with you and reach out to you today in light of Functional Medicine Awareness Month. And right now what I want to do is I want to talk about five ways that you can improve your breathing. The interesting thing about breathing is that we don't really have much of a discussion around it. Right. In certain circles certainly do. Wasn't a big part of my education as a chiropractor even we didn't really talk much about proper breathing technique. And even in functional medicine, we didn't learn much about breathing technique. It wasn't until I went to a breathwork class hosted by my friend Giovanni. It was specifically for Wim Hof breathing that I had any conscious training or awareness around how I breathe. So many of you may not consider doing do you breathe correctly or are there ways that I can breathe better? And it's such low hanging fruit, because whether you like it or not, you're breathing. And in fact if you don't breathe for the next five minutes, you could be brain dead and not live very long without breathing. However, many of us have subpar breathing. So I want to talk to you about that. And it's one of the first things that we try to address with our clients. Not the sexiest topic, but certainly it does improve so many areas of your life. And it's such again, low hanging fruit. And who doesn't want to learn how to breathe properly, to live longer, to live healthier, to be in control of every single cell in their body simultaneously, which we can do through breathing. So I want to give you five simple things that you can do. And certainly this is not going to be an exhaustive list. This is something people spend their entire life learning and mastering and you can, you can really spend the rest of your life mastering your breathing. It really starts with awareness. It starts with becoming conscientious of your breathing. And once you do, you start to see the benefits almost immediately. I always tell people, listen, if you want to feel better in a month, change your diet. If you want to feel better in a week, drink more water. If you want to feel better in five minutes, then learn how to breathe. So I'll give you a few things that you can do that are extremely practical and easy to apply. You have everything you need. You've got a lung, pair of lungs. You've also got a nose, hopefully and you've got a mouth. Right now I want you to Think of your nose as an intake, and I want you to think of your mouth as an exhaust. So what that means is that you are, as much as possible going to breathe in and out through your nose. However, you should try to breathe in through your nose. And if you need to breathe out through your mouth, then that's okay. But as much as possible, try not to breathe in through, through your mouth. So sometimes you might do that. Even with the WIM HOF training, you might do some of that, but long term, and how you spend most of your time breathing should be in and out through the nose. So the first thing that we need to do if we're going to breathe correctly is have the right oral posture. So what is oral posture? I never learned about this. We learned about posture in chiropractic college, but we never learned about oral posture. And that's actually the position of your tongue. So your tongue should be at the roof of your mouth, just behind the front of your teeth, and basically closing this energy center. We call it a mudra. And so what happens is that positioning of the tongue will create a relaxed tension, or lack of tension in the jaw. So your jaw will be relaxed and your teeth will be separated. So you should not be clenching your teeth. It's impossible to be stress free while you're clenching your teeth. So how we position our jaw makes a difference. So tongue at the back of your front two teeth at the top of the root or at the roof of your mouth. Okay, that's proper oral posture. Believe it or not, your tongue is your strongest muscle. So not only does it determine what you say, it determines what you eat, but pound for pound, it's the strongest muscle in your body. So it actually serves as a postural muscle. When our tongue sits at the roof of our mouth, it actually alleviates some of the pressure of the muscles in the back of the neck to prevent the head from falling forward. So it is actually a postural muscle as well. You never really think of it that way. The next thing that I want you to do, once you've got your oral posture right, and this is something that you can bring awareness to immediately while you're watching this, you could start holding your tongue in that position and start breathing better, and immediately your health starts moving in the right direction. When you breathe through your nose, it increases nitric oxide production. It filters the air, pressurizes the air as well, which means that when you pressurize the air, you're actually driving it deeper into the lungs. You're getting more restorative and cleansing breaths. When you breathe in through the nose, you'll notice it's easier to breathe in through your mouth because the air isn't being pressurized. When you breathe in through your nose is being pressurized, so that creates some resistance. Your nose is lined with erectile tissue just like other parts of your body. And so sometimes you might feel one nostril is you're able to breathe through one nostril better than the other. That's pretty typical. The more you use your nose, the more it functions better, the better it functions. So if you are not used to breathing through your nose and you start doing this, you're going to feel like resistance, which is normal, but you're also going to feel maybe your nostrils are blocked, like your passageways are blocked. But the more you do it, the better it's going to get. So those are some fun facts about breathing. I do a whole 90 minute presentation on this. I'm trying to keep this short, so I'll leave it at that. The next thing that you want to do is try to nasal breathe passively. So when you're sitting at your desk, you want to bring awareness to the positioning of your tongue. And are you breathing with your mouth closed, Breathing in and out through your nose? That's super important. Now while you're sleeping, that might be difficult. So one of the things that I encourage my clients to do is tape their mouth at night. You put a little piece of tape on your mouth like this. And what that does is causes it allows you to breathe through your mouth if you still want to, so you can breathe out through the side. I tell my son a story every night with my mouth tape on and so I can still speak. And I could easily take it off if I wanted to as well. The goal is to keep it on all night. And what that'll do is it'll cue you to keep your mouth closed and then you breathe in and out through your nose. If you haven't dreamt in years, you'll start dreaming again. You'll wake up more refreshed, you'll see your oura ring scores start to improve. You'll get more deep restorative sleep when you breathe correctly. So that's another thing that you can do. Number four is you want to extend your exhales so you want to breathe. Let's say you take a deep breath in and let's say that's four seconds. You want to extend your exhales. Now that could be five seconds, it could be 12 seconds. You decide. I like to do something called box breathing, where that's where you inhale for four seconds through the nose, hold for four seconds, exhale for four seconds, hold on empty for four seconds, and then breathe in again. So that makes your exhale portion of your breath 12 seconds. So you're extending the exhales. That's gonna drive your parasympathetics, which is gonna activate your vagus nerve, which is going to activate the healing Mechanisms in all 70 trillion cells in your body. All right. The last thing I want to share with you is lung capacity. So lung capacity is one of the greatest predictors of longevity. So with longevity, we want to think of certain things, right? Grip strength is a measure of directly correlated to longevity and lifespan. Our hamstring flexibility is equated to that, but our lung capacity is. And that makes the most sense to me because, you know, how much. How well you breathe is deterministic in your overall resilience and health. So one of the things that they give people when they want to improve lung health is they give them a spirometer. So this is a really cheap spirometer. It's called a incentive spirometer, because you can set how much you want this thing to breathe in and out. I can go past the top of this, which is the goal for all of you, really. And this is something that you can be applying immediately. You can get this on Amazon. It's called an incentive spirometer. It's like 26 bucks. So very inexpensive, something that'll last you a lifetime. And what you do is you take a deep exhale, so you let it all the way out. Now, with this device, you do end up breathing in through your mouth, but you're gonna take. Let that air all the way out of your lungs, and we're gonna measure lung capacity. What you do is you say the Alphabet over and over and over. You count to 10 over and over and over. Or maybe you say a mantra over and over and over until all the air is out of your lungs. And once that happens, your lungs are going to be on complete empty. And then what I do is I suck my stomach in. I hold that there for a period of just as long as I can, as long as I feel comfortable. And then I take a deep, slow inhale through the spirometer. And I want to make sure every day I can get it at least or five liters. Okay? So I'm not going to do it on this live video, but that's something that you can invest in I also encourage you to do diaphragmatic piston exercises, which is kind of what I shared with you. So this is where you take a deep breath in, always in through the nose, whenever possible. And then you're going to hold it, expand your lungs as far as you can. You want to expand your belly, expand your ribcage, and then really breathe into the top of your lungs. So you're going to take a deep breath in, and then you're going to say the Alphabet over and over and over again. You can chant Krishna's name over and over again, whatever you want, but you just say something over and over again. You can count to 10, over and over again, say the Alphabet, and then you let all the air all the way out. This will draw your diaphragm all the way into its highest position so your lungs are as empty as possible. And then what's going to happen is you're going to then take a hold that as long as you can, right? So you're sucking in the abdomen. And what this is doing is it's gently massaging your organs, okay? Because your abdominal muscles are sucking in, it's massaging your organs. Your diaphragm's in its highest position now, so it's getting a full stretch, just like any muscle in your body. And now what you're going to do is you're going to take a deep breath in through the nose, all the way down into your belly, as deep as you can, and that's going to push the diaphragm down. What most people don't know. Okay? This is a fun fact. So if you're tuned in right now, thank you. This is going to change your life or somebody that you know. The reason that the majority of people have high blood pressure is because they have a weak diaphragm. Let me say that again. So if you're. If you know somebody who's on medication and the medication's not working, nothing seems to be working for them, for their blood pressure. It's not because they have a chemical problem that needs a chemical drug solution. They have a physical problem. They have a weak diaphragm. So getting people to strengthen their diaphragm is so critical and within minutes can lower their blood pressure. And if they continue this, they can eliminate the need for blood pressure medications altogether. Like, the shit that people come to see me for is an absolute joke for us to fix because we know how the body works. Okay? So, anyways, I just thought I'd share that fun fact. The diaphragm is known as the second heart. So think about that as your diaphragm. As you're breathing, your diaphragm is moving up and down. It's pumping and massaging and helping the heart. Right? Like anatomically. Just look at that. Seems so obvious when you actually visualize it and see it. The other thing that your diaphragm does is it pumps the lymph out of your liver, your kidneys, your digestive organs. Because remember, lymph is woven into and around your muscles in the periphery, but in the trunk, you don't really have muscles except your diaphragm and your abdominal muscles that are going to squeeze the lymph and get it moving. The biggest lymph nodes in your body are underneath the diaphragm. So if you're not breathing properly, you're not helping your heart pump the blood through your body. And the heart is more than a pump. I get that. And you're also not moving the lymph that's accumulating around your trunk organs. Right? So when people get cancer, they don't get finger cancer, right? They don't get toe cancer. They don't. They get cancer in the trunk because they're not moving lymph. And lymph is the 12 liters of waste that your body makes every single day. You only have 5 liters of blood, but you make 12 liters of waste products and cellular waste products, sewage, that needs to be moved. So the biggest lymph nodes, right? When people get sick, what do they do? The doctors are looking at the lymph nodes. Well, where are your biggest lymph nodes? They're underneath your diaphragm. So. So what are the number one and two killers? Still. Still heart disease. Right. So heart's working harder than it needs to because your diaphragm's not working properly. And cancer and a lot of cancers start in the lymph because the body can't move the waste out of the body from around the cells. And so the responsibility of that is of the diaphragm. So if you're not losing your breath every day, if you're not leveraging your breathing every single day, then you are in potentially deep trouble, my friend. But if you watch this video and you follow the five tips that I gave you, 1, with oral posture, 2, with nasal breathing, 3, with mouth taping at night, 4 with extending your exhales, and 5, with getting a spirometer or doing diaphragmatic pumps, you will live a much higher quality of life, my friend. So please share this video if you found this valuable. This could be life completely life altering for someone you know. It changed my life, so I'm sharing it with you. And we're seeing people come off their blood pressure medications within days even when all medications failed because they're strengthening their diaphragm. I can't promise that's going to happen, but I've seen it work 100% of the time. So for what it's worth, it might help you or someone that you love. Gotta run, gotta mow this beautiful yard. So I'm gonna go take care of that right now. Love you all. Have an amazing day. Bye for now.