120: Take a deep breath, ft. Mike Maher

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Hello everyone and welcome back to another episode of Cani Crystals, the podcast. As you know by now, My name is Mart, I'm your host, and this week I've got another amazing guest for you on the show. So this week I'm chatting with Mike Mayer, who is a highly sought-after breath coach, and he's known for helping people achieve their health and wellness goals. So what better place to have him than to bring him on the pod? So please welcome Mike to the show. How are you, Mike?

Hey Mart, thank you so much for having me. Yeah, I'm having a great start to the year and I'm really excited for this conversation.

Amazing. Thank you so much for coming on. So obviously we met, didn't we, at Expert Empires in November, and we were both really overwhelmed by the party that was going on downstairs, took ourselves up to the bar upstairs, got chatting. And yeah, because we're in the same kind of line of work as, you know, mental well-being, health, that kind of thing, I thought he would be a perfect guest to have on the show. So do you want to introduce yourself to the listeners and just tell us all about your about your spiritual journey, I guess, and how you came to where you are today.

Thank you. So I realized that the most incredible power that we have is our lungs and what we do with our lungs changes everything. And I've tried it all. I've tried intermittent fasting, saunas, hypnosis, deep tissue massage, fill in the blank. Yeah, vegan, vegetarian. I was just obsessed with like, how do I feel better? And it was only when I started to change what my lungs did that everything I think made sense. And so I've been on this journey now for almost a decade. Bloody hell, makes me sound much older than I am. I don't know. Um, and, um, it all started in Poland with an Iceman that people know as Wim Hof, and I was huffing and puffing with him in a basement. And, you know, I've had the spiritual side, but I've also had these incredible profound health benefits that have just changed everything from being this anxious, panicky guy to somebody that now feels comfortable going on a podcast or has a YouTube channel and all that sort of stuff. So I'm happy to go wherever you want to go with this conversation today.

Yeah. And I think your YouTube channel especially, you've got over 200,000 followers on there, well, subscribers now, don't you?

Yeah, it's unbelievable to think how many people press that button. Every day I feel very blessed by that. But it also shows me there's a lot of people suffering out there, because for example, one of my top videos right now is how to stop a panic attack, and it's had over a million views. And it breaks my heart to think that people every day are searching for a term like that. So I'm very much driven by how can I help other people feel like how I felt, because I've been on that journey and I know we're only a few breaths away from change. And so I really am trying my best to get this information out there, which is why being on a podcast like this is so important. So thank you.

Amazing. So how did Take a Deep Breath come about? What's your story? How did, how did you get into this whole line of work? You mentioned there that you, you know, you started off with Wim Hof. What made you take that leap and, you know, start Take a Deep Breath?

So I made wedding videos in the past. I was a wedding videographer. I did video at university, so I knew how to edit and make cameras and blah, blah, blah. And I had a little YouTube channel where I put like little wedding clips on. I was really scared of the cold. I could never get in the water if it was even a little bit warm. I just thought there's something wrong with me. And so I went through a divorce and I thought, you know what, I've got a little bit of time now. I'm going to go and see this crazy Dutch ice guy and see what he can do. Maybe he can fix me getting in the cold water because I feel like there's something wrong there. And it was the breath that changed Everything. But when I got home from the retreat, I'm laying in my bed and I'm trying to do the breathing. Something's not right, you know, Wim's not screaming in my face, there's not 60 people all around me. This is a bit dull. It's not as good as it was in Poland, you know. Um, and so I started making some breathing exercises, um, and I would share them in the Wim Hof groups and with all the kind of Wim Hof mates that I made in the WhatsApp groups and stuff. And very quickly I had like a couple of thousand views. I was like, wow, I've been doing wedding videos for like 10 years and I had like, you know, 30 views on on some of these things. I thought it was interesting, but a whole year went by and I didn't do anything else with it. And it was only when my girlfriend said, you know, you've got like 1,000 subscribers now. And I was like, no way. And we went in and the short version is we did the Tony Robbins seminar and we quit our jobs and we sold our bed and we sold our car and we bought a one-way ticket out of the country a couple of years ago. We went on this just discovery of the world, luckily before COVID hit. Anyway, about 6 months into that, I got really bored. I was like, hang on, I'm on the best beaches on the planet and I'm bored. What the hell is going wrong with me?

I've never had 6 months off before.

So I started making more breathing exercises again on YouTube, but I was so scared to show my face. I was so scared to put my voice on there. I would hire voice artists and animators, and you'd never know who I was for about 3 years of that channel. And then for whatever reason, I got back to Poland, which is where my girlfriend's from. I thought, you know what, I'm going to make a video, and if I get loads of hate, it's okay, I can delete it. It's not the end of the world, but let's just see what happens. I did a video, top 10 facts, I think, about breathing, and it did pretty well. I was like, okay, people aren't hating me. And then I tried a breathing exercise and that did really well as well. And then I started to get just this little bit of confidence up and it wasn't just one day it changed. It was slowly but surely quitting my job, doing the ice baths with Wim, jumping off a little cliff into the water, abseiling down. So all these little micro commitments I made into just push myself out my comfort zone just a little bit. Over that time, suddenly I was then the guy that was doing YouTube videos and getting millions of views on there. So it wasn't one day. But it was this thing of slowly but surely.

So I'm going to take it right back here to, you know, simpleton explanation. What is breathwork? So I want you to tell me, you know, the different types of breathwork, because I've heard of, you know, box breathing and is it Ujjayi breath that we do in yoga sometimes? Like, how do they vary? What kind of benefits can we get from breathwork?

Oh my God. You know, if I could take breathwork and make it into a pill, I would be a billionaire. Forget Pfizer and all these companies because breathwork, just here's just a little summary of the scientific benefits. Of breathwork, it can help you sleep better, it can reduce stress, it can reduce anxiety, it can get you out of a state of depression, it can help with lower back pain, it can help with irritable bowel syndrome, it can increase focus concentration, it can improve your heart rate variability, which is the gap between the beats of your heart, and a whole host of other things. And so I can really summarize it into two categories for you. You've got I breathe more than I need and I breathe less than I need. And I think that's pretty much breathwork summarized. So what that means is you and I breathe in probably, I don't know, 14 breaths every minute right now, let's say. Now, if I do a Wim Hof or a holotropic or a conscious connected breath, I can go up to 100 breaths per minute, and that's got a whole load of benefits in that. I might have a spiritual experience, I might release some trauma, I might be able to have a huge emotional release in this high section. But if I go down below what we need, like intermittent fasting, I can get down to 1 breath per minute or 0 breaths per minute. I can hold my breath for, you know, 3 minutes. So I can slow your breath right down. Now, you can't do either of those forever. So again, it is a bit like overeating or undereating. We can, we can intermittent fast, and when we do there's so many benefits there. So box breathing is a wonderful example. Box breathing, it's probably, I don't know, say 5 breaths per minute, 6 breaths per minute. I get you down from that 15 or 20 down to 5. And when we slow the breath down, we send a signal to the brain and that signal says, I'm safe, I'm okay, it's all right to relax. When I speed my breath up, I send signals, say there's a problem out there, there's danger, don't relax, let's energize. And so we can hack both of those. So when we're feeling a little bit low in the morning, maybe we've got a little bit of a touch of depression or we're just not feeling ourselves, we can use certain breathing techniques to energize ourselves. But what I've seen in my work is the vast majority, including myself, is I need to slow it down. I'm an anxious person, I'm a stressed person. And for me and most of my clients, we need to slow it right down because that's where the kind of peace and tranquility lies.

Definitely. And speaking of stress relief, are there quick breathwork techniques that we can do in our daily lives for just to get that stress relief or even a bit of energy during the You mentioned there about your top video being around panic attacks. What can we do on the spot in our day-to-day lives? I know you're going to say breathe, but what can we do in terms of what techniques can we use in terms of that to get rid of that stress and that anxiety?

Yeah, there's a two-pronged approach to this. So number one is you might have heard of 80/20 principle or Pareto's law. So 80%, and I would even go as far as to say 99%, is how you're breathing throughout the day and night and exercise. And if we get that right, which is what I work on with my clients, you don't need these little break glass in case of emergency techniques because your breathing is solid. Now, that takes time, and most people aren't there right now. So what can we do right now? There's a couple of things we can do. Number one, try your best to use the nose. There's a whole thing around mouth versus nose. They're the same hole, right? They do the same thing. Actually, it's not true. Your nose is your first line of defense to your respiratory system. They've shown that people with denser nasal hair have less cases of asthma and irritation. So leave those nasal hairs alone. The nose filters the air, it cools it, it humidifies it, it sterilizes it, it makes it so that every breath you take is more efficient. When we use the mouth, we're creating stress. So the more we can be nasal, the better. And then in terms of a technique, I mean, there's so many we can do. Anything that slows your breath down is helpful. My favorite is called sniff sniff poo, or the physiological sigh. I'll just take you through, it's dead simple. So you can do this pretty much anywhere. And it's about 60% in through the nose, then about another 10% is a sniff, and then we do a big long ah. So if I just demonstrate it, it sounds and looks like this. So feel free to have a go if you want. And there's a couple of things happening there. We slow the breath down. I already feel calmer now. We slow the breath down. The second inhale is helping open up the lungs so we get a more efficient breath. And the ah, the sound, the vocal sound, bit like when people scream into a pillow or they sing or all these things. The vocalization helps us relax and get some of that stress out as well. And so this breathing technique is very, very old. There's no such thing as a new breathing technique, but there's a Dr. Andrew Huberman who's one of the biggest scientific podcasters on the planet, and he talks about this a lot as his kind of favorite breathing technique, that you do that 3 to 5 times, you'll be noticeably calmer than you than you were before. But ultimately, I will just go back to saying this, nothing is going to compensate for how you're breathing 99% of the time. Because if your breathing's off throughout the day, then you can do these hacks, yeah, beautiful, they will help. But ultimately, we've got to fix how you're breathing, sleep, exercise, and the rest.

I love how much work, like, breathwork can just bring you down. Like, I literally just did that with you. I only did it once, and I instantly just felt that calm kind of wash over me. It's crazy, isn't it? Like, everything is related to the breath. And I know there that you mentioned about nasal breathing as well. So nasal breathing, a while ago I got these nasal strips that you put over your nose at night just to open the airways because I am a bit of a snorer. And I got some mouth tape as well just to put over. And I saw a video of someone on Instagram last week at the gym running on a treadmill with it, and I thought, I'm gonna try that. Bad idea, honestly. I went to the gym, I put this little bit of mouth tape over, within about 45 seconds I just had to rip it off because I was like gasping for breath. How can we train ourselves to go through the nose? Is it just a case of doing it over and over again?

Yeah, so there's a couple of ways to do this. So I do this, I've got a little gym downstairs and I put the tape on and the strips and I'll use it as a reminder to stay nasal. And I've interviewed a number of experts on this now. So I have a podcast all about breathwork and you would think, how many bloody episodes can you do about breathing, or we're about to hit 100 and there's no signs of slowing down. The nuance is incredible. But one of the guys is a running expert, and he told me, people get on the treadmill and they're straight away, see people running down the street, and once you see poor breathing, unfortunately, you see everywhere. It's a little bit of a curse, but nobody really teaches us this in school. And so we just think it's normal to mouth breathe. But when we know that that's actually causing more stress, raising cortisol levels and adrenaline in the body, that's a good habit to catch. But the advice he gave me, which was so useful, was only exercise as fast as your breath will allow. So that means you're going to have to go a bit slower. But if you think about the tortoise and the hare situation, and this is true of UFC fighters and boxers and all sorts of athletes, if we can go to nasal, it's going to slow us down, but we're going to adapt very, very quickly to that, which means we're more efficient, which means we will be able to overtake where we were previously as a mouth breather. But it takes time, and that time varies person to person. So in your case, I'd say 'Just go a little bit slower, maybe turn it down a little bit.' The minute you feel that I need to go to mouth, that is the sweet spot. That's the best place to be. It's a bit like picking up a dumbbell in the gym and going, 'Oh, that's almost too heavy for me, but I can do 10 reps.' That's where you're going to grow the muscle. And it's exactly the same with the breath. If you can find that just slightly uncomfortable spot where it's like, 'I really want to mouth breathe right now, but I choose not to,' you're going to adapt really, really fast to that. If you go to mouth, you undo some of the work again. So that's the advice I give. Just slow it down a little bit and just trust that you'll beat your personal best within a period of time.

That's enough information that I need to not do CrossFit as much. So yeah, thank you. I'll slow it down. So I know obviously, Mike, you have your one-to-one coaching, don't you? But you also have an online breathwork course as well. So what are the difference between the two? Obviously one-to-one is someone working directly with you, but what is the difference? What do you kind of COVID in those courses?

Yeah, so I've got a 5-week program which I've poured my heart and soul into, um, and Essentially is a video course that anybody can pick up at any stage of their breath career, and they can learn the basics right the way through to advanced techniques. And you breathe with me, I set you— it's built into weekly foundations. And so you go through week 1, I give you some homework to do, and there's some tips and some further learning, and it's all very interactive, and there's lovely little animations. I've had beautiful feedback on that. But the difference between that and what I do with clients is that with the clients, the work is this— it's completely bespoke. So I've got ADHD, I've got dyslexia, I'm all over the place. I use breathwork to calm me right down. If I had to do the same thing every day, I'd probably go a little bit nuts. And so I built a package which was very good for clients, but very good for me. So what it looks like is this is no two people get the same treatment. I typically will run through a number of assessments to work out where's your breathing right now? But not only that, where are you right now and what have you tried and where are you trying to get to? So very often people come to me because maybe I have problems in the bedroom, they've got a lot of stress, they're shouting at their kids, that the sleep is in the toilet. These tend to be the common things. So I need to know, where's your breathing right now? What are you trying to do? What have you already tried? And then I build a plan around that. And typically it's about 6 weeks, so we meet once a week, and it allows me to pivot as well. So what I love about this work is not only are no two clients the same, no two sessions the same. So it might be that we're trying one technique because the breathing is actually very bespoke. And in that, I mean, I might try a couple of techniques with you and you might thrive on those techniques, but I might try them with the person that lives next door to you and it just doesn't work. And so my job is to find, based on your physiology, based on your past, based on what you enjoy to do, how can I find the right techniques for you so you never need to buy another breath course again and you have these techniques for the rest of your life. And my goal is always, I want you to fall in love with me so much that you leave me a video testimonial at the end. So my whole goal is just to deliver as much value as possible. But that's the difference. And so often if people work with me one-on-one, they get the video course anyway. Yeah.

So what are some of the common issues that come up in those assessments? Some of the common issues that you identify with your clients? Is it that— someone once told me that my nose was too narrow to breathe through it properly. I don't know if that's a thing. I don't know if it's to do with lung capacity. What kind of issues do you come up with?

Yeah, it could be a thing. Generally, the rule I got from one of the experts I interviewed, Patrick McEwen, he says if you can breathe through your nose for 60 seconds, you can breathe through it for the rest of your life. And he spent 30 years. And so some people really do have nasal issues and they need obstructive nasal surgery. But this, from what I'm gathering, is quite rare and most of us can fix these things. And so it comes down to a couple of bits, really. Up until about the age of 6 or 7, we're perfect breathers. And if you look at any baby or child, they've got this lovely rhythm going on. Everything's effortless. But then what happens is we go to school, we sit in the desk all day, we impede the diaphragm in this weird seated position throughout no time in human history. Up until very recently, do you sit in the chair? It was either on the floor or you're squatting. So we've made this weird position, which is completely normal now. Sprinkle on a load of stress, put in a bad diet, put in some artificial light, put us in an isolated position away from all of our community. And it's no wonder that the breathing has been affected by this. There's a very simple exercise I do. It doesn't always work, but feel free to try it with me now. You just get your hand out and just picture there's a beautiful lemon in your hand, and then you ask the client to squeeze and squeeze all the juice out. What's happened to your breath? And they say, oh, I've stopped breathing. That's just a little bit of tension in your hand. And so when we carry that tension, it affects everything. So the common issues tend to look like this. Most people struggle to take a deep breath, and what that really relates to is often two things. Number one, your rib cage has become a little bit brittle, so the muscles in between the ribs are not as flexible as they should be because we're not doing the right kind of stretches. The other part of that is our diaphragm, one of the biggest muscles in our body, becomes a little bit weak, and so we struggle to draw in the air. And as we get older, we lose what's called vital capacity, which is the ability to take a lot of air in and out. That just drops and drops and drops. So a big problem people have is they can't take a functional, physical, mechanical breath. And in doing so, you are no longer anatomically breathing correctly. You are inefficiently breathing. You engage muscles in your shoulders, you might engage the throat, you end up doing all these things we would do in a stressful situation. So if a lion or a cheetah or a burglar's trying to get us, we can fill all the way up. You know, we can take these big, huge breaths, we can switch on all the stress responses, and we can fight, flight, freeze. We can do all that stuff. We don't, you don't want to do that day to day. And years of sitting and not using these breathing muscles properly causes them to atrophy. So that's one part. The other part is we just can't, we're not very good at holding our breath anymore. You know, there were free divers in Greece, apparently thousands of years ago, that would go down and get fish in the water, and they were able to hold their breath for minutes and minutes and minutes. And when I started this journey, I think I had about less than a minute was my breath hold. You know, there was times it was much worse than that. But then through this journey and spending time with freedivers and other things, I got to about 3 minutes and 14 seconds. And I know I can beat that. I just need a little bit more time to practice on those. But the incredible thing is your body is really good at responding. So a bit like going to the gym, if you do weight resistance training every day or every other day, you're gonna put muscle on. If you practice breathing techniques on a regular basis, you will get better at having the mechanics, but you'll also get better at holding your breath. And just why would the breath hold really even be that important to you and I? Well, it comes back to the bit we were talking about, about how many breaths you take per minute. And so, you know, the average is now huge. The gap is 12 to 20, which is ridiculous how big that gap is. So if I'm breathing 12 and you're breathing 20, doesn't sound like a lot, but over a decade, that's millions of extra breaths. That's huge. So it's a real waste of energy, and nothing tends to be better when inefficient. So we need to slow the breath down at sleep, at rest, at exercise, and we need to make mechanics really nice and flexible. Think more about your rib cage being like a jellyfish than a birdcage. It needs to be really flexible.

So when we are taking these, say, 20 breaths a minute, obviously that's quite quickly, isn't it? That's like 1 every 3 seconds. Is that due to external factors such as stress and anxiety and people around us at work? Is that what it's caused by? Is that why we take in all these short, sharp breaths rather than long, deep breaths flowing?

Yes. And so there's a couple of things going on here. So poor breathing causes stress and anxiety, but stress and anxiety causes poor breathing. So the two things are linked. But the beautiful thing is we can fix the breath, and so we can fix the breath, which means we may be able to fix most of that stress and anxiety. There can always be psychological things going on, and that would be psychologist to help somebody with. But generally, most people can benefit from improving their breath. In fact, the guy that wrote the best-selling book on breathing called Breath, James Nestor, in the book he said 90% of people are breathing wrong. 90%. And I interviewed him about 4 weeks ago, so I've upped it, it's 95% now. This is based on thousands of studies. We've all got some sort of dysfunctional breathing.

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Wayfair, every style, every home. At you, or they send you an email, or you've messed up at work. This was me after I came back from Wim Hof. I was like, bloody hell, why is my breath so fast and shallow? I've never noticed my breathing before. And it's a bit of a curse again because people watching and listening to this, they'll start to pay attention to their breath, but actually it's a good thing. So, so external stress will absolutely affect affect your breathing. But here's— again, this is why breathwork's so freaking cool. I can consciously take care of my, my breathing. I was a bit nervous before this podcast. I took the dog for a quick walk. I wanted to get some daylight. I took some really nice big slow deep breaths. I just reset myself and got myself ready to make sure that I was in the best possible state for this. So the beautiful thing about breathwork is you don't need Lululemon pants. You don't need to go on top of a mountain. You can do it if you're disabled, if you're sitting in a chair. You can do it in bed. You can do it on the subway. And these are profound science-backed techniques which change everything. So again, I'm not saying forget diet, I'm not saying forget exercise, I'm not saying forget sleep, but I'm saying all of those 3 things can be improved if we improve our breath.

So what are some of the most common misconceptions that people have when they come to you and start with breathwork? Because obviously with me, people come, they're like, crystals, what, really? Do people come to you and think the same thing about breathwork as if to say, oh, it's just a fad? Or it's just something that people are just making up?

Yeah, I think by the time they've got to me, they've probably consumed some of my content, so they kind of already know. So by the time they've come to me, their general questions are, how long is it going to take? And I say, it's 22 minutes a day. That's it. That's all I need from you. I don't need 4 hours. Is it going to work for me? And that's a big one. It's like, let's test it. Let's test where you are right now. Let's see your goals and let's make sure that you've got that. Because if somebody is holding their breath for 7 which has never happened to me yet, there's probably less I can do with that person. But if somebody is able to hold their breath and walk on the spot for, say, 30 steps, then I know that there's huge gains to be had there. Outside of people coming to me, when I've gone on corporate events, or maybe people say, listen to the podcast I've been on, or I'm doing a retreat, they'll probably think, oh, breathwork's for hippies, right? It's just for those hippies and tie-dye. And my answer is, it is, yeah. And I love the hippie side of things, and I can get you to a place where you can have spiritual experience. I can get you to a place where you release emotions, where you feel safe to cry, which we can talk about if you want in a second. But at the same time, breathwork is being employed by NASA and Nike now. You know, they're bringing breath coaches in. I spent time in some of the world's biggest insurance companies last year teaching them how to breathe properly. So it used to be reserved for the hippies and yogis, but now I think with the way science is proving breathwork can actually affect all of us, and according to Nesta, you know, 95% of us are breathing wrong. I think people's ears are perked up now. They're really curious what breathwork can do for them.

So in terms of that 22 minutes a day that you said, a lot of people listening to this will be thinking, if 22 minutes can fix my life, why am I not doing it?

Why?

You know what I mean? Like, why are people not doing this if that's all it takes, 22 minutes per day?

You know, I had a habits expert on the podcast for New Year's. I thought, what a good time to get somebody on the habits. Because most of my clients, I pre-qualify now. So look, if you're going to work with me, I need those 22 minutes. Otherwise, you're just not going to get the results you're looking for. And I've had clients before go, I can do a minute a day. It's just not going to be worth your time and money to spend it with me. So the 22 minutes is what I've worked out from all these different sessions. But the reason people don't follow the habits, there's a whole podcast on this, people could listen to. It's fascinating. This behavioral scientist said there's so many reasons for it, but ultimately we create a lot of barriers in our mind. And so it can— the best advice I've heard from— this was Dr. Gina Cleo, but there's also a book called Atomic Habits by James Clear. Start with a minute. You know, start— if you're listening to this now, I think, well, after this podcast, what can I do? Find a breathing exercise on YouTube and just do— I'm just gonna do 60 seconds and tomorrow I'm gonna do maybe 90 seconds. And I think what we tend to do— this was me a couple of years ago. I need the perfect morning routine. I need an ice bath, meditation, journal, stretch. I need to do my red light therapy. I need to take dog for a walk. I need to, you know, and I had like a list of 17 things and I felt crap every single day because I don't do 3 or 4. It even happened to me last week. Last week I did coherence breathing, I did a workout and I went to the sauna and in the back of my mind I had this creeping voice going, you haven't done enough. I was like, I have actually. I'm very happy where I am today. Thank you very much, dodgy roommate in my mind. But yeah, I think, you know, we need to build up to it. A bit like, you know, we know exercise is good for us and yet most of us don't do it on a regular basis. We know that eating clean and avoiding ultra-processed foods is good for us and yet we don't. And so there's a lot to that question. But I think if we just strip it back from a simplistic thing, I would just try 60 seconds of a breathing exercise and just see how you feel.

Amazing. So you mentioned there as well, you touched on this about, you know, crying when you release. So I watched— I can't remember what it was called now. It was a program with Wim Hof. Um, last year. And he basically got all these celebrities to lay down, and as he was telling them, you know, to fully in, breathe out, and all this, um, he started just like walking around the room, and one by one these people were crying. And when I say crying, I mean full-on release, like full-on release. They were bawling their eyes out. And I just— I don't know, I, I think it's because I haven't experienced it myself, but But how can breathwork release such tension and angst in the body like that and put someone to the point of physically bawling their eyes out with tears?

Yeah, well, I'd love to take you through a session another time if you're up for it, so we could spend a couple of hours. I'll take you through. So my first session was in the basement with Wim, and this was back in 2016, and I'd never really done any breathwork, just box breathing. I think that's the only thing I played with. Rebirth, and I had the same thing. I burst into tears. And then another day, I think a day later, I was having these visions, these visual visions, like I'd taken some sort of ayahuasca or something. So there's a number of theories, and nobody actually knows the reason why, but there's a number of theories about what's going on when these deep breathing exercises do this. I did a rebirthing session 2 years ago in hot water with a professional where I was being protected, and I went through a full rebirth in the situation where I thought I was a baby again. I was reborn. I was having a baby of my own in 3 months after this was due. So I wanted to go through this process. I ended up crying for about 4 hours. It was a very cathartic experience and took me a number of weeks to pull myself back together again. So it was quite profound. So when we breathe deeply, there's a number of things happening here. Some traditions will say we store trauma in the body, we store trauma in the tissue, the issues in the tissue. When we breathe a more rapid response, the left part of our the chattery, dodgy roommate that's analyzing everything, the volume gets turned down. And as the volume gets turned down, the right side, the more intuitive side, can finally speak. And in that right side, the subconscious side, we might have been holding on to so many different things. And so all of these different things mean that we can actually get into our heart, get into our body, and actually feel it. And so one of the techniques I teach is called Vivation, and this is a conscious connected breathing technique where we're breathing fully in. There's a couple of different rates to it, and we're just letting go on the exhale. Bit similar to Wim Hof, but no breath holds. And we focus purely on the body. And the body, we call it body wisdom. It's always focusing on what's the emotion, what's the thing that we're trying to release. And I just did 10 days of this in the US last year. Very, very profound. And the difference with Vivation and say rebirthing, with the Vivation, I get you to stay with your body. With, with rebirthing, this is just my experience, I'm not a rebirthing professional. I found that with rebirthing I just shot off into the stratosphere somewhere. I was often in the galaxy, I was experiencing colors and lights, and it was all wonderful. But when I eventually came back down again, nothing, nothing truly changed for me. But with this vivacia, this one that I've, I've, um, was— I think it's the second oldest breath modality in the West, and I think it was 1978, I think it was founded, and the guy came back from India and built this tradition This one means you stay with the body because the body's like, we're in the mind all the time. We're thinking all these different things. And I've got this podcast to do. I need to say the right thing here and I need to think about what's next. I've got dinner at 6 o'clock. But there's a body here and we live a body experience, an embodied experience, and we tend to ignore the body. And so this sounds crazy, but I actually became very detached from feelings unless they were really negative. Unless I was really stressed or really angry, I would feel that. But apart from that, I'd lost sense of some of my more subtle feelings. And so this Conscious Connected Breathing technique has just helped me tune back into that a little bit. For example, now I've got a 1-year-old and he doesn't like to sleep sometimes in the middle of the night. And so I've got a bad back now as well from having this beautiful little bundle. So I'm rocking him to sleep and he doesn't want to sleep sometimes. And I was getting a little bit impatient about this. I need to get to sleep, got a big day at work tomorrow. All these different things. But now I've applied some of these vibration techniques, um, I will now say things to myself such as, enjoy this moment as much as possible. I'll inhale through the strongest feeling, I'll relax on the exhale, and I'll vibe— I'll use vibration to get myself through it. And it's transformed that 4 AM frenzied, stressful period into, how lucky am I to have, to have these moments with my son that I'll probably never have, you know, in a few months' time they'll be gone forever. So, um, it's a big one, the whole, uh, emotional release. And I would say to people, if you're thinking about doing it, I would pick a professional rather than just sit in your bedroom and do it by yourself, because it can be a little unnerving and you may end up crying for a couple of hours. And I will say this, the body, if it was going to kill you, it would have killed you already. This is what we say in Bravation. The body will give you exactly what you can handle. It's already there, but it's useful to have a professional take you through it.

Absolutely. I love that. And I love that tip as well about your little boy through the night as well, because because I'm 4 days into this, 4 days, and I've had about, I'd say maybe 3 or 4 hours sleep in the last 72 hours. It's a lot and it is very intense. And they say that babies can pick up on that tenseness and that anxiety. So you're trying to remain calm, but at the same time, I could probably feel my breathing getting heavier and heavier thinking, oh my God, I've got all this work to do tomorrow. I've got podcast recordings coming out of my backside. That's the whole reason I'm not recording this one visually, because my eye bags are horrific. So, yeah, so thank you for that tip. Tonight, when he wakes me up for a feed at silly o'clock, I'm going to try and do that and see what kind of difference that makes. So thank you.

Yeah, I was just going to say there's a coherence breathing track on my YouTube channel. It's 8 hours long. I made it for myself so I can put it on at nighttime. It's known as the Perfect Breath. Breath. And it was just featured on the Andrew Huberman podcast. There's a guy called Rick Rubin who is the producer for Gaga, Eminem, Beastie Boys, Metallica, Johnny Cash. This guy's done all this work for them, and he's been using my breathing technique to improve his heart rate variability. So he went on there and talked, which was freaking amazing. But this breathing technique, I do this with my son a lot because there's this thing called co-regulation, and you've just mentioned it perfectly, that when we're in a stress state, we pass it on to other people. When we're in a positive state, we can pass that on as well. The heart rate, that there's a magnetic— this is science, this isn't woo-woo— that they can detect, I think, 2.5 meters away from the body now, that what the heart's doing. And so if we're in a stress response and we're holding the baby or something, that can be transferred. But if you do this coherence breathing technique, you're going to be in a much more relaxed state. And it's that easy to do, and it's the simplest breathing technique, and it's free. So, you know, people can just— you can just play with that.

Amazing. I'll put the links to that in the show notes as well in case other people want to listen to that. Obviously I'll be linking your whole YouTube, but that one specifically as well. Um, so in terms of breathwork and how we integrate into our everyday lives, obviously people do, you know, wellness practices like yoga or meditation. How does breathwork fit into that if we are, you know, actively moving? Is it just like what we're talking about earlier with exercise, or is yogic breathing something a little different?

Yeah. So you mentioned the ujjayi breath earlier. I love a bit of ujjayi. So people that don't know, it sounds like fogging up the mirror. So if you imagine there's a piece of glass in front of you and you're like, ah, that's a constriction of the throat. And it's got a lot of benefits to that. One of the best ones is it actually slows the breath down and it's vocal, so it's quite relaxing. And so there's loads of pranayamas. I'm definitely not a pranayama expert, but what I would say again is for me, with my thesis on all this, it comes back to let's get your breathing perfect. So let's get it to the point where you're breathing really slow and nasal and deep and rhythmic and you've got an expansive rib cage at work, at rest, at play. And then you can play with all these beautiful breathing techniques that are out there. The Wim Hoffs and all these wonderful techniques that are all available on YouTube are really powerful. But my whole thing when I'm working with clients is let's get your foundation right first. So let's get it so you can hold your breath for a couple of minutes. Let's get it so that you can— we get a tape measure out and we measure the rib cage and we want Ideally around 10 centimeters difference between your inhale and exhale on your ribs. So we look at all these different things, like all these little gadgets and gizmos I use with people. But essentially we get your breathing to a really good space and then just have at it. Just go crazy with these breathing techniques, all these sexy ones that are out there. But if you're just getting started right now, I would focus on coherence breathing. It's probably the best breathwork out there. I don't know of another breathing technique that has as many benefits as this. It's the easiest, safest, simplest breathing technique. It showed up in the Lord's Prayer. It showed up in Islam. It showed up in, I think, Buddhist teachings. And there's even a rumor my friend Tom Granger told me that maybe we used to breathe at this rate, around 5.5 breaths per minute. So if you think about the 15 or 20 we're at right now, there is evidence to show every decade we're getting quicker and quicker and quicker. So if maybe we jump back a couple of thousand years ago, maybe we were breathing a lot slower at this cadence, at this rate. So the other way to incorporate breathwork in your day is just keep your mouth closed as much as possible. I like to say shut your mouth. If we can just shut our mouth a little bit at exercise, at the desk, and with stretching, that's the other one as well. So any sort of basic stretch/yoga routine, if you can incorporate some deep breathing in there, it's going to make a big difference.

I love that. I'm going to give that coherent breathing a bash tonight, definitely. So, Mike, what— well, kind of where do you see breathwork going in the future? Like, where do you see all of this leading to?

I'm very nervous about this. I think it's going to go in two directions. I think there will still be a place for breath coaches, human beings. But what I'm seeing in the AI space right now is exciting and terrifying. So there's an app that's still in beta. I don't think you can download it yet, but I met with an owner of it a little while ago and he was saying that he can film your breathing on the app. The app, your phone is watching where the breath is and it's recommending different breathing techniques. There's another guy that I spoke to who's all about like the wearables. And so you get home and your breathing's off and so the incense kicks in, lavender, the lights go down nice and red, your favorite music track kicks in. The music track's also got a breathing technique built into it. You lay in your chair and you're touch your ground in that. And so I think that technology is going to play a huge role because actually there's a lot I can do with you, but I don't have your chemistry, I don't have your data, um, you know. And so I feel like it'll be interesting to see where all of this goes in the future. I've just seen the Apple Vision Pro headset being advertised. They've got like a big breathing bubble inside of it, and you go in and you're actually within the bubble. That looks pretty epic as well. Um, but I do feel that there will be an element of people that want people. And I hope that stays true. You know, my favorite work is festivals, is doing retreats, it's being with human beings. You know, a lot of work I do is on Zoom, but whenever I get to get outside in the real world and actually meet people, that's where the real magic is, I think. And this co-regulation I spoke to you about earlier, that happens, you know, at the Wim Hof retreat. We were all crying. There was some— there was a— just touching this very quickly, there was a moment, um, about day 3 or 4 where there was a guy whose— I think his best friend friend had killed himself, and I think his dad had killed himself a few months before. And so, and none of us had cried, um, like this before, but he just started wailing. And then we, we all started crying. I think there was 60 of us in the class, we were all crying. And we ended up just like hugging him. And I was like, wow, I didn't even know these people like 3 or 4 days ago. And so there was this, this connected— I don't know what you call it— energy, feeling, vibration, co-regulation that happened there. So, um, again, if people are listening to this, they've got the means to do so, try and get on a breath retreat or a yoga retreat or a festival where you can be with other people. Because it's— don't be wrong, it's beautiful on the internet, but actually nothing's ever going to compare to being around other people.

No, I totally agree. I think one of the best experiences I had last year was when I went to Happy Place Festival, which is Fern Cotton's well-being festival. And just being around that many people doing breathwork, meditation, visualization, EFT, all of the above— seriously, it was just so— I don't know, it just felt like such an overwhelming sense of calm and that inner peace. And it's a really hard way to describe it because it just felt— I just felt like I came away from it and it was just so wholesome, and I just felt like so at peace and at ease. And yeah, I definitely say get yourself to a festival. So where do you see yourself in 5 years' time personally? Like, what's your goals and dreams for the future of Take a Deep Breath?

I would love a retreat center. That's, that's what I'm working to at the minute. So I'm not sure when maybe in Spain or Poland or somewhere, maybe with a bit of sunshine.

Always helps.

It would be nice. Or maybe it'll be Wales or north of England. But I just love this idea of having a really beautiful wellness place where people come to me and, you know, the food's beautiful and healthy and there's a really nice breathwork studio. Maybe we've got ice baths, maybe there's deprivation tanks. I've done a lot of sensory deprivation work, you know, maybe there's dark retreats. So just this idea growth. Um, I mean, how lucky is that, right, to live in a wellness place? You know, that's freaking, freaking incredible. So, um, so that— this is what we're— me and my partner and my son are working towards, is how can we make that happen over the next sort of 5 or 10 years.

And you just mentioned there quickly about sensory deprivation. So what's your thoughts and opinions on that? Because it quietens my mind something crazy, and I absolutely love it. But my nearest sensory deprivation tank center place has shut down during the pandemic. I know. So unfortunately I haven't been in a couple of years now. But what's your take on it all?

I found that, first of all, beautiful. I kept having these experiences in my childhood home whenever I would do it. And then I spoke to the chap that ran it. This was in Nottingham. And he said to me, did you have a good childhood? I said, yeah, pretty good. It's probably a safe space, probably taken back. So that was quite interesting. That was one takeaway. There was a chap on the Joe Rogan podcast that owned a center and he would do 8-hour floats or 10-hour floats. He would sleep in there and he would ring his mom up and go, Mom, there was this time you had this like blue check dress with little flowers on. And she's like, how the hell do you remember that? You were like 1 year old. And what he basically said was, it's a bit like being on an airplane with no Wi-Fi. And once you get rid of all the emails, you can start going through the ones that you've been saving for later. And so he thinks that all of our memories are in our brain. And if we can clear all that space out, we can get right back. And I don't know if he ever got back to being in the womb, but he got back to being a 1-year-old in this podcast. Um, my final thought on this is I can get you there with Vivation. Like, I found Vivation to be like a float tank for me. Like, once you're in your body and out of your mind, you're in a present moment state, you're in a flow state. Because I feel like a lot of what happened for me in the float tank was just getting out of the busy mind. Um, so they, they describe float tanks, um, I think an hour being like a 2-week vacation. I'm not sure how they got those numbers, but I definitely feel more relaxed after the, the float tanks. And being in the salt is really nice. Um, but yeah, we, we can do it in other ways. We, we, yeah, again, I'll be— love to take you through a 2-hour vibration session at some point.

So Mike, how can people work with you? Um, like, how will they find you on YouTube, on Instagram?

Yeah, so best way to go is just take a deep breath. So if you go onto YouTube, take a deep breath, I'll give you my links as well. I've got a, uh, 7 Essential Breathing Exercises PDF, which I highly recommend people check out. Um, there's all links to all the breathing exercises in there as well, so you can literally just start breathing for free straight away. And if I've resonated with you and you feel like maybe I'd be a good fit as your breath coach, then we can have a complimentary one-to-one session. I can do some breath assessments with you and we can see and talk about potential next steps together.

Amazing. Thank you so much for coming on the show, Mike, and sharing your wisdom. I really appreciate it.

I've had a great time. Thank you so much for inviting me.

And for anyone else listening, like I say, go and follow Mike at his social links, which are all in the show notes for today's episode. And if you've enjoyed this episode, please feel free to leave a rating or review wherever you're listening from. And I'll see you all next Friday for another episode.

Bye.

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