https://www.listennotes.com/e/9b2f605ef2534fcab24cff41f2037a4e

Our breath is literally the steering wheel of our nervous system. And the 23,000 breaths that we take, you know, 16,000 of them while we're awake, are all conscious opportunities for us to choose how we want to feel.

Hey, midlife conversation listeners, let's have a real chat about energy for a minute. Or should I say the mysterious case of disappearing energy? I know that in our 40s, 50s, 60s, and beyond especially, our days can start feeling like we are basically swimming in maple syrup while wearing a weighted blanket, if you know what I mean. Or we're experiencing that 3:00 PM slump and drop off. Well, that's why you're gonna do a happy dance when you hear about Mitopure, which is an amazing supplement that works on your cellular level. Think of it as a tiny clean up crew for your body's batteries. It contains something called Urolithin A, which is a clinically proven postbiotic that is kind of like a personal assistant for your cells. It clears out the old and tired bits and makes room for fresh new peppy ones. The results, better energy, stronger workouts, faster recovery, and even increased muscle strength and endurance, all without changing your routine. The best part is you don't have to reorganize your entire life or add 17 new steps to your already crazy busy routine. You're just adding in a simple supplement. So right now, Timeline is offering 10% off your Mitopure order@timeline.com/nataliejill. That's T-I-M-E-L-I-N-E.com/nataliejill and let's kick that energy crisis to the curb. Welcome to Midlife Conversations. I'm your host, Natalie Jill, and I'm passionate about having amazing conversations that matter to us midlife women. On this podcast, I do what I do best, taking complicated health topics and breaking them down simply so that we can optimize aging together. I share actionable steps to help you thrive in what I believe are our best years to come. Join me as I interview the most inspiring people living their best midlife years and dive into essential topics like hormone changes, health optimization, weight management, blood sugar, emotional well-being, relationships, beauty, and so much more. Anxiety, stress, our nervous system going crazy, all big symptoms that pop up in midlife. And then ADHD. Let's talk about that for a minute. We know what that means, but why does there seem to be this increased level of diagnosis around that in midlife? And what does stress, anxiety, nervous system, and ADHD have to do with braces and cavities? You would be surprised. Today, we're gonna go real deep here. I've got Sachin Patel on, and I asked him before I hit record, I said, you,'ve got so many credentials, so many titles. If you were sitting next to somebody on an airplane and they said, what do you do? How would you answer? And I instantly knew we'd be good friends because the answer was similar to mine. I would usually say it depends on the day. And he said something similar, but truly he is a metabolic health expert. Today, I've got a lot of questions for him. You're gonna be surprised at this connection and the answers here.

Thank you so much for being here, Sachin. It's my honor. I'm so excited. Great to connect with you again.

And I think we're gonna have a lot of fun with this conversation. So I met him recently. I was speaking at an event. We were just both at Genius Network. I was speaking there. And when I got done, speaking and I was bringing up things that I probably don't really talk about publicly on social media a lot. I was telling my journey in health, but I was sharing some things that are a little bit out there. And what I loved is he got up and he said, I think we're gonna be best friends. And he pretty much said everything that I had just shared. He took it to another level. For example, I was talking about parasites and I mentioned that 50% of people have them and don't know. And he stuck up and said, actually, a hundred percent of people with pets have them. And I thought, okay, we are friends. This is good. This is good. So, Sasha introduced me to a lot of things like mouth tape. We're going to be talking about that. But I want to dial this back a little bit, and I want to bring it back to these main points. Sasha, you had mentioned to me when I met you that you can tell somebody's stress and anxiety level by how they breathe. Tell me more about that.

Yeah, great question. So first of all, they say the eyes are a window into the soul and I look at the breath as a window into the nervous system. The way we breathe is actually a two-way street. It's a two-way street between the autonomic nervous system and our body. So one of the things I, you know, just we've all experienced this. If we experience something stressful, we gasp, right? That's the first response that we have if we feel a sense of relief. we sigh, if something's funny or entertaining, we laugh. If something upsets us, we cry. These are actually all forms of breathwork. We don't think of them that way, but this is a window into the emotional state of somebody when they're experiencing a shift in their body. And so when somebody is standing in front of me, by paying attention to their respiratory rate, whether they're breathing through their nose or through their mouth, I can tell the state of the nervous system. For example, if somebody was standing in front of you and I'll use, you know, very, you know, jarring examples just for so it's easy for people to understand. If somebody is standing in front of you or your child was there and they were short, shallow breaths through their mouth, you know, that person is in a stressed out state.

Yeah.

If somebody's breathing slow and steady, nice and calm through the nose, in and out through the nose, you know that person is in a calm and relaxed state. Now, what's interesting is I do a lot of calls on Zoom and I can tell when I've got my students on a panoramic view where I can see all of them, if I'm going too fast, I will pay attention to the respiratory rate and I will see, I will notice some people start breathing through their mouth and then I know that, okay, I'm going too fast. They're not able to keep up and I'm stressing them out. so I can dial things back. So if you're a teacher, you can pay attention to the way your students are breathing. If you're speaking to your wife or your husband, you can pay attention to the way that your spouse is breathing. If you're striking up a conversation, you could see the shift in that person's nervous system and determine if they want to have that conversation right now or not. And you can also see as a conversation goes on how their body and nervous system is responding. and most people, because they breathe unconsciously, it's a dead giveaway what's happening inside of them. And so now we can become better at reading each other's body language or what I call their breath language by paying attention to how somebody's breathing.

That's wild. You were the first one that connected the dots on this with me. And yesterday I was doing a membership call with my, with my membership group, and I had a guest on there. You might know her, Dr. Amy Apgian, but I had, I had her on. And she was speaking into trauma and what that does to our body. And as people were sharing, I watched her on camera and she would go, like really this deep breath. And it, and I watched how that would calm down the person she was talking to. And I watched this happen over and over again, how someone would share with her. And instead of her just giving a response, she would take this big breath. And I thought, wow. I would have not noticed that had you not shared that with me before. It was wild.

Yeah, it's. It's amazing. Like, once you have the self-awareness of how your breath affects you and how it affects people around you, then you can utilize it as a tool to hold space for others. You know, a lot of times as practitioners and as healers, we're trying to help people feel safe in our presence, and we may not even realize it, but the way we're breathing is. Is keeping a. or creating rather a space of safety for them.

So the way that we're breathing isn't just creating anxiety or stress in us. It could be creating that in others without us even being aware of that until you've pointed this out.

Yeah, because remember, like one of the things that some people might know and certainly a gentle reminder is that, you know, our heart has a magnetic field and the heart is actually controlled by the breath. So if I wanted to raise your respiratory, if I wanted to raise your heart rate right now, I would have you breathe a certain way and your heart rate would go up whether you like it or not, just by the fact that you're breathing a certain way. If I wanted to slow down your heart rate, I would have you breathe a different way and predictably you would have the heart rate drop every single time, a hundred times out of a hundred. So the way we breathe affects our heart field and we kind of know this through the HeartMath Institute's work. HeartMath Institute measures something called heart rate variability. The way you shift and regulate your heart rate variability is not by thinking about it, it's by breathing in a specific pattern that puts you into a state of coherence. And when we're in that state of coherence, our heart and our brain are better connected to one another. And that's the space that I think more of the world needs to be in, more in our hearts and our brains being in that connected state. That's where we make, you know, the best decisions. That's where we unlock creativity. that's where we come up with our best ideas, and that's where we can hold the best space for ourselves internally, but also for others externally.

I was watching a show recently that is a popular show right now, and I was watching them. They're sharing different stories about different couples, and some of the characters in the show, the way they talk is like this fast breath, fast paced talk. And I was wondering why I was feeling anxious watching them, and what you're saying makes sense. So we have to be aware not just what our breath is doing for us, us, but how that's making others interact with us.

Yes, absolutely.

And, you know, sorry, go ahead.

So I'll just say this because it, it pairs nicely with what you shared. Our breath is the steering wheel of our nervous system. So just like you can drive unconsciously, like I could drive my son to school for half an hour and be completely unconscious about the process and do it very passively. Or I could grab the steering wheel and pay very close attention to how I'm driving and do it very. in a very engaged manner. So our breath is literally the steering wheel of our nervous system. And the 23,000 breaths that we take, you know, 16,000 of them while we're awake are all conscious opportunities for us to choose how we want to feel. Do we want to feel calm, relaxed, or do we want to feel in a fight or flight state? And sometimes breathing in a fight or into a flight, fight or flight state is actually appropriate, right? If you're sprinting, then you want to breathe a certain way, but if you're meditating or relaxing or checking email or watching TV or you know, on your computer or talking to your child, you probably want to breathe in a different way.

I have a lot of questions for you. I'm going to start with, were you always this calm and from heart space, or did you have your own battle with anxiety and stress? And before you answer that, the reason I'm asking that is I definitely, I know a lot of people and the people in my life I would Define as very calm. I've always known them to be very calm. So they're my friends. They're my heart space friends. They're the ones that meditate easily. They have these very slow grounded morning routines. And then I've got my other friends that are ADHD and fast. You know, it's like there's these groups. And I have yet to see people move from group to group. So I'm curious, did this with you, were you kind of born with this? Did you have to teach yourself this? I want to understand.

Great question. So, you know, I've had my genetics done and one of the things I learned about my genetics is that I am a fast metabolizer of COMT fast metabolizer, which means that, you know, it, I metabolize my stress hormones very quickly and so they just go right through me. So it takes a lot to get me worked up and it takes a lot to keep me there. So biologically, I believe that I am kind of primed to be more on the calmer side. And then I would say that I've kind of unlocked another level of calmness by being more mindful and conscientious of how I breathe and by simply slowing down my breath by, you know, kind of going, doing, doing work to go inwards. I feel like I've leaned into that capacity a little bit more. So I would say that I was already set up for that from a genetic standpoint. I grew up around my mom who's like super, super calm. So she modeled that to me. She never loses her cool. She never gets- My daughter will never.

Say that about me, unfortunately.

And then, yeah, and then I leaned into it, knowing what I know and what I'm going to be teaching people today.

Okay. So, and have you helped people with my type of personality that were more the high-strung, the fast, like have you actually been able to see them come to a happy medium? I don't think you can completely change them, but have you helped them calm down or get out of this state?

Yeah, so that's a great question. And one of the things that I've learned, and some of this is a theory, so I don't have any science to back this up, just my anecdotal experiences with people, is that, and we've known this actually, this is well documented, is that we store a lot of our trauma in our diaphragm. And we store our grief in our lungs. So if you think about trauma, for example, if hypothetically, we'll just use it as an example, if somebody was going to punch me, the first thing I would do is I would hold my breath, right? Because our diaphragm acts as the distributor of force throughout our fascial system. So all of our fascia connects all of our nuclei of our cells together. So we have this web-like, internet-like web-like structure that connects every cell nucleus in our body together simultaneously. And this is done through a hydrostatic process, which means that that pressure is evenly distributed throughout the body. The diaphragm, because it's a muscle that sits right in the middle of our body, is what is responsible for distributing that force. Now, what also happens with a lot of people, I know this has happened to me and perhaps it's happened to you and others that are listening to this, is that at some point in our life we were told to stop crying or at some point in our life we felt like crying, but we didn't. and the only way to stop crying is to stop breathing first. And the only way to stop breathing is to hold your diaphragm really, really still. So it's kind of like running into a brick wall, so to speak, because you're trying to hold this muscle really still so you don't cry and you don't release. And crying is actually very, very healing to the nervous system. Like you always feel good after a good cry because you're using the cry as a form of breath work to release the trauma, that energy that you're holding on to. It's a way of the body to re-regulate the nervous system. This is why whenever I, you know, if I'm on an airplane and a baby is crying, most adults panic and they freak out and like, shut that baby up. You know, they may not say it out loud, but they're thinking in their head. And in my head, I'm saying, let that baby cry, because whatever, what if we get it to stop crying, it's going to push all of that emotion back down. and what ends up happening is the diaphragm develops trigger points. And when the diaphragm, just like any muscle, develops trigger points, it starts restricting its range of motion. So now somebody who's had, you know, traumatic experiences in their life who hasn't been able to release those experiences and that trauma, their diaphragm becomes tight and filled with trigger points, which then causes them to be short, shallow breathers. and so their habitual breathing pattern now is short shallow breathing, which means they're going to habitually be more on the edge, more in that, you know, fight or flight type of state. And that's going to be their default kind of pattern, nervous system pattern, if you will. So what we like to do is we like to uncoil that. And the way we can do that, one is by doing trigger point work on the diaphragm itself. So just digging, you know, it's easier if you lay on your back and just relax your abdomen, take a few breaths in and out. And then on the exhale, relaxing your abdomen, just kind of dig underneath your rib cage and see if you can find any of these trigger points. And I did this once at an event I was speaking at, and a gentleman in the front row just started bawling his eyes out. The last guy you'd expect to start crying. Yeah. And he just started releasing all this energy he'd been holding on to because in school, when he was younger, he was bullied. So he would walk down the hallway, and at any given time, somebody would come and punch him in the stomach. So he had to walk around.

Oh, wow.

With a very rigid abdomen, holding his stomach really tight, holding his diaphragm really tight. And so he developed this massive trigger point. And so that emotion was all stored in that, in his diaphragm. And once he started massaging it out and releasing it, the emotion came with it.

So it can be revert. And you're saying people could do this themselves. Like they can literally do that themselves. So can you explain that? You would lay on your back and.

How under your ribs, what would you be doing? yeah. So you would just lay on your back, knees bent, relaxing your abdomen. You know, just take a few cleansing breaths. So full inhale, full exhale, full inhale, and then a relaxed exhale. And then you would just hook your fingers like this and palpate underneath your rib cage and just kind of dig in there a little bit and you'll start to feel, if you have them, you'll start to feel these tender points just on the inside of your rib cage where your diaphragm inserts. And you can start working those out. So just in, in a gentle circular pattern, you can start massaging those. and that's going to make a big difference. The other thing that happens is when our diaphragm doesn't go through its full range of motion, we don't get proper vagal nerve stimulation, and we become short shallow breathers, which again keeps us in that perpetual fight or flight state. So breath work, where we actually do a lot of work with the myofascial system. So when I do a breath work experience for people, One of the first things we start doing is we start moving and shaking. So we start waking up the myofascial system, which is again that web-like structure that connects all of our tissues together. And so we start waking up the fascial system. We start patting it, tapping it, jumping up and down, just kind of loosening up that old energy that's become stagnant.

In our tissues, you know? Is that what like a rebounder, when you see people jumping on a rebounder or people just even like doing the.

Whole shaking thing, that's what that is. yeah. So rebounder is great for, for lymph to, to move the lymphatic system, the shaking and the tapping. That's really good for move, for stimulating the fascial system.

Okay.

So, you know, they say our issues are in our tissues. So when we experience something extremely traumatic, for example, we actually go through a process called dissociation. And so dissociation is where we almost forget something has happened because it's so traumatic. But that information, a hologram of that information is actually stored in our fascial tissue. And later on, breathwork in life, it can show up as a disease if we don't clear it out, if we don't properly address it. So with the breathwork experience, what we do is we start getting people to start tapping and shaking and moving, even yelling and screaming to start moving that energy. And then we take them through a series of different breathing practices. The diaphragm now starts moving through a much more full range of motion. The lungs are starting to release all that grief that they're holding onto. And then we take them through a beautiful guided meditation where they start liberating themselves and forgiving themselves and learning how to love themselves again. And it's amazing, like within 60 minutes how liberated and free people feel. And they some people are crying, some people are laughing, they just feel like a totally new human being human being afterwards.

I believe our bodies are intuitively very smart. And when we numb it with too many external things, we get out of touch with what we intuitively feel and know. And I'm bringing that up because Do you think that, like, take a kid, for example, or take adults like me who get fidgety? Like I'm fidgety, like I feel like a lot, like I need to just go move. Do you think that is innately why we feel the need to move or to go exercise? Like that is our way of doing what you're talking about. Like it's your smart body saying, you need to go shake this off. You need to go move. I'm just connecting that as you're saying this.

Yeah, it's quite possible, right? That could be your body's way of saying, Hey, we've got this stuck energy. Let's move it. I would almost argue that that could be a great way for some people, but for some people they might need to go a little bit deeper and perhaps more intentional. And, and so sometimes like movement, like exercise, for example, is great. I'm not going to tell anyone not to exercise, but this type of intentional work, moving our body with the intention to move that emotion, because A lot of times when we're exercising, we're not.

Thinking that we're moving emotion necessarily. Totally. Like we just have to move. I think some people do, like I've always connected exercise with getting anger out, getting like, I've been able to do that. So I think that part. But I hear what you're saying, like you want to be intentional and like, I think of my friend Lavinia Erico, who she does a lot of that in the morning. She does like the shaking and the moving and she has a whole method around that. But it makes sense what you're saying when it's more intentional, which I'm going to ask you some more questions about, But I'm left definitely connecting the dots with, I'm thinking about kids, for example, and being someone who's been labeled ADHD my whole life. You know, I think of where somebody wants to medicate kids so they can sit still, what I'm thinking, but their body is telling them, if you can just move and get it out, you would be able to concentrate.

So it's like, that's where my head went with this. Yeah, absolutely. I think movement is paramount, right? It's such a great stimulus to the brain. It's probably the most potent nutrient for the brain. I think moving is really powerful and kids don't do enough of it these days, unfortunately. And they're, yeah, it's getting worse. It's a lot of it, right? As time goes by and certainly that energy needs to go somewhere. So I do feel that movement is absolutely crucial.

And I think about when we were kids, Sasha, like just how you and I, I mean just us being raised as kids and like we didn't have all the electronics and all the TV choices and all the things. So like, I don't know about you, but I was always like outside moving around playing and like, oh yeah. But now I watch, you know, I watch kids just sitting there for hours on their device or it's just different. So I feel like no coincidence we've got a bigger epidemic of these problems.

100%. You know, I spoke at my son's school yesterday and the teacher asked me like, what's like three things that these kids can do? And I said, get them away from their screens, get them outside, right? Get them playing in the dirt, get them playing in the grass, like being in the sun. I mean, something that, yeah, is so, it sounds so simple, but it's, you know, times have changed, right? It used to be that we'd have to, like, you know, our parents had to drag us in, right? If we'd be flying outside, they'd have to drag us in, and now we've got to push them out and tell.

Them to go outdoors and spend more time outdoors. And now we're telling them to go outdoors and we're, you know, lathering them up with all the, the block and the stats, too. So that's a whole other, that's a whole other topic. We won't do that right now, but that's a whole other topic. So, back to, so I want to ask you more about the breathing and some of the exercises. Somebody told me once, and I had not thought about it like this before either, that our lungs are the only organ that we actually can manually control. So, we can't manually control our heart or our kidneys or our liver, but your lungs through breath, we can manually control that. So, I get this is important to understand and because we can help us with this breath work connection and how we can use that as a tool.

Yeah, absolutely. So, breath work is anything in my, from my perspective is anytime we're consciously manipulating our breath or even in some cases passively manipulating our breath, that's breath work. Okay. So it doesn't necessarily have to be Wim Hof. or something that you do in a studio with a group of people, right? Anytime I could be sitting here right now, in fact, I am. When you're speaking, I'm slowing down my breath. I'm breathing in and out through my nose. I'm doing it in a very conscientious way. So I'm working on my breath.

So anytime we're working on our breath.

I refer to that as breath work. So you've been holding your breath as breath work. It can be. Yep. In fact, what's really interesting, not to get too far off on a tangent, but if you can hold your breath, for 200 seconds, it actually activates anti-cancer factors.

Wow.

P53, for example. So there's actually benefits to actually doing prolonged breath holds as well. And it's actually quite easy to get to 200 seconds if you train up to it. And within an hour, most people can hold their breath for that long.

Well, now I'm thinking swimmers really have an advantage because they learn throughout their whole exercise is how they're breathing.

Yeah. Yep. They're very, they have to be very mindful of how they breathe. So, so there is a breath for literally everything. So I like to think of the breath in three different gears. Uh, the first gear is in and out through the nose. Okay. The second gear is in through the nose, out through the mouth. So when you're at rest, the most appropriate way to breathe would be in and out through your nose, anywhere from four to six seconds in, four to six seconds out. so that's going to be a calm, gentle breath. You're not necessarily breathing in fully and exhaling fully. You're just breathing into about 10% of your capacity. That's about 500 milliliters. So if somebody was sitting next to you, they wouldn't even know you're breathing. So it's calm, relaxed. If I put a feather under your nose, the feather should be barely moving. So the calmer our breath is, the more calm our nervous system is. I did a test in my house once, and I just had my wife bring me a bowl of water, filled it to the very top, and I put my nose to the edge. and I'm looking at the reflection in the water and I'm trying to create as few ripples in the water as I possibly can. And if you think about that, the faster I'm, if I was breathing, you know, quick and rapid, the water would be very rippled, but slow, gentle breathing, the water is going to be very still. So that represents the state of our nervous system. Now, if I'm exerting myself or if I'm talking, then I'm going to breathe in through my nose and then out through my mouth. If I'm going in a full out Sprint, then I'm going to breathe in and out through my mouth. And that makes a lot of sense because every time I breathe in and out, my lungs are going to expand and contract. My diaphragm is going to rapidly move up and down, and that's going to help my heart squeeze blood. Your diaphragm is known as your second heart. Your third heart in Chinese medicine is your calf muscles. So you actually have three major pumps in your body. You have your, your heart, you have your diaphragm, and you have your calf muscles. assistant: and they pump blood from the bottom of the body back upwards. So that's why rebounding can be very powerful or the moving and shaking can be really powerful cuz it moves a lot of energy from the lower extremities back up to the heart. So the diaphragm plays a crucial role and in, in our breath work. That's why the trigger point work could be a good place for people to start. And then what we wanted to start doing when we think, think of breath work is we want to ask ourselves, how do I want to feel? that's the first question because just like what direction do I want to go in is going to change the way you breathe. So if you want to feel calm, if you want to be in what we call a coherent state, you want to be creative, you want to be good at problem solving, then four to six seconds in, four to six seconds out is the way I would breathe. If you wanted to feel balanced and center your nervous system, you could do something called alternate nostril breathing. so alternate nostril breathing is where you breathe in and out through one nostril. Okay. And then you breathe in and out through the other nostril. So you would do this back and forth for about three to five minutes, and that would connect both of your hemispheres of your brain. Wow. Now, if you wanted to feel more energized, so if you wanted to feel, you know, like more in a sympathetic state, then the easiest way to think of this is like you're steering the car. So when you want to accelerate, that's sympathetic that you would press on the pedal on the right, your accelerator. So if you wanted to increase your sympathetic tone, then you would breathe in and out through your right nostril. If you wanted to calm down and go more into a parasympathetic tone, then you would breathe in and out through your left nostril. Kind of think of it like hitting the brake. So you can cover the nostril. What some people might even do is put a cotton ball in their nose. and that will force them to breathe more through one nostril versus the other. So that's one, those are ways that you can minimize.

So before we get too far there, I want to make sure we explain to people, because some people don't know, understand sympathetic, parasympathetic, explain in your words the difference. And then you mentioned Vegas, our vagal nerve, like what is that?

Sure. So sympathetic is our essentially simply put our fight or flight response. so our autonomic nervous system, which controls, which is responsible for pretty much all the background functions and features that are happening, our, our breath, our respiratory rate, digestion, you know, immune system function, all those things that are happening in the background that we don't really think about that's happening thanks to our autonomic nervous system. And the autonomic nervous system has two major divisions, the sympathetic division and the parasympathetic division.

The sympathetic is our fight or flight response. So if a lion, s for stress.

Everyone thinks s for stress, sympathetic stress.

There you go.

That's a good way to put it. So think of a lion walking into your room. There would be a predictable response based on your belief system that this lion's going to kill me. Your body goes into a state of survival. Now, what's interesting about survival is that your body can't heal and doesn't heal and repair when you're in a state of survival. So our immune system shuts down, our blood sugar goes up, our blood pressure goes up, our heart rate goes up, our respiration increases. Everything that you're doing is primed to keep you alive. What also happens is the blood from the trunk now goes to the arms and legs so that you can run away or fight off whatever is attacking you or chasing you. The opposite of that is the parasympathetic nervous system or the parasympathetic division of the autonomic nervous system. This is our rest, digest, repair, rejuvenate, restore, reproduce, division of our nervous system. Every goal that somebody has, better digestion, better reproductive health, better sleep, better focus. All of those things are what people crave. And that's when that happens when they're in that parasympathetic side of the nervous system.

Makes total sense.

So many people these days are sympathetic dominant because of life, right? These days, life can be pretty stressful. Maybe they're kids, maybe they're work, maybe their finances, maybe, you know, politics, whatever it might be. You know, it just seems like there's just so much on our plates, more so than there used to be when I was growing up, and certainly more than when our grandparents and great grandparents.

So it's interesting because, so it's not that stress is bad. It's actually important at sometimes like, like you said, there's a lion in the room. There's somebody cuts you off driving, like you gotta pay attention. There's, there's times your child falls in the pool. Like those are, you need that stress response. But what you are saying is if we're living in that stress response, if that is your dominant state, then there's never a time for rest and repair. So that is where disease creeps up or disease cannot go away. Did I, did I say that right? is that?

Yeah, that's a, that's a good way to put it, right? We need those acute, those acute bouts of stress that we're primed for. What we're not primed for and designed for is for chronic persistent stress. And it's that chronic persistent stress that creates issues for people because they never recover properly from the previous stressor.

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Yeah, it can create definitely more stress. Sometimes even exercise for somebody who's, who's sympathetic dominant. Right. More intense exercise could actually create a problem for them too. So a big part, a big thing for a lot of people to focus on, as I know you are a big fan of, is recovery. How well are you recovering? One of my mentors, the late Charles Poliquin, the first question he would ask as elite athletes is, how well do you sleep, not how much do you bench? And so, you know, that would catch them off guard because they were not expecting that.

Totally.

And so are the quality of our life is really dependent on the quality of our recovery from the previous day or week or month. And many people are indebted to that recovery. And so they never really feel themselves. And so when their body doesn't respond the way they expect it to, they push themselves harder. Yeah. They create more recovery debt. And so for a lot of people, it's slowing down not just their breath, but their lifestyle and their daily practices. and getting slower is actually what can help them. What's really interesting for the nervous system is to get more parasympathetic. One of the ways to do that is to slow down our breath, to lengthen our exhale. So for you to breathe in for two seconds, breathe out for four, breathe in for four seconds, breathe out for six. Anything that we do to lengthen our exhale is going to shift us into a more parasympathetic state. Think of something like humming. right? You might breathe in for a couple of seconds, but when you're humming, you're breathing out for a prolonged period of time. Makes sense.

It's hard to be mad when you're humming, right?

You just feel that's even that you think of like the ohm, that's where that's probably coming from. Like that's right. You're lengthening your exhale, but what also relaxes your nervous system is moving slow. So if you think about it, how, if, if you were in fight or flight, you'd be moving very quick.

Yeah.

But if you're parasympathetic, you'd be close to still. So some of that, those movements that are, that Tai Chi.

Yeah.

Yeah. So Tai Chi can be beneficial, but even like, you know, even the intentional slowing down of, Hey, if you're going to go get a cup of coffee, we'll go grab some water or go to the bathroom, right? Just pay attention to how fast am I moving? Am I hurrying to get there? Because then you're shifting into fight or flight, or am I slow and intentional with my movement? So even in our daily practice, we can slow down what we're doing and that's going to tell our nervous system that we're safe and also help shift.

It into a more parasympathetic state. Yeah, I'm Sasha and I'm so committed to this. And for those of you, some of you are listening going, you,'re more like Sasha, you're getting this, this resonates, and some of you might be more like me, where I feel I live in a sympathetic state and I'm not saying that that's a good thing. It's definitely not a good thing. It is what kind of makes me type A and get things done and all that. But what I will tell you on the counter side, even though I'm definitely working on what you're saying throughout the day, my sleep game is strong, my wind down, my recovery, all that is strong for this reason. so we do have to treat this like a seesaw. And if you know you're going to live in this high stress place and you're like, but I, even if you're working on during the day, we've got to master at least that other side. So like if you were to look at my sleep trackers and how I, like that is so solid, so strong. And we're going to talk about breathing while we sleep in a minute, but you can counterbalance parts that you feel that you can't control with this recovery side. One thing that you told me, Sasha, and I was asking about mouth taping, and I don't mouth tape. And the reason I don't mouth tape is I. I breathe out of my nose like I. And I caught myself. You told me that some people will naturally put their tongue on the roof of their mouth to calm them down. And I started noticing that is literally how I breathe. I close my mouth and. tongue goes on my, and when I'm stressed or when I'm falling asleep, that is literally the position I go to. And you pointed out that kids that suck their thumb, that's what they're doing.

Can you talk a little bit more about that? Yeah, absolutely. So there is a magic button at the roof of our mouth just behind the front, two teeth that actually soothes our nervous system. And so children, especially those who have tongue ties, and a tongue tie is when the little frenulum on the bottom of your tongue, that little stringy part on the bottom of your tongue, when that's too tight or short. And so children cannot then put their tongue in the roof of their mouth. So they end up using their thumb as a spacer to push that magic button, or they might use a pacifier in order to do that. And they instantly calm themselves. The mother's nipple will also hit that sweet spot when a child is breastfeeding or even bottle feeding. The nipple of the bottle hits that spot. and instantly soothes them. Now children who have a tongue tie and who use a pacifier and or their thumb to hit that spot, the consequence of that is it pushes their upper palate upwards. The top of our mouth is the bottom of our sinus cavity. And so when we push our hard palate upwards, it creates a smaller airway for us to breathe through. So not only do these children have a hard time, of course, eventually they stop sucking their thumb, and their tongue sits in the bottom of their mouth. And now they've pushed their palate upwards, which makes it even harder for them to hit that spot. And now they become habitual mouth breathers. And what's fascinating about that is people who are habitual mouth breathers, I think you'll appreciate this. Of course, they tend to be more into a fight or flight state, but they also change the foods that they crave. So somebody who breathes through their mouth. requires more sugar to taste the sweetness. So for example, somebody who's a mouth breather might need four, you know, spoons of coffee for the same sweetness as somebody who only needs one spoon of sugar for their coffee. So it changes the way we taste our food. The way we breathe, whether we breathe through our mouth or nose, also affects our immune system. So for example, when we breathe through our nose, our nose is designed to perfect the air. It pressurizes the air so we get 20% more oxygen to the lungs. It, it temperature regulates the air, moisture regulates the air, and it also cleanses the air. Our nose is lined. The mucosal lining of our nose produces something called nitric oxide. Nitric oxide kills viruses and bacteria on contact. It's like your own personal filter. Exactly. Exactly. So you have your own air filter built right into your face, but you have to be breathing through your nose. And when we breathe through our mouth, it dries out our saliva. mouth breathing is the number one cause of cavities. And it also, when we dry out our saliva, it starts affecting our gum health. And we all know by now that our oral health is closely correlated to our brain health. So plaquing on the teeth leads to plaquing on the brain. And if our gums are not healthy, it also affects our cardiovascular health. So many of the bacteria in our mouth, if you look at plaques in the, on the heart, will be found there as well. So these bacteria make their way into our cardiovascular system through our mouth. So preserving oral health by breathing through the nose actually makes such a huge difference on our immune system, makes a huge difference on our cardiovascular system, on our nervous system, and so on and so forth.

If, and this is why you suggest mouth taping for people to force it out of their nose.

Yeah. So mouth taping, essentially. So here's who should mouth tape. I think that's a good place to start. People who, about 66 of people breathe through their mouth while they sleep. So statistically, most of the people listening to this are going to be breathing through their mouth while they sleep. What mouth taping does or even chin strapping. So if you don't like the idea of perhaps taping your lips closed, then you could use a strap that goes over your head and just underneath your chin. and that keeps your mouth in a closed position. So you start, so you breathe through your nose, right? If you're in bed for eight hours a day, you want to be breathing through your nose because that's going to help you get more into a parasympathetic state. It's going to decrease the number of times or eliminate the number of times you wake up in the middle of night to use the restroom because mouth breathing is a diuretic. You're going to start dreaming again. Your blood pressure is going to drop. You're going to be breathing in a more parasympathetic state. So your cortisol levels are going to drop. And you're going to have way more, better recovery when you wake up in the morning. You know, some people wake up more tired in the morning than when they went to bed. So it kind of begs the question, what happened while they were sleeping?

Right.

They should have more energy, right? That's when we should have peak energy levels, right? When we wake up. And it's because of dysfunctional nighttime breathing and mouth taping doesn't have to be sealing your mouth. You don't have to seal your mouth. Just putting a piece of tape vertically over the mouth. allows you to still talk if you need to, still breathe through your mouth if you need to, but it just keeps your mouth in a closed position so that you're not breathing through it at night.

Now, what about somebody that cannot breathe through their nose? So, like, for instance, my husband would suffocate if you put mouth tape on him. He has, he just has that blockage in his nose. He cannot breathe through it. And he gets frustrated when I suggest, like, in fact, he'll snore in the middle of the night and I'll pinch his nose closed to get him to stop snoring. and he swats me away. But that's how, what happens. So what does someone do that in that situation? They just cannot breathe through their nose.

Yeah, it's a great question. So some people may have broken their nose. Some people might have deviated septums. Some people might have congestion, right? Some people might have narrow airways and, and air, and passages for them to breathe through. So the cool thing about the nose is that the more you breathe through your nose habitually during the day, the more it opens up. so, you know, for people who have been habitual mouth breathers, for example, if initially it's going to feel a little bit constrained when they breathe through their nose. Yeah. But as they breathe through their nose more, they will, that passage will start to open up. So that's one thing to keep in mind. Another thing that people can do is they can wear devices. So you can wear something like an intake. An intake is where you put two magnets on your nose on the outside, and then you put this device. It's a, it's not an electronic device, but it's just this little boomerang shaped thing that you put on, and that.

Opens up your I've seen that.

I've seen people wearing that. Yeah. So it just makes it easier for people to breathe. For some people, we recommend something called Nasya oil. So it's an Ayurvedic formula, N-A-S-Y-A. Nasya oil is an oil that you put into your sinuses before you go to bed, and that helps lubricate the sinuses and can help it make it easier for people to breathe through their nose. And then some people, we recommend a Nasya. So a Nasya is a way to rinse the sinuses out. So if there's any debris or accumulation that's taking place, we want to clear that out. and then the other thing that people want to make sure that they're using is some sort of air purification system in their bedroom. So it's just pulling out whatever's in the air that can cause congestion.

Because if your nose is not working properly as a filter, we need to make sure we're filtering it the other way too.

Right, exactly. And then the last thing I want to recommend is something called nose clearing exercises. So for people who have sinus issues or who have a cold, you can within 30 seconds unclog your nose just by doing a nose clearing exercise. So you would just take a few cleansing breaths. take a, do a relaxed exhale, plug your nose and hold your breath. And then you just move your head around in a variety of different directions and do that three or four times and your nose will open right up.

Wow. That's great. Okay. I'm gonna have him make sure he listens to this. This is important.

Yeah. See if it'll help him. And then, of course, some people have severely deviated septum, so.

And that would be a surgery almost. Yeah.

Yeah. So they may require surgery or some sort of medical intervention for.

What about you had mentioned earlier that your son, I believe, was getting a ton of cavities and you're like, what the heck? He doesn't have sugar. He's brushing his teeth. What's going on here? And you connected this to mouth breathing, correct?

Yeah. Thank you for bringing that up. So mouth breathing is actually the number one cause of cavities. I was shocked by that. And this isn't permission to go eat sugar, right? And destroy your teeth that way. But what happens when we breathe through our mouth? It dries out our saliva. Saliva is very protective of our teeth, right? It maintains a healthy pH as well in the mouth, and so it keeps the bacteria at bay. People who breathe through their mouth habitually end up drying out that saliva and creates the perfect conditions for the bacteria to start eating away at our teeth and causing cavities. So we went to the dentist and the dentist said, you know, Mr. Patel, we have good news and bad news. We thought we were perfect parents, of course, until we got this news cuz we were doing all the right things dietarily. And, it turns out he had a whole bunch of cavities. But the good news was, is these were his, baby teeth, so they're all gonna fall out. So that we didn't have to put him through, you know, torture us on the dentist chair. But, it just kind of a light bulb went off in our head, like, what are we doing wrong? Because we thought we were doing everything right.

Or think about the kids get in trouble for cavities. I mean, like, I, I mean, I used to get yelled at for getting cavities. like, yeah, I was, I wasn't brushing my teeth well or whatever it was.

Yeah, exactly. And, and our parents, like, we didn't know at the time that we should have been paying attention to how he was breathing. So fast forward a few years later, we go back to the dentist and the dentist comes back to us with more bad news. And the dentist is like, well, he doesn't have enough room for all of his teeth to come in, so we're gonna have to pull some teeth. And, you know, me as a chiropractor, I'm like, God, don't make no junk like that. There's got to be something else that we can do. so we took him to three other dentists and they all said the same thing and we were just kind of at our the end of our rope and then we found an airway dentist so I recommend this to everyone especially if you have young children or grandchildren you can go to askthedentist.com www.askthedentist.com and so these are dentists that are not just focused on your oral health but they're focused on your airway as well because the structure of our, of our jaw is going to create the structure of our sinuses. And so what ends up happening these days is many children have smaller and smaller jaws. So if you look back at our ancestral jaw lines and our ancestral jaw structures, our ancestors used to have big, massive jaws. They didn't have their wisdom teeth pulled. They didn't have dentists pulling teeth out of their kids faces, right? They had these big jaws. And the reason they had these big jaws, one, because their nutrition was more wholesome. but two is because they were chewing hard things. And so as adults, and especially as children, most of our food is pureed, right? So you give a child a smoothie, it's super healthy and nutrient dense. So we've addressed the nutrient density part of it, but they're not stimulating their jaw. They're not chewing. If you look at it, if you give a dog a bone, it starts chewing it. In fact, if you give a child a toothbrush, the first thing they do is start biting it and chewing it. in India, my parents were, where they grew up, grew up, they didn't have toothbrushes. So they were talking about, they're like 80, my dad's 80 years old. They didn't have toothbrushes. They would use neem branches and they would chew on the branch. And the oils from the branch would, you know, create healthy teeth for them. But the stimulus of chewing on that branch and then bristling the branch and then brushing their teeth with it, they had perfect teeth. no cavities, perfect dental arches, no sinus related issues, no cavities, like nothing. They didn't have orthodontists or dentists, and they had these amazing teeth. And it's because they were chewing on hard things to stimulate their jaw to produce strong teeth, but also a nice open airway and jawline for them.

So good.

It's so, it's so interesting that human beings are the only animals that have crooked teeth. yeah. So all animals in nature are perfectly straight teeth. Well, I don't know.

I think some llamas don't. I think I've seen some funny llama pictures that don't. Maybe they're, maybe they're AI generated. They always show funny llama smile pictures, so I don't. But I didn't, I didn't, I need.

To think about that. Like, you're right. Dogs, other animals have, they don't need braces. They have straight teeth. Exactly. That's why. So, so, so with my son, just to finish the story. We ended up finding an airway dentist who instead of pulling his teeth, put in an arch expander. So they expanded his arch and he used to complain about having a hard time breathing through his nose. And once we put the arch expansion in, now he can breathe freely through his nose. So it was not the most attractive thing for him and having something in your mouth isn't always fun. But I know he'll thank us later because now he can breathe without any obstruction and we didn't have to pull any of his teeth as well.

That's wild. Talk to you about nitric oxide for a minute. When I met you, you were doing this little test with people. We put these strips in our mouth to see if we had low or normal nitric oxide. And you were sharing some of the benefits around that. And I was sure I'd be low, but I actually was not. You said I was one of the few that was not probably because I don't mouth breath, but can you explain what that is and why that's important? Yeah.

First of all, I want to acknowledge you because, you know, pretty much everyone in that room had low nitric oxide levels and yours came back like spot on. So I was surprised.

I didn't think it was, but yeah.

So it's a combination of how you breathe, how much you move your body, because movement also increases nitric oxide. Also sun exposure increases nitric oxide as well.

So it's a combination of things. All those things I do. And plus you asked me if I.

Eat arugula and I'm like, yeah, I do. I eat all that so. Yeah.

So you're checking off all the boxes.

You're living your message, which is beautiful. And so nitric oxide is a very important signaling molecule in our body. It has three main functions, and I'm sure many that will be discovered soon. So one of them is to, it, it, it kills viruses and bacteria on contact. That's why our nasal cavity is lined with nitric oxide. In fact, many people might be familiar with the medication Viagra. Viagra is a medication that regurgitates and recycles the nitric oxide that we produce.

Okay.

Viagra was initially developed as a blood pressure lowering medication. And then they discovered another thing.

They discovered an interesting side effect, yeah.

And that's what made it a blockbuster drug. In fact, during COVID people were, doctors were prescribing nitric oxide to their patients, I'm sorry, Viagra to their patients because of the nitric oxide effects that it has. Wow. so nitric oxide is an immune enhancing molecule. The other thing nitric oxide does is it relaxes smooth muscle. So in our blood vessels, we have smooth muscles that either constrict or relax to open up the, the blood vessels. So nitric oxide relaxes the smooth muscle thus lowering blood pressure as well. The third thing that nitric oxide does is because of that effect, it lowers blood pressure, but it also increases micro circulation. so dementia, for example, is caused by a variety of different things. However, one of those things is vascular dementia, and the hardest part for the body to get blood flow to is the brain, because the heart has to work against gravity and the blood vessels are really tiny. And so nitric oxide helps open up those blood vessels and helps get more blood to the brain. So, you know, if you want better cognitive function, better sexual health, better immune health, better blood pressure, which, you know, hypertension was the number one comorbidity during COVID So we think of hypertension, we'd think, oh, it's not a big deal, but it was a number one comorbidity for hospitalization during COVID So it's actually quite a big deal. And so when the way we breathe increases nitric oxide. So for example, breathing through your nose increases nitric oxide six fold. Humming increases nitric oxide 15 fold. So just by doing something as simple as humming, we can enhance our immune defenses.

I'm connecting some dots here. So like, for instance, my husband has a cold this whole week. We sleep in the same bed. I didn't get the cold. He gets more colds than me. But based on what you're saying, he's a mouth breather, so he's probably lower on nitric oxide. So now what you just connected was that that's a huge virus fighter. That's a huge, that's going to help. So if someone is they know they're a mouth breeder, should they be taking nitric oxide?

Yep. So nitric oxide can definitely be helpful for people. One thing to keep in mind, just further connecting the dots for everyone listening, is that the mouth is the dirtiest part of our body. Sounds kind of weird to think that, right?

Yeah.

We're so conscious of what goes into our mouth, but from a bacterial standpoint, it's the dirtiest part of our body. And so every time we breathe in through our mouth, we're breathing in air and it's going right into our lungs. Makes total sense. Our lung microbiome. But when we breathe in through our nose, it's perfecting the air, it's conditioning the air, pressurizing it, all those things. And so then we have nice clean air going into our lungs. So people who have, who are habitual mouth breathers are also more prone to.

Upper respiratory tract infections as well. Makes total sense. Gosh, lots of light bulb moments here.

This is so good.

So I want to circle back to kind of something I said at the very beginning. We talked about stress, anxiety, nervous system, even things, I'm not talking about maybe diagnosed ADHD, but things that presenting like that. So it is that nervous energy. Just to kind of recap, what do you want those people to know that are living in sympathetic, that are feeling anxious? Give us kind of like the, these are your marching orders, these are the takeaways. This is what I want you to focus on.

Yeah, I think the first thing that most people can do is just raise awareness around their breath, right? It's something that we've been doing our whole lives and we just assume we're doing it just fine because we're alive. However, that's probably, in my opinion, one of the greatest hidden opportunities, literally right under our noses, for us to pay attention to. Breath is, in my opinion, the lead domino. And because it regulates the nervous system, that's one reason. The second reason is because the biggest lymph nodes in our body are underneath our diaphragm. So the way we breathe also regulates our lymphatic system. The diaphragm is referred to the second heart, so it helps pumping our blood throughout our body, and it's the start of our immune system as well. So there's so many things that are connected to the way we breathe and how we breathe. So raising awareness around our breath is probably one of the most important things that people can do. and the way we do that is by using BJ Fogg's formula. We call it the behavior map. So behavior equals motivation, ability, and prompt. So hopefully after today, you're motivated to breathe even just a little bit better. Right. Next is, do you have the ability to breathe better? All of us have the ability to slow down how much we're breathing. Right. That's an easy place for people to start. And the third thing is the prompt. So think of something. that you think of the most. So, Natalie, what's the thing you think of the most each day?

My to-do list.

Okay. That's fine.

I'm being honest.

Yeah, there's no right or wrong answer.

When I wake up, yeah.

So your to-do list is the thing you think about the most. So now I want you to think of your breath next.

So every time you have that thought, you think, what's my breath around it? Exactly.

So you just kind of anchor your breath to something that you're already thinking of. So it's no additional work for you to think of it, right? You just anchor it to something you're already doing.

And so I believe that to be true because this whole time I'm talking to you, I'm very aware of my breath because we're talking about it. So just that is showing me that that's very possible.

Yeah, absolutely. And so for me, it's the thing I, it's the thing I think about the most. Um, because I anchor so many different things to my breath. I just asked myself, okay, this is a task I have to do. How do I have to breathe to accomplish the task in the most efficient way possible? Yeah. Because I'm my body is already gonna use my breath as a tool. What if I assisted my body in using the breath as a tool? So good. And so it's just, we're just leaning in. We're just leaning in and helping our body do what it's designed to do. So the first marching order is to raise awareness. The second marching order is to breathe through your nose as much as you possibly can. Third marching order is to slow down your breath, particularly exhale. So some interesting fun facts. in the Framingham study, they found that the greatest predictor of lifespan was lung capacity. So the more you could breathe, the deeper you could breathe, the longer you would live. And that makes sense, right? Because at the end of somebody's life, their breath gets really shallow. So something like an incentive spirometer, which is a $20 device you can get on Amazon, and practicing increasing your lung capacity, which you can increase very quickly, very rapidly, very affordably, is a great tool. And then the second thing, or the, I guess the fourth or fifth thing, but the second fun fact that I wanted to share is that the slower we breathe, the longer we live. So the fastest way to slow down the aging process is to actually breathe less. Wow. Most people habitually over breathe. So we take about on average 15 to 20 breaths per minute. If you can go down to four to six breaths per minute, your nervous system is going to be way calmer. you're going to conserve tons of energy, you're going to repair your body throughout the day, and you're going to slow down the aging process. The other thing that happens is, and this is counter counter-intuitive for most people, but the slower you breathe, the more oxygen you get out of each breath. So it's something called the Bore Effect. So if you were to, if I were sitting here breathing, yeah, I'm not getting any oxygen. because what's happening is all that CO2 is getting packed into my lungs and barely any oxygen is getting delivered to the alveoli. But if I breathe nice and slow, there's actually more oxygen delivery taking place. This is called the Bohr effect. And so with each breath, we take only about 20% of the oxygen is actually absorbed. So by slowing down our breath, we get closer to, you know, 80 to 100% of the oxygen being absorbed.

So good, so good. Sasha, this is so good today. I learned so much. Uh, thank you so much, for this. Where can people learn more? Where can they follow you? If they want to go deeper around all of this?

Yeah. So I have a, a free set of tools I've created around breath work and they can go to breathworkwithsasha.com, there they'll find a fully guided, you know, 75 minute breath work experience. You can put in your headphones, play it, and I walk you through the entire process to release trauma, to release stress, to kind of reset your nervous system. I also have got a guide called Breathe like this, not that. So it teaches people situational breathing, how to breathe when you're checking email, how to breathe when you're exercising, how to breathe if you're having a panic attack, an asthma attack, how to breathe when you want to fall asleep faster. So that's something that they can get access to. And it's all free. I just drip it out in a series of emails for them. And it's my gift to everyone in order for them to breathe a little bit better or perhaps a lot better, because when they do this, Amazing things will start happening. It's like I get emails every single day from people telling me how something as simple as teaching them how to breathe created a transformation for them.

So good. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for today.

Thank you. It's my pleasure and honor.

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