Just Breathe with Niraj Naik

Well, hello, ladies and gents, Robert Sykes, ketosavage.com, and today I've got special guest Niraj Naik on the line and we dive deep into breathwork. How to manipulate it, how to do some breathwork practices to make the most of oxygenating your cells, leveraging CO2, switching from sympathetic to parasympathetic at will based off of how you are breathing and different breath work practices. So very interesting conversation. Thoroughly enjoyed it. I've got no doubt that you will have some takeaways from this one. So without further delay, sit back, relax and enjoy the conversation.

And we are live. Niraj, how are you, sir?

Fantastic, my friend.

I'm excited to be chatting with you. I've had several people on the guest and we've all kind of known that the importance of like oxygen and breathing is obviously very vital to our livelihood and existence. But you are a master with all things proper, optimized breath work. So this is something that I definitely need to work on because I am guilty, as I'm sure most of us are, of just living a very hurried life and not taking time to just simply breathe. So I'm excited to peel the curtain back on that man, and just learn from you.

Yeah. Or not breathe. So actually the paradigm shift that I'm going to share with you is that actually breathing less is better than breathing more. And there's a whole science that I can explain the mechanism of to support that very kind of counterintuitive claim that I've just made.

I like counterintuitive, controversial things, man. So I definitely want to peel the curtain back on the science there. What got you into the breath work in the first place? What was the catalyst for you going down that rabbit hole?

Yeah, so it's actually something that happened by accident. It's not like it was something I was searching for. It happened because I actually had quite a battle within the system in the corporate world as a pharmacist, trying to get my kind of renegade ideas out to the masses. And I had actually got very successful getting people off medication, using very similar.

Kind of diet plan to what you're talking about, but more like focus on first step as just stop eating processed foods that come in boxes, go on a non factory diet. That's what I'd call it. And just teaching people how to actually make their own food again. Right. So. So I felt like as a pharmacist I had a very important place, you know, because people would trust everything I said and often they wouldn't have Time for the doctor. And the doctor doesn't have much knowledge when it comes to lifestyle changes and interventions like food and diet, believe it or not. So I got really good at that, but it actually got me promoted. Head office of one of the biggest supermarket chains to do a very, like, could have been a high impact, very powerful project with them, which is a healthy shopping list service which would get customized meals directly sent to people's homes, you know, through their home shopping platform. And then six months into it, they decided to shelve the idea. And I had a real crush to my soul and my purpose. And I was just confused. I was like, why? And I was facing having to go back to my cubicle job as a pharmacist and the stress and everything, the impact and the tension and all that just exploded. Well, I kind of had a, you know, a serious existential crisis. Ended up boom, getting hit with a autoimmune disease called ulcerative colitis. You may be familiar with that. And I was now housebound, basically shedding blood for almost a year. And this was where I learned like the true, you know, mechanisms of getting healthy because none of the medications worked.

The I was facing two choices. Either be guinea pig for a drug hasn't been tested or I have my colon removed. So I was only like 32 at the time. So, you know, wearing a nappy and having a colostomy bag wasn't what I really wanted. And I had actually surrendered to the whole medical system. I thought, you know, I basically given up hope for myself. I lost my purpose in life, my faith in God. Especially when you're suffering like I was, I've. You're spending like 40, 50 times a day on the toilet. You know, that's, it's really horrible symptoms. So, you know, it's kind of like you're shitting yourself, you know, it's like fear manifest, you know. So.

Luckily someone came to the rescue. A yoga teacher in the UK called Swamiyamakananda. She said to me, look, actually you've got a gift here. If you can turn this around with your tenacity and passion to help people, you could become an amazing role model and example for others by reversing the situation. And it gave me like a hope back. So I had to let go of my disbelief because I'm very scientifically programmed and to suddenly take up this woo woo type stuff, which is actually for my own culture. But we're so educated out of it. As, you know, first second generation.

Indian immigrants to the uk, we don't think that things that come from India are considered cool back then, you know, now we all know the benefits of this stuff. So anyway, she taught me some simple breathing techniques and the.

Results were so profound. Just the stress release and the pain relief that I got from just simple rhythmic breathing, extending exhalation, holding your breath in various ways was mind blowing. I couldn't believe it. So I was like, you know, my curious mind thrown down the rabbit hole to learn as much as I could about this amazing wealth of knowledge and wisdom we have from India. So I went really deep into the breathing techniques pranayama and really studied that. I discovered an amazing medical doctor in the uk, sorry, in India called Prakash Marsh, who actually then ended up becoming one of my teachers. And then we co created the curriculum for Soma breath. And what I also went and fell back in love with was in music because I used to be in music. I used to run raves in the UK before I became a pharmacist. When I was at university I had a massive rave actually for 2,000 people every month for three years. It was epic. And that's what I thought I was going to do actually. I thought that's what I was going to do. But something inside me also. Well, Mike, I've learned now, you know, your soul will choose a different path if you're not aligned with the path you're on, right. It will do something, it will give you a disease or it will self sabotage or something until you, you get in line, right, with what you really want to do. And I realized that music back then, that was making and all that was great. We're bringing people together, celebrating life. But it was very hedonistic. It was creating a crazy culture of a lot of people getting off their heads every weekend. And you know, I love the music, but the lifestyle that came with it, not so much. And you know, I couldn't handle it. You know, growing up, getting into my 20s and beyond, like hardcore raving was what my escape. But that also took its toll on me, right. So what I realized that music actually has a spiritual purpose and it's been around for thousands of years, you know, hidden away in these like Vedic texts as a method of transformation. And there's an entire book dedicated to music and it's called Sama Yoga, a whole system of using music therapeutically. So I started to really experiment with that and started to combine the breathing techniques because a lot of breathing techniques involve rhythms, rhythm of breathing that invokes certain effects on the body. So I went deep into that and started to make my own therapy for myself for reprogramming the unconscious mind. Because I also learned that mantra is a form of self hypnosis, reprogramming the operating system, the mind that gets corrupted with thought viruses. And there's those thought viruses that cause negative beliefs, limiting beliefs, and, you know, bad habits that cause disease in the first place. So, boom, I found a way to reprogram myself that works super good. And then I started sharing it and, and so I uploaded onto YouTube, got really cool results. People were like asking me for more. And then I went really deep into figuring out how can I get this out there to the, to the mainstream to get it to people. And I started to build in my own online platform that took off. And along the way I met Wim Hof, became his right hand man for a bit and he was like, this is the front man, this is the guy. And I actually ended up producing the soundtrack to the Wim Hof method that you can Hear on his YouTube channel and courses. And then I wanted to go deeper into the whole pharmacy of techniques that Pranayama has and put music and science to those things. So me and Prakash Marsh joined forces, create the curriculum to Soma Breath. Started off in this amazing island that I was living on now in Koh Phangan in Thailand, where with a bunch of mates, we got together and built the Soma Breath school, which then over the last like six years or so has really scaled into an amazing transformational school with music as a core part of it with over three and a half thousand instructors growing fast. And now I'm like attracting amazing people like yourself and working with other kind of known, you know, like influencers in this space. People like Asim Malhotra that you've heard of, who's big proponent of also, you know, the keto diet and, and breath work and, and so on. So, yeah, amazing stuff is happening now because I've chosen the right path rather than the wrong path. But what I realized was I was in the wrong system. You know, the corporate system is not where I belonged. I'm a bit more renegade than that. And, and that's why we're talking to each other right now.

I love it, man. I love it. So going back in the beginning when you started to have all these issues flaring up and it was manifesting in the ulcerative colitis, you think that was predominantly because of the stress and anxiety and depression that you were experiencing with all the mishap from a career standpoint, like There wasn't any type of. You probably didn't have your diet dialed in perfectly prior to that. But that probably wasn't the main catalyst. It was more so the stress induced.

I think, yeah, I think what that does is it leads you to, to create bad habits and make bad decisions. So it wasn't just the career, it was relationships. They're all linked, right? It's like a domino effect. One thing stresses you out like severely and then that knocks on to everything else in your life. So you know, my like actual lifestyle choices had got better. Like I, because I was now going to be the face of health of this big corporation. But I also had years of abuse right from being a raver. So when you get a stress impact, it becomes like a ticking time bomb and boom, it can manifest as disease. If you're weak in certain areas of the body. Like for me it's the colon. And also according to the ayurvedic system, it shows that my energy type, which is known as vata pitta, this combination, we're more prone to colon issues, especially ulcers in the colon under severe stressful situations. That's where the disease will more likely manifest. So I figured all this stuff out and, and a lot of it's down to environment, like who you're surrounding yourself with. If you're in the wrong environment, your body will kind of do something to shift you out of that environment. Whether you make a conscious decision to change your soul, if you don't listen to that will make that change and it will give you a disease. It will make you self sabotage or do something that makes you change your course of direction. And if you keep ignoring that, it gets worse and worse and worse. And a lot of people do that because they mask the symptoms with substances, with alcohol, with drugs, with prescription medications, with comfort food and comfort eating, right? So I was indirectly doing all that and it was, you know, that one hit, that one big kick in the gut literally from this big corporation that set me off.

Right.

And so it's like a chain reaction. But a lot of this will affect stress. How you breathe, bringing it back to breathing. And how you breathe is very much linked to your, how you think, right? Your thinking and breathing is linked. Your breath is a mirror of the mind. So if you're like a stressed out person, if you're like frantic, if you, even if you're overly excited, your fight or flight mode is switched on, right? It's on. Adrenaline's pumping going through your system. Even if you're extremely Enthusiastic and high on life. If you don't know how to control your breath consciously, you will sometimes develop bad breathing habits like mouth breathing, and you'll over breathe and hyperventilate. And a lot of people suffer from what I call probably the biggest disease in the world, chronic mild hyperventilation, which is something that's totally overlooked and people don't fully understand it. But I've gone really deep into this and what that means is you get less oxygen to your body tissue cells, not more, when you hyperventilate. Even if it's a mild form of hyperventilation, where you may be talking like I am for long periods of time throughout the day, which I was for many years as a pharmacist, rushing, rushing, rushing, you know, talking, talking, talking. And also you're not conscious anymore, you're on autopilot in a stress mode. And there you start to breathe in a faster rate than you normally should or would. And if you don't have time to recalibrate the breath, you'll start to get low oxygenation of your body tissue cells and you get vasoconstriction. You know, there's a lot of people suffer from hypertension because of this. And if you learn how to slow your breathing down, you will actually get more oxygen going to your body tissue cells, not more. There's a mechanism I can explain to you why that is and why the entire system of yoga, meditation, even and pranayama is all geared up and designed actually for one core result, right? Which is a beginning of enlightenment. And that is becoming super efficient using oxygen. We hardly need to breathe, because oxygen, my friend, is something we have a toxic, codependent relationship with. It's something that we can't live with and we can't live without, right? Because it causes oxidative stress. Every time you produce energy in the body, you're creating a little bit of stress. You're aging a little bit. So everyone listen to this. Right now you're aging a little bit as you breathe, unfortunately. So the yogis develop systems that train you to be so efficient using oxygen, you hardly need to breathe while your breath rate slows right down. And they use meditation techniques as well to slow your breathing right down. This actually then makes you more adapted to low oxygen, which then means your body becomes more efficient using oxygen and you get less oxygen stress and you get better body tissue oxygenation. And this prevents you from getting these sorts of diseases I'm talking about in the long term if you, if you train like this. So this is what we teach in summer breath. We, we actually teach the system of becoming super oxygen efficient by giving you techniques that trains you to become really efficient using oxygen in the body through your mitochondria. And then what it does is it overall you're fine. A slowering, a lowering of your breathing rate and an ability to hold your breath for longer periods of time. That's one of the signs that you're becoming oxygen efficient if you can hold your breath for a certain length of time and beyond. And what it also does is it raises one of the most important gas in the body, CO2, which we've been told is this toxic gas that must be let go of at all costs. Right. Or is causing, you know, the climate change and we're all going to die because of too much CO2, right? I mean, that's a whole nother story we can go into later at some other time. But I have to tell you that carbon dioxide is your friend. It really is. It is the way you get oxygen from your red blood cells into your body tissue cells through a process called the Bohr effect. And if this, if this.

Mechanism is disrupted by hyperventilation, because that means you let go of the CO2, you get rid of too much CO2, because every time you breathe out, you breathe out CO2, you will get less oxygen into your cells. And this leads to all the problems I'm talking about.

I definitely want to dive into the science for, for you as having gone through, you know, the academic rigors involved in becoming a pharmacist. Like you said yourself, you're much more science driven. It's kind of. You got the analytical background. I do as well. Like my, my family all are scientists. So like this sounds woo, woo, as you said in the beginning, at what point you, you kind of like were at rock bottom with the physical manifestation of the colitis. But at what point or at what instance did you realize that the breath work was the, the limiting factor, like the game changing component?

So that was through the techniques that my swami taught me. So she taught me these reduced breathing techniques and also breath holding techniques and these reduced breathing techniques and also rhythmic breathing. There's one thing I need to add is the way we can change our physiological state. So from sympathetic or parasympathetic, just with breathing with a rhythm where you're extending your exhalation, like doubling your exhale time, breathing in for four beats, out for eight beats, for example, over and over, what that will do is it switches on the parasympathetic Puts you into rest and digest. Well, digest is incorrect to say that, but it puts you into a rest rejuvenation mode, okay? And that allows you to switch off stress for a moment and helps you get into a trance like states as well, where you can use guided meditation techniques to start reprogramming the autonomic nervous system. Because remember, autoimmune is your healthy cells, your immune cells attacking their healthy cells, thinking that they're foreign invaders. Now, here's the thing. If you go back from back in the evolutionary times, back to when we were single cell organisms in the sea, those cells decided one day, instead of fighting with each other, to collaborate with each other and to create a colony of cells which then became the first multicellular life forms. They came together based on trust, love, connection, collaboration, right? Then those cells multiplied and became eventually, through, you know, evolution, us. Okay? Or maybe there was some interfering through aliens or whatever, who knows? But we eventually evolved into who we are. So our cells are actually connected based on love. That's the real connection. That's based on. Now, autoimmune disease is a malfunction in this intelligence that we have where your immune system thinks healthy cells are evil cells that must be killed, right? This is what causes the disease symptoms. So what we're doing with this is with these guided meditation techniques and the breath, the breath is helping you to rewire and get into a more like kind of theta brainwave state where you can now communicate the unconscious mind and tell it, tell it that everything's okay because your environment is what you become. So if you're in a hostile environment, like a corporate head office, I don't. Have you ever worked in one? But they're like the most hostile environments. Everyone's out to get each other. You know, there's so much competition and so much cutthroat behavior in that me, very sensitive person, don't belong in that environment, right? So, you know, all of this added together with the distrust of the pharmaceutical system and the medical system and the loss of hope for humanity and seeing what was going on in the world, that really disturbed me through the eyes, the lens of the corporate head office. I was not in the right place, the right environment. So part of the healing is to kind of reframe past events. So guilt, shame, anger, fear, needs to be kind of rewired and transformed, transmuted into the opposite. And that is where healing comes from. But these slow, rhythmic breathing techniques also gets oxygen back into the body tissue cells. And because stress will cause contraction and tension and it's going to reduce blood flow as well. When you start to breathe in these gentle rhythms, you start to harmonize the biorhythms in the body. Because every function in your body is rhythmic in nature, right? And they're subservient to the rhythm of your breath. Your breathing patterns really affects your physiological functions. So this rhythmic breathing is really good for your body anyway. But then when you combine it with a certain pattern that switches off stress, that helps you to really relax and get into these trance days where you can reprogram yourself. And so the music also helps with that because the music has a groove to it. So when you breathe in a rhythm, breathing in beats, so I call it, you can really get into these amazing flow states just with the breath. It's like an amazing guided meditation. And then the guided meditation I record over the top, I call it neurosmatic programming now is a way of. It's like nlp, but you're bringing the body into it and the breath is a bridge between the mind and the body and it allows you to start to reprogram yourself. Like imagine you're an operating system and it gets thought viruses. Over time you can reformat this. So this is what I kind of delve into and what I'm explaining now is thousands of years of wisdom from ancient India, it's from Buddhism, it's from Tantra, it's from Pranayama, Yoga. All of these schools, these ancient schools, these actually the science based, in my opinion are all reprogramming tools. They're all about discovering who you are, how do you end up where you are now. And to change, you can go in there and change the very apps that are installed in your mind, your mind where in alignment with what you truly want. And this is the process of, I would say waking up, enlightenment, you know, is another word for that. But it's. Everyone has the ability to do this. And you know, you've seen the power of hypnotherapy, it works really well. The reason why is because it's the same process, but with a breath you can actually speed up this process of reprogramming and it can happen very fast. We've even done studies with Cambridge University. Now with my protocols I've developed which showed like how powerful this breath techniques are in comparison to psychedelics. They use to treat severe depression, like I had severe depression at the time. So psychedelics has a great use for this because it gets you into these altered states of consciousness that allows you to reprogram Right. And you know, I've also had another scientist called Jeff Taron who did one that showed how we quiet the default mode network, which is the brain's version of the ego, through these breath retention techniques, holding the breath. Also Cambridge showed that the breath holds is where a lot of the magic happens with this breath therapy form of therapy. And so a lot of what we teach is all about increasing your breath hold capacity because this is what is the measure of you become efficient using oxygen.

And that method you mentioned a few times, I may be mispronounced, the pariana or something.

It's called pranayama.

Pranayama. And what is that like if someone, you know Googles that, what's the Webster's definition of that?

So pranayama simply means. Prana means energy, Yama means control. And it's the first branch of yoga. It's like it's one of the most important things you do first in yoga, right? It's kind of been forgotten a bit in mainstream yoga, but it's the very important part and it's actually a pharmacy of different techniques you master that gives you the ability to manipulate energy in the body. And remember, energy is produced by oxygen coming into your body, combining with glucose and burning like a combustion engine in your mitochondria to produce ATP, life force energy, which drives all the function in life. So breathing has something to do with every function of your life. So with pranayama you have the ability to consciously control things you thought you had no control over, like your heart rate, your blood pressure, your digestive system, your immune system even, and your way you produce energy and you can become very efficient using oxygen with pranayama techniques. So pranayama is a little bit mystified in the whole yogic literature and stuff. So we've demystified it. Like my, the, the doctor who works with me in India, he is an incredible like yogi, but also knows how to translate Sanskrit, so he did an amazing translation of the ancient original texts. And through that we reverse engineered the whole system of pranayama, which is incredible. There's so many techniques for different things. You think of all the things you go to a pharmacy for, there's a pranayama technique for that as well, right? So this is what I wanted to bring to the world because I believe prevention is better than cure, right? And the more we can do to prevent having to get on the pills, the better because there's a pill for every ill, right? But there's also an eel following every pill. That's A problem, the side effects, I saw it every day. People getting on one medication, a few weeks later, another one, another one. So that's why I'm on such a mission right now to get people to not get on to that cycle, that vicious cycle. Because medical bills are insane. Right. They can bankrupt someone. And there's so much we can do, like, you know, changing the diet. Not everyone has to go full on keto, but it does help for certain.

Issues and conditions, for sure. There's all the evidence out there and yeah. So I'm very committed to bring Pranayama to the world in a way that's accessible, fun, but also scientific that you can trust to get the result that you're looking for.

Yeah, and I definitely want to dive into the tactics here. So like said, I, I am a big proponent for returning to the parasympathetic state whenever possible. When I train, I try and wake up and before I look at my phone, before I look at distraction, to try and just do some mindfulness practices, prayer, breathing outside. Ideally after I get done weight training in the morning, I allow myself to stretch out, return to normal breathing before I consume a meal or anything like that. But I am the worst when it comes to consistently, you know, journaling or meditating or using like a mindfulness app. Like, I've, I've downloaded them all, I've played around with them, but then I never stick with it, never adhere to it. But I feel like if I was able to commit to something and then tangibly experience the benefits in short order, I would be compelled to, you know, obviously adhere to it long term. So for somebody that's going through life, and they are, they would benefit from this, as most people would. How does that look like? What are some very tangible takeaways somebody listening to this could start implementing and actually experience and benefit from on the short term.

Okay, so, so we teach. I have a section on our app, the Summer Breath app, called Breath Pharma. And on there there's a lot of useful breathing techniques. So I'll give you one example, very quick, one, easy one you can do if you got blocked nose or if you've got stuffy congestion. I have a little baby daughter and she's always giving us stuff these days because she's out there playing with all the kids. So sometimes I get a little bit congestion. So what I do in that situation, you can try this right now if you want. It'll give you a little kind of wake up too, is if you breathe in through your nose, breathe out through your nose, hold your nose right and hold your breath and just nod your head up and down. Right. And you do that until you can't hold your breath any longer. Like really do it to your maximum effort and then repeat that two or three times. Right. In a row. All your congestion will go away, all clear. And you'll suddenly breathe again.

So breathe through my nose, out through my nose.

Once into your nose, out through your nose. Hold your nose, like pinch it with your fingers, hold your breath until you go to your maximum breath hold capacity and then do it again and again at least two or three times. And then you'll see everything clears up. You want to try now?

Sure, sure. Maybe a little silence on the, the, the recording here, but yeah, I'll give it a shot.

Okay.

Makes me realize I need to be able to hold my breath for longer. What, how long, how long do you think people should realistically be able to do that as they're pinch their nose will hold their breath like a minute hold between each session?

No, maybe some people will do a minute, but people just starting out might be more like 30 seconds. Yeah, but 30 to 40 seconds. But how did you get on?

No, that's good. I was in about 30, 40 seconds. Yeah, I wasn't congested to begin with, but I feel like if I get congested, especially as the seasons are changing here, being able to do that, that would certainly help.

Yeah. So did that, did that, did it clear a little bit. Did you feel anything?

Yeah, I feel like it just, it brings me to the present state very efficiently, you know, like I. Yeah, just like mindfully controlling your breath and actually thinking about it as opposed to just going about it. I do try and not ever allow myself to mouth breathe. Like when I'm sleeping, I tape my mouth so I can only breathe nasally.

So I'm okay, good.

I try to implement that whenever possible, but I think I should probably do something like that throughout the day. For sure.

Yeah, yeah. So we have lots of other. So this is just a basic one. Then there's like techniques for going to sleep, for example, which is a big common problem a lot of people have. So if you breathe an extended exhalation in a rhythm, so in for.

Two beats, out for four beats. So seconds, that would do in for two, alpha four. And just do that.

If you just do that in a cycle, right, over and over for a few minutes, you'll start to turn on the parasympathetic pretty quickly and you'll feel much more relaxed. And if you Add a little affirmation to it. I command my subconscious mind to put me into a deep, restful sleep so I can wake up the following morning. And you set a time, right? Watch what happens. You'll fall asleep, and then that will happen, right? And we actually make a track just with that. That breathing pattern that you breathe along with that guides you into that state as well. Very relaxing track with beautiful music. And yes, sometimes up. If I'm in a situation where I really want to sleep, maybe I'm like, in a different time zone and I want to reset. I'll use this track and it'll put me into sleep. It's amazing. So, you know, that's another example. Turning on the parasympathetic. You can also do four beats, eight beats out. There's certain techniques you can do, like in for four, hold for eight, out for eight, for example. So this is a really good one for.

Actually kind of turning off anxiety, right? And stress, which is another useful one. If you breathe in for about four beats, where you breathe in fully, you breathe into your lower lungs. So imagine your nostrils are in your back and you're breathing out, expanding your belly, your back, then into your chest, upper back, upper chest. And then so you've got a full lung full of air. So do for. That'll take about four seconds to breathe in fully. Then you hold for eight beats, right? You hold that for eight beats, and then you breathe out for eight beats, right, Slowly, like you're breathing out for a small straw. If you just repeat that pattern, okay, over and over, boom. You'll feel very relaxed. And actually, it helps if you've eaten loads of food and you're a bit stuffed. If you just do that, it will actually help you. You digest the food better, too. It will give you space in the bowels to get the bowels moving. It's really cool.

So the main thing is to definitely be holding or exhaling for at least double the amount of time that you are inhaling so that you have more carbon dioxide than oxygen.

Yes. It's all about the CO2. CO2. CO2 is what you want to use to turn on parasympathetic nervous system, okay. And to calm you. CO2 is a karma. O2 is an exciter, right? O2 is also a vasoconstrictor. CO2 is a vasodilator. Okay? Big difference. So when you know that you can manipulate the gases in your body for whatever situation you want, okay? So with. When you actually breathe out a lot of CO2, you, you actually, you don't get more oxygen, really, you don't, you can't really focus fully saturate more than what you do with just a little sniff of air coming in, inhaling a little sniffer, that's not the thing. But what happens is if you breathe out lots of CO2, right, if you, especially if you're doing a fast rate, you generate heat in the body as well. If you hyperventilate, short bursts, you reduce heat, but you also produce adrenaline and it can create a bit of a stress on the body, which can be used in certain situations for certain things, like as a natural kind of stimulant in the short term, if it's just for a short period. But also it can act as a bit of an anti inflammatory. But there's another way to use that because when you do that, when you breathe out CO2 temporarily for a short period, right? So like say 30 breaths in and out, in through your nose, out through your nose, fast.

If you do that for 30 breaths and then you take a deep breath in and then breathe all the air out and hold your breath, you're now going to be able to hold your breath significantly longer than you thought you could. Your normal breath hold time, just if you breathe in and breathe out and hold maybe about 30 seconds, average is about 20 to 40 seconds, some people are much higher. But if you breathe all the CO2 out, because CO2 is what tells your brain you need to breathe, okay, if you have less CO2 in your bloodstream, it allows you to now hack your breath hold times temporarily. And what that does is it basically triggers a positive stress on the body because you start to lower oxygen briefly and you create a state called intermittent hypoxia. This is a very, very useful physiological state because when you take anything away from the body, it tricks the body into.

Becoming more efficient at using that thing that is being deprived of. That's why fasting helps with food. It basically when you fast, you actually trick the body and thinking you're running out of sugar and glucose and fuel. And what it does then is it becomes more efficient. It clears out old cells that you know are using up energy that you don't need. It kind of cleans the body up a bit so you can become more efficient, so survive on less calories. Okay? Now same thing with diet. So breathing, if you take away the oxygen for a brief period because it can't be too long, otherwise you die, your body adapts to a low oxygen environment. And what this does is Your body will start to do what makes sense as well physiologically to become more efficient in oxygen. So you'll produce more mitochondria in your cells, your red blood cells count increases and you get more capillaries growing in certain areas of your body. Right. And you can actually get coronary collaterals, which are like natural heart bypasses that form, that increases the cardiovascular strength of your heart, but also your brain health improves. You actually increase more blood vessels and neurogenesis in the brain as a result of this. So just doing this like a few rounds of this a day, okay, can be a really good cardiovascular workout for your system. And it's also why high altitude training works. High altitude training has been shown to be one of the most effective exercises where you go up to high altitude train and then come back down and then go back up again. You do this protocol of training at high altitude, coming back down to sea level and so on. And this is shown to be a secret weapon of a lot of athletes. But now they use machines called IHT machines where they give you through machines different concentrations of oxygen, high and low, you know, well, normal and low actually. And sometimes they use actually a higher concentration of oxygen, low, very low concentration oxygen. And this fluctuation, oxygen tricks the body and thinking you're running out of oxygen too. And this wakes up as well stem cells out of the system. Because stem cells, that's why you get more capillaries forming. Stem cells have the power to turn into any other stem cells. Very small embryologic like stem cells are the magic weapon of reversing aging and creating health within the body. Repair of old cells have died due to low oxygenation or inflammation or so on. So this can help lower inflammation in the body and also stimulate rapid healing as well. And so, you know, these techniques have been preserved in the yogic traditions, the Tantric yoga tradition, for a thousand years. Now the science is starting to back them up. You know, people like Wim Hof, he, that's what he's doing, he's showing you high altitude training techniques, simulation of how to training with what he does. And you know, he's all about climbing up mountains in his shorts. And he's doing the kind of techniques that these Tibetan yogis would do to become efficient using oxygen so they can go and stay up in high altitudes, you know, where the oxygen supply is much lower. Right. So, you know, pranayama has these techniques. You know, we do our own version of this. Free divers are doing this as well. That's allow them to swim underwater and hold their breath for long periods of time, you know, and so on and so forth. So, yeah, a lot of incredible things can be done just with your breath that we don't even realize. I mean, there's more, there's, there's ways you can turn on focus, creativity, also sleep, digestive fire. And that's to do with how you manipulate your nostril activity or nostril dominance. I can share about that as well if you want.

Yeah, yeah, I definitely want to dive into that. As far as the momentary acute increase in oxygen, Like, I've noticed that. Like, I used to scuba dive and prior to using the oxygen tanks, we were trying to increase breath hold times and we would intentionally hyperventilate for a period and I would notice that my breath hold times almost doubled. It was kind of crazy. But I'll do something similar, you know, when I'm training. Like if I'm about to do a, you know, heavy deadlift or something, and I am bracing against a belt, in which case I'm not really breathing, I'm just keeping that core tight. I'll hyperventilate a little bit before, you know, committing to that pull. And I feel like that's pretty much the same thing is happening there.

Yeah, actually, deep sea diving is a great way to see how efficient using oxygen, because how long, how fast your oxygen runs out is that measure. Because when I went, I did a whole advanced diving and all this in Thailand, and I outlasted every single advanced instructor there in terms of the oxygen supply, like, significantly longer than most people. Because my oxygen efficiency is so high compared to everybody else. I've trained for it. And so I could stay on the war for ages. People were blown away. They couldn't understand how I could stay underwater for so long compared to everyone else. But yeah, because you don't need to breathe much when you're efficient. And actually that makes the whole underwater experience so much better when you, you just go into these meditative states and, you know, some people panic down there and the oxygen tank runs out really fast or they're just all the way because that's how they naturally breathe. And I used to breathe like that till I learned that actually that's the wrong way. So I had to reprogram a lot of bad habits from the past. And it's so easy to do. And once you do it, everything shifts and changes. But yeah, the, the re. The things that really fascinate me is how we can tap into the autonomic nervous system as well. Like Literally turning on creativity, turning on focus, alertness, like in the moment. You know, literally in minutes, you know, you hear about pills and medication for this, but I'm sorry, there's nothing that compares to what you can do with your breath. I mean, I can teach you one of those techniques as well, if you want.

Yeah, yeah. I'm always down to learn more about how to be creative.

Yeah, yeah. So, so basically we have two sides. The brain. Left hemisphere, right hemisphere. Okay? So the right hemisphere is your feminine brain. And it's the part that's linked to your emotional world. And it's also the more dreamy, creative side. Okay. It deals with kind of imagery, symbols and dreams. And it's the creative parts where you have the divine downloads coming in. The left brain is your more cognitive kind of reason and logic side of the brain. And here's the thing. So throughout the day, you're actually.

Three people, three different personalities. Your left brain, your right brain, and both hemispheres operate at the same time. Okay, this is super interesting because when your left brain's switched on, you're more in your masculine. Okay. You're more in that focus mode. You're more linear in your thinking. Right. And it's actually your sympathetic nervous system. When you're more in your right brain, you're more in your feminine side, your nurture side, your creative side. You're more dreamy. And actually, your mind may have. Have a lot of thoughts. You're more introspective as well. You're more in your mind. Right? So throughout the day, your nostrils will stretch, dominance between left and right. By itself, it's actually linked to the lunar calendar, believe it or not. And you can notice this. You can see which nostril is more dominant right now. By closing one nostril and just breathing in out of one, you'll find one is much easier to breathe out from the other.

Have a go.

Yeah, my right side's definitely winning right now.

Your right side, yeah. Is easy to breathe from.

Yeah.

So you're actually in your left brain because your left brain controls the right side of your body. Your right brain controls the left side of the body. So when your right nostril is more dominant, it means your left brain is more active. Right. So you're actually more in your masculine. So while you're paying attention to every word I'm saying right now. Okay. But if you're in your right brain, you may be drifting off right now thinking about what I said before and going off on tangents yourself. And it's Interesting. You'll notice that you probably do that certain parts of the day. Now also, you know the afternoon slump people get, right. It's usually when the left nostril stretches on because it's also the more relaxed part of the brain. And so you can monitor this throughout the day and you can see which personality are you in at the moment. And now here's the thing. We can. On command, switch nostril activity. Right? You can turn on creativity right now. If you want to be more creative, you need your left nostril switched on. Your left nostril is also known as soma. It's the symbol is the moon. Okay. Because usually the left nostril is more active when the moon comes out. So. And your sun is. Surya is your right nostril. And that's more active when the. The sun's out. Makes sense. Because during the day you want to be more active, sympathetic, getting stuff done. And during the. When the moon starts to come out and the sun goes down, you want to be more now into nurture, relaxing, and being more in your creative. That's why artists tend to be more creative in the evenings. Right. And especially during the full moon. Right. They're more creative suddenly. Right. Especially me. I'm a musician. I feel it straight away. So I can show you how to switch on your right nostril now. Right. So your left. Okay, so let's do that. So you. You know that I'm not completely insane. So take your left hand. Put your right. So all your fingers wrapped around your left thumb. So put your. Basically put your left thumb into your palm and then wrap your. Your fingers around it. Okay?

Okay.

So you're making like a fist, but with your fingers over your thumb. Then you put your.

Left armpit so your left. This fist under your right armpit. And you push up. You put loads of pressure up. Okay. And you close your right nostril with your. So your right hand now closes your right nostril.

Okay. And you're going to push up.

And you're going to breathe in and out through your left nostril. Only for about 21 times. And put the pressure up. You need to really put pressure up. That's what switches on now in a few minutes, your right nostril. So try that.

Okay, So I got my fist around my left thumb and I'm pushing into my right armpit. And I'm holding my right nostril closed.

Yes.

For 21 breaths.

Yes.

It.

Yeah.

In a few minutes, maybe even before the 21. Your left nostril should switch on.

Yeah, definitely can breathe through my left nostril easier now for sure.

Yeah.

So switching on, that's interesting. Man, that's trippy. Like I'm doing yoga right now here as we're talking.

Yeah. And then in a minute you will feel more relaxed. Actually you might start to drift off now actually a little bit in your attention. Your left brain is attention. Your right brain is, I don't want to say distraction, but it's.

Can't think of what rhymes with attention. But you know, it's going to be more in your creative side, your more nurture female side now.

So do you actually go through the day and you kind of like just self check and analyze to. To switch as.

Yeah, yeah. I try not to mess with the whole biorhythms too much unless I really need to. So like, let's say I got to do this interview with you. I want to be really sharp and you know, I want to not go off on tangents. I want to kind of stick to some kind of linear thing thing. Now you see, I was in a bit of a rush, I had a busy day and so usually what I'll do is actually prepare a bit and get my right nostracted. So I'm in my flow. So actually I started this call just checking that my left nostril is more active than my right. So I may be going off on a bit of a tangent, but I definitely feel more in the creative mode right now. Actually I'm having a few divine downloads as we're talking.

Yeah. So, but usually I'd switch it just to. And also here's the other useful time is digestive fire. So you need your right nostril active to digest food properly. All right? So you want to sleep on your. If you eat a lot of food and your left nostril is active, you basically want to avoid eating food. When your left nostril activity, if you want to switch it to your right or if you, if it's too late. What you do is you do a soma power nap is you sleep on your left brain. Okay. For a bit because whatever side you sleep on is the hemisphere that will turn on. Right. So if you sleep on your left brain, your left hemisphere switches on and this is your, you know, the masculine side, the digestive fire. Surya, it's the fire. And after a few minutes when it switches on and you wake up out of it, you're not really going to sleep, but it's like a little power nap. You'll feel so relieved if you're stuffed full of food, suddenly you'll start digesting food so much better. It's amazing if you have more energy. Or right side, you sleep on your left. So whatever brain hemisphere you want to switch on, you sleep on that side.

Gotcha.

So if you want to sleep, sleep on your right brain.

Interesting. Now this is cool, man. This is very cool. So do you feel like I need to have like a bunch of diagrams or charts taped on the wall or something where I can see all this and adjust on the fly as needed based off of the goal?

Yeah. So cool, right? And actually, you can also say no to things as well. Like if you really play with your biorhythm, let's say there's something you need to do that requires attention, but your left nostrils are active. You can wait till it switches and then do that thing. Because that thing will be way more successful if you do it in the river right nostril. So if you want to be creative, your creativity will be more turned on when your less nostrils are active. And therefore you'll have a better outcome, better result. So whatever result you're looking for, check in with it. And if you have to switch it.

So what if you're sleeping on your back, for instance, is it kind of like just a blended hemisphere?

So the back is an interesting one, right? Because.

First you don't want to sleep on your back because it will make your mouth open, usually your snore and your hyperventilating your sleep, which is one of the most deadly things you can do, okay? For your health. So avoid mouth breathing in your sleep at all costs, okay? But it's also known as corpse pose, okay? He basically dies. A reason why it's called corpse pose. So how dead bodies lie. And both nostrils may switch on as well. And here's the thing, you will throughout the day, only a few moments will both nostrils be at the same time. This is a time not to do anything other than meditate. This is the sushumna nadi. It's when you're connected to the divine right. And it's the moment you. All you should do is meditation. If you do anything else in that state, it's going to fail, right? It's not going to work. You're not going to have the best outcome because you're actually connected source at that point. And that's the best time to meditate and have the divine downloads. So if you wait for that moment, you can. But you can also switch them both on by basically using both fists of both armpits and putting pressure up both armpits at the same time and that will eventually switch on both nostrils.

Interesting.

Again, don't mess with that too much.

Yeah. So what, what does a day to day look like for you? Like when you wake up? Like how do you kind of construct your day to optimize where your states?

Yeah, I live what is called what I call a breath based lifestyle. So everything revolves around the breath. I wake up, I do breath based yogic practices, asanas as well as stretching and physical body weight exercises, holding the breath. There's Indian martial arts system called Kalari which is all using the breath with body weight exercises like push ups, sit up squats and so on lunges and different types of variations of squats. So I do all that. So you get anaerobic exercise benefits which is in my opinion way more efficient than aerobic exercise. You get a lot of benefits. A quicker time I use my breath, I have an app, the Soma breath app. So I have these amazing tracks on there and I do one dose of that, usually of the intimate hypoxia techniques, which is an amazing way to start your day. Then I go on with my day, right? And I'll check in with the nostrils and if I need to switch them because I've got something urgent to do, I'll do that. But usually I play with the nostril. I'll kind of work in tandem with the biorhythms that my nostrils tells me as my signal of what to do and what not to do. And I do also spend times where I'm in silence where I don't talk and I keep my mouth shut and just breathe in and out through my nose because that helps recalibrate the nervous system and get the oxygen back to where it needs to go. It's very important that we have these no breathing breaks where you don't breathe much. Reduce breathing breaks, especially if you're a talker. If you're doing a lot of interviews and talking for long periods of time, you need to have at least a minute every 20 minutes just to recalibrate. Like I'm talking a lot right now because I'm in my flow. But I notice now I'm getting a bit light headed because I've talked to talk, talk, talk non stop and I'm breathing out a lot of CO2, so that is meaning I'm getting less oxygen to my brain, not more. This is why it's so important that people stop and just focus on the breath. It's called vipassana. When you just focus on your breath and just breathe in and out in silence. This is one of the easiest ways to meditate and it gives you all the benefits of reduced breathing, which is the cornerstone of good yoga practice. But also a breath based lifestyle that's going to dramatically improve your health, well being, energy levels, your moods, everything. Just literally do a few one minute break every 20 minutes of slow reduced breathing in a rhythm. In for four beats, out for four beats, or in for eight, out for eight. There's other patterns as well you can do and just see what happens your life.

Totally, man, totally. I had a podcast a couple days ago talking about like CPAP machines, you know, sleep apnea. And obviously as you had said earlier, you know, if you've got sleep apnea, you know, mouth breathing is like the worst thing you, you can do. Is there any downside to the CPAP machine as far as like having a regulated amount of oxygen coming in? Is that kind of like better than the sleep apnea? I'm sure, but probably not optimal.

So therefore like severe situations. Right. They shouldn't be first line treatments. Right. So I go with the mantra, first do no farm. You know, it's my friend Aseem Lottra's mantra because pharmaceutical invention is just putting a band aid over the actual cause of the situation. So you need to identify the cause first and then you can reverse engineer what's going on. Why am I in a CPAP machine? It's probably lifestyle factors, probably being overweight, it's probably stress levels, anxieties, maybe sleeping positions. There's so many things you can do before you go on a CPAP machine to fix to prevent you getting on there. Because once you're on that, you become dependent on it and it means you're not actually fixing the port, the cause of the problem. So I'm always like, medical intervention, last resort emergencies, do everything you can before tick it all off. If none of that works, then do CPAP machine. But you also need to give a chance. People don't give changing in lifestyle enough of a chance. People like, we'll go on a diet for a day and say, oh, the diet didn't work, you know, I mean, yeah, so that's not good either.

Totally agree, man. Well, tell me about the, the app real quick to kind of round it here. I want to learn more about that.

Yeah. So the app I'm really proud of, it's got a whole library of different breath farmer techniques and also a whole library of different breath tracks with neurosomatic programming which is all about reprogramming you at a core level with amazing guided breath meditations and using this.

Breath retention techniques to create intermittent hypoxia. The dose I'm talking about and dose stands for dosc Dopamine, oxygen serotonin endorphins. When you hold your breath for a long enough period and also rhythmic breathing as well enhances this. You release a dose and that positive stress on the body, right is what it creates all the magical effects I was talking about with intimate hypoxia. Also that dose makes you feel naturally high. It makes you feel, it gives you a natural high feeling. So in the net result, everything we do, if you follow our app and use it as your daily practice, you're going to get naturally high. You feel like you're glowing every single day, right. But also you will.

Become naturally healthier and happier because these are feel good neurotransmitters, right. And if you feel good and happy and a high vibe, everything we do is a result of feeling. So if you're feeling good, you're going to start doing good stuff to other people as well. You're going to start making better choices for your life. It's the miserable people who go on and do and make people miserable around them and quite cause suffering in the world. It's the high happy, healthy people who go on and do good things. So that's my mission is to make people naturally high, right. Without needing loads of drugs and also healthy and happy and then we can make the world a better place. That's the real mission behind the Soma Breath app and everything we do.

I love it, man. Your raves now look quite a bit different than your initial raves, I'm assuming.

Yeah, we call them breath raves.

Awesome, man. Where do I point people to to learn more the, the Soma breath app, is it.com or.

It's soma breath.com. okay, you can the app there and we also have various courses like instructor training courses and, and so on.

Awesome, man. Well, I'll definitely put some of this into practice. It's getting colder now so I'm going to start doing more of my cold plunging and doing the bread breath as I'm doing that. So yeah man, this is, this will be cool to play around with for sure.

Amazing mate.

Well, I certainly appreciate the time, brother. Keep fighting to keep good fight. Keep making people help help here and happier and doing the good things, man. So the world needs more of right now for sure.

And if you go to my Instagram, Neeraj Nake official. All right. And you send me the keyword breath, I'll send you a lot of good stuff.

Awesome, man. I will check it out. Really appreciate it, brother.

Epic, mate.