SOMA Breath Power Hour with Niraj Naik | Breathwork Training and Q&A | 2026-05-28

People from Norway, from all over the place. Lots of people from England where I used to live many years ago. So, um, you know, sorry about that, that you're still there. Now England's not that bad, England's not that bad. I'm going back there in a couple of weeks. We've got a big event there, um, the Wellnergy Festival. So if you want to go to a the world's— well, let's say the UK's first conscious wellness music festival. Uh, you want to go to that? It's Wellnergy. And Monica, maybe you want to put the links in. Who's going to that? Who's going to Wellnergy? Anyone? Cassie says we'll be there. Christine's gonna be there. Amazing, coming in all the way from Germany. Epic. All right, a few of you gonna be there. It's gonna be awesome. Um, you want to now? Brilliant. All right, so please, um, if you can share a link to it, it's— I'm gonna actually post a link in here. It's just Wellness Festival. So, um, It's in Wimbledon and it is on the weekend. It's on the Friday the 12th and the Saturday the 13th of June. Here we go. It's gonna be a whole, um, lineup of Soho Breath workshops and events because we have our own tent. Uh, first time at a festival we got our own tent, which is great, and I'll be on the main stage. Doing a full-on breathwave. Yes, yes. Okay, so let's, um, get straight into what today's topic's all about. So this is actually a topic that is quite close to my heart, and the reason why, because I think it's the one that affects our health more than anything, right? It really is the one that has the biggest impact, and that is sleep. Okay, so sleep is something that we can't live without. I really wish we could, you know, like, is it— if you think about it, a third of our life almost is spent in bed asleep, right? That's a long time. Imagine what you could do with all those hours. Okay, so, um, what I'm gonna, um, teach you actually to, uh, for the next hour and a half, or if we go longer, we might go longer, is what I've learned about sleep from not just a breath perspective but also, uh, from a whole functional health perspective, right? I used to be a pharmacist many years ago, so actually I saw many people with sleep issues coming in to take pills. And did they work? Well, some people actually swore by them. They, they couldn't do without them, right? They couldn't live a life like without their sleeping pills. And here's the problem with that, is that when you take a pill, you're actually suppressing the root cause of the sleeping disorder, okay? And it can lead to worse, uh, conditions later on. And I used to see people coming, you know, for something as benign as a sleeping pill, and then a few months later they'll be on another medication, usually blood pressure, and then more and more and more. Because the pills are like putting ice on a bruise, right? So if you get a bruise and you put ice on the bruise, it brings the swelling down a bit, right? But if you keep bashing your head against the wall, it doesn't matter how much ice you put on the bruise, it's just going to keep getting worse and worse, right? So what we have to do is stop the person from bashing their head against the wall if you really want to help that person. And what I see, you know, in the world of pharmacy and medicine still, even to this day after all these years, of all this knowledge and wisdom we now have, people are still bashing their head against the wall, meaning they're not getting to the root cause of the problem. Okay, so let's cover the whole root cause of sleep and then what we can do about it and how we can actually start to solve this issue, all right, of sleep, uh, with simple things like breathing exercises that can actually help you get to sleep, but also help have a better night's sleep and so on and so forth. And actually, if you really go deep on this, okay, if you really study yogis, okay, what yogis do, um, and I'm not saying that we have to go off and be yogis right now, okay, and go live in caves in the Himalayas. What I'm saying is that they actually look at sleep as the most detrimental part of the day. They actually see it as also a waste of time, right? Sleeping— if you oversleep, some people sleep 10, 12 hours. Like, that really is a large, like, amount of your day in bed, right? Asleep. Okay, it means you kind of checked out of life. You, you know, you like being in bed more than being, um, out of bed. And what it can also mean is that they— you actually have health issues, okay? Because if you're really fit and healthy, you actually need less sleep. And by fit and healthy, I mean from a yogic physiological perspective, not by some kind of, you know, mainstream medicine standards. I'm talking about from a physiological perspective of a super yogi, and you can achieve this. You can actually achieve this state. This is what SRF is all about, is how do we take these practices of the yogis, which have allowed them to have this incredible health and stamina and longevity, and make it something accessible. So that's what SRF is about. But yogis don't need to sleep a lot, okay? They also are very religious about sleep, so they'll go to sleep at a certain time and they'll wake up at a certain time, right? They time their, their sleep to the circadian rhythms and the patterns of the stars and the moon, okay? And sunrise and sunset. So they say it's the most detrimental part of sleep, of the day. The reason why, the reason why it's the most detrimental part of the day right, is because it's the time when you're unconscious and you're not in conscious control of your breath. And this can lead to all the problems that we do see a lot of in our modern world as a result of over-breathing in sleep. Okay, and we're gonna, we're gonna talk about that as well. We're gonna go deep into what that means. And what yogis have managed to do is like sleep a lot less, 5 hours, that this— they're supercharged. Some of them even need just 2 hours, okay, and they feel supercharged, okay. They spend a lot of time in meditation, that counters that, means that they don't need to, but they're still conscious, but they're in a yogic meditative sleep state, but they're still conscious, right. But they don't need as much sleep, okay, as most people do. And this whole idea of you have to have 8 hours sleep is also a myth, okay? We're going to debunk that. But what yogis do is they change their physiological states. They have the ability to prepare the body in such a powerful way that they don't need as much of the processes that will happen in sleep to recover and recharge, right? And what they also then allow them to do is have more conscious control of their breath. Okay, so we're going to talk about the problems of unconscious sleep, okay, which is something that's not so easy to solve, but I'm going to give you the tips on how to deal with it, okay? Now, well, let's just check in, like, who has issues with sleep here, um, in this, uh, in this group? So do you want to just let me know, like, what kind of issues with CP you're getting? Okay, falling asleep. Getting sleep, staying asleep, broken sleep. Some days I can't sleep at all. Never slept from being a child. Wow, it's a miracle you're still standing. Um, apnea, insomnia, broken sleep, 4 hours per night. Yeah. Okay, well, we're going to try and solve, um, all of these issues by looking at the root cause of what's causing it. Okay, we have to look at this holistically, and then you'll be able to sleep better, like easier. I'm not going to give you just like some miracle pill that you just pop and you just fall asleep instantly. But we'll get as close to that as possible. Okay. Um, and we'll even go through a little practice to help you go to sleep. Right. But then what we want to be able to do is sleep at the right time, how humans are supposed to sleep, understand your own sleep cycles. We're going to go through that. And then be able to wake up at a good time, right? You don't have to do yogic, uh, times, which is usually at 4 AM. Okay. Right. And we'll talk about that in a moment. Why 4 to 7 AM is the most detrimental part of your sleep cycle. Like that's the time actually when most people actually have heart attacks as well. Like between 4 and 7 AM. It's when you get a shot of cortisol, and a lot of people wake up, right, but then they try and fall back to sleep at that time when actually it may have been better if they just wake up, okay, and then have another phase of sleep a bit later on. Because some people have different sleep cycles, different patterns, but yogis tend to wake up around 4 AM, okay. So aligned with the Sun, moon cycles, lunar cycles, and then they do their morning practice and they have so much more time in the day because they don't need to sleep as much. Okay. But they have a strict routine. We're going to talk about routines, okay? Because that's really important. And in order to get to that point, you have to learn how to prepare yourself physiologically, logically. To be able to sleep like that, sleep like a yogi. Okay, all right, so let's get into it. So I actually have prepared for the first time some actual slides, so I'm going to go through this right now. Let's see how this works. Okay, can you all see this? Yep. Okay, everybody see the slides? Cool. Let me just get your chat up. Okay, so let's just go through this together right now. Okay. So you're already practicing sleep. Most of you are obviously sleeping at some capacity, maybe not all getting the perfect night's sleep, but you're all sleeping at some capacity, right? We, we do it every single night, okay? It's kind of natural, ingrained part of who we are. Okay, so this is some of the functions of sleep, right, that we don't always think about. We don't always think about these functions of sleep. Okay, so like, why do we sleep? Okay, why do we actually sleep? What's the point of it? Okay, because, you know, I used to think for a long time like it's just a waste of time. It's like, God, I wish I had more time in the day and like, I'm sleeping. I don't want to sleep, you know, like, and so I would like go to bed as late as I possibly could and wake up as early as I could, right? I was in love with life. Don't get me wrong, I love my life, but I was knackered after a while. When you're young, you can kind of get away with it, right? And I didn't know all the stuff I know now. This is like in the olden days, right? Like when I was at university and and so on and so forth. And then I got a job which I hated, so as a pharmacist. And then I would like delay sleep. I'd go to sleep at like 2, 3 AM sometimes, wake up at 6 AM to drive, like half asleep, like almost crashing. Um, literally, you know when they say don't crash, like, yeah, or I'm gonna go and crash. Um, I'm gonna go and crash. There's a figure of speech in England about you're gonna go and sleep. I literally— I shouldn't say that while I'm driving my car, but I almost did crash a few times, um, because I was so like deprived of sleep. And then I'd go to work in a horrible state again because I really didn't want to sleep, right? I didn't— I mean, I, I, I didn't want to like face the next day. So that's sometimes one of the problems, right, with sleep, is we don't want to do it because we've got so much stuff you want to finish that day. Okay, does anyone resonate with that? So you just don't want to get— go to sleep because there's so many things you do still, you haven't finished them all, so you end up like carrying on and on working. Or you might really get into a book, right? You read that book you're super engrossed in it, or you're watching something on Netflix and you're watching these box sets and they're super addictive, so you just keep watching them, right? And you forget, oh my God, it's like 1 AM now, all right? And then you have to go to work, and then the rest of the, the day is crap. So having some strict routine is really key, right? So, so just understand why you sleep, okay? That's going to really help you get this routine. So first, this is the moment your brain washes itself clean. Okay. This is actually the process of cleansing the brain and your nervous system has a time to recalibrate. So imagine sleep's a bit like turning your computer off. Okay. You know how your computer just runs so much better when it's at a defrag, right? It's like that. Sleep's like a defrag, okay, for your computer, for your super biocomputer. It's a time, time when your cells repair. This is important, okay? Regeneration. Like, if you don't sleep very well or enough, you will age faster. You'll get diseases more, more, more easily. Okay. You know, so certain diseases are really affected, especially degenerative brain disease. You're much more likely to get it because your brain needs to recuperate in sleep. You're much more likely to get degenerative brain disease when you have insomnia or don't sleep enough.

Okay.

Super important. And I can give my own dad as a case study. So my father, he's passed away now. He had a very high-flying job, then he got made redundant in his, um, like 50s, and it was impossible for him to get another job. So you end up becoming a chauffeur, right? He started driving people around. But the chauffeur kind of jobs start really early and then they can go on in into the night, and he needed to do it to pay the bills, right? So he would like be very deprived of sleep for years. And guess what he got? He got a degenerative brain disease, a form of Parkinson's, and his brain, I just saw it just disappear in function. Right. So these are the consequences of not sleeping enough. And it's— I can't stress it enough. There is, you know, there's a real reason why we sleep. We need to do it, but we don't need to sleep as much as we think. You just got to figure out what's the right amount for you. Okay, so it's also when the subconscious processes emotion, right? So that's when we, um, dream. Dreaming is part of that, okay? Dreaming is an amazing experience at night, okay? Um, so it's an important function to resolve stuff that's happened the day before and weeks before. Okay. And if you don't have that time to process, you're going to end up getting issues later on, like emotional issues, you know, abilities to think clearly. You might have more brain fog as a problem or just not able to articulate what you really want to say or react or act in certain situations. So you know how it feels like when you've had a good night's sleep, you just function better, you're a better person to be around with, you are more productive and all that good stuff. If you haven't had a good night's sleep, you get sick more easily, you get more colds and flus more easily, you become more ratty, more irritable, so on and so forth, right? So we all know that. So sleep is active sacred work. Okay. Sleep is not the absence of activity. It's when your body does some of its most important repair work. Okay. So your glymphatic system does a cleanup. So your brain clears waste during sleep. So the way it does it is through cerebral spinal fluid. So we have— every time we breathe in, we have the cerebral spinal fluid that brings up all this good stuff, nutrients and hormones and other substances, up to the brain, right? And when you exhale, it brings it down. So we have this pump, which is your breath, of the cerebral spinal fluid, which also moves the biggest lymphatic gland in the body, okay? And that's what helps clear the brain. Of this junk. So lack of sleep is what is— it makes sense why people get degenerative brain diseases more, more often is often because of sleep issues. Okay. Now, I don't want to scare you. I just want to make sure that you understand this because then you can do something about it. Okay. Because there is something you can do about it. It's also the time when useful stuff gets filed properly. Okay, so it's like the defrag. It helps you have a stronger immune system and process emotions better. Okay, so let's look at sleep and the breath and sleep axis. So the key, right, to understand this, and this is the first step of prevention, okay, that's going to help you sleep, sleep better, um, at night. So mouth breathing— mouth breathing is the one of the biggest culprits towards unhealthy sleep. Okay, so who here knows whether they're a mouth breather or a nasal breather? Who knows this already by their own kind of patterns. Do you want to just feedback a bit? Mouth breather. Okay. A lot of mouth breathers. Mouth at night. So this is like an experiment. What we're doing right now is like a global experiment. Where you can see a correlation. You can see a correlation between mouth breathers, sleep issues, nasal breathers, sleep issues. You can see it right now. Okay, so it looks like quite a lot of you have said mouth or use mouth tape. So on. Yeah, mouth breather. Most of you have said mouth. Few of you said no. Anyone here who's a nasal breather who still has really bad problems with sleep? Sometimes. Okay.

Me, me.

Okay. Okay, so what you can do— yeah, so I've been sleeping with a mouth open and I've been using a mouth tape and it helps immensely. Amazing. We'll talk about those, we'll talk about those devices next. Okay, so the way we want to breathe, if we can, in our sleep is nasal breathing. Okay, and during the day So if you can train yourself to be a nasal breather rather than a mouth breather, you are going to have more nitric oxide, calmer breathing, better oxygen delivery, because your nose is what's designed not just for breathing in your sleep, right, but during the day too. Now, the reason why the nose actually is the filter for the air you breathe. Okay, it's narrower holes. Okay, so you're not actually breathing in as heavily as if you were to breathe through your mouth, which means you don't breathe out so much carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide is the key for getting healthy sleep. We're going to talk a lot about carbon dioxide in a minute. So we breathe in oxygen, we breathe out CO2. Now if you are somebody who hyperventilates, okay, even in a mild form during the day, various causes that we'll go into, right? Then you're letting go of CO2. CO2 calms the mind. It relaxes you, which makes it easier for you to go to sleep. It stops you having lots of erratic thoughts, right? So that also helps you go to sleep. And It's, uh, is a relaxant of your muscles. So sometimes sleep issues are caused by too much tension in the body. It helps relax that. Okay, so nasal breathing throughout the day not only helps you with all those things we just listed, but then it also means you have more CO2 in your system, which makes it easier for you to sleep at night. But then at night we need to be breathing through our nose. So one way, somebody just suggested there, is using a mouth tape, and that really does help. Okay, that really does help. Other things you can do is you must sleep on your side. So who here sleeps on their back? So we've eliminated— okay, we've talked about mouth breathing. Now we want to do is As I'm doing this global experiment, I want to know who here sleeps on their back? Who has sleep issues? Okay, so some of you said yes, some of you said no. Okay, so who— better question— who sleeps on their, um, back? Who has sleep issues? Just, just say that. That's all, that's all I want to know is the yeses for that.

Okay.

And then what I want to see is who sleeps on their back— sorry, who sleeps on their side, okay, who has still has sleep issues, okay. All right, so this is, this is some of the tips you can do now. So what we're looking at right now is the, the physiological issues, right, with sleep that, that we can fix. If none of those resolve it, then you need to look at what's going on with the mind, okay? The emotional issues. So we're going to look at both sides. So when you sleep on your back, you have much more of a tendency to snore. Like, you do more of that, right? And you don't even realize it sometimes until someone, um, walks in on you, right? So like a couple of weeks ago, I, um, came— I came home late, um, and my wife was in the bed, and I didn't know it was my wife yet because I could hear this crazy, like, like, really loud sound. She's gonna, like, really kill me for, for talking about this, but she had also put on a face mask, right? She was doing a face mask thing that ladies love to do, and she'd forgotten about it, and she'd fallen asleep. But on her back. She never sleeps on her back, and she was making the worst sound I've ever heard, and it sounded like a monster, literally. And it looked like a ghost, a demon. And I remember going up to her and I freaked out, and then she freaked out and lost it, um, because she was having a— she was like completely fast asleep. But, um, What that proved to me right there was sleeping on your back is not a good, good look. Don't do that, okay? And we, uh, me and Natasha, always sleep on our right side, okay? So a little bit of a yogic trip here. If you sleep on your right side, you turn on your parasympathetic nervous system. You Your parasympathetic nervous system's in your right brain. Your sympathetic nervous system is your left brain, left side, right? When you sleep on your right, you turn on the parasympathetic, which is your rest and digest and sleep mode, rejuvenation mode. Okay, you'll know that it's turned on because your left nostril will clear up and it'll be easier to breathe through your left nostril than your right. It's magic how it works. But it works, okay? And you'll fall asleep much easier, right, if you sleep on your right side, and you won't hyperventilate as easily, okay? If you sleep on your left, you turn on your sympathetic nervous system, okay? So all of those who said they sleep on their side, which side do you sleep on, left or right? There's one time you should sleep on your left side, and I'll explain what that is later. Okay, some of you saying left. Okay, we're gonna fix that. Okay, I want you to try and sleep on your, um, right side from now on, those of you said left. Okay, so Greg says right. I feel it immediately.

Asleep.

Great. And remember, you also— your body turns and changes position during the sleep, so that doesn't matter. What matters is what side you start to sleep on to kickstart the sleep cycle, okay? That's the one where you want to sleep on your right, okay? Right at the beginning. Then you're going to move around and toss around. That's fine, okay? But sleep on your right side to initiate the sleep cycle. Okay. Prefer right, and when I turn to the left, I notice a difference because right side feels better. There you go. Exactly. All right, so we've covered that. That's great. It is disturbing because I always read that it's better to sleep on our left to activate parasympathetic. Okay, you need to re-read reread whatever that was. And trust me on this one, it's your right side. Okay, try it, try it, and you'll see what happens. Like, what you should always do is look at everything as an experiment, a test. Never take what anyone says as verbatim. Test it. Okay, do you get the result that you want? If yes, then it, then it probably works. Okay, so, um, so yeah, we covered that. Train nasal breathing gently, right? Use mouth tape. But there's a way to train nasal breathing so it becomes more of a permanent habit. Okay, we'll talk more about that in the next steps and all the techniques and solutions at the end of this. Okay, so let's talk about the sleep cycle. Okay, we have a 90-minute sleep cycle. You know I was saying yogis tend to sleep about 2 hours, right? It's because they understand this cycle, right? They understand this. If you understand these cycles, you don't need as much sleep as you think. Okay, so I'm not saying do a 90-minute sleep from now on. No, I'm not saying that. I'm just saying If you're a super yogi and you understand these cycles, you can sleep a lot less. Okay, so if you wake up mid-cycle, that's really when you feel groggy, because even if you've slept enough hours, waking up mid-cycle, you can feel like hungover. Anyone felt that? Anyone experienced that? That when they Um, oversleep. This happens to me when I was younger, like when I read all this, um, stuff, the mainstream stuff about you must get 8 hours sleep, right? So if I'd wake up earlier, like 5 AM, I'll try and go back to sleep again, and then, then, and I, I'd wake up at 5 AM like, wow, I'm bing, like I'm on, I'm ready. But then I'm like, oh, I haven't slept enough. I've slept like 5 hours. Okay, I need another 3 hours. Then I'll go back to sleep, right? And then I'd feel like shit. Okay, has anyone felt that? Like, because I basically disrupted the sleep cycle, right? Because I forced myself to wake up mid-cycle. That's the worst thing you can do for your health. Okay, trust me, waking up mid-cycle. Okay, so let's talk about that. So we go through 4 to 6 cycles like this. We start with light sleep, then deep, um, NREM, and then REM. REM sleep is when like the, the dreaming happens, okay, in this state. Okay, so just remember this is the cycle. Okay, so, so the tip on that last one, okay, is that if you wake up fully alert, refreshed, and charged, and it's only been like 5 hours of sleep, okay, then you probably only need that 5 hours of sleep. Okay, if you try and go back to sleep again, you're not going to feel good usually. Okay, so get out of your head this rule that we must sleep a fixed number of hours because it's not actually true. Okay, we all have different patterns, we have different, slightly different nuanced cycles as well, right? But The key is to wake up feeling charged, like charged up, like charged, awake, ready. Okay, you shouldn't be downing coffees to wake up. You should be enjoying your coffee, not because you're looking at it like it's like your wake-up medicine. No, you should be just enjoying it because you love the taste of coffee, right? Then you'll really benefit from coffee. Okay. Because coffee is good for you, actually. It's got a lot of health benefits. But if you're pounding coffee to wake up, that's not the coffee's the problem. It's your, your, is all the other stuff you're doing in your life that is the problem. Okay, because you actually, if you, if you understand these sleep cycles, you'll know that when you wake up, you should feel alert, charged, and refreshed. Okay? And that may be after 4 hours sleep for some people. Okay? So you have to just know what that is. You have to start to understand your own sleep patterns. Okay? So the master signal, right, is light. So we have circadian rhythms. So one of our biorhythms is the circadian rhythm. Okay, so morning sun, and this is why yogis will wake up at sunrise, the dawn, okay, is when we get a hit of cortisol. So in, in the regions, right, where the yogis would be in, it would be in that range of 4 to 5 AM, right, is when it would be the early, early morning hours, okay? And they would time their meditation with, and their yoga practice, to be as the sun is rising, that early, early hours. Of the sunlight, right? That first morning light. Okay. What happens is in that range of 4 to 7 AM is when you get a cortisol spike. Okay. And the cortisol— don't look at cortisol as this enemy. It's not. Cortisol is a very, very important hormone for your body. Okay. It's needed to produce energy in the body and it has many uses in the body. Cortisol isn't the problem. It's all the things that you do in your life that disrupts cortisol patterns, right? That is the problem. Okay. It's not cortisol itself. Okay. So the morning, waking up for morning sun is really important. So who here blacks out everything in their room and gets no morning sunlight? Who does that? Anyone? Okay. Yes, this is a common situation. This actually affects your circadian rhythm if you do this, okay? Because it doesn't get this morning light, it kind of has to figure out So you're not going to wake up feeling ping, like turned on, because you've disrupted your own natural mechanism for producing cortisol in the morning. Okay, so this is what you have to figure out, is like, how can you sleep in a way— and this gets more and more difficult in the cities It really gets more difficult in the cities because you have all this light coming in from many different sources of, you know, the ambient street lights and all this nonsense. And you get all the noise and all of that because I used to live in Barcelona, I know what it's like. I used to live in London, I know what it's like. And it means it's harder to go to sleep because it's too many lights, so you black everything up But then you can't wake up properly because, well, you need an alarm clock, right? Because everything's so dark in your room now. So this is a, this is a technical issue. Like, I don't know the exact right answer to this, right? How to solve this. What I do know is that if you do everything I'm going to teach you to do, you'll be able to sleep much easier, even if there's some ambient lights in the background. Right? Then you won't need to black out everything. You can at least leave one window open so that there's some sunlight coming in. You don't need a lot of sunlight. You just need a bit, right, to come in. But it's important that you have that bit. Does that make sense? All right. Okay, someone's really smart here. I have a sunrise light alarm, so I wake up to light. Beautiful.

There you go.

That's a modern-day solution to this problem that we have in the cities. Yeah, yeah. So this is what I'm trying to, um, pure— that's exactly what I'm talking about. So, um, this is a problem living in cities. This sunlight idea, this sun alarm, is a really cool idea. I think that's really cool. I invented blackout blinds that are on like a timer, like an alarm clock. Someone needs to make that. That's super smart. Yeah, they have that in places like Dubai actually. If you live in one of those very expensive apartments, they have that. Built in. The only problem is, in these very expensive apartments, like in the Burj Khalifa, you cannot open a window. Can you believe that? You cannot open a window in these, like, $10 million apartments. You cannot open a window. Like, who would want to live in a place like that? That's insane. It's crazy, but people do. Okay, so Then we need daylight. We need daylight in our lives. You need to go for a walk in the sunlight, right? You need to do it during the day, okay? Even if it's just 20 minutes, do it, right? Because a lot of us live in offices, live on our laptops, working, working, working, working, and we don't even see the, the, the, the light of the day, right? I, I had years like this. I don't know how I'm still alive. Like, my lifestyle was so bad. In my 20s. I'm a medical miracle, seriously. Now, every day, religiously, I go for an hour, sometimes 2-hour walk in the sun. Look, I'm spoiled, I'm privileged, I'm all of these things. I live in Ibiza, it's always sunny. I'm very blessed, but I really worked hard to achieve this kind of way of life. But that means that I use that now. I religiously, I go out in the sun. I always have my windows open, sun's coming at me all the time. All right, and I was actually in the basement before. My recording studio was in the basement. I moved it because I just was in the darkness too much, right? And I used to have a sun, um, sun, um, sauna space— sorry, sauna space— have an amazing lamp which I highly recommend. I'm just going to drop in the link to it. Um, and this lamp is like a UV lamp that you can have. So these are, these are solutions for people who live in cities, okay? So, um, all you need to do is if you go to Sauna Space— I'm sorry, Sauna Space, not Sauna Space, um, although it's a cool name, Sauna Space, but Sauna Space. You'll see they have these really cool, um, sun lamps. Okay, they do all kinds of sauna stuff, but they have these infrared lamps. And if you use the code SOMABREATH, okay, S-O-M-A-B-R-E-A-T-H, you can get a pretty decent discount on that. So, um, you want to get their sun UV sun lamps. So if you're somebody who can't get much sunlight, maybe you live in the northern hemisphere, like right up north, and it's dark all the time, the sun hardly ever comes out in the winter, you can get one of these. It's really powerful. When I was in the studio basement, I had that on, on me at least 30-40 minutes a day, right? It's beautiful. My, my wife uses it for her knee because she had a knee, knee injury And it really helps, like, heal that as well, faster. Okay. Okay, cool. So sunlight, this starts to help set the— oh yeah, the code is SOMABREATH. Just typing that in. SOMABREATH. So this really helps set the circadian rhythms, okay? And then Nighttime. Now, who's seen people wearing red-eye shades, red sunglasses? Who owns one? Okay, so one of the other problems of living in a city, okay, is the, um, blue light that comes from all the ambient street lighting, all the gadgets in your house, everything that is electronic, okay? You get all this blue light. This blue light, okay, it's a background light frequency. It, it's, it destroys your circadian patterns, okay? It prevents you from getting into a healthy pattern, okay, biorhythm. So, um, so you want to use some way to filter that light out, especially if you live in the city. And one of the best ways is these blue light protection glasses, okay? They're like these shades, okay, that you wear. They look kind of cool, right? That's one way of doing it. Another way is just to actually turn off those, like, gadgets if you have them in your room. You know, the worst thing of all is hotel rooms with the AC. Oh my God, who's stayed in hotel rooms and they have this AC with this really bright light that never switches off? Like, that is for me like the most annoying thing ever. And so I always get— I always often take with me tape so I can just tape it up. I love taping it up. So that's, um, you know, a source of this blue light, right? And, you know, they also often put in these, um, uh, hotel rooms like the alarm clocks, right? Big bright like numbers. I have to, I have to just unplug them. Okay, so we have a bit of a habit in our house to get rid of, turn off all the blue lights, right? Any, any source of, of light, we turn it all off. Okay, in our rooms. Okay, so that's really important. So this will help you produce melatonin. So melatonin is the hormone that that comes in at the end of the day when the sun sets and it's— the moon goes up. Okay. And it's time to your— like the sunset and the moon rising. Okay. And melatonin is the most potent antioxidant for your body. Okay. We need melatonin. It's very important. Okay. And it helps you have deep sleep, okay, and get to sleep. So often the reason why people can't sleep at night is because they have a melatonin problem. That's why melatonin supplements does really help people. I've taken them sometimes, right? It does help, can really help you get to sleep easier. So that's something you could potentially try, is you can get melatonin supplements 3mg. Try that. If you really, really— you try all of these things, nothing seems to work, you can try melatonin supplements. Okay, it can help. Okay, so melatonin can be produced in various ways as well. We're going to talk about the breath melatonin as well. Okay, but so these are all the ways we can prepare for sleep. It's really important. Another source of the blue light, what is it? Is that right? Who watches YouTube videos and Facebook and has Telegram and WhatsApp going on right before you go to sleep? Anyone? Own up. Okay, this is a source of the big problem. Right? So this, this needs to go off at least an hour before, or even 2 hours before you go to bed. Okay? Your phone, unless you're using the Soma Breath app, but you have your eyes closed when you turn it on. Okay? Like, it's okay if you are using an app just to go to sleep, like to press play on an audio, that's fine. But if you're always constantly looking, studying, watching, viewing, editing, whatever on your phone, you've got a blue light problem. TV screens, just as equal issue, okay? Even worse from a TV screen, right? But you know me, I'm a very honest person. My com— I've got my phone, my company pretty much running on my phone these days, and I'm addicted to it. I, I'm I'm obsessed with what I can create now with AI technology and my phone is next level, right? So even with that said, I'm still able to get to sleep, right? Way better than I used to in my past life because of all the things I do, all the things I practice that we're going to go into. Okay, let's carry on. Okay, so this is a good one. So the sympathetic lock— your body cannot sleep when it thinks it's being hunted. Okay, so all the stimulation puts your brain in high alert. Okay, so, so you notice your sympathetic nervous system, okay, is your— is called your fight or flight response. I actually think that that's like not entirely the best way to describe it. Okay, so it's, it's not just fight and flight, but it's also find. Okay, it's also fine. So when you, when you are in discovery mode, when you're like excited finding new stuff out, find, find, find, find, check it out, oh my God, search, search, search. Google, Google. Oh, what's that? What's that? What's that? You are also switching on your sympathetic nervous system, even if it's a positive state you're in. You're still in high alert, still your sympathetic nervous system. Does that make sense? So that's the same. And if this is going on, right, all day long, right, maybe you love work, maybe you're obsessed with work. Like, work's not a stress. Maybe you think, oh, work's not stressful, I love my work, I love what I do. If you're constantly on, on, on, on, on, it's going to be harder for you to get sleep. Okay, stimulants like caffeine. Okay, tea, black tea is full of caffeine. Okay, if you have that after 4 PM, you got issues, right? You should actually stop drinking caffeine before 12 PM. If you can. That's my— that's what I try and aim for, right? No caffeine before, after 12. I sometimes have a cheeky one at 2 PM if I go for a meeting or something, but I try and at least definitely never have coffee after 4 PM because I know it does affect my sleep. Okay, so the first thing we can do to turn off the sympathetic state right, is your breath, especially the exhale. Breath is— breath control is what we need to master. And with a long exhale, you can actually tell the nervous system that the threat has passed. You can, you can turn off your sympathetic nervous system and switch on your parasympathetic just by sleeping on your right side. Okay, that's one way. But if you bring in the extended exhalation to it, that compounds the effect, right? So we're going to do a little rhythmic breathing exercise in a moment to show you how you can quickly turn on your parasympathetic and go into rest mode. Okay, in a minute. Okay, let's get going. So here's one of my exercises, okay, where— and we're going to do this actually just without music first. You know I love music, okay? I love using music, right? And we'll do it, we'll do a practice with music, but I just want to teach you this one that you can do at any time. So like, you don't have to put any devices on or anything, you can just do it to yourself. Okay, then we'll try it with music so you can see the benefits. Okay, so it's a wind-down breath, 4-4-8 pattern. Okay, so the way you do this, okay, and I've done this before, okay, and the danger of me doing this exercise is that people fall asleep at the end of it, and then I've still got the rest of the presentation to do, and now nobody's paying attention. Okay, so, um, Try it, try it. If you do fall asleep, have a little power nap and then we'll get back on it. All right, so we won't do it for too long, otherwise you will get so relaxed you won't be able to pay attention anymore. Okay, so let's do this sitting up for this moment, but you normally can do this lying down. When you're going to go to sleep, you can do it lying down, but for now let's do it sitting up. Okay, so You will sit up right now with your back straight, okay? And you can, if you want— this is a little trick— time your breathing to your heart, your heartbeat, your pulse. So you can actually measure your heartbeat, okay? That can be your metronome, right? Or just simply just count in seconds, okay? The way you can do that is 1, 1,000, 2, 1,000, 3, 1,000, 4, 1,000, 5, you know, like that. That's a little trick to time yourself, uh, in seconds, okay? 1, 1,000, 2, 1,000, 3, 1,000, 4, 1,000. Okay, ready? So what you're gonna do is you breathe in through your nose Through your nose, breathing in. 2, 3, 4. Hold. 2, 3, 4. Exhale slowly through your nose. 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8. Okay, so now we're gonna do it for a few rounds. I'll count the rhythm. You all follow along. Inhaling through your nose for 4 beats, holding for 4 beats, exhaling through your nose for 8 beats, and then we repeat. Got it? All right, so let's sit up nicely, and after 3, 2, 1, exhale fully, and let's begin. In, 2, 3, 4, hold, 2, 3, 4, out, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8. In, 2, 3, 4, hold, 2, 3, 4. Out, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8. In, 2, 3, 4. Hold, 2, 3, 4. Out, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8. One more. In, 2, 3, 4. Hold, 2, 3, 4. Out, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, and hold. I mean, stop. Okay, how did that feel? I feel nice. Feel more relaxed. Find it challenging. So relaxed. There we go, Tita. Wow, so relaxing. Relaxed. So easy, right? So simple. So let me explain what happens physiologically. So every time you breathe in, your sympathetic goes up. Every time you breathe out, your parasympathetic turns on. So inhale turns on sympathetic, exhale turns on parasympathetic. So when you breathe out longer than you breathe in, you turn on your parasympathetic. Just common sense. And then when we do it like this rhythmically, in a smooth coherent rhythm, we create coherence in the body physiologically that helps our biorhythms. It helps restore balance. But when we do it like this with an extended exhalation, okay, it's turning on your parasympathetic and it's slow breathing. So you just did there, that's a total of 16 seconds for one breath. All right, so it's around 4 breaths per minute. Okay, so 4 breaths a minute is a zone where you start to increase the CO2 naturally in your physiology— carbon dioxide— because when you breathe out, you breathe out CO2. So if you're breathing out slower more, right, than you normally would, CO2 goes up. Okay. And what does CO2 do? It calms your nervous system. It relaxes you. It calms the excitatory neurons in your brain so you can think more clearly. And CO2 helps get oxygenation, better oxygenation, because you need the CO2 to get the oxygen off your blood cells into the body tissue cells. CO2 is important. And by slowing the rate you breathe it out, you actually help yourself calm down, and it helps you get more oxygen, and it helps you get a better night's sleep. And when we do it like this, right before you go to sleep, like, for like 5 minutes even, watch yourself. Well, I mean, it's impossible to watch yourself, but observe if you can. Stay conscious enough, fall asleep very easily. Okay, you'll find that you're about to fall asleep very, very, very easily with this technique. Okay, so I want you to test this out, and you can do this lying on your right side. Okay, so you still do all of the things I suggested, but sleep on your right side and watch yourself fall asleep. Much easier. Does it make sense? And I'm wondering with this, how many of you who said that you, you know, sleep on your right side, you don't sleep on your back, you use mouth tape, but you still have sleeping issues, would actually finally get a good night's sleep with just doing this extra bit? Sleeping on your right side and doing this breathing technique. Okay, so you're going to experiment. That's your bit of a— some breath play for you this evening today. Okay, so let's talk about the spiritual benefits of sleep. Okay, from a spiritual perspective. So sleep can be a spiritual doorway too, okay? Um, Yoga Nidra is one of the most incredible, like, practices, okay? And I created a Yoga Nidra track for myself to, to, to follow along with, and I uploaded it to YouTube years ago. Right? And lo and behold, right, it turned out that Dr. Andrew Huberman— I'm going to post it right now. Anyone heard of Dr. Andrew Huberman? Yeah, probably most of you. It turned out that this has been his go-to practice, my meditation for years. Like, he says it's his number one most, um, uh, like, non-negotiable thing that he does. Okay, I'm gonna try and find the actual post where he says this because it's so, so cool. Just to, just to blow my own horn a bit. All right, let me just find it. It's on X. I'm gonna get my profile next. So, um, I'm going to send you the link to this session in a moment. So what, um, Yoga Nidra is, is a way for you to get into conscious sleep. So where you're still conscious but you're in a very deep rest state. That's why they call it yogic sleep, okay? So you're not actually fully unconsciously asleep, you're kind of in a conscious sleep state, and you have breath control as well in this state. Okay, so let's see if I can find this right quickly to log in. I have to do it from here. Um, yeah, so I'm just gonna go straight to YouTube. If you go into YouTube and you type in Yoga Nidra, um, Soma Breath, you'll find it, and it's called Yoga Nidra for Manifesting Your Intentions. Okay, so why? Because Yoga Nidra is also used as a magical tool, magical spiritual technology, okay? Because in this, um, state, your mind is very receptive, your unconscious mind, to suggestion. So actually, hypnosis works like this. Hypnotists get you into this state through this deep kind of meditative practice that they do. It's called hypnotic induction. They get you into a state like yoga, yoga nidra would, right? The thing with yoga nidra is you're doing it to yourself rather than a hypnotist doing it to you. And hypnotists use this state to implant suggestions into your unconscious mind that changes the programming of your operating system. The operating system that powers your real AI. So you've heard about AI outside, the technological AI, but we have our own inner technology and we have our own AI, okay, which I call automatic intelligence. Automatic intelligence. These are all the things you do instinctively, right, without even thinking about it. And think about this. Everything in your life is a result of those things. If you think about everything you do is because of a nervous system reaction where you did something and you weren't even consciously aware of it. Pretty much everything in your life is a result of that. Even like words coming out of your mouth. Like sometimes we just say those things, we don't even consciously aware we're saying them. Right? It's just flowing, especially when you're at flow state. Now, for some people, that AI is programmed really badly and they say nonsense sometimes, and they say the wrong thing at the wrong time, right? And get into lots of trouble. But imagine— and that's often actually when they haven't slept enough— imagine if you could program your AI to say the right thing at the right time, the right person, to do habits, habitual things that lead you towards success and pleasure instead of pain. Right. And really, like, take your life to the direction you want it to go in. Right. That's what we have to program this AI to have, this incredible ability we have to just do things fast and quick and unconsciously. That's what we have to program, and Yoga Nidra is the art of programming that AI with better software. Okay, super powerful. My life has really made big impact changes as a result of doing Yoga Nidra. Okay, there's a reason why Andrew Huberman says that this one track is his number one track that he does religiously without fail. And then he went and made his own version of it himself, rebranded it. But you'll see his post on it. I mean, it was nice of him to shout me out, which is cool. Um, anyway, so hypnagogia is the theta gateway. So this is the hypno— hypnotic state that hypnotists get you into. Right? This is what we've been talking about. Dream yoga is your ability to wake up in your sleep in a lucid state. Inception. So you can get into lucid dreaming states where you, you, you go into this kind of other world of your own creation where you can play that world like a, you know, a video game. Um, this is possible. Is it Um, so a very good friend of mine, Charlie Morley, he's the world's leading expert at dream yoga, right? Check him out, Charlie Morley, legend. Okay, um, we both have exactly the same birthday too. We're like twins. Uh, we're really, really good buddies. So check him out, Charlie Morley. Um, and then sankalpa is having one clear intention that you program in Yoga Nidra. Okay, so it's, it's basically an intention. Okay, so, so in this state, we can actually enter into the most reliable altered states humans have. So we can use this state in fun ways, and at the end of a very intense, powerful soma breath journey, you can actually get into this state without even consciously being aware of it. That state of extreme peace, bliss, tranquility. If you've done one of our more advanced sessions, you'll know what I'm talking about. That there's this moment where just you, you do, you go into the void, into the other, right? And us transformational coaches at Soul Breath are trained to be able to implant the perfect instructions that you've consciously chosen Right, they're not doing it actually, they're just guiding you to it at that time, in that moment. That's when the real magic happens. Okay, all right, okay. So sleep is a feeling, not a number. Okay, so here's the trap: chasing perfect sleep scores can create The very anxiety that ruins sleep. Who here has, um, sleep trackers or Oura Rings and devices and gadgets and all that shit? Anyone use all that stuff? So my business partner Gary, he's like the most— he's extremely neurotic, right? Great, great guy, but he's very neurotic personality. Okay, he's the— he should not get Oura Rings because what happened was he got an Oura Ring and it would wake him up with a bad sleep score and he would freak out because of it. He would be like running to me going, oh my God, my sleep score is shit, oh my God. And then the whole day is ruined because of a device telling him something that may or may not be true. Okay, so I said to him, just get rid of that, have a good night's sleep. There's something better that you can use as a sleep tracker. I'm going to teach you what that is in a moment. Right, so I don't like Oura Ring so much. I'm not a big fan of it because it's not always accurate, right? We don't know their actual algorithms, like we don't know what's really going on behind the scenes there. So it's hard to trust how accurate their results are. Okay, same goes for Whoop and all these gadgets. And, um, if it wakes you up with a bad score and you may feel great— Gary was always like saying like, but I feel good, man, like why is it such a bad score? I'm like, go by what you feel, man, go by what you feel, right? And you know, like, do you know when you felt when you feel good. You know what that feels like. You know when you've had a good night's sleep, you wake up feeling supercharged and refreshed, and you don't need to drink coffee. You don't need the coffee. If you don't need coffee in the morning, if you wake up feeling like, oh, I don't need coffee today, then you probably had a good night's sleep, right? If you wake up and you like can't like face the day without a cup of coffee, then you probably didn't have a good night's sleep. So that's That's just common sense. You can trust your own intuition. You don't need a gadget to tell you that. Does that make sense? Right. Sometimes we rely too much on technology. Okay. We don't need to. So take a week off the variable. Okay. And then ask a better question. How do I feel? Super important. Okay. So the 8 hours. Is not going to be a standard blanket for everyone. We're all unique. We're all— we all have bio-individuality. So you don't know what those scores are. Like, you have to figure that out. You can only know that, what, um, what the amount of hours you need by actually self-observation, right? By understanding your own patterns, because we're all unique and individual. So we don't go by any blanket statements and scores. If the government gives you advice, remember that that advice is for the masses. And this is how the government gives you advice: they take the averages of the population. And if you take the average of a population, you'll find it's a bell-shaped curve with a lot, a lot more people moving towards the middle, but there's a 25% on either side who are higher or lower than the average. Okay. And that's completely normal. So if you take healthy people and you plot the average, they'll say that health is the average of, of that. So it's more like a bell-shaped curve. And they're going to say right down the middle is the average of the population, healthy population. And they'll do this for cholesterol. They do it for blood pressure. They'll do it for things like how much sleep you need. And it's nonsense, okay? Because we're all different, we're all unique, we're all individual. We don't have— we can't go by averages. We're not linear, rational beings. We're completely unlinear, irrational. We have emotions, we have genetics, we have outside influences, we have blue light, we have disrupted circadian rhythms. We're all different, okay? So we need to know ourselves. That's the most important thing. Okay. So, Sacred Sleep Protocol. So if you can get some morning sunlight in the morning, right, it's going to really help. So even just keeping a bit of a curtain open, having some light coming in in the mornings is going to really help you. Okay, morning sunlight. Now, if you're somebody who wakes up with alarm clock, if you can get out into sun for a bit, right, in the morning, it's going to really help you. 2, nasal breathing throughout the day. That's a non-negotiable. You have to practice that. Okay. 3, um, you need to dim down, turn off your blue lights, lower the lights. Use, uh, the 4-4-8 breath cycle. So 5 to 10 rounds of that, boom, it's going to help you go to sleep. Okay. And before you go to sleep, have one sankalpa. So here's some of the exercises I do. So what I like to do is do a night review. I mean, a day review at night. So what I'll do is I'll review my day in, in, in reverse. So I'll I'll just watch my day like scenes of a movie, but in reverse. I'll play my day out in reverse. Okay, this actually is a great right-brain creative visualization too, as well. And that can actually help you get into more of a dreamy rest state. Okay, anything that stimulates the right brain at night is a good thing to do. Okay, so anything creative. That's why a lot of artists do creative things at night. You know, they draw and paint, or musicians produce music when the moon's out. Okay. Because you're more creative in that state because your right brain is more active. So you can do like a day review. And then from that day review, you can actually come up with an intention. What's one intention that you want to accomplish the next day? Okay. That could help you. right? Like progress towards your goals. Just one. Just focus on one and then see what happens, right? See how you automatically program yourself to get that thing done the next day. It's awesome. Another trick you can use, okay, is the subconscious alarm clock. So I use this affirmation. I often do this, especially if I'm traveling a lot. When you're in your sleep mode, you're closing your eyes, you're on your right side, you've done your 4-8 breathing. Then what you do is say this affirmation: I command my subconscious mind to fall into a deep, restful sleep so I can wake up at whatever the time you want to wake up at is, feeling refreshed and energized. And then just say that over and over again a few times. But you may have already fallen asleep before you can even say a few of them. But just repeat that mantra and watch how that programs your unconscious mind to wake up, you know, alert. Okay, it's crazy. It's amazing. You'll wake up at that time. It's on the dot. It's amazing. So here's a mantra: I command my subconscious mind to fall into a deep and restful sleep so I can wake up feeling refreshed and energized at whatever the time is tomorrow morning, or whatever you want to say. Or you could say it like this: I command my subconscious mind to fall into a deep and restful rejuvenating sleep so I can wake up at 6 AM, whatever time you want, feeling refreshed, energized. Come up with your own mantra, whatever you want. You don't have to use those words. It's just that affirmation. I command my subconscious mind to fall asleep, so on and so forth. Okay, makes sense. All right, next. So sleep is the one thing every human shares. Alright, enter it consciously, breathe through your nose, set your intention, and let the ancient wisdom your body already knows do its work. Alright, so that brings us to the end of this presentation. Okay, but it's not the end because now we shall, um, hold on, go into question and answer mode. So I hope that was useful. We covered a lot, covered so much. Okay, um, and you know, we can go much deeper into this. I go much deeper into this inside our certification courses. Um, and what I want to talk about now for the last part is like what we can do, what you can do next to to prepare your physiology during the day so you can fall asleep like a yogi at night. Okay, and that's to do with conscious breath control. So our number one course I recommend for everyone to do is called BreathFit. Okay, and I will give you all the exercises you need to do during the day, breathing and physical exercises that, that prepares your body. So Monica, do you want to post the link to that, to BreathFit? And if you want to have an intro to BreathFit, all you need to do is go to the Somabreath app, download it if you haven't already. Who here has not got the Somabreath app by now? Come on, anyone not got it? All right, so download the Somabreath app. And this is the Yoga Nidra. I thought I pasted it in already, but here it is. You will find in the courses section, there's a free course called the Healthy Breathing Course, or it's called Breathworks Challenge. Okay, watch every single video, practice every step, and make that into your daily routine. Do that and you watch how much better your sleep becomes, right? But not just that, your energy during the day, your well-being, your mood, everything gets better when you learn conscious breath control and healthy breathing habits. Okay, so this is all to do with CO2 tolerance, increasing your CO2 tolerance. It's all to do with slowing your breathing rate down. It's all about making your mitochondria more efficient and bigger in number, more powerful. That's how we produce energy in the body. They're your little car engines that powers your life. So breath control, which is what we go deep in, in our Soma Breath courses, uh, begins with the Healthy Breathing course on the Soma Breath app. It expands in our BreathFit course, okay, which you get on the website. And then a lot of people become— just join our certification program and get all of that already included. Because in order to do the certification, you have to kind of go through your own transformation first, understand the practice that you're actually teaching by doing it to yourself, get the results, then you really understand it, and then you can actually build a career out of it. So that's what a lot of people choose to do, is instead of like doing a course here or there, they just go, right, I'd love to be an instructor. I'd love to do this. I want to, I want to change my life, and then I want to help other people too. And that's the best way, right? Do a certification course and go to the next level. Okay, so let's get some questions. Who wants to speak live right now and ask me a question about anything? So Astrid says there is a lot of stuff about myofascial dentistry and restricted airways due to jaw malformation. Do you know anything about that, and does the breathwork help in that case? So the, the breathing habits that I teach you in Breathwork Challenge are— help— will help for everybody, even if you have jaw malformation. So what jaw malformation leads to is mouth breathing, okay, because it can often restrict the nasal passages and it can lead to snoring and all those problems. Now the key is you can still solve this by using things like nasal strips you can put on. My friends at, um, Ark of Sweden have amazing nasal strips. Let me get their brand. By the way, I, I don't get any commissions off this. I'm just doing this to help you out. They're my friend's brand, um, Ark of Sweden. They have really cool nasal strips and you just stick them on your nose and it can expand your airways up to 30%, so that can be very useful. Okay, so yes, so use— Astrid says no. Michelle says, what if you have difficulty breathing out through nose because of constant nasal congestion? So nasal congestion, okay, there's one important thing. So we haven't talked about the morning breath all the time. So the best breathing exercise you can do, right, which is the best, in my opinion, the health tracker, is the morning breath hold time. You'll learn that as the first step in the Breathworks Challenge on the app. So what the morning breath hold time shows you is your, your oxygen capacity and your oxygen efficiency. How easily do you get oxygen to the cells where it needs to go and how much storage you have there and what's your CO2 tolerance. All of those metrics will give you an overall indication of your health. If you have a low score below 20 seconds, you often get a lot of nasal congestion, you get sinus problems, you get colds and flus frequently, you get asthma symptoms, get breathing issues. When you get your morning breath hold time above 40 seconds, which is what we aim to do in our courses, right? You will sleep much better. You have better CO2 tolerance, you're more relaxed, more calm, and sleeping becomes a lot easier. But often sleep problems, you can see the correlation between the low morning breath hold time and needing 10 hours sleep, 12 hours sleep at night, still waking up feeling not refreshed. And you'll see a correlation between that and over-breathing at night, mouth breathing, and so on and so forth. So when you do all of the exercises that we teach, the score starts to go up pretty fast and it can go quickly above 40 seconds. So that's why I really recommend the Breathworks Challenge for those of you. Now, sometimes nasal congestion is caused by atmosphere. Allergies and so on and so forth. Food, right? Certain foods, processed foods causes it as well. So you got to be careful with that as well. Like, that's stuff that just happens. It's hard to avoid when you're in a certain environment, but you can do other things to mitigate the effects of it. Okay. Okay, yes, so, um, good point, Sandy. Um, you mentioned if you already follow your steps and still struggle, that there is emotional issues. Yes, so, so if your mind's very busy, okay, if your mind's very busy, it could be because you just are worried about the future, you're hung up on the past, you, your monkey mind, the voice in your head just doesn't calm down, doesn't stop, right? Who has that issue? Who does like over 50% of everything that I'm teaching already on the physiological side, who still finds it hard to get to sleep? Yeah, okay. So now this is something that's more of a psychological situation, the issue that we have to deal with. So if you are a natural worrier, if you're a natural, naturally anxious person, then CO2 is your best friend. Carbon dioxide. You have to practice slow breathing practices as much as possible in the evenings. You must, you have to do all of the techniques a bit more intensely. Like, you've got to turn off all the stimulation. You cannot be using your phone an hour before you go to sleep, right? You can't do that. Otherwise you're going to really struggle. Okay. So meditation techniques. Is a way to also help. So somebody mentions humming. Humming is a great CO2, um, uh, raiser, right? It rises CO2 because you're extending the exhalation. Any technique which extends the exhalation raises CO2. Okay, so humming, Om. Now, if you just chant Aum, Aum, or just hum, and you tune into that sound, and you try and focus on that sound and nothing but the sound in that moment, that's meditation. And that calms the worrying mind in your voice, the voice in the head. It calms that down. It makes it go in the background. So use that. Okay, now other techniques like Yoga Nidra, if you're a big worrier, can really help. Okay, so that Yoga Nidra practice, you can try to get into a more calm state before you go to sleep, and it can— it's like a meditation in itself, so that can also switch off the monkey worrying mind. If you do that. So any kind of guided meditation, guided imagery, um, listening to very relaxing music, white noise, even background sounds, they act like, like meditation cues, and that can help you get into a meditative state, all right, to calm you down. Smells, like having good smells in your— like lavender, Lavender is really good. Have lavender on your pillow. All these smells help turn on the sleep pathways. Okay. So, so you just, if you're a worrier, you've got to also now look at your life. And that's why having a transformational coach is useful. Okay. So for those of you who try everything I've taught in this, still struggle, it's time to find a coach. Okay, a good coach, because a good coach can help you, um, look at your life, like what is the things that causing your biggest source of stress, and help you tackle those things and give you some clarity, right? Like having a coach— I have one, a lot of people I know who are successful have one, um, they, they like are having like Um, somebody who comes in and cleans up your computer for you, right? So that you can actually use your computer more cleanly. That's, that's how I look at them. They come and help you put things in the right places, right, in your life. Okay, my wife is my best coach. She's amazing, and she just helps me to declutter all my thoughts, make them a bit more coherent, and put things into boxes where they need to be. So I stop worrying about things that and just not worth worrying about. Or like, we worry about it together in that moment and we deal with it and we put it to the side. Okay, so she helps me work through things, and that's what coaches do. They help you work through things. They help you think for you and make decisions faster. Often the reason why we have busy, crazy minds is because we find it hard to choose something. It's usually when we've got to decide something and whether we want to decide to do this thing or that thing or that thing, or don't do that thing, or— and we start thinking of all the consequences of all those things. We start to play chess in our minds. Anyone relate to that? I bet you a lot of your, your thinking is down to that, right? It's all the decisions you've got to make. So having somebody who's a good coach can help you navigate those and stop you worrying about things you don't need to worry about. Make sense? Great. Okay, so, um, yes, a mind— like, the mind is the thing we have to take care of, okay? That's why yogis don't have problems going to sleep, right? Because they live in the Himalayas, they've completely, you know, got rid of all of their distractions and possessions, and they've copped out of society, and they've, they've kind of hidden away from the problems that modern people face. And so yeah, they're carefree, they're living very simple lifestyle. But we don't, okay? We live in crazy society. We, we have like insane, like, people running the governments. And, you know, we have all this nonsense from the media and social media and all that. So it's obvious that we, we have stressed. It's obvious, okay? So the solution is also obvious, okay? Because you know what the cause is. So what you have to do, you have to kind of go into a cave for a bit. You're going to go into a little of an imaginary cave and, and just don't think about anything for a little bit. You need to have a little break. And in that moment, clarity starts to come back when you give yourself a break from all the stimulation. And then you can start to think a bit more clearly and you start to sort things out. And if you can go into a cave with someone you trust, they can be your listener, guru, mentor, right? And you can just rattle off to them and they can help you sort things out. Or just literally listening is enough. Often, often when we just speak things out loud, right, it resolves in your head, right? Because the thoughts, the voice in your head is often— oops, sorry, I hate when I get unsolicited phone calls. Anyway, um, often the loud voice in your head that's going round and round and round is, um, is like unprocessed thinking. And instead of speaking out loud, we're voicing it in our mind, right? So when you speak it all out or write it all down— that's why journaling is so useful— it helps to put that thinking to one side. It processes it. Does that make sense? So there's all these different practices you can do, and a good transpersonal coach that we train in soma breath, they're the masters of helping you to navigate the mind and get into a state of peace where you can actually have a better quality of life. Piotr made a great point there. It is like at work when you start explaining problems to someone, you immediately figure out the solution by yourself. Yeah, so often that happens, right? So totally relate to that. The BreathFit is actually a program on our website, soabreath.com. So it's aside from the app. The app doesn't have the courses yet. The new version of the app is coming in a few months We'll have it built in, but for now you get it on our website. Okay, let's have some people on the live now. Piotr, you have your hand up?

Hi. Yes. Yes.

Hello.

Hi. Hello. Thank you very much for this meeting. I have a few questions. I think they are slightly more basic, but you mentioned about this 448 protocol, right? Like 5 to 10 rounds. I just wanted to ask if there's like any specific difference between that one and the quite popular one or common ones, which is 3-5-8 or 4-7-8. Are they like more or less the same, or—

They're all tricks to extend your exhalation. That's all it is.

Okay. Okay.

I just find 4-4-8 easier for people to practice, and it goes really well with music because music is 4-bar loops. So for— you can time everything to really cool music, and the breath is timed. In Soma Breath, we do everything in 4 bars, so we tend to have 4-4 patterns or 8-8-8, things like that. So that's why. It's just true. Once you understand the physiology, you can come up with your own ones, whatever works for you.

Okay.

Yeah.

So I also understand it's not a big difference between, for example, 4-4-8 and 4-8. Because for example, I practice quite a lot before that, before I fall asleep. I, I practice the 0.5, so either it's 6 to 12 or like in a different, but okay. Any idea how can I close my mouth overnight? So I, I put a lot of effort to start breathing through my nose all day and I, I really take care about it, but, and I fall asleep with like breathing through nose and I fall asleep on the right side and took me like time to get there, but I still cannot close my mouth during night. And I can recognize it because when I wake up, I have like pretty dry mouth. I need to drink something, which is like clear signal that I open them up during night. And it's difficult for me to really like, I don't know, like solve this issue.

Do you use the Myotape or any kind of mouth tape?

Yeah, I tried, but I like to like I have a beard and I like to wear it, so I use it usually when I shave. But then after like a week or two, it just doesn't stick.

Niraj Naik.

But, um, I, I— yeah, that's one of the ideas that I have in mind, just to start shaving every day. And at least until I, I solve it, like, through, through this Myotape, um, I'm gonna shave myself. However, also what I heard is that if you open your mouth, it might be also connected with the, like, some problem with a muscle tension, and it might be difficult to close the mouth by yourself. Like once you start opening them up. So you have to use the tape like until the end of your life. However, I have to also admit it's worth it because whenever I do it, I wake up in the morning much, much more like energized and much more relaxed. So I, I can feel the difference. That's why I really want to change it.

Yeah, well, so it's a choice of beard or— yeah, energy, beard or energy.

Shouldn't be, right?

There are other, there are other things you can use. So there are some funny devices which actually shut your mouth. They're kind of straps and they keep your jaw closed.

Okay.

So you can try one of them, right? They're like completely shut. They're for people with really bad problems with that, but it keeps your mouth closed. Okay. So you could try one of them contraptions. Um, and The other thing is you only need a little bit of your lip. You only need this much. It doesn't have to be like a large amount of the tape.

Yeah.

And then that just seals your lips. And then actually you can still even drink through a straw and things like that. But just a little bit of tape's all you need, especially if you already are consciously aware of the benefits of it, because all it does is it kind of reminds your unconscious mind to keep your mouth shut.

Okay, okay.

So just a little bit is all you need.

Yeah.

And last question, if you have any advice, because I, I feel, I feel that I resonate very, very deeply with some nice scents, you know, like some nice candles and stuff like that. And I just wanted to ask you if you have any recommendation for like the healthy, you know, candles or healthy oils, because you can buy a lot of them but sometimes when you start checking, like, you know, the ingredients, I mean, it's better not to use them. So I just wanted you recommend, like, some things on, on, on the chat, like, from, I don't know, that you know from the market. And maybe you have something which is proven, like, verified, and it's really healthy that you can, like, use without any hesitation before you fall asleep.

Yeah, so I actually, um, let me see if I've got it here. So I use this sometimes. And we have it in our sessions, and it's Palo Santo, right? Mimi makes this, and we tend to have our own. She actually sells these with our Solar Breath branding, actually. Um, they're candles and they're Palo Santo. That can help, but this scent can be a bit more energizing, right? But I think she might have other scents. I'm not sure, you have to check their website. But it's Maison Palo Santo is the name. Let me write down.

Yeah, if you could just like— I'm based on someone like— I think Tiffany wrote it down already.

And these are like as green as you can get. These are like super kosher. You can't get more eco-friendly. I've actually seen her at the place where they harvest it in Ecuador and all that. So it's really powerful. Good stuff. But good old lavender oil. So if you can just find a source of organic lavender oil, right? doTERRA, I think they claim to have a very pure brand. I don't know 100% if it's true, but they have claimed to have a very tra— um, um, uh, what's it called? Very clean, pure brand. So I don't know if it's— you have to check that out, but just look for anything really certified organic lavender, or make your own. Okay, get some lavender, make your own oils. That's the other way of doing it. But you can usually get like pure, like healthy, clean lavender oil at least. Okay, right, just don't buy a cheap pharmacy. Right.

Yeah. Yeah.

Um, somebody said, um, wait, somebody said something about falling asleep with candles. Um, I— yeah, so she has, uh, essential oils as well. So I just showed you the candle because they had the packaging, but she has essential oils because somebody says it's dangerous to fall asleep with candles. True. So you can get the essentials that she has.

All right.

Okay. Thank you.

Somebody else mentioned EMDR therapy. It can also help. You can try that. That's true. ASMR. Okay. You can try that too, where they use nice sounds in the background. So there you go. Okay. Thank you. Any more questions? Is that it? We're good. Okay, so Francis, welcome. You saw me yourself.

Hi, hi, I've been suffering with insomnia for, you know, months and months. Trying sleeping pills and all kinds of stuff to see if it'll help. And at one point I even went for my sleep apnea test and they said it was a very mild form, but I'm losing sleep like you can't imagine. Every night, you know, I'm practically awake and I can't sleep. Do you know what the cause of that could be?

Okay, so one of the biggest causes of sleep apnea is— Do you have insomnia or do you say sleep apnea?

I have insomnia actually, and I don't know— No, insomnia.

So what happens? Tell me what happens.

Well, every night I go to bed and I just lay in there and, you know, I'm awake all night. I can't sleep at all. And I wake up in the morning, I have very low energy, I can't function. And it's, it's, it's so hard for me that, you know, like, I, I can't— I don't have the energy levels to do anything during the day. So nobody knows. I don't know what the cause of this could be. And, you know, I've tried a lot of sleep medication, different types, Trazodone, Dayvigo, and there's even Lorazepam and stuff like that. And I've been taking that for a while, and sometimes that doesn't have any effect as well.

So what, what, what was a point where in your life when this started to happen? Or has it been your whole life like this?

It's been like this for the last few months, I would say the last 5 or 6 months.

And what is the— what do you think was a trigger for it happening? Is there like anything you can point your finger to?

Well, there is a bit of PTSD there, you know, but I mean, you don't have to go into it, but like, yeah, life situation, family situation and stuff like that. So I think triggered it. Yeah. So because when there's some form of stress, I think on the mind, then your sleep can get affected as well, right?

100%. So that sounds like what it is. So have those things resolved.

What is the solution for this, Niraj Naik Naik, where I can get a good night's sleep?

Like, you know, well, have you, have you tried all the things that I've mentioned in this presentation so far?

Yeah, I looked at the breath and I looked at, you said sleeping on the right side. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I've been, definitely I will I will try them.

No, but have you tried any of it yet?

Oh, have I in the past? No, I didn't know about it, right?

So, okay, so you need to try all these things and then come back onto one of these calls.

And what do you recommend, uh, the 4-4-8 breath?

All of it. I recommend, I recommend everything that I've taught you. You, you make a routine out of it. Every day and stick to it, especially the, the, the practice you do before you go to sleep.

All right, okay.

And the most important thing is you've got to look at the root cause. So if the root cause is, is an emotional issue, something that's happened, that's the thing you need to work through. Okay, so like It sounds like it's quite clear that there's a trigger. From that point, you got insomnia, and it's— you've got a lot of worry in your mind. Family situations, family situations often lead to that. So once you resolve that, and that's what you need to work on, then your sleep will become much easier. But you won't sleep like a baby unless you resolve that.

Well, what about using the oxygen mask at night? Would that help?

No, no, no, no, no, no, no.

The CPAP machine.

No, why do you need a CPAP? The only people who use CPAP machines are people with sleep apnea.

Okay, okay.

You said you don't have sleep apnea.

Well, a mild, mild form of sleep apnea.

Okay, so then you need to try— because earlier you said he didn't have sleep apnea, but that means you need to try that.

Very mild, a mild form of sleep apnea.

So nobody needs to be on a CPAP machine at all unless they have extreme sleep apnea. It's like the last, last, last, last, last, last resort. Okay.

Oh, okay.

It's never something you give to somebody with mild sleep apnea. That's because sleep apnea makes the problem worse. It doesn't fix the problem, it makes it worse. You might get a temporary relief, but over time it makes it much worse, and you'll hate your life as a result of it. So like, the only, only time is when somebody is going to die if they don't have one, which is not your situation. So you've got to do all the things I said in this call Practice it and then feedback. Tell me what happened. But you must do what I said. You can't dabble. You can't dabble. You can't just say, oh, do this one thing, oh, it didn't work. This is so common that people do.

They go red and the line, the right side, and then what else?

Yeah, I mean, watch the presentation. There'll be a replay. Watch it because I've got a lot of people want to ask more questions. Otherwise I have to do the whole presentation again. Okay.

Thank you very much.

So do the breathing techniques, prepare your sleep routine and all of those things. Sleep on your right side. Replay this, watch this video again, make a note of everything, practice it. But most of all, you're going to resolve your family situation. Yeah.

Okay. Thank you very much, Niraj Naik Naik.

No problem. Thank you for reaching out. Okay, next we have Aarti Kapoor. Hello.

So similar problems like Franco, but have insomnia. I actually took a course, joined Mindvalley to join you. And I tried those exercises where I was probably able to, you know, hold my breath for like 40 seconds, 45 seconds, try to get into the hypoxia mode. Um, but didn't really work for me as much because I think I, we realized I actually had stomach gut issues and that was the reason I was not able to sleep at that point. So I had good 4 years of no diagnosis of what the problem was. My problems were, you know, losing my hair and not sleeping. But nevertheless, uh, got a diagnosis after 4 years, um, slowly got better, but my sleep pattern became so bad that after a month or two of getting the treatment for my stomach, and my stomach's healed now. But I got that insomnia better. Now it's sporadic. You know, I sleep for a day comfortably, then maybe for 2 days I need a pill. Melatonin does not work. And I have also had a sleep test done. Where it said again, only in the REM cycle when I sleep on my back, I have issue in the sense of apnea. Yeah, I do try to sleep on my right. I've always been a side sleeper. And after learning from you, I did try to sleep on my right. Breathing exercises in those time, it didn't work. Now it does work. I also tried meditation, but somehow meditation just brings more anxiety in me. It's like I'm trying too hard. So at this point of time, my insomnia is kind of, you know, 2 days on, 2 days it's not on, and then without any feeling. There's no stress that I feel. I think my stress is when I'm not able to sleep. This not sleeping is a stressor, but there is no other stressors. But the problem— I've had all my blood tests, everything done. My doctor says, because you have that, sleep is probably not getting right. I'm gaining weight for no reason. My thyroid, everything is fine, but not able to sleep is causing me to gain weight. I am 56 years old, past all menopausal stage, but this continues and I'm not able to figure out why so that I can cure. So my problem remains weight gain, sleep sporadic. If you can help, it'll be great.

So what happened?

What happened?

Something happened as well, probably the same with Francis. And you can use a little checklist. This is like—

I don't, I don't feel stressed, honestly. And I don't think I over— there are times that I overthink, you know, I'm thinking— obviously life is never without stress, so you're thinking about your family issues and whatever. And there was a point where I was going through a very big stress in my life last year. And honestly, I slept like a baby. I slept and we had times to take care of our child, you know, my husband and I, and I was able to sleep for 5 hours, wake up perfectly fine, and I was fine. But 4 months after, I got this hit of the insomnia again, and I had it bad for 3 months, and then automatically it got better. There's just no pattern to it. My doctors, been to 7 of them, they, they all just don't have anything, no direction for me.

Okay, so what happens when you try to go to sleep? What happens?

So I calm myself down, try to be away from everything. Sometimes I do pick up my phone to play a game or something to calm myself sometimes. Not every day, but sometimes. And I'm sleeping and I'm not thinking anything, and then suddenly just like a little switch that happens, and I know that I will not be able to sleep. Like, I know. And then 2 hours of tossing and turning, and finally taking your Zolfric and, you know, your Zopidine and taking it and sleeping. I take honestly 2.5 mg, which is a very, very less dose. But the doctor says maybe it's become like a habit. If it's working for you, keep taking it.

How long have you had it for? How long have you had Zolpidem for?

5 years now. Not always. Yeah. So it had— but it's 5 years on and off. I know. I know. Sorry, before you say, I got to mention that I had in between 8 months of great sleep with no, no zolpidem also.

Yeah. So zolpidem is a problem with— it disrupts the whole circadian rhythms. And if you've had it for that many years, even like low dose, I know somebody in Dubai who sleeps 1 or 2 hours a night now. He was on Zolpidem as well, and it's the trying to come off that, it's his sleep's got even worse. So it can work for a bit while you're on it, but then your body becomes kind of dependent on it. There's the problem with drugs, right?

Yeah.

And then, then it's like, then it's it, then that's it. It's become part of who you are. You can't live without it. And I, I am not sure what the answer is to this. This is, this is like, um, it's a pharmaceutical problem. Like, I think it might be related to that right now. My friend has tried so many different things in Dubai, um, and he's not been able to fix it yet. Now, he also has another issue because he had a severe brain injury that actually triggered the the insomnia, and then he was on Zolpidem for ages, then coming off it, his insomnia came back 1,000 times worse. Um, he's a rare case, right? It's a unique situation. So there has to be some way to— you have to try and completely wean off it 100%, and you have to detox the body. You have to go through a real cleanse of the whole physiology. So, like, can I just ask you a straight question? Like, what do you do in terms of physical activity during the day?

I have, um, this weight gain is happening, so somebody said not to do— well, okay, so at this point, 20 to 30 minutes of tai chi Um, and I'm doing 1 hour of walk, uh, and I do it at least 4 times a week, sometimes, sometimes 5, but at least 4 times a week for sure.

Do you sleep better on days you have a walk?

Not necessary. There's— I have tried every pattern, every food on earth. I eat quite well, a very balanced meal. I think I've become half a nutritionist myself, so tried everything. My last— I've been to two sleep doctors. My first doctor said the Z medicine, again, it can affect your memory. And I have— my mom has Alzheimer's. So he tried to give me another medication. Which works differently to sleep and to get me off the Z medicine. And it didn't work at all for me. It just made me drowsy during the day, all day, made me very anxious. So I went to this another sleep doctor and she said, if you can sleep with the Z, the Zolofresh, zolpidem with 2.5 mg, take it for life.

Don't worry about it.

Which I personally don't agree with after following you and Vishen. And, you know, and I have another, um, a doctor, he's a dermatologist but works in wellness in India, in Delhi. And he actually got me involved, told me about you and spoken to him. He's also tried a lot of things, magnesium, this, that. The— but nothing has truly worked for me.

I think it is something related to Zolpidem. What you need to do is you've got to try and produce your own sleep chemicals, right? So have you ever done a sauna? Have you ever used saunas?

Sauna heat?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I have.

Like, maybe do that in the evenings, or have a warm bath. At least warm baths can put you into that very deep state, rest state. If you, if you lie in a hot bath and just put on the Summer Breath meditation music, just chill out, practice your rhythmic breathing. Right? The moment you start to feel drowsy, then you get out and go to bed.

Like, it is sauna in Delhi right now.

Oh, you're in Delhi?

I'm in Delhi and it is sauna here.

Yeah, but I couldn't sleep. I don't know how anyone sleeps in Delhi.

Sorry?

Delhi is like the most crazy city in the world.

Yes, it is.

Yes, it is. It's not easy to sleep there anyway, even if you're perfectly healthy. But yeah, hot baths, if you can do that, you've got to basically trick your own biology to turn on sleep without dependent on Solbitam.

So anything more on these breathing exercises, would they help? Because this weight gain is also because my cortisol level is probably going up at night, my, like, all my blood work is good.

Of course. So the breathing, the breathing techniques, 100% you should do it, but you need to compound it. So like saunas really help calm you down and relax you, especially if you do in the evening before, like an hour before you go to bed or something, is a very good thing. Um, hot bath is a really good thing, not lukewarm but quite warm, at least over body temperature a little bit. Um, and just doing all the things that would be relaxing, you know, just playing like guided meditation music or having guided meditation background. Try out my Yoga Nidra track, that's really powerful.

Yoga?

So the Yoga Nidra track that I posted.

Yoga Nidra, okay. Yeah, yeah, I've tried that 2 years ago.

Yeah, so try all the things, watch this replay again, try all the things those that I explained, right?

Yeah, that I do.

And then, then report back.

Okay, thanks for your time. Appreciate it.

No problem. Thank you. Okay, we've got a chance for a couple more. So, um, HD Body and Mind.

Hi, um, my issue is not falling asleep, it's staying asleep. I probably wake up about 10 times a night. Um, I'm kind of fine with it because I'm not stressed, and I just tell myself, well, I'll just rest then. And I wake up feeling okay. Um, I'm a mindset coach, a breathwork facilitator, so I've already been doing— working on my mindset, breathwork. I relax of an evening. I've got an infrared unit. Um, I'll do the breath that you already say about. So there's everything that I kind of do. I switch my phone off, I have a nice hot bath. So yeah, I'm just wondering why my body just won't stay asleep. It goes to sleep and then I can wake up like every hour. Sometimes it's just after 20 minutes sleep I wake up.

Yeah, um, why do you think that is yourself?

My body just won't rest. I run my own business, I've got my own mortgage, I'm single, so there's not a man that kind of protects me, looks after me. It's all down to me, and I know that, and I'm fine with it. It's my choice to be single. But for some reason— and I'm not worrying, I go to bed fine, everything's under control, I've got savings, so we're not worrying about business or anything. So for some reason, my body's just in that hyper-alert state that I just can't seem to— for whatever reason, I do everything, like I do the meditation, I do a Yoga Nidra, If anything, I thought maybe I'm doing too much, so let's just calm down on the doing and let's do less. And I don't know, just, I'm chilled with it, I'm relaxed, and I wake up okay in the morning. I wake up, I don't even need my alarm, I'm already awake. That's just annoying, it's frustrating. And I really try and biohack with everything else I'm doing. I don't eat processed foods, you know, I'm really down on all my health So this is just one thing that I'm like, why am I not sleeping?

So, so you kind of hit the nail on the head. And this is also something I want to— I didn't fully touch upon but really address is that we have biology, right? We have a bio— we're a bio-computer. We have a hardware which is our physical body, and we have the unconscious part of it, the conscious side to it, but then we also have the human side, which is like the soul, right, the spirit. And biology is wired for, right, the primal level, the reptilian brain, for one particular thing: that's survival at all costs. That's all it gives a shit about. About, right? Doesn't care about anything else. All he cares about, am I gonna have food on the table? Do I have a roof over my head? And am I gonna pass on my genetics, right? And women, this one, the pass on the genetics, is way more important, right, biologically, than it is even for men, because the women carry the, the the baby, the new life form. So being single at a certain age for women, I'm being like a little bit— I might trigger a lot of people by saying this— it turns on the nervous system more than anyone realizes. And consciously you might think, I'm totally fine, everything's great, but unconscious, your reptilian brain's going, I need to have babies, right? And it doesn't care what you consciously think.

I've had a child, I've already had my son, so it's like—

but still, it's why, like, maybe you're, you're wired to be in a with somebody, right? To have somebody there. So I'm just giving you other— because you said you tried everything else.

Yeah, no, you are quite right. I would like a man. Yes, I'm saying it's a choice that I don't have one, but that's because I've become so awake and in tune that actually I just don't really fit into the men that I'm coming up against.

I'm saying, don't blame me whatsoever.

So I'm just like, that's in tune with me on a spiritual level. It's hard with taking the health and fitness into account. Like, I don't even want to go there, you know. So right now, yeah, we'll stay single. But yeah, just don't have a man snoring next to me, keep me awake. I just can't keep myself in bloody sleep, so it's annoying.

Well, one of the best, like, tranquilizers is sex, actually, right? Like, so, and just the comfort of having a partner, it, it does help people go to sleep better. Like it's— I used to prescribe that as a pharmacist to people who couldn't get sleep. It used to work.

So you're saying just go and get a man then?

I mean, I'm just giving you alternative suggestions because you said you tried everything. So I'm just throwing it out there because it's the first thing you said. Like, so the way we work actually, right, is like, I think I've really realized this so much from speaking to so many people, is that the first thing that comes to our mind is usually the thing. The first thing, and the first thing you said was, I know that, you know, uh, it's probably— you even said it at the start, it's the first thing you said, and it's usually the thing, right? Because the, the reptilian brain always speaks first, loudest, right?

So, um, if you could tell me where I meet this man then, that spiritual emotionally intelligent, takes his health and makes his health important, isn't a complete walking red flag. That would be great then. Maybe I need to come to this Conscious, um, thing that you're doing a talk at. Maybe he'll be there.

Well, it's a great plug for that. So Wellnergy is a place where you're going to meet a lot of those people in England, because you sound like you're from England.

Yeah, yeah.

And hopefully it's, um, not like 90% women and like 5% guys and 5%.

When I go to events, being judgy, but the men when I go there kind of tend to be a bit hippie-ish, and then they don't want their own— they're not working. And it's like, oh my God, I want a man that works.

Yeah, I know, I know what you mean. No, so Wellnergy, what I liked about it, um, was that it's kind of the not super into the extreme zone yet. It's kind of the cusp between between the Matrix world and the hippie world. It's like in between us, and that's why I like it, because I fit more into that. I don't— I can't hang out with crystal wand-waving fairies either.

Just either.

I'm, I'm in the real world, but I'm also tapped into very being awake and knowing what's, what's going on.

Yeah. And actually, the guys who come to our retreats are so cool. Like, all the guys I've met um, on our retreats are like really cool peeps to hang out with. Like, when they come to our trainings, teacher trainings, retreats, they're really cool peeps. Uh, so I think the Sonar Breath should have a dating app, as somebody just suggested.

Yeah, yeah. Well, if you come across anyone, send them my way, okay?

Yeah, but like, also, you're— because you're in business mode, you're, you're in hustle mode. Like, that's just normal. Like, we're, we're in reptilian brain mode because we're always looking for the next opportunity, the next customer, next client, this or that. We're all— that's— it's very different to having a job where you clock in and clock out, your responsibilities are finished after 5 PM. If you're in a business, sleeping is naturally harder when you have your own business. So you're going to think of all these things and then maybe think about Like, how can you have that clock off built into your day?

Whereas I started doing that, like turning the blue ticks off my WhatsApp so that they don't see if I've even seen the message, so I don't feel like I've got to reply until working out. So I'm taking so many things into account. So it is literally just, I need a man. Fuck, I didn't want to get a man, not just Thank you.

You never know, put it out there, put it out there. Now you put it out there to the whole world, you never know what's going to happen now.

There you go.

I thank you anyway.

All right, good stuff. Do a Yoga Nidra session, make that your single intention for tonight.

Definitely, yes.

Nice. Okay, I think we've— we're almost there. Like, let's have— let's have Leslie, and then obviously we're gonna on our raving fan Diana at the end. Hello, Leslie.

Hi, Niraj Naik Naik Naik. Uh, I'll be really quick. Hi. Um, so much like most of the other people, I've already done— do your course, I do the breathwork, I done meditation, all that good stuff. Uh, diagnosed chronic fatigue syndrome, done the Zopiclone, developed POTS, quit the Zopiclone, no meds. Sleep is okay, but I currently am back to, um, I have this constant buzzing in my body. Um, so I do— I've done, um, NLP certification. I'm all up on all that good stuff. But I just have this, this physical buzzing in my body that keeps me up at night. Um, so my mind completely— yeah, it's like a— it feels— the only way I can describe it is like it feels like I stuck up my— took a fork and stuck it in an electrical socket.

I thought you were going to say something else, like you stuck something else up.

Well, But no, it's more like current in my body, right? Almost like I can feel the blood coursing through my vein or veins.

Like, what did the— what did the doctor say about it?

Well, it's just apparently a part of chronic fatigue syndrome. I have no medical help here in Canada. It's quite— you know, there's— I'm waiting. I'm waiting for different specialists. I have no heart condition. I have no sleep apnea. I have— I live in a chronic stress situation. I've got a special needs child, and so I'm waiting for specialists for him too. So I have, you know, I'm doing everything I can. I can't change some things, um, but just when I'm under more stress, I, I really sense my body gets out of whack. So I guess my question to you, Niraj Naik Naik, is just, would there be any kind of specific styles of breath that might be helpful for really calming down that overactive sympathetic nervous system?

Just, just what I taught you today will help. What I'll do as well for everybody is I'm going to play one track so you can all do it from— that's on our app as well. For rest, you can practice that. But like, I just want to check what is the— what can these be symptoms? I'm just looking up right now. So there is a name for it and it's like there's— it's obviously to do with your nervous system. I think we used to give like gabapentin for this sort of thing, but I don't know.

Gaba.

You are?

I take some GABA, like just, um, over the counter.

Yeah, no, this is, this is a chemical, this is a drug called gabapentin. You mean gabapentin you take? Oh, you're on gabapentin?

I—

no, I'm not.

Sorry, just gab.

Because there's a supplement called GABA as well, right?

Right, right.

Um, so GABA can actually help with sleep a little bit, actually. Um, it can But like, I don't know this, I don't know, like, was there a particular moment that it started to get worse?

Yeah, I was doing great when my son was doing well. I've noticed in my awareness that my, my physical health is very much so affected by my son's mental and physical health. So when he stopped going to school in January, I've— everything's kind of heightened for me in terms of my symptoms.

Yeah.

So it sounds like it's, it's all again, it's the nervous— where the nervous system is turned on for long periods of time without a break, it, it gives you weird symptoms. Like you feel like you're being charged up.

Yeah.

And also like hyperventilating, like, can create a buzzing feeling and you might be chronically hyperventilating many don't even realize it. Like, you may be over-breathing. So what you need to do is just everything I've taught in this presentation, do it a bit more, right? And especially the 4-4-8 breathing, those sorts of long rhythmic breathing tracks that really help.

Yeah.

So yeah, there's some kind of, um, 21-day challenge too, so I'll be doing that.

Yeah, really. I think that's what it, what it sounds like. I'm not sure if there's any side effects or other medications, but no, no other medication. That's what it sounds like.

Yeah, doing this all natural. That's my choice.

Yeah.

Okay.

Okay, Leslie. So thank you for that. Thank you, everybody, for sharing. We have one more, last but not least, Diana, who's here every week. Not even every week now, it's like every other day on our live sessions. Um, here you go, here's your moment. But she always has her mic switched off, so let's send some love to Diana. Yeah, I don't know what's happened to your mic, Diana, because we can never hear you anymore. But anyway, that's it. My thing isn't working. But yeah, amazing. This has been a great, great session. I hope you enjoyed it. You'll be able to watch the replays on YouTube. This is going to become like a weekly podcast where we're going to probably move to Tuesdays where we'll do another topic every week. And you can ask questions. It's like, I love doing this. I could keep going for another hour, but I can't. My wife's already knocking on the door saying, come on, got dinner. But yeah, I hope this was useful. And please, if you haven't already, download the Soma Breath app. If you want to meet us in person, Wellnergy Festival, 12th, 13th of June. It's going to be epic. Um, if you want to do a certification, uh, check out the links from Monica for the next steps. Because look, if you can solve your sleep issues for yourself by doing what I just shared, and if maybe you already have and you've just gone, wow, I did all that and it worked, and now you want to like share that with others and actually have a credible career, you can also join the certification. So there's many different options in Soma Breath. We have an amazing community, uh, we have our Sunday sessions every Sunday, uh, that you should tune into. Brilliant, beautiful breathwork sessions. Actually, you know what, you can even do a Soma Breath session from the rest section on the app, which we're about to do right now as a final close. Okay, so if you go to the Soma Breath app and you click on Relax, you'll see there's some tracks. And there's one really nice one, it's so good, it's called Quiet Your Mind for Inner Peace. Okay, I'm gonna play it right now, and this is actually my wife's personal favorite. Quiet Your Mind for Inner Peace is really, really good. Okay. Um, so I'm going to play that right now for you all, so just bear with me. You just follow along with the instructions. It's very simple, very easy to do, and I, I feel at the end of this you're going to start feeling more relaxed. You might even drift off in the middle of it, which is also okay, right? Let me just get it for you. Where's it gone? You're good? Okay. So thank you everyone. I'm going to play this out to the end, so enjoy it. Let us know how you feel, and I'll be back in like 15 minutes to see if you have any feedback quickly. But this is the end of the podcast for now. All you need to do is just follow along with the instructions that are all in the audio track itself. Okay, so bear with me and we shall do it.

Welcome to Soma Breath Meditation: Quiet Your Mind. This breath-based meditation will take you into a deep state of relaxation and rejuvenation by simply following along with very easy instructions and by breathing in time with a specially crafted rhythmic music. MUSIC. So as you sit comfortably, bring your awareness to the sound. Any sound that draws your attention, bring this into the present moment. Notice as you tune into this sound, the voice in your head that worries about the future and gets caught up in the past begins to fade away, drift away, taking away with it the cares and worries of the world. That's right. And now bring your awareness to your breath as you breathe in and, uh, letting go on your exhale with a sigh of good feelings.

That's right.

Becoming more and more comfortable and relaxed. In a moment, you shall hear a count and a rhythm, the music that will become the guide for your breath. And as you breathe in this special rhythm, you will be turning off the stress and turning on relaxation. Relaxation. Breathing in through both your nostrils, breathing out through your mouth with a smooth and consistent rhythm, with no pause between the inhale and exhale. Making sure that every exhale that you make, you just relax and do it with no force. And your breath on the inhale Your inhale should be silent and quiet, just as your mind begins to become. So now exhale slowly and fully, getting ready to breathe Breathe in a rhythm. That's right, breathing in a smooth, connected rhythm. No pause between your inhale and exhale. Just allow the music to be your guide, the sound of my voice helping you go deeper and deeper within your own mind.

3, 4, 5, 6, 7.

And notice as you breathe in this special rhythm, become more and more relaxed with a still and quiet mind.

5, 6, 7, 8. In, 2, 3, 4. Out, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8. In, 2, 3, 4. Out, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15.

You may notice tingly sensations and even your eyelids flickering, and know that this is a sign that you're going deeper to states of absolute bliss and relaxation. Aasraa.

In, 2, 3, 4, out, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8. In, 2, 3, 4, out, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8. In, 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8. 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2.

Notice how your mind relaxes and your breathing becomes more rhythmic.

1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2.

Turn up the dial on those good sensations and good feelings of relaxation. With every breath you take in and out, that's right.

Out, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8. In, 2, 3, 4. Out, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8. In, 2, 3, 4. Out, 2, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8. Inhale.

That's right, going deeper and deeper to a state of bliss and relaxation. It feels so good to just relax and quiet the mind.

4, 5, 6, 7, 8. In, 2, 3, 4. Out, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8. In, 2, 3, 4. Out, 2, 3, 4, 5, 5, 6, 7, 8. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8. 7, 8. In, 2, 3, 4. Out, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8. In, 2, 3, 4. Out, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8. In, 2, 3, 4. Out, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8. In, 2, 3, 4. Out, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8.

In, Breathe all the way in and breathe out fully. And hold your breath. As life is just a series of inhales and exhales, as you press pause on your breath, you press pause on life for a moment. And your thoughts become still and focus on a single point. Bring your awareness to that moment of stillness. If you feel you need to inhale, just inhale, coming back to normal breathing before the next round begins. And when you hear the counts and the music, begin to breathe in a rhythmic In, in, 2, 3, 4, out, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8.

In, 2, 3, 4, out. 2, 3, 4, 5, 6.

Now breathing in a deeper and slower rhythm, helping to go even deeper to states of relaxation and rejuvenation.

3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8. In, 2, 3, 4, out, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8.

Remember, the rhythm is more important than the depth. No worries if you cannot breathe fully in or out, just breathe in a rhythm. That's right.

5, 6, 7, 8. In, 2, 3, 4. Out, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8. In, 2, 3, 4. Out, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7.

Know that as you're breathing in this special rhythm, you are helping the oxygen to move into every single cell in the body, helping it to heal, rejuvenate, and be supercharged and refreshed. That's right. The potent new source of energy.

In 2, 3, 4, out 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8. In 2, 3, 4, out 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8. In 2, Hold.

And now let go and breathe all the air out and hold your breath after the exhalation. Enjoy once again that moment of stillness you receive by pausing your breath just for a moment. And then when you get that first urge to breathe, just breathe in gently and come back into a normal breathing pattern. That's right. And know that as you leave this session today, you shall do so with a new sense of positive energy. That's right. Much love and positive energy for the day ahead. Peace.

Okay, so welcome back everyone. Slowly. Now, for those of you who have the ability to go to sleep right now, go do it, um, if you feel like it. But I'll just have to get your feedback quickly if you want, if anyone wants to share quickly. Just in the chat. Um, how did that feel? And if you've all gone completely silent, it could be that it worked and you all went to sleep, which would be great. Well, this is the longest response time I think I've ever had. So, oh wow, I bought a stopwatch and held my breath for over a minute. Brilliant, great, nice one, Tiffany. Feeling good? Okay, so there you go. Go get the Soothing Breath app, go to the rest section, Quiet your mind for inner peace. Use that as an alternative sleeping technique you can use to help you get into sleep state. All right, and also you can use that subconscious command. I command my subconscious mind to fall into a deep restful sleep so I can wake up at whatever time you want, feeling refreshed and energized. Okay, so we're going almost 3 hours. Um, thank you everybody, it's been a pleasure, and I will see you next one. Much love everyone, peace, and see you soon. And for those of you who, um, are in our community, please share. Like, if you get value out of this, please share it, spread it, you know, tell all your friends, get more people onto this, get the word out, right? We need more people doing this. And if you know anyone who's got sleep issues, send them the replays, right? Go to YouTube, send the replay to this one for sleep. There's one on gut health from last week, I think it was. Or a couple of weeks ago, send that. But we're going to be doing this weekly, right? That's my plan, on Tuesdays. So much love, everyone. I'll see you next time.