Afterthoughts: The Neurobiology of Breath and Emotion

All right.

Welcome to Flow Radio. I'm Ryan Wicks, Chief of Staff of the Flow Research Collective. Today, I'm joined by my co-host, FRC Executive Director and bestselling author Stephen Kotler, and our Chief Science Officer, Dr. Michael Mannino. In this episode, we're introducing a new segment called Afterthoughts. We really have two goals here. First, we want to dive deeper into our conversations that we had with our prior guests. And explore the practical applications for unlocking flow states. And second, we're inviting you to send in your questions for our guests, and we'll answer them in the next Afterthoughts episode.

Now, Ryan, I think you want them to send in their questions. We could send in our questions too, and we can answer our own questions, but I think maybe for this segment, it's just an idea, they might want to send in their questions. So yes, I was thinking they would listen to the podcast, for example, with Dr. Jack Feldman or Dr. Joan Koenig, and they would have questions and they would send them to us. And we, of course, would not be able to answer them, but we might be able to call the people who we talk to and ask them to answer them, or we'll answer them ourselves, or we'll make up answers. All three will be amusing these days.

Uh, this day. So yeah, Stephen, you introduced our guest earlier this month, Dr. Jack Feldman, professor of neurobiology at UCLA. Dr. Feldman is a renowned neuroscientist for his groundbreaking work in the neural control of breathing. And one thing that stuck out to us in this conversation is that some of the flow-related questions you had, Stephen and Michael, didn't get answered. And Stephen, as we're getting ready for this recording, you were explaining how it reminded you of the early days of studying the neuroscience of flow and the conversations you would have with scientists then. Can you pick up that thread again for us?

Yeah, it was one of the— it was sort of like the one of the— as a journalist coming in, you hold scientists in sort of such high esteem, perhaps, at least I did. And I had a really sort of mistaken assumption about science. And I'll actually, I'll tell you a weird story that drives this home. So the assumption I made is that you go and you listen, you read their current research, and it raises a lot of sort of like basic questions, really fundamental stuff that, you know, with Jack, I was asking him complicated questions about comparative altered states. How does this breathing technique work versus that breathing technique affect consciousness, emotion, possibilities of getting in flow? And he didn't have any answers. And the reason was there's a lot of basic research that doesn't get done. And sometimes it's because you're really current cutting-edge research. You think you're going farther. And what it actually does is it uncovers a basic question that hasn't been answered. The one that was most shocking to me is I was reporting a story for Wired. I was covering the Everglades restoration project. It's an $8 billion, the most expensive public works project ever done to restore the health of the Everglades. Their metric, they were trying to get to sheet flow, which is when the whole top of the Everglades moves as a single layer and flows as a single layer. It's known as sheet flow. And that's how they measure the health of the ecosystem. So if you want to determine if anything is successful with the ecosystem, one thing you might measure, and this is really foundational, is keystone predators. So whatever is the apex predator that sits at the top of the food chain, that animal or reptile usually determines the health of the entire food chain for a lot of different complicated reasons. But basically, if the apex predator is dying off, everything else that's underneath it will start to flourish. And this is so wolves die out, deer run rampant, and what you have is massive defoliation, right? That happens because the wolf population has dropped. So there's no predators for the deer. So the deer eat all the food, and then all the animals underneath the deer start starving. And you have what's known as a trophic cascade. All this is besides the point. I'm doing the Everglade restoration project and we're out there in the Everglades at midnight in this boat and we're measuring alligator size. We're trying to measure the health of the ecosystem. We're doing a baseline alligator survey. You have to do it at midnight because you use flashlights, you get the eye shine from the alligators. And as soon as you get eye shine, you get out a measuring tape and you like stand on the surface of the water and try to measure the alligator and not get bit. And in the middle of the night, in the swamp, in the Everglades where everything can kill you and night after night after night and after After like a week of this, I finally turned to the guy in charge and I was like, why are we doing this? What's the point? Why are we doing this study? He's like, well, we have to count the number of predators there are to determine the health of the ecosystem. And I just stopped and I was like, well, wait a minute. This is the largest public works ever, project ever undertaken. It's $8 billion of taxpayer money. And the only way to determine if it's successful is to know how many alligators were there before you started versus how many are after, and nobody bothered to measure beforehand. So like, you're telling me we can't even measure the success of the $8 billion? And it was true. Nobody had bothered to do the research at a time before they put through this public works project. It was only after the fact. And I was shocked by it because I was like, oh my God, like, okay, how do you even tell the taxpayers that we well spent their money or not? And that question never really got answered. But it was the same thing was flowing through my head when we were talking to Jack because we were asking him really foundational questions about respiration and consciousness and emotion and flow. And this is all really new. And one of the things, and this is where I want to kick off the next question, I'll pass it over to Michael. He said something that really sort of shocked me, which is we were trying to figure out why there's such tight connection between emotion and breath. And he said, well, One reason is because you've got the brainstem controls breathing and you've got the parasympathetic and the sympathetic nervous system wired in there and they're all very close to each other. And I was like, that doesn't sound like an explanation to me. That sounds like, you know what I mean? Or it doesn't sound like a deep-level explanation. It sounds like, holy crap, this is brand new information. And these three systems that are so tied to emotion all sit next to each other, but we don't actually know how they impact one another. Is that— was I wrong, Michael? Is that— but that's what he said, correct?

I think that's what he said. The anatomical connectivity, like the adjacent— a lot of these systems work together. They're near each other, especially in the brainstem, I think. But wait, backing up to about the basic science research issue is one of the things— one of the evidences, I guess, that he said was ask me in 10 years, like you said. Ask me in 10 years and we'll have answers to these questions, which is like very— I think he's a great scientist in terms of having that humility, that intellectual humility about where the research is, what the questions that are still unanswered are, how we go about testing them, where the research really sits.

I mean, we're I mean, it's Michael Dowd. I'm going to interrupt you for half a second because I just want to put some— I want to take that. One of the things that's so— I agree with you. He's an awesome scientist. He's an excellent researcher, and he's really hard-nosed. But what's amazing to me, I always talk about one of the things that people seem to miss in science is there's always a great story. It's a mystery story. It's always a mystery story, right? Somebody had a question. They set out to answer the question. It took forever. And what amazes me is Jack is in the August period of his career and he started his career, right? He's not an undergraduate. I think he's a postdoc at this point. Maybe he's a grad student and he wants to know where is respiration localized in the brain? Is there a master switch? And he talks about that problem. You go back to his old interviews, they really sort of thought they would solve it within a year or two. 10 years later, right, they've discovered the preBotzinger complex and suddenly they discover, oh, this is the master regulator for respiration. But wait a minute, no, it turns out, no, it's only the master respirator for inhalation. There's a whole different set of, right, neural, neural, neural property, neural mechanisms that govern exhalation. That takes another 10 years, right? And that's sort of like— and now he's 25 years into this research and he's just probing at the fact that, oh wow, respiration has a deep impact on meditation or on emotion, cognition, mood, right? It's really like— it's a really great example of one, how far down a mystery you can crawl, you know what I mean? How easy it can swallow your life. I didn't know when I crawled into the world of flow back in 1996 or '97 that I would 35 years later or whatever, 30 years later, I'm still here. I'm still banging around asking really dumb questions sometimes.

That's good. But that's also good about the scientific mindset or scientific attitude is that you manage your expectations about, you know, these questions that are going to be— you— they're going to be lingering a lot longer than you think.

I always think the best language for you, Michael, you're trained as a philosopher, so you know this. Philosophy, people have projects, right? The Übermensch was Nietzsche's project, and they're meant to last a lifetime, right? So I always thought that flow is sort of my project in the same way that the Übermensch was Nietzsche's project.

As that could be distinguished in a scientific view from hypotheses, right? You test hypotheses. You don't just, you know, you don't think—

I think the project is the thing you start having hypotheses about, which is exactly right.

Exactly right. Yeah, yeah. And the project gets larger and peeling away at the onion kind of thing, so to speak. But he was talking in another conversation about like experiments that were done like in the '50s on cats about the relationship between respiration and I think it was like emotive responses. But we didn't know, you know, we didn't know— no one was really interested in pursuing those kinds of things. And that's also an interesting point is like what questions do we actually pursue and grab onto that will turn out 60 years later to be super relevant and then we find out those things in humans. Like the relationship between breathing and cognition and breathing and emotion is really recent. It's very recent. I mean, I think it was another study that came out that I've talked about before by Zalano and her team at NYU, they looked at the rhythm of breathing and fear and looking at fearful expressions in other people's faces. And they found that on— she found that on the inhalation through the nose but not through the mouth, people are quicker to recognize fearful expressions in other people's faces. On the inhalation through the nose, not through the mouth.

Do you think that's because— do you think that's it? Do you think that's because of the olfactory bulb? Do you think it's because the olfactory bulb is so tied in? And so one of the things that's interesting about— for those listening— but olfaction is every other signal that comes in through our senses, even through like our interoceptive senses, I believe, gets routed through the thalamus except for olfaction, which bypasses it. And it's because we fear certain things, especially it's disgust, right? We need to know very, very fast if something's rotten and poisonous so we don't put it in our mouth. And I believe that's originally where that came from, if I'm not mistaken. So I wonder if that's that. Let me ask you a related question that Jack was—

Hold on, hold on. Wait, wait. Before you ask that related question, I just want to say from a very, very high level in neuroscience, people are still discovering like new neurons, new types of neurons. And like, it's super crazy about As when you take a really big step back in terms of where the field of neuroscience is in general, I mean, we're still discovering things like, oh my God, we didn't discover that like 60 years ago. No, we just discovered that yesterday. It's like, wow.

You know, Michael, I don't know if you remember this. We canceled the practice, but it used to be if you— if I hired you at The Collective, I made you watch, among other things, Robert Sapolsky's class. He did a class on neuroscience at Stanford, but it was episode number 12. And episode number 12, I believe, I think it was the right one, is the one where he talks about neurochemical receptors and how they relate epigenetically. And the point is basically like whatever we think we know about neurochemicals in the brain, receptors are a relatively new topic and it turns out they multiply and go away and disappear completely on like the order of days because of epigenetic factors and genetic factors and they pop back up and they atrophy again. So even if you want to say something like, dopamine does this in the brain and you've got— you specified like which dopamine and which receptor, it still doesn't matter. You're still like— you're not specifying how much of there is in a receptor cluster. And I always say that one of the reasons I think I'm good at flow research is I have low-functioning dopamine receptors, so I have to get a bigger reaction than a lot of people to get anywhere with this work. So it allows me to like— because I'm not an easy test subject, when I run experiments on myself, it gives me a little bit of an edge just as the first, like, help me develop my hypothesis thing because I'm not reactive that way. But, I always think about that stuff and I was thinking about when Jack was talking, if we know that endorphins are involved in breathing on almost a moment-by-moment basis, we then have to start talking about endorphin receptors and how they're being impacted by epigenetics and what role does respiration play in that? And is there a feedback loop, a feedforward loop? All those questions were going through my head. I know there aren't answers to those yet, but that's what I was thinking about while he was talking.

Yeah, yeah, 100%. The, um, a lot of the questions that, by the way, I think like he answered, um, in a way that were like, okay, this is the best of our knowledge, and then this is the best of my knowledge, right, in terms of, in terms of my research. But yeah, um, another, another point that I wanted to like pursue that we didn't get a chance to in the conversation was this idea of interoception. And how— because I get asked all the time how interocept— what it is, right, and how it relates to well-being and how it might relate to better getting into flow and increasing performance and so on. And so, I don't think he—

It's really— yes, so one, interoception for anybody who's listening is our ability to detect internal signals. So, balance for proprioception, mood, you got a stomachache, you got a gut instinct, your hair is standing on end and you can feel— all that stuff is interoception. And there's a lot of— what we've learned so far at the basic practical level is interoception good, right? The better your ability to detect internal signals from a flow perspective, I've always said that the most important thing we can learn is how to detect fear levels inside because the challenge skills balance is such a tiny little sweet spot for 1% to 4%, basically difference between challenge and skills. And anxiety is really— anxiety levels is the major determinant factor. And if you can't sort of moment by moment tell how scared you are, it's really hard to tune your nervous system. And so that's all interoception. —But what— yeah, you go. Let me know.

I want to take this down the rabbit hole here. So we, and you especially, Stephen, talk a lot about William James. And, um, the great thing in education is to make our nervous system our ally, not our enemy. You talk a lot about how peak performance is all about getting your biology to work for you, not against you, right? And, and that is— so here's where this fits into this part of the conversation. So William James and I think it was like Michael Lang had this theory of emotion which he wrote about in, um, what, Principles of Psychology or whatever?

Principles of Psychology. The, what, the— it's the Lang-James theory now, right?

The Lang— yes, the Lang-James theory of emotions. Um, yeah, so I wanted to bring this up in our conversation about the James-Lang or Lang-James theory of emotion He asked the question, if you come across a bear in the woods, do you run because you're afraid? Are you afraid because you run? And normally we think we run because we're afraid. We get afraid, we have fear, then we have this physiological response and then this physical response of getting out of there. Turns out we now know, and some of this is based on Joseph LeDoux's work as well and other neuroscientists, that it's actually the opposite. Get afraid because we run. So we have this physiological response first, the autonomic nervous system response, the sympathetic response, the pupil dilation, all these internal signals, and then we get afraid later on. So our brain interprets all of those signals coming up partially through the vagus nerve, you know, all of these, these signals coming up from the viscera, and then we— the brain creates a story, right? It makes a prediction about, okay, why are we getting those physiological signals?

Yeah, Michael, let me pause you for a moment because 'cause there's a very practical thing here that I want to talk about that people miss a lot. We hear a lot these days about trauma. Trauma dumping has become really routine, right? Everybody seems to want extra credit for having gone through their trauma. And so you hear a lot of people retelling their traumatic story. And one of the things that always happens is because of the Lang-James connection, right? They reactivate, you're reactivating all that trauma again, and you're getting more worked up, and you're actually making it worse. So when by retelling these stories, it's not so much the story, it's that you reactivate all the emotions, which brings it all back up again, even bigger, and you're recoding the memory, you're laying in the neural pattern, and you're locking yourself into that even more because of that.

Yes. So interoceptively, right, interoception, being more aware of what's going on inside your body affects, we now know, all of these cognitive processes like learning, decision-making, working memory, and so on, and emotion. So that's why I think like being able to use breathwork to regulate your autonomic nervous system can then help your brain create a better story or retell a better story, which is why I think breathwork lowers default mode network activity. Psychedelics do the same thing, but it can— you can use it to— and that— and we write about this in our first few seconds of flow.

It was one of the questions I had off of Jack's stuff, right? He was talking about this, and this was the question I asked him: is breathwork opening a neuroplastic window Or is it giving us what you're talking about, which is sort of like it builds space in between emotion when the sensation arise interoceptively and feeling when we can name it and put up and, oh, this is this that I'm feeling, right? There's a gap in between and it lengthens the gap. That's what allows reappraisal and reframing. And I know Jack's worked on that stuff along with respiration because I've seen it on some of his charts and some of his studies. But I'm interested in, like, is that because he was saying something really interesting, which I never— which I don't know if it's true. According to him, if you're getting in this neuroplastic window that's tied to breathing, it would mean that reframing actually is not just a technique for changing your perspective in the present moment. It's actually training the brain to think that way differently over time, Then there's a difference. I always felt like reframing doesn't actually change thought. It's a good tool in the moment, but I haven't seen studies. There's some cognitive behavioral stuff maybe that's okay, but where it has really lasting change. And I've talked a lot about how the Stoic technique of negative visualization seems to work better than reframing because it gets in there in the chain earlier. So I, it was, I could be totally wrong. Like, what Jack is saying is right, then everything that I just spat out of my mouth is actually, is actually wrong. And there's actually neuroplastic windows off of respiration all the time, which is really, it means you could retrain the brain all the freaking time just by breathing. Exactly.

So that's that. And, and here, and so there's evidence of that. I think at least I have data evidence of that, or anecdotal evidence of that. Is like think about— so I think the better you get— so breathing is training, right? You can train yourself to breathe better, to breathe more consciously with an online practice or something, an offline practice so to speak. But I think that that has neuroplastic effects. So you can get better at breathing and then that has downstream synaptic plastic effects. That's what we're saying. And I think that's right. You can get better at it. And over time, it really has these large-scale plastic changes in the rewiring your brain over longer periods. So, that's—

Let me ask you a weird question because I've always wondered this. And this is a really strange, this is a very strange question, but you're going to know what I'm talking about. So, if you've experimented with a lot of different psychedelics, especially psychedelic therapy and whatever, you will know that breathwork has often been used to mimic different psychedelics. And, holotropic breathing with Stanislav Grof's attempt to produce an LSD reaction. One of the things I've noticed with Wim Hof work especially is you get a reaction on the back end usually after your breath hold that's very similar to ketamine. And, here's my question. So, out of all of the psychedelics, it appears that ketamine opens the largest neuroplastic window. So, after a psychedelic experience, you get neuroplasticity opens back up again. You get heightened neuroplasticity on the back end of psychedelic experiences. It allows you to do a lot of faster pattern learning. It's why it's so good for therapy. Ketamine seems to open the biggest window for whatever reason, which is odd because it's a totally synthetic molecule. There's nothing in nature that mimics ketamine. That we can find so far. I don't think that's actually true. I think sooner or later we'll find something. Otherwise, I don't think we'd react so strongly to it. But, that's totally besides the point. My question is, do we think that different breathwork techniques— first of all, do you think there's any— is there any credence here? Is there any way to work back from the reaction to what the psychedelic it'll mimic? Do we think there's different breathwork opens different windows in the way that different psychedelics? And, by the way, ibogaine, which is the South Africa or the African psychedelic that produces the 24-hour trip that they use to treat heroin addiction because it blocks the opiate receptors afterwards, right? You get this huge— it's the 30-day block of opiate receptors after ibogaine. So, they can basically use it to treat heroin addiction because people don't detox and it opens this enormous neuroplastic window. So, you get those two advantages and it works really well. So, that may be greater than ketamine. But anyways, I'll shut up now.

No, I think that there's— my suspicion is that different breathing techniques have differential effects neurobiologically. All right. And I do too. So I mean, I mean, it's kind of definitely on the peripheral nervous system, right? But on the central nervous system, I think that different breathing techniques have even from like alternate nostril breathing, for example. I think, and I think Jack Feldman's actually mentioned this before, that—

Let me ask you a related question to what you just said, because you got right where I wanted to go, which is the question I asked Jack and I've always wondered about, which is, as I said in the podcast, we have this one study, right? Orhan did— Mazano did this one study that we love, the flow and piano study from 2010, where he found Basically, that we just breathe more slowly and deeply in flow. This was for piano players. And one, let me point out why that makes some sense and then let me raise my questions. One, it makes sense from an effortless effort perspective. We know you're using automated learning. You're using less of the brain. We know that happens. We can see that happen. As we learn, we actually end up using less of the brain to reproduce the result. So learning is very energetically efficient. This is one of the reasons why Elke van Goldberg, in his work on wisdom and how wisdom is neuroprotective against cognitive decline— same thing with skills, right? Both expertise and wisdom are neuroprotective. And his point was it's because as we learn wisdom skills and expertise skills, we need less and less neural real estate and less and less energy to reproduce them, right? So there's a benefit there. So that would— that links up with this finding that, oh, you're going to breathe more deeply, you're going to be calmer, less energy, less energy expended. That said, my deepest flow states are always— or mostly— sometimes they're writing-based, but if they're not writing-based, they're action sports-based or they're activity. I'm dancing, I'm skiing, I'm mountain biking. And I always know— I mean, like in those situations, the deeper the— oftentimes, I'm panting. I'm panting. I'm skiing bumps or coming down a really steep cliff face and I'm like, my breathing is really shallow and fast. And that's the exact opposite of the flow findings. So, that says, "Wait a minute, there's differences." And here's the other question. There was something my wife asked me yesterday. We know that, like, slower breathing, you're calmer. Does faster breathing correlate? We know it correlates with anxiety, but does it correlate with productivity at all? Is there a certain level of breathing that we're more awake, alert, and productive? And by extension, what the blank do we think is happening in flow with respiration? Those are the two questions. Yes.

Great questions. I don't know. But I think, number one, I think— well, that's being into— I mean, I'm a scientist. We're scientists here. I think that there is some evidence to suggest that the activity matters, right? Number one, I think I think, right, we know flow is contextual. It exists on a spectrum. And there's one sense that there's a universality to it, like flow is flow is flow. But different kinds of cognitive flow, physical flow, athletic flow, it exists in different contexts. And those different breathing, different respiration, respiratory, whatever you wanna call it, are associated with different kinds of activities. Like, one of my biggest flow activities is table tennis, right, as you know. So, I'm definitely not having a slow parasympathetic upregulated calming effect. By the way, that's the same thing in— again, if you see a bear in the woods, if you calm your nervous system, are you gonna make better decisions about maybe what to do? Or do you wanna have that higher level sympathetic panting, um, and then just let me get out of here. But that happens first.

And let me ask— okay, so let me ask you a related— let me ask you a related question that I've always wondered about that, um, but I didn't answer your question, by the way. I'm like, let me just interject a point and you can— and I'll let you go. Could be the bear in the woods thing. We know flow— like, if you're gonna run away from a bear your best chances of survival are either like a pure fight-or-flight response, right? Pure panic, just go. And probably better chances if you're in flow. So, one of the things I've always wondered is we know there's that U-shaped cortisol curve, right? You need some cortisol in the system. You need some sympathetic response from the nervous system, a little anxiety to prime us for flow. You need the norepinephrine to prime us for learning, all that stuff. So, one of the things I always wondered about when we see the bear in the woods. One, if you see a bear in the woods, does it make a noise? Two, when we see a bear in the woods, are we actually trying to upregulate ourselves towards flow rather than panic? And panic is the—

you know what I'm trying to say. So, maybe it might be helpful to couch this in terms of the flow cycle. And we know, so we know in flow there's decent evidence from like Karina Pieffer who we've interviewed here at the collective and Manzano about a coactivation of a sympathetic response and a parasympathetic response, right? Where we're alert but calm. And in the release phase, right? So in the struggle phase, release, flow, then recovery. In the struggle phase, there's this there's, let's say, a sympathetic response, right? And there's psychophysiological evidence to support that, behavioral evidence as well to support that as this is what your work is on. Then in release, there's a parasympathetic, right? You're calming, you're letting go. There's a phenomenological sense of letting go whether that's like however you do that. And then in flow, there's a co-activation, right? So, I don't know. I think that maybe there's different sorts of breathing techniques that can modulate or facilitate a better cyclical, you know, a better, a better flow cycle. That's what you just made me think of there.

If only we knew somebody who could study that question. That's a great question. That's a really great question. That's a real— you're— I think you're probably right about that. That's really interesting. That's a really interesting question.

Yeah. But I think I don't know where we're going with this. I forgot.

We need to phone a friend. Yes, we need to phone a friend. Hey, just, just for sake of time here, I've got one really practical question. Jack shared with us how often he's answering questions about breathwork, right? We know that as it just continues to be shared all over social media, more and more people are going into it. One of the things that he said he encourages people to do is crawl, walk, run, right? It is a slow ramp into breathing protocols, right? Start with something simple so you can get to the more sophisticated techniques. Is the same for flow? Do we— I mean, is the recommendation when you are starting to train flow and peak performance, are we looking for a slower ramp in? Do we want to start with the basics? So we can get more proficient, better at the work.

So, Michael, I'll let you answer as well, because it's probably going to be a different answer than me. Ryan, the thing that, the thing that most jumps out to me about that question is, so one, there's the— where do you start flow training is a really complicated question, right? Because on a certain level, you want to meet people wherever they are. And so I'll give you an example. The collective— two of our core sort of clients, we tend to train a lot of very powerful, high-powered women in their 40s and 50s, and often they have had some break from their career, often children, right, raising a family, and they're coming back into the workplace and they're really fired fired up. They have endless amounts of motivation, gusto, and they're diving in. I don't need to start them on recovery or even basic motivation stuff because they're already fired up. They're not burned out. The other client that we try to train a lot is executives, right? Leaders, C-suite executives. I think 60-65% of our clients are probably business people in the C-suite, right? Either CEOs or that level of the company. Most of them, the vast majority, are completely burned out, right? They want peak performance, they're peak performers, but they're like, they've been going as far as they— and where you start training them is totally different, right? Then it really is a crawl, walk, run because you want to start with recovery. Are you getting 7 to 8 hours of sleep a night? Are you doing an active recovery practice rather, right? That sort of stuff. The thing that I got that was so cool from Jack is, so I've got a I've got a chart that I use when I train up companies and sometimes with individuals, but always with companies where we talk about distraction management and active recovery. When I talk about active recovery, it's a map. If you have 5 minutes, do a daily gratitude practice. If you have 6 minutes, read fiction because reading 6 minutes of fiction actually has a bigger impact on your nervous system than mindfulness. If you have 7 to 11 minutes, My understanding was that's where breathwork starts to become effective. What I learned from Jack is, hey, wait a minute, there's data that says if you have 5 minutes, you might be able to try breathwork. That was new to me. I haven't heard that. That's a shorter— I've heard, but if you go with Jon Kabat-Zinn and all his research off of mindfulness-based stress reduction, which I think it shrunk at the smallest, anybody shrunk, it was 7 minutes. I had a friend who created a program or 11 minutes. And I had a friend who created a 7-minute meditation practice that I looked at that was interesting to me. And I often taught people because 7 minutes is literally the timeframe between television commercials. We get 7 minutes of television and then we get commercials often in most series. So, the human brain, because we watch TV, we can focus for 7 minutes because we've got this built— if we watch TV, you've got this built-in slot for I know how to focus for 7 minutes. So, it's often easy to train people in breathwork in 7-minute cycles because they've learned how to focus that long from watching TV. So, I played with that 7-minute cycle and found that with really deep breathing, especially if you're slowing it down as a parasympathetic thing, you can usually— that's enough to sort of— and then you go up 20 minutes, you actually go for a walk in the woods, 40 minutes you go to the gym and exercise, that sort of thing depending on your time for recovery. What I got from Jack was, holy crap, you might be able to do this in 5 minutes and another 5-minute tool, which is a big deal.

I agree with everything you said. I just want to add a couple of minor points is one, We interviewed Richie Davidson and he talked about any level of conscious breathing is going to be helpful. And then building the practice, you get better at it, is gonna be even more helpful. And there's probably a diminishing returns that I don't think there's so much research on that. But I will say, Ryan, to your question, I think number one, flow is more complex complex than conscious breathing with any technique. Like box breathing, you can learn that right now. Like learning how to get into flow, understanding your triggers, your environment, all of these kinds of things. It's a more complex state of consciousness, right? And therefore, probably takes more work to be able to learn how to facilitate and make on demand. The other thing I'll say is that massive amounts of people, let's just say, have never tried conscious breathing and don't understand its effect. That's just, I think, I don't know the date on that, but it's probably just a fact. It's like massive amounts of people, we're all overbreathers. Unless you read about some sort of breathwork technique or something like that and then actually sit down to try it. It takes a little bit of effort. Whereas maybe in contrast, almost all of us have experienced something sometime during our life where we're in a microflow state, right? Or a macroflow state. We're doing something we're relatively good at that's somewhat challenging. We have an activity that we enjoy. We have a hobby. So we've probably all had an experience of it in one sense or another, right? And Stephen, you you talk a lot about this, but with breathwork, probably not. So it takes a little bit more maybe of a conscious effort to, okay, I'm going to try this, see how it makes me feel. And then here's another breathing technique, I'm going to try this and see how it makes me feel, and so on.

So, and Michael, it's— there's one thing for anybody coming in cold, it's worth knowing. There's a— while breathwork, and breathwork strikes me as all always meditative, right? Meditation, when you're just focused on your breath, is very different from breathwork. Breathwork usually involves changing the rate of breathing, breathing on certain counting patterns, etc., etc. And the point I wanted to make is that I was— look, I've been meditating since the '90s, following my breath in and out, in and out, in and out. When the Wim Hof breathwork revolution started, I was really certain there was nothing that it was going to add to it. I played with box breathing when we trained the Navy SEALs. I did some box breathing and that was about as far as I got. That was very resistant to a lot of stuff that was going on around me. I was like, "Yeah, yeah, yeah. I've been doing this forever, whatever. You're getting neat effects. I've never had those." And then, I started actually doing actual breathwork and changing respirate. And, what I found is Holy crap. One, breathwork is so much easier than meditation because there's so much more shit to keep your mind occupied. Two, you get much bigger results faster. If you're interested in physiological shifts, emotional shifts, if you're looking for faster results as a gateway in, I found that breathwork is actually a much better gateway into meditation than meditation is a gateway into breathwork. And when I was sort of done with my first round of experiments, I was like, I was like, fuck, why didn't somebody teach me this 30 years? You could save me so much time, so much time, right?

Yeah, that's a good point. Jack made the point also about disentangling breathwork and mindfulness. Like, you know, he talked about wiggling your finger and you get the same thing in yoga. There's a lot of research about how yoga changes the brain and changes physiological responses. Increases vagal tone and all of those kinds of things, increases your— or decreases your pain tolerance— increases your pain tolerance, decreases your pain sensitivity when you're looking at negative images, and increases working memory and all of these kinds of things. Is it the breathing in yoga? Is it the asanas, the movement? Or is it some complex interplay?

I mean, let's also not kid ourselves. It's probably, especially if you're getting a pain response, you're looking at microflow. To get a pain response, right, for delayed pain, you're either talking about anandamide or you're talking about endorphins. And the minute you've been, like, doing physical activity or breathing long enough, once anandamide is showing up, you're— that's probably the microflow borderline, right? It's a great point. Going back to his work at Georgia Tech, I mean, I think this study is 2001 or 2002 or 2003, where he was looking at these questions around anandamide for the first time. So, that's the other thing is when I look at the yoga studies, I'm like, "Okay, but this is very, very flowy and you haven't yet separated it out." There's 4 categories to me that need to be parcelated apart. One, breathwork. Two, the physical movement from an embodied cognitive perspective. Three, yoga is all about if you're good at interoception, So, you've got activated interoception and yoga is super flowy. So, if you're looking at yoga and you're trying to say, "Okay, this causes this," how the hell do you start pulling those things out? The compounds get really confusing to me. Every time I look at those studies, I'm like, "I wish we knew more." And, it's funny because I have a bunch of friends who run yoga studios. I've done Ashtanga for 30 years at this point and they're like, "Have you studied yogi yet? Have you studied yogi yet?" And, I'm like, "No." Here's why. I don't even know how to do it and start taking it apart. You want to talk about basic research, right? And it's because, as you pointed out, we both— you studied under Scott Kelso and we've worked with him. Kelso, who did so much of the foundational work on neurodynamics, started with finger movement, right? When you go with your fingers out of sync, they will naturally get into sync, right? In a syncopated rhythm. Sink a bit, you'll start sinking. And that's how we figured out coordination dynamics and everything else. So, my point is doing this, you're actually getting a huge neurobiological reaction so big that it unlocked all of social neuroscience. The entire field of social neuroscience comes out of this, like people doing this.

The explanatory power of that model and how it extrapolates to explain and describe and make predictions about so many other things about—

So many other things. It's so powerful. But when you want to talk about any physical activity, understand that, okay, yoga, great. It's really cool. But when you do this, that, and the neurobiology that an entire field of neuroscience, that's sort of what happens when you do really basic research and you think something's really easy to study and you get in there and crap, like the littlest thing produces this giant reaction. And what do we do from there is really, is really interesting.

I love that. And I will also say, I mean, in terms of the relationship between respiration and not respiration, but breathwork, right, conscious breathwork and flow and performance, so much research needs to be done. I just— you reminded me of a study. They looked at inhalation and exhalation. And they actually showed that making voluntary body movements is more correlated with exhalation. So, when you're making voluntary body movements, whether that's in your flow activity or just in general, you're doing those voluntary movements and that correlates with a higher propensity for exhalation. So, in— I wonder if you could use that as a lie detector. Maybe. Maybe. Very, very interesting. So inhalation is more about the cognition and exhalation is more about the movement. In non-conscious breathing, I should say. So inhalation is correlated with cognition, as we talked about with Jack— fear, working memory, learning, decision-making, cognitive processes— whereas exhalation is more correlated with movement.

Let me throw something in there too that makes this even weirder. As you probably know from breathwork and mindfulness, if you want time dilation, it's the gap between inhalation and exhalation, right? Like, that's where the most time dilation— time stretches out. They're always taught in all the meditative traditions, they're like, stretch out the moment between inhalation and exhalation. So, it's not even just inhalation and exhalation. There's something very special about the transition between the two and what that does to the brain that I think is going to probably, because time dilation or time passing strangely doesn't just have to slow down, can speed up, is so right. It's baked into flow's definition. So, I've always wondered about how that's going to actually map out 20 years from now when we actually have those answers.

I think if you're a master at your autonomic nervous system, you're a master of type of breathwork, I think like that could seriously— this is like what more research needs to be done, hello, about mastering breathwork and getting into flow and increasing your performance.

And it could be my, my alter ego, Yogi barking up the wrong tree. Yeah, that's true.

Hey, hey, gentlemen, thank you. I think that's a perfect place, uh, to end this episode. Folks, send in questions, uh, for Jack Feldman, and we will answer them on the next Afterthoughts. Thanks for joining us today. Take care.

Or we'll make up answers to them on the next Afterthoughts. Either way, we're scientists. That's what we do. Thank you for hanging out with us, everybody. This has been another edition of Flow Radio. Dr. Menino, thank you. Ryan Wicks, thank you. Stephen Kotler out.