Why You’ve Been Breathing Wrong Most Of Your Life - Breathing Expert Mike Maher
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Hey friends, how's it going? Welcome back to Deep Dive. This episode is a little bit different because we're talking all about the topic of breathwork. What the hell is breathwork? I had no idea, which is why I interviewed Mike Mayer, who's the UK expert on the topic of breathwork. He's worked with and interviewed dozens of people who specialize in breathing. I didn't realize this was a thing. Apparently, the way that we breathe by default and the way that most of us kind of find ourselves breathing day to day is kind of wrong, which is quite interesting because I thought that, hey, I've been breathing perfectly fine my whole life. Like,

How bad can it be? But apparently, like when we breathe wrong in terms of either breathing too much, breathing through a little, breathing through our mouth, that's something I do a lot. Apparently that's really bad. All of that can contribute to things like increased blood pressure, reduced quality of life, and apparently even increase your risk of heart disease further down the line. And apparently breathwork is this active meditation where we consciously alter our breathing patterns to get outcomes like helping us relax, regulate our stress levels, raise our energy, increase our immune system function, changing our state of consciousness, or even calming our nervous system, allegedly.

To be honest, I was pretty skeptical about the whole thing, but this conversation with Mike has changed the way that I approach breathing. I also read the book Breath by James Nestor, which is excellent and also kind of helped me realize the perils of

breathing badly. But that's all the stuff that we're going to cover in this week's conversation on Deep Dive. So I hope you enjoy this discussion with Breathwork coach Mike Mayer. What is Breathwork and is it a scam? Okay. Oh, wow. Bloody hell. So first of all, I want to say that I adopt a white belt mentality to everything. I'm sure we'll get stuck into the back story and all that sort of jazz later. Is it a scam? I

There might be elements of it, potentially, like with anything, there's a scam. But I like to use the term now, breath play. That's my breath play. So we should be playing with our breath. And I'm hoping over the next period of time that we're talking, I'll try and demystify some of it for you. Because actually, there's quite a lot of science that sits behind breath work or breath play. But

the simplest thing I would say is you've got two areas of breath works. I'm going to try now to simplify breath work for you. I'm going to simplify every breathing exercise that's ever existed in two ways. So here we go. So we breathe 25,000 times a day, something like that. Some of us maybe 30, 35,000, but 25,000 breaths a day. We're all doing that. And then we've got all these different breathing exercises that people talk about.

And so there's two categories. Number one, I breathe less than I need. So that would be one group of exercises. And that's what I would really like to talk about today, functional breathing. I'm going to get on that route. So I breathe less. So an example of that would be alternate nostril breathing. So I'm sitting here right now breathing. Maybe I'm doing 15 breaths a minute. And all of a sudden, I'm going to cap my right nostril. I'm going to breathe in really slowly and out really slowly.

Now, I've capped the airflow through my nose, so already it's half a nostril, one nostril, rather than two. And I'm breathing slower than I need. And that's got a whole load of benefits which we'll get stuck into. Now, there's the other side of breathwork. I breathe more than I need. Hyperventilation exercises. Benefits there. Maybe some people would call some woo-woo stuff there as well. I've had some profound experiences in there.

But what I would like people, if somebody takes me away from this conversation, it's we need to get our foundation of breathing right. Because I believe we've lost our way how to breathe. We don't breathe the way nature has intended us to breathe. And the good

The good news is our body wants to breathe correctly and we can find out how to do it quite quickly as well. Okay. What do you mean by breathe correctly? Like I've been breathing my whole life. I'm sitting here. I haven't died yet. Yes, my nose always feels a bit blocked and I'm definitely a mouth breather. But like, you know...

so what? So what? Yeah. Yeah. What's the point? It's, it's, uh, yeah, I've been breathing my whole life, you know? And, uh, when I was, I was talking to my girlfriend's mom, she's like, what's he doing on YouTube? What's this thing? Breathe in, breathe out. Everyone's doing that. So, so, you know, uh, there's a wonderful writer called Dr. Chris Ryan. He wrote a book called sex at dawn and he wrote another one called civilized to death, which I highly recommend. And the front cover of that book is a chimpanzee. I think he's got a t-shirt on. He

He's sitting in a bad posture with a cigarette. He's got his iPhone out and a can of Coke. And we're that chimpanzee. We are not designed to be sitting...

16 hours a day in poor posture chronic stress emails coming in. Yeah straight So we're living very not how our ancestors used to live and so of course if I'm in a compressed position and I'm stressed There's a very good chance that I've gone to mouth breathing because mouth breathing is stressful breathing and we'll get into that I'm probably in a bad posture. So my diaphragm is a bit locked and not moving properly so as a productivity

guru man, person, I would say that we're not breathing as efficiently as we should be. And that's the key to this is efficient breathing. We're not being efficient right now. Why does efficient breathing matter? Okay. Isn't the whole point of breathing to, you know, oxygen into bloodstream, carbon dioxide out of bloodstream and oxygen

the body figures the rest out? Yes, yes. But there's a nuance to this where we go down the path. So let's talk about the nose, first of all. The nose is a wonderful organ that sits on your face, this beautiful schnoz that breathes. We've got all these wonderful hairs that sit in there and they filter all the dust and rubbish out of the air. If the air is too cold, it's going to warm up the air for us. If it's too hot, it's going to cool it down. It's going to humidify it. It's going to put pressure into the air because when I breathe through the mouth, that big old pipe...

It just it just comes in really quick. Yeah, but when I breathe through the nose, I'm breathing a bit slower Hmm, so pace which we'll get into as well is really important So then the nose does all these wonderful things and it also does it releases something called nasal nitric oxide. Are you familiar with that? Vaguely it's like a vasodilator or something. It is a vasodilator So it helps open up all the smooth tissues and around the body. I think it one molecule of the year 1992 But but that is produced

through your nose. And if you hum, which will be a breathing exercise we'll do later, it produces more of it. So let's think about what we've just covered off there. Warming and cooling of the air, moisturizing of the air, pressurizing the air, sterilizing the air through nasal nitric oxide. All of these things happen here. You don't get any of that through the mouth.

It's sterilizing the air. There's nasal nitric oxide. It kills bacteria. It kills bacteria. So if you want a bit of protection from airborne issues that are going on in today's society, you get zero protection if you are using your mouth. If you're using your nose, you have got all of these protections. Your nose is designed for breathing. Your mouth is designed for kissing and eating, which I quite like. Okay. So why...

I mean, I'm very much a mouth breather. And I realized this when I started doing YouTube videos and I started doing vlogs filming myself. And I'd be like, I would look at myself and I would have this sort of, at all times where I'm like hunched over or belly sticking out. And I just had no idea that I was doing this. By the way, if anyone's listening to this on the podcast version,

I would consider checking it out on the YouTube version because I guess we're going to be talking about breath and like exercises and stuff where seeing it visually might also help, but we'll do our best to describe things as we're going along for the listeners. But I had this very much kind of posture with my mouth open. And I also realized when I started doing the podcast that I was looking back at the footage and I was like, why is my mouth hanging open like an idiot all the time? Like what's going on there? But at the same time, as a mouth breather, I still have survived. So like what are the kind of downsides of mouth breathing other than all

Because yes, there's all these things that the nose does for you, but I feel I'm operating at reasonable capacity just by breathing through the mouth. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So I too was a chronic mouth breather until I found out. And here's the thing. What's going to happen for you now will be a perspective shift.

Because next time you go to the gym, you'll be like, oh my God, everyone needs to shut them out. You'll just see it. We all go around with our mouths open. So the problems are, and it's a bold claim, you are literally starving yourself of oxygen by breathing through your mouth. And I'll explain a bit of the science behind it. So what's going on here? So oxygen...

comes in with the air and we breathe co2 out co2 is a waste gas we've heard that term before um and interestingly i was watching you've got some wonderful study with me videos and i was watching one the other day he's putting on the background you know just to just crack on my work and you're looking at the oxygen disassociation curve in there and bore effect and that sort of thing so if i break this down to a really simple way um

homeostasis, we want to be balanced. Our nose is designed for breathing, our mouth isn't. By the way, emergency, fantastic backup. If you break your nose, you get into trouble, or there's that saber-toothed tiger everyone keeps talking about in the wilderness, we've got this fantastic extra valve we can open up.

But actually, it's there for that emergency situation. So when you are mouth breathing, you're blowing off too much CO2. So too much is coming out because the pressure is here and you're breathing at a nice slow rate. And we'll talk about pace as well. And so you're breathing out too much CO2. Now, that is also, it works like a vasodilator as well. So when you don't have enough CO2 in your body, everything starts to constrict and it gets tighter. Yeah.

And here's the other thing. So in our plasma, in our blood, in our red blood cells, we've got hemoglobin. In each red blood cells, around 270 million hemoglobin. And in each of those, it can hold four molecules. So four oxygen or four CO2. So I like to call that the hemoglobin taxi. So four passengers get him. Now those taxis drive around the body. And if I pick up a really heavy bottle and I start to

you know, do some, you know, some curls, this muscle's gonna start to get warm. You know, it's using extra energy. It's probably using more than my legs, which aren't really moving. And so there's a presence of CO2 there. And your body wants to deliver some oxygen and then take the CO2 away. Sure.

If you have blown off too much CO2, then the presence of CO2 is lower. It is harder for the oxygen to get into the places it needs to get to. What's known as the affinity is now stronger. The oxygen doesn't want to leave the hemoglobin. And so it's not getting out. You are no longer an efficient breather. You are making it harder for your body to get oxygen to the places it needs to get to.

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Yeah, this is reminding me of like first-year physiology where it's like CO2 contributes to the acidity of the blood and in one of the directions, whether I can't remember whether blood becomes more acidic or less acidic, the curve, you've got the shift, the Bohr effect, the shift to the right or whatever. And then it's harder for oxygen to be released. So you're saying, okay,

So if we're breathing through our mouths, then A, because of the fact that we breathe more frequently through our mouths and B, because of the fact that there's less pressure of air going out,

Because the way gases are exchanged is based on kind of partial pressure differentials. We are therefore blowing off more CO2 than we probably should compared to breathing through our nose. That is causing the Bohr oxygen dissociation curve to shift in the direction that means that we are more likely to be somewhat starving our muscles of oxygen. The affinity is too strong. Yeah. We can't get the oxygen out. Now there's more layers to this. So...

When you blow off CO2, you have sensors in the back of your brain, chemoreceptors. And what they're doing is, our body is this wonderful machine, you know. It's detecting how much CO2 is in the blood. And there'll be a base level for all of us. Now, the wonderful thing is, if I get into a situation where I start running, or I'm scared, or what have you, and the CO2 starts to rise, or I hold my breath, it's probably easy because I hold my breath, CO2 starts to rise, right?

The chemoreceptors go, "Oh no, we've got a problem here. "The CO2 is going up. "Let's send a signal to the brain, to the lungs. "We need to stop breathing faster, quicker." Now, you're gonna feel an air hunger and that is the CO2 rising 'cause many people think, "When I hold my breath,

And I feel that need to breathe. Oh, it's because I'm running out of oxygen. But if we put on a pulse oximeter, you're probably between 95, 98% full of oxygen. You hold your breath, maybe it gets 92. You're full of oxygen. So it's not your body running out of oxygen. It's the CO2 that's rising. There is a later stimulus, I believe, that says the oxygen's running out and there'll be another impulse to breathe. But I believe that's much, much later. And so what's happening here is we've all got this CO2 baseline.

which is flexible this is the problem and a good thing it's a flexible baseline so right now if i was you know a mouth breather my entire life it might be that uh when my co2 rises to this point the signals start to say you need to breathe a bit faster because we're a bit worried if i'm chronically mouth breathing blowing off too much co2 i have a new a new baseline it starts to be at a lower level

And then there's this thing which is like a vicious circle because I now feel air hunger at a lower level. I'm more likely to breathe quickly and maybe breathe through my mouth. And guess what that's going to do? It's going to lower it down a bit more. And so this is the cycle most of us are stuck in. And this problem relates to how we sleep, how we exercise, and how we work rest, you know, and do the things during the day. And they all affect each other. So if you are a...

mouth breather in the gym, there's a good chance you're mouth breathing at night. If you're mouth breathing at night, there's a good chance you're mouth breathing when you're sitting and working. And the three things go together. And just going back to your point about you seeing yourself on the camera, I too have had that.

And I don't think this is a very fair thing, but if you go on Google and type in mouth breather, and I'm not calling you this or me, it's a stupid person. And if you look at a picture of a village idiot, they're normally like that. So we've known that this is a problem for a very, very long time. And in fact, there's been several reports of this, I think in Kenya and other places, where they would give young children a cup of water

And I'd hold the water and I'd have to run for 10 miles. And at the end of it, to pass the test, you had to spit the water out, the right amount of water. And the whole reason that was designed is to make you be a functional nose breather, not be something that... Because another issue with nose breathing versus mouth breathing, I believe it's a 42% increase in moisture comes out of your mouth if you're...

blown onto a mirror or something like that. So I'm sorry, I'm going off in a few different tangents here, but in essence, we don't want to lower our tolerance to CO2. We want to increase it. And the good news is we can do that with breathing exercises and education. Okay. So in a nutshell, we should not breathe through our mouth. We should breathe through our nose and we should not breathe as frequently as we are. We should breathe less frequently because we're

we want to have the right level of carbon dioxide in our blood rather than an artificially low level of carbon dioxide in our blood because the right level of carbon dioxide in our blood leads to us, the hemoglobin, letting go of oxygen more readily. Ergo, our muscles and our brain and every tissue in our body will be more effective because it's now got the appropriate amount of oxygen rather than less oxygen. Yes.

Okay, interesting. There's one that's worth caveating here as well, because when I first learned of this, I was like, oh my God, I can never breathe through my mouth again. I need to breathe through my nose all the time because mouth breathing is really bad. And this is what puts people in a lot of... So if you're watching this or listening to this right now, this gives you the extra bit that a lot of people don't get.

There is a huge difference between how I breathe 25,000 times a day and a breathing exercise. And we have to know that distinguishment is there because there are some wonderful mouth breathing exercises that are out there that have specific qualities. For example, even just a sigh.

We sigh when we're stressed and we sigh when we're relaxed. And so you might think, well, I shouldn't do that because a sigh is I'm losing all that moisture and I'm mouth breathing. And so what we want to do is we want to create an environment where we are nasal breathing 99% of the day, but we can still play with some of the breathing exercises that are out there. So a few months ago, I read the book Breath by James Nestor, or rather listen to the audiobook.

And basically every single chapter in that book talks about how mouth breathing is like, you know, the coming of Satan. There's all of these negative effects of mouth breathing. And he kind of talks about how mouth breathing is bad for your jawline. Mouth breathing is bad for like,

Basically, basically everything imaginable. Is that legit? Is mouth breathing like actually killing us as James Nestor would potentially have us believe? You know, you look at the experiment he did where he bunged his nose up with two earplugs for 10 days. He looked...

Really bad at the end of those ten days I think very quickly within the first day or so his blood pressure had gone up X amount of points His sleep was impacted and then I think he said, you know Something like 30% of the American population are breathing like this all the time And then when he took those earplugs out of his nose him and Anders Olsson I've interviewed both of them actually when he took those earplugs out of his nose I get I think it was within a matter of hours his blood pressure had started to come back down again and started to feel more himself and

So, again, is it that bad? If it's a breathing exercise, I would say no. Go and have some fun with the breathing exercises. But the thing is, if most of us are chronically hyperventilating all the time, we need to get that foundation fixed first before we start playing with the sexy stuff with the big breathing exercises. Because that's the stuff that's going to make sure that we're in a better place. Because if you take, for example...

You know, like Wim Hof breathing, which is 30 big breaths in and then a pause. That is known as a stressor. It's like going to the gym. You're stressing yourself out. And there's some benefits to that. But if you're already stressed because you've been mouth breathing all day, I think it's the right thing for you then to go and do some more hyperventilation. I think we need to do it the other way. Let's get our baseline right. Let's get it secure. And then once it's in a good place, we can then start to play with it. Okay.

So let's say someone watching or listening to this is like, all right, cool, I'm sold. I want to do this nose breathing rather than mouth breathing thing. Are there any...

Are there any tangible benefits they would get within a reasonable amount of time? Or is it like, I don't know, taking supplements where it's like, oh, I know I probably should do this just so my body is B12 levels or a baseline, but I'm not really going to notice a real difference. Yeah, yeah. By the way, I feel like that about turmeric. I've been taking turmeric for two years. I'm like, what am I doing here with this bloody turmeric? So I was a chronic mouth breather. And there are some measurements that you can do. So one of them is what Patrick McEwen, the author of The Oxygen Vantage, calls maximum breathlessness test.

So what that is, that is you, because it's always good to measure, isn't it? You want to be able to measure and track your things. And so what you do is you do a normal breath in, normal breath out, you cap, and then you walk. And you count the steps you can walk, and you make a note of that. And another one is you do breath in, breath out, hold, and you wait till the first impulse to breathe happens. And that gives you two numbers. So you can start to track that. But let's talk about what are some of the benefits. And I think it's about flipping it on its head sometimes. So what are the problems? Because here's...

Here's the thing, I like a bit of grounding. I saw a documentary about grounding, how important it is that our body touches the earth. And this is a whole other conversation. We're the first animal that's removed our body from the planet, which is really bad. Put insulation on our shoes. And actually you can measure the kind of electromagnetic static in your body. And when you touch the earth, it kind of falls down and blood moves better. It's a wonderful documentary.

But we're these people that kind of expect a big benefit, but actually a lot of it's bringing us back to baseline to be not to be that chimpanzee with a can of Coke with a poor posture. It's more about, well, let's just get us to how nature intended us to be as opposed to, oh, there's loads and loads. I'm going to feel like I'm Superman. Well, you might get some of that, but if you're a really poor breather, you might not even know what good breathing feels like till you do it. I drive people mad because when I'm breathing, when I'm talking, I'll...

I'll take a normal breath in through the nose now to carry on the conversation because I want to keep that kind of good habits going. So some benefits then. So let's break some of this down. So there are some breathing exercises that can improve your heart rate variability and some studies on that. So there's one breathing exercise called coherence breathing. And that heart rate variability is the gap between the beats. And they say that the variability of those beats kind of signifies good health.

Sleep is a huge one. So probably my favorite benefit of good breathing. I know you've done mouth taping. And if you are mouth breathing in the night, which so many of us are, because remember if we're mouth breathing in the gym and mouth breathing while we're recording videos and all that sort of stuff, and we talk all day, we might be talking all day and doing different things, then there's a good chance that you might be going to mouth at some point in the night.

Now, what's the problem with that? Well, you're never going to get into the deeper levels of sleep if you're a mouth breather.

And then we know then that poor sleep is associated with increased risk of diabetes, cancers, high blood pressure. You know, I before I mouth taped, I was a frequent weir in the night. I just thought that was normal. And then the minute I started the matter is I'm not going for we anymore. And what's going on there? And it's because our body is releasing the right amount of kind of hormones and suppressing the feelings of going to the toilet and that sort of thing. And you get a better night's sleep.

and be interesting to know your thoughts on how you experience it because for me it took me a couple of months it was so bloody unnatural to have something on my mouth i would rip it off but i persisted with it and now my sleep is is better i wake up more refreshed i don't have a dry mouth and so sleep you know in itself if i just said look i've got this magical pill for you here that's going to help you sleep better and it's going to reduce all the risks associated with sleep we'd

Or how much is that pill? I'd love to take that. And it might be able to improve your heart rate variability. And it's going to be able to lower your blood pressure. And we've not gotten to diaphragm yet. But diaphragmatic breathing could help with lower back issues. It could help with digestive issues. So there's a whole host of other mechanical issues which we can get into because our diaphragms are not moving properly as well. And again, we want to be a functional, efficient breather.

Okay, so plenty of benefits of nose breathing. And I yeah, I mean, I still take my mouth to this day. I don't do it on days like if, for example, I'm staying over at my mom's place, and I forget to take my 3m surgical tape, then I'm like, Oh, okay, cool. I guess I'm not mouth taping tonight. But I do find that on days, I don't know, I don't know if this like, I need to actually track the data on this properly. But

I do find that on days where I have taped my mouth properly and wake up having not ripped it off. I just feel like it's a bit of a faff to take it off and like get it in the way of like moustache and beard and stuff. Once I've done that, I feel like, oh, I actually feel pretty rested tonight. And I did like, you know, I did this 30-day mouth taping video and I looked at the hour ring and tried to track the numbers. It didn't really yield anything particularly significant. But I mean...

I still do it and I feel like the benefit of just not waking up with a dry mouth plus the fact that I've read this book and you know vaguely looked into breath work a little bit and see that okay breathing through nose while at night seems to have a lot of benefits sticking a piece of tape on your mouth is a magic pill basically to force yourself to breathe more through your nose

Um, one issue that I have just while we're on the mouth breathing, breathing, breathing topic is that I often find my nose is quite blocked, especially if I've got like a, like a cold or something. And, you know, when I was younger, I used to think, oh, I can't breathe as efficiently through my nose as I can through my mouth. Therefore there is something wrong with my nose. Like, is that something that, that you, you hear often? Yeah. So, um,

Some people have to have surgery on the nose. Again, I'm trained as an oxygen advantage and Pateko breathing coach. So these are areas where we focus on let's breathe less than we need. And so Patrick McEwen, who wrote a couple of books in those areas, he says, if you can breathe through your nose for a minute, then you can breathe through your nose for the rest of your life. And he's been looking at this for sort of 20 years.

And so there is a nose unblocking exercise. And if you've come across this, we can do this when we jump into it. And that will give you a bit of relief. But it's use it or lose it as well. If you've come off a day of mouth breathing and you've not really been using that nose fully, when you come to go, right, I'm going to tape up my mouth now, it might be a bit stuffy because it's not been used. And so you could do a breathing exercise to kind of open it up a little bit. And then once it's open, in theory, it should stay open. Now, colds can affect it.

asthma can affect it and, you know, surgical interventions might sometimes be needed and you obviously would speak to a medical professional about that. But I think for the vast majority of people, we...

We didn't have a very good breath education. I don't know about you, but at school, no one sat me down and said, "Hey, breathe through your nose, shut your mouth." I know in some places, I think it was in Mexico, they give you a tap on the back of the head, I think, if you're in school and you're breathing through your mouth. Same in Poland, where my girlfriend's from, they told you, "Shut your mouth." We didn't really get that education. We copied poor role models, and everybody else is doing it, and we're not using our diaphragms properly.

And so it's no wonder that we've got this issue where our noses are a bit stuffy because we don't really use them as much as we should do. Okay. So it sounds like nose breathing, breathing properly, breathing less potentially helps us get back to baseline.

There are other claims that people say about breathwork. I've vaguely come across some of the Wim Hof stuff but haven't researched it extensively where he talks about how kind of discovering the breathing thing helped, I don't know, cure his depression or was to that effect. I know that breathing is a huge part of all of the, like pretty much every ancient tradition where there are allegedly benefits for it. People say that breathing in a certain way gives you psychedelic experiences.

Beyond the breathing properly gets you to baseline What are the other like actual I guess science evidence-based benefits of breathing and Like how do we distinguish those from the potential hype around breathing which may not necessarily be true. Yeah. Yeah, okay so this would

put us into I breathe more than I need category. And we'll have a little chat about that now. So, um, so my breathwork journey started in 2016. I just gone through a bit of a split up in, in a relationship. And I kept hearing this name, Wim Hof, Wim Hof over and over again. Um, big fan of Joe Rogan podcast. And I finally listened to a podcast. I was like, this guy's incredible.

Incredible and crazy at the same time and I did some googling and he had a retreat in Poland. This is December 2016. Yeah So for people who haven't come across when half can you do a little like yeah, okay, of course. Thank you so so the Dutch Iceman and

I think he's broken 26 world records. He would spend, for example, his time in a box of ice. I think he did two hours in a box of ice. He has a bit of a tragic backstory where his partner passed away. She took her own life. And he used kind of cold and breathing as a way to deal with some of the grief that happened there. And then he created what's called the Wim Hof Method, which involves colds.

cold exposure and breathing with a mindfulness element to it. And you combine all those things together. And that was the retreat that I went on. He's got world records for like hanging from a balloon with one finger and

Running through a desert with no water, doing a marathon and going up Everest in his shorts and all these wonderful things that make you think, oh, my God, that doesn't seem real to me. Yeah. And I think he's like one thing I remember being struck by with his story is that he's very cool with scientists poking and prodding him and measuring his blood levels and like doing like scientific studies and stuff. Yeah. Which is unusual because most woo woo type people. Yes. Would be like, oh, well, it's not going to work if you measure it.

I says, guys, yeah, come at me with all your instruments and it's all good. Yeah, he has a wonderful one about being injected with a poison and he starts doing this huffing and puffing breathing technique and when most people start to get sick, he didn't get sick and he's like, I can replicate that with like 20 strangers and he did and I think he did it again with 40 strangers and that is to do with, I believe...

I haven't read that for a while. It's to do with the adrenaline that's getting released through this breathing technique. So if I just explain a bit about the breathe more than I need stuff, because it is very exciting. Yeah. Sorry, I interrupted you in the middle of your story. So you said 2016, you listened to an episode of Joe Rogan, you discover Wim Hof. And you're like, this guy, it seems interesting. What happens next? So I go by myself to Poland.

By the way, you know, I've never done anything like this. My background's corporate. I'm very much what you see is what exists. There's nothing else out there.

And so I was very skeptical, but also very drawn to this. And again, I had this kind of freedom because I've been in a relationship for 12 years. And so suddenly I was like, oh, this just feels like the right thing to do. So anyway, I go out there. There were 60 of us in three little cohorts. And we'd all get an instructor each. And you're with Wim the entire time. This guy that I've seen in podcasts, he's got a wonderful Vice documentary. Had breakfast with him several times, just sitting opposite him and picking his brains. And he would teach you his breathing technique. And then you go off and you...

this is December time now, you're going into these absolutely freezing pools and lakes and stuff. So anyway, on the first proper night of the course, we go to Wim's house. He's got a little house. He's got a big hotel house and he's got this dodgy ice bath. Like I remember his girlfriend at the time saying, if you slip, you'll break your neck. And I was like, Jesus Christ. And so we've got this big ice bath. He cracked the ice off. It's completely pitch black out there. People have got mobile phones to kind of show you where to go in. And he's got a sauna inside.

And so he's like, right, get in. Let's get you in the cold. And I can't even get in a swimming pool at this point if it's too cold. I used to go to Tenerife as a kid and couldn't get in the salt pool because it was too cold. That was one of the reasons I wanted to do this. So anyway, I went in, jumped straight back out again. And I was like, I need to go home. This is ridiculous. I can't do this. And I remember thinking I've wasted all this money and all this time. And I just sat in the sauna and people were, I've been in three times. I've been in four times. I just felt like a real piece of garbage. And then, I don't know, just something inside. Just go back and do it one more time.

And if you hate it, then you can leave." And I was like, "Okay." So I was having this conversation. I go back in and the guy's just saying to me, "Relax, relax." And my shoulders just came down. And I think he said something like, "Imagine you slipping into a warm bath." And so I went into the ice up to my neck and I did just relax. He's like, "Good, you've got it. You've nailed it." And so suddenly I'm in this, it's minus five, minus six outside. I'm in this water and I'm completely relaxed. I was like, "This is ridiculous. How is this possible?" And then we go on to do the breathing exercises.

And again, I'm very analytical, a bit atheist, not really sure what's going on. We're huffing and puffing. And we're doing it for 45 minutes, maybe an hour. And so we're doing 30 breaths. Then we do a retention. So what has happened? Is this while you're in the ice? This is, no, no. Two separate things. Yeah, very dangerous to do it in the water. So we're back in the hotel now. So you're doing 30 breaths. You've blown off all that CO2.

And then you're holding your breath and you can hold your breath for bloody ages because if you remember from the CO2 chemoreceptors, CO2 is so low. So even if I've got a low baseline, it's going to take a while for my CO2 to build back up again. And we kept doing that. And

I'm telling the story of a story of a story now, Ali, but I have some of the most profound feelings and effects of my life. I saw colors, I saw images, I had a weird conversation with a being and it was very, very simple. It was just, "Oh, I'm so glad you found us." And I've never done any plant medicines or anything like that. So I know people talk about ayahuasca and different things and they've described similar feelings.

After it was all over I was just in the flood of tears and there was 20 of us doing this We were all crying we all kind of cuddling each other strangers, you know 48 hours ago And it was one the most impactful kind of moments of my life to have that experience I was I need to get down this breath work route now because there's something going on here But then the more I found out about it and the more I found about Patrick's work and and dr. Bliss of ranches work and all these people have had on my podcast

podcast as like ah we've got to get our foundations right before we start messing with some of this stuff because it can be very profound but actually if i'm already in a stressed situation let's let's let's get the functionality sorted

So you decided to quit your corporate job and get into breathwork? Like what happened next? So I'm awakened now to something weird going on. Next thing I did was I walked across the Camino. So you can do a walk across Spain. I think you know that. So I did that for 33 days. Again, by myself. I've never done these things. I went by myself, made friends with a fantastic group of people. And we just walked every day, 10, 12 hours just walking in sunshine. You were the tribe of people. It's taken a lot of the boxes of what nature intended us to have.

And then after that, I went to see Tony Robbins with 13,000 other people. And we're doing this process called the Dickens. And he basically is getting you to this point where you're thinking, what are all the problems that I think I've got in my life? What if I don't change them? Where would I be in five years? Now, let's extend that to 10 years if I don't make change.

again people are crying there's 13 000 people in the room crying oh making these these noises this is like day three of his retreat um i was like i need to quit my job i need to quit my job i always wanted to go traveling around the world i never did it so this was 2018 and then me and my girlfriend we handed a notice in that week sold the car sold the bed and then we took a year off and went i went traveling indonesia israel um

Borneo, a lot of places in that way. It was wonderful, Bali. And that whole time I'd already made a couple of Wim Hof breathing exercises on YouTube.

And it was only because nothing existed at the time. And my background before the corporate world, I did video production at university. So I know how to edit and I know how to film and all that sort of stuff. And these videos started doing really well. And I'm in Bali and I've got a bit of time and I thought, okay. And I started looking at Fiverr and I started getting voice artists and all that sort of stuff. And the channel just keeps growing and keeps growing. And then when the pandemic really kicked in almost two years ago now, I was like,

I've got a good feeling for this, but I don't really understand any of the science of it. And so that's when I learned the oxygen advantage through Patrick. He trained me. And then he had this manuscript for this book called Breath by a guy called James Nestor. And he said, this is the best book I've ever read on breathing. And this is Patrick McKeown saying this. He's a bit of a godfather of breathing less than I need.

So very cheekily, I emailed his publicist said, would it be interesting having a conversation with me on zoom? I've got a really decent breath channel now. It might be good to sell the book. And she's like, yep, bring him on. Um, and that was the first podcast. And then he was on Joe Rogan the week after. And so then it kind of exploded, but it, what it taught me was, uh, you need to learn some of the science now because you've got all this like breathe more than you need. You've got some wonderful feelings and sensations, but,

But it seems like there's thousands of breathing exercises out there. We need to understand some of that. So that was kind of where I got to. And by the way, I can demystify breath work again in a simple way for you. So we hear about all these different breathing exercises, but we already know it's breathe more, breathe less.

If we dug that down a little more, it's mouth or nose. There's an inhale. There's a hold at the top of the inhale. There's an exhale. There's a hold at the exhale. And then there's the pace. So there's kind of seven key variables to any breathing exercise. And that's why I like to call it breath play because we can kind of go with a long inhale and a slow exhale. And we can just mess about with those sort of things. Triangle breathing. So in, out and hold. Or box breathing in, hold, out, hold. And so again,

Again, breathwork can seem quite daunting at first, but really it's seven different variables that can make a huge change. And the exciting thing I've always found about breathwork, the reason I'm so passionate about it is how you breathe affects how you think and feel. And we know that we have the ability to consciously change how we breathe so we can affect how we think and feel. Okay. I have a, that's such a great story. This is fantastic stuff. I have, I have a few different things, a few different like points I want to dive into. The first one is a bit of a tangent. Um,

You're at this Tony Robbins retreat. A, what prompted you to go to a Tony Robbins retreat? Because most people like in our generation would think it's a bit woo woo and stuff. And it seems more for the, I don't know, our parents' generation possibly. I don't know. Maybe I have the wrong idea of Tony Robbins, but you know, as much as I kind of appreciate and admire the guy, I,

It just, the vibe that people my age seem to have of him is like, oh, you know, woo-woo fake guru kind of vibes. I don't know how true that is. So, A, what prompted you to go on that retreat? And what was that experience like when you decided to quit your job? If you can like...

So I watched I Am Not Your Guru on Netflix. I heard really good things about that. So good. Because I know Tony Robbins from Shallow Hal. Have you seen Shallow Hal with Jack Black? No. So Jack Black and who's the actress? Gwyneth Paltrow. Okay. And I won't ruin the story. It's 20 years old. Anyway, he's in the elevator and he hypnotizes Jack Black to see her as being more beautiful than she might be physically in the story. And so I was like, who's this guy? And then I saw the documentary and

And it had me in tears. I was like, oh my God, when you start to look at the stories of people and their personal transformation, it blew me away. Then my best friend who I met on the Wim Hof retreat, we've been best friends now for five years. He went there and he said it profoundly changed his life. And so I was like, I've got this kind of feedback from how I'm feeling watching the documentary and what my best friend's saying, did my own research. I was like, I need to go and do this. It was just a bit like with Wim Hof.

and the Camino there was kind of this you've heard of the traffic light systems how you brain your heart and your guts feeling and if you've got a challenge in your life you might say okay let's do the traffic light system my head's saying it's a no but my heart's saying it's a yes my gut's saying it's a yes I've got two greens one red it was kind of this all over I feel like I just need to go and do this and it was wonderful it was four days it was in London you're exhausted you start at

11:00 AM, I finished at 11:00 PM. He's a beast. He's on stage. And you know, he's been doing the same shtick for 40 years now, 30 years. It hasn't really changed. If you look at the videos from the eighters, it's the same sort of stuff, but it really does work. And so I learned so much. - Yeah, what's it like? What does the Tony Robbins retreat look like?

So you go into a festival, that's how I could describe it. So you go into the Excel Center, it's 13,000 people in seats. And then I was like, I am not gonna get up on my, I'm not gonna be dancing. I'm not a dancer, you know. I am very, what do you call it? You know, tight and I'm not gonna be doing this. 15 minutes later,

Come on Tony. And we're all up on our feet and the energy in the room, I don't know how he does it. There's a combination of music, intensity, you kind of know who he is. And then you're just in this kind of, I guess, hypnotized state for four days where he's like getting you to break off into little groups and say, right,

Let's talk about a time where you struggled with so-and-so and then you make some notes in your workbook and you don't really get a break. You're going for like, he's like, you need to play full out with me now for the next four days. Can you do that? You can do four days, can't you? You know, we can do anything for four days. So he gets you in this chart. I would highly recommend it. It's like one of the top things. I need to do one of these now. I mean, he does it on Zoom. I did that one last year. It's good content.

but it's not the same. Yeah, I guess it's not the same as in person. Yeah, it's incredible in person. So I left there just buzzed and it's almost a bit too much because like I need to change my whole life. You know, I need to tell everybody about what I've been through, but they're not going to know because I've not had the four days with Tony and that sort of thing. And so, you know, I gave my notice, but I did it in a,

I said, look, that was March. I'm going to leave in December. I've been with the company 14 years. So I'm going to give you like seven, eight months notice. But I will be leaving at the end of the year. And I want this to be an official resignation because if you don't take it, I'll still be here for another 14 years. And it was the best decision because everything that you think is a fear of leaving your job, you say, well, what's the worst that's going to happen? I might not get another job. You're going to get another job. And so I got another job when I needed to. And it was absolutely fine. So what was it about the...

Event that made you decide that you needed to quit your job. It was it was the Dickens process I mean, there's a combination of things you're doing but it is this visualization exercise

where you've kind of been thinking for the last couple of days about what are my limiting beliefs? What's stopping me from moving forward? Where would I really want to be if I had no fear? So if I had no fear, what was it I would want to do right now? Well, why am I not doing those things? And you really think about it. And the process is about two hours long. So two hours of guided visualization. And it's like, how would you feel if you're in this place of lack?

in five years and 10 years, what noise would you make if you were that person? And you're like, "Ooh," and everyone's doing it. So it's kind of feeding off each other. And it's like, okay. And he's like, step into this bright light. Imagine what it's like now if you remove those fears and you did what you really wanted to do. And by the way, I'm butchering this from like a few years ago, but you do it and then you make some commitments like, okay, so what am I gonna do next? And my first one was quit my job.

And so it just felt like the right thing to do. - Well, okay. I really need to try one of these. So his team actually got in touch with us last year when he was doing a Zoom thing and being like, "Hey, do you wanna do the Zoom thing?" I was like, "Oh no, I wanna do it in real life. I think Zoom wouldn't be quite the same experience."

But I have done some of these like visualize your ideal future type stuff, like guided meditation type things for like 10 minutes at a time. And I always feel, damn, that was really useful. I should do this more often. So just the thought of actually

you know being committed to doing this sort of stuff for a few days or a few hours i imagine would be quite quite useful yeah and it's it's the stuff that we just tend not to do like really think about where do i actually want to be in five years time like what are the things holding me back like like when when day-to-day life is going along you just don't think in those terms um

As a person you are and the things that you talk about, this is right up your street. It is. And I know he's been around for years, but he's kept current. So, and he always adds extra value. He's a master of adding extra value. And so, you know, we're getting to the end of, I think, day one. I can't remember day three.

day three. And then he goes, oh yeah, my friend's just come to do a little gig for you. And then Pitbull turns up and does like a concert for you in the same place. And I wasn't a massive Pitbull fan until then. But then he tells a story about how he was coached by Tony and what he did to help his life and how he was in his mum's car listening to Tony Robbins tapes in the 90s and 80s. And so he tells a story. Then he starts doing it. And you're like, I've got a free concert out of this as well. So you are in this four-day bubble of

It's really powerful. It shifts. If you've got stuff that's kind of bubbling under the surface, it's going to come through in that session. By the way, Tony Robbins in Breathwork is fantastic. So Tony Robbins, what I would say about him is he is researching what's the best thing in a specific modality.

And so he does all sorts of stuff. So he's looking at kind of human psyche and NLP and a load of other things. But he also says that the quickest way to change your state is to change your physiology to move. So he's very keen on moving, listening to music and changing your state. But he also has a good thing about breath work. So he's adopted the Wim Hof method into that. And he's got people doing a bit of that. He does some priming in the morning where he's doing kind of breath of fire stuff. But he also...

really loves a guy called Dan Brule, who is the godfather, I think, of breathwork. He's 40 years in now. He started as an EMT. I had him on the podcast at my end. And what he doesn't know about breathwork isn't worth knowing. But what he, and Tony wrote the foreword to his book. And Tony Robbins has a quote, something like, if you can harness the power of your breath, you can change yourself physically, mentally, and spiritually. And I think that's just, it's a really lovely summary of

his interpretation of what you can do with this very benign thing of breathing in and out. You know, it's this weird thing we don't really think about, but when you start getting under the surface and playing with it, it can have big changes in your life. Awesome. So yeah, this Tony Robbins experience made you decide quit the job and then let's explore this breathwork stuff more. Started the YouTube channel, things started going well, pandemic happens, you've got the podcast, you have all these big people who are into breathwork and have researched it and doctors and professors and stuff on the podcast.

And now here we are trying to talk about breathwork. One of the other things that you said, which I found interesting, was you said that breathwork or breathing or changing the way you breathe has the potential to change how you think. What's the deal with that? So far, we've talked about kind of oxygen dissociation curves and stuff. We haven't really touched on the mental effects of breathing.

Breathing. Yeah, what's going on there? So there was a study in mice and and what it was really weird the terminology they use but they said there's some neurons in the brain that spy on the way we breathe and so there's this thing around how I breathe does affect it sends signals so I was trying to think I was trying to rationalize them Maybe you're trapped under a tree and you can't breathe properly or someone scared you but suddenly the way that you're breathing is bi-directional so if I'm stressed my breathing is gonna change and

But if I breathe in a stressful state, it's going to send signals that I'm stressed. And so when I interviewed Dr. Blissa Vranic, who trains UFC fighters and SWAT teams in America how to breathe properly, I said...

I said, "Chicken and egg here, what comes first? Does dysfunctional breathing cause stress and anxiety or does stress and anxiety cause dysfunctional breathing?" And her response was the best. She goes, "I don't care. Let's fix the breathing. We know we can fix the breathing. So let's fix the breathing. And if there's still an issue afterwards, then let's look at what that is." And so that to me was this thing around, okay, how we're breathing is affecting how we're thinking and feeling. So for example, if you extend your exhale, going back to that breath play thing,

What you're kind of doing there is sending a signal to your brain to say, everything's okay. We're okay. We're safe. Because if you're running from a tiger, you're not slowly nasal breathing. If you picture what that person looks like, they're probably panic breathing. So a slow exhale through the nose or the mouth actually just sends some signals that everything's okay. And so by doing that, it can actually lower blood pressure, make you feel calmer and more relaxed. And so there's some breathing exercises around sleep and just doing some breathing

and then breathing in, counting to four, holding for seven, and breathing out for eight. And just that release, just saying everything's okay, it can change how you think. Now, if you do Wim Hof breathing and you stress yourself out, that's going to make a different change to your brain. It's going to make your brain feel there's a problem here. We're hyperventilating. And that's going to have its own effects on your thinking and feeling. But if we go back to the functional side of stuff, if we are depriving our brain

wonderful body of oxygen because we've blown off too much co2 that is also going to affect it because it's affecting how much blood and rich oxygen is getting to your brain as well because you're out of balance so it sounds like the effects on the brain are more like breathing less slash breathing more deeply gets you into this relaxed calm state and it's it it it it sounds like it ties in with that stuff that genuinely the way that you move your body does affect

Relate to the way that your brain and your body kind of feels in a way like I know some people used to They I think like we came across like James Lang theory of emotion, which was that you know, we don't smile because we're happy We're happy because we're smiling or words to that effect and people are quibble about this in the in the scientific community of like oh But like the evidence isn't quite there and if you look at this meta-analysis it doesn't but I think you take taking all that aside and

I guess, you know, people's actual lived experience of, you know, when you do, for example, a mindfulness thing or like a yoga thing or like a breathing thing, it does change the way that you feel. And maybe the scientific study about exactly what's what fMRI scanner is showing is doing in the brain while you're doing breathwork. Maybe that's a bit equivocal, but who cares? Like, I think my view on this stuff is that like, well, if it works, then I'm not going to quibble with it too much.

And there's a good quote I came across in an article I was reading about stretching, which is that often scientific evidence lags behind best practices. And I think on the breathing front, like given that breathing meditation, these sorts of things have been part of traditions for thousands of years.

The scientific method may not have yet caught up with that. That's my kind of very, very rough read on it. I guess you would know, you've interviewed doctors and stuff like, is the science behind all this stuff like,

actually pretty legit and it's just not not very well known or yeah i mean there's plenty of studies um about all different things to do with breathing um but what somebody said to me once was um you know breathwork people aren't very rich people and so you know to get a study done um is is harder i guess than some other things like meditation but breathwork is

I see it as like the new yoga. So yoga, I don't know, 30 years ago, probably wasn't main mainstay like it is now. Breathwork seems to be that thing in part due to James Nestor's bestselling book has really helped. Um, but it's this thing that's now gaining momentum. And with that, what I think you'll see is a lot more scientific study, but you know, I've had, um, I've had a number of doctors on, um, Dr. Catwell haven't released his podcast yet. He's at the Boston children's hospital. Um, and he talks passionately about, um,

mouth breathing in children about the dangers of mouth breathing about all the you know things that can be fixed so easily if we just shut our mouths um and he's a doctor that's seen on the front line um every single day um and yeah a whole host of other kind of professionals that's the the benefit i guess like what you do with uh kind of your niche is um you get spend time picking the brains of these people and you start to see patterns and so that for me was the thing of

They all keep talking about functional breathing and how it's an important baseline to get that right And so I've had some I've had like a wonderful beautiful human on from the holotropic Institute and people loved her and you know She talked about all the healing powers of hyperventilation But that to me seems secondary to the let's get the functional breathing right functional breathing as in are the does 25,000 breaths that we take rather than see one of breathing exactly. Yeah, okay at this point I'm sold on the

mouth-breathing thing. Sorry, the nose-breathing thing. What's the deal with sort of... I read in Breath about how standard...

standard respirates, you know, respiratory rate that we cite as doctors is somewhere between 12 and 20. And if someone has lower than 12 breaths per minute, they are hyperventilating. Greater than 20 is hyperventilating. And these numbers are used in scales like, you know, could someone have sepsis? You know, the sepsis criteria, one of them is like a breath rate greater than 30, greater than 20, depending on which thing you look at.

Or also if someone is hypoventilating, so breathing too little, potentially sign of opiate toxicity and these other bad things that are happening. And so provided someone's respiratory is between roughly 12 and 20, you're like, cool, this is fairly normal. But then one thing I remember reading in Breath by James Nestor was that, oh, shit, maybe 12 is actually too much. Yeah, what's the deal on how often we should be? Yeah, I think, you know, that number seems to change from a different paper to paper and person to person. But I think between 10 and 15 is pretty good.

Once you start getting above 15, you're getting into kind of dysfunctional territory. And Anders Olsson, who was part of that book with James Nestor, says, and he's worked with thousands of students, I think he's seen people in the 30s, you know, per minute in terms of breath. What there is, there is something known as the perfect breath and coherence breathing is down this road. And that's around 5.5 breaths a minute. So he talked about that.

But that isn't how we should breathe all the time. But coherence breathing is very, very ruddy cool. So I'm not an expert in this at all, but what's going on here? Have you heard of entrainment?

So if you put a load of metronomes together, they sync up. Do they? Yeah. And this happens with some grandfather clocks. And I think the guy originally thought, oh, it's because the wind is blowing them. But actually, they were on the same piece of wood. And so there's small vibrations and they sync up through that. So you go on YouTube now. I think someone's got like 100 metronomes and it shows them all syncing up because they're all on like a wobbly ball. But anyway, what that's showing is when one thing starts to happen, it kind of has an effect on other things.

When you're breathing at 5.5 breaths a minute, or 5.5 in, 5.5 out, you...

Or using your diaphragm which we haven't spoke about yet. You're breathing a nice slow rate the inhale is Coming in and then you're going out and that's pumping the heart. We're massaging the heart with a diaphragm And then what that's doing is when you breathe out and you're massaging the heart the diaphragm moves back up again So the bloods going around your body at a rate now that you're pumping it because you're going a nice slow rate You're not breathing fast. You're slowing it all down and

Apparently what is happening is then the signals are going from your heart to your brain and it's all becoming in sync. And so there's a improvement of heart rate variability there, more relaxation. And so the coherence people are fascinating people. There's a whole other subsect of breathing. But that's where it comes back to this 5.5 seconds. And I think James Nestor spoke about rosary beads and people praying and they would be kind of saying the Lord's Prayer and breathing and not nasal breathing, but

they were slowing their breathing down as they were talking about the Lord's Prayer, and I think it's in other religions as well. So there are some health benefits to slowing it right down. One of them is by slowing your breathing right down, you are starting to build up your CO2 levels. And by building up your CO2 levels a little bit, you're gonna start adjusting your sensitivity to CO2 as well.

And so if your CO2 sensitivity is higher or normal, let's say, you're going to breathe at a slower rate. But if your CO2 level's low because your mouth's breathing, you're going to breathe at a faster rate. So some of the exercises which we'll jump into in a bit are all about let's just slow our breathing down. Let's get used to that feeling of air hunger. Because by doing so, it's a bit like going to the gym and lifting that weight. We're training ourselves to breathe at a slower rate. Okay, cool. We've mentioned the diaphragm a few times.

I've had a few singing lessons, which to my annoyance, often focused on breathing. I was like, come on, I want to get to the good stuff. They were like, bro, there is no good stuff until you sorted the breathing thing out. But I've never done them for long enough to actually have sorted the breathing thing out. And I always want to just dive into actually singing songs and all that. But they were often focused on kind of

So sort of people describe it in different ways. Like breathe. Some, some people say breathe into the tummy and other people say, Oh no, breathing into the abdomen is like not how you should be thinking about it. It's not about pushing your tummy out. Instead, it's about using your diaphragm. Then some people say, well, the diaphragm is under the control of the phrenic nerve or something, which is, uh, is not under conscious control. And therefore like, how can you,

actively choose to breathe through the diaphragm. And then I went on a rabbit hole on YouTube about this and it seems like everyone's got an opinion about whether you should be breathing into your tummy or not into your tummy or into the base of your lungs and not into the base of your lungs.

I guess the question is, how should we be breathing? So Dr. Chatterjee wrote a really good book about stress. And in there, he talks about diaphragm. He says, when we're unconsciously breathing, the diaphragm is moving about one centimetre. But when we consciously focus on belly breathing, let's say, we can move it up to 10 centimetres.

Now, we've talked a lot about the nose, but when it comes to gas exchange, the blood is at the lower part of our lungs. And that's where the really cool gas exchange happens, the best gas exchange. And obviously, we use the nose because we want the vasodilation of the nasal nitric oxide. But also, what's happening is if our belly is locked, let's just say I put a band around this now and I can't move it.

Then I might become what's known as an upper chest breather. So if you take a big breath in, then your chest goes up. You've got all these extra muscles, which can be used, again, a bit like an emergency mouth breath. We do all this. And my channel's called Take a Deep Breath. And if you said to nine out of 10 people, how do you take a deep breath in? But actually, you can take a deep breath in slowly, using your nose and using your belly. So instead, you'd be...

I always feel conscious when I do this because the belly comes out and I'm like, oh, why am I so fat? So, by the way, one of the biggest things I struggle with in my life is what's known as gut sucking, which is bloody terrible for you. So I started working in pub kitchens when I was really young, like 14, 15. I had free access to chips and fries the whole time. And so I easily started to get a bit of a belly doing that.

And so I thought I would suck it in. It was only when I had the conversation with Dr. Bliss Vranich where she's like, yeah, you shouldn't be sucking your belly and that's really bad. That's a common trait people have because you are effectively stopping your diaphragm from moving, which means you can't get a full gas exchange. All this is locked.

Your diaphragm is this dome-shaped muscle that goes all the way around the back. So if you start here and you start working your fingers around, the diaphragm is bloody huge. It goes all the way right around the back. You know, this huge thing, one of the biggest muscles. And that muscle is a stabilization muscle.

So it's linked to poor lower back problems. It's linked to your digestion. And so, you know, if you're using your diaphragm, it's kind of massage and everything. You'll know as a doctor, there's not a lot of space in here. If you look at what's inside, everything's pretty compressed. And so the extra work of the diaphragm is kind of massage and everything, the tummy, all that sort of stuff. And so if it's locked,

again we are not being that natural you know ancestor with a chimpanzee with the can of coke kind of bent over and so we want to be able to use the diaphragm I've got some exercises I can show you around how we kind of open it all up and stuff and it's

conscious practice, but I also believe it's education as well because if you don't know the diaphragm is good for you and the nose is good for you, then why would you use it? But now that people listen to this and you understand the what, the why, and we're going to do the how, that's how you can make a significant shift in your life. Okay. So I shouldn't be worried about my belly coming out while I'm breathing. Let it come out. Yeah. Let it come out. We'll do some exercises just to kind of release that. But yeah, we...

we uh we need to release the belly so when you say suck your gut in what does do you mean like tense your abs yeah so so literally you could be like if i'm in the photograph i'd be like i need to suck the tummy in for that and you might be you might be like that all day there'll be some times i mean i've done a lot of work on this over the last couple of years but there'll be some times that i'll be um you know i use i use a a sauna spa where i where i am and i was speaking to a friend the other day and suddenly i felt myself sucking my stomach tummy in yeah i was like oh

Come on, you know, that's bad for you. And so I have to kind of just consciously remind myself to kind of release it But yeah you by doing that you're not giving you die from the space to move properly And so by doing that you're no longer an efficient functional breather. You're being dysfunctional but in a different way to What's going on here because you're not getting the air into the lower lungs and not doing a good transfer got it Okay

Shall we dive into some exercise? Yeah, let's do it. Let's do it. Just one last thing on breathing I think is important is the efficiency and the rate of breathing. Okay.

So in the simplest way possible if you do my maths is terrible, but if you do 12 breaths a minute And your tidal volume which is the amount of air you take in is half a liter. Yeah, so that's that's like 12 liters Yeah, all right six liters. Six liters. Thank you. Six liters a minute. Yeah. Six liters now if I was to double my tidal volume to a liter of air I would only need to take six breaths in that same minute and

extra bonuses because that air is in your lungs for a little bit longer you've got a bit more time to do the transfer so by slowing our breathing down we become more efficient i think it's 20 percent more oxygen is absorbed through each of those breaths so i've now just suddenly taken half the amount of breaths as you and more oxygen was able to be absorbed into my body so pace is so important to slowing everything down and again this is where education comes in because you can slow your breathing down build up your tolerance to co2 and your general breath per minute will start to

slow down as well. Okay, cool. So how do we do this? Okay. So how's the, how's the nose? First of all, is it, is it a bit open, a bit blocked? It feels a bit blocked, but it always feels a bit blocked. I've been consciously trying to breathe through the nose for the conversation, but I've,

I'll have a look at the footage afterwards. I'll see how much of it was actually hanging open. You're cursed by the way now because you'll be looking at everybody mouth breathing. Have you got a phone or something to hand? Yes. So a bit gross but a bit fun. You could just blow onto it and you can see like which nostril is kind of what the airflow is like. So if you just put the phone here like this and then just kind of breathe onto it, get an idea of what your kind of breath is. Maybe one nostril is a bit more open than the other. I don't see anything at all. Let me take it out of its case.

So for people listening in, what I've been doing is I'm holding up my phone parallel to the floor underneath my nostrils and blowing onto it. Yeah, definitely more from this one. Okay, so one's a bit more open than the other. So it's a feedback mechanism just to see kind of what's going on. I mean, you can sometimes just cap a nostril and

See which ones open and we have what's known as arousals with our nostrils So sometimes one will be more open the other and they'll take it in turns to kind of open and close Yeah, this one's that's right one's definitely much more than the other one and there's some interesting studies around again I would do yoga years ago. I think this is a waste of time alternate nostril breathing There's some studies and James Nestor references these if you're breathing through the left nostril

it's more of a cool and calming effect. If you breathe through the right nostril, it's more creative energy effect. And that sounds like proper, proper woo-woo. But they've done studies where they've kind of blocked somebody's nostril up and then done some tests with them. So anyway, there's some cool stuff with nostrils. So what we want to do, let's...

Do you want to unblock your nose first? Sure, I'm going to do that. So it works about 50% of the time. If you're already breathing quite well, then you might not feel it, but we'll do it now. Maybe we can cut it if it doesn't work. So what I want you to do is, in a second, take a normal breath in and a normal breath out. And I'm going to cap the nose. I'm going to just shake the head and the body. And the reason I'm doing that is to just create a bit more CO2. And what I want you to do there is do a fairly strong breath hold. Okay.

And then when you're, this is important thing, when you're finished, you want to breathe back in through the nose because you've harnessed some nasal nitric oxide there. So we want to make sure we capture that because it's the vasodilator. So in, out, hold, shake as long as you can. Don't do this if you're pregnant, if you've got epilepsy or high blood pressure, it's quite a strong breath hold. And what we'll do, that is just going to start to increase the CO2 in your body, start to open everything up a little.

bit so we'll do it we'll do it you need to do about five times on this so we'll do a little bit and see how okay so normal breath in normal breath in normal breath out and cap your nose shake your head keep shaking shake your whole body it's good to feel silly look silly have a little dance keep holding and as you're doing this just know you're full of oxygen and so when that urgency to breathe comes it doesn't want to be a very stressful breath but when you feel the right time to breathe you're going to breathe back in through your nose

And you're gonna harness all that beautiful nasal nitric oxide and then back out through the nose. So it may have started, may not yet. We're gonna just breathe normally now through your nose just for the next 20, 30 seconds. We're gonna go for a second round. And just the air hunger, how would you have described how you felt during the last few seconds? Was it quite tough? - Yeah, quite unpleasant. - Yeah, quite unpleasant, okay. So just keep breathing through your nose, settling the breath again. And when you're ready now, we're gonna do a normal breath in through the nose, a normal breath out through the nose. You're gonna cap your nose. I'm gonna shake.

That's a boogie. And again, you know, that urgency to breathe is going to come up. And that's a good thing because the CO2 is rising in your body just to the point where you've got, you know, a medium to strong air hunger. Keep going. Know that you're full of oxygen. And we'll just keep breathing for a second. Now, we're only two into probably five, but is there any noticeable difference as yet? Is it still feeling about the same or...

I think this, the unblocked nostril has become more unblocked. Okay, good. We'll do one more and we'll see how that's going. But about five is about optimal for this. And a wonderful thing to do before bed is, you know, it's an exercise. It's going to help open things up before you put your mouth tape on. Okay, so when you're ready in your own time, you're going to breathe back in through the nose and out through the nose. You're going to cap your nose and we're going to shake. Keep going, keep shaking, keep going. Getting a real insight to you as a dancer at a wedding, I think here.

Right now the co2 levels are really starting to to go a bit higher in the body. No nothing dangerous here We're just you know slowly holding our breath not to the point of passing out just purely a point where we can start to Open up on those a little bit

Yeah, we're feeling a little bit, maybe a little bit more open. Yeah, yeah, good. Yeah, definitely on this nostril. Good, good. And you know, you can do that three, six times. It's just a good way to get you started. So what I want us to do then first is you can do this with your eyes open or closed. This one's called breath awareness. So I take my right hand onto my belly. Right hand, belly, yep. And left hand onto my heart. Left to left hand, heart, yep. You want to sit up nice and straight.

And this is maybe the most difficult exercise, Ali, because what I want you to do here is do nothing. I just want you to focus on how your breathing is. And it might be very hard to do first of all, because you're gonna wanna start to change things. But really the whole point here is just to check in with your breathing. And the reason for your hands where they are, because not only will you get to sense it through your nostrils, you'll also get to sense how your hands are moving. So your belly hand, is that moving much? Is that staying the same? Same with the chest.

So it's just breath awareness could be arguably the most important because we need to know how we're breathing first so we can get under the hood and start to make some changes. And as you sit there and breathe, not really trying to change anything at all, just paying attention to the sound or the feeling of the air that comes in through your nose and out through your nose and how your hands are moving and avoiding that temptation to change anything. Just breathing in through the nose and out through the nose.

It can be quite powerful this because you're checking in with yourself here. It's a form of active meditation because not only are we just trying to clear our thoughts, we're actively focusing on something, but something we don't really want to change just to pay attention to. So just continue now breathing in through the nose and out through the nose. And when you're ready, you can open your eyes again.

And so the benefit of that exercise is just to get a sense of how you are feeling. And as you go through the steps of practicing different breathing exercises, that becomes a useful tool to kind of check in with yourself. Because you might have found right then, oh, my hand didn't really move much on the belly. It was quite static or I could feel my chest was moving quite high. Or I felt like I was breathing quite fast on there. And so it's just a check in and then something you can journal about and come back to.

So what I want to do now is do a little bit of box breathing with you. And the reason for this is before we go into some of the other exercises, let's just slow everything down. Navy SEALs use this exercise because by slowing everything down, we might be in a better state to make a decision as opposed to being frantically breathing, panic breathing, trying to make a decision. Let's just slow everything down. So what I'll do, I'll just guide you through a little bit of box breathing, just a couple of rounds. So I'm going to use the nose for this. So we're going to breathe in through the nose for four, three, two, one, and hold for

four, three, two, one. And out through the nose, four, three, two, one. And hold, four, three, two, one. And in through the nose, four, three, two, one. And hold, four, three, two, one. And out through the nose, four, three, two, one. And hold, four, three, two, one.

one. Let's just slow it down slightly now. In through the nose, five, four, three, two, one. Hold, five, four, three, two, one. Out through the nose, five, four, three, two, one. And hold, five, four, three, two,

two, one, and go back to normal nasal breathing. Now, when we slowed it down, was there any challenge with that? Or was it, I could do five. I could do maybe even six or seven seconds. That's great. Yeah. Good. Okay. So what I want us to move on to now is, um, of course,

What's the point of these breathing exercises? Okay, so the breath awareness is to check in with the body. The box breathing is just slowing us down. So you're just getting a bit of control now. So starting to get under the hood and play with it. And so by breathing at a slower rate, it comes back to increasing your levels of CO2. So if I feel like I'm in a stressful situation? Yeah, if you've come out of a meeting and your boss has been shouting at you or whatever, and you're just in that...

Panic state you can check in with yourself You can then do box breathing just to slow everything down and I buy slowing everything down you're thinking clearer And you can move forward and make a decision nice. Yeah, okay, cool So what I'd like us to do now is let's start to feel the airflow because this is a really cool exercise So what you do is you get the middle finger and where the middle finger meets the hand you can just place that on your on your nose like this and as you're breathing through your nose

Hope you've not had anything smelly on your hands. What you'll find is the airflow should start to hit the hand. Yeah? So what I'm going to do now, I'm going to guide you through slowing this down. So just keep that hand there. By the way, you can also do it like this as a feather breath. I don't think it looks very good from a PR point of view to be doing that. So I like to do it this way. And so what you're doing here is you're feeling the air as it's hitting your hand. And so we're going to start to slow that down now, Ali. So what I want you to do, you can stay in the position you're in. You can keep your eyes open or closed.

Just before we start to play with it, get a sense of what the air feels like. Maybe it's stronger on one nostril or the other. Maybe the intensity is quite hard. Just try and remember if you can what that is because we're going to start to slow it down. And what I like to use as an analogy is one of those old car stereos with the winding knob that you can use to turn the volume down. And what I want us to do now is let's just start to turn that volume down. And what that means for you is we're going to reduce the airflow, maybe just a couple of percent to start off with.

Can we make the air flow quieter, more gently and smoother as we breathe in through the nose and breathe out through the nose? I can already hear a quieter breath from you now. It was quite loud before and that was quite fantastic. So we're just slowing it down. And as you start to do this breathing in through the nose and breathing out through the nose, the levels of CO2 in your body are going to rise slightly and you're going to feel what's known as an air hunger.

And that's good, that's what we want to do here. Now a bit like when we did the breath holds before to unblock your nose, that would be classed as a strong air hunger.

We don't want to do that. We want to probably have a medium air hunger here. You know, we're not trying to get to that point where we're desperate, but I would like you to get to the point where you want to start to take a bit of a bigger breath, but you're choosing not to. You're choosing to keep it slow. So we're breathing in through the nose and out through the nose and the airflow is nice and gentle on the hands. Now just give me a nod. Is it gentler than it was at the start of the exercise? Good. Okay. Now,

Now, if you can, because it's the first time you've done this, I imagine, let's just take that radio knob and let's just turn it down another couple of percent. Could we go a little bit more? Could we go to a slightly lower inhale and a slightly slower exhale? Slightly little bit more of airflow going back and forth. And again, you're getting this wonderful feedback of what's hitting your hand. So you get to feel the air, but you're also getting to feel it in your body, the feeling of air hunger. Breathing in through the nose and breathing out through the nose.

And then when you're ready, you can move your hand and you can go back to normal nasal breathing. How was that exercise for you? Yeah. I realized that sort of subconsciously I was like making noise while I was breathing. Yeah. And probably wasn't necessary. Yeah.

- Yeah, when I was, I did yoga in Bali for a month and I would make the loudest noise possible 'cause I wanted the yoga instruction and I was really suffering. And then I only realized after, no, no, no, slow nasal breathing is the game here, it's the way forward. So it's just, what we're doing here, we're just playing with some different tools, some free tools that can get us out of our head and get us to feel what's going on with our breathing. Now, an exercise like that, you could do that for 10 or 15 minutes in the morning and the evening. And by creating that air hunger on a consistent daily basis, you're gonna be in a position where you're gonna start to raise your tolerance to CO2.

And so I did that and it took me about six weeks to get my breath hold from about 14 seconds to about 30, which is a good way. And so with all of these things, like anything in life consistency is key. That's the thing that we absolutely want to be doing.

What I want us to focus on now is a bit of the abdomen breathing. So you talked about belly breathing, you know, how best to do it. There is a lot of different ways of doing that. But first of all, I like to think about the rib cage because people talk about, can you improve lung capacity? And if you think about those, those, those,

Sacks those bags just hanging in the ribcage. Well, they're kind of constricted by everything that's going on You know if the diaphragm is not moving and the ribs are locked then actually your lung capacity is going to be reduced and Actually, if we can open all that up and it can make some some differences So what we need to do here is we want to start opening things up So this is is a bit of a breathing exercise, but it's bit of movement And by the way, this is very accessible. So I'm very very very tight and

just naturally, I think. And so this is an exercise that pretty much anyone can do. We can do some crazy yoga with Adrian and, you know, we can do handstands. But in this, it's just about opening things up a little bit. So the first exercise is called picking apples. And what we're going to do is we're going to put our hand up in the air.

And as we do, we're going to breathe in. And we're going to grab an apple from the top. And so we're breathing in, grabbing the apple, stretching all of this, all of the intercostal muscles here that sit in between the ribs. And we're just going to open them up a little bit and grab the apple. And the good thing is we can slow the breathing down at the same time. So we're going to go in. And I can emphasize that exercise, but actually it does feel quite nice to go. So we'll go in again. That's good. We can go the other arm. In, pick an apple. Nice big stretch. And down. And there's two apples. Let's go with both hands now.

And we can really stretch the ribs on both sides. And if it's your first time, don't push it. And back down again. Let's do one more. Both hands in the air. Just feels good to get your hands above your head. - Yeah, feels great. - I think we don't do enough. Now let's add some twists to this.

This is a good chair for this. So we face forward too much. These muscles need to move. So what we want to do is we're going to take a breath in through the nose. And as we breathe out, we can grab the back and we're just going to do a twist. And we're just twisting all the intercostals and get a nice twist in there. Almost like wringing a tea towel out. So we'll sit in, face forward, breathing in now. Squeezing and twisting and squeezing and twisting and squeezing and twisting. And then when you're ready, you're going to breathe back in through the nose and face forward. We'll do one more of that side.

So here we go, nice breath in and out. Twist in and squeeze in, get that tea towel nicely wrung out, get all that dish water out of that tea towel, let's go. Okay, and face forward and breathe in. And we wanna balance things out, so we'll do the other side twice now as well. So in your own time, you're gonna breathe in and we're gonna twist. Keep twisting, that's it. Nice twist, breathing out, face forward. I'll do one more twist and breathing out through the nose.

What that exercise doing you can do apple picking for a few minutes you can do twisting for few minutes I always like to feel like I'm a bit more loose now I'm doing that and so we're just opening up all that kind of cage a little bit because it doesn't get the love it deserves there So now we've got a bit more flexibility and again, that's a good exercise could do every day every other day And what we want to do now is I'm gonna do some mechanical focusing on our belly breathing so

Some people say you can breathe into the back, you can breathe into the sides. And if you actually put your hands here on the sides, we're gonna let our bellies go a little bit now. If you take a nice slow breath in through the nose,

you feel your hands start to move apart. And the reason this is a good exercise to do is because, yes, belly breathing is important, but it's really a 360 breath. Everything is opening into the back. I heard that at the start of COVID, they stopped putting patients on their backs because they weren't being able to get a full breath. And so we breathe, you know, in a 360 way. But I also think it's useful to focus on the belly. So I like to imagine there's a little balloon in the belly that's inflating.

And what we're doing here is when we breathe in through the nose, we're really focusing on everything expanding outwards. And then as we breathe back in again, the diaphragm comes back up into a nice resting position. And just by focusing on the diaphragm, it already starts to move a little bit more. A bit like what Dr. Chatterjee said in his book, you know, one centimetre versus 10 centimetres is huge. And so we don't necessarily want to push out as far as we can, but just a normal nice breath in.

And we want to try and keep the shoulders where they are. We might be used to being shoulder breathers. And if you look at somebody that takes a big breath, the shoulders move in. We want to keep that breath nice and low. And we can also put a hand back on the belly and one back on the chest. And this time now we can focus on the belly moving out as we breathe in. And as we breathe back out, the belly moves in and the diaphragm moves up. Breathing back in and breathing back out.

So those exercises, I would say, are really useful as functional foundations for people. So what we've got there, just a quick reminder, so we've got breath awareness to check in. Then we can do some box breathing to slow things down. Then we can feel our breath. Then we can do some twisting to open everything up. And then finally, we can focus on our diaphragm.

and we can focus on the belly breathing. By using those combinations, now with the breath awareness of the education that we've got, you can start to unpick what's happened over decades, for me in particular, and we can start to go back to the way nature intended us to breathe, which is functionally, which is efficiently, which is the way that we should be breathing, the way we used to breathe

as children, but actually we lost it through chronic stress, poor posture, you know, being indoors and being cramped all day. We can actually unpick some of that. And I've been through my own breath journey. I had lower back problems. They're much better. I had IBS my whole life. My diaphragm was locked. No surprise, I wasn't getting any massage in there. And so we can start to unpick

some of this and if I can give a bit of a plug. So I've just finished literally yesterday, a functional breathing essentials masterclass. It's a five week masterclass. And what that does is it takes everything we've talked about here, but we go in much deeper into the what, the why and the how. So this will be like a mini masterclass. And over those five weeks, I'll set you different homework

You then get a week to practice it. You get to learn all about it. There's different things you can do. You can measure your breath scores, all these different things. And at the end of the five weeks, you get a really deep knowledge of being a functional, efficient breather. And that's live now. And I can do an Ali 2022 22% discount on there. So I was thinking about that. So I can give you the code for that. So anybody that's watching this will be able to get a discount and get cracking with that course. Yeah, we'll stick that in the video description and the show notes.

Sweet. This has been great. Interesting introduction to the idea of breathwork. I will continue taping my mouth shut because it seems to be good for you. I will continue being somewhat trying to be mindful of breathing through my nose, even if I don't feel like it, because I always feel like, oh, it feels a bit blocked. But this exercise is quite useful. And I'm very keen to attend to Tony Robbins' thing. And also, I've been thinking about, oh, I should go to one of these Wim Hof things for ages. Just haven't really gotten around to it. But it will happen at some point. And then we're doing an interview on your podcast.

straight after this. So we'll put that in the video description and the show notes so people can check out more if people are interested in that sort of thing. But yeah, thank you very much for coming on. Any recommended resources for people who want to dive into this topic a bit more? Yeah, so obviously I'm shamelessly plugging my course, but also my Breathcast...

I don't know if that's an original name or an unoriginal name, but there's kind of 50 plus experts now been interviewed all about wellness and breathing. And that's really been a big source of my breathing education. And so to have this time and you can go and watch these on YouTube or listen to them on Spotify, um, anybody that wants to go deep down the rabbit hole of breath work, you know, most of the top people are in there. The James Nesters, the Patrick McEwans, um, the Dr. Bliss of raniches, um, and a whole host of other people. So I really recommend that as a, as a

a good resource if you want to go much deeper. - Sick. So, and we'll put a link to the Breathcast podcast in the video description in the show notes as well. All right, so that's it for this week's episode of Deep Dive. Thank you so much for watching or listening. All the links and resources that we mentioned in the podcast are gonna be linked down in the video description or in the show notes, depending on where you're watching or listening to this. If you're listening to this on a podcast platform, then do please leave us a review on the iTunes store. It really helps other people discover the podcast.

Or if you're watching this in full HD or 4K on YouTube, then you can leave a comment down below and ask any questions or any insights or any thoughts about the episode. That would be awesome. And if you enjoyed this episode, you might like to check out this episode here as well, which links in with some of the stuff that we talked about in the episode. So thanks for watching. Do hit the subscribe button if you aren't already, and I'll see you next time. Bye-bye.