Transcript

Ani
Hi and welcome to the Somatic Coaching Academy podcast. Hey, Brian.

Brian
Hey, Ani.

Ani
How are you?

Brian
I am feeling inspired.

Ani
Sure you are. Today we are doing a book report for you on James Nestor’s book Breath. And we do these book reports because we read it so you don’t have to.

Brian
Yeah, we did better with that one.

Ani
We did.

Brian
We’re practicing that a little bit. Yeah.

Ani
So I got to tell you, I saw this book on our bookshelf, Brian, and I looked at it for a very, very long time before I decided to pick it up because to me it looked like it was going to be chock full of boring research.

Brian
Yep.

Ani
Right. Like, I don’t know why. I just had this bad impression about it and, oh, my gosh, it wasn’t like that at all. It was such a delightful read.

Brian
It’s a delightful book, isn’t it?

Ani
It’s a wonderfully written book that has fantastic storytelling in it, great research, but it doesn’t bog you down at all. I loved it.

Brian
Yeah, it’s fantastic. So I had the same experience. It sat on my bedside stand for a while, not because I thought it was going to be boring research. I just had other stuff I was prioritizing, and then finally I just picked it up one Saturday afternoon. I said, I have like 10 minutes to read, and I couldn’t put it down.

Ani
I know, It’s like a book that you couldn’t put it down? Was so good. But even the first story in it, he’s talking about deep sea divers and breathing around deep sea diving. I was hooked on page one and a half.

Brian
Yeah. So good. So good. So the basic kind of theme of this book, Breath, and it is really just a wonderful book. So we’ll give you that five-star rating now.

Ani
Thumbs up now if you’re gonna read it.

Brian
It’s really great. Like move it to the front of your reading queue if it’s been sitting in there for a while. So the book’s really written in a very entertaining way, as Ani pointed out, and it’s written about – James Nestor talks about pulmonauts.He talks about these people that are kind of like pulmonary astronauts, pulmonary explorers, pulmonary pioneers. Looks all the way back into ancient practices of, you know, Pranayama and Qigong, those practices, and then all the way up through contemporary practice through the 1800s and 1900s, even up until today. And really a breath of history in there as well.

Ani
A breath of history.

Brian
Yeah, exactly.

Ani
And not just the breathwork history, but like human history. I can be a bit of an anthropology kind of nerd. And I love, loved every time he was like ancient human.

Brian
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, some of the anthropology stuff I didn’t expect, and it was like really, really hit you. Yeah.So the way that the book is organized, and I think that’s the way we’ll do our report today, is based on kind of the chapters. And so the chapters are kind of outlined like, well, mouth breathing, nose, exhale, slow, less, basing kind of like all these different kind of breath practices or the science and the physiology. There’s a lot of really awesome physiology in the book also, but written in a storytelling kind of way, so it’s not bland or boring at all.But I thought we would just kind of go through each chapter and just kind of give a couple highlights of each chapter as we go through that I thought were fascinating, like some of my big takeaways.

Ani
Sounds good.

Brian
So the first chapter that we dig into is called Mouth Breathing.

Ani
Okay, if you listen to nothing else about this podcast, don’t breathe with your mouth open. Oh my gosh, Brian. It was astounding how much mouth breathing has to do with every possible ailment under the sun in your body and in your mind.

Brian
Amazing. Yeah. So the basic research shows around mouth breathing is that it definitely promotes physiological changes for the worse. In everything.

Brian
And just a couple, let’s just kind of spot a couple of them off. So when we mouth breathe, it actually causes the tissues in the back of the throat to become softer and actually kind of atrophy.The breathing muscles in the facial structure get weaker when we breathe through our mouth. And then that leads to things like snoring, which you might think, oh, there’s a little snoring going on. Well, what the research shows in the book is that no amount of snoring is normal or healthy because it’s a precursor to sleep apnea.And sleep apnea happens when your airway closes off for periods of time while sleeping, which means then that you’re not actually getting oxygen, which is bad for you.

Ani
It’s just plain old bad for you.

Brian
But mouth breathing actually causes atrophy and softening in the back of the throat and the palate.It’s been linked to things like high blood pressure. It’s been linked to things like having fewer brain cells, slower learning, and potentially even links to ADHD.

Ani
Okay, so you know me. I don’t catalog information that I can look up. The two that stick in my mind are ADHD and hemorrhoids.

Ani
I was like, it’s just from soup to nuts, right?

Brian
It’s straight from the top all the way down to the bottom. So one of the things that I found really fascinating about mouth breathing is two things. So you have up to 40% more water loss from your body when you mouth breathe.So in other words, we’re getting dehydrated mouth breathing. And so think about if you’re at night and you’re sleeping and you’re mouth breathing, then you’re actually breathing off 40% more water, which means that you wake up with a dry throat and really need water and that kind of stuff. But that wasn’t the interesting part.The interesting part is that when we mouth breathe, it causes changes to a hormone called vasopressin in the body. And vasopressin has to do with how we store water, how our kidneys kind of store water through the night so that we don’t have to get up and pee in the middle of the night.

Ani
Yes.

Brian
I thought that was interesting. So that when we mouth breathe, we actually are losing more water, but we also have to pee more. So it disrupts our sleep. So we get less deep sleep when we’re mouth breathing, which causes all those hormonal changes in the body.

Ani
All right, so let’s just pause here.

Brian
Amazing.

Ani
You better betcha that as soon as we read this, we were like, oh my God, thank God we’re not mouth breathers.

Ani
So we were doing it.

Brian
Yes, we were doing it. I noticed, I started noticing how much I mouth breathe during the day.

Ani
And I was like, oh my God. I did not think I was a mouth breather at all. I was like, well, this doesn’t apply to me.Oh my God, all the time. Like, wow. Yeah, so yes, we went out and bought the sleep tape, and we did the sleep tape.We did the whole sleep tape thing. And I don’t know about you. I don’t think you’re using it anymore.I used it two nights and realized I actually don’t breathe through my mouth as much as I thought I did at night. So I don’t really use or want the sleep tape now. Neither one of us snore. But I definitely catch myself all the time breathing through my mouth during the day.

Brian
Yeah, and he does talk about in the book that if you have the sleep tape on at night, so you tape your mouth shut at night. So if you don’t know what sleep tape is, you basically tape your mouth shut. I actually kind of liked it, because then I went to bed knowing I wasn’t mouth breathing.

Ani
Oh, for sure.

Brian
Right.

Ani
Yeah.

Brian
And then I would wake up, but the problem was when I would wake up in the middle of the night, and if I did need a drink of water, my mouth was taped shut.

Ani
You got the little beard thing going on too, so everybody wants to know. Inquiring minds want to know, Brian, what was it like to tape your mouth shut because you got a beard?

Brian
Well, you have to just go on the lips.

Ani
Yeah.

Brian
You just basically tape the lips shut.

Ani
So it’s okay. No beard hairs were injured in the process.

Brian
Right. But I felt like I actually slept pretty well with the sleep tape. Some people say they feel like they’re claustrophobic, like they’re going to not be able to breathe.

Ani
I had that experience the first night when I first woke up in the morning, because apparently I wake up, and the first thing I do is try to breathe through my mouth. I was like, oh, my God. One of the reasons I like the sleep tape is as soon as I put it on, I can’t talk to anybody.

Brian
Well, that’s true, too.

Ani
I was like, lights out. For real.

Brian
Yeah. If you live with someone who talks in their sleep, mouth tape’s a great idea.

Ani
That actually, yeah, works.

Brian
We’ll leave that one there.

Ani
Yeah.

Brian
Okay. The other thing about mouth breathing that I thought was really fascinating, they pointed out, it can even cause changes to your facial structure.

Ani
Yeah.

Brian
Like your jaw, your mandible, how wide your sinus, like all kinds of things from mouth breathing. The studies that the researchers did was they had somebody do sleep tape, so they went from being a chronic mouth breather to a more normal nose breather, and it actually changed the shape of their face.

Brian
Amazing.

Ani
Yeah.

Brian
So one thing again.

Ani
If you take anything away from the podcasts, watch your mouth breathing.

Brian
Don’t breathe through your mouth, okay? Yeah. If you exhale through your mouth, sure.That’s actually some of the breath practices. It’s more the inhaling through your mouth, chronic inhaling. That’s the problem, okay?The next chapter is called nose. If you’re not breathing through your mouth, you’re breathing through your nose, sort of thing. What do they have to say about nose breathing?Well, just a really quick way of physiology here, inside of the nose, there’s these nasal turbinates that filter in warm air as they go in and out of your nose, and that doesn’t happen when you breathe through your mouth. You’re filtering out particles that you don’t want to get into your body, and you’re also warming air to get into your body as well, which means it’s less of a shock to your system that way. That’s just a normal kind of nose function.Now, the other thing is that inside of those nasal turbinates, inside of the sinuses, are sensors that have direct connections into your brainstem and into your hypothalamus. Your hypothalamus is in charge of kind of the metabolism in your body.

Brian
Like whether your metabolism gets jacked up, goes really fast, or goes really slow. The hypothalamus is reading and measuring the amounts of things like oxygen, carbon dioxide, nitric oxide that are flowing through those passages at what rate and what speed to tell the hypothalamus how much to either turn your metabolism up or down.Now, you don’t get that feedback if you breathe through your mouth, which means that your metabolism could get out of sync. You have all those problems that we had just kind of mentioned just a bit ago.

Ani
Is that why mouth breathing makes you dumber? Because you’re not getting enough information?

Brian
Well, now I guess that too. You’re not getting us information either.

Ani
Your brain’s like, well, you’re not sending me information. Well, I don’t know. We’re just going to go on vacation.

Brian
Yeah, but you have less blood flow to keep brain areas too because of these kind of changes. So you have those sensors that are hooked up there as well. So that’s really, really important.Now, one of the other really important features about nose breathing that he points out here in the book is the idea of what’s called nitric oxide. So nitric oxide is a molecule that gets released into the bloodstream when we breathe through our nose, but it does not get released when we breathe through our mouth. And you might be like, well, who cares sort of thing.Well, here’s the thing. When nitric oxide is present when we have healthy and robust amounts of nitric oxide in the body, we actually have positive, it creates a positive influence on our immune system. Our body weight, right?

Ani
Yeah, that’s another thing.

Brian
Body weight. You can actually lose weight, go to appropriate weight levels by breathing in more healthy ways, including breathing through your nose, believe it or not. Circulation, mood, even sexual function are all enhanced by having healthy levels of nitric oxide.And you also have an increase in 18% of oxygen absorption when you have nitric oxide present. So if you’re exercising, breathing through your nose, you actually absorb oxygen better. It gets absorbed into your cells more efficiently.You actually deliver oxygen better to your cells when you breathe through your nose. I know you’ve been experimenting with that when you’ve been running, right?

Ani
I have been practicing this. So you used a word. What did you say? Turbines.

Brian
Turbinance.

Ani
Turbinance. Okay. In your nose. All right, so my takeaway was your nose has muscles.I didn’t realize that. And when we first heard the don’t breathe through your mouth thing and I started shutting my mouth, I realized I can’t actually breathe through my nose all the time because it’s almost like my nose fatigues. And it was.And so one of the key places I was breathing in and out of my mouth consistently was exercising and I run. And so I’m spending the entire time running, breathing in and out of my mouth. So I tried to stop.And it was hard because my muscles weren’t used to it. My nose muscles weren’t used to it. So it was interesting, Brian, because I went through this period of time where I could do it kind of on and off and I’d go nose to mouth and nose to mouth on and off and on and off.And then one day I was running and I was really trying to focus on breathing in and out of my nose and I was starting to get a little breath hunger kind of thing going on, but it wasn’t bad.

Ani
And then it was like I went through some kind of wall in my nose where all of a sudden it opened up to be able to breathe different and better in there and I could keep going. So before I just couldn’t do it, but then eventually I could keep breathing in and out of my nose.Now I got to the place during that run where I needed to start breathing in and out of my mouth again, but now I’m to the place where I can do today I ran for 70 minutes in and out of my nose.

Brian
Oh, great.

Ani
Yeah.

Brian
Both in and out.

Ani
Yes.

Brian
Yeah, yeah.

Ani
So, so cool.

Brian
One of the breath practices you talked about in the book is actually having that transition step between breathing in through your nose and out through your mouth.

Brian
Right, right. Because then actually you still have the…

Ani
I was doing that too…

Brian
Nitric oxide. Nitric oxide still gets released when you breathe in through your nose

Ani
Right.

Brian
and then breathing out through your mouth you actually don’t blow as much nitric oxide off.

Ani
I was doing that, but I really was just trying to get nerdy. Experimental. Yeah, To see if I could get to the point where I could do it. And now it doesn’t bother me. At the end of my run, I did want to take a few breaths in and out of my mouth and I did and it was fine.But yeah, it took like going to the gym in my nose.

Brian
Yeah, exactly. And he points that out in the book as well. That there are muscles that you need to condition because they haven’t been being used if you’ve been mouth breathing.

Ani
Yeah, yeah. So very cool.

Brian
Yeah. So let’s take a breath in through our nose right now. Blow it out.Okay, on to the next one. So the next chapter was called exhale. And so I think we’ve talked about a little bit about this on some of our podcasts in the past.And this is one that I teach on most a lot of times when I’m teaching and traveling is that the single greatest predictor of lifespan is your lung capacity. What’s called your vital breath capacity. So we can all test that right now together.And what that is is you take a big deep breath in and then you extend your breath as far as you can to empty your lungs as much as possible. So let’s do that together right now. You ready?So adjust your posture so that you’re up nice and tall. That just helps with the biomechanics of breathing. Go ahead and take a breath in.Breathe way out now. Go out, out, out, out. More, more, more, more, more, more, more, more, more, more, more.

Ani
Out, out, out.

Brian
That’s your vital breath capacity. And if someone who knew what they were doing was measuring that, they could actually give you a prediction of your lifespan.

Ani
My insurance guy should do that. Because, you know, we talk about how long we’re going to live.

Brian
Exactly. Which is kind of funny because when you go to your doctor for your annual visit, they’re taking your blood cholesterol and your glucose and that kind of stuff.

Ani
Bend over and touch your toes.

Brian
Yeah. And they’re not asking, asking you to do that, which is kind of crazy because that is what the longitudinal 60 year long longitudinal Framingham Heart Study says is that that is the greatest predictor.

Ani
Not a pulmonaut. Not my doctor is not.

Brian
Not a pulmonaut. Our doctors are not pulmonauts. So the exhale is so important.Adults only use about a third of their lung capacity on a regular basis when they’re taking their daily breath. And if you don’t use your full lung capacity, it shrinks over time and it gets weaker, kind of like you were talking about with nose muscles. So one of the exercises that you could do for a breath is to actually just practice a few, several times a day those long, slow, complete exhales.Emptying everything out so that you’re literally using your muscles. You’re using your abdominal muscles to squeeze out as much air as possible. That will actually not only train your abdominal muscles, it also will train your diaphragm.Your diaphragm then has the capacity to have larger excursions to be able to have more complete and full breaths because my diaphragm is a muscle and you can condition the diaphragm.

Ani
Yeah. There’s stuff you can do with your diaphragm.

Brian
Yeah, yeah. So those long, like, slow, deep, get it all out exhales are a really important feature of breathing. Yeah. Other thoughts on exhale? Okay, cool. All right, so let’s go on to Slow now. So Slow is the name of a chapter. And this is something that I had known but had kind of drifted off of my awareness somewhere. And then when it came back, I really kind of took it up and did a lot of kind of deeper study on it. Is that breath rate, did you know, Ani, that your breathing rate, like if you’re just sitting around breathing without thinking about it, is determined by your carbon dioxide levels, not your oxygen levels.

Ani
You have been talking a lot about that. And the first time you told me that I was like, wow, you know, we always think it’s about oxygen.

Brian
Yeah, it’s actually about carbon dioxide. Now, no matter how often someone breathes, someone can breathe, and let’s say, by the way, this is someone without a chronic disease. So we’re not talking about someone with COPD or IPF or pulmonary hypertension or COVID or anything like that.We’re saying, so someone without a chronic pulmonary disease, if that person is breathing 20 times a minute or five times a minute, their blood oxygen level usually doesn’t move that much. It usually stays around 96%, 97%. And the thing is, is that when we’re breathing 20 times a minute, it’s not like you’re getting more oxygen in.You’re actually breathing a lot of oxygen back off. And so the reason we’re breathing so fast isn’t because we need oxygen. It’s because there are carbon dioxide imbalances in the system.And what the pulmonauts in this book we’re talking about is how some people are making cases that carbon dioxide is actually a more important molecule for breathing than oxygen is.

Ani
How about that

Brian
More important molecule actually for the whole body than oxygen is. And I thought it was fascinating that that was the case.

Ani
Yeah. I love it when science, like, changes like that. All of a sudden it’s like, was there all the time.

Brian
,Yeah. Wow. And so one of the reasons is that oxygen, so the way it works, we breathe in oxygen.It goes down into our lungs. It goes through the alveoli into the bloodstream. And then oxygen hops on to hemoglobin, which is circulating in our red blood cells.The red blood cells go through the body. Let’s say they go down to our leg muscles. And then they jump off of the hemoglobin and then into the cells to bring oxygen in the cells.And then the cell uses that oxygen to go through the Krebs cycle to create energy. That’s the basic idea. Here’s the thing.Oxygen will not jump off of that hemoglobin unless carbon dioxide is present. Carbon dioxide kind of pries it off of the hemoglobin.

Ani
And there’s that balance.

Ani
The yin yang is always there.

Brian
Exactly. So if you have low levels of carbon dioxide and you actually do not liberate oxygen from hemoglobin. Liberate your oxygen, people. That’s right. And then it can’t get into the cells. So really the deal is, what the pulmonauts are saying in this book is that we actually need to learn how to increase our carbon dioxide tolerance levels.

Ani
I’m working on that one a little bit.

Brian
And so the way you do that is by breathing slowly. Because rapid breathing blows off a lot of carbon dioxide. And so we blow off a lot of carbon dioxide.We actually get less oxygen absorption. And then we get dizzy and faint and confused and all those things. And a lot of the research they did in the book was they, not the book, but they were talking about, I think it was Niels Bohr, way back in the early 1900s, would do forced rapid breathing for dogs.And the dogs would become sick, confused. Sometimes they would even die, unfortunately, from actually over-breathing. They actually died from over-breathing.And when he allowed them to breathe slower or when he forced them to breathe slower, their function normalized. It’s because over-breathing breathes off so much carbon dioxide that they actually lose the ability to absorb oxygen and then they die. Right?So this idea of breathing slowly is really, really important. And so the slower we breathe, the slower we breathe, we actually increase our health performance, health and our performance and our thinking and all those other things because we actually are including more oxygen.

Brian
And again, this doesn’t necessarily work for people with COPD.For people with COPD, they actually have very high levels of carbon dioxide because of the lung function, the expansion of the lung, they’re not breathing enough of that off. So there’s a different problem there. We’re really talking about this for people with these non-chronic pulmonary diseases.Although, there is a bunch of research in here about doing these breath practices with people with chronic lung diseases that has been really successful.

Ani
Yeah, the research was astounding on that. To see the kinds of things that could change.

Brian
Yes, yeah.

Ani
Properly.

Brian
So you’ve been practicing with the slow breathing.

Ani
I have. It just reminds me of how we talk about the importance of practice because if we think we’re going to implement these things on our everyday while we’re just going about our activities, we forget because we’re focused on other things. So practices like doing your core centering practice in the morning or whatever, practicing slower breathing and then it starts to become a habituated thing.

Brian
Yeah, yeah. So let’s go into the next chapter which is called less. And so, this kind of comes right into this over breathing.Now we’re talking about less breathing. We’re not only talking about going slower through the nose working on exhale, we’re actually talking about breathing less overall. And so most people over breathe.

Ani
I couldn’t.

Ani
This was another one that I couldn’t believe. And I definitely thought I wasn’t doing and I’m definitely doing.

Brian
So have you tracked how many times a minute do you breathe on a regular basis? Have you done tracking?

Ani
No, I actually haven’t.

Brian
Yeah. So what the…

Ani
Most of my practice with all of this stuff has been through my exercise routine so that I had like a dedicated time I was focused on.

Brian
Okay.

Ani
So that I had, like a dedicated time. I was.

Brian
Oh, to focus on it. Yeah, that makes sense. So kind of the contemporary knowledge or understanding is that if you’re breathing more than 10 times a minute at rest, then you’re actually producing disease in the body.In a lot of ways what’s happening is that you’re creating… Your blood is becoming more alkaline because when we breathe too much we blow off more carbon dioxide and then our blood becomes more alkaline becomes more basic goes up like above. Now our blood is supposed to be 7.4 from pH. That’s kind of like the balancing point and our body does all it can to keep that pH regulated at 7.4 because if it goes if it varies from that even a little bit then it becomes catastrophic for the system. So the body will always do what it needs to do to balance that out. Now for over breathing then we’re blowing off too much carbon dioxide our blood becomes too alkaline and then what happens is we get what’s called renal buffering. Our renal system starts to do different things in order to try to bring the blood pH back into balance

Brian
And it does that by secreting, like, bicarbonates which then build up in the system and then have to be excreted and when these bicarbonates get excreted you end up excreting out also things like magnesium and phosphorus and potassium and you actually also end up creating bone demineralization also by doing that process.So over breathing can lead to a whole bunch of problems with nerve function muscle function and bone loss.

Ani
The breath system is connected to everything. Everything, I think, is one of my biggest takeaways here.

Brian
Biggest takeaway.

Ani
And one of the reasons why it’s connected to so many problems is connected to everything.

Brian
Yeah, so two highlights so far is that your breathing is connected to you getting up and peeing in the middle of the night which is like a whoa you can make a change there. The other thing is if you’re worried about bone loss or if you’re having a problem with nerve or muscle function.

Ani
That was a big one. I was paying attention.

Brian
Check into your breathing. I’m not saying these things are curative but you know what? They’re supportive. What if you could just take down your distress levels around your body or take away one pain medication or take away having to take magnesium at night because you’re getting muscle cramps at night sort of thing and just change it with your breath.

Ani
There’s so much awareness now around menopause and perimenopause and women’s issues which is awesome and when I read that about bone loss that’s one of the big things that people talk about that’s a problem for women in later life.

Brian
Exactly, exactly. So practice breathing less. Practice breathing less. Okay, next chapter. Do you have anything to say on less?

Brian
Less to say on less?

Ani
I will say less, and that will be more.

Brian
Okay, cool. All right, so chew. We’re not going to talk a lot about this one.

Ani
No but it was really interesting. When I saw it I was like why are we talking about chewing because we’re talking about breathing that it all made sense but basically don’t overeat soft food. The processed nature of our food is such a problem.

Brian
Yeah.

Ani
Such a problem.

Brian
Yeah. It’s kind of like a double whammy. Basically, when man discovered fire and we started cooking our food.

Ani
Yeah.

Brian
what meant that two things happened.

Brian
Number one we could actually extract more nutrients from the food which made our brains bigger and as our brains get bigger our sinuses get smaller. So if you look at other primates humans have the smallest sinuses of any of the primates because our brains are bigger so it’s taking up more room in our skull but when our sinuses get smaller then we have all these kinds of problems and then we start mouth breathing and then all these other issues happen. Right. So it’s pretty fascinating. So most of our foods are processed and they’re soft which means that we get very weak chewing systems and when you have stronger like the masseter muscle the temporalis muscle when those muscles get stronger it actually causes your jaw to widen which gives you more room in your sinuses.

Ani
He said something in this chapter about mewing, which I meant to look up because I don’t completely remember what that is, but I do remember it’s something teenagers talk about.

Brian
Oh, right.

Ani
Yeah. I was like, I’ve heard that word go through my household.

Brian
Yeah. I don’t remember off the top of my head.

Ani
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I still have to look it up.

Brian
So that’s what’s on chewing. Okay. And then there’s part three of the book. He has a couple other ideas and one of the chapters is called More on Occasion.More on Occasion. So this is where he taps into things like tumo breathing and holotropic breath work and those kinds of things which we’ve talked about a little bit on the podcast and said be careful doing these things. But there is value in doing these things for a couple primary reasons.Number one I know a lot of people in trauma recovery areas have been using these practices and the reason is is because when you do hyperventilation for a prescribed amount of time a couple of key things happen. Well, of course what happens is you blow off a lot of carbon dioxide. You get less oxygen absorption to specific areas of the brain.So you actually lose blood flow into parts of the hippocampus some of the limbic system some of the frontal lobe and when you specifically what hyperventilation does you lose blood flow to those parts of the brain and that can result in things like hallucinations and out of body experiences which is similar to what happens when people use plant medicine.

Brian
Right?

Ani
Yeah.

Brian
So for sure. Yeah. So holotropic breath work can be. Have similar effects to using plant medicine, which gives you a sense of distance or can change your relationship with your trauma story and those sorts of things. So it’s becoming popular in those types of segments.

Ani
So maybe do it with a very qualified practitioner.

Brian
Yes, yeah. And for a prescribed amount of times.

Ani
Right.

Brian
And. And there actually is a specific way to do it with hyperventilation followed by breath holding in different areas. So he talks about it in the book, but it’s. So there is value. There is value to it, and there is science behind it. But he also goes on to say how you really need to be careful doing it. So again, make sure you’re not doing it near water. Make sure you’re not doing while you’re driving, make sure you do it while you’re lying down, because there’s, you know, you could pass out, all kinds of things kind of happen. So you have to be kind of careful doing it, but there is value in potentially doing it. Right. One of the other interesting values in doing it is that a lot of the reason why people do breath work is when they’re feeling stressed. So stress is again, a sympathetic nervous system kind of amplification, and that slow breathing slows the autonomic nervous system down. Now, with, with tumor breathing or holochuff breath, or cyclical hyperventilation, what you’re doing is you’re consciously creating a stress state. You’re consciously creating a state of sympathetic nervous system arousal so that you can learn to slow it down.

Brian
So in that way, it’s kind of like going to the gym for your nervous system. So I just. That’s a. There’s another potentially valuable way to do that, but you just want to enter into it with caution. So it says more on occasion. More on occasion, yeah. Okay, what else we got. Hold it. Is another. Was another chapter. And so this way is a way that we practice increasing our CO2 tolerance. Now, the important thing about this is that, you know, CO2, like very, very, very high levels of CO2 are linked to things like anxiety and panic. And so for people who have anxiety and panic disorders actually have a very low tolerance for elevated levels of CO2. So this practice of holding your breath, and so I’ve been doing this for a long time, breath holding practices, especially with my core centering practices I do. Is the idea is that if you can widen your window of tolerance with breath holding, it means that you actually start to expand your capacity for elevated levels of CO2, and that has positive implications for anxiety. So if people who are anxious have a hard time holding their breath because they have higher sensitivity to elevating levels of CO2, if they can increase their sensitivity, if they can decrease their sensitivity to high levels of CO2, in other words, increase their tolerance for CO2 levels, it actually can help their anxiety issues.

Ani
Yeah, this really came up for me as I was starting to look at some of these breath practices and deal with and. And feel the sensory aspect of the breath hunger. And I love how the widening your window of tolerance is. Yeah, it has so many implications to, like, daily living.

Brian
Yeah, yeah. So that’s the breath holding lecture. One more, one more chapter was called Fast, Slow or not at All. And so it’s kind of a summary chapter where he’s talking about really, you know, any, any conscious breath practices can have beneficial effects. Anytime we’re unhooking the unconscious automatic breathing process and taking under conscious control and doing something intentionally with it can have benefits. So it can be faster, slower, not at all. Sometimes any things we talked about, they can all really be valuable in a lot of way. The other thing he points out in here is that breathing is energy, breathing is qi, breathing is prana. Right. So qi from the traditional Chinese medicine vernacular for breath and energy, prana from the yogic philosophies for breath and energy. So lots of cultures recognize that breath and energy have the. They’re synonymous. They are the same thing. And so any conscious breathing is doing conscious energy work. So just holding your breath intentionally, you’re doing conscious energy work. Just slowing down your breath consciously is doing conscious energy work. And so it’s a really easy way to start accessing the energy systems to do energy work intentfully.

Ani
Yeah, I love the ability to do conscious energy work, like on the regular, like energy work 10 years ago or maybe for some people now. Seems like something you go and you have somebody hover their hands over you, and that’s energy work. Like so much of the. So many of the practices are just everyday energy work.

Brian
Yeah, right.

Ani
So much.

Brian
We can do very, very practical energy work to get started. Like, if you’re thinking about, well, how do we even get started with doing these breath practices? Like, what’s the big takeaway from this book other than what we talked about with the mouth? Breathing is. Breathing slow less and through your nose is a great place to start. Breathing slow less and through your nose is the best place to start. Other than that, go carefully and consistently with whatever breath practices you have. One other thing I liked about the book is there’s an index chapter of all the breath practices really appreciate covered in the book. And I thought that was a really great synopsis or summary of it.

Ani
I was. I didn’t look ahead and so I found that at the end and it just felt like a gift. Yeah, I was like, oh my gosh, that’s so great that I did that work for the reader.

Brian
Yes.

Ani
So our book report was focused mainly on, you know, the bottom line and the science behind things. The book has fantastic stories. So if you were interested in the topic, grab the book because the stories are great and a lot of the stories are because he was experimenting with all this along the way. And so it’s just. It really is like reading a fantastic storybook.

Brian
Yeah. Yeah. Highly recommended. So you can start right now from this podcast. Get in there, breathe slow, less and through your nose, pick up the book, enjoy, and we’ll look forward to seeing you next week on the podcast.

Ani
Bye for now.

Brian
Thank you for listening to this episode. We hope that this conversation will help you improve your practice and change the way you think about your work, your clients and yourself.

Ani
Continue your exploration of trauma sensitive somatic coaching by listening to more podcast episodes@somaticcoachingacademy.com you could be the trusted guide that people turn to to help them with their most challenging situations and to reach their most precious goals. Thank you for joining us.

Brian
We’ll see you next time.