Unarmored Talk

Are YOU Breathing in the RED ZONE or the GREEN ZONE? | PTSD, Stress & Healing

• Mario P. Fields - Sergeant Major (Ret.) • Episode 145

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✨ What if the number of breaths you take per minute could reveal your true path to healing?

🩺 Trauma expert Dr. David Rubenstein shares insights from over 22,000 measurements, showing that 19+ breaths per minute almost always signal PTSD, while 7 or fewer indicate optimal recovery.

His color-coded “red to green” framework provides an objective, unalterable way to track progress. For 🎖️ veterans, military conditioning complicates recovery—but healing becomes possible when reframed as a mission for someone they ❤️ love.

🎧 This is the third episode in our six-part series on trauma and healing—be sure to check out the first two episodes if you haven’t already.

Watch: https://youtu.be/YcnlJrfBKJw

Dr. Rubenstein's Link:
https://totalreliefmethod.com/how-it-works/

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Mario P. Fields:

Welcome back to Unarmored Talk Podcast. Thank you so much for listening and watching each episode and continue, please, to share with your friends and family members and colleagues, and don't forget to leave a rating or review if you feel this is an awesome show. And you can connect to all of my social media on the parade deck. Just look in the show notes media on the parade deck just looking to show notes. Or you can put in the search engine Mario P Fields parade deck and get all access to my social media. Well, let's get ready to interview another guest who is willing to remove their armor to help other people.

Mario P. Fields:

Respiratory rate you guys know the last episode. If you haven't watched episode one, shame on you. Go back and watch episode one, episode two. We ended with what I just started with the respiratory rate and how that impacts total method of healing PTSD, chronic pain and more. Welcome to the Unarmored Talk podcast. I'm your host, mario P Fields, and if this is your first time listening to the show, thank you, welcome. If you've been with me for quite some time again, I always appreciate your loyalty and support. And, as a reminder, if you have not watched episode one or two, get on that YouTube channel. Check them out. They're about 19, 20 minutes. I wouldn't say long, I'd say short because we need more time, but we're jumping right into it. We ended the last episode with breathing and how breathing can reduce stress, ptsd, chronic pain. Maybe make Mario grow taller than five foot two and a half. Let's jump into it, david.

Mario P. Fields:

What about this breathing component it david.

Dr. David Rubenstein:

What about this breathing component? So, um, the respiratory rate. Breathing for human beings is the most fundamental action of their whole lives, bar none. There isn't anything more rudimentary, there isn't anything more, uh, important. Um, as it turns out, there isn't anything more important. As it turns out, there isn't anything more predictive. So your respiratory rate is the number of breaths you take in and out per minute.

Dr. David Rubenstein:

And before we started recording Mario, we started talking about how you can't actually take somebody's respiratory rate while they're aware that you're taking their respiratory rate, because their brain will change it. It'll go higher, it'll go lower. So when I am taking the respiratory rate of a new patient, I tell them this I'm going to do some paperwork while you just rest and get ready for our session. While you just rest and get ready for our session, go ahead and just lie there and I'll be with you in two and a half minutes. While I finish my paperwork and secretly, I'm using a timer I wait for two minutes that's the standard and then I take the respiratory rate. Then you get an authentic rate. But if you get anybody that has any awareness that it's a false rate, you can't even take it. It'll be way faster or usually way slower than what's actual for that person.

Mario P. Fields:

That makes all the sense in the world. Every time I go to the hospital or any medical facility and they go. I'm about to check your heart rate. It goes up. I'm about to check your heart rate. It goes up. Or you just help me, even when I'm facilitating, you know, united States Department of Labor employment workshops for transitioning service members. Before we do an assessment, one of the workshops, I go, the assessment you're about to do that Dr Holland-Rice had coached it's going to. And the moment I say that everyone changes. Dave, you just helped me change the way I even do things. But so interesting.

Dr. David Rubenstein:

So there's this phenomenon called white coat high blood pressure, and it happens every day in all the hospitals across the world where people get intimidated or excited and stressed about seeing a doctor in a white coat, which are slowly but surely they're getting rid of them partially because of this. But just seeing the person man or woman, doctor with a white coat on is intimidating and your blood pressure will usually go up because it's a little intimidating for folks. But back to respiratory rate. So I didn't go looking and assuming that respiratory rate was going to be significant in working with the vets and civilians for PTSD. What happened was I had a team of around 20 people and we went into several inpatient and outpatient environments for addiction, not to mention the our home facility where we were taking measurements of, you know, dozens of people every single day as they went through.

Dr. David Rubenstein:

And after about two and a half years of taking this information in, I sat down with the information in my laptop for a little while and I started to see that this huge amount of data 22,000 measurements started to populate itself into columns and I thought that's kind of curious and when that happens in science and it just happens organically like that, that's something that should really catch your attention.

Dr. David Rubenstein:

And it turns out that not only does the respiratory rate predict things like sleep, how well you sleep, how much of a reaction to a given stress thing that happens in your life, how much of a stress reaction you have, so a stress reaction that's above normal. We would call high stress reactivity above normal what we would call high stress reactivity. So it also predicts your brain dominance. Brain dominance is are you using your high brain or your low brain? Your low brain is what dominates the PTSD environment. It predicts things with jaw problems Like who, who saw that one coming? Focus and concentration that's one of my favorite topics to speak on and and and about 20 other things that are all issues that people that are facing PTSD are looking at.

Dr. David Rubenstein:

Hmm dsd are looking at. And so then, after, after, it divided itself into four columns. I call it the red column. If you're in the red column, you're pretty much happy dsd. Um, then there's a yellow, then there's a blue and then a green, in a progression of improvement. So obviously you want to go from the red to the green right. But right in the middle of this chart that was organically produced, something amazing happened, and when I mean I mean the geographical middle of this chart. What happened was it created a dividing line.

Dr. David Rubenstein:

Either you were healing at an acceptable rate or you were not healing at an acceptable rate. You know, if you're going to let's say, excuse me, let's say you're in therapy and you're in therapy for three years and you're still working on your PTSD, that's not a good sign of healing. Well, it's just taking too much time. Um, whereas when you're healing rapidly and you look at the respiratory rate, the respiratory rate's always very low. Uh, believe it or not, many people who are in this green level here's the things that they have that people in the red don't they have high rates of healing, they have very low reactivity to stress, they sleep like a baby every single night, and even when they don't sleep well, they're not affected. They don't sleep well, they're not affected. You know how many people, if they have a bad night of sleep, you know their whole day is bad or the whole week is bad. And my favorite is the focus and concentration. The focus and concentration is my favorite because it tells you what's happening in the brain itself.

Mario P. Fields:

I would have never, you know. Know, you've mentioned some interesting things. One, I love how david, how you mentioned you weren't even looking for this, like you said in science, you're going what's that? Well, okay, team of 20, what? What is this? We're not even looking. What is it telling us? And then, two, how you were able to take those analytics and put them into four quadrants, four columns, and connect that to some scientific trends, if I may ask. So in that first column, the red, because let's be real, unless you're wearing some dress, blues with a red stripe, if you will what rate, what respiratory rate have you seen consistent with folks in the red? And PTSD and chronic stress and pain and all of that.

Dr. David Rubenstein:

Very simple 19. If you're breathing 19 or above per minute, okay, and it's not like you can go, okay, I'm gonna measure my breathing, I'm gonna put my phone next to me and I'm gonna just breathe and see what my is not going to work, unless you have the unusual ability to put that aside. You know how you going to change your breathing, but you've got to be able to breathe how you normally breathe when you're not being observed.

Mario P. Fields:

Wow, so so if your respiratory rate is 19 and above per minute yes, that's red. And then the lower your rate is, the more healthier and more positive trends for you, yes, so what's that next column? Is that the yellow?

Dr. David Rubenstein:

Yeah, the yellow would be 11 to 18 breaths per minute. That puts you in the yellow. And let me just say one thing about the red. If you're in the red, I would say there's a 99% chance you have PTSD, whether civilian or military forms, and they're not the same. But if you're in the red, you pretty much have PTSD, because this mechanism of breathing in the brain and what's happening in our mind and all this it's all interconnected, as everyone knows. Our mind and all this, it's all interconnected, as everyone knows. And so the you want to go from the red to the green, obviously, and knowing these numbers helps us to be able to objectively look at a person's situation and we can go. Oh well, your, your respiratory rate's now 10. That means you're in the blue. Congratulations, there's no PTSD in the blue. Okay, there's just not there.

Mario P. Fields:

And you know what's funny? It's not funny, but it's interesting is, and you've heard me and other folks have heard me I'm on the backside of major depressive disorder. You know, I am no more medication, I am past. I won't say beat it, I'm no longer, no longer ill. But I've noticed my rate, my respiratory rate. From my, my watch, I'm below 19. And when I didn't correlate until I met you and we're doing these wonderful episodes is why do I feel so much better? I'm more resilient, and I was thinking of oh, it's because of many things, but not my rate.

Dr. David Rubenstein:

Yeah, who? Who would have made this correlation? By the way, I have to full disclosure to our audience, mario. Um, I don't know why I I it might be because of a head injury I had when I was a child, but I do almost everything completely backwards. Um, when I write an article, for example, when I'm done and I think, hey, okay, that's a good article, all I got to do is reverse the order of the paragraphs and it'll make sense to everybody else. I've been doing this for the same way for 35 years.

Dr. David Rubenstein:

So, and one of the reasons why I'm saying that is that you know what you were saying about intention. I didn't have an intention to create this chart that it's an amazing piece of technology because it makes makes very, very something very complicated and makes it very simple. You know, you can have a third grade education and look at this chart and go. I know exactly what it means, I know exactly what it's saying to me and I know exactly what to do now and our breathing technologies that we've developed are different, because I concluded a long time ago, with great general acceptance by both scientists and regular people every day, that stress, particularly chronic stress, is what causes almost all of our ills.

Mario P. Fields:

Is that why, David, I've heard people say the cliche of stress kills.

Dr. David Rubenstein:

Yes, yes, there's four kinds of stresses. One of them is called background stress kinds of stresses. One of them is called background stress and, mario, this is the one that kills people. It works like this Every time that something stressful happens in your life, a little piece of that goes into like a backpack that you carry around 24-7. It's there when you sleep and that little nugget of stress, you keep adding more and more nuggets of negative stress into that background we call background stress, and what happens is that it just simply overwhelms all your biological systems, all your biological systems. Nutrition is something that I have a great interest in, but I have a very good question for nutritionists and it's a bit of a trick question.

Dr. David Rubenstein:

The question is when you give a nutrition program to someone, are you counting their chronic stress, because the nutritional requirements of a human being that is chronically stressed and one that is not chronically stressed are entirely different and nobody's counting that in the science of nutrition, which is a very, very difficult and complicated science. We're only now just starting to make headway with nutrition as a real bona fide science. So it's the stress, it's like. You know, in politics it's the money. Dummy. Know, in politics it's the money. You know what I mean. And with human beings' health and well-being, it's our stress and to the degree that you have resources to overcome that, chronic stress is very predictive of the quality and longevity of one's life.

Mario P. Fields:

And depending on the, how much you know, like you said, the four components in that one is that background, stress and and and even you know, even the way you correlated the nutritionist and I've watched my myself and my wife kind of say we want to get healthier. You know we're, we're getting I don't say older anymore, david, I say we're seasoned. But even my wife, I've never heard her come home and say, you know, I talked to the nutritionist, even myself, and they said well, first, mario, let's take a deep dive, if you will. And what's your environment, before we even get to the caloric intake and the type, how is your daily living? What's stressful to you? Let's take an inventory of things that may be good stress, bad stress, what is it? And what's the background? What's another stressor? Dave, you talked about that background. What's another one?

Dr. David Rubenstein:

Well, before I tell you another one, I just had this thought it's a thought for our military brothers and sisters, thought it's a brain on thought for our military brothers and sisters. Um, what the military teaches you how to do, and to do well, is to offset the momentary stress. Muscle memory intervene where the normal human reaction would be to do something else. In your training you are trained to do something very specific under a stressful situation. People think they take that as that it erases the stress. It does not.

Dr. David Rubenstein:

I'm guilty of that, guilty of one of the components of military Training and military Version of PTSD that is not found in the civilian, because civilians don't have those types of training. So what happens is that build-up in the background stress grows more rapidly and more voraciously in the minds and bodies and souls of the military as opposed to civilian. Wow, it's one of the markers that makes it different, because you're not allowed to have, it's not efficient to have, it's a bad idea to have normal reactions in military environments.

Mario P. Fields:

Interesting, interesting. And now, as you have really since 1994 and you continue to refine this total method of healing and especially for these episodes as it pertains to veterans PTSD, chronic pain and more have you seen it more challenging to deal with your veteran patients, when it comes to what you just mentioned, as compared to your civilian patients?

Dr. David Rubenstein:

Yes, and you'd think it's because of the intensity of the ptsd. That's not the problem at all. That is not the problem, and that's always a shock to them. Um, it's in the motivation to heal. What happens with our military brothers and sisters is that they, as a general rule, cannot find internal motivation to heal from this devastating problem. They may and I say may find the motivation to do it for their wife or to do it for children, or it has to have a mission that's not direct about that person powerful and I I 100 can relate where, when I first got out, you're right, you're accurate.

Mario P. Fields:

And I want to say right is if I could find someone or something to latch on to make me change in a better way or heal. That was the motivational factor Until recently, when I changed that mindset. You've helped me and other folks where I'm going. No, the motivation is for you to get you better and it's you that needs to motivate yourself. And I have so many veteran colleagues and counterparts that I can name them today where, when they lose that thing for themselves to heal, they just sink into deep depression. Wow.

Dr. David Rubenstein:

They won't take steps for themselves on behalf of themselves. I believe that this is a part of the in-service context You're in service to the country, to your platoon, to your division, to whatever, but there's no military person out there. That your division to whatever, but there's just there's no military person out there in service to themselves. No, that's, that's an oxymoron.

Mario P. Fields:

You wouldn't survive.

Dr. David Rubenstein:

So, um, there's these little hidden things that, um, the public needs to become aware of. So, if you're somebody suffering from PTSD and you're ex-military, you need to find the person you love the most, who's impacted the most by your PTSD, and say for them I will heal. Now you have a mission, that's an in-service mission, and you will do very well with that.

Mario P. Fields:

Man, I can't wait to fly out to California. Your money is no good around me, david. Your money is no good Now. Everyone. We talked about the rate, the respiratory rate of breathing. David, before I do, everyone's going to be mad at me. What was green? If you're in the green, what was that sweet spot? That rate, that respiratory rate Seven or below, seven or below Breaths per minute. Everyone, I want to do it. I want to end it.

Mario P. Fields:

Next episode we're going to get into the details on the how. How's that diaphragm from David's expertise going? How does he help clients around the world, veterans and more, and I know y'all mad at me, but I don't care. More to come, david, I love you like a brother man. You too, mario, you are my brother. Yes, I am Well, everyone. You guys know the deal. Stay in touch. Watch episode one, two and, of course, this one, and then four will come out soon, but until then, I will continue to intentionally pray for you to listen to viewers, your family, friends and any living being around you. David, have a wonderful day. Thank you, Mario, you too. Thank you for listening to this most recent episode and remember you can listen and watch all of the previous episodes on my YouTube channel. Listen and watch all of the previous episodes on my YouTube channel. The best way to connect to me and all of my social media is follow me on the parade deck. That is wwwparadecom, or you can click on the link in the show notes. I'll see you guys soon.

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