Episode 61 - Essential 8 Series (Part 3)
Breath can be used as a powerful proactive and reactive regulation tool. Your respiratory system (aka breath) is one of the most powerful physiological levers you can pull to shift the state of your nervous system. Did you know that every time you inhale your heart rate speeds up, and every time you exhale it slows down? Let's say you extend your exhale out longer than your inhale — well now your heat rate slowed down longer than it sped up. This sends an immediate message to and through your nervous system to activate your relaxation response.
You can also use breath to activate your system when you're in a state of Shut Down or want to practice increasing your stress threshold.
Ideally you want your natural breath throughout the day to steady, diaphragmatic breaths, in and out your nose. This is how we're evolutionarily supposed to breath. But it's estimated that at least 50% of the adult population has some kind of breathing inefficiency. Maybe that's mouth breathing during the day and/or night, short shallow breathing, imbalanced breathing, and so on. Let's change that!
📓 Download your Breath Workbook! - CLICK HERE
So here’s the 3 takeaways:
Looking for more personalized support?
Website: https://www.riseaswe.com/podcast
Email: amanda@riseaswe.com
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/amandaontherise/
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@amandaontherise
Episode 61 - Essential 8 Series (Part 3)
Breath can be used as a powerful proactive and reactive regulation tool. Your respiratory system (aka breath) is one of the most powerful physiological levers you can pull to shift the state of your nervous system. Did you know that every time you inhale your heart rate speeds up, and every time you exhale it slows down? Let's say you extend your exhale out longer than your inhale — well now your heat rate slowed down longer than it sped up. This sends an immediate message to and through your nervous system to activate your relaxation response.
You can also use breath to activate your system when you're in a state of Shut Down or want to practice increasing your stress threshold.
Ideally you want your natural breath throughout the day to steady, diaphragmatic breaths, in and out your nose. This is how we're evolutionarily supposed to breath. But it's estimated that at least 50% of the adult population has some kind of breathing inefficiency. Maybe that's mouth breathing during the day and/or night, short shallow breathing, imbalanced breathing, and so on. Let's change that!
📓 Download your Breath Workbook! - CLICK HERE
So here’s the 3 takeaways:
Looking for more personalized support?
Website: https://www.riseaswe.com/podcast
Email: amanda@riseaswe.com
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/amandaontherise/
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@amandaontherise
0:00
Welcome to regulate, and rewire and anxiety and depression podcast where we discuss the things I wish someone would have taught me earlier in my healing journey. I'm your host, Amanda Armstrong. And I'll be sharing my steps, my missteps, client experiences and tangible research based tools to help you regulate your nervous system, rewire your mind and reclaim your life. Thanks for being here. Now let's dive in.
0:27
Hello, hello, welcome back. I am so excited for today's conversation all about breath, I could nerd out about all things breathing, physiology, mental health, how I'm still recovering mouth breathing are so much more I also know that not all of you listening are going to feel as enthusiastically about breath mechanics and its impact on our nervous system. That's okay, my hope is still that by the end of today's conversation, that each of you listening will learn something that does interest you enough to start paying a bit more attention to this part of your physiology. Now, to give you a bit of a preview for today's conversation, well, and also probably to give me a little bit of a outline to follow. So I don't take you down completely unnecessary rabbit holes on the balance between co2 and co2 in our breath and how that engages with our functioning. Some of you may be really interested in that we're not going to go that deep in today's conversation, I want to keep it a very functional, anatomical physiological conversation to give you just enough, again, just enough understanding of how your body works to start working with it. But what we're going to go through in today's conversation is number one, I want to invite you here now together, you've hit play on this, let's do a little bit of experiential reflection and observation on your breath. And then I want to help give you context to what it is that you notice with basic overview of anatomy and the physiology of breath. What is functional versus your optimized for, you know, sub optimal breathing patterns. And then talking about why breathing matters and how you can use breath work, or awareness of breath, proactively and reactively to help regulate your nervous system as well as to help manage nervous system states when you're feeling really activated or shut down when you're experiencing symptoms that we often associate with anxiety and depression.
2:25
Now, quick side note, if you are joining for the first time, or if it's been a few weeks, since you jumped in today is part three of an eight ish part series on what we call the essential eight at Rise As We and I say eight ish because well there are eight episodes in the formal series, one for each of these research supported habits that heal. There was an episode before the series that gave some context on behavior change and how to listen through each of these episodes. And then I am certain there will be one or two episodes following that help you really put together the pieces of the essentially, what does it mean? What is the term regulated living that I use so often even mean? How do you put together your own regulated life where to start with each of these essential eight habits.
3:13
But before we dive in to the teaching, and the conversations around breath, I really want to invite you into just a moment or two of observation and reflection. So if you're in a place where it's safe, or makes sense to do so, I invite you to pause for just a moment to notice your breath. And when I asked you to notice your breath, where and how do you notice your breath? Do you notice it? On the inhale? Is it in through your nose or your mouth? Do you notice it in the rise and fall of your shoulders or your chest or your belly so just noticing your breath as it is right now and then taking a moment to reflect on Do you know how you usually breathe? Is it in and out your nose? Is it usually in and out your mouth? Do you know if you breathe differently at night versus during the day? We have a lot of clients who breathe one way during the day maybe it's you know shallow chest breaths or nasal breathing and then at night they know that they mouth breathe most of the night. When you exercise do you do most of the workout or if you go for a walk or run are you doing most of it nasal breathing or you switching to mouth breathing pretty quick pretty early on in a workout and we're not judging anything that you're you're reflecting on or noticing you're just So we're we're data gathering right now. And some of you, I'm very aware that some of you are like, Amanda, I don't know, I don't know how we breathe. I've never paid attention while I work out or while asleep or while I'm just going through my day. And so I want to offer you to maybe the next few days to pay attention with the context of what you're going to learn today. What is there to notice.
5:27
Now, together, I want to invite you to take a deep breath. So whatever a deep breath means to you. Take a deep breath in and out. Taking a few more noticing as you inhale, what expands do your shoulders lift as your chest expand as your belly expand? And as you exhale? And also, when you go to take a deep breath, how does it feel? Does it feel easy and expansive? To take a deep breath? Does it feel tight and restrictive when you try to take that breath? Do deep breaths feel relaxing and soothing for your system? Or do they feel really activating your agitating. Again, there's no right or wrong here, just taking a moment to pause to notice to be in conversation with your body for a moment. All right, we will come back to expanding on some of the things that you might have noticed in today's conversation.
6:44
But I want to start this chat by talking about some basic anatomy and physiology of breath. So when it comes to how breath moves through our body, we take a breath in and we either take a breath in through our nose or through our mouth, and then it travels through our windpipe and there are various different structures, your larynx, your pharynx your trachea, we are going to just call them your windpipe. So you breathe in. It travels down, it fills up your lungs. Now the main driver of your breath is actually a dome shaped muscle called your diaphragm. And so if you were a visual learner, right now, I want to invite you to take your hand and make a cupping shape like you're trying to hold water in your hand and then flip it upside down so your knuckles are on the top. Then take your thumb and place it at the bottom of your ribcage. And that's about where your diaphragm is inside your body. Now, as you inhale, I want you to flatten your hand, extend your hand. And as you exhale, re dome your hand. So as you inhale, your hand goes flat. And as you exhale, your hand re domes and this is what your diaphragm this is what this muscle does inside your body. We inhale your lungs expand your diaphragm flattens that kind of pushes on the organs of your stomach. So when somebody says, you know, do a belly breath, I think we logically know we're not really breathing into our belly. But when we take a deeper, bigger, more expansive breath, when we fill our lungs up, it pushes your diaphragm flat, causing your belly to expand more as your lungs expand more. And then as you exhale, your belly lowers the air comes out your lungs. And another part of your anatomy that actually also plays a role in functional breathing is your pelvic floor.
8:40
So experiment with me one more time where squeeze your butt cheeks and pull up your pelvic floor maybe like you're trying to stop yourself from peeing and hold that clench and try to take a deep breath. What you likely experience was that it felt harder or more restrictive to take that deep breath. What were like and I could, that's another rabbit hole we could go down is like pelvic floor function and your breath. The reason I point that out today is because what we often also see is that individuals struggling with anxiety or chronic stress have a hypertonic actually a pelvic floor that's too tight. And so knowing that pelvic floor physical therapy is not just important for postpartum women, but it can also play a role in improper breath mechanics to help create a more regulated and functional system as a whole.
9:32
So an optimal breath for simplicity's sake. So optimal functional breathing is when we have nasal inhalations and exhalations we breathe in and out our nose. And we see that rise and fall of our belly. These are deep, slow, diaphragmatic breaths the way that you would witness a baby breathe. So if you lay a baby on their back and you watch them breathe, they're breathing in and out their nose and their belly rises and falls. And yet what we see is that over 50% of an adult population has dysfunctional breathing patterns. And one of the common contributing factors to that is chronic stress. So what I want to help you understand next is that our nervous system state impacts the way that we breathe. And the way that we breathe impacts our nervous system state the way that we breathe intentionally or unintentionally.
10:23
So let's first talk about how the state of our nervous system impacts our breath. When your sympathetic nervous system state is activated, this is your fight or flight response, what we see is that there's a change, there's an automatic change in the way that we breathe, our breath becomes more short and shallow, this keeps our system activated so that we can be alert and queued in to handle the stress or avoid the danger. And when the stressor passes, or the danger is over, and our nervous system shifts back into a parasympathetic state or our rest and digest state, we see that breath changes as well breath deepens, it slows, and none of that is anything that we consciously choose. Breath is part of something called our autonomic nervous system. This is the part of your nervous system that controls your body's automatic functions, things like heart rate, respiration, blood pressure visual system. And as you'll hopefully come to see why breath is such a powerful tool is because it is part of that autonomic system, that happens automatically. And we can have conscious control over it.
11:36
So the state of your nervous system impacts the way that you breathe. So for whatever reason, your stress response is activated. Often because of past trauma, or just chronic living conditions. In a modern fast paced society. What can happen is that you can create a habitual breathing pattern that is short and shallow. And so the same way that that state changes the way that you breathe. And if we really don't exit our body's fight or flight response, that can become a habitual breathing pattern that then perpetuates this stress response. Because when you have short, shallow breathing, your vagus nerve is not being activated. And next week's episode is all about vagal toning. So if you aren't familiar with your vagus nerve yet, you will be next week. And what you'll hear me say next week is that we improve our vagal tone. So high vagal tone, good, low vagal tone, not so great, kind of like high muscle tone, more functional, lower muscle tone, less functional, we improve our vagal tone by activating our vagus nerve, frequently and over time. So if your default breathing pattern is short, shallow chest breath, and that's what maybe you noticed when we observed it together, or maybe you're gonna go this week and start paying attention to your breath. You are missing out on hundreds and 1000s and 10s of 1000s, hundreds of 1000s over time, moments to activate and stimulate your vagus nerve, which is going to decrease vagal tone over time, which we know has a direct correlation with mental health struggles, emotional reactivity, stress, resiliency, or lack thereof.
13:21
So the state of your nervous system changes the way that you breathe. And that matters because when we don't take deep, slow, diaphragmatic functional breaths, we are not in fully engaging our parasympathetic nervous system, we are also not engaging our vagus nerve, which has its own ripple effects. When you fully understand breath, you come to see that breath optimization is a major hinge habit similar to sleep in our overall mental and physical well being. So looking at it in the reverse direction, the way that we breathe can also influence and impact our state and I wasn't going to talk about reactive breathwork practices until later in the conversation. But we're here let's go here. If you are feeling really calm, and you start to hyperventilate, you're not going to keep feeling calm, that is going to increase your heart rate that is going to judge your nervous system that is going to activate your sympathetic response. Similarly, if you are in a sympathetic response, you can intentionally slow down your breathing, engage in some extended exhale breaths to help you be more parasympathetic to engage that rest and digest nervous system state more consciously. One thing that could be helpful to know is that every time you inhale, your heart rate speeds up just a little bit and every time you exhale, your heart rate slows goes down just a little bit. So when you extend your exhale longer than your inhale, what's happening is your heart rate is slower for a little longer than it was faster. And this automatically engages your relaxation response, this automatically puts you into a more parasympathetic state.
15:17
Now, I think there's probably two categories of you, well, three categories. Some of you are just listening and listening, and you're taking it in, there is another group of you probably listening who's like, awesome. So if I'm starting to feel stressed or anxious, if I just extend my exhale, I'm going to feel more calm. There's another group of you who are like Amanda, I've tried that, and it made me more anxious. So before I talk about how we can more productively use our breath to positively shift our state. Let's talk about where it can go wrong. Because an extended exhale, breath, if you are on the verge of a panic attack, or highly activated, could absolutely reinforce to your system that it needs to stay activated, there can be backlash. So let's say for example, you are highly activated your mid panic attack, you're maybe on the verge of a panic attack, and you try to take an extended exhale.
16:17
What is going to happen when you extend your exhale is that your relaxation response will be engaged. And if your nervous system is highly activated, if it feels like it needs to be activated to keep you safer to handle a situation, it will see what you're doing with that extended exhale is your basically strong arming your physiology to change, it's going to take the engagement of your relaxation response as a threat. It's like you don't understand we have to be here to handle this to do this now. And so when it comes to reactive regulation, the rule of thumb is you have to meet your nervous system where it's at. For me personally, if I can catch activation, stress, agitation, early, a breath practice like an extended exhale, a physiological sigh, which is a double inhale with an extended exhale. Those can be really, really powerful tools that helped me take that agitation or that stress at a lower level, I noticed that my shoulders fall away from my ears, my whole system settles, I can think more clearly, I'm more present with my tasks or more patient with my kids. And the difference is, that tool met the intensity of the activation of my system. If I were to be at the edge of a panic attack, or explosively angry, and I were to try to take a deep breath or an extended exhale, it is likely that my system will reject that.
18:02
And to illustrate this, what I want to offer is what it might look like to reverse or recover from a panic attack using exclusively breathwork tools. Now, I will caveat this with I myself would never reset from a panic attack using just breathwork tools, I would also engage in probably movement and discharging some swaying or shaking or heel drops. But if I were I want you to hear what this might look like. To better understand what I mean when I say you need to meet your nervous system where it's at. Because breathwork isn't just about taking deep breaths. There are hundreds of different breathwork techniques which can induce a variety of different physiological responses in our body. What I will warn you with this demonstration is that I am going to make the sound I'm going to demonstrate hyperventilating and so if you feel like that could overload your system, go ahead and just fast forward a couple minutes till we get to the description.
19:08
So let's say I am having a panic attack what is likely happening just automatically is mouth breathing. Because mouth breathing happens when we are in a really really heightened state. We'll talk more about mouth breathing in a minute. And it's going to be fast and shallow. So if I'm at the peak of panic, it's and that's happening, just unintentionally. So what I would do and have done to help me navigate panic attacks, is I just start to bring awareness and intention. So instead of letting my body just breathe like that out of panic, I start to breathe like that out of purpose. And then either as my sensation as I have that awareness maybe I'm also engaging in some color spotting. Like I said, I would rarely just do it through breath. I will start to interact intentionally slow down, I'll let myself stay with mouth breathing. What works for me sometimes is to shift to a physiological side that sounds like it's a double nasal inhale with an exhale out your mouth. If you have young kids, you know, this is going to be a familiar sound to you, when they're really upset and they're settling down. What do you hear it's a this is a natural way our body tries to recalibrate. So I may go from hyperventilating to slightly slower, to a physiological sigh, to maybe some slower breaths. As soon as I can, what I'm going to try to do is shift to a nasal inhale and a mouth, exhale, and then maybe a nasal inhale, and exhale. So I'm going to do this as a really quick brief sequence, this would take much longer in actuality, but where I might start, I'm gonna bring intention.
20:56
And what I would likely be doing in between these breath patterns is layering in some other somatic discharging practices, some containment practices. But even just doing that, I can feel my system buzzing a little bit from even just those few seconds of quick inhalations and exhalations really sharp. So what this all boils down to is your nervous system state impacts the way that you breathe. Also, shifting the way that you breathe can change your state. in either direction. If you are feeling low shutdown, fatigued, and you want to be more energized, you can engage in activating or upregulating breath practices. And one of the things that all of the members inside my Rise Membership have access to is a breathwork library. And I have three primary styles of breathwork practices in that library, calming breathwork, that helps them engage their parasympathetic nervous system that really helps them down regulate, activating breathwork, that helps them juzze and alive in their nervous system, engaging a sympathetic nervous system state, ideally, in conjunction with that green zone. It's a mixed state if you've been part of conversations where we've talked about that. And one of my favorite breathwork practices to guide and to lead and to practice is to record and create is what I call full spectrum breath practices. So what you experience in a full spectrum breath practice, I often do these as part of my monthly release classes, which you're welcome to join anytime that's my monthly nervous system regulation and trauma release claps is the beginning of the practice starts with some breath awareness, regulation, some deep, slow breaths, just really trying to get us to a regulated baseline. And then I guide you in activating breathwork breath work that's going to engage your sympathetic nervous system that is going to activate your system. And then I offer some support, where you sit in stillness and observation as our system is activated. And then we engage in breathwork, that reregulate springing your system back down from that. And there's a few reasons why that can be a really powerful practice. Number one is because what you're doing is potentially repattern in your association with the sensations of being activated. So if all you've ever associated, the somatic sensations of activation, faster heart rate, change in breath, with anxiety, then anytime you're excited, it's going to trigger anxiety. Anytime you get your heart rate up with a workout, it's going to trigger anxiety. And so if in a practice like this, you can familiarize yourself with these sensations in a safer context. Now, ooh, you may have some choice. The next time activation shows up for you outside that formal practice. Is this excitement is this physiological activation or is it anxiety.
24:12
What it also can do over time is it trains stress resiliency, so again, you are practicing activating your system on purpose you are fill militarizing yourself with that experience, you're building capacity for activation in a safe way. So that when outside this formal, proactive practice of breath, work, your system activates. You're like, yeah, I can handle this. I've been here my system knows this. There's familiarity around that.
24:37
So what this all boils down to is this two way relationship between your nervous system state and your breath, changing your state changes your breath, changing your breath can change your state. And when it comes to engaging in specific breathwork practices to shift your state, there are no universals. I wish I could sit here and give you a prescriptive protocol that says when you're feeling anxiously activated, do an extended exhale breath. And that's always going to work for you. It might work for you, sometimes it may not work for you other times depending on the intensity of your activation or your systems willingness to be flexible with breath. Other parts of your anatomy that play a role in how comfortable breath is for you could be your intercostal muscles. So there might be some just mobility work that we can do with that your intercostal muscles are the muscles between your ribcage. And so some of the work we do in those Release classes or in different sessions and uniquely with each client as needed is work on mobilizing their ribcage so that they can take deeper breaths so they can have greater access to their parasympathetic nervous system state.
25:42
And I wish I could give you prescriptive upregulating breath work where I'm like, hey, the next time you're feeling so depressed, it's hard to get out of bed, try this mobilizing breath work and it's going to be uncomfortable to be in bed, your system is going to be activated and that's going to work every time. But when it comes to using breathwork to upregulate your system, when you understand anxiety and depression through a nervous system lens, when you understand it with that analogy that I share with you often have your stress bucket on that ladder. What puts us in a shutdown state is because our nervous system the stress load on our nervous system has gotten too big or it's lasted too long for some of our clients, when they're feeling really stuck in immobilization. Doing activating breathwork is the perfect tool for them to judge their nervous system, get them into a more mobilized state. For other clients, those very same mobilizing breath practices overwhelm their system and reinforce their need to stay shut down. So this is again where I have to in order to feel ethical about what I present on this podcast is to remind all of you that there are not universal protocols. We have some universal physiology. But we all have unique ways in which our nervous system interprets that filters that in response to that. And this is where working with a trauma informed a somatically trained coach or therapist or practitioner can be really helpful in helping you cultivate and create and explore an experiment to put together your unique somatic toolbox to figure out the tools and the practices that really help you navigate your nervous system with more agency. And I do the best I can on this podcast to offer some generic categorizations of hey, some of these breathwork tools are generally more helpful for activation than shutdown. And in my new book Healing Through the Vagus Nerve, I also have a whole section in that book dedicated to hey, here are some practices that are generally best suited for when your system is activated, or here are some practices that are best suited for when your system is shut down. And you need to take responsibility and accountability to figuring out uniquely which ones are the best fit for you. And that is the work that we guide clients in our practice in every single day in both our one on one anxiety and depression coaching program, and inside our Rise membership. And I will add links to learn more about those programs in the show notes for any of you who are interested in getting that support.
28:16
So I want to shift our conversation now to talking about how you can leverage and how you should think about leveraging Breath and breath awareness and breath work proactively. And when I teach clients about proactive breathwork so this is not what I just shared with you. What I just shared with you is reactive oh I'm in a moment of activation or shutdown. I want to shift my nervous system state via breath. Proactive is usually split our conversations into two different categories. Number one is building awareness around and optimizing your daily breath. So how you automatically take every single breath all day, every day and night. And then the second category of proactive breath is intentional practice. Like breathwork sessions like you might do like a daily meditation practice, you can do a daily breathwork practice to either calm or activate your system or like a shared with those full spectrum breath practices to build new context and familiarity with the sensations. And I want to elaborate on that number one on your daily breath first by sharing a bit more about my personal journey where I have admitted multiple times, not just earlier in this conversation, but on this podcast about how I am a recovering mouth breather. I have no idea no idea when my mouth breathing started, but it was my mid 20s When I started to learn about breath and the nervous system that I paid attention to my breath for the first time ever also had context this is why I share with you what optimal breathing is because your awareness of what optimal breathing is also helps you to cue into disk function, or sub optimal breathing patterns that you may not know exist. And that was my story. It wasn't until I learned how I should be breathing that I realized that I was mouth breathing like 60% of the time at least. And for context, mouth breathing, you is only necessary when you are congested via cold or allergies or whatever, or during intense exercise, and that's to help get oxygen to your muscles faster. So mouth breathing indicates that something is suboptimal or stressful to your system. So if I'm chronically mouth breathing all the time, I am sending low level stress signals to and through my nervous system all day every day with these mouth breathings. I'm also just not getting the additional benefits of nasal breathing things like filtering, the toxins enhance circulation. So mouth breathing in any other context, then, to navigate congestion, or at the intense part of a workout is dysfunctional and suboptimal.
31:11
Now, if you have a medical condition that causes you to mouth breathe more often. I think having this information can also be helpful. Because if for whatever reason you need to mouth breathe more often than not the awareness that that is contributing to suboptimal physiology that that is producing a low level stress response in your body all the time, can help you take other areas of your life more seriously to decrease overall stress load. And I mentioned that next week's episode is on vagal toning the following week, we're going to talk about stress management. So you're gonna start to see how all of these essentially really feed into and support each other. But I spent a decade with suboptimal sleep, suboptimal breathing, obscene stress levels of fast nutrition. And all of that took a toll on my nervous system that could have been minimized if I understood my physiology better now to give you a little bit more buy into taking the way that you breathe every minute of every day, automatically, more seriously, I want you to imagine it this way.
32:14
Let's say your right foot was turned inward, maybe you were born that way. Or maybe you had an injury, maybe you don't even know how but you have a right foot that turns inward. We understand that 100 steps, 100,000 steps of walking with one foot forward and one foot turned inward. That right foot turned inward taking steps day after day after day, after day after day, is going to put strain on your knee, it's going to change the way that your hip sits in your your hip socket, that joint, it'll impact your posture over time your spine. And in a situation like that. There's likely two I guess three roads either number one, you just ignore that that is there. And you're like, I don't know why my knees always hurting. I don't know why my hips always hurting. I don't know why I'm experiencing so much dysfunction. And either because of lack of awareness or just denial that your foot has anything to do with it, you're like, you just you don't acknowledge that your foot is turned in. Camp number two is, maybe there's nothing you can do. And your foot just is turned in. Okay. So if we can't fix the dysfunction in the foot, then what can we do to compensate for it in other places? How can we really rehab the knee? How can we strengthen the hip and pull that into a more optimal position? How can we be more aware of our posture, maybe we are not a long distance runner, but instead we choose swimming as a recreational activity. Or the third camp is, oh my gosh, it's my foot. It's dysfunctional. So I am going to be really intentional about rehabbing my foot, seeing if I can get it in alignment, so that I can not have this cascade of other dysfunctions that happen because my foot is turned inward.
34:07
And this is what happens with dysfunctional daily breathing. When we have chronic short, shallow breathing, either as a stress response, it's maybe just become habitual. There are a cascade of negative impacts that we experience. Number one, the reason we breathe is to properly oxygenate our blood. If we have sub optimal breathing, we have sub optimal oxygenated blood which means that the blood that is running through and producing all of your bodily functions, how your organs function, how your brain functions, everything is happening sub optimally. Also, we are contributing to more We're stress loads, so we're likely in that sympathetic nervous system state more often. And not only does that sympathetic nervous system state impact the way that we breathe, but also when we're in a fight flight response, our body turns off other unnecessary functions for survival.
35:17
The most notable when it comes to mental health is usually digestion. Because most of us know that anxiety or depression and digestive issues are sister symptoms. And the reason being is that the nervous system is at the heart of all of it. When we're in this fight or flight response, if there's a saber toothed tiger in our closet, which our nervous system doesn't know the difference between a saber toothed tiger or just negative thoughts in our head, it doesn't need to optimally break down food to optimally pull all of the macro and micronutrients out of your food to digest it. So even if you are somebody who is eating a nutrient dense diet, but you are chronically stressed out, you may still be nutrient deficient, because you're not fully and properly digesting your food. And that's something we may talk about a few episodes from now when we get into the essential aid of nutrition.
36:12
But what this boils down to is just an invitation from me to you to pay attention to how you breathe every day. And if you notice that you are kind of a short, shallow chest breather, if you are a mouth breather, consider the role that that could be playing in your overall stress physiology. Consider what steps you might take to repattern and retrain more functional breathing. And what that's looked like for me is I had just a post it note on my computer that said check your breath. And it was just building awareness around it. So anytime I saw that post it note, anytime I just organically thought about or noticed my breath, I would intentionally engage in four or five, deep, slow diaphragmatic breaths. And then inevitably, I would get back to working on my work project or having a conversation with somebody. And eventually I would shift back into mouth breathing. And then I would see the post it note I would think about my breathing again. And over time, I've been intentionally trying to retrain my daily breath for about eight years now. And I nose breathe more often than not, but especially on days where I have a high stress level. Or if I have recently had a cold, because it's really easy for my brain to fall back into those patterns. So when I get congested, my brain is like, Oh, this mouth breathing thing, okay, and I noticed for sometimes up to a month after my cold has healed, I'm mouth breathing more often than not, because it was just easy for me to slip back into that old habitual breath pattern.
37:46
So just building awareness and letting it take time, letting it take time, I also found mouth tape to be really helpful. It's essentially just medical tape, that's not going to hurt your skin when you pull it off. And I would use it at night to help keep my mouth closed and encourage nasal breathing at night. I also would use it and still use it sometimes on days where you just about my computer for a long time, I'm not going to go into a lot of detail in the PDF that I'm going to attach in the show notes that goes over breath gives you a lot of workbook and extra resources around breath. There's a link to the mouth tape that I use there. It's just really simple. And if you Google mouth tape, it's pretty self explanatory, just encourages your mouth to stay shut so that you nasal breathing more often. Those have all been tools to help me repattern my daily breathing.
38:36
And so when we think about using breath as a proactive regulation tool, I think the most important place to start is in paying attention to how you breathe every single day. Because the more you can retrain that the more your vagal tone improves, your organ function improves, there is just such a positive ripple effect from having optimal daily automatic breathing patterns. And then the second category of proactive breathwork is what I shared earlier is having dedicated breathwork sessions to practice calming breath practices or full spectrum breath practices, whatever meets your unique need.
39:18
Alright, I know that we're running a bit long with this chat, but there is one more thing that I think is really, really important to bring into the conversation with breath and healing and the trauma world in the somatic world. And that is something called cathartic breathwork. So if you're not familiar with this term, it is sometimes called Holotropic breathwork. It's a form of breathwork that involves intentionally altering your breathing patterns to induce states of release trauma release, emotional release. And wow, it can be helpful. Incredibly so for some, it can also do incredible harm. So this is the type of breathwork session, that is often what you see in videos on Instagram. These are these people kind of hyperventilating, they're maybe yelling, they're shaking their sobbing. This is a type of longer form breathwork session that often happens in these big breathwork events that might have 50 to 500 people present. And most people, I think, who go to these big breathwork events with their friends and things have no idea what they have walked into. And for many, many people there because I've been to these events, this is their first exposure to breathwork. And it can be really, really harmful. The idea behind these cathartic breathwork practices is to use breath to access these deeper parts of your psyche to allow suppressed emotions, or tensions to surface and be released. And in case it's not already very clear, here's my opinion on this. While there is a time and place.
41:08
In my opinion, these breath practices are used far too generally and without enough context for the participants in the room that you are leading. And without enough context for these participants to know what they are opting into. And like I said, Well, it might be helpful for one person, especially and can be in a one on one setting or a small group setting with a facilitator who knows how to titrate this experience and personalize it for every person, which you just cannot do in a room of 500 people, it can be so traumatizing to other individuals. And even though sometimes it might look like there was some big release that's happening. And maybe even for you in the moment, it feels like there's a big release that's happening, what sometimes might actually be happening is that your system or someone else's system is just re experiencing that emotional overwhelm, which reinforces that overwhelming experience to their system, potentially making your sensitivity to that past trauma or that overwhelm higher, pushing people into catharsis like this can blow them way, way, way outside their safety zone. And can do more harm than good. And we have worked with so many clients in our practice, who systems backlash because of a cathartic breathwork event that they went to with a friend. So what I am just offering here is proceed with caution, with big events or experiences or retreats that involve that. And in my opinion, that should never be anybody's first experience with breathwork practices.
42:53
Okay, let's reel it back in for a minute. To just summarize, why does breath matter, especially why does breath matter when it comes to regulating my nervous system or navigating anxiety and depression. And what it comes down to is that breath can be used as a powerful, proactive and reactive regulation tool. Your respiratory system, AKA your breath is one of the most powerful physiological levers that you can pull to shift the state of your nervous system. Because it's part of your autonomic nervous system. Part that happens both automatically and that you can consciously control and the purpose of breathing is to properly oxygenate your blood. If you have dysfunctional breathing, you are sending sub optimally oxygenated blood to every single part of your body. And it's not hard to imagine how over time, this can manifest as a number of different issues. Disease and most notably, its impact on your digestion. This is why so often, anxiety and depression and digestive problems coexist with each other. If you are chronically stressed if your fight or flight response is never fully turned off, then your breathing nor your digestion is never going to be fully optimized.
44:10
So here are even more simplified are three takeaways from today.
44:15
Number one, breath is a pillar of health. Your mental and physical health is only optimal when your breathing is also optimal.
44:25
Number two, before you can use breath as a powerful regulatory tool, you have to understand your basic breath physiology and your basic nervous system functioning. And when you do breath becomes one of the most powerful proactive and reactive regulation tools that you have.
44:46
Number three different breath practices are optimal for different nervous system states.
44:53
So just one final reminder that linked in the show notes is a mini workbook to help you better understand and explore your breath as part of your healing journey. This is also something that we provide a ton of personalized guidance around. In both Restore which is our one on one anxiety depression coaching program. And RISE, my mental health membership and nervous system healing space, there's a whole breathwork library in both those places. And every single week in both those places you get support in regulating your nervous system, reclaiming your life from anxiety and depression, breath being part of that. And I'll throw some links in the show notes for both of those programs if you want to learn more as well. Okay, I run way over the normal time limit for these episodes. I told you, I could go down a rabbit hole on breath and I didn't even touch half the topics I'd like to so that's for future conversations. But that is it.
45:45
Thank you for being here. I'd love to hear from you about what part of this episode you appreciated. Send me a DM on Instagram or send me an email. And until next week, I am wishing you the most optimized slow, deep breaths possible.
46:02
Thanks for listening to another episode of The regulate and rewire podcast. If you enjoyed what you heard today, please subscribe and leave a five star review to help us get these powerful tools out to even more people who need them. And if you yourself are looking for more personalized support and applying what you've learned today, consider joining me inside Rhys, my monthly mental health membership and nervous system healing space or apply for our one on one anxiety depression coaching program restore. I've shared a link for more information to both in the show notes. Again, thanks so much for being here. And I'll see you next time.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai