Breathe to Rewire Your Brain: How Breathwork Unlocks Calm, Focus, and Peak Performance

Ep 117. Unlock the Power of Breath: The Hidden Link Between Breathing, Stress, Beliefs & Peak Performance

What if the key to unlocking a calmer mind, sharper focus, and more powerful performance wasn’t in a pill or a mindset trick — but in your breath?

🧠 Modern neuroscience meets ancient wisdom in this episode as we explore the science-backed power of breathwork and how your breathing patterns can instantly shift your mental state, emotional response, and even your subconscious beliefs.

Every inhale and exhale sends signals to your brain — regulating your nervous system, determining your fight-or-flight response, and influencing how you think, feel, and react. When you're stressed or anxious, your breath shortens, your heart races, and your body enters survival mode — often before your conscious mind can catch up.

Here’s the truth:
 💥 Your breath is the first responder to your stress — and it holds the code to breaking free from reactive patterns, anxiety spirals, and outdated belief systems.

In this powerful session, you'll discover:

• The science of nervous system regulation through breath
• How upregulation and downregulation impact your emotions, clarity, and energy
• Why subconscious beliefs are triggered by breath-controlled signals
• Tools to rewire your stress response and reclaim control in seconds
• Breath techniques used by elite performers, military, and therapists to enhance focus, resilience, and connection

🌬️ Whether you're feeling overwhelmed, stuck in limiting beliefs, or just want to perform at your highest level — mastering your breath is the gateway.

This isn't just about stress relief — it's about biohacking your body and mind through conscious breathing. It's performance optimization, emotional regulation, and belief transformation, all starting with a single breath.

🎧 Tap play now to learn:

• How to stop anxiety before it starts
• What breathwork does to your brain in real time
• How your subconscious reacts faster than your thoughts — and how to take back control

📈 Join the global movement of high-performers, mindful creators, and seekers who are using breathwork as a tool for transformation.

✨ Breathe better. Think clearer. Perform stronger.

Take care and walk well.

Transcript

armando (00:40.098)
Welcome back folks to episode 117 of the Running Man Self-Regulation Skills Project Podcast with me, your host, Dr. Armando Dominguez, PhD in Health Psychology, licensed professional counselor and an adjunct professor at a local community college. What we're going to be discussing today is going to be what is known in the Chinese martial arts as Qi and the Lord of Strength, which when translated translates to vitality, air and breath. So we're going to be discussing.

not only breath but breathing, but the fact that it's so foundational to everything that we do. And in this podcast, we cover methods of self-regulatory skill that range from not only the physiological, but birth control and also meditation and visualization type things that are practical and usable right now, but also strategic tools that are not only subjective thought process, but also things that impact our objective or experience.

matter what it is that we do, not just with what we're doing on this podcast, but anything you do as a human in this lifetime is founded on the breath. Anything you've ever done, if you think about it, is going to involve breathing. So what we're to talk about are some of the differences in breath and what

self-regulatory skill looks like within the breath itself. What are we regulating? And regulation does not always mean control and take away and less, but also it could include and sometimes does include upregulation.

We're going to talk about down regulation and we're going to talk about the three types of breath where we're hyper oxic and where we're taking more oxygen and hypercapnic where we have more CO2, but also when we're in O2 sat residual O2 saturation or what we call residual breath in the martial arts. And we will kind of talk about how useful that is in situations that are not only domestic, but even personal and business and how useful those tools are when we're trying to keep a handle on

armando (02:41.093)
things or maybe you'll having to.

navigate something such as a physical altercation or one that could become physical and how to regulate what it is that my reactivity is going to be without necessarily allowing it to unravel in a negative way. for starters, what we're going to do is look at up regulation and down regulation as an idea when we breathe. And the reason I want to touch upon these is this podcast is a self-regulation project. That means it's, it's a work in progress. It's not something that you get all at once, but you do get benefit right away.

do some of these things, but also long-term you gain skill and there is a more profound benefit over time that conditions our body to become one more resilient, if you will, and also more controlled in stressful situations by virtue of conditioning or practice because in essence we've immersed ourselves, we practice this, and I've been there before, got the t-shirt. So no surprises, then the state of stress, maybe not the situation, but the state of

feeling stress in the body is now no longer novel.

and it doesn't freak you out. And the term freak out in quotes is a higher cognitive process where I've created a judgment, the name and a label. And we realize the lack of freak out doesn't mean my allowing myself to have an opinion or judgment, but rather when this occurs as a result of the body being overwhelmed or reacting to an environment rather quickly and then having an opinion after the fact. But the freak out occurs in a pre-conscious sense, it's pre-conscious in the sense of not

armando (04:19.978)
higher cognitive I should have said pre-cognitive as in lower perceptual before it becomes a higher processing issue at the pfc or the frontal cortex. Now the upregulation that I'm talking about often

Depending on the level of stress can be impacted by not only thought kind of like when we talk about the lemon and salivating and It doesn't matter which lemon for how many years ago even somebody else just saying the word lemon telling you about their experience or maybe seeing somebody actually body but you're not and yet your body

responds to the imagery inside as a recollection and drops pituitary hormone. Therefore, we salivate. That means we have a concrete measurable response that science knows about and that fMRI technology has measured and yet we have an impact. It's palpable. It's real. It's physical. It's not all in your head and it's not a matter of I choose to believe this but rather it's compelling enough and believable enough that I react to it because it is either a

threat or potential promise of food if I haven't eaten in a long time in my environment. Sometimes what we perceive as threatening our environment or something threatening isn't always something that we have the chance to process and a conscious I made that decision sense. But whenever we do perceive things and the signal is basically being interpreted and we're acting within fractions of a moment we're talking about

speeds that are in the realm of 60 milliseconds to 100 milliseconds where it's so fast that by default we treat it as a threat and we can't tell the difference even if it is somebody or something that's familiar to us that occurs at about 150 to 300 milliseconds and even that is 400 times faster than our conscious mind at the prefrontal cortical level that comes on probably at about 1.2 seconds in comparison so whenever we discuss the fact that we're up regulating often the up regulation isn't

armando (06:19.083)
how much air we're bringing in when we breathe in oxygen saturation at the cell respiration level and residual saturation that is after I exhale how much oxygen I have that I'm still working with that's within the realm of about 20 to 30 percent that I would have had in reserve so to speak. Whenever we have this sense of I have to breathe out often it's because the autonomic system is

responding to something that could be potentially a threat or if anything something novel that we would probably carry into what we Know as the unknown

the unknown that we have to probably regulate up for to make sure one we have enough oxygen to we have a level of arousal where I can respond and by default I don't have to think about it really fast if I have to run from it or fight really well to be able to get away from it or eat it or mate with it for that matter but whenever we have this occur by default our skeletal muscles get the blood flow the hemodynamic dynamics of cognition start to really show up in the sense that it goes away the blood flow away

the brain and goes to the body and is now a default mode, exercise and movement of blood to the muscles, the skeletal muscles, so I can get stronger and faster and run, hide and climb. So the upregulation that I'm talking about has to do with levels of arousal, sometimes hyper vigilance and hyper arousal, terms that are used. But that means that our particular activating system is now aware and awakening the body to respond in whatever way is appropriate in our environment to incur

our survivability. But the upregulation often involves an increase in the amount of oxygen going in and CO2 going out. So we have an increase of respiration, not only mechanically, the inhale, exhale, wherever we have the intercostal muscles stretching to open up our ribcage to breathe in or inhale, but also our diaphragm dropping and creating a vacuum of sorts in our lungs to create a vacuuming of the air that's outside of us.

armando (08:25.171)
bring us in so that we can open up whatever space we need to bring in extra O2 for that response, sympathetic nervous response where the body gets warmer, heart rate goes up and we're getting ready to move quickly.

Now we upregulate many things there, but also we're upregulating not only levels of arousal, but our capacity to fight and protect. But at the level that we're talking about right now, breathing, it's our oxygen that goes up. We hyper oxygenate in a sense for a moment. We become hypoxic, but it doesn't stay like that for long. And we're not going to be taking little quick breaths where we start to do what's called hyperventilation, but we're trying to prevent the hypercapnic event wherever we have too much

CO2 where we might get dizzy and then our body and our organs start acting kind of weird like whenever we're underwater diving too deep and we might pass out because we have euphoria and We've hyperventilated have too much oxygen but no CO2 and then all of a sudden ding ding ding We're out we're floating somewhere at about 60 or 80 feet and we're asleep as we drown So that's not a good thing but these things once again up regulation down regulation of the breath is autonomic

Now the breath can be brought under conscious control and our autonomic system will override frequently Whenever it thinks that we're doing crazy stunts while you shouldn't be doing that to my organism Breathing in breathing out doing something like Wim Hof breath and I love his methodology But even he says don't do it in the water because it could kill you many people have died as a result of trying to do free diving thinking that they can Lengthen the amount of time they can go without breathing in and diving deeply and

and winding up with really severe events and even things like aneurysms, sort of thing. But that's a very high-pressured situation to say the least, and they're very unique, and this isn't to steer you away from breathing, but rather just sometimes people get overzealous and even get to the point where it becomes like politics, where people speak badly about folks that breathe through their mouth. And even the term mouth breather makes one sound like one some sort of a Neanderthal, not that they breathe.

armando (10:39.273)
through their mouth just making a bad example I guess but the idea is this we start getting on our high horse and making judgments when we ourselves cannot up regulate or down regulate effectively and This is more so about not only longevity but better performance in your life not only in physical skill But also my day-to-day interactions wherever I might talk to somebody maybe I'm an attorney and if I'm out there Speaking and being able to regulate how I breathe also determines how cool I am and how I am perceived

because my state can vary based on how I breathe and if I get nervous and I start to sweat and start hearing things and feeling like things are precious even though it's subjective and nobody's trying to hurt me but yet knowing the value and the weight of what I'm doing could cause me to feel a lot of pressure and make me really want to perform as close to perfect as possible even though perfect's an absolute and my dear there's probably a belief system driving that so you can see where the pressure is but you can also see wherever if one stays in this

hyper aroused or threatened state, then we're probably going to be more apt to use substances to bring that state down quickly because we don't like being there. Because one of the things that we do, if we do that frequently enough, is realize that not only is stress a habit, it's a pattern, but even our breathing is a habitually pattern conditioned response, which means if you breathe in a very dynamic,

really working hard since.

then that's something you're going to have to decondition or learn how to do differently and that's going to take time and practice. You can do it here and there as kind of like an injection of a difference in breath but once you start learning how to do it and practice it we become more accustomed and our body learns. It takes in the novelty of it and at first it becomes the unknown. We might even get a little shaky maybe not do so well with it but once we do it regularly and the body realizes what we're doing again then it starts to adapt and allow us to breathe more not only effectively

armando (12:39.639)
but more efficiently and then we become good at it to where it becomes second nature and then our blood pressure drops heart rate measurable starts to drop as well versus having this perpetual level of potential stress, even though maybe I'm not in any kind of danger. But once again, the up regulation can occur very well. Now on the flip side is we're gonna talk about down regulation. What is it that we are down regulating? Well, one of the things too that you can do as far as down regulation is state regulation. How tense am

Can I down regulate my anxiety, my sense of stress, or my sense of threat?

And yes, you can, because largely what we consider threatening in an environment where I could get hit or eaten or bitten, this sort of thing, we're looking at something that is external to us in environment that we determine whether or not one, can I get away from it? Two, can I stop it? And three, do I have the wherewithal to get away from it or maybe not necessarily have to endure what I'm predicting or expecting? Cause there's a belief quality there. So down regulation has to do with not only state, what state my body's in,

but also what intention do I have and what am I attending to? What am I paying attention to? Cause I can intend state stress reduction. And I'll give you, for instance, many years ago, I used to use heart mass, a little handheld tool and it had a little ear piece that you'd plug in, which I thought was phenomenal. It was given to me by a friend and I was showing him meditation in exchange. He told me to use it to see if I could capture

what it was that I was doing as far as skill with this little tool called the M-Wave. Now I'm not plugging them. I'm telling you, if you want to go find their stuff, it's phenomenal. It's worth the money. And even the computer program is, and I don't get any kickback for it, but I'm telling you, it is a useful, worthwhile tool. Do seek it out. They have some cell phone versions too that you can get. But the reason I'm this out is that just by intention alone, but by wanting to end quotes, just wanting to regulate my

armando (14:43.322)
measure of stress without necessarily changing how I was breathing, but just the desire to want to be in a state of less stress would cause a down regulation, not only of my heart rate, my breathing changed a little bit, but it wasn't intentional. was just me paying attention to where my thumb was touching that little sensor that determined how my relative stress was. And

It went down measurably and it had multiple programs and it got to the point where I could very quickly intend that I would do this almost daily. Very quickly intend my level of stress perceived measurable stress to go down and it did.

Now there were some master level stress levels that, that, I was barely, barely getting close to, but those would take probably more time than I had with the way before it decided to break on me. And what I will tell you is that just by intention alone, my desire gives my thought pattern, a direction of, want to be there in the future. And where is there, what is there when I get there, a level of less stress, a feeling of ease and comfort, whatever it is that we, we label that.

as far as that state and our body responds just by wanting.

Now this isn't me visualizing or making pictures in my mind that those are all good, useful, powerful tools. Definitely sports psychology uses a lot of it and we use it in hypnosis and general suggestion whenever we're doing sales, this sort of stuff, or even just trying to encourage somebody to come to our way of thinking. But the powerful thing on the down regulation thing is that what you attend to, what your attention is on is not focused as like I'm looking at all the details, but rather just being aware of it and keeping my mind on it, so to speak, without necessarily

armando (16:25.23)
I'm labeling it and naming it and do it as a higher cognitive process just by virtue of my more visceral perceptual sense of attention and attention doesn't always involve your eyes. You can attend to things. You can listen to things where your eyes closed. You can see things in the dark without having to have details and still be aware of it. Whatever it is that I might see the outlines of and it may not be clear and hard line. I'm maybe looking at a book in a dark room and I can see the

of it, but whatever it is, I'm aware of it, the distance and the size and all that, all those things are taken in and that's being attentive. Attention is always on. You don't pay attention. We just become aware of our attention and we tend to like to focus it and say that we're doing it somehow, but it's actually being done already without our involvement. So to speak, it's just our being able to leverage that. That makes it a useful tool, but our intent, I want to be relaxed. My attention to what's going on in my environment.

Also was coupled very closely to that but down regulate oxygen for instance often if I want to Hypervent to do something like a meditation method or whatever you can do it for a short period of time But our body will down regulate what it is I'm doing because my autonomic nervous system my parasympathetic nervous system I'm trying to arouse my my energy levels or my breathing level to get excited and warm it will want to go to the to state of equilibrium that it

can get to as quickly as possible. Once you stop doing the silly stunt at the prefrontal cortical level, because, that'd be neat to do. And yet it's telling you, no, no, I don't like to do that. It's about efficiency at the autonomic level. And it wants to stay there and maintaining that sense of equilibrium or balance is always paramount to the body because anything that raises that heart rate usually is involved with running from a threat or involving itself in a threat. And the parasympathetic has to do with the rest and digest qualities.

that often we do our friend and befriend with and often we gain our higher cognitive processes that are most creative. We don't create very well when we're really super stressed and often the down regulation involves a relaxation and not really a loss of tones but a softening of the tone of the skeletal muscle skeletal tissues and less pressure in the kidneys and and in the heart and the in the lungs and there is also less limiting action to what we call the diaphragm in this in the intercostal

armando (18:54.84)
muscle so we can breathe at ease even though we may not be mechanically breathing deeper we're probably alternating better because we're not physically tense and we're not burning in a metabolizing sense more oxygen than otherwise we would be if we were stressed for instance. So some very deep thoughts right there.

Whenever we're regulating breath, it's probably a really good idea to know the three states of breathing that we generally occur. There are more, but these are the ones that are most primary. the thing is whenever we're in the state of inhaling actively, generally speaking, if your structure is good, and if you have no physical injury and you're capable of breathing in through your nose, your body will regulate temperature, through the sinuses and the sinusoid cavities. Whenever we're inhaling, if we're inhaling through our nose, when it's

cold, it warms the air. When it's really dry, tends to moisturize it. Whenever it's too hot outside, it tends to cool the air that we bring in as we breathe. So that's a really important thing. When we mouth breathe, we tend not to get that benefit quite as much and we tend to think we're breathing in more. What it is is a catch-up breath if we've been very tired and exhausted. But also that kind of limits our ability to filter what it is that we're taking in. We probably increase our chances

of immune function being triggered in the sense that we bring in more dust and bacteria, that sort of thing, without filtration through what like cats have these turbinates. If you look at a skull, they look like these little filters that they go through. And our sinuses act in a very similar way. And that in the mucosal layers capture that so that we can minimize any assault on our body that could be considered a immune threat, so to speak, beyond just the physical. So some things to think about there. Now inhaling.

The state where hyper oxygenating usually has to do with how much oxygen we take in. It's called a hypotonic state if we have more oxygen that we need. And if you're in the opposite where you're in a hypercapnic state, that means that a carbonic gas or CO2 is excessive and that can cause this to trigger what we'd call a hyperventilation to where our body starts to try to re-regulate itself. And sometimes it has a hard time doing that, especially if we go into anxiety panic mode at that point.

armando (21:13.594)
Which isn't far away many times the other state that we have that whenever we intentionally inhale or exhale with the Intent of either having more oxygen or more co2. Those are generally stunts that our body will generally Re-regulate on its own if you start getting a little dizzy you sit down the body will take care of itself Just as long as you stop doing what may have induced those states, but the third state I think is probably one of the most fascinating is probably one of the more powerful ones too Is that whenever we exhale and hold our breath when?

you literally let go all air and move. Have you ever gone walking and realized that when you inhale or even when you're running and exhale that it's not one for one, one swing of the legs and arms and exhale, one swing of the legs and arms and exhale, inhale this sort of thing. What we do is that sometimes we will inhale and go two or three strides, exhale for three strides and sometimes you may even exhale

continuously going through several strides before you inhale or if I do like I swing kettlebells do the same thing and I don't necessarily match one movement for one breath.

That's something you can do with Tai Chi and it's actually rather good to help encourage relaxation and motion and oxygenation to the tips of the fingers. This sort of thing is rather wonderful in that sense. But whenever we're looking at the residual breath, when we breathe out, we are still quite capable without inhaling moving and our body, our torso tends to consolidate. If you were to do something in the martial sense to strike or somebody's trying to hit you and you blew out all your air, you're not going to lose your air. You know, it's going to

hit you in the gut and then cause you to lose your oxygen wherever they caught you in and inhale. You're actually more solidified, more consolidated and you become, I don't want to say heavier, but much more solid. So harder to move, but also you get mechanically stronger whenever you do that because the whole of the torso is consolidated. There's no tension involved necessarily. It's just a matter of blowing out and staying that blown out or that non inhaled state so to speak and you're breathing at the

armando (23:18.842)
cell level respiration, what we call the O2 saturation. And that can be a very helpful thing whenever you're in a dark place, wherever you may have to protect yourself and hide and not breathe and know that you're not going to have to necessarily suck wind immediately because you feel like you're going to die. If you're relaxing, you do that. You can probably hold your breath for a good long time in many cases. And whenever you're capable of expanding the ribs, when you're inhaling and really train those as we get older, you don't necessarily have to

be going through what many elderly folks do, where they have limited skeletal structure movement in their upper body, in their torso, to wherever it sounds like they're breathing through a bag or filter. And by keeping the lungs and the ribs fully expanding whenever you inhale and exhale, you encourage more efficient oxygenation, but also more comfortable states during times of stress. And we become more aware of the fact that even when we are

dealing with things that are stressful, we don't necessarily have to feel like we're not able to breathe because we tense up and our heart rate goes up. We become more effective at drawing more air effectively and breathing out CO2 effectively. So we don't go into that fight-flight response that is a state before it's ever a pre-conscious state, should say, precognitive, before it ever becomes a cognitive process of, this is getting difficult. So that's a lot in a little bit and I just want to cover these areas of breath and breathing as

foundation, having to deal with stress and regulating, but also realizing what are we up regulating, what are we down regulating, what are we trying to keep even and with the breath, the Lord of Strength, Qi and the Chinese methodologies. These are the things that are not only foundational, but absolutely necessary to be aware of so that we can become better at what it is that we want to do. Now that's going to be it for tonight. And I certainly have had a good time talking to you about this. This is always fascinating to me.

have any questions or even any feedback, please send it to the email at running man get skills project at Gmail. I'd love to hear from you. Also, if you go to YouTube, we have the channel there. Please like subscribe and share. I'd like to see if we can get that channel to grow some. And on top of that, we're getting closer to getting the interview format taken care of. We're probably a little less than a month away when I start doing video interviews in addition to audio interviews. And I look forward

armando (25:48.512)
to doing that. I'm really excited. I already have a couple of guests that I'm lining up and hopefully there'll be some information that is not only useful to you but also something you can share with people as well. And for now, take care, breathe well, walk well.