Laughing Through The Pain: Navigating Wellness
Welcome to Laughing Through the Pain: Navigating Wellness. A podcast about the wellness industry, breathwork, bio-hacking, exercise, and mental health. Designed to help regular people and practitioners find their way through the confusing, conflicting, and often untrustworthy world of wellness. While at the same time trying to make you laugh. Hosted by Richard and Andy. Richard Blake, AKA the Breath Geek, is a PhD psychologist, breathworker, bio-hacker, and amateur CrossFit athlete. Andy, aka the the funny one, has his bachelor's in psychology and helps to avoid the curse of knowledge by asking the questions the experts don’t think to answer. They want to help you avoid making the same mistakes they made while trying to make their way through all things wellness - subscribe and like the podcast now.
Laughing Through The Pain: Navigating Wellness
What You're Getting Wrong About Breathing: Taylor Somerville on the Surprising Link Between Breath and Burnout
Imagine transforming your life with just a breath. Our guest, Taylor Somerville from Memphis, Tennessee, guides us through the XPT style of breathwork, illuminating how simple breathing techniques can shift us from anxiety to calmness, and even enhance our physical well-being. Drawing inspiration from the natural breathing patterns of children, Taylor reveals how lifestyle changes alter our breathing and offers practical methods to reclaim optimal habits. The episode promises not just a change in perspective, but actionable steps to improve your daily life through controlled breathing.
Explore the dynamic relationship between breath and exercise as we uncover the hidden dangers of over-breathing, inspired by Patrick McEwen’s Oxygen Advantage. Whether you’re an avid gym-goer or a curious beginner, discover how underwater workouts with heavy D-balls and dumbbells challenge the body and mind, offering unique benefits that extend beyond the water. Taylor shares anecdotes from his own journey, emphasizing the power of breath awareness in promoting overall well-being and resilience.
Venturing into the realm of sauna and cold therapy, we compare traditional barrel saunas with their infrared counterparts and delve into cold exposure practices like ice baths. Taylor shares insights from his personal transition from a high-pressure career to advocating for a more holistic health approach, highlighting stress management techniques that go beyond conventional methods. With practical tips on integrating these therapies into your routine, this episode encourages taking control of your health to prevent burnout and foster a balanced lifestyle.
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Laughing Through The Pain: Navigating Wellness
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are you burnt out and need to do some underwater swimming. That's an unfair question. Um, I was just saying to rich off air. I do admire the stories of people who are maybe recognized. They're in um a bit of a spot, career-wise, work-wise. They're sort of working themselves into a stress situation and actually do something so positive about it and take action. And that is what our guest does on this episode. Coming in from Memphis, tennessee, who've we got Rich?
Speaker 1:Taylor take action. Somerville, that's not his name. I just added that in there because, yeah, he does take action. He's an action man and, yes, we learn all about breathwork the XPT style of breathwork that he teaches, as well as the benefits of ice baths and sauna, and I think sound fun.
Speaker 2:and then you made it sound awful and then he made it sound fun again, so I've left kind of wanting to do it, but not the way you did it.
Speaker 1:Well, it was fun. It was fun. I guess I didn't share that. I shared my sort of my blooper reel, whereas actually, you know, the vast majority of it was. There were challenges that I and everyone else sort of overcame, and that's an incredibly rewarding, exciting feeling.
Speaker 2:So definitely try it in the, in the right environment, would be my advice yeah, it sounds very humbling and also, I think the um really interesting to challenge yourself mentally in that way, because we've all been there underwater when you think, shit, I really, really, really need to take a breath here and obviously by doing this underwater workouts you're encouraged to fight through that to some extent, but not so you black out. That sounds miserable. Yeah, really interesting episode. Obviously a very cool guy, very nice accent here we go here.
Speaker 1:We go. Here we go. Hey listener, quick favor, quick favor. Do you like my steven bartlett impression there? Do you know? What would really help us is if you could share this podcast with someone you love if you think it's good, and if you don't think it's good, share it with someone you don't love. Either way, we get more listeners, which is good for us and will be good for you in the long run, because of karma and going to heaven, maybe. So, yeah, maybe. Share that you are listening to it. Share on instagram, take a screenshot of our episode and put it out there, and maybe we'll give you a shout out as well.
Speaker 2:Taylor, welcome to the podcast. I'm going to start with a question that Rich will want to answer, but he's not allowed to because I want to hear your answer. Why should we care about how we breathe?
Speaker 3:Thank you for having me. Andy Rich Happy to be here.
Speaker 1:Well why?
Speaker 3:Let's see, because it affects every system in the body. Breath is the first thing we do, it's the last thing we do and it is really one of the only things that is automatic, yet it's under our control. So we can use the breath to help change our mental and physical state. You know, we're calm, we tend to breathe calmly. We breathe a little deeper, we breathe a little slower. When we're anxious, worked up, we breathe a little faster, a little shorter. So, just like we're breathing that way, we have this kind of bi-directional nature of our brain and our breath and we can breathe ourselves into that state. You know, we can also help reduce tension in the body, you know, help make our oxygen uptake more efficient. So I would say, just looking at the nature of it being the first and the last thing we do, that it's pretty important. But also how we can use it to affect our nervous system, affect our emotions, affect our actions, it's very important.
Speaker 1:Absolutely. One question I always get from really funny people is they say I've been breathing all my life. What can you teach me about breathwork when you get those questions? I assume you've had that question, I don't know if it's just people are annoyed at me.
Speaker 3:But what would you say if someone said you know, I already know how to breathe? I'd say, yes, we all know how to breathe. But are you breathing the most optimal way for what you're doing? Are you breathing the most functional manner? Just like you know you can do anything in life, are you doing it to the best of your ability? And we look at children, babies. You know I've got a 11-month-old child. You watch them breathe.
Speaker 3:It's a nice diaphragmatic breath. It spans the belly and the ribs and that pattern tends to stay with us until we start sitting a lot. We get in school, we begin to shift into a more stressed state, naturally because we're not moving as much. The foods we eat tend to causing us to breathe into our upper chest and you can even see this in younger children. As it starts, that pattern starts to shift. So you know and you can even see this in younger children as that pattern starts to shift, so you know you can continue breathing like that and naturally put yourself in a more stress state, in a more chronic stress state.
Speaker 3:Or you can take your breathing and make it a little bit more optimal, a little functional, and one of the things we really focus on with all of our clients is how we're breathing every day and how you're going throughout your day, you know, making sure you're breathing through your nose, breathing lower and breathing slower. Doing that one thing can quickly shift your mental state, going from a little bit overly anxious to a little bit more calmer and easier to ride the waves, and I think that's really one of the first things people do. That's what we focus on with our clients really work on building that base and that foundation.
Speaker 2:And you can see a shift in a little as a couple sessions at making that small little change. You mentioned that your clients that. Could you talk a bit about your?
Speaker 3:journey to breath, work and what you do now. And so I spent 15 years in the investment business here, mainly in Memphis, tennessee. You know I've lived here for 20 plus years, but I was last 10 years of my career. I was on a trading floor doing economic macro analysis. I was a trading company, but we really my part was focusing on what's going on with the political structure, with macroeconomics, with interest rates very high, stress, environment, and I was overly stressed out, overly anxious, very quick tempered, went through some personal difficulties, got divorced 10 years ago, so had that had a financial crisis in 2007,.
Speaker 3:Had a career where I'm waking up at four o'clock in the morning sitting at a desk for 10 plus hours a day. You know the desk by 6 am typically sitting at a desk for 10 plus hours a day. You know, at the desk by 6 am typically and very kind of not able to handle my emotional responses as well as I should as I was going through that divorce. I started meditating, found meditation, got into that and was like man, this is easily starting to calm me down. Then I found Wim Hof, started doing some of that. Then I found XPT with Laird Hamilton and Gabby Reese, heard them on a podcast and decided I was going to go to one of their experiences. So went out there, went through their breathing protocols, the pool workouts, the hot and cold, and just kind of looked around at all the people that were there, from high-performing individuals, from Olympic athletes to financial people, through doctors, lawyers really trying to challenge themselves and push themselves and learn something new and something healthy. And as I went through that, I was like you know, I just don't really feel like I can sit here at a desk anymore and I quit.
Speaker 3:Three, four months later, started my company Symmetry in 2018 and been teaching breathwork and stress management since then. When I started, I had a sauna on a trailer, which I still have, and I would drive around to gyms and yoga studios around Memphis in the South, put on workshops, throw people an ice bath and saunas and teach them breathing techniques. And then COVID hit. I had to go a little bit more. Virtual Breathwork kind of started taking off and began working more with clients one-on-one. Now we do group coaching, one-on-one coaching, corporate work, really focusing on stress management, using the breath as the foundation of everything we do, and not only breath, but we look at mindset, look at how you're moving your nutrition relationships. You have focus on sleep as well. A lot of people struggle with sleep. We deal with athletes, executives, really high-performing, busy people.
Speaker 1:Awesome. Quite the journey, which is going back to your previous answer. You said something about how food affects our breath. I haven't heard too much about that. Can you say more about food and breath?
Speaker 3:Yeah, heard too much about that. Can you say more about food and breath? Yeah, as we start eating more high processed diets, you can see that can increase your your breath rate. Sugar put your body in a more naturally stressed state, which is going to increase your respiration rate, and so that's one of the things also has to do with your jaw functioning.
Speaker 3:You know Weston, a Price, dida, lot of research on this. There's other books called Jaws, that kind of focus on some of this, where you see the jaw adaptations throughout time and you know that affects how you're breathing. So it can shift you into that more mouth breathing which is going to, as a child, is going to narrow your airways, make it harder to breathe through your nose, narrow your jaw, narrow the facial structures, nose narrow your jaw, narrow the facial structures and so it makes it. You know, if you're kind of eating that processed diet throughout your life and starting early, it's going to shift you into a more mouth breathing state a lot earlier which is going to put you into that more stress state, put you into, you know, not letting your proper breathing patterns, not using it like you should.
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely. And one of the things sort of Patrick McEwen teaches on the oxygen advantage training, which I'm just finishing now, is supposedly we're all chronically over breathing and what is our largest detox pathway? It's the breath. So if we are eating toxic foods or you know foods, we need to put more stress on our body, we need to breathe faster to process that well, to carry out that detox process.
Speaker 2:So go on, andy, taking that a little bit further, then how would someone know if they're breathing particularly badly? I mean, you mentioned you have an 11 month old, congratulations. You mentioned, like diaphragmatic breathing, expansion of the rib cage. What's the opposite of that, I suppose?
Speaker 3:tend to breathe into your upper chest, tend to breathe in and out of your mouth. So first off, very big on creating awareness, notice how you breathe during the day. Sitting here on a Zoom meeting, driving around in your car, or are you just sitting there with your mouth hanging open, just kind of panting? Might have more tension in your neck and your shoulders if you're doing that Creates a lot more tension in your body. So really creating that awareness and noticing it first, that's how you're going to find out. Or do you naturally sit there and close your mouth? Do you snore at night? If you're snoring at night, you might be mouth breathing during the day. So it's kind of first creating awareness and then from there you can create changes from you know, knowing what you're already doing. But it creates looking a little bit inside and understanding and what you're doing in the moment.
Speaker 3:And we like to say we like to use what we call transition. So things like you know, as you're going from the home to the office, between meetings or to the gym and back home, that's a great time to check in and notice what you're doing. You know, if you have a boss and they call you into the office, what happens automatically. Maybe you start kind of breathing a little bit more rapidly, maybe you shift to that mouth breathing, just noticing it during situational awareness, kind of understanding what's going on in your body where you might feel tension, watch your breath, notice how you're breathing there, and then we work to shift it, doing different exercises, lower breath, and we can also use things you know, such as a fitness tracker, to look at your respiration rate as well there's a lot of telltale signs.
Speaker 1:Yeah, just seeing if someone's shoulders are going up and down, they're breathing. You know, that's a giant sign of upper chest breathing. And when I was a kid, I actually used to have problems breathing, especially around food. I had a lot of anxiety around food and I would find this thing where I couldn't get over my breath. It just felt like I could never take it on a big enough breath and I just thought I need to take bigger breaths. You know, you just have to breathe faster and bigger and through your mouth. But actually what I was doing was making it worse. You know, what I should have been doing was breathing nose, low and slow, as the oxygen advantage saying goes, slowing down that breath, increasing carbon dioxide, which, yeah, would be uh, which is the boar effect, which is, uh, the hemoglobin won't release oxygen to the cells without the presence of carbon dioxide, and what I was doing was blowing off all my carbon dioxide, which was making me even more breathless. So creating this vicious circle.
Speaker 3:Yeah, we so often get stuck in that way, through that vicious cycle, and I love what you mentioned, the vertical breathing. You know that's a very telltale sign and I'd say you know, 90 percent of people have no idea that's something. So, having just watching yourself breathe in the mirror, are your shoulders moving up and down or can you get lateral rib expansion? You know, if you're driving in your car, maybe you can feel your low back pressing into the seat as you're driving, or if you're sitting at your desk, so kind of creating that awareness there. Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 1:And I had a chat with a guy in my gym or I just noticed he's always chewing gum and I asked him like why are you chewing gum all the time? He's like, oh, it's because of my ADHD. And he was saying, like well, I noticed, when he chews the gum he breathes in and out through his mouth and mouth. Breathing can create ADHD. So it's like he noticed a problem. He tried to solve it with chewing gum, but actually the chewing gum was making the problem worse. What he needed to be doing was closing his mouth, breathing in and out through his nose, slowing his breath down. You can also chew gum with your mouth closed. But yeah, it was quite funny. I remember sort of alex ferguson was always a gum chewer. Alex Alex Ferguson's arguably the best soccer coach. It's certainly his British soccer coach and yeah, he was always fuming. He was always very angry. I wonder if he breathed in and out through his nose, if he would be a little bit more calm, but maybe he wouldn't have had the success he had.
Speaker 2:Yeah, just to correct Rich there, sir Alex Ferguson is definitely the best soccer coach ever. I'm going to take it in a slightly different direction. You said earlier, taylor, that you exercise underwater. For those of us who've never done that, can you explain a bit about what that entails and the benefits?
Speaker 3:we basically take any. You know dumbbells. We like to use heavy D-balls. You know kind of 160 pound, 100 pound, 150 pound, like rubber medicine type balls is what a D-ball is and dumbbells are the main tools that we use and doing almost anything that you could do in the gym. So in the shallow end, deep end, squat, jumps, thrusters, we're swimming, holding weights, we're carrying D-balls, underwater farmers carrying the dumbbells at you and the benefits I mean there's a ton. It's a great way to mix up your training If you're constantly pounding in the gym or you're running a lot or you know it's going to take off. You know less impact on your joints.
Speaker 3:The hydrographic static pressure of the water also is a great way to kind of help clear out lymphatic fluid. It also stresses you in a different way. To kind of help clear out lymphatic fluid. It also stresses you in a different way. We run these workouts here over the summer and people who have never done it but maybe they're great at the gym, great athlete you throw them in water and it's an equalizer.
Speaker 3:In the gym and sports you can typically just push and fight through things In the water. You can't fight the water. You just got to learn to relax and let go of that Navy SEAL saying slow is smooth and smooth is fast. That's a great understanding in the water, yeah. So learn how to control the mind.
Speaker 3:We're doing a lot of breath holding techniques, learning how to push a little further than you think, how to keep calm in those stressful states, and so you get a ton of physical benefits and you get a lot of mental benefits of, for one, just stepping out of your comfort zone, pushing yourself and learning that sometimes you need to just back off a little bit, slow it down, become more efficient, make your body more efficient and with the carries underwater and things like that, you can see people increase their capacity pretty quickly when they start jumping out, the first sign of the feeling of the need to breathe that air hunger building up, just you know, getting a little panicky and bailing, learning I can actually go further than I thought and kind of pushing through, and then maybe by the few sessions they're able to make it all the way around the pool.
Speaker 3:I run most of my stuff out of my house and have a pretty large pool for this area, pretty deep, and it's a whole lot of fun and a great different way to train in the summer and also get you a little vitamin d as well and get you out of the gym lights that we train in so often.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I, I have done this in uh.
Speaker 1:I went to the xbt retreat in hawaii in february and it's incredible, like it's so difficult. I turned up thinking you know, I do CrossFit, I'm probably going to be really good at this, and I really wasn't. Like there's some of the exercises you do, like one of my favorites was basically you're at the side of the pool and you've got two sets of dumbbells and then you push yourself back off the side of the pool, the weights take you down and then you have to like squat down on the bottom of the pool and then jump up, get like a little sip of air at the top, flip back down and then go back down to the floor and you have to do like eight reps. And obviously you make it harder by doing more reps, more weight, or in this pool they had like steps. It was a huge, huge pool and they had like different levels. But yeah, it was amazing when I first started I was just terrible, I do one and then I just dropped the weights and they'd be like so drop the weights, like don't fail.
Speaker 3:That's the number one rule Don't drop the weights. Yeah, I know the way.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I know, I just completely panicked and then, you know, felt very ashamed and things like that. But then you do learn, okay, actually I've got more air than I realized. What like I do. There is a sort of mental hurdle that you have to get over. It's like, yeah, just because I'm getting up like a contraction in my chest, doesn't mean I'm going to suffocate, and because no one's doing, you know, blowing off all their carbon dioxide like someone would with windmoth, you know well, most people aren't passing out. But yeah, how many people do pass out, taylor?
Speaker 3:I have never had anybody pass out. We don't do any breath work, any superventilation, hyperventilation, breath work ever around water. So definitely don't see anyone passing out. You know most people aren't. I don't want to say strong enough mentally but have the ability to push that far, unless you're blowing off so much CO2 where your body is not going to understand the signals properly, and that's when you get those shallow water blackouts and something to be very careful with. That's why, also in the pool, we you know I partner everybody up, so everybody's got a partner. You got me coaching and watching, sometimes another coach depending on how many people, but everybody's got a partner. So there's a lot of safety that goes involved and I wouldn't say don't go home and try anything you might see on Instagram by yourself in the water Always a bad idea.
Speaker 3:And one of the things you mentioned, richard, the squat jumps. I love that because for one, it's a great way to connect your breath and your movement. You really have to focus on getting that breath at the top, then exhale as you go all the way down so by the time you get back up you can get another full breath. Most people try to hold it the whole time and then exhale and inhale right at the top. That's not going to ever work. So you're learning little tricks about efficiency, how to keep your mind under control of those situations, and you know, the first time you do it I think the first time I did it I panicked quite a few times. And still when I try to do stuff in the water, sometimes you panic, that's just. You know. That's kind of the way life is. No matter how many times you've done it, you can still get out a little bit over your skis. Maybe your ego takes over and you're trying to do more than you think you should.
Speaker 1:The water is going to put you in your place pretty quickly, big time yeah and when you're xpt. They have a para rescue person, like effectively a doctor's guy. The awesome guy called luke was there just overseeing us the whole time, because I think they do have people pass out there. They do have people who are mentally strong enough to drown themselves, if you like well, and I mean you can watch in shallow water blackouts.
Speaker 3:They happen instantly with, I mean, somebody looks like they're completely fine and breathing as well. So it's you know, there's a lot of precautions that go into it yeah, I can remember.
Speaker 1:The worst thing that would happen is like doing an exercise like the one I would just mention, because you're pushing yourself up from the bottom of the pool. If you don't quite push yourself hard enough with the, the weights, when you go up for that sip of air, many times I would just sip water and then choke and then drop the weights and be like on the side humiliating myself. It is such a unique challenge but, yeah, such good fun.
Speaker 2:That's very humbling, yeah, big time. Um, can we talk a bit more about like the work you do with people is? It sounds like quite a holistic approach. You're looking at breath, you're looking at testing the body that you know. Mind and mental resilience obviously comes into it a little bit. So could you tell me, like what it's like to work with you, what you're looking to do for people?
Speaker 3:So we help high achieving people take back control of their lives. They have more time, more energy and less stress, and that is our focus. And when we start out assessing, understand we have a pretty detailed questionnaire looking at all areas of their life. You know even things like what excuses do you make when you fail? Why do you tend to not hold up and do things you know kind of create? What are the stories that are in your head? Where are you more stressed out? Work, home? How is your sleeping patterns? Yeah, so we're taking a holistic view and approach and then we take breath to the center. So we're very principles focused. We want you to understand what matters. So we're going to teach you a little bit about the nervous system. We're going to teach you about the breath. We're going to teach you tools that you can take and learn how to keep habits and keep them for a lifetime. We start and we typically focus on how are you breathing functionally, your mechanical breathing patterns. Then we're going to look at your biochemical Richard's mentioned a few times, you know CO2 and the oxygen advantage type stuff doing a little assessment in that area and we work to fix that that everyday breathing pattern. Then we're going to give you tools that are going to help you, you know, downregulate in a stressful situation or maybe upregulate in a stressful situation Because when we look at breath, we're looking at what I call the five pillars of breath. We have everyday breathing, which we've talked about quite a few times. We have grounding techniques, things to calm the nervous system down tends to be longer. Exhale focus You're going to slow the heart rate down, slow the nervous system down, get you in the more of that parathent, sympathetic state. We look at activating techniques, things that are tend to be a little bit more on the faster breathing patterns that are going to ramp you up. You know, instead of reaching for a cup of coffee in the afternoon at two o'clock, which is going to affect your sleep, maybe you can do 30, 45 seconds of a breathing pattern. Some breath holds kind of naturally activate the system. And we look at stress resilience, which tends to be we look at mainly breath holds there. So we kind of work our way through this pattern. Then we ended with a transformational, more what most people would think about breath work a little bit longer. We don't get into that too often but it's something that we can work on with some of our clients. But in that stress resilience is one of the things I like a lot.
Speaker 3:Use a lot of freediving tables. Really focus on understanding your breath, understanding that trigger that happens in your mind, because what's the most stressful thing in our life it's when we're holding our breath. Body's number one goal is respiration. So you start holding your breath, you start really understanding. Okay, what's the story? You tell yourself, how can you kind of calm yourself, just like we do in the water? You can do it statically, laying on the ground and work through those areas.
Speaker 3:And we focus on a lot of that stuff with our one-on-one clients and with our group coaching. So one-on-one, our programs last typically about six months with clients and our group coaching we're about four months that we do Used to do some work with people. Maybe one session. When I first started doing one-on-one work started out with like one or two sessions, realized you know you're not really getting anything out of that. It's very hard to create sustainable habit change and just working with somebody once. That's really our focus there.
Speaker 3:And then we go into companies. We'll teach about stress, teach employees okay, here's some breath techniques you can do. Put them through a breath session, teach them about the nervous system, teach them about stress and then give them usually three techniques they can take home with something to start the day, something to help with sleep and something kind of for stress in the moment. So those are some main areas that we work with in clients and we run workshops and things of that nature we do a lot of our work is virtual or in person as well. The workshops we tend to do in person, but everything else can be done virtually.
Speaker 1:Yeah, one thing I know you talk about is email apnea, and you talked about how holding our breath is one of the most stressful things we can do. So what is email apnea?
Speaker 3:Apnea is breath hold Email, so it's basically a term. You can sit here and Google it, and it is when we're working effectively. Now, email is just when you're answering emails. They found that people tend to just unconsciously hold their breath. Conscious breath holds can do a lot helping us for that resilience, for that stress, that mindset. But when we're unconsciously doing it, we're just putting our body in a more stressed state, creating a little bit more chronic stress, and you'll find that not only with emails but with scrolling through Instagram or staring at your phone. It can just be an unconscious habit that we create and we'll repeat over and over again. So that's another good time to check in and notice your breath. You know notice. Are you actually breathing? Some people might be breathing a little fast or some people might just be doing those breath holds.
Speaker 2:And it's not just a distraction thing, then we're just distracted from focusing on our breath, because it seems to me you should still be able to breathe properly and email right, and it seems surprising that that wouldn't you know so easily distracted.
Speaker 3:You would think we are very distracted and generally in this world, in our modern culture, that's kind of one of the things that happens. But you know, why do we unconsciously do that? I'm not exactly sure, but it is just a pattern that is seen through a lot of research. Yeah, Richard might have through his research he might have a little bit more actual knowledge on what the research says there yeah, I don't know.
Speaker 1:I know it's a thing, I know it's not just something breath workers have made to sell their services. It is definitely a problem. Tech apnea is the other thing I've heard. It's like it's something that's stressful replying to a whatsapp message or whatsapp group, the work thing. People tend to hold their breath because they're a bit anxious and then they, you know, they get lost in the, the portal that is our telephones or our computers, and then they're, you know, they lose connection to their body and things like that.
Speaker 3:So I think it's that and you can and you can look at when you say you get startled, something scares you a little bit. What do you do? Take kind of in and hold. So that's just kind of an unconscious stress trigger. And nowadays we have so much coming at us, I think that's part of it is we're constantly just dealing with information overload. What are those emails saying? Maybe it's something from a client or a boss telling you're fired or you know. And I think that just once it gets ingrained into our system, into our nervous system, it just repeats and repeats. Yeah, that's right.
Speaker 1:Sighing good or bad?
Speaker 3:It depends, like most things. It's not necessarily good or bad, it just it kind of depends. Sighing is natural, it's a great stress relief and it's something we do periodically throughout the day. But you can oversigh. It's something you can easily see with people who tend to run on the anxious front. You know, it's one of the first things I'll look at when meeting with a client for the first time.
Speaker 3:How often are they sighing in the session? Is it constantly hold, breath hold? Then you get kind of this apnea driven fear response and it leads to a little relief because that CO2 is starting to build up. They got to blow it off really quickly. Natural happens. But how often is it happening? If it's happening 15, 20 times in a less than an hour long session or an hour long session, that's probably something we're going to work on and focus on. And if you notice yourself doing that, I would say start creating just a small little hole on the exhale. After you do that sigh, just next breath, just hold it and get used to that CO2 building up in your system. Get used to that air hunger, because it definitely depends. So there's a lot of good with sighing, you know, and I know Huberman's got all the physiological sigh and cyclical sighing.
Speaker 3:Now I would counter that doing five minutes of sighing is not the best thing to help with your stress and anxiety, which is one of the things he'll talk about. Because that's just. That's really no different than just taking a pill. What's the underlying symptoms? Why are you sighing? Why do you need to sigh that much? Like there's a lot more that can go into it. So I would say, if that's like your go-to breath work to help with your stress, you could be perpetuating a problem because you're probably naturally over-breathing through your day. So you need to work on more of air, hunger, tolerance, co2 work, as opposed to just going straight to a cyclical sighing thing over and over again.
Speaker 2:Can I just ask for? Rich always gets me to chirp in if two breath workers are getting too technical. So far, I think I'm with you. The term apnea is that literally when you just stop breathing? And is that, um, always an unconscious thing, or is it sometimes like you know? How does that happen effectively?
Speaker 3:yes, that's when we stop breathing. It can be conscious or unconscious and then you have basically obstructive sleep apnea. We have something blocking our airways when we sleep and that's that creates that, that breath hold we're trying to draw to breathe. There's also central sleep apnea when you sleep, which is basically you lose the drive to breathe because of some stuff going on in your brain. So apneas you can basically think of as stopping breathing and they're conscious and unconscious and, like you know, what free divers use are called apnea tables. So they are holding your breath for a certain number of you know, say, my max breath hold is three minutes, then I'll train by holding my breath for 90 seconds and then get a minute rest and then I'll do it again over and over again. There's a lot of different ways to work on that. Like I would say, something that you can train, but if you're doing it over and over unconsciously, it's something you need to be aware of.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and then, conversely, you've got dyspnea, which is a chronic shortness of breath and chronic hyperventilation. So I had a client recently who, on their O-ring, their breath per minute rate was over 20, which would be dyspnea. And then we brought that down with some exercises to create functional breathing, create carbon dioxide tolerance and things like that. It is really complicated, the whole oxygen advantage thing thing, and a lot of it is counterintuitive. So is it all making sense to you, andy? Is anything we should clarify?
Speaker 2:absolutely. I just wanted to be crystal clear on that definition of apnea which keeps popping up. So yeah, I think that's crystal clear. I wanted to ask a question. You mentioned, I think, when you started your business, you had a trailer with a sauna in. Obviously that must mean you believe in that quite extensively. So can you talk to us about why we should disorner?
Speaker 3:uh well, sauna, I mean the research on saunas. It's one of the better things that you can do for overall health, and I'm big on traditional barrel saunas, not a big fan of infrared. They don't get hot enough. Most of the research is on traditional saunas over 180 degrees, the Finnish sauna with the rocks, that's what I have. I think it's great on metabolic health, cardiovascular health, improving endurance, improving strength training. It's a way to kind of trick your body to still think it's working out. You know, great for stress relief. It's also good for helping with circadian rhythm, along with the cold there as well, because temperature is one of the indicators for sleep. So there's a lot of benefits overall for sauna yeah, big time.
Speaker 1:So many benefits, like for depression as well, and all cause mortality and alzheimer's and things. I think it's one of the healthiest things you can do. The infrared versus dry sauna debate is one I I'm still going back and forth because I have an infrared sauna and I do try and get it gets up to 175, but yeah, most that's pretty warm for an infrared sauna. Right, it is because, yeah, if I go in the afternoon the sun goes like right through the glass. So the benefit the sun plus the, the actual panels, is is heating it up.
Speaker 1:But I do wonder whether it's sort of the, you know, absence of evidence is an evidence of absence thing. I know that most of the research on sauna is done on the dry saunas, the finished saunas, the ones that get hot. I would love to see a study, you know, comparing a clear, light infrared sauna 130 degrees fahrenheit versus a infrared sorry, regular sauna at at 200, because I know that yeah, all the evidence says like, yeah, it works at 185, but I don't know if there's any evidence that shows it's not working when you're doing 130. Is that, is that right?
Speaker 3:well, not necessarily that it's not working. I know, um, I've read some stuff recently about the way infrared sauna heats you up is so unnatural as well by heating you up from the inside that can cause some issues. So there's a lot of debate on that front. Personally, I think infrared saunas got a lot of. They're just a lot cheaper and I think they which made it be easier to put into facilities, and so those facilities then turn around and say this is better. And another reason I'm not a big fan of them is you can use electronics and stuff in there. You can't use your phone in my sauna. When you get in, it's going to get shut off within like a few minutes. So I think another benefit of being in things like sauna is getting away from everything that's coming at you. So you could be getting the same benefits by sitting in there and watching TV or scrolling on Instagram, but probably not minutes, but when it's down at 140.
Speaker 1:I can stay in there for half an hour and I'm dripping with sweat. I feel like I'm certainly sweating a lot more. You know, sort of the because of the amount of time it's. It's easier in that regard and I know some people like what's his name? Brent bauer. He has this huge like in sauna group detox protocol group on facebook and he says like it's actually better to do the lower heat because you're more parasympathetic and to detox you need to be in the parasympathetic state, whereas if you are in a 200 degree sauna you're extremely stressed. Your body is in fight or flight. It's not detoxing in that environment, it's just trying to survive and maybe that's better for heart health or resilience and heat tolerance and heat shock proteins, but maybe it's not so good for detox.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I mean I'm not sure on that. I would say I don't know. I would say you can take a traditional sauna and turn it down, because sometimes I do that because it's nice to stay in longer and do more movement things along those natures as well. So that could be the case. I have to say I don't know exactly.
Speaker 1:To be continued.
Speaker 2:Moving from hot to cold. Why should we get ourselves cold? How cold are we talking? How do we do it? Et cetera.
Speaker 3:How cold. Well, I would say that also depends on how adapted you are. There's tons of physical benefits, just like with the sauna. It helps with your immune system, helps with inflammation, helps with your mood anxiety. As I mentioned, it can help with setting the circadian rhythm. So there's a lot of physical benefits there the cold shock, proteins and things along those lines.
Speaker 3:But really putting yourself in kind of stressful situation, learning to breathe your way down, kind of come out of that stressful state, realize you can do hard things, realize you can do something uncomfortable. I tell people to start with a cold shower. Don't worry about any time, just get in there and don't use that. When you turn on the cold shower which I can say sometimes is harder than getting into an ice bath and you hit the cold shower, what's your first reaction? Get out of here right now, turn it back to warm. Don't do that. Don't get out until you can give yourself three slow, controlled breaths. Once you do that, all right, step out If you want to go back in or you want to stay longer. But at first just get three controlled breaths and then see how you feel and you can kind of gradually adapt your way up there If you've never done it.
Speaker 3:We use really cold. You know in our protocols that we have. Here we are. The cold tubs are 30-ish degrees. I've got an ice barrel, I've got a trough and then I've got a cold plunge with circulating water and the cold plunge is 40-ish. The other two are about 30, and the sauna's 200 plus.
Speaker 3:So it's pretty cold and it's also not something that I say people should do every day. It is a stressor on the body. It is something that is difficult. So it's something you know. I do it a couple of times a week. I have a lot of clients who come and do it about once a week, but I don't think you need to do it every day. I think occasionally, yeah, you want to test yourself and say I'm going to do 30 days in a row of getting in the cold tub. That's great, but it's not. You know, it's just like anything. It is a stressor on your body. It's a, you know, something you need to adapt to and there's contraindications as well. You know serious heart conditions, thyroid problems, they're all can be contraindications on how you can adapt to that cold. It causes a shock response.
Speaker 3:So with anything it always goes with depends In this world that we live in. You just hear a lot of absolutes on both sides when you look on Instagram and the internet, and so I tend to skew towards the middle of it. It depends on who you are and what's your goal with it. Do you want to do it? If you're a bodybuilder, you probably don't want to do it right after you work out. If you're a regular Joe and you're just wanting to get into the gym and it's going to make you feel better, you can do it right after you work out. Losing that little bit of strength gain is not going to matter as much. So it always just depends, and I would say start and do something, because our bodies were not meant to sit in 70 degree weather air conditioning all day long. 70 degree weather air conditioning all day long. We were meant to go back and forth between temperature extremes, but you got to work on a little bit of adaptation to get there. I think.
Speaker 1:So you disagree with Carnivore Aurelius? Did you see his post saying that ice baths are terrible because it's like putting your body into a plane crash? The amount of stress you're going to and we wouldn't want to be in plane crashes every day.
Speaker 3:I think that's some of what he says is true in that post. But being so absolute is wrong. It depends, you know, it depends. It's not great for everybody, but doing some amount of cold exposure I think it's good and it can help people, especially mentally and on the mood, boost, feeling, learning how to control yourself in stressful environments, doing something uncomfortable, I think is a big added benefit.
Speaker 3:And but you know, I'd also say people who feel they have to do the cold every day. Maybe you shouldn't, maybe you should take a step back and think about, okay, why do I have to do this? But it's a stressor, just like anything. Just like a workout's a stressor. You could say doing a hard workout's like putting yourself into a car crash or killing yourself every day. So I mean, you could kind of put it with anything like that. So I think there's a little bit more nuance in that type of statement. But yeah, everybody doesn't necessarily need to do it. And I would say, if you're not going to get into a cold, start doing a cold shower and learn how to control your breath in that stressful environment, and everybody can get benefit out of that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and for people in the UK the water tends to be cold enough to get a pretty cold shower yeah for sure I was just thinking that Less so in Memphis.
Speaker 3:Yeah, in Memphis, Tennessee, it's not very cold. It's at least until the winter.
Speaker 1:It's definitely not too cold right now but there is a thing now you can get. It's kind of like a mesh bag that you can put over the head of your shower and then you put ice cubes in it and you basically, yeah, you turn your shower into an ice shower and I think that's a pretty cheap and easy hack. Really, I've never seen that. Yeah, you'll get targeted on Instagram now.
Speaker 3:Yeah, my phone's sitting over here and it's hearing me the next time I open it up.
Speaker 2:I'm sure I'm going to get something later on this afternoon. Yeah, I think the UK will definitely be cold enough and then, in terms of you're just trying to, if you wanted to progress, to maybe putting yourself in colder water, is it best to build up just time each day, or time every couple of days? What are we looking to do here?
Speaker 3:I would go to like a week. Once you kind of feel comfortable at a certain temperature, then you increase it and stay a little bit longer and stay a little bit longer, you know, at the temperatures we're doing 30 degrees. I don't really like people staying in longer than five minutes. We typically stay in three, three-ish minutes, but most of the people are cold, adapted and have been doing it for a while. If you've never done it.
Speaker 3:50 degrees Fahrenheit, which is roughly about 10 degrees Celsius, I think somewhere in that range, and you know a good rule of thumb there is like you can go to. So 10 degrees Celsius is about 10, you want to stay in about 10 minutes if you can adapt to that. So you kind of go to the degree Celsius for a time domain as well. I'm kind of trying to work up there and a lot of the older research was 50 to 60 degrees, but they were putting people in to cold tubs for, like I think, one of the things they would. Just you sat in a lawn chair in a cold 60 degree pool for like an hour. Nobody can do that. That's one of the reasons we ramp up or ramp down the temperature and take the time down as well. It's a little bit more intense, but it's kind of gradually. As you feel comfortable, you can lower the temperature, is what I would say.
Speaker 1:Fair enough. One question I have that I expect the answer is again it depends, but what have you got against fitness trackers?
Speaker 3:them. I think I had the first Oura Ring, which I thought was great. That was the first time I really ever tracked my sleep. I think that was the only one tracking sleep that I can remember, back in 2017, 2018. What I think can be a problem is people become wedded to the information and from there they only feel good if their tracker tells them they're feeling good or they have to burn an X number of calories a day. And the problem is most of this stuff is not very accurate. Even now I've heard of people doing studies where they will put on the same tracker on different risks and get two totally different readings from sleep HIV, everything being different.
Speaker 3:They're relatively good on your heart rate, on your steps, so if you've never worn one for one, getting an understanding of how many steps you're actually taking a day, we have a lot of clients who are active athletes but they might sit at a desk all day. So while you work out one hour a day, if you get 4,000 steps, that's not really you're not having an active lifestyle. So getting a base understanding of that. Or maybe your resting heart rate is upper 60s, 70s, when ideally you want to be in much lower for your active, healthy person Knowing your respiration rate. I think it's great when you first start using those. Like you said, richard, earlier you had the client who was over 20. That's exceptionally high for a respiration rate when you're just sitting there. I was actually trying to think, man, have I seen anybody just have a resting respiration rate? When you're just sitting there, I was actually trying to think I'm like man, have I seen anybody just have a resting respiration rate? No, I get worried when they're around, when they're getting close to 20, that's definitely mean you're in a chronically stressed state.
Speaker 3:So getting some understanding the sleep data, the sleep stages I think from some of the research I've read, they're about 60% accurate, so but they are very good at telling you how long you're actually asleep and how long you're a bed. So getting an understanding of your sleep efficiency. I think that helps.
Speaker 3:And when you get stressed out because your data on your watch or your Oura Ring or your Whoop isn't telling you what you want to hear and that's upsetting you because maybe you thought your HRV should be XYZ and you see it, or it said you had bad sleep data, take it off Like what good is it doing if it's adding more stress in your life. So I think it. You know there's great times to use it, but if you become too worried about that data, then that's problem. It's better to get a better understanding of what's actually going on inside. So when you start working and using the data and like, oh okay, this is how I actually feel, maybe when I've gotten eight plus hours of sleep, this is how I feel when I am well rested or my heart rate's relatively low kind of getting a better understanding of what's going on inside of you.
Speaker 1:I think is very subjective. I think it reads some people's sleep really well. I think it reads Natalia's sleep, my wife's very easily because she sleeps pretty deeply and she's a champion sleep score every night, 95 plus. But mine is sometimes in the low 70s my sleep efficiency, and I did calibrate it with the DreamSleep. So sleep is an eeg sleep tracker. So it's actually using first-hand metrics, it's actually reading your brain waves, whereas the aura in the whoop they're using second-hand data and my aura gave me like a 78 sleep efficiency and the dream sleep gave me like 92. So that was when I really sort of lost faith in my aura rings ability to track sleep efficiency. But yeah, as say, I think for some people it can be very good to, you know, affirm that they're good sleepers, like Natalia and some people it can make them think they have insomnia when they don't.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and when you look at a lot of those things that well, how they do HRV, how they do their recovery scores or something, they're all just an algorithm and they change those algorithms all the time and don't tell you. They're all just an algorithm and they change those algorithms all the time and don't tell you. So it's like all right, you know why did my stuff suddenly shift?
Speaker 2:What could be? They just updated the software and change the algorithm. Yeah, what is? I've seen this sleep efficiency metrics and it's basically total sleep as a factor of total time in bed, if I'm not mistaken. So what is the problem? If you just want to lie in bed for longer, even though your sleep might be, you know, you might still get eight hours if you're in bed for 10, 10 hours or eight. So why does sleep efficiency matter?
Speaker 1:I think, yeah, if you're just having a lie in, then that's going to distort the data and if, when I do have a lie in, I will edit it in oring to take out that lie in. But it's more like, well, I'm having these gaps in my sleep in the middle of the night when I'm trying to be asleep, so that's when it's. You know it's a problem because I did used to wake up many times, used to go to the toilet sort of four or five times in the night and then struggled to get back to sleep. So I did have a problem with sleep efficiency. But yeah, you are right, if you spend a load of time, you know, reading a book and it thinks you're asleep.
Speaker 1:That's gonna distort it, yeah but you can map, you can manually edit that okay one last question for me, taylor.
Speaker 2:Where do you, where do we find you?
Speaker 3:you can find my website is wwwsymmetrylive, on Instagram, at symmetrylive or at Taylor underscore. Underscore Somerville Three easiest places, awesome.
Speaker 1:And so what's next for you? Got anything exciting lined up.
Speaker 3:Right now we've got a new group coaching cohort that starts on September 10th, Got some good corporate work that we're working on and then really start getting ready for next year, maybe turning some of the group stuff and what we do into a more online course. We use a lot of recorded modules as part of that, so that's something we're contemplating and working on. And then you know it's a lot chasing around a little baby 45, so I'm an old dad and I just continue and watch her grow.
Speaker 2:Awesome. Yeah well, good luck with all of that, and it's been a pleasure talking to you. Thanks for trying to get people more healthy and for giving us some practical tips for our own lives as well.
Speaker 1:Thank you for having me guys me as we're going to talk about how burnt out you are andy, how terrible you look. Not this again, we are recording, andy, yeah, okay, yeah, we are recording. I, I did. I did just bring that on you.
Speaker 1:But one thing I do want to say a point I do make is this sort of impossible situation that some people get stuck in with something like burnout or with taking control of their health. Sometimes you see people and they're really stressed out, they're not sleeping, they've got a digestive problem, all these things, things. And me, as you know, a holistic person, is telling them you know, try meditation, try breath work, to try all these things, and they're always just like oh, I haven't got the time, I haven't got the money, you know, lucky, isn't it nice for you to be able to do breath work? That's the kind of attitude you get with some people. It's gonna be really frustrating because you can see someone's well, they are complaining all the time about their health, but then they won't do anything about it.
Speaker 1:There's there's the one type of person. The other problem, the other situation you get is when someone is trying to take care of their health but then everyone around them is sabotaging them. It is the, you know, the overstressed mom, the you know the burnt out father and you know, let's say, in those two examples, the the overstressed mom. Everyone needs her to keep doing her thing, everyone needs her to keep burning herself out for, for the family or in the, the corporate environment, the boss doesn't care about your health or your chronic fatigue, they just care about their, their bottom line, and so, yeah, you can get made to feel guilty for taking time for yourself in certain scenarios. So there are many, many challenges to to, yeah, taking care of your health.
Speaker 2:And what I liked is that taylor um had walked the walk. You know he obviously works with a lot of um high achievers and he sounds like he was a very high achiever as well, isn't and is now a completely um in a completely different field achieving, and I think there's that authenticity of like he knows what it's like to sort of feel that stress and also how to alleviate it. So I was really really cool guy and learned a lot. I like the. I love the practical implications. I'm actually going to give a cold shower a try. Moved away from cold water submersion probably when it got I didn't have an ice bath anymore, but I will try that tomorrow, building into that why not good man.
Speaker 1:Enjoy the british winter as it's coming all right, where do they?
Speaker 2:find us andy great question instagram at andy sam. At the breath geek, richard has a website richard l blake. And then it's laughing through the pain, navigating wellness on all podcast platforms that's right.
Speaker 1:Like subscribe, write us a review. We do read them out sometimes. And yeah, sign up to the newsletter as well, because that is gonna be coming at you more frequently. All right, thanks, andy. Thanks rich bye. Thanks, listener yeah probably thank the listener as well yeah probably as well, all right, bye.