Laughing Through The Pain: Navigating Wellness

Breathwork Under the Microscope: Is the Science Killing the Magic? With Guy Fincham

• Richard & Andy • Episode 45

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Ever wondered how a simple breath could transform your life? Join us as we unlock the secrets of breathwork with our insightful guest, Guy Fincham from the University of Leeds. Guy takes us on his personal journey through health challenges and academic rigor, highlighting the authentic and methodical approach he brings to researching breathwork. From dealing with chronic fatigue syndrome to exploring the Wim Hof Method and gentler practices like Qigong and yoga, Guy's journey is a testament to the potential healing power of breathwork.

Our conversation doesn't shy away from critically examining the science behind these practices. Guy candidly addresses the limitations and criticisms of his studies, emphasizing the necessity of informed consent and the importance of safe practices, especially for individuals with specific health conditions. Discover the intriguing findings from his PhD studies, which challenge assumptions about the effectiveness of popular breathwork techniques. We also delve into the complexities and nuances of measuring breathwork's impact on mental and physical health, offering a balanced perspective on its transformative potential.

We also tackle the exciting research frontiers in breathwork, exploring its role in sports performance and its capacity to induce altered states of consciousness. Guy shares insights into ongoing projects, including research on breathwork’s benefits for menopausal symptoms and social anxiety. Our engaging discussion touches on the spiritual roots and cultural significance of these practices, ensuring a well-rounded exploration of their profound impact. Whether you're a seasoned practitioner or a curious newcomer, this episode promises to enrich your understanding of breathwork's remarkable potential.

00:00 Introduction and Beginnings
02:14 Discovering Breathwork
03:06 Healing Through Breathwork
03:36 Research and Academic Journey
04:24 Understanding Breathwork Practices
06:57 Mechanisms of Conscious Connected Breathing
23:38 Challenges and Criticisms in Breathwork Research
27:32 Introduction to Jack Kruse
28:12 Current Hot Topics in Research
29:23 The Importance of Breathwork
30:18 Research Questions and Focus Areas
30:55 Historical and Cultural Roots of Breathwork
32:31 Gaps in Breathwork Research
38:23 Breathwork and Sports
39:24 Challenges in Clinical Trials for Breathwork
48:30 Future Directions and Projects
50:50 Conclusion and Contact Information

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Andy Esam
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Laughing Through The Pain: Navigating Wellness
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Speaker 1:

Rich, you've found another unicorn, Someone doing worthwhile breathwork, research.

Speaker 2:

Oh, what do you mean?

Speaker 1:

another one oh, I was thinking you would be the first one.

Speaker 2:

No, stop it. You didn't have to say that.

Speaker 1:

Well, yeah, I did, because you WhatsAppped me about it. I have to mention that.

Speaker 2:

But no, really interesting guy.

Speaker 1:

What's he called? Where's he come from?

Speaker 2:

Well, you've just said his name, guy. He's an interesting guy. What's he called? Where's he coming from? Well, you've just said his name, guy is. He's an interesting guy. He's one of the interesting guys. His name is guy guy fincham. He is a university of leeds graduate. Way, you know, all the top lads are me, kia starmer, um, tolking um and guy fincham. Um, he is doing proper research on breathwork. The world needs it and he's doing it in a very rigorous way. So we're going to find out things like why he's getting so much criticism for his research, aren't we?

Speaker 1:

Yes, it's a really nice integrity about him in terms of being very upfront about limitations of his studies and how some of them didn't necessarily show what he thought they were going to, and that kind of brings a little bit more trust to what he's doing.

Speaker 2:

Um kudos yeah, he's uh talks about his lived experience of breathwork because he's got his own issues with uh. He's had his health, own health challenges that he did breath work for and kind of came to the conclusion that he was doing the wrong type of breath work for his condition and how that led him to different types of breath work and different modalities to research.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I think it's sort of the um following his uh, his heart. I suppose he's voting with his feet, isn't he? He's like dedicating his life to researching what has been so impactful for him. So, um, yeah, there's again. It comes back to that authenticity. It's been um.

Speaker 2:

It's really interesting conversation yeah, and it is great to have a proper academic on, because you know well one because no, that wasn't.

Speaker 2:

I wasn't saying I'm not a proper academic no, I mean it's good to have an academic breath worker on another one. Uh, because, as great as most breath workers are, there are a lot of breath workers out there who, um, just don't have such a deep understanding. I mean, there can't be many people who have as deep an understanding of the mechanisms behind breathwork than Guy. So I think we're really getting you know A grade five star information in this podcast. Totally agree, enjoy, hey everyone. Are you ready to kickstart your health journey and experience true transformation? Let me introduce you to a brand new program I'm thrilled to be a part of, called Momentum.

Speaker 2:

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Speaker 1:

Guy, thank you very much for joining us. Simple one to start you off, hopefully.

Speaker 3:

How did you get into breathwork? So it's a fairly long story.

Speaker 3:

I'll try and give it the medium story. It all started from my undergraduate degree. I was introduced to meditation during my exchange year in UC Berkeley in California. I just became really interested in mindfulness, meditation, Buddhism, and I was actually originally studying international business and when I completed my degree I moved to China to study Mandarin and whilst I was there I was also working in a startup and I didn't really feel extrinsically sort of motivated and my health wasn't the best it could have been and I just I don't know, I just didn't feel like I had a clear purpose. But I was always interested in meditation and mindfulness and I looked into research in that topic and there were people such as professor john cabot zinn in america and then professor mark williams in oxford and in Oxford, and they were conducting research on meditation and mindfulness and I thought, oh wow, that's something I like to do. Why don't I devote my life to that, to researching meditation and mindfulness, Something that I'm interested in? So I applied for a master's conversion in psychology at St Andrews in Scotland. I left China, went to India and Sri Lanka on my way back and took part in some very intensive silent meditation retreats just to become more familiar with the topic.

Speaker 3:

When I got to St Andrews I was completing my master's, I was starting my thesis on meditation, and at the end of the first semester I then developed chronic fatigue syndrome. So it forced me to take a two-year leave of absence from a one-year master's program. So it turned into a three-year master's basically. But during this time it was also, I think the pandemic happened a year into my leave of absence. And during this time I came across a guy called Wim Hof. He's quite famous, obviously. And I came across a guy called Wim Hof he's quite famous obviously and I came across him through a paper. Actually it was a very famous paper in a really big journal called the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and I just it really grasped my attention because this paper was basically saying you know, you can influence your own physiology, your own immune response through breathing. You can alter, you know what's going on with your nervous system just through the breath. And that blew my mind and so I just became obsessed with breath work.

Speaker 3:

I kind of moved away from the observation of breath in mindfulness practices to control a breath in breath work. And then I was listening to a Joe Rogan podcast one night and James Nestor was on the offer of breath and he mentioned people, people like Richard Brown and Patricia Gerbarg, these medical doctors and psychiatrists in New York, and I trained with them as a breathwork teacher and took part in all of their workshops and practiced frequently and actually managed to cure my chronic fatigue syndrome. Breathwork was a big part of that. There were many other things as well, but breathwork was key to my own personal healing journey. And then I decided to completely switch up my research ambitions. I found a doctoral fellowship from the sasakawa young leaders fellowship fund in tokyo in japan and they funded me for three years for my phd at the school of psychology at sussex and, yeah, this is the first you know sort of fellowship of its kind in the uk and it was, yeah, solely focused on breath work, and I I got my PhD recently, about a month ago Congratulations.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, thank you.

Speaker 3:

And now moving over to Brighton and Sussex Medical School to conduct postdoctoral research. So yeah, it's been quite the journey but it's been good.

Speaker 1:

Amazing If I could go back back. So rich will probably know this, but I don't know if many of our listeners will. I mean hearing that breathwork actually helped. You know chronic fatigue syndrome. How, what does that practice look like? How do you think that's doing that?

Speaker 3:

yeah. So originally, as I said, I got into breathwork through wim hof method and this. You know these are rounds of cyclic hyperventilation with retention and initially I was finding that this kind of practice was helping me with my relapses and in hindsight, it was probably just the fact that, you know, I was just dumping loads of adrenaline and it was just helping me manage life. In that moment, you know, I was very stressed so I actually told my, I told uh, richard brown and patricia gerberg about this.

Speaker 3:

You know I'm practicing the wim hof method and they said, well, maybe long term you know that maybe that isn't what you need, maybe you need to focus on more gentle practices, to practices from qigong, from yoga, from all around the world, more accessible practices with breathing and movement and some meditation. So it was kind of those modalities which helped the most with me in terms of a long-term sort of healing, instead of just maybe just sticking, kind of like the fast sort of healing, instead of just maybe just sticking kind of like the fast-paced breathing might just be like kind of sticking a plaster on my symptoms in the moment, just helping me deal with what trying to make sense with my life at that moment. But it's really the sort of the accessible practices that really, like, probably shifted my my recovery in the right direction long term yeah, that aligns with a previous guest and a listener of our show, james dowler.

Speaker 2:

He I did my conscious connected breathing breathwork training with him and breath guru and he had chronic fatigue and he kind of realized, yeah, the over breathing, high ventilation breathwork stuff is not so good for him and his chronic fatigue. And he's yeah, he thinks it's more about nervous system regulation for him. And so you've done a lot of research, guy. That's why we've got you on here as a a person who's done more research than I think maybe anyone else on breathwork. I'm not sure if you've got the most published studies, but I you haven't. You can correct me there. You can answer that you don't think so?

Speaker 2:

okay, well for this, for our listeners, yeah you're up there, you're in the, you're in my top three, um, but there's so many mechanisms of actions on conscious connected breath work, so I do also want to come to coherent breathing and wim hof later, but conscious connected breath work, that's the main one I teach, that's the one I did my research on. So, one, how do you define conscious connected breathwork? And two, what do you think the main mechanism of action is?

Speaker 3:

So conscious connected breathing, ccb is Kapalabhati or Bhaskrika, where you do it very rapidly but a breathing rate where you can either increase the rate or depth, so it isn't normal ventilation, so it's high ventilation breath work. So it's high ventilation breath work. You know you're actually blowing off enough, you know to kind of get these sort of effects that you can get from conscious connected breathing. But the key is there is no, you know, there's no pause. So after a while, it's not uncommon, for you know, after five, ten minutes of doing it, it's not uncommon for practitioners to report that the breath kind of becomes warm because there's no stop start in between it. So that that's a good place to to get to for practitioners with conscious connected breathing, in my opinion. Don't know what you think, but the mechanisms, there's so many potential ones In terms of basic physiology the fact that you're blowing off CO2, and CO2 is a vasodilator, so therefore your blood vessels are constricting, so you get vasoconstriction because there's an absence of CO2. And yeah, this basically reduces cerebral blood flow to the brain and this can cause hyper excitability. There's so many different things that could be happening. We don't know, but we've, you know, kind of hypothesized in one of our papers, from Alessandro Colasanti and Ema Katar, that essentially what you're doing through this hyperventilation or rapid sort of intense, conscious, connected breathing, your brain is making predictions of your bodily you know, your body, the environment, what's going on with your body, and your body is sending interoceptive feedback to the brain, right, right. So your body's predicting you know everything. It wants to keep everything in a stable manner. So it's sensing what's happening in the body and if what's happening in the body isn't what the brain wants, it will try and correct that. So you're over-breathing, you're sending this interoceptive signal from the lungs to the brain saying you know you're hyperventilating, the brain wants to stop that. It wants to say you know, stop over breathing. So you can get this mismatch between what your brain's saying, what your body's saying, and this results in something like a. It's called a you know, prediction error. Um, you get prediction error overload and what we've kind of hypothesized is that through your brain taking top-down control and discounting your intercepted bodily signals, you are, you know, you're, you're ignoring what's going on in your body. You're causing all of these changes. You know, respiratory alkalosis, ph going up, major changes in your excitability in the brain. You're ignoring all of that and this might be why it kind of causes a sort of depersonalization in a positive way.

Speaker 3:

People many people report sort of oceanic boundlessness becoming one you know. And people some people report sort of oceanic boundlessness becoming one you know, and some people report you know kind of out-of-body experiences and instead of it being a negative, it actually turns out to be a positive experience for many people who practice CCB depression and health, anxiety or fatigue, where you might become hyper-focused on what's going on in your body. You're actually doing the opposite with the breathwork because, discounting it completely, what's happening in the body, you're kind of causing this kind of for lack of a better word shit show in the body and and, uh, your brain doesn't know what's going on you're, and you're just ignoring it because you're taking top-down control and you're overriding the interoceptive, um, you know, sort of signals, instructions that your body's sending back to your brain. But then again there's so many other mechanisms as well.

Speaker 3:

But I think from a sort of you know, overall perspective, if you want to just look at it from a like a whole sort of system level, I think that's a good place to start, as opposed to just being like oh yeah, maybe it's um serotonin, maybe you're, or maybe, oh, it's dmt. You know, like there's so many things, but they're like, they're very small. I'm trying to think, I think we're trying to think even more, so, bigger picture, what could be going on? And it's not. Yeah, so it's kind of like a disruption of this metacognitive layer and as it so you kind of you no longer have this metastability and yeah, I think that could plausibly be what's going on but you need more research to do all these things.

Speaker 2:

Sorry for the long answer. No, it's great. The DMT one annoys me a little bit because it's like the sexiest one, but it's the one that the basic breath worker just loves to to shout about being the active ingredient in ayahuasca.

Speaker 2:

So it's dimethyltryptamine and all every breath worker who's just. You know, they've only ever listened to podcasts and done a weekend training. They're like dmt, dmt, but it's. Yeah, it's so much more complicated than that. Maybe it is dmt, maybe there is some dmt as well, but I don't think there's much evidence for that. I really like that explanation, guy. I also liked martha haveneth's one that she did with robin carhart harris, the sort of the similarities with serotonin. I can't explain it right now, but yeah, is there a paper people can find with your explanation for that?

Speaker 3:

yeah, sure, so we published a review in yeah, neuros, neuroscience and bio behavioral reviews. So and it's the first part of the paper it's high ventilation breath work. So that's all you need to google and it gives a gives you a long list of different types of practices and it touches very much on conscious connected breathing, on ccb, and you know ccb conscious connected breathing is used in other kind of forms of breath work like, for example, rebirthing or holotropic breath work. It in you know, overall, kind of broadly speaking, people have their different sort of practices but and different names for them. But I think generally what we're talking about when we're talking about high ventilation breath work is conscious connecting breathing. But again, there are so many elements that go with conscious connected breathing right set, setting, facilitator, the priming, what you do at the start, integration, what you do after. I think they're just as important as the breath work itself and the breathing is just a catalyst for change, in my opinion what advice would you give?

Speaker 1:

it just occurred to me what advice would you give to someone thinking about doing this kind of breath work? Because some of the things you've described, and certainly some of my experiences in my first session, were actually quite difficult. You know, there's weird stuff going on. As you said, it's a bit of a shit show. So how, yeah, what advice would you give to people looking into this?

Speaker 3:

so, yeah, you raise a really good point. That's a great question. I think the most important thing, yeah, is to know what you could potentially be getting yourself into right. So I think if breathwork teachers who are offering these sort of classes aren't, you know, providing some kind of informed consent and giving you a list of potential contraindications beforehand, then I think that's a red flag.

Speaker 3:

In my opinion, you can people with epilepsy, history of epilepsy, for example this this isn't a good idea because hyperventilation lowers the threshold for an epileptic seizure, because I was just talking about the neuro excitability in the brain. It's, you know, synonymous in a way with an epileptic seizure. So, you know, pay much more attention if you're, you have a history of that or you're prone to that. Hyperventilation can cause, you know, panic attacks. So panic disorder is is another contraindication. Read, read into, you know what people are saying on their websites or what courses they're providing. Just make sure that they they are like giving complete, the complete, full picture and obviously taking safety very seriously. And obviously you don't do any of this stuff in an environment which isn't safe. That's the first thing to say. It has to be in a safe environment.

Speaker 3:

But, yeah, it's funny because my favorite sort of practice are these slow and gentle ones, but I still came into it through a fairly intense practice with a wim hof method where there were breath holds in there, but it was still pretty intense. So I think it's good to kind of start slow in breath work. You know, even I didn't do that myself, but in hindsight maybe it could have been better to you know. Sort of start with these gentle practices or learn to walk before you run, you know um. So yeah, I think it's just maybe play around with the more simple practices first and then, when you're comfortable with you know controlling your breath in certain ways, then it might unlock another level to your sort of conscious connected breathing practice so I've got a nice segue for that.

Speaker 2:

So coherent breathing, that would be classed as a gentler one, but you had a study that found that didn't work. Can you tell us about that?

Speaker 3:

yeah, sure. So, yeah, I mean, yeah, that's a, that'd be a journalist title for sure, and I've been getting feedback from people about the kind of way I've presented these findings but essentially what we did for that study it was the first empirical study of my PhD and we had one group do coherent breathing at five and a half breaths per minute, five and a half seconds in, five and a half seconds out, with no pauses. So in a sense in in a conscious kind of breathing way, but just not at a speed which would elicit the sort of changes that you get in high ventilation breath work. And we compared this to breathing at 12 breaths per minute as the placebo group and we took, you know, standard mental health measures before and after. It was four weeks, it was all online, there were 400 people and, yeah, we saw decreases in stress, saw improvements in in well-being, saw decreases in anxiety and depressive symptoms at post intervention and at follow-up. So four weeks post intervention, four at follow-up. So four weeks post-intervention, four weeks follow-up. But there were no differences between the groups on the improvements.

Speaker 3:

So as a good clinical trialist, you have to say you know the most. The simplest explanation to this is that coherent breathing as it was delivered in this setting 10 minutes a day, online, unguided self-care for four weeks is no more effective than a placebo of 12 breaths per minute. But there's always nuance there and there could be many other explanations for that. I have a bunch of qualitative data that I supervised someone on analyzing and you know it shows, going through these responses, you know it shows that people had really good experiences with both of the practices. So it kind of draws into question. Was the control group just in itself through, just focusing on one's breathing for 10 minutes a day for four weeks, just also beneficial as well? Um, and you know know I was probably guilty of having an overly reductionist approach to this, but my sort of interest was just around was reducing it down to the breath rate just to see if there was a difference?

Speaker 3:

and in this case there wasn't coherent breathing just for my benefit is usually used to just calm the nervous system yeah, I would say so, I think, breathing sort of, if you do equal inhales, equal exhales, it's more of a balancing. And then obviously, if you extend the exhale, I think that's a more conducive to deeper relaxation and for and you know kind of down shifting. So for me I would practice, you know, equal inhale, equal exhale in the daytime and then at night I would keep increasing the exhale out until it gets to kind of a one-two ratio.

Speaker 2:

And you ran another study on Wim Hof breathing that also didn't outperform a placebo. Tell us about that.

Speaker 3:

So I took a very similar design. Uh, this is my second empirical studies with the phd and, yeah, the primary time point of post-intervention, we got the same, the same sort of results with, you know, the decreases in stress, but no difference in in the magnitude of the difference between the groups. So again, as a good clinical trialist you have to say the most posimonious or the most simplest explanation is that the placebo was not more effective. The intervention was not more effective than the, than the placebos. In this study the intervention was all online, unguided. You know salpalp. Essentially it was three weeks, 20 minutes per day, the wim hof style breathing was a day, the wim hof dilation, with retention increasing from 45 to 90 seconds. So 45 seconds, 60 seconds, um, with 15 breaths per minute, pretty short holds.

Speaker 3:

We blinded the trial and put it in a way that everyone was, everyone thought that they were doing uh, fast breath work and it was all done through the mouth.

Speaker 3:

There were no differences, you know, in terms of the same for the co-reading study. There were no differences in the expectancy and the credibility of the interventions and people weren't sure if they were in the intervention or the control. So we designed some really stellar placebos for this and yeah, it's just, I think it's just a good practice, I think it's a good thing to do in early on and in a field where hype can kind of, you know, outpace evidence and evidence bases. In hindsight, I mean, I wish I could have had the sessions, at least for the first one, delivered in person or on Zoom, just to ensure that participants were performing the interventions appropriately and they were adhering to it. But alas, you know you don't have infinite study resources as a phd student. But my interest is moving more towards you know, doing the in-person, or at least you know facilitators being present for the first session, at least just to ensure that people are doing what, what they say that they're doing.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I've found the same thing with my clinical trial is, you know, we kind of had two experiments in that, uh, we had live zoom sessions for the conscious connected breathing and we had amazing results with that, you know, huge reductions in anxiety versus the control group. We had a, you know, obviously a very weak control, as in we just had people on a wait list, uh, which is fair criticism there. But then we also had this sort of moderating variable where we had people doing 10 minutes of recorded conscious connected breathing and we told them you know, do this as much as you can. And then at the end we asked people, how often did you do the recording? And we found no difference between the people who did it every day and the people who didn't do it at all. So, you know, these three studies of ours point to maybe it's the recording, that's the variable that's making things much less effective. Potentially. That's really interesting.

Speaker 3:

I'd love to see this.

Speaker 2:

I want to see the last, yes well, nature scientific reports are looking at part one and then I need to put it to part two, the other, the moderating variable. I need to write that up. Part two, the other, the moderating variable. I need to write that up. But you can have my phd dissertation that'll be on pro quest soon oh sweet.

Speaker 1:

After the second study were you losing a bit of heart on your phd guy, I suppose? Two-part question as well. Did you, did you get some criticism for the research and how did you, how did you deal with that?

Speaker 3:

yeah, I, I've got loads of criticism on Twitter, but it's not a real place, so it's all good.

Speaker 2:

Sticks and stones.

Speaker 3:

I don't mind. As long as it raises awareness about breathwork, I'm happy. I'm not in it to promote a certain type of breathwork, I just want to share knowledge about it. I think it's, yeah, it's funny I when I have had criticism before, it's quite obvious that people haven't even read the first sort of paragraph of the paper. You know so I don't take it personally at all. But, um, I'm not. Yeah, I'm not losing. I didn't lose heart because I kind I think the placebo is really really good. I kind of thought am I inadvertently creating a second intervention here? And to me the placebo is the meat of medicine. To me I think it's really important. I think I'm quite happy that both groups improved at the primary time. But I don't mind if I think honestly it's. To me it's a better result than if breathwork outperformed the quote placebo.

Speaker 2:

Um, yeah, it doesn't matter to me either way yeah, I, whenever I put out anything sort of moderating breathwork on Instagram, like you know, I put a video saying you can do too much conscious connected breathing. You know you can potentially affect your carbon dioxide tolerance. Conscious connected breath work like this is this is nonsense and stuff. I was like what am I saying is nonsense? And I did reach out to these people and and effectively, so many people have just black and white thinking.

Speaker 2:

It's like you have to only say good things about breath work because, well, the people I was speaking to were just practitioners, so you know any negatives is going to take away from their cash flow. But as an academic, you're really like told you really need to find your criticisms. You know you need to put the limitations. Told you really need to find your criticisms. You know you need to put the limitations in there. You need to put the generalizability section in there, and the more criticism you have of yourself, the more credibility you actually have, whereas in social media it's like any kind of moderating is just a red flag, and you can.

Speaker 3:

you know you can apply this to all, to everything right. You can apply this to exercise you. Everything right, you can apply this to exercise. You know, sometimes doing too much exercise can damage you, right? Sometimes it's not healthy to over-exercise, or sometimes maybe I don't know if you're on a ketogenic diet. Too much fat maybe isn't so good. I think there's a nuance to it. All and the same with breathwork, maybe you know if you're doing too much breath work in a day, maybe you're neglecting other areas of the life like relationships or whatever.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, it's, uh, I think it's that it applies to everything. Too much sun exposure not good. Too little, too little, also not. You know, there's a whole, there's a whole spectrum getting into jack cruz territory.

Speaker 2:

I know you're a fan no comment. Have I outed you as a jack cruise follower?

Speaker 3:

I don't, I wouldn't say I'm a a fan. Uh, I, I think it's good to provide nuance for everything. I think light is a very important tool. Tool is that? Is that even a thing? Light it's nature. Getting back to nature is a good thing. I think we're seeing that. I think spending time outdoors is very important for our well-being and general mental health. But, yeah, maybe I'm not a full-on, I don't know, I'm not. You know, there's no point even going into this territory now, is there?

Speaker 2:

Okay, change of direction. All right, andy. No, even going into this territory now is okay, change of direction. All right, andy. Now I'd love to know your thoughts on jack cruz. Um, no bit of background, please. Yeah, um, jack cruz, he's a he's a medical doctor, biohacker type guy. He's all about light and the benefits of light for the mitochondria, um, but he's kind of since the pandemic, gone.

Speaker 2:

You know, he lives in panama or something now and hates the us government el salvador el salvador okay, and he's just very anti-establishment and he's just a very extreme person in his views.

Speaker 3:

But yeah, I think that's enough said you should have my, my friend from medical school, you know okay, all right.

Speaker 2:

Yes, thank you.

Speaker 1:

Yes, we'd love the intro what do you think of the the hot topics then at the moment in terms of like? Obviously you both put research out there. You both had a fair share of criticism. I've no doubt guy handled it better than rich, but how? What are the? What are the hot topics that are still kind of being, I guess, hotly contested? What are the battlegrounds at the moment?

Speaker 3:

I'll let Richard answer that what are the battlegrounds?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, yeah, well, yeah, there's one I've written down here. There's just a lot of debunking that needs to be done, isn't it? We mentioned the DMT thing. The other one I can think of is that the reason CCB works is because it increases the amount of oxygen in the body. Yeah, I would say that's a bit of a battleground, but I think most people know it's not. It's actually decreasing the amount, and people understand the Bohr effect. But what do you think, guy?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, I think you're not super oxygenating, it's CO2. That's the important factor here, and you need CO2 present to liberate oxygen from haemoglobin.

Speaker 2:

So yeah, yeah, any other battlegrounds you feel like, any other areas you want to tackle?

Speaker 3:

not really. I mean my, my research. I do the research I do because I just want to know if breathwork can help people. Does it work for people? It's more important to me than why it works. So I understand people are very interested in the mechanism behind things. But for me it's more about you know, does it help you, be it physically, mentally, athletically, that you know, does it help you, be it physically, mentally, athletically? You know, you spoke about potentially doing some research and the sports side of things. I think, yeah, the good thing about the breath is that everyone can do it. It's accessible. You can't patent it. You can try, but you can't. There's nothing more decentralized than breathing. I mean, that's the beautiful thing about breath work is that you can try, but you can't. There's nothing more decentralized than breathing. And I mean that's the beautiful thing about breath work is that you can do it anytime, anywhere, unless it's hyperventilation, then do it safely so what do you think are the key research questions that you and the academic world should be focusing on?

Speaker 3:

that's a good question. At the moment my I'm turning my attention towards altered states of consciousness and the effects on altered states of consciousness that can be induced and evoked by breathwork. There's a database, an open science project, called altered states database and they input data from psychedelic trials for different compounds and you can look at the kind of phenomenological profile of these altered states of consciousness and then compare them to other modalities like breathwork. And that's why I'm quite interested at the moment, because I think, because of the psychedelic renaissance and the way research is going at the moment, that providing that those kind of data on breath work and comparing it to psychedelics can ignite a lot of interest. And then you know, through that people will see that you know it's not, oh, it's not just hyperventilation, it's not just conscious, connected breathing, it's all these other things as well and I think it's really important just to acknowledge the roots of breath work.

Speaker 3:

So the, the most well-known body of practices, you know, comes from pranayama, actually the classical limb of yoga. Prana means self-regulation, sort of control, or prana. Prana, sorry, prana being the life force or vital energy, you know can be synonymous with breath, but isn't breath, because you know prana is the universal energy. It just is what it is, and then I am is a regulation of, or control of, stop, start. So it's kind of regulating one's breath essentially, albeit not exactly, but I think it's just important to acknowledge the roots first before you know. Just you know we're a bunch of white guys talking about conscious, connected breathing, but it's much deeper than that and it goes back, you know, centuries it's probably 10,000 years ago taught by shamans and whatever, whatever race, whatever colour, it doesn't matter. I think the beautiful thing, again, again, about the breath, is that it's accessible to all.

Speaker 1:

And yeah, I think it's just a beautiful thing bearing in mind how long it has been around and obviously all the different permutations and stuff. As two researchers in the field, are you kind of surprised of the gaps in the research yeah, that's a great question.

Speaker 3:

I am, I am really surprised, yeah. So yeah, that's such a good point. I believe the first kind of study published in the Western world at least, was 60 years ago, so I think 1964. I think there's a paper by I forgot the name, I think it's Higashi, from Japan, looking at pranayama, looking at a um looking at pranayama, looking at practice, specific practice of pranayama. But if you went to, you know um, india, then this kind of this has been used for thousands of years and they they don't need, they didn't have scientific papers to back it up, you know um.

Speaker 3:

I view the time period we're in right now for breathwork as obviously I said this a few years ago, so I think I'm a bit off but meditation in the 70s, 80s you had just a few hundred papers fast forward to now you get three, over three, four thousand published per year. So, like the increase has just been mass is huge, unprecedented. So I think we're getting kind of getting to that point now with breathwork where you know there's a maybe a few hundred papers. Well, probably, maybe more, but it depends what you're classifying as breathwork. But I think we're kind of about to see that kind of blast off for breath work research. So I hope I'm right, because I said this at the start of my phd and it still hasn't, you know, had seen this unprecedented surge like meditation has yet. But I think, with more research groups that are starting to take it more seriously, I think, yeah, I think we're kind of at that cusp and especially because it's got a strong link with psychedelics now through holotropic breath work and rebirthing breath work, I think that's only going to help, you know, advance the field in terms of the number of publications.

Speaker 3:

But the important thing is to do, you know, good research on it from the outset, so you don't suffer from this sort of mismatch between the hype and then the evidence base. So that could be said of some meditation research, some mindfulness research, where you have these, you know, thousands and thousands of papers, but many of them aren't, you know, of high quality. So I think it's important to, whilst we're at this cusp, to really do solid research so it can, you know, evolve in a evidence-based manner. And it's not, it doesn't just become a fad, because I think people with lived experience of breathwork, people who you know I'm an example of someone with lived experience who've really benefited from breathwork. So it does work for people. It just may maybe it doesn't work for the whole you know, general population, but for certain people it could be tremendously beneficial. So I think it's just, you don't need an rct to say, oh, it's helpful, because it's always a an n of one, like it's always what works for you.

Speaker 3:

And there are so many different things that you can do. I'm going off on a tangent here, but you can. There's so many things you can do to get to, to the place that you of well-being, of flourishing. You know you could do yoga, you could do breathwork, you could do exercise, you could do diet, whatever you're trying to get, trying to get to that same spot. You know, like mahatma gandhi said, truth is one, paths are many and there are so many paths that we can take, and it doesn't have to be breathwork, yeah.

Speaker 2:

Well, I think breathwork will take off, guy, when you start creating clinical trials that have positive results and have softer placebos.

Speaker 3:

Well, that's the question right Like is the softer placebo. Is it a form of breathwork?

Speaker 2:

Yeah.

Speaker 3:

It's really hard to apply this model of clinical trials, randomized clinical trials this is what I'm struggling with now is that randomized clinical trials are designed for, you know, pharmaceutical interventions they're not lifestyle interventions, that kind of thing into a, an rct, because the rct design kind of dilutes the, the teaching, it dilutes the lifestyle intervention that you're trying to study sometimes. So this it's really hard to grasp between creating a placebo which maybe doesn't have any breath work involved in it at all, no pacing of breath, maybe just placing attention somewhere else and then comparing that with um, conscious connected breathing, for example. So this is the kind of thing that I'm trying to as I'm going forward with my research. Is what? What is a good control group?

Speaker 2:

and, uh, if you have any ideas, I'd love to hear your thought yeah, um, I don't know, yeah, I really struggled with that and then just go in okay, weightless control. But I don't know, yeah, I really struggled with that and then just go in Okay, weightless control. But I don't know. I was thinking like a journaling group or something like that would be just really easy, cost effective.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, not not five stars, but maybe halfway there. And yeah, going back to your point about who breathwork is effective for, I think is really key Because, again, you know black and white thinking. People just want to know does breathwork work? And it's like yes or no. But you know, with cbt, cbt has like has a 48 response rate, so it doesn't work for the majority of people but people are pretty happy with that. That's seen as the gold standard of therapy and maybe breathwork works for 40 of people and we're really happy for that but then does, yeah, does breathwork work?

Speaker 2:

was the title of my thesis and, as it is, it's just a simple yes, no right, that's all the answer it's.

Speaker 3:

It's a nuance, right, that's a surprise.

Speaker 2:

Yes and no okay, um, sport as well, that's an area. I think that there's not been any research on ccb and sport. And yeah, guy, and I've had a chat about this with um with a connection that that we have to a sporting person we'll see whether or not it comes off. But yeah, I, I am also mega. It was so surprised when I looked, did my literature review, and there's like 20 studies on conscious connected breath work, and even my supervisor was like you know well, you know where there were studies. They thought I was just being lazy. I was just like no, there's just there's just no more studies. I can't do any more. Um, but uh, yeah, uh. So what do you think about sport and conscious connected breath work, guy?

Speaker 3:

conscious connected breath, breathwork in a fast sense.

Speaker 2:

No, I mean, I like it for athletes because you know so many people I think you know in terms of research. There's so much exercise science out there because people just love sport. So I'm wondering, you know, can we jump on the tails of exercise science research with CCB?

Speaker 3:

But when you say conscious connected breathwork, ccbb, what exactly do you mean? In terms of the internet? You mean the, the normal practice of the high ventilation? Yeah, okay. So yeah, I'm I'm not, I'm not sure, I don't know. Honestly, in terms of ccb for fast-paced breathwork, for athletes, I think ccb at a lower rate if you're doing conscious breathing, but a coherent breathing rate, maybe it could be beneficial for things like recovery yeah even including physiological sighing after sessions and maybe you know down regulating after, after training sessions or before, doing coherent breathing before sessions to enhance, you know, one's sort of focus and calm.

Speaker 3:

I don't know about hyperventilating before. I don't know how I'd like you to.

Speaker 1:

I'd love to know more and if you have any thoughts how hyperventilation could help with sports performance yeah, that's what I was thinking rich because, like having done it I mean a few, a fair few times, I would. We're almost advised to take it easy afterwards, aren't you? And before, and so they'd have to be quite a narrow window. Why would you think it?

Speaker 2:

would be good for sports. I would just like to see the england football team doing conscious, connected breathing in a game in the euros final. They're running around there and there's me on the side. They don't need gareth southgate, it's just me saying relax your, inhale you, we're all one no, with sports it must have been considered.

Speaker 1:

But I'm just thinking like why would you think it would benefit?

Speaker 2:

I think it could help with performance anxiety and flow states. I think you could help people with, like, getting into that altered state and then they're visualizing scoring the penalty, they're visualizing making the tackle, they're visualizing lifting the trophy, and maybe it's yeah, it's a type of visualization manifestation type benefit, or it's also, uh, someone with performance anxiety. Why do they have it? Oh, it's because they have this unprocessed, maladaptively stored memory from 10 years old where their coach, you know, humiliated them in front of everyone and they've never gotten over that and that's holding them back. Um, maybe that's, maybe you could get there with just, you know that, with just regular psychotherapy.

Speaker 3:

But, yeah, maybe ccb speeds that process up sure, I think anything that helps the human, you know, flourish, or improves their well-being, would aid performance. So I guess oh well, I was confused at the start of the question was because I thought it was going to be more slow, breathwork related or even breath holding right, you know, sort of oxygen advantage or something like that. Um, but yeah, no, I think yeah, if you can just help the human, I don't we. Were you thinking conscious connected breathing sessions right before performing or were you thinking in general?

Speaker 1:

in general?

Speaker 3:

surely not well, I think I, yeah, I think that I think I think you could be onto something here, because I think it's a very physical intervention.

Speaker 3:

Right, you put a lot of effort into conscious, connected breathing, at least at the start. You're putting a lot of effort into it. It's a very physically demanding task initially, initially, um, and I think populations in sports, athletes it, that's a kind of practice that couldn't could resonate with them. Um, and that's why I think I hope to see you know later down the line, sort of trials being done with veterans with trauma, and if a sort of physical intervention like this, a somatic, cathartic thing like this, might be more well suited to populations which are used to doing quite physical, physically demanding and challenging tasks, like veterans, athletes, military, um, yeah, fire service, that sort of thing. I think people maybe we've have elevated levels of stress in those populations of intervention of this kind could resonate with them more than psychotherapy and let's sit down and talk, maybe they want to. Maybe using the body more is could be of more benefit to them. So, yeah, I think you could be on to something that I like.

Speaker 2:

I like yeah, and the oxygen advantage stuff I think is also relevant as well. You know there's there's a fair few studies on repeated sprint ability and breath hold, especially with with rugby players, and I'm in touch with a previous guest, gray cause, now that I am oxygen advantage certified, so go me. Um, yeah, more research is, um is on its way, hopefully related to that I really like this question.

Speaker 1:

It's one that rich came up with. Thanks, man ask it, um, but does this, like the scientific work, the research kind of, I guess, undermine some of the spiritual, religious history of the practice? Is it kind of like taking away some of the magic, if you like?

Speaker 3:

absolutely. Uh, that touches on what we were talking about earlier, the cultural roots, but then also the rct design, where you're just kind of reducing these practices down. You know what I did in the coherent breathing study I was kind of trying to just isolate the, the breathing rate, to see if there was an effect. But you know, we we didn't have, we didn't include the kind of psychoeducation in there, the the kind of context of which it emerges. You know, coherent breathing is found independently across the world from different traditions.

Speaker 3:

This sort of rate is found, you know, in Buddhist meditation practice in Japan, something called Zazen, where they enter meditative states, states, but they actually breathe at this sort of rhythm. And then you can track it to other parts of the world where they have this similar rhythm as well, and they also during prayer in italy I think it's the latin hail, mary um, where people are actually respiring at this rate or a kind of coherent breathing rate. So so, yeah, I think this is what I'm kind of struggling with is don't lose the magic of it through designing it.

Speaker 3:

So, in a sense, like you could, people could be like this is pointless. You know this is pointless because it's kind of defeating the purpose, but I'm still also trying to provide something. People who wouldn't otherwise be familiar with these practices actually be, you know, in the western world, where it might make it a bit more accessible for them, um, and maybe that, in a way, is also creating its own magic right, yeah, for sure peaking curiosity and attention.

Speaker 3:

Um, yeah, I don't think. Yeah, I think it's it's hard it's, but yeah, it could be doing that. But also more people could be getting exposed.

Speaker 1:

I think that yeah, I think the latter what you just said. I think some people do need that like evidence, like that hardcore evidence base Okay, this works, and then they'll experience the magic for themselves.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, it makes me think of birthday cakes. You know people are like, yeah, if you did a scientific study on the birthday cake, why do people love them? It'd be like, well, people just love the glucose molecule. But it's not. It's it's the cake, it's the jam, it's the different textures, it's the candles, it's the, it's the lights going on it's the people singing happy birthday with you. It's the attention you get on you. It's the song. It's just so many component parts that add up instead of just glucose I was speaking.

Speaker 3:

I was speaking to um someone a couple of years ago, a guy who was setting up gyms in psychiatric wards, and you know we were just having a discussion about diet and he was we would. He was saying you know someone who with a mental, mental health condition in psychiatric wards? If they're, it's probably, it's how probably it could be healthier for them to all be eating ice cream together than for them to be, you know, alone in their room eating a bowl of kale. I thought that was really interesting. It's like it's the whole community aspect around food as well, around, you know, the birthday cake. It's more than the component parts. It's, yeah, it's fascinating. I think there's a lot of nuance to all of it and I think that's why I mean group sessions in breathwork can be really transformative. The group element and the magical things can happen when you're in a group doing this and it's not just you by yourself yeah, yeah, I think that would be a really interesting study.

Speaker 2:

You know, group breath work versus individual one-to-one breath work. And there was that study that the haven't if the one where they had a placebo. They had people just doing regular breathing and they were measuring their altered states and the people in the placebo who were just breathing as normal had altered states because of well, they put it down to social contagion. So, yeah, just being in a room with people in altered states creates altered states, a bit like when you go to a nightclub and you're not drinking and everyone else is wasted, you feel a little bit drunk placebo is that placebo is that the power of the mind.

Speaker 3:

Is that what is it?

Speaker 2:

to be so.

Speaker 1:

So what's next for you then, guy? Um, you mentioned transferring to the medical school. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Speaker 3:

yeah, so I I will be at the medical school for at least the next year or so, whilst I'm also applying for sort of postdoc fellowships and much longer term funding. But yeah, at the moment, the my interest is focused mostly on high ventilation, breath work, conscious connected breathing and these altered states of consciousness and whether they can sort of mediate or at least correlate with changes or improvements in mental health and well-being. Um, so, yeah, that's. I'm also analyzing some pilot data, some qualitative data I had from leftover from my phd. Um, there's, yeah, several things going on at the moment, but that's the main focus right at this time. But yeah, there's lots of stuff happening and I'm involved on a with a trial on um using sort of wim hof style breathing for menopausal symptoms, hot flashes, and I'm also, yeah, I'm also on a uh, a grant with um, a university in the netherlands, a maastricht, and it's on sort of this, yeah, conscious connected breathing, delivering it remotely to people with social anxiety disorder.

Speaker 3:

Um, yeah, so I think that's kind of all of the projects that I can really manage, yeah it sounds like a lot but, uh, yeah, it's um, a lot more people now are starting to, like, reach out to me and I think it's yeah, I'm trying to also protect my time as well, so I can actually keep doing the research that I'm doing. That's why I'm doing this, right, so it's to do the research. I want to keep doing that, um, so I'm just trying not to get too distracted. But we also did a we filmed for a documentary on breathwork at the medical school and the director of that is talking with various streamers and yeah, that that will be out at some point in in, maybe next year or the year after. But uh, yeah, there's lots of stuff in the pipeline, but I'm used to that because science and scientific research moves quite slow, um, sometimes for good, sometimes for bad.

Speaker 2:

Yeah.

Speaker 3:

I'm used to it.

Speaker 2:

And how do people find you?

Speaker 3:

Easiest way to find me is just at breath. Underscore guy on Twitter X.

Speaker 2:

Twitter and you're on LinkedIn as well quite active there.

Speaker 3:

I am on LinkedIn. Yeah, sorry.

Speaker 2:

Guy Fincham on it, guy Fincham.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, it might be Guy William, my middle name's. William, so it could be Guy William Fincham. Yeah, it might be Guy William. My middle name's William, so it could be Guy William Fincham. But yeah, if you want to just check out studies that I'm sharing breathwork studies and thoughts on breathwork then yeah, breath underscore guy on X is the best.

Speaker 2:

Excellent, All right well, thank you very much, Guy. Thank you so much, Guy.

Speaker 1:

I really appreciate your time.

Speaker 3:

No, I really appreciate it. Thank you so much for having me.

Speaker 1:

Welcome back.

Speaker 1:

Welcome back. Yeah, really enjoyed that. I've got to say I think that's one of the best questions you've ever written on any one about the. No, no, I mean it. Just I really do, because I had about three weeks ago, almost to the day, I had a breathwork experience, um, that I would put as one of the best moments of my entire life, and if someone tried to explain that to me with kind of science, I just don't think I would I'd be able to get there. So it's good that he also acknowledges the um, the sort of the, the spiritual element to breathwork, as well as trying to find out the sort of mechanics and the science behind it. So I found that bit really, really interesting.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, science is obviously reductionistic, deliberately, and it is almost impossible to capture the full spectrum of experience from breathwork. I've got a lot of of experience from breathwork. I've got a lot of qualitative data from my research. There's no place for it, but it's like this stuff's changed my life. I can't believe I met my sister in spirit. I can't believe these things happened and you can't really. Yet you can, but it's very difficult to quantify that. And randomized control trials they're looking for the average results. You know I've talked about the kurtosis spread in my study, which means the variety of reductions in anxiety and the kurtosis was huge. Some people had enormous reductions in anxiety from six weeks of conscious connective breath work and some people had um minimal changes, almost nothing, and you know you really need to go into detail to to pass that out and I think that the sort of the magic of, of of breath work is something quite, really, quite sacred.

Speaker 1:

You talk about the how long it's been um being practiced and also, um, yeah, as you say, people have described things, but I don't think you'll ever really be able to to describe with the science. So, yeah, I really enjoyed it. I didn't actually know where you were going with the birthday cake point, so I'm glad that actually kind of had a point what were you?

Speaker 2:

thinking birthday cakes, and I was like you thought I just wanted to talk about birthday cake.

Speaker 1:

Birthday cakes I thought cake so I thought shit if I missed his birthday. What's going on here? Is this like yeah, that's a good analogy.

Speaker 2:

Thanks, yeah, lots of compliments for me today, good. One other thing I would like to mention is the history of conscious connected breath is surprisingly short. So, yes, pranayama goes back centuries and T tumo what aka wim hof goes back a long time, but, as far as we know, stanslav grof invented conscious connected breathing in the the 60s and 70s, and so it is relatively recent. It depends what you describe as conscious connected breathing, but certainly holotropic breath work was invented by him, and and then they've got the derivatives of that, such as transformational breathwork and clarity breathwork and rebirthing and breath guru, the ones that you have just done. So, yeah, in that sense, it's less surprising that there hasn't been so much research, because it is relatively recent.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, well, keep doing the work. You guys, guy and Rich, Please just keep bringing attention to the subject. Yes, will do All right. Where do they find us Rich?

Speaker 2:

They find me at the Breath Geek, although I may change it to Dr Breath Geek any day now. Oh wait, I'm waiting for the revamp, the revamp and at andy esam and we're laughing through the pain, navigating wellness on all good podcast hosting websites, platforms and even a lot of the bad platforms thanks for listening.

Speaker 1:

Everyone bye.