023 - Life changing breathing techniques with Polly Warren

Since recording this episode I've really started focuing on how I breathe. I'm taking more expansive breaths, trying to nasal breathe as much as I can and, starting my day with 10 minutes of breath-work and wow I've noticed that I have so much more energy - it's that simple!  

That's because this week I’m joined by breath-work coach Polly Warren to explore the life-changing benefits of nasal breathing. We dive into why the way you breathe matters so much, how to maximise your energy levels, support better digestion, and flood your body with more oxygen for long-lasting health.

Polly shares simple yet powerful breathwork techniques you can start using today to feel calmer, more energised, and in tune with your body. Whether you’re struggling with fatigue, gut issues, or just want to take your wellbeing to the next level, this episode is packed with practical tools to help you breathe better and live better. 

✨ What you’ll learn in this episode:

• Why nasal breathing is essential for energy, digestion & oxygen uptake
• Simple breathwork techniques to improve health & vitality
• How slowing down your breath supports a calmer nervous system
• Practical tips to weave breathwork into daily life

Polly and I also discussed her upcoming retreat in Austria as well as her breathwork training videos - links below

And here are the links to the show

Free resource: The Breath Check up

Learn how to breathe more efficiently for £47 Breathe Better Basics

For more details on the retreat in the Austrian Alps 

email Polly directly: info@pollywarren.com

Book a call to see if Metabolic Balance is right for you?

https://calendly.com/book-with-amanda/30min

Get your copy of my book here

Get in touch with Amanda:

• Be Healthy with Amanda - more info here
• Subscribe to my new podcast for £5.99 / month
• Email: hello@amandaryder.co.uk
• Buy Amanda's book - Feel Good for Menopause here
• Follow Amanda on Instagram @amandarydernutrition

Transcript

Hey everyone, welcome back to How To Feel Like A Midlife Goddess. This is Season 2. I hope you've all had an amazing summer and recharged your batteries, had wonderful holidays, just done whatever has been good for you. Now, thinking in September, I'm really all about what can we do now. 

It's sort of, you know, a fresh start for us again, change in routine. So, we're starting with Polly Warren. Now, Polly Warren is welcome back to this podcast.

She was one of my first guests in Season 1 and she is a Certified Breathwork Coach. And what she doesn't know about breath isn't worth knowing. But today, she's talking to us about how we can improve our energy, our digestion and our response to stress by just changing our breathwork.

We talk about the importance of breathing through your nose and just giving us some really nice tips that we can start using straight away as soon as we've listened to this podcast. So, I think you're going to find it super inspirational. I find Polly such a lovely, calming, motivational person who really helps me to kind of get in touch with myself and go a little bit inwards instead of always thinking about what's going on on the outside.

But yeah, have a listen and I hope you find some of the things that Polly teaches us in this podcast can really help you just feel that bit healthier. Let's go to today's conversation. Hey, Polly, welcome back to the podcast.

Oh, Amanda, it's a real pleasure. Thank you for having me for the second time. No, amazing. 

And yeah, I really want to welcome you back. And you had lots of good things to say. You were one of my first podcast guests, I think, or one of the first few.

But I thought today what would be really useful for the listeners is, you know, it's September. We're all thinking about sort of resetting and getting back into our routines, but perhaps with a slightly different spin, doing a few things. And you know how you come across lots of things like, you know, you might suddenly get into yoga or meditation or breathing or running or cycling, whatever it is.

You do need that sort of constant motivation and some things stick and some things don't. But personally, I felt really good when I was doing just 15 minutes of breath work every day. And sadly, I've slipped out of that habit. 

And I thought it would be really great to just talk today again about the benefits. You know, some sort of quick and easy tips that people can start using in their life. So for those who didn't hear the first podcast, Polly, can you just tell us how you first discovered breathwork and why it became such an important part of your life? Yeah, sure. 

So actually, I discovered it backwards in a funny sort of way because I was going through a huge amount of change and transformation in my own life. I was in perimenopause trying to find solutions to how I was feeling. I was really very stressed out. 

My nervous system was at capacity. And the first breathwork I did was through a woman called Samantha Skelly, who runs Pause Breathwork. And I found her on Instagram. 

She just sort of popped into my feed. And I just was like, who is this woman? I need to learn more. And I ended up going and doing a six-month training in breathwork alongside all these other modalities that I was already using, like coaching and lots of different modalities.

So I went and did this six-month training and I kind of really got into it. And I then, though, however, through that training, which was probably more down the conscious-connected breathwork type of breathwork. So that's probably more... Conscious-connected? What do you mean by that? So it sounds good, but... There's such a scale of breathwork.

Yeah, I'm sure. Conscious-connected breathwork is when you don't have a pause in between your breaths. And it's often used for release, for trauma release, for connecting with yourself at a really deep level through letting go of stuff.

It's often, if you've seen, I mean, gosh, my feed's full of it, obviously, because I do breathwork. But my feed is full of different breathwork schools and these people having these big cathartic experiences. And yes, there is a place for that.

And that's probably where I went in first. But actually, which is amazing, for a lot of people, for a lot of people I've worked with, a lot of my clients, it's not the first place to go. Because if your nervous system is already jacked up and you are experiencing a huge amount of stress, you are quite often going to be triggered.

The type of breathwork, which I then delve into in a big way, was breathwork which was a bit gentler, which was really about calming the nervous system. And that is a really good first port of call. So for me, I didn't realize really how much I needed to do this.

I was juggling, as many midlife women are, family work, that invisible load so many of us carry. And I kept finding myself just running on that autopilot. And when you're doing that and your body's in a constant state of go, actually, your breathing is affected.

So learning to use your breath to calm your nervous system is such a gift. It just can be so helpful. So that is when I really got into it and I did more training.

And actually last year I did the most, it really did frazzle my little brain. I did a very, very in-depth training called, it was sort of a deep dive into the science of breathwork. But it was a nervous system regulation and it was brilliant.

So yes, that is how I've kind of found myself in there. And I've just been following what has been interesting to me. And here I am and I feel I've got a huge amount of knowledge now.

So yeah, it's great. Yeah, brilliant. I mean, I have to say for most of us, it is calming that nervous system.

It's so easy to say it and it's so hard to do it in practice. And I know for myself, when I've had a week where I'm just quite revved up, it's just so hard bringing yourself back down again. But when I was doing a bit of breathwork, even just like four in, hold for seven, out for eight.

You do that three or four times and you think, oh yeah, I am beginning to sort of, instead of being up here floating around in the ceiling, you sort of come back down into your body, so to speak. But sometimes you don't even know you need to do it because you're so focused on work or family or just life. It just revs up, doesn't it? And life does go really fast these days.

So tools like that are just brilliant. And do you think that's the only reason why it's helpful for us in midlife to sort of calm the nervous system? Or is there any other sort of benefits to how we breathe? And we can talk a bit more about what that breathwork is. Yes. 

I mean, there are so many benefits to breathwork. So yes, obviously it's for calming your nervous system, which as we know, is going to bring down your cortisol levels, which is so beneficial because then if your cortisol levels are lower, it's going to allow your other hormones to be more balanced as well. So often if we're too stressed, it's just putting all the other hormones out of work as well.

It's also, if you're breathing well, then you are going to have more energy. Quite simply because it's exhausting when you're not breathing properly. You're using energy that you don't need to be in.

Often we're breathing from the upper chest, we're breathing from the back of the neck. When we breathe quite shallowly because we're not thinking about breathing. Exactly. 

It can actually, you use more energy. And when we breathe in a way like that, what we're doing is we're not actually using our respiratory system to its full, which means that we're not getting the oxygen from the air down into the bottom of the lungs where it's used most effectively and then into the bloodstream and then actually into the cells, into our organs. That process isn't being used efficiently.

So we're just not getting the oxygen from the air into our brain, hence things like brain fog, into our cells, which gives us our energy into those mitochondrial cells that we need. So it really does affect every part of us. It's one of the most important but yet overlooked aspects of wellness, I believe.

Yeah, I completely agree. And I think from the women that I work with, they will say that they really feel the fatigue. And nearly everybody who comes through my door will say, is there anything you could do to help with my energy? They might come for something else, but it'd be a tick box of symptoms that they're experiencing.

And energy is always right up there. And without energy, it's not just physical energy, but it's like mental energy. You just don't have the motivation to get things done.

And you think, gosh, I used to whiz around getting all this stuff done. And now you need to pull on all the resources that you have, don't you? Like breathwork in midlife. Exactly. 

And I think breathwork is such a broad umbrella term that people often get confused by that. And what I'm talking about here, the breathwork is very much functional, everyday, good breathing habits. And breathing is a behavior.

There are two parts in your brain which controls the breathing. So there's one part which is literally like a ventilator. So even if you are, you know, it is like literally keeping you alive.

But there is another part which is in charge of how deep you breathe, how fast you breathe. So when you, for example, go for a run, that is the part which is going to change your breath rate and how deep you breathe so that you can actually get more carbon dioxide out because there's a buildup of carbon dioxide. So we can actually train that part, retrain that part if it's become out of sync of where it should be.

We can retrain it because it's behavior and it's like any behavior, it takes time and practice. But you can do it, which is one of the beauties of this. Yeah, yeah.

So would you say the most common mistakes that you see with people breathing is like the shallow, the shallow breathing or mouth breathing? I know I do that sometimes and it's all about nasal breathing, isn't it? That's supposed to be, that's what I understand. It's better to nasal breathe than to mouth breathe. Yes.

So shallow breathing, mouth breathing, breath holding, quite a lot of people hold their breath because often if you were in a fight or flight situation, what do we do? If you were out millions of years ago, thousands of years ago and you were hunting or you were being hunted, you try and be as still as possible. So we tend to hold our breath and that pattern can then get stuck. So we might hold our breath.

I know a lot of people say that if they're writing emails or sometimes they find themselves holding their breath and then that can disrupt your pattern. And the thing about breathing is, you know, it's the stress generally. Stress is what causes the change or stress or trauma is that's what changes how we breathe.

And there's a two-way relationship with that. So just as stress makes us breathe faster, you know, breathing too quickly or too shallowly, that then signals to the brain that we're in danger even if we're not. And then that activates your stress response and that then increases your heart rate, your stress hormones, and then it makes everything, you know, more inefficient.

So it's a really vicious cycle. So over time though, you can train that because that is when we become, that's when we over breathe. It's when we're constantly in that stress cycle.

We over breathe, we let go of too much. And that basically means we are breathing too shallowly and we're just not getting enough oxygen delivery to ourselves. Yeah.

So, yeah, I can see that. Yeah, I completely resonate with that. When I've had to write a document or, like you said, I've been sending emails and my head's really in it.

And then I think, God, I feel a bit dizzy or, yeah, a bit nauseous when it's just because I haven't been breathing. Yeah, it's mad, isn't it? But so easily done, especially as we spend so much time in front of screens. So just before we go on to some of the sort of practical tools that we can use in our everyday life, why is nasal breathing so important? Well, we are designed as human beings to be breathing in and out of our noses the majority of the time.

Yes, we do have the ability to breathe through our mouths, but only when we absolutely have to. So if you're running up a hill, you're going to be building up a huge amount of carbon dioxide and then you'll want to let it out of your mouth. However, most of the time we should be breathing through our nose.

Our noses have so many amazing functions. So it's like a bit of a high-tech air filter. So inside it's lined with all these little tiny hairs, which trap dust, they trap bacteria, allergens.

If you think of the air we're breathing, all of those nasties in the air are going to be caught before they go into the airway. Whereas if you're breathing through your mouth, there's nothing there to stop them going into your airway. So they're going straight into the body.

I think it's something like 20 billion unwanted particles every day are breathed in. So we do not want those in our system. The nose also warms and humidifies the air so it's ready for your lungs.

It just makes breathing more smoother, more efficient, healthier. The nose also slows down because it's a much smaller airways than your mouth. It slows down how much oxygen we take in, which is really important.

Because the slower we breathe, the more we're going to use our diaphragm, which basically means that the oxygen is going to go deeper into our lungs, which is where it's more efficient. So there's research that shows that nasal breathing can boost oxygen delivery by up to 20%. And it's 22% more efficient than mouth breathing.

So it basically just means that more oxygen is going to reach your muscles, your brain, with less effort. And that's the most important thing, and that's going to help you feel more energised. That's such an easy gain, isn't it? You think about all the things that we do to try and improve our health, and that one thing, nasal breathing, is going to increase our oxygen, did you say by 20%? 20%.

So our body's going to work much more efficiently if we do that. Our body's going to work less, but we're going to have more oxygen and more energy. And also, just one last thing, there's a gas which is produced, or a molecule in your nose called nitric oxide, and that plays a huge role in your health.

It helps, again, protect from viruses and infections, it kills bacteria, and it also improves circulation. It really helps to open up the blood vessels. So again, you're losing that if you're breathing through your mouth.

The biology is, you know, our physiology is that we are designed to breathe through our nose. Yeah, and I always think about nitric oxide and vitro, and helping people keep their blood vessels flexible so they contract and expand. If you think about what most people, how most people end up getting ill as they get older, it's all about the circulatory system, isn't it? It's usually an issue there, so yeah, that's super important.

So, Polly, how can we get into this habit of breathing through our nose? Because, you know, people are hearing it today, and then tomorrow, you know, they're back into their lives. What can we do to trigger ourselves to remember to breathe through our noses? Well, yeah, I mean, the first step is awareness. Everything always starts with awareness.

We've got to become aware of how are we breathing in the first place. What I always recommend to people is simply, we all have our phones with us now all the time, just set a little alarm, a ping, something, or a vibrate to go off at regular intervals throughout the day so that you can just check in. Oh, how am I breathing now? Am I holding my breath? Am I breathing through my mouth? Is my breathing really shallow? Just check in, and that then is your nudge to correct it.

So, I've actually got a little mini, well, two things which I could recommend, which I always recommend people to start with. I've got something called the Breath Checkup, which is free, and people can just go and check in with how they're breathing now. Give them that awareness.

What's their breath rate? What's their carbon dioxide tolerance? That's that feeling of air hunger we often get. So, often, people might shut their mouths, go for a walk, breathe through their nose, and they go, oh, my goodness, it feels really hard because you're not used to it. But that simply is your tolerance to that sensation of buildup of carbon dioxide.

You've got plenty of oxygen. You just need to train that tolerance, and it shifts very, very quickly once you start to simply breathe through your nose. So, once you've got more tolerance, you can tolerate having more carbon dioxide in your body or in your blood.

Yeah. Yeah. And once you've done that, it's easier to nasal breathe or it's easier to hold your breath.

Yes. So, you're going to find, once you've done that, you're going to find that you are, over time, going to be able to hold your breath for longer. You're going to be able to breathe.

You're going to be able to do really gentle yet slow, long breaths because you're going to be using the oxygen in that breath so much more efficiently than if you're breathing really quickly and really shallowly. So, what you then need to go on to do once you've kind of done that checkup is you'll understand your tolerance to carbon dioxide. You'll also understand how quickly you're breathing and where you're breathing from, if you're breathing low or if you're breathing up high.

It's just simply a matter of breathing in a way which is more supportive. And what I always say to people is, very simply, if you put your hands around the lower two ribs, what we're looking for is when you breathe in through your nose, you should feel a really nice 360-degree lateral expansion of your belly and your ribs. Yeah.

It does feel like my hands are going apart when I do that. Exactly. That's what we should feel. 

We should feel them going apart. And when you exhale, they should come back together again. I think a big mistake a lot of people think about is like, everyone talks about belly breathing, diaphragmatic breathing, which ultimately, which means the same thing.

It's like learning to breathe low. But belly breathing is quite misleading sometimes because you can actually push your belly out with your stomach muscles. So, often people are doing that and not breathing using the diaphragm effectively.

And then diaphragmatic breathing, we're always using our diaphragm to breathe. You can't breathe without using your diaphragm. It's just how effectively you're using it.

So, I prefer the term expansive breathing. So, you're expanding your belly, you're expanding your ribs, and that tells you that you are engaging your diaphragm effectively. So, if you put your hands on the bottom two ribs, you should feel your hands parting.

And also, it's kind of like a 360 kind of feeling that you should feel the breath not only in your belly, but also sort of around the back as well. Yeah, I can feel it when I'm really focused, but I probably don't do that. Again, I've got another very, very low step-by-step guide to showing you how to do this.

This is just like the basics of breathing, and then it's about the practice. So, I would recommend five, ten minutes a day, just practicing that, slowing the breath down. And over time, as you progress, you can then slow the breath down.

So, a good place to start is to breathe in for three, breathe out for six. Then you can breathe it in for four, out for seven. It's just like gradually building it up.

In practice, you can kind of breathe in for ten, out for ten. But we don't need to be breathing like that all the time, but it's just reminding your brain and your system how to breathe most efficiently. So, I could do that in the morning when I wake up, perhaps, for a set of time of ten minutes, put my hands on the bottom ribs and just feel them expanding, so my fingertips are pulling apart, feeling the breath sort of around the back.

So, like you said, it's much more of a sort of widening, expansive breath rather than trying to do it all day. Like, I'm sitting here, like, that's not going to work, is it? Yeah, so it has to be quite focused. It's about training your brain.

So, yeah, I've got loads of recordings where I just talk through doing that for ten minutes, just, like, breathing, you know, in a certain way. And it just helps you to repro... It's just reprogramming your brain, widening those neural pathways, all of that. Yeah, I will leave the links, Polly, so anybody listening, you can just click on Polly's link and go and see how to do this.

I think it's just so very beneficial. So, another thing I wanted to ask you about, and, you know, we all find ourselves in stressful situations. Have you got any practical tools that we can use in the moment when we feel that we are getting revved up and, you know, you're just in the stress, you can't switch it off, there's something stressful coming your way? Yeah, just a sort of quick breathing technique that we can... Absolutely.

Well, there's the physiological sigh, which was coined by Andrew Huberman, who's a Stanford professor, and he did some research on this, and this is a really good one for everybody. So, what you're doing is you're breathing in through the nose, big breath in, so your belly... So, using the... Down low into the belly, all the way up to the chest, and then you're going to take another little sniff of air at the very top, which, basically, what that does is it opens up all the air, the alveoli, the air sacs, and then you very gently have a long, slow, gentle exhale, and you can do that through the nose or the mouth. If you're feeling really stressed, you probably want to do it through the mouth because it's slightly easier to let that breath go.

And if you do that three, five times, you are going to say to your nervous system, I'm OK, I'm all right. What you're doing, effectively, is you're taking the breath in, and when you breathe that second bit in, as I said, you're kind of waking everything up, like get it in the system. At least it's giving that extra... Yeah, that little bit of extra, right.

It's just coming up. Yeah, the airways. And that exhale is going to be offloading all that kind of carbon dioxide, which you've probably been building up through not breathing properly, or holding your breath or whatever.

So, it's like, let that go. And that's a really good way. And then, you know, I always talk about, I have an acronym called CALM, where you just, like, the first thing is you just catch it, catch it before you spiral.

So, take, you know, and then you've got to create space, and you're going to do that by taking a breath, just taking a breath. Then you're going to alter... The A is that you're altering your state, so you're going to shift your physiology. So, that's like just taking a breath, doing something to calm you down.

Psychological sigh, was it? Yes, psychological sigh. Exactly. Breathing in, just breathing it in.

And then taking another sip of air in. And another sip of air at the end, yeah. And do you hold that, or do you then immediately let it go? You can hold it for a moment, and then just let it all go.

Okay. Just that letting go can feel so good, really just letting it go. And we do two or three of those, just to remind ourselves.

Yeah. Just to change your state, bring you back into a calm. Yeah.

And then you want to just label that, you know, what is it? The L is for label it. So, what emotion are you feeling? Is it frustration? Is it anger? Is it anxiety? What is it? You are not that emotion. You just label it.

I am currently feeling a huge amount of anxiety. And just, you know, what are those thoughts that are popping up? I'm so pissed off, or I'm really worried. Just feel it, label it.

And then the M is the most important thing, move forward. So, what you've got to choose. Do I just accept the thing that's just happened and let it go? Can I do anything about it? Can I control it? If I can't, I'm just going to accept it and let it go.

Or if I can, can I do something? Can I take some sort of action forward? So, that's, you know, because that's how we get out of these spirals, is by actually doing something rather than standing still and going, oh, and having a freak out. We actually need some sort of action forward. Yeah.

So, can we just go to that? So, C, so it's calm. So, we're in a stressful situation where you think, okay, we need to be calm. Or let's just say the word calm.

Yeah. Catch it. Catch it.

Notice the trigger. So, catch that trigger. You know, what has happened? And then just create a bit of a space.

So, pause. Just catch it and pause. Okay, that's the C. And then the A for calm is alter your state.

So, that is basically using something to calm you down. So, here it could be that physiological sigh. It might be that you do some tap.

If you're into tapping, you do a quick tap. It might be that you do a longer exhale rather than, you know, just that also might work. So, it's just doing something which is going to alter you.

Or even just removing yourself from your office or wherever you are. Stepping outside, putting your face outside might be good enough. The L then is label.

So, name your emotion and your thoughts. So, name that emotion. What is it you're feeling? Because often when things start to escalate, when we get into that spiral, it's because we're trying to suppress the emotion.

So, when you're trying to suppress that anxiety, it kind of gives it a lot more energy. So, if we name it, oh, my God, I'm feeling really anxious or I'm feeling really angry, that's immediately going to diffuse it immediately. And also, if you can start to label and identify the thoughts, you know, is it something are you ruminating on something which has already happened? If that's the case, you can't do anything about it.

So, you can let that go. If you're ruminating about something in the future which hasn't happened yet, again, you know, can we bring ourselves back to the present moment? And if it was something from the present, okay, can you do something about it to change the situation? And that's when we move to the M, let's move forward. So, let it go or do something about it.

All of this is in September. If any of your listeners want to join, I'm doing a whole September nervous system rewire which is about exactly this, exactly this, stopping the spiral and calming the nervous system. So, I think there's twofold.

When we go into that spiral, quite often it's because our nervous system is in a place of high arousal. Anyway, its baseline is quite high. So, the first step is you've got to bring that down.

And the second step is in those moments, that sort of, that moment between the thing that happens and how you react or how you respond. That is something you can really train. This is something which has been such a game changer for me personally.

I used to be very hot-headed, particularly when it came to my kids. I could really lose my rag very quickly. And learning this stuff has, you know, first you need to come in my nervous system and then learning to really have this awareness in the moment has enabled me to most, on the most part, not always but mostly, be able to respond calmly and not lose my head.

And obviously, that diffuses any situation, particularly with judges. Yeah, I mean, it's just so awful, isn't it? I mean, God, I've lost my shit so many times in my lifetime. And it's not pretty and nobody feels good, especially you, nobody around you.

You want to avoid it, don't you, at all costs? Yeah. But it's just so easy to say and sometimes it's just, yeah. But I feel for, you know, like Bryce Quirk, and, you know, like you talked about calm and catching it and thinking about what triggers you, but it's really important, I think, as we do go through midlife and beyond, that we become self-aware.

You know, there's some things that I just do. They're just my own little idiosyncrasy. And I know it's a bit mad, but that's just me.

Yeah. And, you know, I just think it's just, yeah, I find it quite, I can't be around people that have no self-awareness now. You know, they've got to like 45, 50.

They just don't realise that that's not a great trait or doing that is really disrupting to other people. So I think it's so important to actually, you know, have that self-awareness as you get older. Absolutely.

And I think breath work really helps you with that, doesn't it, enormously? Yeah, I mean, self-awareness is just so important. You can't change or improve anything unless you have that self-awareness. And that is why I love breath work, because you get that.

It really allows you to be introspective. It allows you to go inward. And you really need to start to learn to know yourself better.

And unless you have a practice which enables you to go inward and understand yourself better, it's very difficult to change anything or to improve or to... To move forward. Exactly. And to feel calm and at peace and all the things, I think, in midlife you kind of look forward, don't you? Because, you know, you know something's changed and you can't just keep doing what you've been doing for the last couple of decades.

You know, you're in a different place now. You're in a stage of your life. And if you don't kind of change with it, then it's, yeah, it can be really, really hard, can't it? So I think getting a bit introspective, whereas a lot of women don't... Well, a lot of people don't always like that, but actually I think it's really necessary, isn't it, to know yourself and look inside a bit.

A lot of people do that, obviously, through meditation. I personally find breath work before any sort of meditation really beneficial because you can get into that meditative state so much quicker and so much easier. So much easier than just today.

So I always, in my sessions, we always end with a little meditation, but the breath work helps you drop in much quicker. And it's really good for those people who find meditation really difficult. Yeah, yeah, it's really, yeah, a good idea to do that.

Again, it's just having that kind of, doing it every day. So Polly, what could you say to us that would inspire us to say, okay, that all sounds amazing. We want to increase our oxygen.

We haven't talked about digestion, but I know breathing well can really help with digestion, can't it? Gosh, yeah. I see so many people that have digestive issues, IBS and constipation or all sorts of things going on with the gut because the gut is quite a good barometer of how healthy you are, I think. And when things go wrong or you've had a stressful decade or whatever, it really takes its toll on the gut.

So breathing can be really helpful for that, can't it? Yeah, and that's something which has really helped for me. I've had many gut issues over the years. Have you? Yes, it all started with a dodgy courier biting in the pool many, many years ago.

Gosh, yeah. I've never quite been the same since however breathing has really, really helped. And it's simply because when you breathe calmly, slowly, you're shifting yourself back into that parasympathetic branch of your autonomic nervous system, which is where we want to be to be able to digest our food.

We can't possibly digest our food if we're stressed in that sympathetic branch. And that is when you get the bloating and all the problems. So the more you can be in that calm, in a calm, relaxed state before you eat and then whilst you're eating and then after eating, it's going to be so beneficial for you.

It's really helped me. And very briefly, one of my clients who has been trying to lose weight for many, many, many years unsuccessfully, when she learned how to breathe and calm her nervous system, has ended up losing four stone and she puts it down to this simple shift where she had quite a lot of weight to lose. And it wasn't really my primary aim with her.

With me, my primary aim was just to calm her nervous system down. But she puts it down to that, that her body now was able to release that weight because it was calm. It wasn't that constant fight or flight mode.

And when you're stressed all the time, basically you're releasing sugar into your bloodstream because your body thinks you're in fight or flight. But then you're actually still sitting at your desk perhaps and then that sugar just gets turned into fat. People don't kind of realize that, but it's a horrible, vicious cycle.

So you often see fat around the middle of very stressed individuals. So yeah, being calm, getting into that parasympathetic, it's where it's at, isn't it? So sorry, I kind of branched off a bit there, but I wanted to say, yeah, what can you say to us, Polly? Like tomorrow, I want to start breathing again like 10 or 15 minutes. What can you say to us to inspire us or some practical tips to build it into our lives? It's the last thing we're going to do instead of the first thing that we do.

Exactly. So the first thing you can do, and the things we've got to make it easy for ourselves, the first thing you can do is the moment you wake up, your eyes open, before you've even got out of bed, if you can remember, as your alarm goes off, just before your feet even hit the ground, take a slow breath in through your nose, fill up the belly, do what we just did with the ribs, slow exhale, and that's simply that, just to calm yourself before you've even got out of bed, to build that awareness into how you're breathing is a great way to start. I would always do that.

Just one breath, not even a few breaths, just one. You can do more if you want, but one breath is better than zero breaths. And the thing with breath work is three minutes is better than no minutes.

Five minutes is better, obviously, than three minutes. So it's just doing what you can. Slow, long exhales are brilliant.

Whenever you're feeling a little bit stressed, simply, again, you can just bring your awareness inwards to your breath. How am I breathing? Take a breath in and then gently through, and I would, if you can, do it through the nose, long, slow exhale out. Do that a few times and you'll immediately feel yourself calm down.

It's building that relationship with yourself. How am I feeling? And it literally is like a remote control to your nervous system, your breath. So it's just finding little ways like that where you can actually control it.

But if you've got to go and do a big presentation, I always, before I do any sort of presentation or anything I'm feeling really nervous about, I will always do some breath work beforehand. Quite often I'll do a box breath for that because a box breath, if you do a very slow exhale, lots of times you can actually become a little bit sleepy because it's so relaxing. Whereas a box breath, which is basically in for the same amount as you then hold at the top of your breath and then you exhale for the same amount and then you hold at the bottom.

So basically you're breathing in a square, so in for four, hold for four, out for four, hold for four. I always think of it like the line of the box, so breathing in for four, so line of the box at the top and then I'm going down, I'm holding it, then I'm going across to make the other side of the box and then I'm breathing in again and then I'm holding it. Is that right? So yeah, breathing in, hold, breathing out, sorry, breathing out, hold, breathing in, yeah.

And that's really good because it actually, the holds help to activate a little bit of your nervous system so it's a little bit activated so you keep that calm focus, which is what you're going to want going into a presentation or a meeting and not feel too sleepy. Yeah, yeah, brilliant. So we've got the, we've got the starting the breath in the morning with a nice big breath or two or three as you wake up and just again, just getting in, I suppose just getting in contact with your body, isn't it? Yeah, if you do that.

Yes. Using the box breath if we're going to be doing something where we need to be on but we want to be calm at the same time. Yeah.

If you, I mean before bed you can do a long slow exhale so you could breathe in for four out for eight before bed just to calm everything down and generally I really love just doing some coherence breathing which is breathing in and out for the same amount so I, the perfect, the sort of, I mean the perfect, there isn't such a thing as perfect breath but science has found that if you breathe in for five and a half to six breaths per minute your cardiovascular system, your respiratory system, all sync up. So if you look at all, if you had brainwaves and heartbeat monitors on you're going to see how everything is in motion together and this is a great way to increase your heart rate variability which is those pauses between each heartbeat and the higher your heart rate variability the bigger the difference in between heartbeats shows you are, shows your resilience so the higher the HRV the better. It's a really good marker isn't it? Really good marker for heart rate variability.

and we can practice that by doing coherence breathing. I absolutely love it. It is so soft and gentle.

It's literally in five and a half, out five and a half, very gentle, soft but yet low breath. So that's one of my real go to's and I do that, I do that one regularly. Yeah, well it sounds like we all need to come on one of your courses which leads me to talk about your amazing retreat that you're holding in Austria in October.

Now I'm going on this retreat because I just know how brilliant Polly is and you know, you spoke on the first podcast about how you were quite a hot headed person and triggered really easy and quite stressed and all over the place and you are the epitome of calm now and I can see the transition and you know, I love your post, I love your newsletters you know really, they're all really fantastic information. So I have signed up to come on this amazing, it sounds amazing, the hotel looks gorgeous, the location is stunning but Polly, do you want to just tell the listeners a bit about what to expect? Yeah. You've still got a few places of people we'd look on.

We still have some spaces and we are very, yeah, the more the merrier, we would absolutely love people to come and join us so it's from the 16th to the 19th of October and we are going to Austria to the hotel, the hotel is called the Interalpen, Interalpen Hotel, it's in a place called Tyrol and it's absolutely beautiful, it's up in the Alps, beautiful, clean, fresh mountain air. There's going to be daily breathwork with me every day which will be really lovely, gentle type of breathwork, you're going to get your own room which I always think is really important on a retreat, particularly at midlife, sometimes you don't want to share, you want to have your own room. Absolutely, I'm looking forward to my own room.

Yes, there's going to be a guided walk to a traditional, one of these traditional Austrian huts, there's going to be this massive spa, it's like 5,000 metres of saunas, pools, steam rooms, the food, and the food looks amazing, oh my god, it looks amazing. The food looks great and in terms of flights, all of it's going to be done for you, you literally just have to turn up. So for all of this, it's £1,450, it includes all of it, and if you were to go and have a look at the hotel and do this separately, it is going to be way more to book three nights for yourself without any of these extras.

Without any of the extras, I looked at that and my first thought was wow, that hotel, I just feel healthier just looking at those photographs because it's just the epitome of like, you know, a healthy place, it's in the arts, you know, like you said, the air, the food, yeah, in every way, it's absolutely gorgeous, the hotel is lovely, the location is amazing, yeah, I'm sure your breath work is going to be quite transformative for a lot of us. So yeah, join me people, you know, if anyone's listening and wants to come, yeah, book on before it's too late, it looks amazing. absolutely, oh, thanks Linda, yes, yeah, brilliant, okay, great, well, thank you for your time again, Polly, thank you, I'm sure that's really useful and it's again, just a nice little reminder, something very easy we can do, it doesn't cost us any money, with just a bit of focus on our breath and yeah, absolutely, all those benefits, it's yeah, it's so important, so I'm sure that's motivated, inspired a lot of us to start thinking tomorrow about our breathing.

Absolutely, so it's an easy win, it's an easy win because it's one thing that we can all do, we can all breathe, so yeah, it's just how we're breathing, so yeah, thanks very much Amanda for having me, okay, thanks Polly, thank you, bye.