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Episode #010 - David "Jacko" Jackson - Master Breathwork Instructor
93 Plays2 years ago
Today's guest is David Jackson, he is a master breathwork instructor, strength and conditioning coach , and former professional rugby player.
Breathing is something we all do without even thinking about it. But what if i told you that you have been breathing incorrectly for years. Breathing has a huge impact on our mental and physical performance, in relation to our attention span, ability to concentrate and focus, managing stress levels and in performance to delay lactic acid, exercised induced asthma (that wheezing sensation when you have pushed it hard), and much more.
In this episode, David talks us through the mechanisms behind breathing, how we can test our breathing efficiency, why we should be breathing through our nose, rather than our mouth, how we can mange stress using breathwork , improve our health and mental performance through breathing, and much more.
Numerous free resources can be found through the following links, where you can find out more about the work David does.
Website: https://probreathwork.passion.io/
Instagram: @jacko.david.jackson
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Transcript
Introduction to David Jaco Jackson
00:00:00
Speaker
Hello and welcome back to perspectives. Today's guest is David Jaco Jackson. He is a master breathwork instructor and a former strength conditioning coach and professional rugby player.
Breathing and Performance Benefits
00:00:14
Speaker
Breathing is something we all do without even thinking about it. But what if I told you that we had been breathing incorrectly for years?
00:00:21
Speaker
Breathing has a huge impact on our mental and physical performance in relation to things like our attention span, our ability to concentrate and focus, how we manage our stress levels and in physical performance when delaying lactic acid, and that ability to reduce exercise in used asthma, which is that
00:00:43
Speaker
wheezing sensation you get when you've run a little bit too hard then you realise you're coughing and wheezing for the next 45 minutes to an hour after.
Nasal vs. Mouth Breathing Overview
00:00:52
Speaker
In this episode, Jaco talked us through the mechanisms behind breathing and how we can test our breathing efficiency, why we should be breathing predominantly through our nose rather than our mouth, how we can use breath work to manage our stress levels and improve our overall health and mental performance, and much, much more.
00:01:14
Speaker
This is a very, very interesting episode. There's a lot of stuff about breathwork I did not even realise myself. But before we do get into the episode, I wanted to ask a favour.
Subscribe for the 10th Episode
00:01:26
Speaker
It is nearly Christmas and we are at episode number 10, so if you would like to give me a gift this year, you can do so by subscribing to the podcast and spreading the word. We have made it to 10 episodes, which has been pretty amazing and I've really enjoyed.
00:01:42
Speaker
the experiences I've had doing this podcast. We've had some amazing guests. So thank you very much to everyone who's come on. And if you are a regular listener, I really, really do appreciate your support. It means a great deal that you choose to spend your free time listening to me talk for in excess of 40 minutes at a time. So thank you very much. So without further ado, let's get on with the show. David Jackson.
00:02:30
Speaker
Jaco, welcome to Perspectives. Great to have you on. Thanks for having me.
Jackson's Recovery Through Breathwork
00:02:36
Speaker
So I know you are a professional rugby player in your heyday, but can you tell us a little bit more about yourself and what you do? Yeah, so I retired from professional rugby just over 10 years ago from a brain injury. I'd had a series of concussions throughout my career and
00:02:56
Speaker
That was a very difficult time, took me a sort of year to get over my more classic symptoms. But then it was another couple of years or few years before I came across breathing and the effect that that can have on or how the effect that a brain injury or concussions can have on our respiratory centers in the brain, how that can affect
00:03:19
Speaker
a whole manner of things and our recovery and our brain health and our nervous system and you know I was back to I'd retrained as a strength and conditioning coach we were just talking before we came on air about the school calisthenics where we were teaching and coaching and doing gravity defying movements and stuff but I still had issues with like my memory, sleep, managing stress
00:03:41
Speaker
So potentially to the outside world was fine, but my inner world was probably still needing some work and myself or my wife were always interested in anything that would help promote brain health for myself because I'm in a category of people who have sustained a number of concussions and then also one very significant traumatic brain injury. I had a seizure on the training field and a bleed on the brain.
00:04:07
Speaker
But puts me in a category of people that are prone to early onset dementia and cognitive issues moving forward. There's research that shows that after just three concussions, they see, you know, the fourth and beyond significant cognitive decline for those people. And those that play in sort of contact sports, like, like I did a lot of people, you know, think, well, cranky, I mean,
00:04:35
Speaker
I got took to hospital four times. Like if you add up all the concussions when I didn't get, you know, it's like 10 or more, it's, you know, it's double figures for a lot of us. So it's really important that we do look after ourselves. We don't have to go down the various different rabbit holes, like what's going on in the sports unless you want to. But I think there's been something around breathing that has been
00:05:00
Speaker
not dismissed, I think, just left because the notion that it's just this thing that's automatic, but just because it's automatic doesn't mean it's optimal. And because it's automatic, once there's a space that's been affected from a brain injury or from any type of stressful event, which could be a physical stress like that, or it could be a psychological stress, and it could be a big stressful event or just constant daily little bit of stress.
Benefits of Nasal Breathing Over Mouth Breathing
00:05:26
Speaker
our nervous system and stress, the breathing responds in the same way. And it won't normalize itself on its own. And this was something that I found through the Oxford Advantage, needed to do it for my own self, but started to see the effects it was having on me, but then also on athletic performance and working as a strength and conditioning coach at the time.
00:05:52
Speaker
I was like, wow, I wish I knew this when I played rugby, like how it's affecting our ability to perform, our ability to concentrate, lactate threshold. There's just the ability to manage your breathing. You know, when you're playing a sport like rugby, like there's times where you're absolutely blown out of your arse. And to be able to manage that, it feels amazing. And then how you recover and like being able to sleep after a night game and things like this. So I started reaching out a few years ago to some people that were still involved in rugby from when I played.
00:06:20
Speaker
And yes, started working with, started working within the world of rugby on this and it's something that is, yeah, it feels like it's built, people are starting to become more aware of it. Some of the listeners I'm sure will be sort of at the point where hours are first, you're not breathing, like, well, you can train breathing at once. You just breathe, don't you? That's often a starting point for people, but there's so much to it and I'm sure we're going to delve into that during the podcast.
Breathwork Techniques and Benefits
00:06:47
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, the idea of brain health's really, really interesting as well because I've got friends who played rugby even just last couple of weeks ago and a friend who texted me saying, did 80 minutes on Sunday, mild concussion again, just kind of the norm most weekends going out and getting concussed on the rugby pitch. And then you see in the rise of some of these sports that just are out and out absurd now, you've seen the world slap fighting championships and things like that.
00:07:13
Speaker
Yeah, I think at least in rugby, like the purpose isn't to try and knock someone out. It's just that, yeah. Yeah, no. I try to not feed my intro algorithm, but yeah, every now and again, you see something like that. Yeah, just so people just sat opposite each other and just whack each other. Yeah, it's, it's, yeah, it's, I think, as you say, I think people are becoming more aware of it now. But yeah, I just don't understand how that has ever been allowed, to be honest.
00:07:41
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. It's crazy. That's literally crazy. Because they sit there and they have to not even flinch. Yeah, it's crazy. That's a story for another day, or a tale for another day, to right the wrongs of that sport.
00:07:58
Speaker
But I've noticed breathworks really taken off in popularity over the last couple of years You see people doing it, you know, my own experiences have been through I used to do a bit of yoga back in my uni days The society 25 pound a year, which is probably the best value for yoga you're gonna get ever
00:08:16
Speaker
Yeah, but that was all about obviously mindfulness and trying to relax and sort of Listen to your breath control the breath through the movements all that sort of stuff as well. And then you got sort of other Popularities as well where people are doing breath work for like
00:08:33
Speaker
meditation in the mornings as well and then there's different strategies as well. I had a guest on who utilises lots of different strategies in his training including things like wearing earbuds so he can listen to the sound of his breath and noise his heartbeat. Just try and again practice that connection. He said he always looks for connection and I know there's some other people as well. So there's I think Andrew Tracy, I've heard he carries water in his mouth just to encourage things like nasal breathing when he's training and things like that.
00:09:02
Speaker
Me and Andrew Tracy did like a breath holding type of conditioning session together a few months ago. Actually, there's a little video on YouTube on that. But yeah, Andrew Tracy's a cool guy. Yeah, I'd like to get him on. We challenged a few things. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:09:18
Speaker
And then I've seen recently an Instagram video came up the other day of someone performing breath holds for like free diving and stuff like that. I think she managed like four minutes and 20. Yeah, those guys are insane. And she came up like convulsing. It looked pretty terrifying, to be honest, but not something I really want to get involved in. But yeah, it's amazing what you can do with breath work and things like that as well.
00:09:39
Speaker
I have noticed a lot of people start taping their mouths now as well. My other half tries to get me to take my mouth but it's not for the purposes of nasal breathing, it's more to get me to shut up. But I've seen it's a pretty versatile tool to use breath work. So hopefully we can dive into a few of those bits today about the benefits that breath work can do and
00:10:01
Speaker
But I want to really start at the beginning, so you've talked about some of the benefits in your introduction there before, but why do you always encourage nasal breathing? What is it about things like nasal breathing and breath work that you think is so important?
00:10:17
Speaker
a teacher works at risk and someone asked a question about, it was through a tongue position. It was like, why should the tongue position speak to the roof of the mouth? And I was like, I'm going to give you two answers because one of me wanted to be a bit sort of cheeky. And I was like, sort of crude answer was like, because that's where it's supposed to be. And it's like with breathing, like you ask the crude answer to, why should we be breathing through the nose rather than the mouth? And I was like, because you're supposed to, that's how you're designed to breathe. It's like, why do you talk with your mouth?
00:10:46
Speaker
you know, rather than talking with your nose, you know. And these are sort of silly little examples that, why do you have your eyes, why do you have your eyelids like at the top of the head when you're trying to like look? It's like, because that's where they're supposed to be when they're down, I can't see. But it's one of those things that we don't think a lot about. It's one of those things that luckily, we don't have to think about it.
00:11:09
Speaker
It's so important breathing, it provides oxygen to all the cells in our body, and that oxygen is in absolute abundance because of the sheer number of red blood cells and the oxygen count capacity of the blood. And actually one of the most important things our breathing does is it
00:11:27
Speaker
is the breathing out of carbon dioxide. And it's that exchange of gases that not only provides option for energy for every cell within our body, but it's also regulating the pH of our blood, which means that pH needs to stay between very small and fine margins, like 7.3 to 7.4 or even smaller.
00:11:49
Speaker
And, you know, breathing and breathing through the nose specifically compares to 30 different functions of the nose that shows it's designed for breathing. The mouth doesn't hurt. You can use the mouth, but it's more like the emergency exit, the emergency option when you for whatever reason can't manage
00:12:09
Speaker
either the sheer amounts of carbon dioxide that's being produced during exercise, or you can't manage the air flow through the nose because the nose is a much smaller airway, or smaller opening, let's say, and therefore there's more resistance, or a very stressful scenario. If I'm doing a ice bath, for example, where my breathing changes, the cold can take my breath away.
00:12:38
Speaker
There's nothing to do with oxygen or carbon dioxide like changes in that scenario. There's no more carbon dioxide or less oxygen in an ice bath. It makes no difference. But what it does do is it influences our stress response. So we do know that there's a psychological component to breathing and the nervous system, our breathing, our psycho physiological responses are all linked in together.
00:13:04
Speaker
And I guess I had firsthand experience of this with my brain injury where there was like a psychological aspect to it. There was a physical
Exercise for Breathing Efficiency
00:13:14
Speaker
stress and trauma to the body and the nervous system was, you know, there was, there was dysregulation of the, of the nervous system. And my breathing reflected that. I think that the interesting thing is that me for a good few years, like a lot of people, we have no idea
00:13:34
Speaker
that our breathing is suboptimal and no idea the effect that's actually having. But what I love about breathing and teaching now is it's very simple to give people some tools to be aware of it. It's very simple to change the way that we feel, the way that we think, the way that we sleep and recover or perform.
00:13:55
Speaker
because it is working with another system. And when we do some very simple things with our breathing, we can have some really positive effects on our physical and mental well-being and physical and mental health overall. That's interesting.
00:14:14
Speaker
I was going to ask then, there's an optimal ratio between mouth to nose breathing, and you said about it's more of an emergency when you can't get enough oxygen through the nose, you need to start picking your mouth. It's a convention. Most people, you know, I certainly do it and I know if I've
00:14:31
Speaker
bit on a bit of a run or something you tend to stop breathing a bit more heavily through your mouth and Previous guest I've had on he said he actually uses nasal breathing as a performance limiter So in that sense, he's he's limiting how fast he can do it purely based on that reason there that doesn't want to stop through his mouth and when he does he knows that he's going a bit too hard he needs to back off a little bit so he can sort of regain control of the breath through the nose. Yeah So given a really broad perspective
00:14:58
Speaker
What's really important is to understand it's never one thing apart from like, you know, if you're just sat down watching telly or reading a book, there's absolutely zero reason why you should be breathing through your mouth.
00:15:10
Speaker
But when we're talking about that exercise, it depends on the intensity of the exercise, it depends on the individual, it depends on their airway, it depends on the purpose of this training session. I, like that other guest, went through a huge phase where I only let my nose dictate the intensity of the exercise that I was doing.
00:15:32
Speaker
Well, the exercise that I started working towards was my first marathon and then ultra marathons. We're not running very fast. It's aerobic. It's not anaerobic. And so it's much easier to stay in a nasal breathing capacity. It's also not just about which hole in your face you're using to get the air in. Breathing is not.
00:15:55
Speaker
getting the air in. Breathing, that's just the opening that you're using. We then have the mechanics of how we're breathing. We also have the speed of which we're breathing. We have the volume of air of which we're breathing. And all those things
00:16:11
Speaker
play into the dynamics around your breathing and all those things can make you perform better and they can be more efficient or they can be less efficient and you can waste energy and effort and nervous system of regulation on the acts of breathing which can then, when we talk about exercise performance,
00:16:30
Speaker
diminish our performance and make us fatigue quicker. You've even got the strength of your breathing muscles. Think about strength training. In order to provide a stimulus, and this is where my background in strength and conditioning, I like to use a lot of analogies from that. If I'm wanting to make my deadlift stronger, or if I want a deadlift 200 kilos,
00:16:52
Speaker
If I have a bar that weighs 20 kilos, and no other weight's in the gym, and I just set about lifting that 20 kilo bar, and I get better and better and better at lifting that 20 kilo bar, maybe I can lift it a thousand times without getting tired because it's not very heavy. It's that there's never going to be enough resistance to provide an adaptation where I actually get strong enough to lift 200 kilos. Whether you're breathing with your nose or your mouth, nose provides about 50% more resistance than your mouth. So that'd be, if people are inherently mouth breathing more exercise,
00:17:20
Speaker
using the nose will provide some more resistance, which for some people, depending on what their airway is like and what their chemo sensitivity is like, what their psychological relationship is like with breathing, they may or may not find that actually good, bad, or somewhere in between in terms of like, does this actually feel hard or not? But it is providing a bit more resistance, but it's not a lot
00:17:45
Speaker
And if you want to build up the strength of your breathing muscles, then we need to provide some resistance, some decent resistance. Stronger muscles perform better, stronger muscles will fatigue less. And there's a real performance benefit to working on the strength of our alienation and exhalation type of thing I do with some professional and international rugby players I work with, because they're trying to find an extra edge and
00:18:11
Speaker
We're working on nutrition and sleep, but we're working on all these different things, and breathing's just another one of those that has yet to be trained. And just because you're feeling, doing cardiovascular training, aerobic, anaerobic, whatever,
00:18:26
Speaker
It's not training the respiratory system like specifically.
Improving Breathing Efficiency
00:18:33
Speaker
It's not providing resistance and it's not in changing our tolerance to carbon dioxide buildup which can be linked with our lactate threshold. If we just come very quickly back away from spore and just go to like normal day to day or you're doing a meditation or whatever it is that you're doing,
00:18:51
Speaker
We should be breathing in and out through our nose, and we should be trying to do less than more. Think about efficiency. To breathe efficiently, you're gonna do less of it. Use less fuel. Your breathing is then calmer, is slower. Your nervous system is calmer, and you're gonna feel better. And the nose helps to do that from a number of different angles. One, just like the extra resistance slows down the speed of your breathing.
00:19:17
Speaker
But once you're not exercising, slowing it down isn't challenging. It should be calming. You've got nitric oxide in the nose, which helps with oxygen uptake and is antiviral, antifungal. You've got all the different little tiny hairs in your nose, which helps to filter the air as it comes in, that the mouth doesn't have any of these properties. So you're like almost cleaning the air as it comes in and goes into your airways. A lot of people that have asthma
00:19:42
Speaker
are inherently mouth breathers and particularly excise induced asthma. When we start to build up people's tolerance to be able to breathe through the nose and use that filtration system that's naturally within the nose, we significantly improve asthmatic symptoms. And I've had plenty of clients that, you know, the last guy who's like, actually, I don't know where my inhaler is anymore. I've lost it. And it wasn't bothered that he lost it. He was like, I just haven't used it. I can't remember the last time I used it.
00:20:08
Speaker
because I don't need it anymore, which is fantastic. And he feels better for it. And hopefully it makes a lot of sense. If you're getting unfiltered, cold air, dry air hitting the back of the throat, it's going to irritate your airways. Of course it is, whereas the nose is providing that protection and, importantly, keeping a lot of moisture inside.
00:20:32
Speaker
that moisture helps with the oxygen uptake within the blood and the and the transportation or removal of of Cl2 out of the blood into long so that you can then breathe it out. I don't know all 30 different functions of the nose off the top of my head but give us a few hopefully build up the picture of like
00:20:51
Speaker
It's the organ for breathing, the nose is for breathing, the mouth is for eating. In terms of, you talked about obviously filtration through the nose as well. Have you found anything interesting to do with things like hay fever or allergens to do with breath work as well? Have you found that you can use breath work to alleviate symptoms like that at all?
00:21:09
Speaker
That has been documented. I personally haven't, I haven't had clients come to me with that as an issue and something that we were working on. So I don't have any personal data points on that. But yeah, that has been documented. So a really good book for like a really wide broad view and a broad perspective on what breathing can do for all aspects of how the world is.
Recommended Reading on Breathwork
00:21:35
Speaker
Patrick McKeown's The Breathing Cure, so it's like the book that came after the oxygen advantage. The Breathing Cure, it's a great book for that.
00:21:43
Speaker
I'll add that to my list. I've not read The Oxygen Advantage yet, but I'm obviously familiar with a bit of... You could probably jump to The Breathing Cure. It has a lot of the same stuff in the first few chapters of it, so it's not like you need to read The Oxygen Advantage before you read The Breathing Cure. The Breathing Cure was to be a standalone, sort of, here's everything. It's like a Bible. It's massive. It's like, well, that's it.
00:22:07
Speaker
The the encyclopedia for breathing basically. Yes, pretty much. Yeah. Yeah I was listening to a podcast the other the other day and they had Andrew Huberman on who is a He's a neuroscientist from Stanford University and he was talking about in the it was in the early stages of the podcast they were talking about nasal breathing and how it can impact the
00:22:28
Speaker
attractiveness in later life so effectively what they're saying is your how you breathe as a child whether you're a predominantly a nose breather or a mouth breather would determine the shape and the sort of jaw musculature development in later life so if you breathe more through your nose as a child or in early stages and throughout your life you tend to have a
00:22:54
Speaker
but only a more a more chiseled jaw so yeah you know and then better teeth because your teeth have got the space for themselves yeah so is that to do with uh can you tell us a bit more about that then perhaps you know if you if you can share a bit of light on why that i'm not the i'm not the expert in like that sort of child development and stuff um james nester documents it well in his book um breath um and i say he's been talking about it there um the
00:23:22
Speaker
Nesta talks about looking at skulls and how over a period of time we've seen this change in the structure and one of the theories that makes a lot of sense to me is that that early child development of the jaw and structure and the muscles around that, breastfeeding is really important for that and there's actually like having to chew our food whereas a lot of the time now
00:23:48
Speaker
with someone may not breastfeed or maybe breastfeed about long.
Children's Breathing and Facial Structure
00:23:52
Speaker
And then also the types of, you know, mushed up baby food is relatively new as a concept, like we don't have to chew our food that much. But I think the breastfeeding was a really big part of developing that. And just an understanding around nasal breathing, he had a story in his book around
00:24:15
Speaker
a tribe somewhere where it wasn't because they were looking at research literature, it's just something that's passed down through generation knowledge that when the babies were sleeping, the parents or the grandparents would, if the mouth was ever open for the child, they'd just gently close their lips because they knew that nasal breathing was calmer, probably purely from just observing it. Do you see someone?
00:24:44
Speaker
like breathing through the mouth it just it doesn't look right you know it doesn't look calm and even if you just do this now people listening can do this as well like open your mouth really wide as wide as you can and then take a breath in
00:25:00
Speaker
It will be vertical and shallow in your upper chest. You cannot, because of the resistance that isn't there, that mouth wide open makes it more obvious to feel and notice. But you can't mechanically breathe well when you're breathing like that. It's just impossible. And yeah, it's part of that fight or flight stress response.
00:25:25
Speaker
So trying to breathe in your nose starts you off in a better starting point from the way the air is entering in. But then we also want to think about what's going on below that.
00:25:38
Speaker
I felt it tickling the throat as well when you notice it. That is cold, isn't it? You definitely notice it more in the winter when the thermometer starts heading south. You do step out in the cold in the morning and you do get that real cold on your throat as well.
00:25:57
Speaker
So talk to me about, you said about the nasal breathing as well, abnormal breathing and how would someone identify if their breathing is maybe suboptimal?
Assessing Suboptimal Breathing
00:26:10
Speaker
Is there a little test they could do? Is there something they could do at home to perhaps gauge how effective they are at breathing?
00:26:17
Speaker
Yeah, one of the simplest things I get people to do at the start is normally a couple of things, but the most simplest is literally sit down, relax, put one hand on your upper chest, one hand below where your two lower ribs meet. So not on your belly, because where your belly button is isn't where your lungs or your diet from it. So where your two lower ribs meet.
00:26:37
Speaker
That's where your diaphragm is. And sit and count your breathing for about 30 seconds. So just set a time of 30 seconds and count your breathing and feel your breathing. So use your hands to notice the size of the breath, the direction of the breath, and where the movement within your body is coming from. And see how much is it is vertical compared to sort of a three-dimensional expansion. See how much of it's coming from that upper chest rather than coming from the lower portion of the rib cage where the diaphragm is.
00:27:06
Speaker
and observe, trying to slow your breathing down, because when you just sit and count your breathing, it's quite natural to slow it down. Just observe your automatic, try to be the observer of your breathing. We had someone yesterday, we were doing this at the workshop, they seemed very calm, they seemed fine, let's say, the classic English word, how I am, fine. I think we were actually pointing at the English language saying fine dining,
00:27:31
Speaker
You know, we were talking about Penny Hill Park, fine dining there, Michelin star restaurant. That's fine dining. So fine means in that respect regards means like over the top, like fabulous or whatever. I think a good word. Whereas how are you doing? I feel fine. It's like, it doesn't make any sense. But anyway, seemingly fine.
00:27:58
Speaker
a breathing rate, so respiratory rate. Do it over 30 seconds just because people naturally slow it down. So rather than doing it over a minute where it's going to gradually slow down more, do it over 30 seconds and then multiply that number by two to get your respiratory rate. That person was breathing at 14 breaths in the 30 seconds, so 28 breaths per minute. When I'm running,
00:28:23
Speaker
10k in about 50 minutes. So like a 25 minute, 5k to other things like having all right days. I'm breathing at 20 breaths per minute.
00:28:34
Speaker
people are sat down listening to this podcast right now, breathing like some dude is running. And that ain't good. That is not efficient and that is not a calm nervous system. And it is a doorway to actually understand how are you doing? You're not fine. And I'm not asking how are you doing in terms of like, mentally, whether you're
00:28:56
Speaker
feel okay and on top of your work commitments or whatever, how is your nervous system and your breathing is a reflection of your nervous system and your breathing will tell you how your nervous system is doing. And if you are breathing that fast,
00:29:10
Speaker
The rate or speed at which we're breathing is indicative of like stress. You know, I see myself as quite lucky. I had a very traumatic, stressful brain injury, though it was very obvious. Whereas if you have a lot of little stress every single day, it builds up without you knowing.
00:29:29
Speaker
You know, a bit after my brain injury, I wasn't breathing as fast as her. A bit actually my breathing, a bit hers is worse than mine, but it goes under the radar. It's like the analogy of the boiling frog. If you put a frog in boiling water, it jumps out. You put a frog in cold water and gradually heat it up to boiling.
00:29:47
Speaker
Unfortunately, it dies. I've not done it. It's just the analogy. But apparently so. And that is life for a lot of us. We don't know. But what I can tell you is your breathing will tell you. Your breathing will tell you how hot that water's getting.
00:30:03
Speaker
It's an early sign before you have a breakdown. Death by a thousand cuts, isn't it? That's to say. Yeah, man. Just that little build up of stresses and things like that. Your breath will tell you. Your breath will tell you. It can't knock. It can't knock.
00:30:21
Speaker
So you spoke about stress there and obviously you mentioned before about how it can be used as a tool to manage stress. So can you tell us a little bit more about how we could perhaps utilise the breath as a measure to sort of counteract the stresses that we incur in day-to-day life, of which there are many now for sure.
00:30:43
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, I'd love to. Yeah, I'd love to. And I'll give a few very practical things for us to do. But just to mention, I've got a free course on my website, prayerbreathwick.com. This isn't about me, sort of promoting my website, but that's about saying there's a free course. I made it free because I want people to be able to use this tool. And it's a really great question because what we've just talked about is
00:31:05
Speaker
sort of banged on about it. I was just trying to get the message home and be like, your breathing will tell you whether you're stressed or not. The beautiful thing about the breathing is it's bi-directional. The breathing can be the thing to de-stress, to bring yourself back down. So I guess the key thing is understand a very simple little thing that's very difficult to introduce without sounding like you're singing. Every breath you take,
00:31:34
Speaker
So every breath you take, your heart rate on the inhale speeds up slightly and is more sympathetic activating the nervous system's up-regulating fight or flight. Every exhale you take, heart rate slows down and is more parasympathetic promoting. The rest digest the relaxation which runs the opposite of the fight or flight. This is happening with every breath you take.
00:31:54
Speaker
And this is happening because your nervous system is supposed to be and communicating and finding out how is my external and internal environment and responding appropriately. You know, there's a gazillion things that your wife always says this. She's a health coach who talks a lot about physiology, talks a lot about this, or nervous system stuff. So he's like, there's a gazillion billion whatever things that your body's got to do. The nervous system has these two arms.
00:32:23
Speaker
so that it can switch between the two because it can't do everything at once. You can't run away from the stress and digest food at the same time. It's like you can run away from the stress and then once you've calmed yourself down, then you can digest your food. So understanding a little bit about the nervous system, really important, understanding that the more we're going to stress the body, the more we need to respect the recovery part of it.
00:32:49
Speaker
And then in terms of managing stress, I think there's two really key things that I teach with the breath. One is trying to just reduce the overall level of stress within the body. Think of like a stress bucket. Rather than being like up here, I'm going to try and just improve the efficiency of how you're breathing, which is the one thing your body's got to do in the background, regardless of anything else you're doing.
00:33:13
Speaker
So I can be breathing a bit calmer bit more efficient to have to do as much of it you have to spend as much energy that's just gonna be overall a slightly more calmer nervous system that's gonna give you a bit more capacity to cope with external stresses that you can't control. That's that's one thing so that's working on the three dimensions of our breathing.
00:33:34
Speaker
working on the mechanics of our breathing, so breathing through the nose, breathing, so as in the diaphragm, the biochemistry, which is improving my sensitivity to carbon dioxide, which is really important for managing stress because the more sensitive we are to carbon dioxide building up,
00:33:50
Speaker
The worse our blood circulation is, the worse our oxygen gets a less efficient oxygen delivery into tissues. And the more prone we are to anxious thoughts, like carbon dioxide has a positive effect on the conscious senses of the brain to help us from a physiological perspective manage stress and anxiety better.
00:34:12
Speaker
And so we can use the breath to, on one side, bring the overall system down to give us great capacity. And then the other thing is, in the instance, knowing that if I slow my exhalations down, I start to bias myself away from that, like fire to fire, which wants more into calm estate.
00:34:34
Speaker
So the slowing of exhalations can be really helpful. Nasal breathing, because of the olfactory nerve, when we're breathing through the nose compared to breathing through the mouth, our state of that nervous system is different. When the mouth breathing, we're much more likely to be in a fight or flight response.
00:34:56
Speaker
But the fact that all these things are linked, none of them are in isolation. If you said when your mouth breathing, that less resistance, the irritation of the airways, the faster breathing rate that it's going to create, the more upper chest shallow it's going to create, it's going to keep me in that sort of state, that fight or flight state. So one of the simplest things is just to be consciously aware of your breathing.
00:35:16
Speaker
Choose to close your mouth and breathe through the nose. And we know that when someone counts their breathing or focuses on their breathing, they naturally slow it down by about 20%. That was why I said before we were counting our breathing as a measure. Try not to slow it down. Only measure for 30 seconds so you don't slow it down to much in the multiplity.
00:35:35
Speaker
But utilizing as a tool is like, okay, choose the first mouth, I'm going to breathe through my nose, and I'm going to just focus on the sensation of the air in the nose, focus on the sound your breath is making, and you'll naturally calm it. If it feels good to do so, you start to slow down your exhalations.
00:35:53
Speaker
If you just consciously get control, slow down your exhalations, your heart rate slows down, you start to shift that nervous system back towards, back towards balance. In an extreme situation where you're like feeling very anxious and sort of like, you know, towards a panic attack and someone said you slow your breathing down, like make sure you get even more angry or stress.
00:36:15
Speaker
then that isn't as simple as just slow your exhalations down. But an exercise that I cover in that free course is one from the actual advantage called many short breath holds, where we literally take two breaths and pause. Take two breaths,
00:36:33
Speaker
and pause. And the pause might have been one or two seconds. It's just like a little circuit breaker within those two breath cycles. And when you go back to the two breath cycles, you can just be consciously aware of your breathing that will help to slow the doubt and just get you back in control of your physical and mental states. I think the other thing that I'd just recommend for everyone is just this notion of, let's do this now. Take a breath in and breathe up your nose.
00:37:03
Speaker
And what happens is, yeah, you lift the chest up, and everything goes vertical. Now, I don't know, is this just audio? Is there visuals? It's just audio for now, but there will be videos going up on YouTube eventually. Okay, well, basically, I'm showing it, if you ever have the video, I'm showing a picture of the nose. Your nose is the tip of the iceberg. Your airway is everything back behind your nose.
00:37:29
Speaker
You know, when you breathe in, air's got to go back and it goes down your throat to your lungs. If you think about breathing into your face rather than up your nose, for a lot of the people, a lot of the time it dramatically changes the mechanics of how they breathe. When we breathe into the face, like breathe horizontally, we get a bit more of horizontal and expansion of the rib cage rather than lifting of it up. And that is going to be better for our breathing.
00:38:00
Speaker
Yeah, they're probably some key things I would suggest as a starting point for people around using the breath to, one, bring the whole system down, and two, use it in stressful sort of situations.
00:38:14
Speaker
I guess just kind of keeping that, taking that awareness away from this stressful situation and focusing on the breath can actually help in itself as well.
Breath for Stress Management
00:38:22
Speaker
Yeah, the stress you'll be thinking about the future or the past won't be thinking about the present and your breath is happening in the present moment and it helps you to
00:38:32
Speaker
to come back to the now. Don't worry about Susan having a pop at you from accounts. You've just got to focus on your... Yeah. So you mentioned counting the breath for 30 seconds. Is there a target? You mentioned yours is about 20 breaths per minute. Is there a range? If I was running. If you're running. If I was running. So just relax what we look at.
00:39:01
Speaker
When we're sat down, you're not going to count it really much. You're going to count it really much with sat, relaxed, doing nothing. And I said, we have people 28, 30, whatever, it's like breathing very fast. It's just a sign that this nervous system is stressed. At rest, relaxed, we want it to be around 10 to 12.
00:39:23
Speaker
Yeah, as a, as a true genuine, like, just, I'm on auto. Yeah. I know people can, I can sit there and I can bring it down to like six best per minute. I can make it four best for that might be able to make it two or, you know, we get very good. You can practice and get one breath per minute, but that's not going to be your normal when you're not thinking about it.
00:39:45
Speaker
So it's trying to get a gauge of what is my breathing doing when I'm not thinking about it, but unless you've got something like a wood band or some tech that monitors your respiratory rate without you thinking, then you're going to have to think about it, but try not to think about it in that sense.
00:40:03
Speaker
And you mentioned circulation as well. So I in particular suffer from cold hands, cold feet, more so in the winter, but even in summer, sometimes I do as well. So is there, you know, is there something that I could do with breath work as well by getting that score down perhaps to that 10 to 12 mark?
00:40:23
Speaker
Yeah. Might need some sort of improvements in things like circulation. Yeah, so the thing with circulation or how breathing influence, the positive influence circulation and blood pressure, and blood pressure regulation is, carbon dioxide is a vasodilator. So it helps the blood vessels open up, which helps with circulation, also helps with oxygen to dilute the tissues.
00:40:44
Speaker
When you're, the more sensitive you are to carbon dioxide, you're more likely to breathe faster. But one thing you'll definitely be doing is breathing more air than you need to.
00:40:56
Speaker
And, you know, oxygen within the blood is in such abundance because it's so important. When you breathe more, you didn't get any more oxygen in. You're already full. What you do is you get rid of carbon dioxide and the more you get rid of carbon dioxide, the more sensitive you come to it. The more sensitive you become to it, the more you want to get rid of it. And the more you're getting rid of it, the more your blood vessels will constrict because carbon dioxide is the dilator of blood vessels.
00:41:26
Speaker
One thing you would want to do, slowing down your breathing, but without increasing the volume of air that you're taking in each breath is like a, one thing would be like a breathing, what we call the actual exercise is breathing light. So breathing slower, lighter and less air than you might naturally want to. And you'll create a sense, a soft relaxing sensation of air hunger, which is just,
00:41:52
Speaker
a feeling that comes from a signal from the brain that it's noticed carbon dioxide is staying in the body more than you normally do. That sensation of air hunger is all that that is. And it's going to be, as long as you don't try to make it too strong, it should be calming, relaxing, it's good for you. Carbon dioxide is good for your vagus, it's actually good for that communication with the nervous system. And the other one is that two breast pores.
00:42:22
Speaker
The same for managing stress, you do two breaths pause, a little pause helps you to accumulate carbon dioxide rather than getting rid of it. And you can just work on the, we could talk about, we call it like the chemo sensitivity of the receptors in the brain to carbon dioxide, like they're monitoring carbon dioxide because the effect it has on the pH of the blood, effectively makes the blood more acidic and the bodies want to try and keep that in balance.
00:42:51
Speaker
So when you improve your sensitivity to carbon dioxide, you improve your resilience to stress, you improve the speed at which you'll want to breathe as well, and you can certainly improve your circulation for sure. Literally, people will
00:43:09
Speaker
you can do like a guided breathing light practice again, plenty those on my free courses on the website and within five minutes you'll probably feel your hands and feet becoming warm because it's happening you know you're literally influencing levels of CO2 within your blood gently
00:43:26
Speaker
that helps the blood vessels to dilate and you feel the increase in circulation. It happens here just in just a few minutes. Amazing. I'm definitely going to try that. I'll have a look at your read. He's in. No more gloves. And it's free. So it's a no-brainer. Yeah, you still want to wear gloves when it's standing outside, for sure. But yeah, you can definitely work on it because I've got cold hands. I'm not even cold, though. It's just I just get cold hands. Just, yes. Yeah. Yeah.
00:43:50
Speaker
It could be something else as well, but the easy thing about breathing is, it's free, you just do a bit of work on it and see if it helps. What's that? Have you seen the graph? It's the fuck around and find out graph. Yeah, exactly.
00:44:06
Speaker
So we've talked about using it as a stress management tool. We've talked about how you can sort of increase circulation, things like that as well. You mentioned focus and concentration. So I know a lot of people struggle with concentration, myself included, certainly getting better at it. And I've been reading some books that have definitely opened my eyes to a few major distractions in my life, such as have you read Stolen Focus? Yohannaro's book?
00:44:34
Speaker
now I have a really good book so it's just how basically the digital world is hungry for your attention and it's everything is designed to grab your attention so there's times where exactly why could I not concentrate there are you know that's you kind of the odds are against you as well so if you feel completely useless and not being able to control your ability to focus it's not it's not completely yeah but yeah
00:44:58
Speaker
I probably look at it slightly, like the same in total agreement, but I'll probably look at it slightly differently in that I think you'll agree with this.
Concentration and Breathing
00:45:07
Speaker
It's not just that the, yes, the digital media is hungry for our attention, and it definitely is designed to grab our attention and distract us. But we choose whether, I choose whether I pick it up.
00:45:23
Speaker
The phone does not pick me up. The phone has never picked me up and it does not have the ability, yes, it picked me up. The phone does not have the ability to move my arm and make it pick you up. I choose to pick you up, yeah. Every time I choose to pick it up and every time I choose to check WhatsApp, check Instagram, check my email.
00:45:43
Speaker
I'm practicing destructive. I'm practicing being destructive. And therefore I get very good at being distracted. It's like, cool, you did it. You got better at what you were practicing. Don't complain that you can't, if you don't practice concentration, that's why you practice. It's not that we don't just, we don't practice. There we go, I'm going with soap boxes. We don't practice, but look, it's a good point. We don't practice concentration.
00:46:11
Speaker
And it's worse than that, it's not that we don't, if we just didn't practice concentration, we'd be quite superb. We don't practice concentration and no one helps us to concentrate. When I dropped the rubber ball during a game, what did my coach shout at me? Concentrate!
00:46:26
Speaker
And it's the word concentrate and it being shouted at you aggressively. Does that in any way improve your ability as a skilled concentrate? Of course not. So we don't get taught how to practice concentrating and we do not practice it. Not everyone. So we don't practice it. And then worse than that, the other side of it, we practice being distracted. I do all the time, I hate my phone, not hate my phone. I'm the same as everyone else.
00:46:54
Speaker
So, we practice getting distracted. I'm trying to practice being distracted less and I'm practicing some concentration with some breathing practice, with some meditation practice, trying to balance those things out. Now, though, we can't cry about the fact, and I'll make it really obvious, but we can't cry about the fact
00:47:17
Speaker
that we're not good at concentrating when we don't practice it and we practice the opposite. If you name a sport that you don't play. I was waiting for that. Name a sport that you don't play. Do you play cricket? No. Don't play cricket. You used to. You used to. Name a sport you don't play. Golf. Tennis. Name a sport. Tennis. Let's go tennis. Tennis.
00:47:34
Speaker
Right. Do you get annoyed that you're not getting any better at tennis? When I play and I'm not very good at something, yeah. But that's... So you're commonly annoyed that you're not getting better at tennis? If I play a sport and I'm not very good at it, I don't like it. But that's because I've never played it before. It's not...
00:47:50
Speaker
Yeah, but you're not answering wherever you come back. You need to answer my question. You don't play tennis and you do not practice tennis. Are you currently annoyed that you're not getting better at tennis? No. You can't be because you don't do it. But it's the same thing. Like, but weirdly, we don't look at it that way. So it's like, you're getting what you practice. We practice distraction. So you're getting bloody good at it. We just don't clap ourselves for getting good at being distracted because we see it as a negative thing. Yeah. But all your body's doing is it's just getting better at the thing you provide it with.
00:48:17
Speaker
Yeah. I like that. I'm going to make a video on Instagram about it. Yeah. No, it's good. It is good. It is true. It's...
00:48:24
Speaker
It's one of those things where I think people know there's something wrong, but they don't really know what to do about it or they don't really know where to focus their attention to resolve it effectively. So, you know, again, just that mindfulness element is probably, you know, starting with the basics of what we said about the breathing techniques. Is there anything specifically breathing wise you have associated with it being a good
00:48:50
Speaker
you know, a good tool to utilize for improving your being mindfulness and your ability to concentrate, for example. Yeah. So I think there's, again, two great things with breathing. For some reason in the podcast, it's always two, but two great things with breathing is one, just the act of it being happening in the present moment. It's just a great anchor's classic sort of talk, as things people will talk about with meditation, things like focus on your breathing, focuses you on the present moment and keeps your mind
00:49:20
Speaker
So there's one like is a is a physical thing you can feel the effort the nose you can feel your body or you die from moving this you know you can literally connect with it and it can be quite internal you can really be quite introspective with it but the other really important thing an interesting thing that people probably like about it is that
00:49:37
Speaker
And they've studied these types of things with like brain scans and comparing people saying nasal breathing compared to mouth breathing. Their ability, what parts of the brain are activating and lighting up. And, you know, there's a positive correlation with nasal breathing and the ability to be able to focus and concentrate. Coming back to that same gas, carbon dioxide, you improve your sensitivity to carbon dioxide so you can manage more of it.
Breathing and Brain Function
00:50:02
Speaker
That vasodilation that helps with your circulation, but it was a big one for me for my brain, it improves blood flow everywhere, but particularly blood flow to the brain. And carbon dioxide is also the catalyst that allows options to be released from red blood cells into the tissues.
00:50:17
Speaker
When I improve my tolerance to carbon dioxide, or improve my sensitivity of it, I improve blood flow to the brain, and I improve option delivery into the brain. And that is going to be able to help me with my focus and concentration, for sure, just the general functioning of the brain. I think the other bit that's, there's three things, one is to make it more than two. The third thing that then be,
00:50:38
Speaker
your actual nervous system state. When you're more stressed, when you're more in fight or flight, when you have more sympathetic activation, things like peripheral vision narrow, and narrowing of our field of vision, it's more difficult for us to focus concentrated decision making. We're in that state of more just reactive. And so one of the, it always comes back to the same sort of things. Breathe for your nose,
00:51:02
Speaker
Try to breathe more mechanically better in terms of the rib cage expansion, diaphragmatic breathing. Control your exhalations or slow down your exhalations. Keep a bit of calm outside inside rather than breathing it out. And that's going to help with your nervous system. It's going to help with optionally blood flow to your brain. It's going to help you with your focus and concentration. And you can literally practice, you can have a practice of, you know, you might call it meditation or you might not like meditation.
00:51:32
Speaker
call it something else, call it practicing getting better at concentrating. And whilst you put your phone somewhere else, so you put the other things that normally distract you away, and you step into a place where you then practice concentrating, not only
00:51:48
Speaker
Are you going to practice concentrating? Can you just keep focused on your breathing in some way? But by doing that, you're also practicing not being distracted. So you're ticking boxes here. People haven't really asked me about this so much. This is an area I haven't really probably spoken about that much. So thank you for having really great questions about that side of it.
00:52:10
Speaker
I find it interesting, it sounds like a lot of this is interlinked with just going back to basics really. It seems like all the beneficial tools nowadays, especially around health and fitness, we look at functional movement and squatting and things like that. It also seems to be circling back to when we were when we were younger.
00:52:32
Speaker
how are you breathing? Are you breathing properly? And things like, you know, it's always like we've kind of been conditioned as we get older in life with the way the world's structured for whatever reason. I mean, you don't have to go live in a cabin in the woods or anything like that, but, you know, just being mindful of some of the things that are present in our day-to-day life that may be actually a bit more of a detriment to us than we thought. Yeah. Things like sitting.
00:52:56
Speaker
People always say, oh, well, you know, the amount of people that can't just sit in a squat position when when we were growing up, you look at any like babies now or how they pick toys up and stuff, they're always sitting in that squat position. Yeah. So I think about what's natural and just you don't have to go far back, like just go back from talking like this in the day around like like cold water. So you go like depending on how old you are, either your mom or dad or your grandma or grandpa will have washed in a cold bath.
00:53:26
Speaker
because they didn't have an electric shower and they didn't have central heat. It's that close. It's literally that close away. Whereas, so we can argue that it's not natural. It's not normal on the scheme of humanity to be able to flick a switch and have hot water on you. I know it's nice, but that's not natural. And it's then, how many things in our life are we doing that are not natural for me?
00:53:55
Speaker
not normal for me in terms of my biology. And then you start to go, okay, I can start to make some decisions about maybe you're one of the weirdos like me that chooses to keep the shower on cold, for example. Could be one really simple little thing. Or maybe you walk outside without shoes on, you're on grass in your bare feet and breathing through your nose rather than breathing through your mouth, which is again,
00:54:21
Speaker
more natural, how we're designed to be. Shoes are a great one. How long have we had shoes with rubber soles? That was long. A mate of mine that I played rugby with, he came over from New Zealand, from where he was in New Zealand, same age as me, 41. When he was at school, they didn't wear shoes.
00:54:42
Speaker
And one of the other lads from New Zealand as well, he's like, yeah, when we played his school, we had to take our football boots off, our rugby boots off, and we had to play barefoot, so it was fair, like, you know, you couldn't have one team in barefoot and one not, like, you know, there's barefoot, and actually, barefoot is normal. It seems not. It seems weird. You see a lot of those shoe companies are bringing out those barefoot trainers and stuff now, aren't they?
00:55:06
Speaker
That's not to say we need to go back to, you know, foraging for mushrooms and berries in the woods to sustain the living. But yeah, there are tools out there that you can, you know, the vivo barefoot, vivo. Vivo barefoot, yeah, I've used those for years now, love them. But like, one of the things I love about them is like, they much prefer you to just not wear any shoes when you get the chance to. But when you need to wear a shoe, have one that gives your foot the space to sit in.
00:55:37
Speaker
But yeah, just think about what things are more natural rather than just what's normal now. Normal now is, by we're sat here looking at a computer screen at each other, that's not normal. Your brain finds it really weird to look at yourself because it never does that in normal life.
00:55:53
Speaker
I just wanted to circle back to the last few points really. One you mentioned earlier was about when we're looking at increasing performance and things like that, we can look at restricting the flow coming in. I know there's things like people do altitude training. I know there's a bit of scepticism around things like the altitude masks and the oxygen training masks and things like that, apart from looking like Bane in the gym.
00:56:18
Speaker
Do you see any benefit of using tools like that or anything better? So one of the interesting things, it's almost like false, but really interesting. So the altitude training, what about altitude? The air is thinner, so it can have, there's less available oxygen in the air. Hypoxic training, like hypoxic is when your blood oxygen saturation has dropped below 91%.
00:56:41
Speaker
Now altitude training at say like 3,000 meters is going to be somewhere like a mid to 3 or 4,000 meters being like a mid to high 80s percentage of red blood cell saturated oxygen, your production saturation. So we can mimic altitude training with breath holding because you can mimic the hypopsia that you create.
00:57:02
Speaker
Now, these masks came out that would provide resistance to our breathing and would make your breathing feel harder. And when you're at altitude, breathing feels harder. And so then they got marketed as an altitude training mask. And then people went, hold on a minute.
00:57:21
Speaker
This mask is providing resistance to my breathing, making my breathing harder, but it's not changing my blood oxygen saturation. And so then everyone poo pooed it. And now what people are starting to realise is they go, hold on a minute, one of the things that's difficult about how to train is not just that the air is thinner in terms of oxygen. The fact that air is thinner, the way that we breathe is you have to increase the volume inside of you, which decreases pressure and air moves from pressure up high to low.
00:57:45
Speaker
When the outside air pressure is lower because you're at altitude, your breathing muscles have to work harder to get the air to come in and get it out. So actually, one element of altitude
00:57:58
Speaker
is also the ability for your breathing muscles to work, to be stronger. So then we come for something you're old on a minute actually, providing resistance to my breathing is one way to train those respiratory inhalation and exhalation muscles that's necessary for altitude. So those altitude mass that be poo poo because they weren't created in hypoxia
00:58:19
Speaker
actually are training the strength element that we need for altitude training so then it's like oh actually maybe they are sort of an altitude mass and then what we do with altitude messages we use the mask and we use breath holding with them so we do get hypoxia because we use exhale breath holds and that's been widely studied for last 20 odd years
00:58:40
Speaker
And then that resistance is something that's building up the respiratory muscle strength, which is not just for altitude, it's just good for the strength of those breathing muscles, for joints of those breathing muscles.
Mouth Tape for Better Sleep
00:58:51
Speaker
If you're working in sports and you train all the other muscles in your body, why aren't you training your diaphragm? Why aren't you training your intercostal? Because they're going to benefit as well. Like bicep curls for your lungs basically. Yeah, exactly.
00:59:06
Speaker
The last point I wanted to just touch upon before we round this off and drop it to a close, there's been obviously so much information here, really appreciate all your time and obviously I'll link all the resources and the websites and things like that at the end. The idea of using mouth tape for sleeping has become quite popular now, I think it'd be good to get your
00:59:30
Speaker
Yeah. Your take on those who are perhaps a bit more sceptic about this. Is that what I want? Yeah, sceptic about it. And, you know, it might seem quite scary to obviously tape your mouth. I mean, we're not talking about using duct tape here. Yeah, I should make that explicitly clear. You're not trying to completely glue your mouth shut. But yeah, what would the benefits of using tape be?
00:59:56
Speaker
Obviously, we've talked a lot about the benefits of nasal breathing over math, breathing math, breathing more part stress. You sort of think, well, would you want to be breathing in a stressed way when you're trying to sleep? Or do you want to be breathing in a calm, relaxing way when you sleep? The calm, relaxing one.
01:00:14
Speaker
You know, you lose a lot more moisture with his foot to present more moisture while your mouth breathing at night. So you wake up with a dry mouth, your airways dry like the options of the breathe is poorer. You're also more likely to snore when your mouth, it's very difficult not to snore when your mouth is acrid. Before we get to mouth, okay, but we do mouth take first, but don't let me forget about like body position.
01:00:33
Speaker
When we're putting tape directly on the lips, we recommend using 3M micropore tape. It's always like semi-seathrough and it's not like crazy sticky like duct tape. You don't even have to seal the whole of your mouth. You can just use it like a thin strip in the middle and you can leave a space either side in case you like need to cough or you know, you just, it feels a bit panicky. You don't want to make yourself, if it stresses you out, that's not gonna help.
01:00:59
Speaker
So it needs to feel, it needs to be calm and comfortable with it. So one thing we always suggest is put some on during the day for 5-10 minutes whilst you're washing the dishes or watching telly or reading a book or whatever on your computer.
01:01:12
Speaker
just to get used to the fact that actually your brain is more than happy and prefers to breathe through your nose than your mouth if you give it a chance to. So make it a bit more of a norm. And I think one of my bugbears, so I take my mouth and I work use take my mouth, take my clients and stuff. But the thing that is just classically social media, it's like,
01:01:33
Speaker
okay great take my mouth and us as humans we go great I'll take my mouth and I go oh that's just like a band-aid literally over the top of the problem the problem is you don't naturally breathe through your nose you need to do some conscious work whilst you're awake on your breathing to change your norm change your auto the other thing that's um gonna work in your favor is that your body position so if I'm lying on my back
01:01:58
Speaker
your mouth just because of gravity is more likely to drop it. So sleeping on your side or your front can be beneficial for keeping the mouth closed without the need of tape. But yeah, for a lot of people, taping the mouth
01:02:15
Speaker
working on their nasal breathing consciously during the day and you combine those two things together. Being comfortable with the mouth closed at night is an absolute game changer for people to sleep. When you change and improve people's sleep, you change the following day. Big time. Like no one wakes up from a great night's sleep and goes, ah, I wish I slept to this last night.
Holistic Health and Lifestyle Choices
01:02:37
Speaker
but you always, the opposite happens. If you have a bad night's sleep, it affects how you feel in your mood and how you are the next day. This is massively important. Is it live changing? Change from one's sleep.
01:02:52
Speaker
Yeah, you see a lot of people, there was an expression I heard the other day of stepping over pounds to pick up pennies, which is where people try their best to, you know, things like optimize these different things, but neglecting the fundamentals, such as getting enough sleep, or, you know, they got a perfect
01:03:11
Speaker
Perfect morning routine. They they're taping their mouth or they are doing the cold plunges or whatever they are doing but they're still only getting like five hours sleep four hours sleep doing it and It's you know, you gotta obviously nail the basics first. Yeah, you gotta respect the whole the whole thing you go respect the whole system and not all the different stresses that you put in on you on your body and
01:03:33
Speaker
Absolutely. Jaco, so if people want to find out a bit more about what you do and access some of those free resources that you were talking to us about earlier, where might they find them?
Further Resources on Breathwork
01:03:44
Speaker
Yeah, website is probreathbook.com. There's a free foundations course. There's a free course for stress and anxiety management. And then if anyone's interested in like I teach as a master instructor, the actual advantage, I teach the advanced certification. So it's a qualified coach. All the details for that are on there in any workshops.
01:04:02
Speaker
that I'm running and then my Instagram is probably the best, easiest place to find and interact with me. Try and put out as much good information on there, lots and lots of stealing your attention but hopefully trying to educate you and sometimes also entertain you depending on what subscriber video it is. My Instagram is jacko.david.jackson.
01:04:23
Speaker
So I said, I never knew that a nasal swab could go that far into your nose. I'll let the nice ones find out for themselves. Brilliant. Thank you so much for your time today. It's been really, really insightful. And I'll definitely be looking at some of those resources and trying to implement some of these practices in my daily life as well. So thank you. Great. Thank you, mate. Thanks for having me on. I hope the listeners, the benefits, if anyone has any, any questions, whether they send me a DM on Instagram, I'd love to hear from you and love to connect.
01:04:53
Speaker
video.