You're walking up the down escalator if you're breathing dysfunctionally, the dysfunctional breathing is not your fault as much as it is your responsibility.
We are talking about something that seems relatively simple, and that's breath work, but it goes so much deeper than that. This was such a fun episode to record. We are talking with a special guest, Campbell Will. He is a senior physiotherapist, breath work coach educator, and he has spent over a decade working as a physiotherapist in hospitals and clinics around the world, but his journey into breath work is what really gets fun to hear about. He started with just a single Wim Hof session, if you're familiar with Wim Hof breathing, and he thought it might just be a fun experience, but it ended up changing his whole trajectory of his career. Campbell has combined his background with the Science of Breath work and working with hundreds of clients and training health practitioners as well to be able to use breath work as a tool to actually heal the body. And so in this conversation, we're unpacking all things breath work, what it really is, and what's really fun to talk about is the science behind it, how it affects and interacts with and informs our nervous system. You've all heard me talk a lot about the nervous system and our fight or flight, and this breath work is so powerful to help restore and rebalance our nervous system. He shares with us practical ways we can use it to reduce stress, improve sleep, boost energy, which was really interesting to me, and just basically improve your life. So I think you are going to love it. Stay tuned. Turn up the volume and let me know if this episode stands out to you. If there's anything else you want to hear like this, I'd love to hear from you. Let's dive in.
We can blame the environment of the 21st Century like, I'm happy to do that. I'm not saying, Hey, your dysfunctional breathing is because you did something. It's like, No, you're a 21st Century human. I'm very confident you're not breathing well because of all these environmental conditions that we face every day. So it's not your fault, but it is your responsibility.
Well, Campbell, thank you for coming here today and talking with us. I am really excited to dive into this conversation. I know this is something you love talking about, so I'm looking forward to it, yeah, as am I, Mallory, I'm really pumped. Awesome. So we're talking about breath work, and this is something that you and I were just talking about. I think most people have a very superficial understanding of breath work, right? Like we should all slow down and breathe a little bit, but we're going to be talking in a little more detail and diving in quite a bit deeper into the different ways we can do breath work and the different benefits. And this is something that I'm excited to learn more about, because I don't know very much. Will you start by telling us a little bit about your story of how you got into breath work, because I think it's really interesting,
yeah? And I mean, it's such that we use this term breath work, right? And that's like, if we kind of just simplify this down to breathing, it's something we're all doing, but when we start to breathe intentionally, we can begin to maybe call that breath work. So I always like to just kind of start, because a lot of people maybe have a pre people maybe have a preconceived idea of, like, oh, breath work is a bunch of people in a room hyperventilating and screaming, and it's like, you have a really thin slice of the pie when we consider this really broad approach of breathing. My background, I was always just fascinated by the human body. It always drove me. It's just like how this thing works. And so that led me down. I became a physiotherapist, and my first kind of role was in the hospital setting as a leave cover physio. So I was on all the different wards, just kind of covering when people are away. So I got exposed to a lot of different kind of clinical presentations, but I kept coming up against this idea of breathing not really being addressed in the way that I thought it needed to be addressed. I had this distinct memory a few times where I had patients in ICU who would tell me I was the first person to talk to them about their breathing. And that always just struck a chord with me, you know, like end of life or critical care shouldn't be the first time we actually talk to someone about the thing that keeps them alive. And so, you know, created a little bit of a frustration itch that I was kind of continuing to chase. And then I kind of came across the Wim Hof Method, and this is probably seven or eight years ago, and it was just a curiosity thing. I was like, you know, this guy's doing some pretty amazing things, climbing mountains and submerging himself in ice. And I kind of dove in. And it was one of those, just like, oh, there's something to this. I don't know what there is to it, but I just felt very different afterwards. And I'm a pretty curious person, and really wanted to understand mechanism, and so I kind of dove in, and I went and did the Wim Hof training, and kind of that just sent me on this journey of like, there was so much more to breathing than even I, as a respiratory physiotherapist, was aware of the five years of schooling I did to become a physio. We did one lecture on the diaphragm. It was on neurological injuries. You know, it wasn't on the role that breathing plays on emotional regulation and energy management and my lymphatics and my posture and like all of these other really important systems in the body. And so that kind of just set me down this path of trying to keep one foot in the clinical world and one foot in this world of breath work, which is this, you know, 5000 year old practice in some you. Lineages, and really trying to, just, like, see how these two things fit together. My goal was not to leave clinical practice, nor was it to, you know, try and bring breath work into ICU, but I saw the opportunity of, like, I think we're missing a lot of potential of really empowering people to understand a little bit more about how their body works, and moving away from a mode of treatment reliance, right? I'm seeing the practitioner because they can do something to fix me versus like, what if we equip the individual with an understanding of how their body works, and empower them to use the tools that are actually going to be supportive, right, for where they're at. And so the last couple of years has been me really kind of trying to train more practitioners in what I call functional and therapeutic breath work, which is more of an assessment and treatment model. So yes, we use breath work, but far more emphasis is on assessing and identifying, perhaps imbalances or room for improvement, because a lot of people today in the 21st Century are breathing quite poorly, and I'm sure we'll get into the reason why, but I've found that then there is this kind of sequence, right? First, we need to kind of bring breathing back to its optimal state before we can then use it and extract all the potential out of it, which most people will see as
breath work. Well, I think that's just really interesting and exciting, and it makes me want to just dive right in and say, Well, what like? What are we missing? What is this magic that you've discovered? Not magic, right? Because it's so it's the most basic physiology that we have. But what have you found through your own experience or through training other people or practitioners that we are missing by not focusing on breath work?
Yeah, I think it, it gives us this really interesting window into what's occurring below the surface level in the body, the way that I teach breath is kind of the interface right between the outside world and how my nervous system and physiology are responding. And so if we think of the nervous system's kind of role as interpreting or perceiving the environment, determining, Hey, are we safe? Are we in danger? And that is then determining, where am I allocating resources? What functions are we prioritizing? Breathing is this really big input to that system, right? And if we think about this, what happens when we're frightened, what happens if we're in pain? You know, we brace? There's all these things that happen to our breath as a reflex to things that are happening in the outside world, and that's been occurring for a couple of million years, right, with the kind of modern version of the nervous system. But if we think of the changes that have occurred in the last 50 years in terms of the environment that we're in, the notifications and the constant dings and the hustle culture and the not enough and the artificial light and the artificial food, we can kind of go on this huge list of changes that have occurred in the last 50 years, and we're kind of seeing the impact of that in breathing, yet we continue to kind of move the goalposts, something I think you'll find really interesting, Mallory, if you go back to like, medical literature, healthy respiratory rate for adults used to be eight to 12 breaths a minute. And then, kind of 19th century, it started to tick up a little bit. When I went through university, it was 12 to 16 breaths a minute currently establish healthy respiratory rate for adults is 12 to 20 breaths a minute. And I think that is a plea. You know, we're really missing an important signal from the body. Someone breathing 1520 times a minute, that's not normal. That is a reflection of a nervous system under duress, right? Like the breathing is just kind of the output. And saying, Hey, this system is working really hard all of the time. But if we don't identify that as a sign or symptom of dysfunction, and we say, Oh, it's just normal, then we really miss a big, early sign. And I think one of the most fascinating things about breathing is, I would argue it's a leading indicator rather than a lagging indicator. Oftentimes, when symptoms emerge, right? These are lagging behind some dysfunction that might have been occurring for a while, breathing is one of the first things to change. Breathing will start to elevate when someone is fighting an infection, right? Like we see all these changes in heart rate variability and breathing that are kind of occurring early. And so what I've kind of found is not just seeing breath as a treatment tool. Of, let me teach you a practice to change how you feel, but also seeing it as an assessment tool, of, like a window to your physiology, and it tells us a lot about the stress that you're under, the way that you manage or don't manage your emotions. Are you moving enough? Are you sleeping well? Are you getting restoration? And so we can kind of use that as a, hey, there's something here. And then we can start to work on actually addressing that at the level of breathing and physiology. The other reason I think it's so powerful is it's very neutral, right? We can dive down therapy, you know, or cognitive behavioral therapy, or emotional work, and people seem to have a level of resistance or misunderstanding, whatever it might be. But most people, breathing is quite neutral. It's just this thing that's going on. And so when we use breathing as kind of a way in to regulate emotions or the nervous system or energy management, or my mindset and all these like tools that I think are super important, it gives us a little bit more of an easy way in that doesn't have. All of the stories or layers attached to it that often people go, Oh, that's not for me. So I think it serves these really wonderful purposes. Number one, of a mirror what's going on? Number two is a kind of lever that we can then begin to influence the nervous system and physiology. And then three, really easy entry point for a lot of people, because it's like, oh, this just this thing that I'm doing all the time.
I love so many things that you said. One of the things that I want to come back to is, when you talk about the autonomic nervous system, it's interesting because, I mean, the reason it's called autonomic is because it's basically reflexive, right? We see a saber toothed Tiger, and multiple systems in our brain will prep us to stay alive, right? And a lot of those mechanisms we don't have any control of. Like I can't tell my heart rate to slow down because there's not actually a tiger there. I can't tell my blood pressure to slow down because there's not I can't affect my digestion because there's not actually a tiger there. But breath work we can actually affect and we can actually utilize. So I want to hear more about that from the perspective of the nervous system. And so maybe let's go there. Yeah,
that's such a, I mean, you just hit on such an important point. And I think there's been a, you know, this idea of autonomic nervous system. It leaves people saying, All right, well, I can't affect it. Whereas, actually, what we found is there is this doorway and through an indirect mechanism right right now, if we both just chose to breathe faster, our heart rates are going to increase, our blood pressure is going to go up, our brain waves are going to accelerate, right? We're going to start to trigger that more sympathetic part of the nervous system and all of the things that come with that. And I have voluntary control of my breathing, so I do have influence over the autonomic nervous system. The part that I think is really fascinating is that, if we kind of understand right, the brain and the nervous system respond to breathing in a very predictable way, because for the longest amount of time, right, my breathing only ever changed in relationship to what was happening out there, right? The Tiger comes out of the bushes, right? So I begin to learn over millions and millions and millions of repetitions through generations that, hey, fast breathing means we're probably running from a tiger or trying to catch our food. You know, slow, rhythmical breathing means something else. And so we've got this really kind of built in predictable response that then opens up this door of like, okay, so when I learned to begin to use my breath for my nervous system. And there's wonderful emerging research to show that we have this kind of breath print, right? Your breath is very different to mine. And so if we did the same practice, we might get a very different outcome, right? And so this idea of kind of learning, how do I begin to use my breath as a lever for my nervous system? It becomes really, really empowering. And I'm sure we'll talk through some of these practices. But the biggest issue I see that I think breath begins to solve, is a lot of people today aren't able to really access that more restorative state, right, the parasympathetic because one of the big drivers, I've found is dysfunctional breathing. You could be sitting on the couch watching Netflix with your kids, but if you're breathing up into your chest, you're breathing shallow, you're breathing fast, that is still sending a message to your nervous system to saying there might be something dangerous out there. We might need to run. We might need to fight. So let's keep all our defensive systems online. Let's stay vigilant. Let's be in a threat detection mode. And that's very costly metabolically, right? And so I could be doing all the right things, but this one piece of I'm breathing dysfunctionally continues to tell my nervous system a different story. The point that I really like to stress is, I'm not calling breathing dysfunction a pathology as much as a response to perhaps a pathological environment. Right? We sit more than we ever have, right? It's really new thing to sit 810, 12 hours a day. Well, when we sit, we change the orientation of the rib cage and the pelvis. The diaphragm is less effective, right? We get less of the vagal stimulus. So again, downstream impacts back pain, right? Eight and 10 adults in the US will struggle with back pain their lifetime. If you've ever hurt your back, right? What do you do when you're picking up your groceries or your kid, or you're rolling over in bed? You hold your breath, you brace we learn really quickly. Pregnancy is a huge one, whether we're talking the anatomical changes that a woman's body goes through, or the hormonal and physiological both of those impact the way that I breathe and stress being this final big picture, like our breathing responds immediately to perceived levels of stress. And so we've got this kind of perfect storm of postural stress based, movement based right that are kind of edging our breathing towards dysfunction. But then downstream of that, the symptoms that may pop up are more based on a nervous system that's stuck in a sympathetic mode, right or that can't access recovery. And now my immune system, my inflammation, my cellular repair, all these other downstream things start to break, and with the kind of conventional healthcare model. Which is very symptom based and diagnostic. We're usually not looking at this kind of root cause, which may be something as simple as the way you breathe 25,000 times a day. We're looking for the pathology. We're looking for the, you know, the break, instead of like this might just be a really bad habit that you've done over the last 20 years, and now it's the straw that breaks the camel's back.
So how much of an effect? Because, as you're saying this logically, it makes a lot of sense that this is so core and so pivotal to our health. But what can actually be affected, for better or for worse, by proper or improper breathing? What is the actual clinical what do we actually see in people? Besides, yeah, your respiratory rate went up. Like, the things that people really care about, what's being affected there? Yeah.
So I would break this down into two primary impacts, and depending on how sciencey or clinical we want to get, we can dive into the weeds, but I really like to take complex concepts and make sure everyone can understand it as a way that's relatable to them, right, without having a medical background. So let's talk about the first one, which is on the physiological side of things. If we talk about energy, right? That the energy, the currency of energy in the body, of ATP, right, generated by our mitochondria. Our mitochondria need oxygen, right? So aerobic metabolism, when I can deliver the oxygen to the cell, is going to yield much more energy than anaerobic metabolism, where I can't get the oxygen in the cell. That relationship of oxygen being moved from red blood cells to cells is highly dependent on carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide is the gas that we breathe out. Everyone calls it a waste gas. It's very, very important. It's a potent vasodilator, so it relaxes my blood vessels, and it actually kind of bumps the oxygen off the red blood cell and pushes it into the cell where it can be used to create energy. So breathing dysfunctionally, right? Maybe I'm a mouth breather. Maybe I breathe too fast. Maybe I'm a breath holder. These things are going to interrupt or influence my, what is called chemo sensation, right? My sensing of chemistry, and we've all got a set point. So this person now may not have enough carbon dioxide in their system to actually deliver oxygen to the cells. So on the kind of energy level which is important for all of us, and I'm not talking energy to lift weights or run up a hill, talking energy to digest food and beat your heart and keep your body running really, really tightly dependent on the way that we breathe. The second being this kind of nervous system piece right as a line of information or line of communication. If I'm breathing in a way that stimulates the sympathetic response, and I'm doing that literally, 24/7 it's very hard for anything to override that, right? If we think of just volume, right, it's like, Oh, I could sit down and do five minutes of breath work, but if the other 23 hours and 55 minutes, I'm breathing poorly, that five minutes doesn't matter, you know? So we have this constant input to the nervous system, and this is the part that I think is harder for people to grasp, because we love linear this causes that. But like, when we're talking about the nervous system, it's much more this, like indirect mechanism. So someone might have digestive issues, and they're like, Well, what's breathing got to do with that? Well, if you're stuck in a sympathetic state, you're not pushing blood flow to your digestive tract, and you're not secreting salivary enzymes and digestive enzymes, because the nervous system is not prepared for digestion. It thinks it's about to run from a tiger. Digestion is the last thing on its mind. So some we kind of compartmentalize and be like, Oh, that's an issue with my gut, or that's anxiety, that's a mental health issue, or that's my pain or my immune system. And perhaps there's this big driving factor that the nervous system has lost its ability to move between states. You know, it's stuck in a sympathetic overdrive, all these different things that can be occurring. And what I've just found time and time again, clinically, is one of the biggest drivers, and I really want to make it clear, not the only driver, right? I'm not saying breathing is the cause of all of these issues, but because it's such a big input, right, 23,000 times a day, we have to consider it, and it's very hard to override that you could do great exercise and great movement and great nutrition, but this one input, if it's happening 23,000 times a day, and it is sending a signal to the nervous system that is going to be received by the nervous system. And so I think they're the two, right. We can talk about what stems from that in terms of emotional regulation or lymphatic system or postural work, but to me, it's really like energy physiology and then kind of nervous system, and what my nervous system is interpreting about the world, which then determines what is it actually telling my body to do?
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yeah, and this piece that I think just fits with those two things, again, I try not to just, like, throw stones at conventional healthcare, but it's time for an update, right? Like it, there are many elements that are outdated, right? Science is, you know, we've caught up with the certain things, but a big part, I think, we're so focused on diseases rather than health, right? Like, even the functional medicine side and the root cause of disease, we're still looking at the cause of disease instead of the cause of health. And I think that's just a really interesting kind of like mindset that we've fallen into, where we're literally looking at, like, what's causing the disease, and how do I manage the disease, instead of like, what if I allocated my resources to creating the conditions for health to emerge? Because, like, we all have this innate capacity for health. Oftentimes, there's things in the way, you know, a dysregulated nervous system, chronic sleep issues, right? Nutritional like, these things aren't necessarily the you know, it's like, instead of trying to eliminate the pathology, what if, instead, we focused on the capacity for health. And I think that's where breathing is just really interested me. I always get this question, hey, could breath work help with IBS? Could breath work help with my anxiety? Could breath work cure my cancer? And it's like, like, yes, but it's because if we're using breath to really support the system rather than manage the symptom, then absolutely it can help. And there's all these really cool examples of that, where we shift away from, hey, let's almost forget about the disorder, the condition, the label, the diagnosis, and really just work on like, what could we do to support, nourish and soothe your nervous system. And let's see what happens. It's like, oftentimes there's a resolution of the symptoms, not because we tried to get rid of them, but because we focused on what it is the body actually needed so it could be healthy. And that's where I just get, like, there's this convergence of worlds, but, and I've just found, for me, that breath kind of sits at the center point of that. And when we focus there, it's like these little tendrils kind of reach out into all these other aspects.
I am so 100% on the same page. And it's one of my frustrations with functional medicine, is a lot of patients who are chronically struggling will come to me saying, but what's the problem? What's the root cause? And there's, there's a place for that, right? There's, there's some stuff that we do there, but so often I'm, I'm trying to help them understand it's the foundations of the body. Like, if we can put the foundations of the healthy body in place and then trust and believe in your function, very, very frequently, it really will solve so many issues. But it's hard to do because so many of these things, like eating, for example, if you tell someone to go eat perfectly, gosh, there's a lot of obstacles between here and there, even if we believe it. But breath, I hope you're going to tell us, we'll we'll move into the how in a second. But I hope you're going to tell us that it's a little bit easier right to cross from here to there, as opposed to so. Any of these other things. If you take someone who's chronically ill and they're absolutely exhausted and you're like, you know what would help some walking and maybe some hiking? You know that sometimes is a little bit harder, it's true, but it's sometimes a little harder to conceptualize. Like, how do I get this really sick person to be able to do that? And it's one of the reasons why I very frequently start with working on the nervous system is because if the body is stuck in fight or flight, it's exhausting. It uses up cellular energy. It uses up every kind of energy, but it also programs the body to stay in a survival state, instead of in a recovery state. And in order to get through any of this, we want our bodies to be in a recovery, repair, maintenance, state, growth, state, and most things we do in functional medicine, sadly, it's really easy for it to keep it in that that I lived another day, I survived another day. Sort of state. Instead of fully shifting over, we're going to keep talking about the nervous system, because we can't get away from it. But let's start talking about, how do we how do we do this? What are the different ways that we can actually put this into practice so that we can see some of these wins?
No one likes this answer when I give it to them, the clients that come to me, right? I teach this model in our practitioner program of ACO, which is awareness, control, optimization and a lot of people's first introduction of breath work lands in the control, right? I get a dozen messages every day of like, hey, what's the breathing practice I should do for my anxiety? Right? Control. Like, how do I control this thing? And again, the answer they don't want is like, well, it depends, right? Without the awareness of what may be contributing to your anxiety, we're left in a guessing game, right? Some people, when they're exposed to stress, hold their breath. Others hyperventilate. Others go into a really erratic breathing pattern. Each of those require a different kind of management strategy, and so before control of like breathe in this pattern or do this breathing practice, I really encourage people to spend a little bit of time actually learning about their breath, right? Our breath is this mirror and spending a little bit of time. I talk about a formal and informal practice, right? The formal practice being, hey, set a timer for two minutes, three minutes, sit down and just see if you can notice your breath right, and know that it's going to be challenging at the start. I often make it a little bit similar to learning a language, right? If I was standing in front of two people speaking Spanish, and I didn't speak Spanish, it's just noise. There's nothing for me to pick it's literally noise. But as I begin to learn, I might pick up a word here and there, and eventually I can communicate, right? I can be in that conversation. And so when we sit down and like, pay attention to our breath, most people like, I don't know I'm breathing like nothing's happening. It's like, Yeah, you don't let you don't speak the language yet. Just spend a bit of time. But what we're trying to do is, like, the part of our brain that is literally observing our breath, we start to strengthen that part of the brain. We become more attuned to these subtle changes that we're missing. So the idea of like, being able to catch when I begin to breathe faster, or when my breath moves up into my chest, or when I start holding my breath. If I miss those cues, it's very hard to manage. And so the awareness piece right formally sitting down and just spending a couple of minutes and trying to not change control do anything except notice it coming in and going back out. But then the informal, or sometimes I call the opportunistic practice. Every time you feel a certain way, I'm feeling really stressed, I'm feeling really excited, I'm super tired, I'm upset, right? These emotional states that we find ourselves in, is then being like, and how am I breathing? Because what people will begin to learn very quickly. This is like, usually three or four days, people start to pick up these changes. It's like, oh, I breathe different when I'm stressed versus when I'm relaxed. And I didn't know that there was a difference. I just thought breathing is always happening, but now I'm starting to attune to it. I do have a different breath when I'm super relaxed, and it's different when I'm stressed, and it's different when I'm angry and it's different when I'm frustrated, when we're doing that, we're kind of starting to establish a little bit more of this, like emotional state and respiratory pattern link, right? What do people do when they're frustrated? Right? There's a very specific type of breath people take, but that is true of all emotional states. And getting really clear on that, it's like, next time I'm feeling stressed, I can breathe like I'm relaxed, because I know what that looks like, because I've spent some time in awareness, and that changes the channel on the nervous system, right? Remember, breathing is this big input. If I start breathing like I'm relaxed, my nervous system is like, Oh, the environment must be safe. Otherwise we would be breathing really slowly with our diaphragm and a nice, easy rhythm. And so that awareness, piece of kind of recognizing how my breath changes depending on the state that I'm in or how I'm feeling, is in my mind, this, like, absolutely necessary foundation for which everything else is built on. That is not to say, if I say to someone, hey, breathe in for four and breathe out for eight, it's going to have an impact. Yeah, it will, but it's going to be less effective than actually finding out, well, what are the changes that occur in my breathing? And that's going to point me in the direction of what I should actually do about it. So firstly is awareness. The second piece I want to kind of touch on is we have to kind of consider breath almost holistically across the systems of the body, the three primary kind of like pillars that I would break it down into. One is the biomechanics, which is the how if I'm breathing, is it nose or mouth? Am I using my accessory muscles or my neck? Is my rib cage moving like where is the breath moving in my body? The second is physiology, and this is more based on right the gas exchange and that kind of respiratory chemistry, and then the third being this nervous system state. Although I separate these to describe, they impact each other really, really tightly, right? But a lot of people, it's like we could teach someone breathing exercises, but if they've been bracing their diaphragm for a decade, we're only going to get so far. The limitation is actually biomechanics, like, their diaphragm needs to have more mobility, their rib cage needs to have more mobility. Their breathing patterns need to change, right? So, yes, breath work might work, but again, it's going to be limited in its impact because we haven't unlocked the constraint, which is like the way that you breathe. Now, again, let's say someone has had back pain, and they've had two kids, and they sit at a desk, I know for a fact that person is breathing shallow right? Their diaphragm is more moved to a stability muscle and a protective muscle, and it's not breathing as much. And now I'm recruiting these accessory muscles, which are more sympathetic, which cause me to breathe higher in my chest. That shallower breath means I need to take more of them per minute. So all of a sudden, again, we've got this like recipe that that person, because they're breathing shallow and fast, they're going to have a change in their set point of carbon dioxide. They're literally now driven to breathe out more often, and they can't allow that kind of accumulation of CO two that's going to have an impact on blood pressure. And so for me, this really big part, and this can be done as a self assessment, right, is like, where do I breathe? Right? People can place a hand on the chest and a hand on the belly and just kind of notice, it's a very rudimentary, but it helps, right? Your shoulders are going up and down. Your diaphragm is not doing that right. Like muscle down here does not have the capacity to elevate your shoulders and your collarbones, right? So, just like if my chest and shoulders are going up with my breath, it's like cool, somewhere along the way, I learned to use these muscles instead of this muscle that probably needs to be addressed before anything else. So we can give the diaphragm a bit of a massage every day, we can work on actually mobilizing our rib cage, and we're kind of unlocking the body so that breathing can kind of conform to this new shape. Once we've kind of worked on mechanics, then it opens up the door to us actually addressing physiology. And this is where practices like breathing slowly, breathing with the nose, doing intentional kind of what I would call sub maximal breath holds, are all great to start to get my body used to a little bit more carbon dioxide, again, right? So we're kind of addressing the physiology, and then the nervous system piece is then learning to kind of tweak these knobs and dials. How can I breathe to increase my arousal because I'm feeling flat and lethargic today? How can I breathe to dial down my arousal because I'm feeling a little bit anxious and overwhelmed today? And so this nervous system piece then becomes our steering wheel. But again, I want to highlight we're only getting good at steering because we've kind of made sure that the body has the capacity right through mechanics and physiology, so these kind of necessary steps before we can then jump in the driver's seat and be like, Oh, I can actually kind of have this relationship and influence my nervous system in A really predictable
way. I think that when we're talking about the nervous system, it is so interesting to remember that it is bidirectional, right? That the breath we're doing is telling our nervous system how to feel, but the nervous system then tells our breath what to feel. One of the things that I work on with patients is the idea of how to calm the nervous system, you mentioned earlier, therapy, right? That the brain can be, it can get in the way. Sometimes it can be really stuck in these modes of protective thinking that aren't very helpful. And if we try to calm the nervous system just through thinking about it, then it can be very difficult to just think less scared, right? I'm safe, I'm safe, I'm safe. Like the brain is going to be like, No, you're not big story brain. Yeah, exactly. But when we have mechanics of the body, the mechanics of the body can very frequently. They're sometimes easier to coerce, to to exercise those to cue the nervous system that we're safe. So things like tapping or shaking, there is breath work there, and that's one of the things we use. But I like what you're teaching us about. It's not quite that easy, necessarily, just to start going through the motions of breathing as if you're in a safe state, and recognizing that there's a capacity here. There's a training that needs to happen to get your body used to like you said that carbon dioxide. And getting used to that feeling. One of the things that I hear from patients frequently when we talk about breath work, and again, I talk about this very superficially, is they'll say, like, I hate breath work. I don't like how it feels. It feels uncomfortable for me. So will you dive down that area just a little bit more of I think, that increasing capacity and that training, but also, like, we can't always just go from Super dysregulated nervous system and just do breath work, or it will. That's the body's way I think, of saying, like, yeah, stop breathing so slowly. Do you know how many tigers are out there? Like, you need to be breathing fast, right? So tell us more about that
exactly. And this is honestly one of my favorite areas to kind of dive into, because so many people, particularly our kind of higher stressed, anxiety, panic attack type it, you know, it's like, you say breathe. And they're like, I prefer not to, yeah. And for me, the really big part is coming back to my nervous system and this sense of familiarity. So we take our person that's been really stressed and anxious for 10 years, they've got really familiar with this level of arousal, like they're used to the sympathetic state. And the nervous system loves nothing more than predictability, right? It loves to know what's going on, how much resources it has to spend, right? Like, so it's more comfortable. And I use the word comfortable, not as if we like it, but like my nervous system would rather be in the state that it's always been in than in a foreign state, this new state, because that novelty requires more metabolic energy, right? How are we going to deal with this? What's going to happen? So the moment that someone sits down and goes, I'm going to do that breathing exercise, and they slow their breath down, there's a latency of about 10 or 15 seconds before the nervous system begins to move towards a parasympathetic state. Now, if this individual has an access to parasympathetic state in a decade, that's going to feel really scary. They're going to get agitated. They're gonna be like, I should clean the oven, and I should call my mom and I should like, all these things are gonna just rise up because my nervous system is trying to get back to what it knows, right? It's like, let's go back to the stress. We're really good at that. I know how to deal with that. This thing over here is parasympathetic, soft, slow. It's like, don't really know what's going on there, so I'm going to do everything I can to not spend any time there. And that's a really key part for people to understand. It's not because most people go, Oh, well, I can't do it, or it's not for me, or I'm doing it wrong or I'm broken, right? No, we just haven't really got used to it yet, right? Each time I spend that few minutes, my nervous system learns. It becomes a bit more familiar. It becomes less scared of that state, and eventually it actually does become comfortable. But it's so important for us to explain to clients and patients, right? If we're like, breath work is this magical, soothing, calming, relaxing thing, you're going to love it, and then 30 seconds later, like, I've never felt more anxious, right? We really should set the expectation of like, Hey, your nervous system is probably not going to like this a lot, because it really loves to stay where it's been and you've been here for a while, right? We need to approach this gently, right over time, and we need to keep kind of dipping back into this state until it starts to feel more comfortable, and the idea that over time, I can spend three minutes and five minutes and 10 minutes, and now I'm learning to access this restorative state that has been really difficult for me to access for a long time. I think so many people get lost in that first like, this is hard, and I don't like it, and I don't like the way it feels. So it mustn't be for me. And then they go up. And what's really interesting that happens there is, we don't get to create this separation, right? Of my breathing is this thing that I'm scared of, right? We associate it's like, oh, breath work. No, not for me. It makes me feel anxious, when, in actual fact, it's like the parasympathetic state just feels really unfamiliar, and my nervous system wants to go back to what it knows. So kind of having that longer timeline, instead of the this is going to make me feel good really quickly. This is, as you said, a skill that I need to acquire, right? And that's going to take some repetition and some consistency, and it might be a little bit challenging or uncomfortable at times, but the outcome of the other end of that is a very different nervous system, and so that piece of kind of just recognizing, you know, what this client that I'm working with, or myself as an individual, you know, I've been under a lot of stress for the past five years, that is now ingrained in your breathing, right? Like our breathing is the most adaptive physiological process in the body, right? Again, look at someone in back pain. Very quickly, their breathing pattern will shift to stop hurting their back, right? They'll breathe shallow. They'll hold they move their breath higher because they're trying to, just like, avoid pain. You know, a month later, the back pain is going away. The breathing pattern hasn't gone back right now, I've learned to hold my breath every time I get out of the car. And so we got to consider that, like, the longer I've been in a state of stress, or I've been in pain, or I've been, you know, again, sitting in a position that I shouldn't be in for too like those things, even if they change, breathing kind of takes a while to catch up. It needs us to kind of manually update the system, in a way. But. And so without that, that's why it feels really uncomfortable to breathe slowly and coming back to a point you made earlier. This idea of kind of like fixing ourselves, that there's a state behind that, right, I'm broken, is then infusing everything I do, instead of right, I'm doing these things to kind of support the system, right, like, instead of this energy of brokenness or not enoughness or scarcity or control or fear being a nervous system state that's driving the sauna that I'm doing and the walk that I'm going on and all the great things I'm doing, but if I'm doing that from a place of trying to fix my brokenness, then I would argue there's going to be less of the positive benefits. And there's this wonderful research coming out from a lady named Alia Crum that's kind of showing how much our belief, right, impacts our biology. I believe that I'm broken and I'm doing this and it's not enough. Well, guess what? That's going to impact your cortisol and your stress and your hormones, right? Whereas the person that's like, I'm doing this because I love the way it makes me feel. You know, we all know people that exercise from a place of self criticism and self hate, and I just am trying to beat my body into shape, versus the person that exercises because they love it, right and they love the way it. Want to make them feel. We could really argue that there's a very different outcome to the exact same thing. They both go for a 20 minute run, but one person is doing it from a state, you know, of brokenness or scarcity, and the other place of collaboration and connection and patients different outcomes. And so to me, it always comes back to just like, oh, what's the nervous system kind of role here, if I believe I'm broken, and the medical system is, you know, amplified that belief that the cure comes from this and I'm broken and I need to be fixed, then, unless we address that, you can give someone all the right tools, but the state that they're in is not conducive to healing and rest, restoration and repair, and, you know, all the wonderful things that we want are kind of being driven away because we haven't addressed the underlying thing, which is the state.
Yeah, yeah, yes, to all of this. It's, it's, it's fun to nerd out, because these are exactly the types of things that that come up, but it's really lovely to see it from another perspective. You know, you and I have never met, we've never crossed paths professionally, and yet these are the deepest truths that I feel when we're approaching healing. Is this concept of the body is very rarely broken. I mean, occasionally, right? You have a genetic something that doesn't work very well, but most often, the body is responding physiologically to exactly what we're telling it to do. We don't realize we're telling it to do that, but we are. We are inadvertently programming our bodies to do stuff all day, every day, and have for the last 510, 2040, years of our lives, the body is just a cumulative result of what we're telling it to do, and so the best outcomes we get are when we consciously and proactively understand what we need to tell it to do, just to like we talked about earlier, to to have healthy foundations, just to function. Well, we don't often need to tell it how to fix itself. It's super smart. It is incredibly smart. It will fix itself a lot of the time if we just keep giving it those right cues. So I love hearing you say all of these things. It's really fascinating. Have you ever tried red light therapy at uplift for her, we are big fans, and we and I use it ourselves regularly. Red light therapy helps support energy healing, reduce inflammation and improve skin health, and there's more and more data to support that. One of my favorite at home options is the loom box, a powerful, clinical grade device that combines red light with near infrared light so you're getting both surface level and deeper tissue support. It's easy to use and makes consistent red light therapy actually doable. One of the things that I love about the loom box is how easy it is and how compact it is, so you can grab it out really quickly, use it while you're in bed, getting ready to go to sleep, and then put it away and not have to unpack a big, complicated device. I use it most nights as I'm going to bed mostly just for relaxation, I find I feel very calm and wake up with good energy. So it is one of my favorite wellness add ons. If you're thinking about adding it to your wellness routine, we have a link in the show notes that will save you $250 off of a loom box. You can also find it on our favorite products page at uplift for her.com now back to the show. I got a
smile on my face because I had this. I was in the garden yesterday, you know, and I we were away for a month back on the East Coast visiting family. And guess what? The garden's kind of gone into a bit of disarray, right? But I'm not down there. Like, how do I fix this flower? It's like, oh, it needs more water the soil. Like it's conditions. The flower knows how to be a flower. The plant knows how to grow fruit. Like when we look at nature, it would be, I think everyone would agree. Would it be silly that I need to teach a tree how to grow leaves? You know? It's like, that's kind of what we're doing with healthcare. It's like, it's broken and I need to fix it, instead of what you and I are suggesting is, like the conditions the environment right might be, quote, unquote broken, and. We are simply adapting to that. And so instead of us being broken, it's like maybe we're adapting perfectly to a somewhat broken environment, and that's where we should be then addressing and kind cool, what can I do about my relationship with the environment so that my body starts to have the conditions for health to emerge right for the flower to grow on the plant, not because we fixed it, because we just created the right conditions for that just to happen
naturally, right, right? I love that. Will you then tell us about any sort of examples or stories from your clinical experience of training people in breath work? What are some of the things that you actually see? What are some things that people listening, if they, if they dive in and do this work and really start to, I don't want to say repair, after all of that, to support healthy breath work. What are some examples of clients that you've seen in that that have seen changes from
this? Yeah, the three biggest kind of categories. So we've trained 250 health practitioners. I've probably worked with a similar amount of clients over the last six, seven years. The biggest ones I see, number one is anxiety. You know, label this mental health disorder. I have a bit of a disagreement with right, because then we just think attributed it as a mental problem, instead of addressing physiology, right? It's a huge physiological driver to anxiety. So anxiety and anxiety based disorders, I see, do really, really well. The second bucket being fatigue. We again, chronic fatigue, right? The pathology, the label, the diagnosis, but also those just like subclinical fatigue, just like don't have enough energy, struggling to get through the day, the energy piece is huge. And again, I attribute most of that to kind of like almost rewriting the nervous system, where it's like, oh, we can access restoration. We're not waking up in a sympathetic state, spending all day in a sympathetic state, going to sleep in a sympathetic state and wondering why we're tired, right? It's like, it's not often we change, you know, gave you more calories or change your diet. It's like we access that well of energy that is restorative states. And then the third being pain. Pain, you know, when we kind of think of this through the biopsychosocial model, pain being this experience that is modulated by the nervous system based on the state I'm in. I'm either amplifying pain signals or I'm diminishing them, right? If I'm threatened and I feel like, well, guess what? That pain is a big alarm bell, and I need to know about it. I need to think about it. I need to address it, right? But if that, again, is being influenced by the state that I'm in. It is less about the tissue right the joints in someone's back, and it's more about how their nervous system is interpreting those signals, which we can modulate at the level of the nervous system. So kind of anxiety, energy and pain are the kind of big categories, but if I may, I want to share a story and a version of this happens, like with every cohort we run, but this one was just particularly like incredible in terms of the way it worked. We had a practitioner come in that had dealt with about eight years of chronic headaches, had seen half a dozen neurologists, had tried different medications, had literally tried everything to deal with these chronic, intermittent headaches, it would just come on really, really intense. Weren't migraines. Couldn't really attribute them to anything. As we went through the awareness and the breathing mechanics piece, right, the first two weeks of our program, she realized the job that she'd had for the last eight years. She wore a high waisted skirt that was really tight, almost like a corset, right? In this module, right? And she identified that she undid the button of her skirt, and she immediately noticed, oh, my breathing, just like, oh, like, I get breathed down here again, headaches went away almost right, like, and again, if we understand the mechanism, right, when I restrict my lower abdominal, you know, area, and I drive breathing up into my upper chest that creates a change in intrathoracic pressure, which causes almost a backlog of pressure in the head, the intracerebral pressure. So, like, it was really like, if you breathe up here and you're holding your breath up here all the time, it's really hard for blood to exit the brain, right? That pressure can cause headaches. And so she just had this like, Oh my god. The eight years of headaches that no one could explain were literally just being created by me breathing in a really funky way because I was wearing this super tight skirt and breathing up into my chest eight hours a day, and didn't recognize that relationship. And so those kinds of things are the ones that just make me like, oh wow. You know the long term unexplained. It's like, Wait, could it be so simple? And so often is like, I shy away from saying it's simple, because I don't mean that it's simple and easy. But sometimes we're jumping to, like, the complex answer, like, it must be some mystery thing that we've missed, instead of like, maybe you're holding your breath all the time, you know, maybe you're breathing in a way that's creating a difference in kind of pressure dynamics, and that's having an impact on pain perception, all these different things. So examples like that are what get me really excited. And we just see it time and time again with these things that are like, Oh, I have unexplained X, Y and Z and again. I don't want to make it sound like. It is just purely a breathing thing. It again, that indirect mechanism. It's like, what is this breathing pattern that you've learned to do, doing to your physiology, to your energy production, to your mood stabilization, to your nervous system state? And then we can kind of comprehend it's like, yeah, I see how these symptoms might be linked back to this thing that I'm doing. I love
that. I love those real life examples, because they do kind of put it in perspective, of, like, I think of so many women who wear yoga pants, you know, for a prolonged period of time, or or restrictive like shape wear. And it's interesting to think, like, oh, maybe that's like, maybe that's having an effect. So
what I've seen a lot right particularly women that did ballet and dance through early childhood adolescence, because what is the finishing posture in ballet and dance, right? It is suck in the TUM and puff out the chest. And so I work with all of these 4056, year old women that have these very obvious, dysfunctional breathing patterns, and I'm like, Whoa, you learned to do this when you were nine, and you've been doing it for the last 45 years. Is it any wonder that your nervous system is completely fried, you know? And I've just found, like, when we consider the environment as well, right? Like, in this kind of high stakes, usually it's like a scary dance teacher, you know, with a stick a lot. And a lot of my clients are like, Oh yeah, my dance teacher had a stick, right? Should we tap my tap my belly to suck it in? And so what we learn under those conditions we don't then walk out of dance class and be like, oh, we'll just go back to breathing this way, right? That was a high stakes environment. Increased neuroplasticity. I learned to breathe to get me through this environment. My brain hardwires that, like, I should remember this. This is important. This is the best way to do it. And so we have this again, like, really benign. There's no like, this is just a byproduct of a posture that a lot of people use while they're doing a certain activity, but a lot of people do that at this stage of life, that then all of a sudden we might be dealing with these really dysfunctional breathing patterns that just came from from dancing. I learned to do this thing in those conditions, and then that overflowed into my baseline behavior.
Yeah, really interesting. So when we talk about these different styles, will you give us some just examples of like, what are the different breathing patterns that you utilize in in teaching someone how to breathe therapeutically?
Yeah. So I really like to break breath work down onto a spectrum, right? So on one end of the spectrum we have the kind of functional, restorative or corrective side of breath work, which is a lot of what we've been talking about today. You know, my diaphragm and my rib cage and increasing my CO two tolerance, like I'm working to correct right imbalances, to bring my breathing back to its kind of optimal state. But the other end of the spectrum, we could more kind of call like experiential breath work or therapeutic breath work. And that's where I'm kind of like doing breathing for a specific outcome in mind. There's this exploding popularity of breath work in the last kind of five years, you know, Wim Hof kind of starting that, but we have Holotropic breathwork and rebirthing and transformational and biodynamic and literally dozens of different methods. My issue with that is they're often all the same thing, right? It's breathing. We're just telling a different story, and we're creating a different container around it. But that confusion of like, Well, should I do this breath work or that breath work? What's that one doing versus this one? I think it just creates confusion. It's like, there is one breath work method, and it's breathing, like, how you use your breath should be, you know, determined by the outcome that you want. So I really love this idea of outcome based breath work. You know, what do you want? I'm anxious and I want to calm down. Well, that will determine the type of breath we're going to use. But to kind of make this a little bit more concrete for people, one of the easiest ways to kind of think about this is what part of my breath is linked to the sympathetic nervous system, and what part of my breath is linked to the parasympathetic so my inhale, when I inhale, we're kind of leaning towards the sympathetic. We can think of it like the accelerator. Right? As I inhale, my heart rate actually increases. So if I spend more time inhaling than exhaling, I'm going to slowly push my nervous system towards the sympathetic end of the spectrum, right. The exhale is like the break, right. So the exhale length to the parasympathetic. If I exhale longer than I inhale, that is pretty reliably going to start to suggest to my nervous system that nothing scary is happening, and that we can start to drop the defenses and the guards and focus on restoration. So just that of like, okay, I could breathe in for four seconds and out for two seconds, and that's going to wake me up and make me feel more alert. I could breathe in for two seconds and out for four seconds, that's probably going to make me feel a little bit more calm. Now, of course, there's nuance to it. I want people to walk away and be like, Okay, I've got breath work now two and four, you know. But just as an example of like, what we want to happen, right? Will then determine the way that we're using the breath. And I encourage people away from one method versus another method, because that is one size fits all right? The Wim Hof Method is a great example, right? 30 breaths, big, active inhales, then you hold your breath for 90 seconds, and we have this kind of like routine that is called the Wim Hof Method. What if you do 10 breaths? So what if you only hold your breath for 20 seconds, or what if you do nasal inhale? Instead of it's like, what is it called now? And so we get lost in this, like labeling versus kind of having this intuitive understanding of, like, how do I want to breathe, to change the way that I want to feel? If that makes sense. But to give it one more layer, I really like to kind of create these categories of, like, we have breathing practices that we can kind of put in this bucket of meditative kind of awareness building exercises, right? Self awareness, interoception, right? There's practices that help us become more aware of our breath and our body. Then we have the kind of physiological bucket right, breath holding slow breathing right, my intention being exposing myself to more carbon dioxide because of the benefits that that can have my cardiovascular system. But we're kind of targeting physiology. Then we have the nervous system kind of based exercises, and we can simplify that to up regulate or down regulate more arousal or more calm. And then this final bucket being this kind of like experiential type breath work. And really there's only two types, right? There is cyclic hyperventilation, most popular example Wim Hof Method, right? We hyperventilate, which is just big, fast breathing. And we do that in cycles. So I breathe and I hold my breath, and I breathe and I hold my breath. And the other popular form is called Conscious connected breathing, which is just this kind of like continuous pattern where I'm breathing, usually for 2030, sometimes 40, even longer. And this is where these emotional releases and these cathartic experiences can occur. The reason I, you know, I used to teach a lot of that style of breath work, but what I'm seeing in the world is not a deficit of peak states and hyperventilation. It's like, it really struck me as like, Hey, wait, I'm getting all my clients who are chronically hyperventilating. And I'm saying, Go and hyperventilate for 20 minutes every day. It just, I was like, Wait, how is that solution? You know, it's not. And so I don't think of them as one versus the other, but more of, like a layered approach, of like, first, let's work on the restoration the correction, right? So that then we can use this really powerful tool that more and more research is coming out in these non ordinary states of consciousness, right? They're showing very similar impacts to like, you know, psychedelic assisted therapy and these really interesting new approaches that we can recreate a lot of the same conditions subjectively and objectively through intentional use of the breath. But my kind of bugaboo with that is, if you're someone that is chronically dysregulated, right? And you've got a lot of stresses in your breathing dysfunctionally, and you go and do 45 minutes of a big, cathartic breathwork session, you'll probably have a panic attack. You'll probably again have this like, oh my god, I had a terrible experience, and I never want to do breath work again. And I'm going to tell everyone not to do breath work, because it was so horrendous for me, right? It wasn't that breath work was wrong. It was just that it was the wrong type of breath work for that individual state and where they were at today. So kind of like working our way up to these big, dynamic practices that, again, can be very powerful, but also come with a little bit of risk, right? If someone's overwhelmed already, or they're over capacity, that's just not the answer.
That just makes so much sense. I think it's really easy, especially in the world of social media and tips and tricks and things, you know, someone sees a breathing method and they're like, oh, I want to feel better. I want to have more energy. I'll do that one. And I think it's interesting to see, even with something as simple, seemingly simple, as breath work, that there's a there's a way you want to go through it, especially if you are in need. You know, if you are feeling dysregulated, where do people get started? Do they need to work with someone? Do they need to take a class like, Are there resources available? If someone's listening, they're like, Okay, this resonates with me. I really need and I hope it does. What do they do? What are the next steps for them?
Yeah, so I want to reference a recent meta analysis that came out on all these different breath work methods, and basically, what they found was really interesting. Five minutes is the minimum effective dose, right? So let's try and do at least five minutes. You could do multiple rounds of five minutes, but like, when we hit five minutes, we seem to get a latency, right? So like, let's say under five minutes, I'm doing three minutes of breath work, we can measure the impact while you're doing it. The moment you stop, it kind of goes away. Beyond five minutes, we see this little bit of a latency. It's like I stopped doing the thing, but I'm still seeing increased heart rate variability, right for the next hour or so. So five minutes seems to be this really cool, like, Okay, five minutes is my goal, right? That's pretty achievable for most people. Most people think breath works 30 minutes on the yoga mat with a candle, and he's like, five minutes can actually be enough? There wasn't much difference versus coherence, breathing versus resonance, frequency versus meta. It didn't seem to matter too much. The specific pattern, right? Slow, intentional. This is the recipe that I've come up with. Is like, slow, intentional, breathing is the answer, rather than like, should I do four four breathing or box breathing or triangle breathing? It's like, if you breathe slowly and you are intentional with that practice, and what do we mean by that? It's like, I'm not doing breathing while I'm checking my emails. I'm not doing breathing while I'm thinking about what's for lunch later, like I'm here, present and really engaged with this practice. But that seems to override. What practice you choose, right? And then the third thing, it was found that with a guide or a practitioner does seem to have more impact, right, but only if it's the first few sessions, right? So learning how to do a self guided practice is equally as beneficial as having a guide or practitioner lead you through it indefinitely. So what that means for people is and I almost want to just leave the practitioner part out, because I want this to be as accessible as possible. This is not now I have to find a practitioner in my area. Like, of course, if you want to speed up the process, finding a trusted guide could help you do that. But it's not necessary, right? So where do we start instead of, Well, should I do this method or not? It's like, can you spend five minutes slowing your breath down and being with your body while you do that, right, and trying not to, oh, this is making me feel right, like we jump into the analysis and interpretation. Instead of just like, I have a five minute timer, I'm going to try and breathe kind of slowly. Now, what helps that is having a rhythm, right? So instead of like, just trying to slow the breath down. Having some structure can be beneficial. But what we found is, like, whether you do a triangle or a box or a circle or a square, it doesn't seem to matter. So find what feels comfortable for you. This idea that, like, it's going to be right for everyone. When I'm teaching people, I'm like, All right, we're going to try this pattern. How did that make you feel? Now we're going to try this. What about that? Better or worse, what about this one, right? I don't know the right pattern of breath for anybody that only they do, and so trying a couple of things being going, you know what that second one I did, I just immediately felt right, like a little bit of a drop in my body, or my mind slowed down, or it's like I just felt more at ease. That's probably the one you should practice. Like, don't make it hard on yourself. Find the one that's enjoyable, and then try and build some consistency. And so I would say to people, where to start awareness throughout the day. How am I breathing when I feel certain ways? Can I spend a few moments of just observing and letting my breath happen and developing a little bit more awareness? But then as a kind of formal practice, can I sit down for five minutes in a comfortable position and breathe slowly and intentionally for no other reason, right? Not because it's going to make me feel something on the other side, right? We don't want to tie it to the outcome as much as we want to tie it to the process, right? But that seems to be the recipe. Through this meta analysis of like, what's going to have the highest benefit and is the easiest,
most accessible to people, that's where I would start people.
I think that's good, and I'm so grateful that you gave us those tips so that we feel like you know you really can get started on your own, but then also opportunities to learn more and grow a course. What's the final message that you have for for this audience, for women who are interested in breath work, or what? What do we need to know about breath work, just your final words,
I would just say,
I hesitate to use like,
you know, black, white, concrete, but I almost do feel it is, it is the missing piece for so many people. And it's easy for me to say that, and I don't necessarily mean breath work. I mean everything we've spoken about today, the relationship of breathing in the nervous system and the nervous system and how you approach and experience the world, the relationship of breathing in your energy and the energy that you have to be engaged with your kids or shut down. You know, it's like all these other aspects where it's like, I'm not saying breathing is this panacea, but if it is not working the way it's designed to work, you will find everything else harder, right? Whether that's being a mother, whether that's being a boss, whether that's not being anxious, like you're walking up the down escalator, if you're breathing dysfunctionally. And again, the dysfunctional breathing is not your fault as much as it is your responsibility, right? Like we can blame the environment the 21st Century, like I'm happy to do that. I'm not saying, Hey, your dysfunctional breathing is because you did something. It's like, No, you're a 21st Century human. I'm very confident you're not breathing well because of all these environmental conditions that we face every day. So it's not your fault, but it is your responsibility. And so kind of seeing this as a little bit of a stepping stone, right? Like, it doesn't need to be the be all and end all. But like, if I start to develop a relationship with my breath, that is probably going to be directionally correct, right, that is likely going to yield benefits, whether it is anxiety or panic or fatigue or pain. You know, in my mind, it matters less. The starting point is probably this baseline of like, what is telling your nervous system how to show up in the world, how to respond to the world. That input, the largest input we have is how you breathe and how you hold your body, and that is really very within everyone's reach. So I don't want it to sound complex. We covered a lot of complex concepts today, but this can be incredibly simple, right where it's like, hey, if I'm like, in this tight and compressed position of my breathing, that's probably going to make me feel a certain way. I don't even have to know what the mechanism is. What would happen if I kind of drop and open my chest and my shoulders and I soften my forehead and my jaws and I let my breath kind of just like, conform to this new shape in my body. You know, within 30 seconds, people are like, ha. I kind of feel different. I don't really know what. Can't put my finger on it, but like, yeah, less anxious or more calm, you know, it's like, we want that curiosity piece to be there so it, you know, the long winded way of saying, you know, it's like, don't minimize the impact that you think it could have. Because one of the biggest kind of like resistance I see is like, it couldn't be that simple a breath work. Now I'm breathing all the time. Like, that's not the answer. My issue is because of something different, right? We don't want it to be so simple. And I think part of the reason because, let's use that example before, someone that's seen dozens of neurologists and spent 10s of 1000s of dollars, it's such a confrontation to be like, and you mean, it was my breathing the entire time. Like, we almost don't want it to be so simple because of the sunk costs and what we've invested into our health, and so try not to let that be the deterrent, right? Of like, no, no, my problem must be way more complex, and I it couldn't be breathing like approach it with curiosity. What if it could like, Curiosity is this wonderful state to be in. So getting curious about breath and about that, how that might be impacting all these other things, that's what I would leave people
well that I feel so inspired, I am excited to to up my breath work game and to really dive in and try some of these things. Because who doesn't want more energy and a more regulated nervous system and better pain control? Right? Who, doesn't want those things? So I really appreciate you being here and sharing Campbell. This is such a fascinating topic for me. I hope other people find it fascinating as well. Where can people find you?
I'm most active on Instagram, so at breath body therapy. And I really say to people, you know, it's like, it's me in there, and I just live and breathe this stuff. So, like, the skeptics are my favorite. You know, if you're doubtful or you're like, Oh, I heard this podcast, but come on, let's have a chat about it. You know, I got plenty of resources from kind of, like little PDF guides and a kind of self paced course to really kind of start people of like, All right, well, what should I do if I was going to go in this path of trying to restore my breathing? So I just encourage people to reach out. I try and share as much content that helps as possible, but I'm always open to have conversations, to kind of take the learning a little bit deeper with people.
I love it. Thanks so much for your time and your expertise. This was really, really fascinating. Thank you, Mallory, thank you so much for tuning in to today's episode. A huge thank you to our guests for sharing their insights and time with us. We are grateful for the incredible support from our sponsors and to all of you listening. We couldn't do this without you. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider subscribing on your favorite platform. You can find us on our website, uplift for her calm YouTube, Apple podcast, Spotify, or wherever you love to listen. And if you found value here today, please share this episode with someone who would benefit from it, leave us a comment or give us a review. It really helps us reach more listeners like you. Thank you for being part of our community. Stay tuned for our next episode. Lastly, this information is for educational purposes only and not intended to be medical advice. You.
