(#305): How Breathing & Breath Work Impact Our Mental & Physical Health & Performance

Things get a little scientific in this Crash Course Podcast dedicated to all things breathing and breath work.

In this episode, Coach Shaun discusses how and why humans breathe the way we do, oxygenation of the cells through both nasal and mouth breathing, and the role of different muscle groups in breath work.

From neuro transmitters to nitric oxide to the amount we sigh in a single day - you'll learn the importance of breath work and it's influence on mental state, fear, stress, and athletic performance.

For more information on the importance of breathwork, mindful breathing practices, and how to start, head to: https://bit.ly/3CdX0Kn to download a free mindful breathing packet from Live Unbreakable.

Interested in following Live Unbreakable on social media? Follow @liveunbreakable or @livingunbreakable for healthy tips and tricks on the daily. LiveUnbreakable.com for all inquires, personalized or group coaching, and other downloads!

Transcript

01:33 Coach Shaun: Ultimately, I thought about painting this podcast for about roughly 2-3 months, but there's literally so much to talk about that I didn't even know really where to begin. If you're one of these people that is listening to this podcast and you say, “Oh my God, breathing, breathing work, like whoop”, this is exactly the podcast you need to listen to.  If you already know a lot about breath work, this might not be the best podcast, but I would still encourage you to listen, because there are some times that maybe you didn't know that could be beneficial for you in your practice or in your athleticism moving forward. So, I've talked a lot about breath work on social media to my clients, to my friends. I probably had nausea, but never on the podcast because there's probably going to be a couple of iterations out there, I'm going to do like this one and then dive deeper into different kinds of breath work because there's literally just so much to talk about.  We’re going to dive into all of it in a second, I'll set it up for you guys. I want to take this second to remind you all that this is Crash Course podcast, which is a literal crash course in the topics of nutrition fitness, health and everything else that pertains to it, so we're just going to graze the surface of a bunch of different pieces of breathing and breath work, and breath science.

I think of this more as like a 100 level course that you took in college, it's an overview of one topic that gets you really interested in it, so that you feel more inspired or motivated, or may be inquisitive, and you want to dive a little bit deeper into different pieces of it.  All of that is encouraged 100%. I did a bunch of research for this podcast, and you'll see that as we go into it, but, just try it for yourself. If you're one of those people that's like, meditation is not for me. But you've never done it. Okay, well, maybe you want to try it and the same with breath work, if you've never done any breath work, this might be a great chance for you to jump in and try it and see if you see any benefits after a week or two weeks.  If you still don't, that's totally okay. I would say you try it for a month, but two weeks is totally fine, and if it's just something that you don't work into your routine, that's okay.  Maybe you'll leave this podcast with a couple of new ideas and hopefully I'll get that feedback. 

03:50 Coach Shaun: The benefits of breath work, I want to start with that because everyone's always asking why I'm so interested in it.  What got me interested in it in the first place? And honestly, I stumbled on a couple of podcasts.  I had some clients send them to me and start asking me questions: is this true, is this real?  Honestly, since I've incorporated it into my practice and I was always doing it part of my morning routine and evening routine.  Since I've started doing it throughout my day and focusing a little bit more on it, especially during higher stress situations, I've noticed profound effects from an emotional and physical standpoint, even mental standpoint.  In just a matter of minutes of working through breath work, and I want to provide that for you, it was kind of this weight lifted off my shoulders, and if this podcast can inspire that for you, I would be so, so appreciative, so happy.

04:50 Coach Shaun: Some of the benefits of really focusing on breath and breath work are: 1) increased energy, which we will dive into the science behind; 2) reduced stress and anxiety; 3) increased focus; 4) better sleep; 5) a balanced nervous system and a stronger immune system, separate but equal and 6) improved athletic performance; and that's not all of them, that's just the stand-outs.  Not for me, but for all of the studies that I kind of dove into. And I do want to stress that the reduced stress and anxiety; I stress about stress as I crack myself up.  Reduced stress from breath work, there's a lot of science out there that backs the combination when you're in a higher stress situation and your emotions are really high, your heart rate rises, and your breathing also increases.  If you can start to control some of those different pieces, you start to have a less stressful life just because you know how to handle things that come up, whether or not you know they're going to be there.  If you know you're headed into a stressful situation, maybe you are doing some public speaking or you're going into an event that you have to perform at. Whether or not it's athletic doesn't matter, while there's a lot of things you cannot control; you can control how you react both internally and externally, and that is one of the other benefits is really being able to control more things about your environment.

06:31 Coach Shaun: So let's dive into a couple of fun facts because this is really cool, the one that I found probably most interesting was that we as a collective human experience, we sigh 1 time every 5 minute increment. Now, if you don't believe me, I didn’t believe that, just sit down and for 5 minutes, start a timer and see if you sigh.  Maybe set it for 10 minutes and see if you sigh twice.  On average, you sigh 1 time every 5 minutes, and that's because you are taking in that deeper breath and then exhaling more, and as we get into the science behind breathing, you'll understand why.  It has to do with the amount of carbon dioxide; so fun facts. The next one is the more you are stressed, the less you sigh.  If you're stressed and your breathing rate is increased because of that, you don't sigh as much, you don't take that big breath in and that big breath out as frequently as you should, and that also impacts your nervous system and that also impacts your performance.  When you are breathing in, your brain is more alert and willing to keep track of and store information than during an exhale.

So if you are trying to think about something, you're really trying to intake what someone's saying, you will breathe in.  This is a response that we have created on our own, but when you're really trying to focus on something, you take that big, deep breath in because your brain is more alert than when you exhale.  Another fun fact, the average person breathes about 13 pints of air every minute and takes about 17,000 breaths per day, that includes the sighs because those are breaths. Breathing air is not actually a good description of what happens when we're breathing.  “Air” is made up of almost 79% nitrogen and 21% oxygen, and then smaller amounts of other elements. We're talking like carbon dioxide, hydrogen, and helium. So when you're inhaling “air” made up of oxygen, carbon dioxide, and nitrogen, our lungs are swapping around 4-5% of oxygen for carbon dioxide, our lungs exhale almost half a liter of water every single day. That's pretty cool. So when you're thinking about hydration, this is one of those things where you say, “No, hydration is only if I'm sweating or I'm doing some sort of exertion.”

09:10 Coach Shaun: No, absolutely not. Your body uses water just to exist, and this is one of the ways that it does that.  Most people can hold their breath for a maximum of only 1-2 minutes, but some people can do it for much, much longer. Some of our free divers in the world hold their breath for 22-24 minutes, which I think is absolutely insane, especially with pressure.  Because as they're free diving down the pressure obviously gets much more intense and I know I can't hold my breath for 22 minutes, let alone with added pressure on that. Also, your lungs are the biggest waste removal engine in your body, and account for about 70% of body waste in the form of carbon dioxide in the air that we exhale.  Breathing practice is scientifically proven effective in fighting anxiety, depression and stress, and there's physiological evidence that indicates that even a single breathing practice can significantly reduce your blood pressure; that’s adding in breathing practices one time throughout your day.  Mouth breathing changes your face.

I said this on social media, if you guys don't follow me on Instagram, it's @livingunbreakable.  It’s one of those fun facts that I threw out there, but researchers found differences and not only in the facial development of children that breath through their mouths compared to children that breathe through their nose; but also an adult, if you do this for long enough, under higher stress (and I say stress lightly in the situation, I don't mean you're behind on deadlines at work, but I mean if you're exercising that physical stress), you can change the shape of your face and your airways. And then the last one, I think this will be kind of a duh moment for a lot of people, but your emotions change the way that you breathe.  So it's not just one or the other, or a vice versa, your emotions change the way you breathe and the way you breathe, also change your emotions, it's a cyclical feeling here.  Research has shown that our breathing pattern actually influences the emotion that we experience, if you are experiencing one emotion, if you were to do some breath work, chances are scientifically proven, that you can change the emotion that you're feeling and the experience that you're having.

How powerful is that? Y'all. Seriously, that's so cool. You have to do is breathe different, and you can have a totally different human experience. I don't know anything else that you can do in the moment. You can do some mindset work for sure, but doing breath work is, I'm just going to do my 4-7-8, I'm going to do my box breathing, I'm going to do whatever it is, and then you can literally change your experience. Freaking insane. I love it so much.

11:52 Coach Shaun: So I'm going to go into some of the mechanics of breathing now because to really understand moving forward, like how our body uses breath in the system, I think it's really important that we also start from the beginning, from a scientific perspective.  When we are breathing, it's not just our nose, our mouth, or our lungs that are doing work; there’s a lot more that goes into it.  So the muscle responsible for endless cycles of inhalation and exhalation is your diaphragm, which delineates your abdominal cavity.  When we take a breath, the diaphragm contracts and flattens out and pulls air into the lungs, and then as your lung fill, the ribs expand and your intercostal muscles help with this, and they lift up and out, and then during your exhale, your diaphragm relaxes and your abs contract and pull the ribs back down and the air leaves the lungs.

12:45 Coach Shaun: Now, the process of respiration is unique in that it is under both conscious and unconscious control.  If you pay attention to your breath, you can easily control it and change it, but as soon as you're no longer focused on it, your autonomic nervous system takes over and you continue breathing all day, all night without even thinking about it.  It’s generally an automatic process, and most people never pay attention to it, but sometimes athletes and performers pay much closer attention to how they breathe. That's important in this whole process to know that you're going to continue doing this no matter what, but also you can change what that habit looks like kind of in the background.  Automatically right now you're breathing one way, and you can change that. Now, proper breathing techniques require your thoracic mobility, abdominal and core strength of course, and full range of motion in your diaphragm from both contraction to relaxation. Now, a lot of people walk around, athletes included, with their diaphragm in a constant state of contraction.  Your diaphragm also needs to continually return to a relaxed dome state to function properly. And in order for the diaphragm relax, the abs also have to contract in opposition.  From a functional point of view, we’re using three different groups of respiratory muscles: we've got the diaphragm, the rib cage muscles, and abdominal muscles; and each of these acts on the chest wall and its compartments, like your long opposed ribcage, the diaphragm-opposed ribcage, and the abdomen, so contraction and relaxation of the diaphragm really does rely on several different muscle groups.

Under normal circumstances, we are breathing through our nose, this isn't under any sort of stress, this is when we are not exercising just from an automatic standpoint.  Unless we're talking, our tendency to do nasal breathing, because air flows that are necessary for normal breathing are easily managed that way by passing through your nasal cavities, there's no need for us to breathe through our mouth.  But when there is an addition in ventilation need, like during exercise or stress or whatever it is, we breathe through our mouth because the passage ways are much larger.  But our bodies are literally designed to breathe through our nose, we're designed to breathe with our lips sealed and the tongue up on the roof of our mouth. That's how it works, because nasal breathing allows our airway to stay open and our jaw and face to develop normally.  But like I said, as an adult, you can still change that, but when you're breathing through your nose, the important difference between nasal breathing and mouth breathing is that nasal breathing, you have passage ways that are meant for air to be filtered.  So your nose hairs will capture particles and keep them from entering your lungs and the rest of your system; if you're breathing through your mouth, that doesn't necessarily happen.  Breathing through your nose allows you to filter bacteria and allergens, so you read in CLEANER oxygen as you breathe, you produce more projection of nitric oxide to open your airway, so more oxygen gets into your blood stream, and then you have improved athletic performance because you're improving your CO2 tolerance, you're improving your sleep, you're reducing your risk for sore throats and dry mouth, and you're improving symptoms if you have sleep apnea as well.  If you're one of those people that's been diagnosed with sleep apnea, you know you have that, breathing through your nose purposefully throughout your day, can actually help you with that.

16:23 Coach Shaun: So as I mentioned before, your nose acts as that filter, so your nose hairs prevent as many as 20 billion particles of foreign matter from entering our body. So if you are mouth breathing, that's just getting all caught up in there.  And not even all of it, because we have no real way to filter air that comes in through our mouth, so that's why when we were wearing masks and we had our mouth open a lot and we were mouth-breathing because it was hard to breathe in through our nose, that changed a lot of physiology.  We were breathing through our mouth and that was changing the way that we were breathing, not just from a bacteria standpoint, but also are the muscles that we're using to breathe, and so some of them got stronger, some of them got weaker.  Breathing through your nose also changes the humidity and the temperature of the air, so it's easier to adjust to your body temperature then breathing through your mouth, so that helps to keep your lungs more productive because filtered, humidified air actually releases nitric oxide, which improves oxygen circulation by expanding the blood vessels.  So nitric oxide is a vasodilatior, which means it opens your blood vessels and allows blood to flow throughout your body without any restrictions, which is important for all things related to your heart and your blood, thinking muscle soreness, preventing build up in our arteries, keeping your blood sugar low, all that kind of stuff.

But nitric oxide is also an antibacterial and an anti-inflammatory, so it's preventing infections, reducing inflammation, and it can help with things like IBS and other gut issues as well.  It also acts as a neurotransmitter, which is really, really essential for your brain function; with low levels of it, we see things like depression, Parkinson's disease, and Alzheimer’s.  Nitric oxide is actually really good for you: your brain, your blood, and keeping your system healthy.

So with all of that in mind, there's a breathing exercise you can do called alternate nostril breathing, so if you take this time to sit down somewhere where you know that you can do this safely as if you're in a car or whatever, probably don't do this, but if you're sitting down listening, try this out and see how it feels.  Sit with your back straight and your left hand on your left knee, relax your shoulders and press your right thumb onto your right nostril inhaling just through your left nostril. Nice and slow, no need to have a big inhale, hold your breath at the top and then place your right finger on your left nostril so you exhale through your right nostril, inhale to your right nostril, and then continue the exercise alternating which nostril that you inhale and exhale with.  See how that feels, really focus on your breath, focus on your heart rate, and see how you feel when you're done with that exercise.

Another really awesome exercise is called diaphragmatic breathing, this can be really, really powerful and really beneficial.  If you have ever practiced Yoga, you've probably done this already.  You sit in the same upright position, keeping your shoulders nice down and relaxed, close your lips so you aren't tempted to breathe your mouth at all, place your hand on your stomach and then one hand on your chest.  As you inhale slowly through your nose, focus on air, expanding your stomach like a balloon, your chest should remain in place. So typically, when you take a deep breath, you feel your chest move up and down because we're using our lungs, we're pulling in with our intercostal or abs, everything we talked about before.  This time, your chest should not be moving at all, it should remain in the same place, but your stomach should go in and out almost like you're feeling really bloated and then you're not.  So, exhale and inhale and repeat this several times, you get used to that feeling of inhaling and exhaling deeply through your nose using just your diaphragm; really focus on that.  That’s not something that you can do automatically, that diaphragmatic deep breath, because it's not as efficient in your day-to-day movements and life as it would be for you to just breathe your nose normally using your lungs and your diaphragm as they were created.  If you notice that you are either sighing more frequently or less frequently than you would normally see, more than once every five minutes, diaphragmatic breathing can really start to help you create a much more normal and easy breathing pattern even when you're not thinking about it.  Both alternate nostril breathing and diaphragmatic breathing are really, really powerful exercises that you can incorporate without anybody else even really knowing that you're doing them except for the nostril one because you have to hold your. one side of your nose, so maybe do that one at home.

21:23 Coach Shaun: Diaphragmatic breathing is easy to do any time, and I have found that super helpful for me in the morning when I'm doing a lot of focus work, if I'm doing some meditation that's always what I start with is really focusing on my breath, taking those bigger inhales using my diaphragm to exhale really deeply and starting to really, really dive into that slower, slower breathing. Now, there's a lot of different methods you can use when you are exercising or anything that raises your heart rate to exercise doesn't mean you're going for an all-out sprint one day, it could be walking your dog or whatever it is.  When your heart rate is increasing the most efficient breathing cycle is a 5.5 second inhale and a 5.5 second exhale, so you're doing about 5.5 breaths per minute.  Along with breathing less often, breathing quieter can also start to help you to start to think about those slower, quieter inhales and exhale, and that will also help to normalize carbon dioxide and the nitric oxide in your system as well.

So I'll give you a couple of other exercises here, let's start with the 4-7-8 breathing method. Now, this is one, and I'll include this document in the show notes for you guys too, but I created a breathing freebie for LiveUnbreakable that I released to social media. So again, it's @livingunbreakable. But I released this freebie because I was finding breath work to be very powerful and I wanted to be able to share that with a lot of people. So I created this freebie, has a bunch of information inside, but it also has a couple of different breathing methods.  In addition to having some of the scientific background to it, also has some mindful breathing exercises and some other important things for you to know about breath and breathing and the types of breathing that we typically see day-to-day.  One of the really, really helpful breathing methods that I include in this is called The 4-7-8 breathing method. Now, this breathing exercise is a natural tranquilizer for your nervous system, and it switches your autonomous nervous system state from a sympathetic fight or flight to a para-sympathetic, which is your rest and digest.  So post-exercise, this can really help increase recovery, it lowers your cortisol.

This can also help switch your body into a state of recovery, so if you're having issues with sore muscles or anything like that, this can be really beneficial.  It also increases your antioxidant defense status, so after exhaustive exercise, it can be really beneficial to lower those stress related markers for inflammation.  It can also help you with sleep and getting to a deeper sleep or helping you unwind, controlling your breath and kind of calming your mind.  It regulates your blood pressure and your heart rate, so it can start to affect your brain and better way, so affecting memory. And like I said before, just now sleep. So this breathing exercise was actually based on a couple of studies, and I'll just read a few of them to you, but there was a study back in 2016 where they accidentally stumbled upon the neural circuit in the brain stem that plays a key role in the breathing-brain control connection.  This circuit is part of what's been called the brain's breathing pacemaker because it can be adjusted by altering breathing rhythm, so slow and controlled breathing decreases activity in the circuit, whereas fast or erotic breathing increases activity, which then in turn influences your emotional state which is, it's still kind of a mystery about how this is happening, but we know that that pathway exists, and that's actually a really, really big step forward scientifically.

25:15 Coach Shaun: There was another study also in 2016 where they found that yoga breathing for just 20 minutes was able to lower stress-related markers of inflammation measured in the saliva.  Basically researchers were examining levels of biomolecules in the body, these are called cytokines in the saliva of all the participants and half of the group read a book for 20 minutes while the other half did this yoga breathing exercise.  Rhythmic breathing is a simple breathing exercise that can regulate your breath based on counts.  What the researchers did was for that half, they had the participants begin the exercise in 5-minute intervals up to 20 minutes.  They found that at the end of 20 minutes, 3 stress-related biomarkers were significantly decreased in those who did the yoga breathing exercise, not in the people who were doing reading. And then the last one was about, I think it was in 2011, looked at the impacts of diaphragmatic breathing to see if it reduced exercise-induced oxidative stress.  They monitored athletes in the study during an exhaustive training session, after the exercise athletes were then divided into two equivalent groups, and they were studied for an hour.  One group would spend time relaxing, performing diaphragmatic breathing and concentrating on their breath in a quiet place; where the other subjects spent the same amount of time sitting in an equivalent quiet place.  But the results showed that relaxation induced by diaphragmatic breathing increased the anti-oxidant defense status in athletes after exhaustive exercise. So it was actually really cool.

So now that you have the science behind it, because I am such a data geek, I can't help it. So the 4-7-8 breathing technique, I'm going to tell you how to do it. It's based on an ancient Yogi technique called Pranayama, and it helps practitioners gain control over breathing. Now, this was created by Dr. Andrew Weil, and the numbers should be a dead giveaway 4-7-8 referring to the counts when breathing in, holding and then exhaling. So what you're going to do for this practice is start by sitting up in a comfortable position as straight as you can get your spine, roll your shoulders down and back, chin is up looking straight out.  Place the tip of your tongue, on the ridge of your gums just behind your upper front teeth, expand your diaphragm and slowly inhale through your nose for a count of 4, once you're there, hold your breath for another count of 7. At the end of 7, you're going to open your mouth slightly, keeping your tongue in place and exhale for 8 counts, then you're going to repeat the cycle 4 times.  

At the end of exercise at the end of a stressful day when you're about to start your day, this can be done at any point.  To start to really reap the benefits of this breathing exercise, you should do it at least once a day, and you should do it for 2-4 weeks at least, and you'll start to see some of those benefits that we were talking about, especially if you're having trouble catching your breath after even any kind of exercise, if it's really humid outside and you went for a run, you find it really hard to catch a breath or after you do a really intense metabolic conditioning work out, anything like that.  It’s also just a really great way to focus on your breath and your breathing, so breathe in for 4, hold for 7, breathe out for 8.  I think I have 6 different exercises that you can do if you download this freebie, I'll add this into the show notes so you guys can download it.

29:04 Coach Shaun: Another one that I've been doing lately, is called box breathing.  Basically box breathing is, also called square breathing, but it's a deep breathing technique that helps you slow down your breathing and a calms your nervous system and decrease stress in your body.  This was created to improve your focus, so what I want you to do is sit down, so wherever you can straighten your spine, roll your shoulders down and back, and for this breathing exercise, you're going to breathe in for a count of 4, slowly feeling the air entering your lungs, expanding your chest, then you're going to hold your breath for 4 seconds, and then as you exhale, you're going to count to 4 as well, so the previous one was 4-7-8, this one is 4-4-4, you're going to repeat this 4 times, and this really helps with focus and it helps to calm your nervous system.  So if you're in a really high stress situation or you're heading out, maybe you're going to do a presentation, doing the 4-4-4 is really easy because it's not only easy to remember, but it's easy to repeat.  You can do that without anybody knowing, if you're already on stage if you yourself getting caught up, breathe in for 4 seconds, hold for 4, and then release for 4, and even just doing that count one time, I think you'll really start to see that difference and start to feel a difference.

So realistically, tons of science out there about all of this, tons of science that I didn't even touch on, but again, the benefits of breath work are just too many to ignore, and it's just a part of mental, physical, emotional well-being that we have I would say not focused on enough.  In training when I'm with my clients, I will have them focus on breathing, so typically during a workout, you want to exhale on work, inhale when you are taking a rest, so let's say you're doing a squat or something, you want to exhale on the way back up, you're inhaling on the way down.  So inhale down, exhale and then stand out because your muscles can be nice and tight, so take that big deep breath at the top, drop down, read it out and then stand up when your muscles are tight.  You can do that in a number of ways, and just incorporating that in your workouts is going to be really beneficial anyways.  Throughout your day-to-day, even leaving athletics completely out of it, you're going to see more energy because your sleep is better because your immune system and your nervous system are going to be better supported and you're going to have more focus and less anxiety, which are also tied together, because you're helping system really calm itself down and you're spending time increasing something that your body needs: oxygen, nitric oxide, and it's eliminating waste from your system.

So, I hope this was helpful, guys. I really love breathing, and I think there's so much about this practice that we can discuss ad nauseam, there's so many different breathing exercises that we can go over, and I want you to take this, listen to it a couple of times.  Do some of these breathing exercises, and then let me know how it goes, I'm so fascinated how this impacts people in different ways, and so far the clients that I know that have incorporated it, have told me that they feel much more centered, not like I can focus more, but they feel more centered when something goes wrong, when there's a change that they weren't expecting, they're less angry or frustrated, and those are such powerful feelings to eliminate from your day-to-day, and there's so many things you can do with them. That is just, it feels like something so simple as adding in breathing exercises can have such a huge impact in your day-to-day to your lifetime, and I just encourage you to give it a shot.

Coach Shaun: Thank you so much for tuning in today. It was such a pleasure having you on the Crash Course podcast, brought to you by the LiveUnbreakable brand. If you enjoyed today's podcast, please some love on iTunes as a review so that I can keep this good stuff coming at you. Or share this podcast with your friends to give them a crash course on something that you're passionate about.  If you're not following me on social media yet, I would be honored to have your follow so search for LiveUnbreakable on any major social media platform and enjoy the extra motivation and knowledge shared over there, and of course, reach out to me at LiveUnbreakable.com with any questions. Until next time, y’all.