How Your Breath Affects The Way You Burn Fat, The Importance Of A Daily 45 Minute Walk (With Your Mouth Shut!), The Pros And Cons Of Nasal Breathing & The Five Gear Breathing System That Will Transform The Way You Handle Stress with Brian Mackenzie #547

Your breath is intimately linked with every aspect of your health – from how you respond to stress to how efficiently your body burns fat. While most of us breathe over 20,000 times a day, few of us pay attention to this automatic process. But it may hold the key to transforming our physical and mental wellbeing. Today’s returning guest is the wonderful Brian Mackenzie, Founder & Creative Director of SHIFT, President of The Health and Human Performance Foundation and a world renowned human performance specialist who combines breathing techniques, movement practices, and stress adaptation training to enhance physical and mental performance. His methods have been used by Olympic athletes, professional sports teams and military special forces and Brian's work has undergone rigorous scientific testing at institutions including Stanford University School of Medicine and San Francisco State University. He is also the author of several books including, Unbreakable Runner, Power Speed Endurance and Unplugged. In this fascinating conversation, we explore: Why breathing is "the remote control to the nervous system" and how becoming aware of our breath patterns can help us instantly regulate our stress responses The relationship between the way that we breathe and our ability to burn fat The "Five Gear Breathing System" that matches our breathing technique to different activity levels, from relaxed walking to high-intensity exercise Why nasal breathing (while beneficial at rest and low intensities) might limit our performance and oxygen use during higher-intensity activities How a simple daily 45-minute walk with nasal breathing can transform our metabolism, stress resilience and mental clarity The three-stage stress response cycle and how breathwork provides a practical tool to interrupt our automatic reactions to daily triggers Why Brian believes finding joy in mundane tasks like washing dishes is possible when we focus on the process rather than constantly chasing outcomes Practical techniques to establish healthier boundaries with work, technology and stress – including Brian's approach to shutting off work by 4-5 pm and using red light in the evenings to improve sleep Brian is a remarkable individual, with an enviable track record of transforming the wellbeing and performance of a wide range of individuals, and this conversation is full of practical insights that you can utilise immediately to improve your health, performance and the overall quality of your life. I hope you enjoy listening. Support the podcast and enjoy Ad-Free episodes. Try FREE for 7 days on Apple Podcasts https://apple.co/feelbetterlivemore. For other podcast platforms go to https://fblm.supercast.com. Thanks to our sponsors: https://www.boncharge.com/livemore https://airbnb.co.uk/host https://drinkag1.com/livemore Show notes https://drchatterjee.com/547 DISCLAIMER: The content in the podcast and on this webpage is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your doctor or qualified healthcare provider. Never disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because of something you have heard on the podcast or on my website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Rangan Chatterjee?

  Hey guys, how are you doing? I hope you're having a good week so far. My name is Dr Rangan Chatterjee and this is my podcast, Feel Better Live More.

• 0:15Rangan Chatterjee?

  Your breath is intimately linked with every aspect of your health, from how you respond to stress to how efficiently your body burns fat. But very few of us pay enough attention to this automatic, yet transformative process. Today's returning guest is the wonderful Brian Mackenzie, founder and creative director of Shift, president of the Health and Human Performance Foundation, and a world-renowned human performance specialist who combines breathing techniques, movement practices, and stress adaptation training to enhance physical and mental performance.

• 0:56Rangan Chatterjee?

  Brian's methods have been used by Olympic athletes, professional sports teams, and military special forces, and his work has undergone rigorous scientific training at institutions including Stanford University School of Medicine and San Francisco State University. He's also the author of several books, including Unbreakable Runner, Power Speed Endurance, and Unplugged. In this fascinating conversation, which we recorded a few months back when I was in LA, we explore why breathing is the remote control to the nervous system, and how becoming aware of our breathing patterns can instantaneously regulate our stress response.

• 1:41Rangan Chatterjee?

  We also discuss the pros and cons of nasal breathing, the benefits of a daily 45-minute walk whilst only breathing through your nose, the relationship between the way that you breathe and your ability to burn fat, the three stages of our stress response cycle, the five-gear breathing system that matches your breathing patterns to your activity levels, the benefits of establishing healthy boundaries, and the importance of being able to find joy and presence in daily activities like washing the dishes.

• 2:18Rangan Chatterjee?

  Brian is a remarkable and quite unique individual with an enviable track record of transforming the wellbeing and performance of a wide range of individuals. And this conversation is full of practical insights that you can utilise immediately to improve your health, performance and the overall quality of your life.

• 2:47Rangan Chatterjee?

  A big part of what you do these days is around our breath. I've always been obsessed with root causes.

• 2:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:57Rangan Chatterjee?

  Is there anything more root cause, right? Breathing is not just about your ability to run a fast 5K on Saturday or your ability to relax in yoga. It is metabolic health, it's cognitive health, it's hormonal health. Like, your breath is at the centre of everything. And therefore, it's striking that so many of us don't pay attention to our breath or even know how to manipulate our breath to change our states, right?

• 3:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, yes, yes. And the real thing that I feel would benefit most people is being aware of it, right? And my understanding of really being aware of one's breathing is if you can be aware of it, you can let it happen and pay attention. And there are times, yes, you can use breathing to regulate and become more aware of what's going on. But if you're not willing to confront the pain that has you in this reactive state to stress from wherever that originates, typically childhood. And you don't, that doesn't mean you need to go relive childhood.

• 4:08Speaker 01

  It's like, well, oh, I was in a defensive pattern because my environment was incredibly hostile and everybody was fighting when I was young. So no wonder why I've got my dukes up all the time and anything in what I do, right? I'm really at a point where it's like, if you're just going around that shit, if you're going around that and just trying to control breathing and go about it that way, you're not going to find that root.

• 4:36Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 4:37Speaker 01

  The root will be disguised, it'll be camouflaged.

• 4:42Rangan Chatterjee?

  You've said, haven't you, previously, there is no amount of breathing that will change the pain you are not willing to confront.

• 4:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:49Rangan Chatterjee?

  One of the things I wanted to talk to you about today is this idea that

• 4:54Rangan Chatterjee?

  our breath is intimately linked with our nervous system and how we then view the world. So if we talk about the pain that we are not willing to confront, right? So let's say there is pain from childhoods because of A, B, and C, right?

• 5:13Rangan Chatterjee?

  That can then result in some sort of dysfunctional breathing patterns, potentially, I'm guessing, as a consequence. So then if you have compensatory breathing patterns because of trauma, let's say,

• 5:31Rangan Chatterjee?

  then it can be hard to address the pain sometimes if you're in this constantly wired state. So presumably, being able to work on your breath and maybe change things a little bit can change the state of your nervous system, which might then allow you to go inwards and confront the pain.

• 5:52Speaker 01

  Yes. What you first touched on when you began the question was, you know, we've gotten to a place where we're kind of just, we just want to fix the problem or we want to fix how we feel. That's what I run into is people just want to feel differently. People don't want to actually change their behavior. And what we're talking about right now is a behavioral pattern that breathing follows. And although you could, there is some school of thought that breathing is behavioral. I'm more under the impression that physiology has more to do with it.

• 6:32Rangan Chatterjee?

  What does that mean for people?

• 6:34Speaker 01

  So, um, you know, pretending that a, you know, lion walks into the room, there is a heightened arousal state, there is a sympathetic response to that. And the first stage of that is, there is the stimulus, right? So we've got some sort of stimulus. Somebody cuts in front of me while I'm driving. There's a stimulus.

• 6:57Speaker 01

  The second part of that is the nervous system's response to that. My sensory system, which operates through communication, through an electrical network that is firing things, it goes on high alert, pretending as though somebody cut in front of me. The first thing anybody does when they're driving, if they see that, is they grab the wheel and they hit the brakes, right? That is your nervous system responding, reacting to that stimulus. After that, the third part of this is the physiological processes involved in that and, and the driving of behavior. So my sympathetic nervous system goes up. I'm releasing neurotransmitters and hormones, adrenaline, right?

• 7:40Speaker 01

  Norepinephrine, these things are released real time. And so that third part of the stimulus response now becomes the first part of the stress reaction. And each of these is universal to us all. And I've got this happening and somebody cuts in front of me and this stuff happens. So all of these chemicals in my biochemistry is changing in order to manage what it is my system is putting off, right? So let's just go with adrenaline as it's an easy one. My response to adrenaline and anything when I'm not prepared for is dukes up, per se. It's confronta-, it's personal.

• 8:25Speaker 01

  So then, the second part of that is, the recovery phase should happen. So it's like, if somebody cut in front of me and I didn't actually get pissed off, I'm like, oh, whatever, like, let them go. That is a response that's like going and lifting some weights and, and resting between sets. Okay, let's just pause that, Brian, because this is really interesting. Yeah.

• 8:53Rangan Chatterjee?

  Our stress response is hardwired within us. Okay, so.

• 8:57Speaker 01

  No avoidance.

• 8:58Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yes, if there was a lion that just came into this room now, we probably would change quite significantly in terms of how, how our being is, how we're interacting, our posture, our muscle tone, everything will change. Okay. You're driving on a road, wherever you live in the world, and someone suddenly cuts in front of you. So you slam on the brakes. Okay, that's an automatic response, right? You've slammed on the brakes.

• 9:24Rangan Chatterjee?

  Is it possible to get to a point where that doesn't even generate the physiological changes? So if you work on this enough, and we're going to go through loads of practical things in this conversation, is it that everyone?

• 9:38Speaker 01

  Yes, this is a great question.

• 9:39Rangan Chatterjee?

  Will have the physiological response and then we train ourselves to not respond to the adrenaline? Or is it different?

• 9:45Speaker 01

  Here's what's interesting, you know, so funny enough, you know, part of Andrew Huberman's research before he had his podcast at his lab, when I was involved with his lab, they were in that, they were in his VR, looking at stress from everybody, from people who are, who are on anxiety medications, all the way up to like Navy SEALs. Everybody responds to stress. Everybody responds to the stress and what capacity and how they come off that stress is the important part.

• 10:16Rangan Chatterjee?

  Okay, so even if you're a calm, non-reactive person.

• 10:20Speaker 01

  You're gonna, when the lion comes in the room or somebody cuts you off, you will? Your body naturally reacts to it. It's the behavior that you choose to follow as a result of that.

• 10:33Rangan Chatterjee?

  Got it. So it is what Viter Frankl says.

• 10:35Speaker 01

  This is where a choice happens, right?

• 10:38Rangan Chatterjee?

  Is that where breath work can potentially come in for some people?

• 10:41Speaker 01

  A hundred percent, this is where, this is where breath work does come in. So this is where intervention comes in. When I have an emotional reaction to something that I don't like, or I don't like the way I feel, or I don't like what I said, and I want to work on that, that is where the opportunity for intervention comes in. So I can take a breath, I can take several breaths, I can come down. And if I can bring myself down, then I might have the opportunity to bring reality on. Did that person who cut in front of me start their day by going, I'm gonna go find Brian Mackenzie and I'm going to cut in front of him today? And I am going to intentionally piss him off? No, that is not what happened.

• 11:26Speaker 01

  And not at least in my, this world that I currently live in. Now, the old world I existed in, I might narcissistically have pulled that one off.

• 11:36Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 11:36Speaker 01

  Right? But in the moment, you will start to arc stories for the emotional reaction that you have to things. And that's where the breathing is starting to get away from you as well. So my breathing, your breathing will do things in these places. It's simply responding to the activity and the change that's going on.

• 11:55Rangan Chatterjee?

  These things, they're so linked, physiology and psychology, psychology and physiology.

• 12:00Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 12:01Rangan Chatterjee?

  The thing I've really been thinking a lot about, Brian, and I'd love to hear your perspective on this, is I feel compared to who I was five years ago, that I interact with the world in a completely different way. Most of the time, I actually feel really calm. And I feel that when the stimulus is happening, I seem to have this ability now to know that there is a space and go, yeah, I'm not right into that. Right? Now, people will say, like, I've covered trauma on this podcast on many occasions with people like

• 12:43Rangan Chatterjee?

  Gabor Maté, Dan Siegel, Bessel van der Ko, all these kind of greats in the trauma world, right? And a lot of people will say, and I agree with, that trauma can be stored in the body. With our certain patterns, our breathing patterns, maybe we're slightly more flex, whatever it might be, we have these patterns. And so there's a school of thought saying that you can't change that trauma with the mind, you do it through the body.

• 13:08Rangan Chatterjee?

  And I believe for some people, that is the mechanism to change it. Not that you can separate the body and the mind, okay? I feel in my life, a lot of it has been cognitive. So I had a conversation a few years ago with an Auschwitz survivor, Edith Eger, when she was 93. Yeah. That conversation changed my life, Brian, because she was able to reframe her whole existence in Auschwitz to the point where she said to me that the greatest prison you'll ever live inside is the prison you create inside your own mind. And that's from someone who lived in the hell of Auschwitz, right? So that really landed for me. So I would for years practise, if I ever got emotionally triggered in the day, I perhaps couldn't do it in the moment.

• 13:53Rangan Chatterjee?

  That evening, I'd reflect and go, ah, that situation was not inherently triggering. That situation was not inherently offensive. If it was, everybody would get triggered to it. Everyone would take offence to that. No, no, there's something in me that is being activated by that stimulus. So if I want to change, I have to find in me, instead of putting the blame elsewhere externally, I have to figure out what insecurity, what inadequacy, what is being triggered inside of you. And by doing that regularly, I now feel that it's become my default response. Now, at the same time, I also do work on my body. I have an amazing movement coach. I work on my breathing.

• 14:36Rangan Chatterjee?

  I now have access to certain movement patterns that I didn't have five years ago. So I can't say what exactly it was, but I don't buy that it necessarily always has to come from the body or always from the mind. These things are connected. Does that make sense, Brian? Oh, yeah. Because I don't know, people say, well, how come you're so calm these days? I'm like, I've done a combination of things. I've done the work. I've constantly looked inwards at my triggers. Now, breath work, I would say that's a very big term that people interpret, you know, in all kinds of different ways. Yeah, for sure. That has helped me as well, but so has cognitive reframing.

• 15:15Speaker 01

  Yes, yes.

• 15:16Rangan Chatterjee?

  So I don't know if you can sort of pass through that through the lens of what you're saying now about we encounter a stressor and our stress response goes up. So how come I can be calm now?

• 15:27Speaker 01

  The simplified version of, you know, how I was getting complex is, is it's like, if I choose not to respond to somebody cutting me off, and this is just, you know, use whatever you want, insert whatever you want, your father saying something to you, you know, or what, you know, whatever.

• 15:46Rangan Chatterjee?

  Whatever is that triggers you.

• 15:47Speaker 01

  Your wife or your husband saying something to you that's popping you, right? If you choose not to allow that to go beyond that moment, you've now learned how to adapt. You've now learned how to stay with it and you don't have to take that personally, right? So if I choose to let the guy cutting me off go, I now adapt and I now am over here in the logical side of something, I'm rooted in reality. And I think what's really important here is that over here, my core values are the anchor point. For me,

• 16:31Speaker 01

  my core values sit with things like authenticity. It's like, just be real. Just be authentic and you're in my world if we meet and I'm happy to interact. And if it's not authentic, I'm out. I don't have time for that right now.

• 16:48Rangan Chatterjee?

  Here's a question, Brian.

• 16:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 16:51Rangan Chatterjee?

  If your nervous system is constantly wired, chronically activated.

• 16:58Rangan Chatterjee?

  And you've never learnt how to switch it off or calm it down. Is it even possible to know what being authentic is?

• 17:08Speaker 01

  Not in that state, no, because you're in a chronic stress response.

• 17:11Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, and then if everyone's walking around in a chronic stress state, of course, no one's being authentic.

• 17:16Speaker 01

  I mean, a lot of my, this is what a lot of my clients, actually, not the professional athlete side. I mean, although on occasion I'll get a professional athlete that's dealing with something like this. But this is more of the, you know, private, the clients that are like the executives, right? These are the guys and gals that are functioning up here all day, all night. And then they go and train and the way they train mimics the way they work. And, and, and they don't realize that they're, that they're in this heightened stress state, right? And so the third part of that stress reaction. So let's just pretend I didn't let go of the guy cutting me off.

• 17:54Speaker 01

  I've now brought in more hormones and neurotransmitters that are now blocking an adaptive process. And now we've on boarded adrenaline again because we're now making up a story about what we're going to do to this person. Or they're taking advantage of me, or they're doing this to me. I'm essentially victimizing myself in some capacity, right? And so I now go at this with a non adaptive process that if I repeat this enough and I don't let that go, I remain in what's called chronic stress. That does not allow for that parasympathetic arm

• 18:39Speaker 01

  of my autonomic nervous system to come back online as well. And that, if that goes on long enough, I can have a multitude of different responses that occur with that. I can stay in a heightened stress state, or I can actually retreat and then be pulled down into this more depressed nervous system state where I, I can't get out of bed. I can't do these, you know.

• 19:00Rangan Chatterjee?

  You say it's non adaptive, but could we not make the case that? We're always adapting. The question is, what are we adapting to? And what is our response?

• 19:09Speaker 01

  So the new adaptation becomes this heightened

• 19:13Rangan Chatterjee?

  Exactly.

• 19:14Speaker 01

  Or whatever state that is now not allowing me to recover. It'd be the equivalent of just lifting weights. Like, I go to lift weights, I just go, I go squat. And I just keep squatting all day. And I keep set after set after, and I'm fatigued, but I'm still going. And I'm still going. And I'm still going. And then I might let off the brakes that evening and decide to go home and sleep if I can, because my nervous system's now just torched. And I'm hungry and I gotta eat. And then I'll wake up the next day and I start doing it all over again. The moment I get to the gym.

• 19:52Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, this is such a great analogy, because what you just said through the lens of you squatting is how many people are living their daily lives. Now, through the lens of what we've just been talking about, you're known for many things around the world. Many people would regard you as an expert in human performance. What does human performance mean to you?

• 20:17Speaker 01

  Well, I don't think I'm an expert. I'm more of like a specialist. I'm still learning every single day about this. Performance is, for me, is a path towards growth. And most of what I've found, even at the elite level, is that if we can unlock a lot of the mental constructs that we've built, then there's a freedom in that that allows us to really see where the limitations are in what we're doing. When I went and worked at San Quentin Prison for six months, I ran a program.

• 21:02Speaker 01

  And I would go in every Friday and work with these guys. And I, when I first went in there, I, you know, it had occurred to me. I'm like, okay, so these guys are in prison. Most of these guys are doing, you know, 25 or more. But I do know the effect.

• 21:22Speaker 01

  Of men and women in prison to the outside world. So if you don't understand that, take the time to kind of understand that, which is part of the reason why I was going into these prisons, was to kind of help affect some sort of change in that or growth in that place. But the thing I thought about when I went in there was I explained to these guys, "Look, every year, there are a group of individuals that decide they no longer want to participate in society. And so what they do is they give away everything they have, and they typically will move to the mountains of Asia somewhere. They will isolate themselves with a few other people. They'll eat once or twice a day, and they'll breathe and meditate most of the day.

• 22:06Speaker 01

  And at the end of this, they find enlightenment. What is the difference between you and them? They committed a crime, and they are stuck in a place. How do you want to do your time? Do you want to figure this out? Do you want to figure out how you're doing this? Do you want to evolve and grow towards something differently? Because there are people choosing to live the life you're living for like punishment. And they're finding enlightenment through that process, right? However, that's what I think about with anybody and everybody. How do you want to win? Do you want to win and be miserable? I mean, I've seen the Michael Phelps documentary,

• 22:50Speaker 01

  and I've worked with some of the athletes that were in that documentary. And I'm like, "I know what this is. It's the same thing going on out here. Just because they're competing in a physical aspect at something doesn't mean there isn't something in that mind that's kind of..."

• 23:08Rangan Chatterjee?

  So make it relevant for someone who's listening, Brian, who is kind of, they're not an elite sportsman, okay? They just want to live a better life, right? They don't want to be reactive all the time and chronically stressed and unable to switch off and snapping at their partner or their kids. What is the relevance of what you do?

• 23:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 23:31Rangan Chatterjee?

  That's going to help that person?

• 23:33Speaker 01

  I guide people towards the process. Diao Deqing, Sun Tzu, Bruce Lee were very impactful for me. And there's a very famous Bruce Lee quote that I have everywhere. "All goals apart from the means are an illusion. Becoming is a denial of being."

• 23:58Rangan Chatterjee?

  Why does that mean so much to you?

• 24:01Speaker 01

  That gives you unlimited possibility. If I'm not invested in the process, I'm somewhere else. Look, I was doing the dishes this morning and putting away the dishes. As I do most mornings when the dishes are done. If there are dishes, I go and I put them away. And I don't get upset in the slightest about the fact that I have to put them away. In fact, I found myself in joy.

• 24:29Rangan Chatterjee?

  Oh, man.

• 24:29Speaker 01

  As I was putting away and I was reflecting on the fact that I had earned the money because I valued myself to purchase these dishes.

• 24:42Speaker 01

  I've been able to afford dishes for probably 30 or 40 years. Why am I thinking that? Because I'm in a place where I enjoy going and doing this thing and being invested in the process of putting these things away. How am I putting them away? I didn't just arrive at that. That became, why am I so pissed off that I'm putting away the dishes right now? Why am I pissed off I'm doing my laundry right now? This is a part of my life. This is a part of my existence. Like, what am I tied up in? Where do I think I'm going to arrive at?

• 25:20Speaker 01

  To where I don't want to do this? What is that point? And I really looked at that and the reality of it. And I find joy in just about every moment of my day when I'm not busy.

• 25:36Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, man. I cannot tell you how much I resonate with that. It's all story. Right, as I mentioned to you on Monday, like on the plane over to LA this time, I just had this clarity.

• 25:50Rangan Chatterjee?

  When you're 30,000 feet up in the air, right? You have this big picture perspective. So I thought life is simply a set of experiences. And the story we put on those experiences is ultimately what determines the quality of our lives. Boom. You can wash your dishes every night and be pissed off that you have to do it, that your partner didn't do it, that they should have done it, that you, whatever story you want to make. Or you can change your perspective and like you have done, it is possible. Oh. And the problem is, and this is why I wanted to talk to you. I don't think until you've stepped out of it and realized that you're choosing the narrative on every situation. You think you're in it.

• 26:35Rangan Chatterjee?

  You think you're a victim to the world, that the way you feel is down to everyone around you without realizing, oh, I can change this. I was chatting to someone about purpose yesterday and I said, for me, it's, it's less about finding my purpose. Life is more about how do I find purpose in everything I do? Yeah. So you wash the dishes and it's like, no, this is an opportunity to be mindful and present and feel the dishes. If someone had told me that 10 years ago, Brian, I would have thought, what are you talking about, mate? Like the dishes are the dishes. But I honestly feel that doing the dishes can be the most enjoyable experience in the world if you've reframed it.

• 27:15Rangan Chatterjee?

  So what I want to talk to you, Brian, about, because we could go even deeper than we've already gone, right? I really want to make this practical for people where possible. There is no quick fix here. No. I'd love to tie in breathing and how we breathe to the concepts that we've been talking about. Our stress response, our nervous system. Oh, easy. Can you sort of simplify that for someone? Oh, yeah.

• 27:43Rangan Chatterjee?

  Today's episode is sponsored by the daily health drink AG1. The clocks are about to change, the mornings are darker, everyone around you seems to be coming down with something and suddenly that wellbeing you felt in the summer seems a long time ago. I certainly know that feeling and that's why at this time of year, I remind myself to lean into the fundamentals and one of those fundamentals is AG1. AG1 is a daily health drink that has been in my own life for over eight years. And one of the many things I like about it is the fact that many of the nutrients it contains, for example, vitamin C, vitamin A, zinc and selenium, supports a healthy immune system. Some of the other things I really like about AG1 is that they are committed to continuous

• 28:27Rangan Chatterjee?

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• 29:14Rangan Chatterjee?

  Today's episode is sponsored by the daily health drink AG1. The clocks are about to change, the mornings are darker, everyone around you seems to be coming down with something and suddenly that wellbeing you felt in the summer seems a long time ago. I certainly know that feeling and that's why at this time of year, I remind myself to lean into the fundamentals and one of those fundamentals is AG1. AG1 is a daily health drink that has been in my own life for over eight years. And one of the many things I like about it is the fact that many of the nutrients it contains, for example, vitamin C, vitamin A, zinc and selenium, supports a

• 29:51Rangan Chatterjee?

  Healthy immune system. Some of the other things I really like about AG1 is that they are committed to continuous improvement and updating their formula as a scientific research involves. And each batch is independently tested for quality and safety markers, including heavy metals, allergens and banned substances. This is how they can guarantee what's in your scoop and what's not. Right now, AG1 is offering a free AG1 flavour sampler and AGZ sampler to try all the flavours, plus free vitamin D3 and K2 and AG1 welcome kit with your first AG1 subscription order. That's $87 in free gifts for first time subscribers.

• 30:36Rangan Chatterjee?

  All you have to do is head to drinkag1.com forward slash live more to claim this offer before it ends.

• 30:49Speaker 01

  You go through this process that I've talked about where you've got, you know, the stimulus response and then the stress reaction after that stimulus response. And we've walked through this.

• 31:00Speaker 01

  And as, you know, like, as, as I've learned, if I don't like what I'm feeling, then that's where the opportunity is. Okay? Eckhart Tolle, in a healthy organism, an emotion is a short-lived response.

• 31:20Speaker 01

  Okay? I, I, I hundred percent agree with that.

• 31:26Speaker 01

  There's no baggage with that. There's no dragging an experience that happened yesterday or 50 years ago through every day of my life. There's no reason I need to do that to where I can't live in total joy. And if I'm stuck in sadness, if I'm stuck in...

• 31:48Speaker 01

  If I'm stuck in excitement, there's one. This is where I usually throw out to clients. I know all this other stuff sounds hard. Let's start with excitement. Let's look at the things that bring you excitement. Let's, let's slow down there. Let's bring that down in a level to actually see it for what it really is. See what the, because there are far too many of us that are getting very excited over really sexy shiny things that inevitably we didn't actually want to be doing or involved in. And because we didn't take the time to bring it down enough to go, oh, anything that goes up comes down. Right? So, and that doesn't mean you can't get excited about things. How, make it a short-lived response. How do you make that happen?

• 32:30Speaker 01

  Well, when I get excited, I slow it down. I intentionally slow it down. So if I know I'm going into a situation, so here's, there's three ways we can go about this. If I know I'm going into a situation that could be difficult, work, home, whatever, or you're gonna go do something that you really didn't want to do. That's where breath work comes in, stage one. I'm gonna do that to bring myself down a bit, to jump over and go, what is the reality of this? Versus the emotion of it.

• 33:04Rangan Chatterjee?

  I spoke to a friend last week who was getting really triggered by an email from his boss.

• 33:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:09Rangan Chatterjee?

  And I said, mate, you know that that email in and off itself is not problematic. Right, he showed me. Like, that's just a neutral email.

• 33:18Speaker 01

  It's just information.

• 33:19Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah. You're choosing to put this story on it and amping yourself up. You don't have to. And I guess one of the things I think is most powerful about becoming aware of your breath is, is that deep knowledge where you know, I can actually change the tightness of my nervous system.

• 33:43Speaker 01

  Look, Casper Van Mullen was the one who coined the breathing is the remote control to the nervous system. So you can toggle that nervous system if you're willing to sit in it and control it before you go into something that you know could be difficult. Now, the second part of that, where this could come in, is if you get good at the first process.

• 34:08Speaker 01

  Then you can go in to an actual situation you have not planned for, didn't know was coming, and real time,

• 34:18Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 34:18Speaker 01

  Regulate. Oh, I can feel that. I can feel my adrenaline coming up. I can feel my, I'm getting, I'm getting emotional. I'm getting angry right now. I'm getting frustrated right now. Breathe into that if you, if you, if you got it. But if you don't, the third part is if the, the reaction that you've had, you didn't enjoy, now you've got an opportunity when it's over, to regulate and go look at the reality of that.

• 34:48Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 34:48Speaker 01

  So in either, any one of those three, reality has to come into play. You've got to be able to jump out of the story or the narrative that you're in. And breathing is the thing that can typically allow for that to happen if you're actually applying this, but you've got to be consistent with it.

• 35:09Rangan Chatterjee?

  Okay, so let's talk about something practical then. You've got to be consistent with it. So there's our ability to use our breath in the moment. Like, let's say we developed and cultivated the self-awareness. So, oh, I can feel something's happening there. Oh, okay, I'm not going to say anything. Let me just calm it down. Let me breathe into it. Okay. But for that person who's never ever paid attention to their breath and is kind of resonating with something going, all right, well, where do I start, Brian? Where do they start?

• 35:43Speaker 01

  I think the simplest thing to do, and this is what I'll show with people if I, if I go do a talk, so that they have something to walk away with is, if you can just inhale through your nose and exhale through your nose a little bit slower each time until you find a place where you're most comfortable with the exhale. But continue to just inhale and then slowly exhale. You're gonna bring it down.

• 36:15Rangan Chatterjee?

  So your exhale is longer than your inhale?

• 36:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, you want to prolong the exhale, just slightly, right? Or even even more, as long as you're comfortable. You don't want to you don't want to do this and to the degree that you're hitting panic switches.

• 36:29Rangan Chatterjee?

  Okay, but I think that's a really good point because one of the breathing techniques that has taken off over the past decade. Which has elevated this topic of breath work in many people's consciousness is Wim Hof. Okay. And yes, there's upsides and downsides for sure of that kind of breathing. But I believe that many people think that breath work has to be hard. I have to be pushing it. I have to be holding my breath. I have to go, oh, I can keep going, right? And what you're saying there is that you don't need any of that necessarily. You can start off in a very comfortable way, just breathing in and breathing out for a little bit longer, but you don't have to feel uncomfortable. Is that right?

• 37:14Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 37:15Rangan Chatterjee?

  So it can feel easy?

• 37:16Speaker 01

  That is controlled breathing. And then another simple thing that you can do is just sit there, shut your eyes and pay attention to your belly moving every single time you breathe, you breathe in and out. And that's all you do for about 30 seconds or so. And after about 30 seconds, you're just you're going to switch that over to paying attention to your chest and how your chest moves through every breath. And you'll do that for 30 seconds. Not forcing anything, let it happen, just allowing it to happen.

• 37:58Speaker 01

  And then I would move people into now I want you to pay attention to the air moving through your nostrils. Just the air moving through your nostrils.

• 38:09Speaker 01

  So if you can do this without having to control your breathing, you're becoming highly focused on something, but you're calming yourself instantaneously down without having to control your breathing at all. And your breathing naturally just starts to drop.

• 38:25Rangan Chatterjee?

  So would it be a helpful practice? Let's say as part of a morning routine, maybe after they wake up.

• 38:32Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 38:32Rangan Chatterjee?

  For five minutes.

• 38:33Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 38:34Rangan Chatterjee?

  Doing what you just said. Make the case for someone, if you don't mind.

• 38:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:40Rangan Chatterjee?

  Why they should give up five minutes of their precious morning to do that. What are the potential implications later on in their life? Later on that day, for example?

• 38:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, uh, simple. You're gonna change what's going on metabolically real quick. So you're gonna start activating things and getting more, more oxygen used up because you're changing how the chemistry happens. So you're actually regulating your nervous system.

• 39:02Rangan Chatterjee?

  Okay, so let's say you don't have much time. You do five minutes of this kind of calming, grounding breathwork practice every morning.

• 39:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:11Rangan Chatterjee?

  As someone who does that or similar versions of that, I feel there's so many potential benefits. I think it's a beautiful way to start your day. It's a very intentional way to start your day. Instead of reacting to the news headlines and the social media, the noise. You're just like, oh, I'm gonna start.

• 39:29Speaker 01

  Whatever noise is out there, yeah.

• 39:31Rangan Chatterjee?

  I'm gonna gently just bring myself into the day, for example. I think it's also in a world where so many of us are focused outward on more information and more expertise and more opinions, which then become confusing. I think a practice like this brings you inward. You're starting to pay attention to what's going on inside your body. Right? You're starting to understand, oh, like even I know this stuff, but even when you were going through it, I started to do it.

• 39:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 39:59Rangan Chatterjee?

  And I'm like, oh, wow, I'm on my head at the moment. Like, I'd forgotten what was going on in my body. Of course, I'm talking to you.

• 40:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 40:04Rangan Chatterjee?

  But it was a nice reminder, and I think that then.

• 40:06Speaker 01

  It's such a, this is, so I'll, I'll layer this stuff in for people throughout their day. Like, hey, man, like, as soon as you get off that call, like. Boom. As soon as out of that meeting, boom. This is where you go to at least just do like three minutes.

• 40:19Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah. Am I remembering correctly, a few months ago on Instagram, I think you said something to the effect of, if you have a well functioning nervous system, then you will be able to take a nap at 1pm. What I understood from that post was many people say that they can't nap. They're tired, but they can't nap. And I appreciate that everyone has the opportunity to nap because of their work pressures, et cetera, et cetera. But some people who are working from home and potentially could have the time so that they're too wired to switch off.

• 40:52Speaker 01

  I mean, look, a healthy, functioning animal can take a nap at any point after a stress response. But what does a lion do after it misses the kill? It goes and lies down and then takes a nap. I remember going to general quarters. So I was in the Navy and I remember going to general quarters, which is, you know, a drill for we're going to war or something's happening. You're going to your station and it would be held for a certain amount of time. And most of the time it was for a prolonged amount of time. And I remember vividly, I was like, perfect, I'm gonna take a nap.

• 41:34Speaker 01

  And I would literally take a nap when I would go to GQ. Because I was going to be stuck in this place for so long and none of my superior officers were going to be there or anything. So they weren't going to see me. They're going to be at their general quarters station, you know, but I was going to take a nap and I would take a nap. And then I got out of the Navy and then I started working. I was becoming successful and all of these things. And then all of a sudden I couldn't switch off. I couldn't take a nap. I remember all of this.

• 42:02Rangan Chatterjee?

  So what happened? What was the switch in you?

• 42:04Speaker 01

  I just kept turning it on. I took on every opportunity I could get. I said yes to everything. I didn't learn how to say no. I didn't slow it down from the excitement of everything, the new thing. And that doesn't mean to do, go do new things. It's like, did I have the bandwidth? And I didn't have the bandwidth. I didn't have the bandwidth because I was burning myself out all day. And then I was still trying to train. Right, so I was still trying to work out and do everything I was doing at the time while working out.

• 42:33Rangan Chatterjee?

  Just adding more and more things into your schedule, more training.

• 42:37Speaker 01

  And then I do the physical stuff because damn, I felt good after that. But not realizing, oh, this is going to have compounding residual effects. The interesting thing was, is I was doing a lot of long, slow distance in the early stages of that stuff.

• 42:49Rangan Chatterjee?

  You mean endurance training?

• 42:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And this is where I started to evolve things, not just for myself, but a lot of the athletes I was working, because they were burnt. And so it was like, well, what could we chip down? So we started chipping things down and it was less and less and less. And it was like having some great effect, but turns out that if you don't turn it off, if you don't have time throughout the day where you're able to shut it down, then that doesn't mean you need to take a nap. It means can you regulate? Can you bring it down?

• 43:16Rangan Chatterjee?

  And that's why you're so passionate about the breath.

• 43:18Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 43:19Rangan Chatterjee?

  Because the breath, once you become intimate and pay attention to your own breath.

• 43:24Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 43:25Rangan Chatterjee?

  And what's happening in your nostrils and your chest and your abdomen, like you just mentioned.

• 43:29Speaker 01

  Like if I'm talking, or if I'm speaking, or if I'm going and teaching, like, man, I'm on. What am I doing right after that? Am I going to go have multiple conversations with people? Because I might, because people just saw me do something and so they have questions and they want to talk to me and it's like, I'm on again. Then it's like, okay, what do I do as soon as after that? Oh, I'm jacked up. I was working with some stand-up comedians and none of these guys and gals can shut off after they do a set, because they're so wired from being on stage. So a lot of these guys go and play video games and stuff, or they're drink, and you know, and it's like, dude, go regulate. Like, go bring yourself down.

• 44:07Rangan Chatterjee?

  Okay, this is a great example. So a performer, you know, they finish, let's say, on stage at 10:30 PM.

• 44:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:15Rangan Chatterjee?

  They're ramped up. Maybe it's not as different as the person who's still working late into the evening on emails, whatever it might be. Maybe, you know, to make it really practical for people, they can't switch off. So, and I know performers who say that their bad habits come in when they're on the road. Like, what is a healthier way for them to down-regulate at 11 PM instead of the bottle of wine, for example?

• 44:39Speaker 01

  Go back to the green room or wherever you've got an opportunity to separate yourself from people. And just take five or 10 minutes and bring it down, regulate.

• 44:50Rangan Chatterjee?

  So what breathing?

• 44:50Speaker 01

  Do some breathing, do some breathing. You could even do breath hold work if you wanted to. That's going to change some things and bring it down a bit. But that is going to bring the nervous system down. And it's going to allow you to actually not be in a reactive place. That's the problem is that we get in, when we get into this heightened heightened arousal state, you can only react in those places. If you do bring it down, you can respond, you can be like, oh.

• 45:20Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 45:21Speaker 01

  But maybe I don't do that versus like, no, I'm not doing that. Yes, I am doing that, you know?

• 45:25Rangan Chatterjee?

  The amount of patients over the years, Brian, who came in to see me with sleep issues. And of course, there's a whole variety of different reasons why one may be struggling with with one's sleep. Right. But so many of them, and this is one of the probably unintended or maybe intended consequences of the digital world in which we now live is that these boundaries between work and home have kind of vanished in a way that, you know, 20 years ago, you left the office. There's stuff you couldn't really do at home. You had to be in the office to do it. So there would be a natural boundary, whereas now people can work and do their emails into the evening.

• 46:06Rangan Chatterjee?

  And one of the things I I realized after a while, I was telling my patients a lot is that you know, you're struggling to switch off and see that like literally doing work emails, firing them off, and then going to bed and saying, hey, I'm struggling to sleep. Okay. And I'm like, if you're doing that and you're really activated now, some people can switch it off quickly for sure.

• 46:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, my wife can.

• 46:28Rangan Chatterjee?

  But many people can't. And I'm like, for me personally, I have to have, I don't have to anymore, but I chose a few years ago to go, you know what, once it hits 7pm, that's it, I'm done. Like, that's the day done. Now everything is chill mode. It's relaxing, it's reading, it's music, it's doing some stretches, it's chatting with my wife. It's not work related. It was a choice I made. And what I used to say to these guys is like, have you got kids? Said, yeah, I said, you know, with your kids. Just before they go to bed, what do you do? You don't put all the lights on full. Give them a load of sugar, put the music up loud. You don't activate them, do you? No, you dim the lights, you soften your tone.

• 47:13Rangan Chatterjee?

  You might read them a bedtime story. You're creating this kind of environment around them that is conducive to falling asleep. But as adults, we kind of think that we don't need that. I'm like, your kids need a bedtime routine. You might benefit from a similar bedtime routine to your children. It's about what is the signal you're giving to your nervous system, isn't it?

• 47:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, oh yeah. We create more stimulus through the unprocessed junk, whatever we're not dealing with. And it's this compensation of just trying to get as much done as we can. Because in the world we live in, it's just like it's this barrage of information that we're all aware of. We all talk about it like we understand it. However, when you don't have boundaries, like you've talked about how you have boundaries, like 7pm comes, you're done, like it's done, right? For me, it's more like four or five o'clock. Like, it's really like-

• 48:08Rangan Chatterjee?

  It's early these days, to be fair, yeah.

• 48:10Speaker 01

  For me, it's really four or five o'clock because I, if I, I'll obsess. I will obsess on my work and about, you know, like, look, I tested you and I'll keep going and looking at your data and bringing it in and working on it because I'm in the, in the space where I'm like, yeah, yeah, yeah. But that'll also be there tomorrow. And I really enjoy a lot of the other hobbies and things that I do. And one of them is like cooking. So I get to go home and I get to start cooking. The way I cook is, isn't pre-planned. It's what's, what do we have and what can I create? And-

• 48:47Rangan Chatterjee?

  So you, but you're changing your nervous system states.

• 48:49Speaker 01

  I am boom, going from work into, now, now I'm in the kitchen.

• 48:53Rangan Chatterjee?

  Play, creativity.

• 48:54Speaker 01

  Playing. And when it's a little warmer, I typically will come home and because it gets, it gets dark later, I'll go home, grab Tiana and I'll be like, we're going to the beach. And we will go body surf for like 45 minutes or an hour. But my mornings are the same way. Like, I don't actually go and sit and do breath work very often in the morning because I head out the door and I go walk for 60 to 90 minutes.

• 49:22Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, I want to talk about this and this is really important. So there's-

• 49:27Rangan Chatterjee?

  Doing breath work whilst you're sitting down and still.

• 49:35Rangan Chatterjee?

  And the exercise you kind of illustrated and took people through before is it's kind of about paying attention and just sort of starting to notice what's happening. But there's also breath work or paying attention to your breathing when you're moving. Right? So you're saying you don't tend to sit down and do that much anymore. You wake up, I know you walk what 90 minutes minimum a day?

• 49:58Speaker 01

  Oh, I mean, I'm, I'm, I think my average is something like 17,000 or 18,000 steps a day.

• 50:05Rangan Chatterjee?

  And this is something different from five years ago.

• 50:07Speaker 01

  Oh, God, yeah.

• 50:08Rangan Chatterjee?

  Okay.

• 50:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, I mean, look, I've been walking for quite some time. It's just the level of walking because of what happens. What I really invested one in with walking is the same thing I'm invested in with cooking and or going body surfing or even surfing for that matter. Like I didn't even throw in, if there is a big enough swell, I shut off everything. Cancel appointments with with clients like and anybody who's a surfer understands this. Like it's done, like this, it's out.

• 50:38Rangan Chatterjee?

  The thought that just jumped into my head was it's so counter to what we think life should be, which is about seriousness. And if you have a meeting or something there, you have to do it. And I, I understand that many people have jobs where they have to maybe, you know, you work for yourself, so you have your autonomy to do that, whereas many people don't. I accept all of that, but it just makes me think about culture and actually how the playfulness, the things that truly nourish us, those are the things that everyone tries to fit in on their one week vacation or maybe on a Sunday afternoon. Do you know what I mean? It's something, it says something about culture where these things have been relegated to being only when you have time, only when you finish your emails.

• 51:21Speaker 01

  This is goes right back to process and what we were talking about in the beginning. My work is the same way. I'm literally having fun like a kid with what I'm doing and I'm enjoying that. And I'm not losing sight of that. I feel like at this point in my life, at 50 years old.

• 51:41Speaker 01

  I got rid of the kid that was a tortured soul and brought back the kid that was playing. And I've taken the things that I've learned and that I'm very passionate about. And I've learned to apply that to everything I'm doing. But I have set hard lines in the sand with these things.

• 52:05Rangan Chatterjee?

  Like what?

• 52:06Speaker 01

  You don't get me when I'm surfing. You don't get me after 4pm. My time is the most valuable thing I have and your time is the most valuable thing you have. And attention is finite. Where I choose to spend my time, I choose to be there and invested in it in the most creative way that I can. And that's just presence. I can't do that without presence. If I'm thinking about the next meeting I've got to go to and the deal I've got to close and then or whoever I've got like uh uh. It's not gonna work. It doesn't work for me like that. And then I love the job I'm at, but more importantly, I love every single person that is in my life. No matter how short that is.

• 52:50Speaker 01

  And then third, I feel like I'm a kid and you'll like this. I'll feel like I'm a kid in the eighties playing again. The eighties, bro, the eighties.

• 53:01Rangan Chatterjee?

  Pre smartphones.

• 53:02Speaker 01

  Bro, the innocence and the the risk taking that I was in up to when I was living at that time. The craziness of it. But the the the just the drive to explore. And that's what walking does for me. Walking in the morning reminds me of when I was a kid and I live behind this forest. I would just go, I was out, I was gone at like six years old. Eight years old, I'd go walk out the back and I'd go into the forest and I'd go screw around building tree forts, all this stuff. You know how hard that is right now for people and their kids? Like to allow even a 10 year old or to be on their own.

• 53:43Rangan Chatterjee?

  Jonathan Haidt writes about this in The Anxious Generation. He's talking about, you know, the negatives of smartphones that are in early age and social media are in early age. But. For him, the case he makes is not only about reducing that, it's at the same time, we need to increase free play, give our children independence, get them out taking risks, playing. The world is actually a lot safer for most of us than it used to be, yet we're behaving. Like, I think he says something to the effect of we are underprotecting kids in the online world and overprotecting them in the offline world. And I think he's, I think he's really on to something.

• 54:20Speaker 01

  I don't think he's wrong. I mean, I read Johann Hari, you know, did a book.

• 54:24Rangan Chatterjee?

  Stolen Focus.

• 54:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, Stolen Focus. That was a fantastic book as well, but, you know, and all of that's provided me with information that I've been able to utilize, right? Like, I'm able to take steps to understand these things. It's like, you know, I don't have a true existence on social media anymore. It's like from afar. And, you know, if I go post a video that I have to get on the app for to post that, I actually have to go to the App Store, install the app, and then I delete the app after I've done that. And I don't go through and start scrolling because I know what's going to happen to me. I'm not, I'm not immune to the things that are going on with you on there, if you're actually on there. I go through the same thing where I get caught in the infinite scroll and

• 55:08Speaker 01

  I'm emotionally getting triggered by things. And it's like, oh, that's interesting, that's going on. And people pretend like that's not happening to them. And literally, there are people I have had conversations with that think that's not affecting them. And they're full of shit. It's affecting all of us. I've watched it. I see it with myself. I see it with clients. I see it with people that I'm close to. It affects us all in a certain way. And real life, real life, is with the people you're closest to and the ability to show up and interact. But that doesn't mean you can't go on social media and do the thing. It's just like getting caught in that loop and going, oh, there it is, I'm out.

• 55:47Rangan Chatterjee?

  It's interesting. You were talking about the boundaries you put in place, the clear boundaries you put in place. And boundaries are something that many people struggle with.

• 55:53Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 55:54Rangan Chatterjee?

  I used to struggle with it, for sure.

• 55:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 55:59Rangan Chatterjee?

  And a lot of the time, there's a pushback, sometimes that it's selfish. But the funny thing is that I imagine, and I put it to you, like, putting in boundaries is actually one of the most selfless things you can do. Because what people don't realize on the other side of boundaries is that You then you then have something to give to the people you want to give to.

• 56:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 56:23Rangan Chatterjee?

  Let's talk about your gear system here, right?

• 56:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 56:26Rangan Chatterjee?

  Because I think it's it's really practical. And I think it's going to be a tool that people can take away because we've gone pretty deep.

• 56:34Speaker 01

  Right? Yeah.

• 56:35Rangan Chatterjee?

  And I think you can go that deep. But having some practical activities that you can start, you know, playing around with each day. I think it helps people go to that deepness. Do you know what I mean? It's like, it's easy to hear these concepts that go, well, yeah, Brian, wrong and all right for you guys. Like, I don't know why you enjoy doing the dishes. What are you guys talking about? I hate doing the dishes. So let's bring in these five gear systems because I think they're useful. Everyone moves their bodies, maybe some not as much as others. But what are they? And why do you think they're so important for people to know?

• 57:11Speaker 01

  Well, we developed the breathing gear system out of discrepancy that we found in observing breathing as a dynamic through low, moderate and high intensity exercise.

• 57:27Rangan Chatterjee?

  So the gear systems apply to when we're moving our bodies.

• 57:30Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 57:30Rangan Chatterjee?

  It's not about waking up and actually paying attention. No. So we parked that we're now moving our bodies. Let's say we go for a walk.

• 57:36Speaker 01

  It's about exercise, go for a walk.

• 57:38Rangan Chatterjee?

  Go for a walk.

• 57:38Speaker 01

  And this is a perfect example. Is if gear one cannot be used while someone is walking, we have a very big limitation, which is nothing but an opportunity. Don't look at limiter as a negative. Limiter is an opportunity. So I have an immediate opportunity if I can't have somebody in gear one. And breathing gear one is simple. It's can you maintain one breath cycle in and out of your nose for greater than four seconds? So that would be like a two in, two out. Right? Two, two count in, two count out. I get that upwards to somewhere around eight seconds for walking level,

• 58:23Speaker 01

  maybe 10 seconds walking level effort for people. But that's a good check. Does that mean you should go on a 90 minute walk while trying to apply gear one? Absolutely not. I mean, go spend like 10, 20 minutes really focusing or from time to time, every few minutes, checking in and applying that breathing pattern of.

• 58:49Speaker 01

  To the effort you're at with walking.

• 58:52Rangan Chatterjee?

  Okay, so let me frame it my way and see if this makes sense. Okay, so walking is, of course, it depends whether there's an incline or it depends on the speed, but it's, you know, it's not the most intense of movement activities, right? So you're saying you're going for a walk around your block. Gear one is the ability to maintain a nasal in-breath and a nasal out-breath, so you're not opening your mouth. And you want that in and out-breath to be at least four seconds.

• 59:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 59:20Rangan Chatterjee?

  Okay. If you cannot do that, okay, so it could be that you can only manage two seconds, or it could be that I can only walk around the block by opening my mouth.

• 59:30Speaker 01

  That would be gear four. So we'll work through this.

• 59:33Rangan Chatterjee?

  Okay, so why is that a problem, though? If someone can't go around the block on a flat pavement and keep their mouth shut while they're doing it, so exclusively nasal breathing, if they can't do that, why is that something they should be paying attention to?

• 59:48Speaker 01

  They're not utilizing oxygen real well.

• 59:51Rangan Chatterjee?

  Okay. Can we think about these five breathing gear systems like a car? You know, gear one to five where, you know, we start off the car in first gear and we go to second gear and third gear and fourth gear and fifth gear. Is that...

• 1:00:09Speaker 01

  Sort of, sort of, because gear one would be much, you'd be in, gear one should be primarily most of what you're doing throughout your day. So gear two is a transition from gear one, obviously, to where I go from that four count and now I'm down and I'm probably more like three, two to three seconds per breath cycle.

• 1:00:27Rangan Chatterjee?

  But still nasal in and out.

• 1:00:28Speaker 01

  Yes, I'm still nasal, right?

• 1:00:29Rangan Chatterjee?

  Still nasal. So gears one and gears two are both nasal.

• 1:00:32Speaker 01

  And what I've found, what I have found over the last few years is that gear two is actually pretty limited. And you're probably more effective if you're only if you're gonna be prolonged at gear two, you're actually more effective at jumping up to a gear four. So see, I'm skipping gear three, because gear three is nose in, mouth out. And that's largely a transitional gear for coming down.

• 1:01:02Rangan Chatterjee?

  And we're gonna go through this, but for people who like wanna learn more, it's all on your website, isn't it? Like you've got the gears and that is shift.

• 1:01:09Speaker 01

  Shiftadapt.com.

• 1:01:11Rangan Chatterjee?

  Right. So if it goes to shiftadapt.com, you've clearly got the five gear systems there.

• 1:01:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think we have it. We have that up somewhere on that site. If not, they can go to actually my my X handle, and it is pinned at the top of my of my profile.

• 1:01:27Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:28Speaker 01

  And there is a systematic breakdown of it and where it relates and how it can work.

• 1:01:32Rangan Chatterjee?

  Okay.

• 1:01:33Speaker 01

  That said, skip gear three going up. So I'm in gear two. If I'm gonna be there for more than a minute or two, I'm gonna have somebody go to gear four.

• 1:01:42Rangan Chatterjee?

  And that is what, in and out through the mouth?

• 1:01:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's just relaxed mouth breathing.

• 1:01:47Rangan Chatterjee?

  Okay. So as your intensity is going up, you've moved from gear one to gear two, you're saying on the way up, jump and skip gear three, and you're now at gear four. So you've gone from nasal breathing in and out to mouth breathing in and out, but in a relaxed way. And then gear five is?

• 1:02:10Rangan Chatterjee?

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• 1:03:32Rangan Chatterjee?

  All you have to do is head to drinkag1.com/livemore to claim this offer before it ends. Today's episode is sponsored by the daily health drink AG1. The clocks are about to change, the mornings are darker, everyone around you seems to be coming down with something and suddenly that wellbeing you felt in the summer seems a long time ago. I certainly know that feeling and that's why at this time of year, I remind myself to lean into the fundamentals. And one of those fundamentals is AG1. AG1 is a daily health drink that has been in my own life for over eight years. And one of the many things I like about it is the fact that many of the nutrients it contains, for example,

• 1:04:14Rangan Chatterjee?

  vitamin C, vitamin A, zinc and selenium, supports a healthy immune system. Some of the other things I really like about AG1 is that they are committed to continuous improvement and updating their formula as a scientific research involves. And each batch is independently tested for quality and safety markers, including heavy metals, allergens and banned substances. This is how they can guarantee what's in your scoop and what's not. Right now, AG1 is offering a free AG1 flavour sampler and AGZ sampler to try all the flavours, plus free vitamin D3 and K2 and AG1 welcome kit with your first

• 1:04:56Rangan Chatterjee?

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• 1:05:16Speaker 01

  For heart rate zone junkies, people who actually understand heart rate zones, gear four is happening somewhere between heart rate zone three and four.

• 1:05:25Rangan Chatterjee?

  Okay.

• 1:05:25Speaker 01

  That is where that is occurring. Gear five is power mouth breathing, meaning I'm actually really moving air like

• 1:05:40Speaker 01

  this is heavy duty strength and conditioning sets. This is sprinting at the end of sprints, if they're short or you're talking 400 meters, 800 meter efforts, you're going to hit those. If you're hitting those for time, if you're hitting those for high intensity, gear five is coming into play. Okay.

• 1:06:02Speaker 01

  Gear five is something that I realized there were a lot of problems with not just myself that I noticed, but other people I've noticed who are not able to get that respiration rate above about 40, 45.

• 1:06:19Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, okay. And we'll come to my test here. But just again, to make sure everyone's following along, right? So there were these five gear systems that you've gone through. As our intensity of movement increases, we in essence move up through the gears like we would in a car. Right?

• 1:06:38Rangan Chatterjee?

  Why is it important for someone to know that? So what I mean by that is let's say someone is using gears four and five exclusively, i.e. they're never nasal breathing. Okay. They're, they go for a walk around the block on a flat in perfect weather conditions, and they're breathing in and out through their mouth. Okay. So they're not using one, two, or three, they're straight into four. Cause I think people need to know that to encourage them to start.

• 1:07:03Speaker 01

  For the hundreds, if not thousands of people that I've tested or looked at the data on currently, you have a breathing related issue when exercising. And you have a big opportunity in maximizing your performance and output by either, like, look, I tested, so I tested Kawhi Leonard this morning, who's an NBA player for the Clippers. And he asked this very question, well, how's this going to help my performance? And I explained to him, well, Think of it like a season, right?

• 1:07:44Speaker 01

  If I can give you a tool that's going to allow you to be more efficient with your breathing, you're not losing that blood to your locomotor muscles. So you're not getting more stressed sooner. You're using energy a bit more efficiently. So game after game, if you don't change this, by the time playoffs come, you're pretty tired. You're pretty exhausted. It's pretty hard versus you now have, you're now recovering faster.

• 1:08:14Rangan Chatterjee?

  You've got capacity.

• 1:08:15Speaker 01

  You've got more capacity because you're using oxygen later than you were earlier.

• 1:08:22Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, so there's a performance benefit. There's a capacity benefit. You can go for longer before you fatigue. Someone we both follow on X, Alan Cousins. My interpretation of what I've read from Alan is, you know, if you're keeping at that low heart rate, if you're walking to the mailbox, if you can keep it all nasal breathing and at a low heart rate, that's going to help you burn fat. There's a metabolic benefit. And so for some people who maybe don't want performance or not NBA players, well, many people are trying to lose fat off their bodies, right? And there's a metabolic reason to be able to access gears one and two, isn't there? It's going to help you burn fat.

• 1:09:05Speaker 01

  We definitively understand that if you're breathing through your nose, you're more aerobic than you are if.

• 1:09:11Rangan Chatterjee?

  Which means you're using up fats.

• 1:09:13Speaker 01

  Correct. So think of your aerobic system is kind of like your checking account, right? And your anaerobic systems are your savings account. If I'm constant, my mouth, my mouth open is my savings account. You're on limited time. You're incinerating carbohydrates when that mouth's open. So you're using up, that's not a bad thing. It's just a thing. But I'm on limited time. If I'm more aerobic, I'm utilizing fatty acids more. So I'm burning fat, right?

• 1:09:46Rangan Chatterjee?

  Okay, now I love all this, right? So we're in a situation where, and this is how the breathwork landscape has changed over the last five or 10 years, of which I'm a prime example. Okay, so.

• 1:09:56Speaker 01

  Yes, this is good.

• 1:09:58Rangan Chatterjee?

  Let's go back 10 years. A decade ago, I can't quite remember what was happening, but breathwork wasn't as popular as it is now. Right? In my own journey through this podcast, which is to go for seven years now, the first time I really dealt with nasal breathing on the show was with Patrick McEwen many years ago. I had a lovely chat with Patrick.

• 1:10:21Rangan Chatterjee?

  He spoke to me about the Bolt Score and the benefits of nasal breathing and that progressed to me talking to you and all kinds of people about breathwork. James Nestor then releases this blow up book globally Breath and talks about the benefits of nasal breathing. Is it fair to say that that message was needed because the vast majority of people were over breathing and using their mouths more than their nose? But something has shifted where some people who get a bit obsessed like me, take that nasal breathing message and try and do everything in our lives with nasal breathing and then we start to have problems in something like a gear five, which is what I think you're finding with me.

• 1:11:05Speaker 01

  Correct. Yes. And I experienced the same thing. I did the same thing.

• 1:11:10Rangan Chatterjee?

  But it doesn't mean nasal breathing is not important.

• 1:11:12Speaker 01

  No, no, no.

• 1:11:13Rangan Chatterjee?

  It's another way.

• 1:11:14Speaker 01

  There's a limitation, for sure.

• 1:11:16Rangan Chatterjee?

  Can you, could we say this? That there was a deficiency of nasal breathing in society. The increased awareness has, has, has meant that less people are deficient now because they're aware of it. But the problem is, is that they've tipped it too far where they've actually now neglected mouth breathing, which is also important.

• 1:11:37Speaker 01

  Correct. You will not, go look at a tour cyclist who climbs Al Duaz or whatever climb you want to talk about and they're punching it. Their jaw is on, their jaw is open and they are, and they are moving that air fast.

• 1:11:53Rangan Chatterjee?

  So let's talk about that then through the lens of the testing you did on me.

• 1:11:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:11:56Rangan Chatterjee?

  Right? So, because I think this kind of illustrates this quite well.

• 1:11:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, you were, you were not able to get above a 42 respiration rate.

• 1:12:05Speaker 01

  And you were at tidal volume, but I'm pretty sure you could get deeper.

• 1:12:10Rangan Chatterjee?

  Let's break that down. Like, some people won't know what tidal volume is and what these terms mean.

• 1:12:13Speaker 01

  Tidal volume just talks about how much air is in the lungs, right?

• 1:12:17Rangan Chatterjee?

  So are we saying that I was good at the lower gears?

• 1:12:19Speaker 01

  You were good at the lower gears. Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:12:22Rangan Chatterjee?

  So, so, because I put in the work at the lower gears.

• 1:12:25Speaker 01

  Oh, yes.

• 1:12:26Rangan Chatterjee?

  And I've focused on nasal breathing.

• 1:12:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:12:28Rangan Chatterjee?

  So it looks to say you were really happy with that.

• 1:12:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, and metabolically speaking, look, like, based on, you, you, you were between .95 and 1.0 for like 15 minutes.

• 1:12:41Rangan Chatterjee?

  And what does that mean for people who don't know those terms?

• 1:12:43Speaker 01

  So Rangan was at, at, at a low to moderate, moderate, moderate, high level. He was staying under 1.0 RER, which is respiratory exchange ratio, which means once you hit 1.0.

• 1:12:59Rangan Chatterjee?

  You're burning carbs.

• 1:12:59Speaker 01

  You're totally burning carbohydrates.

• 1:13:01Rangan Chatterjee?

  So I was able to burn fat?

• 1:13:03Speaker 01

  You still had some fatty ass, you were still burning some fat.

• 1:13:06Rangan Chatterjee?

  Even at relatively, you know, moderate, moderate to high intensities, which I probably wasn't doing five years ago.

• 1:13:12Speaker 01

  A systems level, a metabol, so just, that's just looking at the metabolic now.

• 1:13:16Rangan Chatterjee?

  Right.

• 1:13:17Speaker 01

  Here's where, here's where part of the assessment is different that I, that I'm doing. And the endurance community will understand this. I'm looking at tissue utilization of oxygen and I'm looking at delivery of oxygen. Okay, so I'm seeing how the hemoglobin is getting delivered, the oxygen's getting delivered to the tissue. And I'm seeing how well that tissue is actually utilizing that oxygen.

• 1:13:42Rangan Chatterjee?

  Okay, so many of us understand that oxygen comes into our lungs, right? And then from our lungs, it gets into our blood. You're saying there's two things to think about. Yes, you have to get the oxygen from the lungs to, let's say, your muscles, right?

• 1:13:59Speaker 01

  As soon as you start working, the muscles' demand goes up.

• 1:14:01Rangan Chatterjee?

  Right, so the oxygen gets to the muscles, but you're also saying that even if it gets there, it may not be being used efficiently.

• 1:14:08Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 1:14:09Rangan Chatterjee?

  Right, so, so this is the kind of nuance that I think many of us are not thinking about, so.

• 1:14:15Rangan Chatterjee?

  Okay, let's go back to my test then. What was I doing? Am I getting oxygen there and it's not being used efficiently? Or am I not even getting oxygen there?

• 1:14:21Speaker 01

  You're getting oxygen there. However, you weren't utilizing the oxygen well at these places.

• 1:14:27Rangan Chatterjee?

  Why?

• 1:14:29Speaker 01

  The mitochondria aerobic system wasn't getting enough oxygen or hadn't been for for long enough. Because the nose breathing is happening with everything and you're more than likely doing it at higher efforts, which you confirmed with me. Yes, you are. So you're not actually bringing in enough oxygen to actually help that. So you're the system can't.

• 1:14:50Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, it's funny.

• 1:14:51Speaker 01

  Or the tissue can't, but the system's fine.

• 1:14:53Rangan Chatterjee?

  A few years ago, I went to Salford University in Manchester to do my lactate threshold testing. And I was right in the middle of my nasal breathing passion. And I was nasal breathing till right at the very ends. And it's really interesting. These guys have done thousands of lactate threshold tests. My test confused them. Because they weren't seeing what they used to. They weren't seeing the usual step changes. I don't think at that time they'd seen someone who was nasal breathing right until the very, very final speeds. And they were gonna do some more work on me. And then COVID happened, nothing, we didn't actually do anything. But now it's all starting to, the penny's starting to drop now.

• 1:15:37Rangan Chatterjee?

  I'm like, ah, maybe, not maybe, I was overly nasal breathing. So they couldn't even get the data. They wanted to give me my training zones. It was, is that making sense?

• 1:15:48Speaker 01

  Dude, I watched this exact thing with it. So I have a pretty good relationship with the UFC PI. And one of my, one of my clients owns the UFC. So we went over to the PI to do all of our testing there with Roman, who's the exercise lead physiologist there. And he, he did this exact same thing.

• 1:16:09Speaker 01

  And literally with a minute and a half left, he decided to start mouth breathing.

• 1:16:14Rangan Chatterjee?

  That was me. That was exactly me.

• 1:16:16Speaker 01

  That's all it lasted. He fell off a cliff immediately afterwards. And yeah, you were struggling your ass off because you didn't, you didn't have enough oxygen onboard. And you haven't actually developed the, the tissue, the, the, the muscles to be able to move that.

• 1:16:32Rangan Chatterjee?

  So I've developed the lower end, which is great and has metabolic benefits and performance benefits. But I've sacrificed or underdeveloped the top end.

• 1:16:41Speaker 01

  Yeah. It's like doing yoga with your primary breathing muscles and then asking yourself to go, you know, do powerlifting, right? It's, it's just, it's not those two very different worlds, right?

• 1:16:53Rangan Chatterjee?

  But you need both. It's not.

• 1:16:54Speaker 01

  Oh, correct. Yes.

• 1:16:55Rangan Chatterjee?

  So I was right to focus on the nasal breathing and

• 1:16:58Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:16:59Rangan Chatterjee?

  correct that deficiency in my life.

• 1:17:01Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:17:02Rangan Chatterjee?

  But now it's like, hey, Ronan, you've got that one. That's okay. Keep doing that. But now we need to bring in.

• 1:17:07Speaker 01

  Yeah. And the series of questions that I ask based on what I see is what validates what we see, right? And that was the questions that I had for you was like, hey, you know, are you doing any mouth breathing? Like, oh, no, no, no, no, I don't do, you know, like I'm, you know, this is what I'm doing. And I'm like, that's what I thought, like.

• 1:17:24Rangan Chatterjee?

  Okay. So let's say you're going to give me a program and I'm going to work on certain things to do. And I guess some of that's, well, maybe you can share, what are some of the things you would ideally have me work on?

• 1:17:36Speaker 01

  We would, one, have you, uh, work at just above gear two. So working to like heart rate zone two, heart rate to heart rate zone four. We'd be doing some intervals there with mouth breathing, particularly gear four, not gear five. Gear five, we would touch, we'll touch with things like strength and conditioning. So I threw in with your program, the, one of the main points of the limiters was, let's do some real, let's do some strength and conditioning at least twice a week, where you're getting that intensity up to where you are move, wanting to move air.

• 1:18:19Speaker 01

  And that may just be after you finish squatting, but it hits that and then we can gear down as a result of that. So I get up to a point to where I hit that when I'm lifting heavy. And that doesn't mean the whole workout's gear five at all. It's we're hitting those stages. You're also doing structured cardio throughout the week, at least twice a week, to where we're doing some interval type work, where you're working for a few minutes in gear four, and then coming back into a gear one for some easier stuff. And making sure that we've got the, you know, the working gear one in there.

• 1:19:00Rangan Chatterjee?

  So the gears that I have underdeveloped over the past few years, the gear four and five, right? In essence, you're saying now we're going to stop redeveloping them. You're gonna now, you've got gear one and two going pretty well. Let's now get gears four and five going well. So I've got this real variety and depth in my system. I want to know what the benefits for me of doing that are. Like, why should I do it? I feel good. I can nasal breathe at low intensities. I'm gonna do it, Brian. It's not that. For the purpose of the conversation, why should I? Why shouldn't I just keep doing what I'm doing?

• 1:19:42Speaker 01

  You're gonna most likely see an increase in VO2 max.

• 1:19:46Rangan Chatterjee?

  Could you explain to my audience what a VO2 max is?

• 1:19:48Speaker 01

  Maximum amount of oxygen you're able to utilize in liters per kilogram a minute. So your body weight in kilograms and how many liters you're using of oxygen or can use in a minute. That's just a rough reference point of the higher that VO2 max is, the less likely it is that that's going to slip into a dangerous zone as you get older. The good news is you're probably not in any danger. The even better news is that following what I'm going to lay out is going to most likely increase that exponentially. Meaning, when you go on a walk, it's even easier.

• 1:20:29Speaker 01

  You're not using high-stress energy in the places you used to.

• 1:20:34Rangan Chatterjee?

  Is it fair to say that if you can develop this five-gear system with a variety of different movements and a variety of different breathing gears and heart rate intensities?

• 1:20:47Rangan Chatterjee?

  You're working out your stress response system.

• 1:20:50Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:20:51Rangan Chatterjee?

  So how, like, given what we spent the first hour talking about, which is the way we respond to stress, the choice, or perhaps not the choice, depending on how you want to frame it, in terms of we have a stressor and we have a response to that and we can train our response, we can get more helpful responses over time. Do you think that if people develop their five gear breathing system, it would help them better manage stress in their own lives?

• 1:21:18Speaker 01

  Across the boards, yes.

• 1:21:20Rangan Chatterjee?

  Because it's not separate, is it? It's not how you deal with the driver who cuts you up is actually related to how you move your body.

• 1:21:28Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 1:21:29Rangan Chatterjee?

  But I don't think people know that.

• 1:21:30Speaker 01

  Well, your breathing is a respondent to all of that. Breathing is playing a role in all of that. So me learning how to actually, and this doesn't like, I want to be very clear. I, I don't, nor do I expect clients to go into the gym and or go and do cardio every time they go and work out that they're implementing the gear system.

• 1:21:57Speaker 01

  A small portion of that training, I will integrate the gear system and breathing into, but not the whole thing. It's like, if I've got a guy playing in the NFL or NBA, whatever, I do not want them thinking about the gears when they're playing at all, not at all. That is part of training and then it should transcend over into is that is my client now seeing differences in how they're playing and intuitively picking up on this process as they, as they go through that. Right? Are they, as soon as a play ends, you know, in NFL, or are they immediately into?

• 1:22:41Speaker 01

  Do they do that intuitively, right? That's where that should happen. However, the crossover is how I'm managing my day to day stress is going to show up in my training. And if I can't maintain a gear one in something I should be able to maintain a gear one in, I now know I'm probably a little more smoked than I normally am. Or if I had a workout I was gonna do that had some sort of gear in it, and that's much harder, you are now seeing a response to stress that you have a feedback loop to, to understand, oh, wow, this is a lot more difficult, or this is much easier today. I am really able to get, work harder in this gear, right?

• 1:23:23Speaker 01

  That is a very, that is a crossover point for understanding, oh, I'm actually making some adaptations here towards expanding my potential for stress. Like, I'm able to handle far more than I was prior to this. And here's the thing, if I don't use oxygen well, your physiology will catch you. We call these metabolic disorders. Like, it will catch you. And that doesn't mean your breathing is the culprit here. It means, yeah, your breathing's probably affected, your food's probably affected because you're making fast choices on that and you don't care about where you're getting your food from, just hypothesizing, your training is too intense, or it's not intense enough, right?

• 1:24:07Speaker 01

  Like, there's, there's all these variant, like, look, you go look at research, like, it comes out all the time, but variance to training is the thing that is typically the best stimulus, not the same thing over and over and over, repeating.

• 1:24:22Rangan Chatterjee?

  It's so interesting, this stuff. I mean, I'm deeply fascinated, like you, about human behavior. A big part of my job for many years as a doctor has been to help patients make better lifestyle choices.

• 1:24:37Rangan Chatterjee?

  And I used to think that knowledge is all that people needed. And I'm like, no, no, no, people need knowledge for sure. They need external knowledge, but what they need more than anything, I believe these days is internal knowledge, that awareness of why am I going to this behavior? So let's take sugar, for example, right? And I think this relates to your work and the gear systems. If you're chronically stressed and generating emotional stress by every way you interact with life, the drivers, the boss, the traffic, and you're thinking you're a victim to the world.

• 1:25:11Speaker 01

  You did the math.

• 1:25:12Rangan Chatterjee?

  You're gonna consume more sugar because you.

• 1:25:15Speaker 01

  You're using up sugar.

• 1:25:17Rangan Chatterjee?

  You're.

• 1:25:17Speaker 01

  Your body needs sugar.

• 1:25:19Rangan Chatterjee?

  Exactly. And so you keep thinking that you need to hear another podcast on the on the negatives of sugar. But the problem is, you already know that. You need to understand why do you need that sugar? What is going on upstream that is naturally means you're going to consume that sugar? And you can apply that to alcohol or three hours scrolling social media and whatever it might be, like, what's the upstream driver? Is it fair to say, Brian, then? Because not everyone who who is listening to this right now is going to be able to come to your facility. Okay.

• 1:25:53Rangan Chatterjee?

  So in terms of practical advice that may work for most people.

• 1:25:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:26:00Rangan Chatterjee?

  I think a conclusion that I'm drawing is that everyone should be able to walk around their block, keeping their mouth shut.

• 1:26:10Speaker 01

  If you can't go walk for at least 45 minutes a day, you've got. My suggestion is find the time to walk for at least 45 minutes a day with your mouth shut and not on a screen.

• 1:26:26Speaker 01

  You're laying the beginnings of a metabolic foundation, the stuff Alan Cousins talks like so well about. I actually believe it's more than

• 1:26:38Rangan Chatterjee?

  More, so do I.

• 1:26:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, you're gonna need more than 40, but if you can get 45, that's a good start. But go get lost in that 45 minutes. Go explore.

• 1:26:46Rangan Chatterjee?

  But keep your mouth shut.

• 1:26:47Speaker 01

  Keep your mouth shut and explore.

• 1:26:49Rangan Chatterjee?

  Well, let's say someone tries that and goes, hey, Brian, I'm really struggling. Like, I'm trying to go for a walk. I have to open my mouth after 10 minutes.

• 1:26:58Speaker 01

  Take a few mouth breaths and go right back to nose breathing.

• 1:27:00Rangan Chatterjee?

  So it's training. It's like you don't have the skill now, but you can develop it and cultivate it.

• 1:27:05Speaker 01

  Take a few mouth breaths, go back to nose, go back to gear one.

• 1:27:07Rangan Chatterjee?

  Okay, so practice nasal breathing at low intensity.

• 1:27:10Speaker 01

  It's 80% of what you should be doing, right? So 80% of what you should be doing is really underneath that nose breathing thing. Then there's the, hey, if you can get that 45 minutes, great. Go work, spend your day paying attention to how much you're talking, how much you're getting stressed out. Find pieces of time where you can just bring it down for a minute or five. Just start with a consistent habit of controlling some breathing or paying attention to your breathing through your belly, your chest, your nose, if you want, throughout your day if you can. Then, if you're gonna go train, if you're gonna go exercise and you really wanna exercise,

• 1:27:52Speaker 01

  use your walking, the end of your walking and how you feel after walking as a basis for how hard you can train or what you can do that day. You'll know. Your body is gonna tell you through that walk how good you feel. If you feel great, like, and try and mix up things, like try and do some strength training. We know definitively, strength training is as important as VO2 max. Having muscle tissue so that you can get up off your tail is just as important as having a VO2 max, right? So maintaining strength, that doesn't mean you need to go into a powerlifting meet.

• 1:28:35Speaker 01

  Like, it doesn't mean you need to become a powerlifter, but Finding complex movements and applying them, do that throughout the week, maybe at least twice, if not three or four times a week, if that's your MO.

• 1:28:49Rangan Chatterjee?

  So you're saying the 45 minute walk, right? Or, okay, whatever you can manage. You're saying have that daily walk.

• 1:28:55Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:28:57Rangan Chatterjee?

  That daily walk does several things. Yes, it's training you metabolically, it's training your stress response system, but it's also helping you tune into yourself because if you do it every day, and this is why I like repetition, you start to feel, if the practice is the same and you feel different, you know that something else is causing you to feel different. I.e. oh, I didn't sleep well last night, or I've got a lot of stress in my life at the moment. That walk felt a bit harder today than yesterday. Maybe it's the same place that you've gone. So you're starting to understand yourself better and the state of your nervous system through that daily walk?

• 1:29:33Speaker 01

  A hundred percent.

• 1:29:34Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:35Speaker 01

  A hundred percent. And for 20 minutes of calm, just sitting, the brain looks, looks, looks good. But the brain after 20 minutes of walking, looks real good. Real good. You start to see things because of blood flow changes and metabolic changes that start to happen that aren't requiring high stress from that. And you kind of start to work through creatively a lot of the stuff that you're working, whatever you're working on, whether that's work, whether that's life, whether that's whatever. And I've found that that is the place where I can really tap in and I, I'm also very aware of like, you know what? I am definitely not lifting today. I'm still a mess.

• 1:30:20Speaker 01

  And there's no reason why I'm going to put load on my back or, you know, pull heavy off the ground, whatever.

• 1:30:28Speaker 01

  I'm going to do some, probably some low level cardio later, or I'm going to go swim, right? Like, um, you know, or I'm just.

• 1:30:35Rangan Chatterjee?

  You're getting in tune with yourself.

• 1:30:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm just.

• 1:30:37Rangan Chatterjee?

  You're starting to learn about yourself. It's paying attention to what's going on inside.

• 1:30:41Speaker 01

  You'll start, you'll start to figure out that, that when you don't move, when you don't walk, when you don't exercise, your body. Starts to take a nosedive. Your stress levels go up through the roof. Your HRV starts to drop. Your resting heart rate starts to increase. Your blood pressure starts to increase. Literally, I can watch this with, I, I watched this with myself. My resting, my morning lactate reading goes up. If I don't do anything the day before, right? Like if I don't do any walking, if I don't do anything the day before and I was talking and I was engaged in work or I was flying and all that, dude, the next morning, I'm hot, I'm running hot. So I've gotta go, I don't have to.

• 1:31:25Speaker 01

  I go walk and then I'm like, I don't go crush it the next day. Like I have clients, I manage their, like, this is what I do is I'm like, yo, you're landing in Abu Dhabi, you are not going and training hard. Yeah, yeah, I am. And I'm like, no, you're not, like, not if you wanna sleep. Like, if you really wanna get adjusted sooner, we're gonna get light, we're gonna go walk around, then it's gonna be, hey, here's this low level.

• 1:31:50Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, it's interesting that we, we have all this data now coming out, well, for many years that, um, exercise is as good as an antidepressant or better, you know, we, but the point I'm trying to make is that we're so used to being a sedentary society that doesn't move. We talk about all the benefits of exercise, but actually, if you flip it, it's like if we were all moving, it's not that exercise has the benefits, it's that not moving has all these disadvantages. It's the same thing, but reframed.

• 1:32:23Speaker 01

  And if you wanna have, if you wanted to just even, even at a higher level, get your ass outside and do it. Get exposed to the light, the morning light. Like it, it's critical that you're doing this stuff. This is like how we were, how we evolved. This is how we became what we are, as a result of being outside and having to go walk towards something to get it and then bring it back or however we were doing it. And I mean, look, my house, when it gets dark, it gets red. The only lights that come on are red. You know, I I'm I'm ahead of this because I noticed the sensitivities I have towards the light.

• 1:33:05Speaker 01

  I I really get sensitive towards light in the dark. Like when I was driving at night, I would notice, I would just be like, God, this sucks because a headlights.

• 1:33:15Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, light is as powerful as a drug. We just don't see it like that.

• 1:33:19Speaker 01

  And I forget the name of the book. I read one, it was great on on on on light and sleep and, you know, light being the original uh toxic thing.

• 1:33:31Rangan Chatterjee?

  When you I've got this. I think it's a I think it's within the iPhone. You can put this like heavy red filter on your phone. And so I triple triple click in the evening and it goes red. And then if you ever just put it back, you can feel the ice strain.

• 1:33:48Speaker 01

  My my phone's mostly red, is is red.

• 1:33:51Rangan Chatterjee?

  But you don't real we don't realize how much we're being strained and stimulated until you change it. And then you flip back, you're like, wow, this is what most people are looking at.

• 1:34:00Speaker 01

  What's wild is I used to watch, so I'm a big entertainment guy, like I love movies. I love good shows and I grew up that way. I when I watch on the television now, I can't watch on the TV for very long because it's so stimulating. I watch on my iPad, which I can put in red. So I everything's in red. That that light thing has a huge impact on the, you know, on the metabolic system, like how everything's functioning.

• 1:34:33Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, it's so interesting, like thinking about our evolution and how we live. It strikes me that because we're so disconnected from, let's say, our food supply, because we're so disconnected from how we used to live, because our lives are so overly busy and chronically stressed now. It's as if we all need education now on what diet we should be consuming, how we should be breathing, how much we should be moving. Whereas I remember last summer, uh my family and I went to Kenya for four weeks and we went on safari. And one day we spent at a Masai camp.

• 1:35:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:35:11Rangan Chatterjee?

  And there's many things I noticed, but one of the things that struck me hanging out and interacting with some of the Masai that morning was.

• 1:35:23Rangan Chatterjee?

  There was just a quietness, a groundedness. I was just struck by this kind of grounded presence that you don't often see in the modern worlds.

• 1:35:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:35:33Rangan Chatterjee?

  But a lot of people you meet in modern life now are quite there. Like I used to be, in your head, you're not grounded, you're anything. Do you know what I mean? How does, how do you think about being grounded? And its relationship with the breath?

• 1:35:48Speaker 01

  I mean, there's nothing to fix with any of us, to be clear. But when you're grounded in yourself and you're, you're living, you know, how you truly want to be living. You don't need to change, you don't need to change a whole lot because the process of which, what you're doing already involves all of that. I haven't met anybody. I've yet to meet someone who is totally grounded, that is not highly physically active in some way. I have not.

• 1:36:31Speaker 01

  There is no eastern philosophy without a physical practice. None of them. None. Why? I've looked. Why? Because they understood. It was about like monks up in isolation that I brought up with the, you know,

• 1:36:52Rangan Chatterjee?

  The prisons before?

• 1:36:53Speaker 01

  The prisons. They walk every day. You've got some sort of practice. Go look at the Shaolin monks. For crying out loud. You know, you go look, every philosophy, you got yoga. Like it was about movement and moving into positions, asanas and getting into position. And being able to breathe in that position. Because if you can't breathe in that position, you don't own that position. That position owns you. You know, and so anyway, it's, it's, I'm, I'm very interested in people that, that are very grounded and I'm like, I'm, I'm blessed with what I get to do and how I get to do it. But I'm more so just, I'm, I'm just playing, man.

• 1:37:38Speaker 01

  That's all I'm doing.

• 1:37:39Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, I love it, Brian. Absolutely love it. Couple of loose ends in my head I just want to tie off before we end the conversation. We spoke before about we get oxygen to our lungs and then we have to deliver it to our tissues or our muscles, but then utilize it when it's there as well. And I think you said that with me, I'm able to get it to the tissues and muscles, but I'm perhaps not as efficient as I could be at using it there. First of all, is that, is my recollection correct?

• 1:38:09Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 1:38:09Rangan Chatterjee?

  Okay, so how am I, and through me then, the people listening, if they have the same problem, how are they going to improve, you know, the usage of that oxygen at the tissues? For me, is it that high intensity? Is that what's

• 1:38:27Speaker 01

  It's not just high intensity. It's, it's even moderate intensity and bringing on enough oxygen for the, for the tissue to use it versus limiting what you're, you're doing, right?

• 1:38:38Rangan Chatterjee?

  So I'm artificially limiting.

• 1:38:41Speaker 01

  You are, you are controlling things too much.

• 1:38:45Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, doesn't sound like me.

• 1:38:49Speaker 01

  You have controlled things too much and not allowed the system to do his job.

• 1:38:56Rangan Chatterjee?

  So we need to let go.

• 1:38:57Speaker 01

  What it was communicating, let go.

• 1:38:59Rangan Chatterjee?

  Let go.

• 1:38:59Speaker 01

  When, when, when the trend, when you feel the change, that's, we're just re aligning, feeling that change.

• 1:39:07Rangan Chatterjee?

  So as I start to let go and allow myself to breathe in a whole variety of different ways, at a whole variety of different intensities, so appropriate breathing for the level of movement and intensity. Are you saying that because those things start to then match up, that then means that my oxygen delivery to the tissues and the usage is also going to start to match up? Whereas now there's a discrepancy.

• 1:39:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, and because of that underutilization issue, that's probably over time created.

• 1:39:42Speaker 01

  The issue with your tissue being able to use that oxygen even at lower rates.

• 1:39:48Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:49Speaker 01

  Right? So the ability to get that going again is what we want. That's what we're trying to train, but the strength training actually helps with that as well.

• 1:39:59Rangan Chatterjee?

  Okay.

• 1:40:00Speaker 01

  Right? Because, look, we're looking for better mitochondrial development and that comes in many different fashions. Walking, yes. However, strength training, yes, it just comes in a different way. It's just high intensity, right?

• 1:40:13Rangan Chatterjee?

  And I've heard you say, Brian, the greatest hack for your mitochondria is working on your breath.

• 1:40:19Speaker 01

  Yes. Well, yeah.

• 1:40:21Rangan Chatterjee?

  Which again, I don't think a lot of people are thinking about and sort of tying this up to the start of the conversation. Breath is that central piece that so many of our behaviors, our emotions, our ability to perform, they come off as a byproduct of our ability to.

• 1:40:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:40:40Rangan Chatterjee?

  Like breathe appropriately and efficiently, right?

• 1:40:42Speaker 01

  Yep. And I don't, you know, I mean, I don't know how many people have your issue. I've only seen it like four or five times. Granted, every person has been very aware of the breath game for some time, right?

• 1:40:55Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, because I guess people like me who are really interested.

• 1:40:58Speaker 01

  Well, anybody who read Breath typically.

• 1:41:00Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:01Speaker 01

  Was like nasal breathing is everything and that's not on James. James wasn't saying that's everything.

• 1:41:05Rangan Chatterjee?

  Ever since I first came across Patrick McKeon, however, many years ago, like I've been, oh, right. I'm going to go and walk nasal breathing, but I've probably overdone it and I get that.

• 1:41:14Speaker 01

  Look, man, I've been staring at this down the, down the lens of a metabolic heart for quite some time and seeing the changes. And, and what like, I mean, the changes simply in walking with one's mouth open versus one's mouth shut were eye popping.

• 1:41:30Rangan Chatterjee?

  In terms and make that really practical somewhat in terms of your ability to burn carbs or fat.

• 1:41:34Speaker 01

  If I'm over breathing, which isn't what your problem is, right?

• 1:41:38Rangan Chatterjee?

  So that's not my problem.

• 1:41:39Speaker 01

  People, most people. Or have an over breathing issue.

• 1:41:43Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:43Speaker 01

  So if I'm over breathing, I'm definitely not getting oxygen to the tissue. Right? So I'm, I'm, the sympathetic nervous system clamps down and I'm, I'm not going to be, I am going to be screwing up the dissociative curve of oxygen's utilization because I have, I'm getting rid of excess CO2. So if I over breathe and if anybody wants to, if anybody's done Wim Hof, they've felt what over breathing feels like. That's where that high starts to kick in. But what's happening is, is things are clamping down. Right? And so we're limiting how oxygen gets used.

• 1:42:25Speaker 01

  And so the, the red blood cell can't offload as much oxygen because there's not enough CO2. Oxygen is a useless destructive molecule without CO2 and CO2 is what knocks that, helps knocks that oxygen molecule out of the red blood cell to go to the cell to be used.

• 1:42:41Rangan Chatterjee?

  Also, Brian, just to finish off that loop as well.

• 1:42:47Rangan Chatterjee?

  Given what I shared with you right at the start, which is that I feel compared to last time I was here in LA with you, that I'm a different person. My nervous system sits differently. I'm calmer. I'm more present. Do you think in any way that matches my journey with breathing? I.e. perhaps I was over breathing like most of us five, six years ago. And by working on the lower end and the nasal breathing, maybe neglecting the higher end, but by working on that lower end, do you think there's any correlation between that? And the fact that I'm less reactive these days?

• 1:43:24Speaker 01

  There's direct correlation between aerobic and parasympathetic nervous system and sympathetic nervous system and anaerobic.

• 1:43:31Rangan Chatterjee?

  So if, so it completely matches up?

• 1:43:33Speaker 01

  It is direct.

• 1:43:34Rangan Chatterjee?

  As I've worked on this lower end.

• 1:43:36Speaker 01

  It is direct.

• 1:43:36Rangan Chatterjee?

  My parasympathetic nervous system is much better able to function.

• 1:43:40Speaker 01

  If the lion walks in the room, your system goes, oh, we need immediate action. You think it's going to go use fatty acids for that? It can't.

• 1:43:49Rangan Chatterjee?

  It needs carbs for that. It needs to go to sympathetic.

• 1:43:51Speaker 01

  More carbohydrates or it needs, you know, decreased team phosphagen system.

• 1:43:55Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:56Speaker 01

  It needs to instantaneously. But oxygen's a part of that. In, when I go use tissue, it, it'll deplete that. Like, we've seen that. Like, there is no one or the other. It's like how quick that's going to happen.

• 1:44:11Rangan Chatterjee?

  Well, Brian, I love talking to you. I love hanging out with you.

• 1:44:15Rangan Chatterjee?

  We've covered so much. We've gone into so many different areas. As we wind this down, if people want to learn more about you, they want to work with you, they want to do your online courses that you guys run, where should people go?

• 1:44:28Speaker 01

  Shiftadapt.com. So S H I F T, adapt, A D A P T, dot com.

• 1:44:36Rangan Chatterjee?

  And what's on there? What can they?

• 1:44:38Speaker 01

  We still have a membership site and we have a lot of stuff, a lot of courses, things like that, or webinars we've done that we talk about a lot of this stuff. We'll be releasing a number of programs, et cetera, that'll be on a little bit higher level than that, that people can go do. And then on the upper tier of all of that is actually hiring my business partner and/or I.

• 1:45:00Rangan Chatterjee?

  So actually work with you one-on-one?

• 1:45:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, so Emily Hightower, who I work with, she's on the other end of the stress here, where she's helping with developing tools and regulating nervous system on the day-to-day, throughout, you know, like, hey, how are you managing this in the moment type of stuff? Like, what's your life look like? What's going on in life?

• 1:45:23Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, amazing. We've covered so much. Emotional reactivity, the power to choose our response, breath work, the different gears, the metabolic benefits, have been able to access all the gears, et cetera, et cetera. To bring it all together, like, Brian, if there's someone who has followed our conversation and is still with us, and is like, yeah, you know, there's something there for me. There's something Brian was talking about that applies to me. I haven't taken my breath seriously. I haven't taken my levels of physical activity seriously, or whatever it might be. How would you help that person? They feel stuck, they feel lost, they feel unmotivated.

• 1:46:06Rangan Chatterjee?

  But they're saying, Brian, give me some inspiration. What is your final piece of advice? What would you say to that individual?

• 1:46:13Speaker 01

  Learn to say no. Learn to say no to the things you don't want to do.

• 1:46:20Speaker 01

  And that is a very, that actually goes far deeper than just saying no to something you instantaneously know you don't want to do. It's looking at those sexy shiny things that are of excitement and being able to slow it down enough to say no to maybe getting into a business deal or taking a job that you really don't want to take, but you think you do because you got to make the money and maybe you could go figure that out another way or, you know, can you change some lifestyle habits? I think no is the path to freedom because you'll only be doing the things that you truly want to be doing if you learn to say no to the things you don't. And I've found that because of that, I'm surrounded by the people I want to be surrounded by. And that's it.

• 1:47:05Rangan Chatterjee?

  Love it.

• 1:47:06Speaker 01

  It's simple. So if you can live the life you want, but I mean, just applying the principles of making your day a process, like literally make it a process, like the dishes, right? Like I get to go drive to work. Yeah, you get to. Or yeah, I get to have a job. Or yeah, I get to drive in traffic because I get to live here because I get to do these things. It's very different than I have to.

• 1:47:33Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah. Love it, Brian. Thanks for everything you do. Thanks for the help you're giving me personally and that's coming back on the show. Really appreciate it.

• 1:47:42Speaker 01

  Thanks for having me. Love you, dude.

• 1:47:48Rangan Chatterjee?

  Really hope you enjoyed that conversation. Do think about one thing that you can take away and apply into your own life and also have a think about one thing from this conversation that you can teach to somebody else. Remember when you teach someone, it not only helps them, it also helps you learn and retain the information. Now, before you go, just wanted to let you know about Friday 5. It's my free weekly email containing five simple ideas to improve your health and happiness. In that email, I share exclusive insights that I do not share anywhere else, including health advice, how to manage your time better, interesting articles or videos that I'd be

• 1:48:31Rangan Chatterjee?

  consuming, and quotes that have caused me to stop and reflect. And I have to say, in a world of endless emails, it really is delightful that many of you tell me it is one of the only weekly emails that you actively look forward to receiving. So if that sounds like something you would like to receive each and every Friday, you can sign up for free at drchatge.com/friday5. Now, if you are new to my podcast, you may be interested to know that I have written five books that have been bestsellers all over the world, covering all kinds of different topics: happiness, food, stress, sleep, behaviour change, movement, weight loss, and so much more. So please do take a moment to check them out.

• 1:49:13Rangan Chatterjee?

  They are all available as paperbacks, ebooks, and as audiobooks, which I am narrating. If you enjoyed today's episode, it is always appreciated if you can take a moment to share the podcast with your friends and family, or leave a review on Apple Podcasts. Thank you so much for listening. Have a wonderful week. And please note that if you want to listen to this show without any adverts at all, that option is now available for a small monthly fee on Apple and on Android. All you have to do is click the link in the episode notes in your podcast app. And always remember, you are the architect of your own health.

• 1:49:54Rangan Chatterjee?

  Making lifestyle change is always worth it, because when you feel better, you live more.