Top Breathing Techniques To Ease Your Mind, Heal Your Body & Change Your Life! EP 1176

Today we’ve put together a powerful mashup all about the importance of breath work! We’ve had multiple guests on the show diving deep into the conversation about the power of breathing and how it affects your body to reduce stress, decrease inflammation, and how you can learn to regulate your body’s response to anxiety with a few simple techniques. So stick around to hear from James Nestor, Andrew Huberman, Wendy Suzuki, Nicole LePera, and Wim Hof! For more go to: www.lewishowes.com/1176James Nestor full episode: www.lewishowes.com/1060Andrew Huberman full episode: www.lewishowes.com/1072Wendy Suzuki full episode: www.lewishowes.com/1160Nicole LePera full episode: www.lewishowes.com/1083Wim Hof full episode: www.lewishowes.com/799 Get more from Lewis! Get my New York Times Bestselling book, Make Money Easy! Get The Greatness Mindset audiobook on SpotifyText Lewis AIYouTubeInstagramWebsiteTiktokFacebookX

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  We have the access to the most powerful regulator of stress through our breath.

• 0:05Lewis Howes?

  This is episode number 1,176 on the power of mastering your breathing.

• 0:13Lewis Howes?

  Welcome to the School of Greatness. My name is Lewis Howes, a former pro athlete turned lifestyle entrepreneur. And each week, we bring you an inspiring person or message to help you discover how to unlock your inner greatness. Thanks for spending some time with me today. Now let the class begin.

• 0:36Lewis Howes?

  Today, we've put together an incredible episode about the importance of breath work. And we've had so many powerful guests and experts on the show about diving deep into the conversation about the power of breathing and how it affects your body to reduce stress, decrease inflammation, and how you can learn to regulate your body's response to anxiety with a few simple techniques. So stick around to hear from the incredible James Nestor, Andrew Huberman, Wendy Suzuki, Nicole LePera, and Wim Hof. And make sure to share this with someone that you think would find it empowering and inspiring to help them improve the quality of their life. If you've got a few friends that you know might be struggling or just want to take their life to the next level, then send this to them right now so they can listen along with you.

• 1:19Lewis Howes?

  And a quick reminder, if this is your first time here, make sure to subscribe to the School of Greatness over on Apple Podcasts right now. Click that subscribe button, leave us a review and a rating, and let us know which part of this episode you enjoyed the most. And a big shout out to the fan of the week, who is Darcie Sisson, who left a review over on Apple Podcasts about episode 1,172. And she said, "This was a very powerful interview with Dr. Phil with so many life-changing takeaways. And I'm so proud of you, Lewis, for asking such wonderful questions. You truly have a wonderful way of connecting with your guests and getting them to be real and also vulnerable. I love all the wisdom that is shared, and I feel like I'm truly a part of the conversation as I'm listening.

• 1:59Lewis Howes?

  Keep up the great work and thanks for helping us as listeners enrich our own lives with your beautiful content." So a big thank you, Darcie Sisson, for being the fan of the week, for leaving a review. So if you guys want a chance to be shouted out as a fan of the week, all you gotta do is subscribe, leave a review, and we do this every single week. Okay, in just a moment, we'll dive into the power of breathing and mastering your breath.

• 2:23Lewis Howes?

  In this first section, you'll hear from author and journalist James Nestor. He believes that the world has lost the ability to breathe properly. And after spending years in laboratories and ancient burial sites, working with researchers at Stanford, University of Pennsylvania, and other institutions to figure out what went wrong with our breathing, he's learned how to fix it.

• 2:44Speaker 02

  So I've talked to dozens and dozens and dozens of these people. People who had had asthma for 50 years, who have been on bronchodilators, oral steroids. If you stay on oral steroids for too long, it starts impacting your bones, which is why increased risks of osteoporosis, autoimmune diseases, I mean, worsening asthma. It's bad news. And again, this is no, no controversy about this. But what do you do? You can't get off this stuff because then you'll die of an asthma attack. So this story was written about in the New York Times about how someone, he was a violin maker in Vermont, just started breathing in this different way, breathing within his metabolic needs instead of over breathing. Asthmatics over breathe all the time.

• 3:29Speaker 02

  They breathe through their mouth. He was able to get rid of oral steroids that he'd been on for decades. And he was going from 20 pumps of a bronchodilator to, I think, two a day. And I read this in the New York Times, so this is not a sketchy journal. And I said, what is going on here? So I spent months and months talking to the top researchers in this field. And a lot of people think that asthma, oh, I inherited it. There's nothing, it's an incurable disease. I can't do anything about it. I have to stay on these drugs. That is not true. If you look at the scientific literature, and if you look at these people who have done NIH studies into asthma and breathing, and what a huge impact it's going to have. I want to be perfectly clear, I'm not a doctor.

• 4:13Speaker 02

  I'm not a breathing therapist, okay? I'm not saying go ditch your bronchodilators. No, I'm saying that you should, if you have asthma, it would be worth your time to explore how breathing can help benefit you, how it can help blunt the symptoms. But don't do anything per this advice.

• 4:32Lewis Howes?

  Right, right, right.

• 4:32Speaker 02

  Put that big label on there.

• 4:34Lewis Howes?

  Of course. And what would you say are some best practices from your research? When our nasal passages are congested, how do we? We can't breathe through your nose for five days for whatever reason. What's the strategy there? Have you, have you heard anyone share that?

• 4:50Speaker 02

  So some people, their noses are so messed up, they need surgical interventions. Absolutely. But for the majority of us, including me, I was a perfect candidate for surgery, right? Broken this nose about four times, basketball, surfing, like, I'm a complete mess. But I wanted to see what my body could do, and I was able to restore so much of that damage through breathing to open up these passageways. So a nice trick, if you are congested, is to exhale, and you hold your breath, and you hold your nostrils, and you move your head back and forth. You move your head up and down until you feel a significant need to breathe. Then you calmly exhale through your nose,

• 5:37Speaker 02

  and inhale again, and then wait about 45 seconds to a minute, and do that same thing over again. So what you're doing is you're increasing that magical molecule, carbon dioxide, which is a vasodilator, which helps to open your nose. So there's a lot of YouTube tutorials on this, and it's free.

• 5:59Lewis Howes?

  Right, so first, close your nose, then exhale, or exhale, then close your nose?

• 6:04Speaker 02

  You can exhale, then close your nose.

• 6:06Lewis Howes?

  Get all, get all the air out of first, then close your nose, go up and down, side to side, then exhale more, or then inhale?

• 6:16Speaker 02

  You can inhale through your nose from that.

• 6:18Lewis Howes?

  Then inhale through your nose.

• 6:19Speaker 02

  If it's still congested, just be very calm about this. Don't, just calmly inhale and try that again. Patrick McEwen, who's been doing this stuff for 20 years, has a lot of free tutorials on YouTube.

• 6:33Lewis Howes?

  He seems pretty fascinating with his research, yeah.

• 6:36Speaker 02

  This guy is someone who had severe asthma, severe health problems, was getting no help from anyone, figured out how to breathe, now has zero symptoms of asthma, and is teaching thousands of asthmatics what he did. He was a business guy, right? He had no intention of doing this, and his life took a hard left turn into this world. So he's scientific, he's a great practitioner. He's, he healed himself through it, so it's worth listening to him.

• 7:06Lewis Howes?

  For those who struggle with extreme anxiety or panic attacks, it seems like more and more people are dealing with anxiety and panic attacks. What's the easiest way to calm down using breathing that you've discovered?

• 7:21Speaker 02

  Slow your breathing down. So there was a study about 10 years ago, NIH study by Alicia Marette down at Southern Methodist University. She went to Harvard and Stanford and she gathered a bunch of different people who were suffering from panic. And she just had them slow down their breathing and increase their CO2 levels. I know I keep saying CO2, but, but this is, this is the stuff, people. And something like 96% of these people, a year after the study concluded, said they were much improved or very much improved. The majority of them stopped having panic attacks. Because what happens when we're panicked, okay?

• 8:04Speaker 02

  I'm sitting here with you. Oh, I feel claustrophobic.

• 8:11Speaker 02

  The more you breathe like that, the more you're going to exacerbate and hasten that attack. So when you feel it coming on, you don't stop and take a deep breath. You stop and take a slow and light breath into your lungs, right? And control your body and control your breathing. And this is such a profound effect on people. And again, that, that study, um, it was published top scientific journal. It's available for everyone. It just, I, I find it so bizarre, and I should mention that my father-in-law is a pulmonologist. My brother-in-law is an ER doc. I'm a huge fan of Western medicine, but

• 8:52Speaker 02

  it's so bizarre that people with panic, people with asthma, no one's looking at how they're breathing, right? They're, they're given these, these pills and powders and, and put on their way. And the science is, is very clear on this stuff. It can have a really profound effect.

• 9:08Lewis Howes?

  Does the mind or thoughts, when we're in a panic or stressed or fight or flight moment, does the mind or thoughts influence the breathing or does the breathing influence the mind?

• 9:19Speaker 02

  Great question. It goes both ways. So what you're thinking is going to influence how you're breathing, but the wonderful thing is sometimes you can't take control of those thoughts, right? You get nervous, you can't turn that off, but you can take control of your breathing. And 80% of the messages are coming from the body to the brain, not to the brain, not from the brain to the body. So just by allowing yourself, think whatever you want to think, but slow down your breathing to the way that you would be breathing when you're calm, and you will start shooting calming messages into your brain.

• 9:57Lewis Howes?

  Interesting.

• 9:58Speaker 02

  And you can take control of those, those states. And this is something that Huberman has been studying for years down at Stanford, right? With the, with the phrenic nerve and the way that the diaphragm moves, how that diaphragm moves is going to affect the signals that your brain is going to get, going to get, and it's going to affect how you're going to be processing things.

• 10:19Lewis Howes?

  How the diaphragm moves?

• 10:21Speaker 02

  So the diaphragm is this amazing muscle that sits underneath the lungs. The lungs don't inflate and deflate themselves, right? They need something to do it. So we have this crazy muscle. It looks like a parachute or an umbrella that when we breathe in, that diaphragm goes down. And when we breathe out, that diaphragm goes up. So this rhythmic motion of this diaphragm, the diaphragm works as a pump. Some researchers have said the heart is a secondary pump. The diaphragm is the main pump. So when you're, when your diaphragm's going like this, it is sending panic signals to your brain. This is like, you know, red alert, things are bad. But if your diaphragm is going like this, this is sending calming

• 11:06Speaker 02

  signals, right?

• 11:07Lewis Howes?

  So it's almost like you could be stressed out in your mind, but the moments or moments you start to slow your breathing, it's going to send signal back to your mind that everything's better. You don't need to stress as much. So you, if you can control your body, you'll control your mind.

• 11:24Speaker 02

  So guess what Navy SEALs do before they go in for some black ops mission, really intense stuff, they start breathing in a box pattern. Four in, hold four, exhale four, hold four. Four in, hold four. Imagine a box. If you look at what's happening there, you're in for four, but you are holding or exhaling for three quarters of the time. So the longer you hold and the longer you exhale, the more you're going to be eliciting that parasympathetic, that calming response. So these guys aren't going to sleep, right? They're trying to focus themselves to be the biggest badasses on the planet, right? To go take care of business in an efficient way. They can't have their brains just all over the place. What, what

• 12:09Speaker 02

  are you saying? Panic. They can't panic. They're dead. So this is a technique that anyone can use. I mean, the vast majority of us aren't going to be in that scenario, but we can breathe the way that they breathe and that so many other people do to focus our thoughts, to take, take advantage of our breathing to take over certain states, anxiety or anger.

• 12:32Lewis Howes?

  Can you explain why the diaphragm is sometimes referred to as the second heart?

• 12:38Speaker 02

  So the diaphragm, again, is this huge pump. It's almost like the heart is a sump pump, right? It's just doing all the other work, just the additional work. But the diaphragm is enormous. And as you're breathing in and out, it is pumping blood, okay? It is helping to pump blood, but it does something else. A lot of people view breathing as just a biochemical act, right? Getting oxygen in, getting CO2 out. It is a biomechanical act. So when the diaphragm goes down, it also softly massages the organs, which helps us leach out more lymph fluid. So it is the pump for lymph fluid. So everything in the body should be

• 13:20Speaker 02

  moving. You know, you can think about it like a pond gets scummy, right? And a lot of stuff starts growing it because it's still water. That's not what happens with a river. And our bodies want to act like a river. Things, things are static for too long, does not like that. That's where problems occur.

• 13:38Lewis Howes?

  What's better for the body and your health? Chest breathing or lower belly breathing? Like, where is the diaphragm sitting? Is it in between the two? Is it a mixture of both?

• 13:50Speaker 02

  So, a lot of us are chest breathing throughout the day. And when we chest breathe, this is associated with a sympathetic or fight or flight response. What happens when you get scared?

• 14:04Speaker 02

  But instead, people are doing this all, all day. So, when you breathe like that, a sympathetic response, it's amazing. This is what has kept our species alive. It focuses us. It shifts blood from less important organs to the heart and the skeletal muscles. So, we can like fight or we can run. But it's meant only to be in that state for shorts, a short amount of time. So, if we stay in the sympathetic chest breathing state for too long, we are cutting off other organs. And a bunch of problems can happen in those organs because of that. I won't go down the laundry list. Just trust me on this. So, to answer your question, you want to breathe lightly, fluidly, and deeply.

• 14:49Speaker 02

  This does not mean you have to just go for it every breath and push out your stomach.

• 14:56Speaker 02

  It means you should be breathing through your nose. Nasal breathings are, are deeper. Okay? These go to the lower lobes. At the bottom of the lungs is where we have the largest profusion of blood. So, that's where oxygen exchange can happen much more efficiently. So, light, slow, and deep. That's how we should be breathing.

• 15:15Lewis Howes?

  And less.

• 15:15Speaker 02

  Ordinarily, you would say breathe in line with your metabolic needs. But I'm saying for the vast majority, less is, that's your metabolic.

• 15:24Lewis Howes?

  Gotcha. And is it true that our lungs get smaller as we age? And if so, can breathing practices prevent this from allowing us to have more expansive lungs?

• 15:36Speaker 02

  So what happens from ages around 30 to 50, you're going to lose about 15 to 16% of your lung capacity. Oh, man, that sucks. 50, it just goes down very, very quickly. That sucks. The problem, well, there's good news behind this. I'm going to impress you, then I'm going to inspire you back to it. So the problem is our ribs get a lot less flexible, our intercostals get less flexible. But what's great about this is you can reverse that damage. Guess what yoga does? I'm going to have you reach your arm like this, breathe into this lung and be flexible.

• 16:15Speaker 02

  And now breathe into this lung. So yoga is essentially just allowing us not only to maintain our lung capacity, but increase it. I've worked with freedivers who have doubled their lung capacity. So Doubled? Average adult male, six liters. This guy had 12 liters. So I think he had, he was abnormally large. I won't say quite doubled, maybe 40, you know, 70% larger. So it's not uncommon to increase your lung capacity 30% by, by including these exercises by breathing properly. And especially when we get older, this is so important. We don't want to go

• 16:57Speaker 02

  down that entropy, right? And be, we at least want to sustain it. If we can increase it, great. What's the benefit to increasing our lung capacity? It's the same benefit of having a larger gas tank in a car, right? So if you're driving cross country, do you want to stop and fill up every hour? Or do you want to stop and fill up every six hours? Right. By having larger lungs allows you to take fewer breaths and to get more oxygen with those breaths. It's about being efficient. So when we're breathing slower and when we're breathing deeply into our lungs at our metabolic need, our heart can work so much more softly. We aren't overworking it. When we're breathing twice the amount into our chest,

• 17:43Speaker 02

  Just feel your heart rate when you do that. The heart hates this. Why do you want to overwork your heart? You should, it should just be doing what it needs to do, not compensating for your bad habits. And that's what this larger lung capacity, the softer, lower breathing allows you to do.

• 18:01Lewis Howes?

  Is there anything that you've learned and that doctors or scientists are saying is essential for us as human beings to practice that you don't practice? For instance, I know sugar is horrible. I know it's the root of all evil in the body and developing cancers and all these things. But I love sugar. You know, I'm better at it. The more I know how horrible it is for me, I'm better at balancing that. But I still love the sugar, you know? Is there anything that you're like, these things I should never do, but I still do it because it's just a bad habit?

• 18:34Speaker 02

  Well, you're talking to a guy who just had a big old chunk of chocolate before I hopped on.

• 18:39Lewis Howes?

  Good thing you don't have it. Good thing you're not with me right now because I'd be sharing that with you.

• 18:43Speaker 02

  I'm, I'm with you on that. You know, it's, I, I think it's a little ironic in a lot of wellness circles. People are so stressed out about doing the right thing all the time that they're miserable. To me, the point of wellness is to live a happier and longer life. So why do you want to spend all your time beating yourself up for eating a piece of chocolate or drinking a beer, you know? So I think in moderation is key. I, these breathing practices like Wim Hof method, Sudarshan Kriya, they've been found to be so effective for people with autoimmune problems, asthma, anxiety, depression. But just breathing those slow and easy breaths can, there's so, so many

• 19:28Speaker 02

  benefits to that. And psychologists and psychiatrists have used this for people with anxiety and depression as well. So having said that, as long as you have this foundation of healthy breathing, just like with, with diet, as long as you have a foundation where you're eating a lot of vegetables, right? You're not eating a lot of, of highly processed carbs or not too much sugar. You can have a piece of cake. You can drink a beer. You can have a glass of wine. That's all fine. The same thing with breathing. If you're laughing really hard and you're breathing out of your mouth, who would tell you that's a bad thing, right? I'm talking about the habits, habitual breathing, the 90% of the day, even 80% of the day.

• 20:09Speaker 02

  If you adhere to healthy habits there, it's going to have a downstream positive effect on your health. And the science, the studies, the data has really shown us that.

• 20:21Lewis Howes?

  In this section, you'll hear from neuroscientist Dr. Andrew Huberman, who is a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford and runs Huberman Lab, which primarily studies brain states such as fear, courage, anxiety, and calm, and how we can better move in and out of them through practices like visual cues, breath work, movement, and supplementation.

• 20:43Speaker 03

  We talked about a tool to calm oneself. The reason I like the physiological sigh is we are all equipped with the pathway. If people want to know if there are some medically oriented folks out there, if you want to teach this to other folks, there's a nerve called the phrenic nerve, P-H-R-E-N-I-C, that goes from the brain down to the diaphragm that controls that and then controls the lungs. And so when you decide, okay, I'm going to use the sigh, the physiological sigh to calm myself, in a way, you're engaging top-down control because you're taking control of your internal landscape, rather than trying to take control of your thinking, which is very hard.

• 21:18Lewis Howes?

  You can't fix your mind with your mind sometimes.

• 21:20Speaker 03

  Trying to control the mind with the mind is like trying to grab fog. It's just going to keep moving, right? Have you ever tried to grab or smoke? It just moves. It's vapors. You're never going to grab it. The key is to, is to, is to take control of the system by taking control of a real physical entity, this phrenic nerve. And the reason I describe this stuff is not to put a lot of unnecessary detail, but I think when people realize that this isn't something that you build up over time and then are able to do, that you literally have a wire, set of wires that goes down to your diaphragm, this muscle in your abdomen that can move your lungs, and then as you blow off carbon dioxide, when you do that exhale,

• 22:02Speaker 03

  Your brain starts to calm down and then your mind, the top-down control, the cortex, can start taking control of the limbic system again. It's like you're, it's almost like you're losing control of the automobile and you're trying to steer, but really there's another lever that if you just pull it, then the state, the steering wheel will stabilize for you. So that's the way to think about the physiological sigh. On the other side of things, when you're feeling overwhelmed and fatigued, there are two ways to approach that. First is the kind of foundation of fatigue, which is almost always poor sleep and scheduling of sleep. This is something that doesn't get discussed a lot. I don't think I've discussed this on any podcast previously. But, you know, getting better at sleeping is a whole set of practices. But sleep is a slow tool.

• 22:47Speaker 03

  It's not a real-time tool. Cause if you're feeling exhausted and you have to get up and have your day, deal with children, deal with work, deal with life, we can talk about how to get better at sleeping, but in real time, what you want to do is you want to bring more alertness into the system. Focus. Focus and alertness. The way to do that is to take advantage of a very well-established medical fact. All medical students learn this, all MBs know this, which is that there's a direct relationship between how you breathe and your heart rate. And so I'll give a little bit of the background and then I'll give the specific practice just so that people understand where this is coming from.

• 23:26Speaker 03

  So when we inhale, when we inhale, it almost feels like everything's moving up, but actually what happens is our diaphragm moves down. Okay. So when we inhale, our diaphragm moves down. When that happens, our heart literally gets a little bit bigger. The volume of the heart gets a little bit bigger, which means that whatever blood in there is moving per unit time a little bit slower. And there's a set of neurons in the heart called the sinoatrial node that sends a signal to the brain and says, hey, blood flow is slowing down. And the brain sends a signal back to the heart and says, okay, let's speed up and speeds up the heart rate. So the short, concise way to put it is when you inhale more vigorously or longer, you're speeding up your heart rate.

• 24:11Speaker 03

  This is, this actually, there's a name for it in the medical community, but the important thing to understand is as you inhale, you're sending a neural signal to your heart to speed up. And when you exhale, the diaphragm moves up.

• 24:26Speaker 03

  The heart gets a little bit smaller, literally because there's less space there. Then there's a signal sent to the brain and the brain sends a signal back and says, "Slow down the heart rate." And so...

• 24:38Lewis Howes?

  So this is happening quickly. So if you inhale, it's speeding up.

• 24:41Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 24:41Lewis Howes?

  If you exhale, it's slowing it down.

• 24:43Speaker 03

  That's right. So if you want to become more alert, you actually can just simply make your inhales a little bit more vigorous or a little bit longer than your exhale. So let's say you get up in the morning.

• 24:54Lewis Howes?

  Longer inhale, shorter exhale.

• 24:57Speaker 03

  That's right. To speed up your heart rate and to be more alert.

• 25:00Lewis Howes?

  Not longer exhale, double intake.

• 25:04Speaker 03

  Right.

• 25:04Lewis Howes?

  Shorter.

• 25:05Speaker 03

  So longer or more vigorous inhales will speed up your heart rate and make you more alert. Longer or more vigorous exhales will slow down your heart rate and make you less alert.

• 25:18Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 25:18Speaker 03

  And this has a name, which is, you know, it's a certain kind of arrhythmia, but that makes it sound bad. This is actually what's happening all the time. This is the basis of heart rate variability. When people talk about heart rate variability is good, you know, that you don't want your heart rate to be one level all day, high or low. A lot of people don't realize that. They think, "Oh, I got a nice, slow heart rate." And you think...

• 25:41Lewis Howes?

  All day long. While you're asleep there.

• 25:42Speaker 03

  That's right. Well, slow heart rate is better than high artificially, you know, sorry, excessively high heart rate. But you don't want your heart rate to be like this. You want your heart rate to go through these fluctuations. Heart rate variability is good.

• 25:56Lewis Howes?

  Why?

• 25:56Speaker 03

  Because heart rate variability reflects the activation of what's typically called the parasympathetic nervous system, which is the brain's ability to slow down and calm the nervous system. So when your heart rate is going like this, it means that your heart rate is speeding up and then your brain is slowing it down. Your heart rate is speeding it up and your brain is slowing it down. And that's what's happening all day long as you're moving through things in a kind of calm, alert way. But when you get that troubling text message or you see a post or a comment and you go, and all of a sudden your heart rate just goes, "Doo doo doo doo doo doo", and you feel like you immediately want to respond or you're going to say the thing that maybe you shouldn't say, you're going to do the thing that maybe you shouldn't do, or you just want to be more thoughtful and more targeted in your response.

• 26:37Speaker 03

  The key is to slow down the heart rate by making your exhales longer or more vigorous. So it could simply be...

• 26:47Speaker 03

  And then shorter inhales, longer exhales, or do the physiological sigh. Or if you wake up in the morning and you're experiencing the other kind of stress, which is you look at your phone and the news, like the world is overwhelming me. My life is overwhelming. I don't know what I'm gonna do. I don't even know what sequence I'm gonna do things in. You're just discombobulated and a lot of people struggle with this. The key is to do a few breaths, even while you're getting out of bed and preparing your morning coffee or water, or whatever it is, and just start breathing in a way that's inhale emphasized.

• 27:22Speaker 03

  Which sounds weird, but basically what you're doing is you're speeding up your heart rate. At some point, usually within only two or three of those breaths, you're gonna feel more alert and then you can just go back to breathing normally.

• 27:32Lewis Howes?

  So you don't have to do this for hours. You do this for a few moments or minutes.

• 27:35Speaker 03

  That's right. And while I'm a fan of breath work as its own thing, because breath work can teach you how to operate these levers in your brain and body, so to speak, breath work is a dedicated practice that you do away from these stressful events. Whereas, learning to control your heart rate and thereby your mind using your breathing. So it goes breathing, heart, rate, mind, in that sequence. So if your mind isn't where you want it to be, don't start with the mind. Start with your breathing, then, which will control your heart rate, which will then allow you to control your mind.

• 28:13Lewis Howes?

  So don't think your way out of a moment of stress. Feel, breathe your way out of this moment of stress.

• 28:20Speaker 03

  That's right. And one of the things, and I'm certain there are gonna be people out there listening to this saying, wait a second. The yogis and the yogic community has been talking about this for centuries. What are you doing? You know, this is just a recasting of what we already know. I agree. I agree. Within the science community, these things have been given crazy names like arrhythmias and heart rate variability and the diaphragm and the phrenic nerve. And so the language of science has known all about this for many centuries also, but it's been shrouded by language. And the yogic community has known about this for a long time, but it's been shrouded by language. So by bringing this discussion forth, I just wanna be clear that

• 29:01Speaker 03

  I'm not trying to reinvent the wheel or pretend that I invented the wheel by any stretch. I'm trying to say that we all have these circuits, these levers in our body that we can that we can pull and push and people learn how to do this intuitively. But we're never really taught the underlying mechanisms. And I do believe that one and yoga's not big on mechanisms. They're very good on naming and on, you know, yogis in different areas of the world. When they say something, they usually know what the other one is talking about. Scientists do as well, but mechanism, if people can just understand a little bit about why the heart slows down when you exhale more than you inhale or why the heart speeds up when you inhale more than you exhale.

• 29:44Speaker 03

  I do believe that having that knowledge in the mind allows people in a moment of stress to say, oh, I understand what's happening to me and therefore I should go to this particular tool. You know, I, I do understand that one doesn't need to understand how an engine works in order to drive a car, but you do need to know how the control panels work. Right, right. This is why we send people to driving school and why we don't let 10 year olds drive, although I'm sure there's some out there. Yeah, yeah, on a farm somewhere, yeah. Well, actually, there was this one news thing. I don't know if you've seen this where a state trooper pulls or a CHP or somebody pulls over a car that's kind of weaving through the lanes on and they pull over and I think the kid was six years old. Oh, my gosh. He actually managed to get onto the freeway. How? And he was driving the left-hand lane and his driving was pretty bad, but he was

• 30:29Speaker 03

  below the That's crazy. Well, that just tells you that the young mind is eager to steer things and press pedals and things of that sort. And explore. We are definitely not recommending that. But this is very different than driving a car in the sense that all the panels and all the controls are there. We have, we're all, most people are taught how to drive a car. Most people are not taught how to drive their nervous system. And so a lot of what I'm talking about here is just one language, one version of the language of how to drive and control your nervous system.

• 30:59Lewis Howes?

  And you can't drive your nervous system with thoughts and controlling your mind alone. You have to connect the whole vehicle is what I'm hearing. You can't just steer thoughts. You need to also use the brakes or also use different levers, which is the entire car.

• 31:13Speaker 03

  That's right. It's, it's very hard to control the mind with the mind. It can be done. There are people that are, get better at that.

• 31:20Lewis Howes?

  Right. Maybe it's practice over time.

• 31:21Speaker 03

  But using, I say, when in moments of stress, either excessively alert stress or excessively fatigue stress, look to the body because there are mechanisms that have been built into the body for hundreds of thousands of years designed to do this. Now, the reason I can say that is that the physiological side, the double inhale exhale is controlled by a specific set of neurons in the brainstem that Jack Feldman's lab discovered. When children or adults have been sobbing very hard, or when they're out of air in a claustrophobic environment, they naturally do that to reopen these little sacs in their lungs. Now, inhale emphasized breathing can be practiced in a way sort of away from stress in a kind

• 32:04Speaker 03

  of offline approach that can be beneficial for raising what we call stress threshold. So there's a whole other way to look at stress, which is to say, how do I get calmer in the mind when my body is freaking out?

• 32:17Lewis Howes?

  There you go.

• 32:18Speaker 03

  And I think people will recognize some of what I'm about to describe as kind of Wim Hof like breathing. It is also traditionally been called tummo breathing. Some people call it super oxygenation breathing, although then there are other people like Patrick McKeon and company that will say, well, you're actually blowing off more carbon dioxide than you are bringing in oxygen. And so the naming again now is a mess.

• 32:38Lewis Howes?

  Yoganidra, breathe.

• 32:40Speaker 03

  So yoga nidra is exhale emphasized. But tummo breathing, Wim Hof breathing, and super, what sometimes is called super oxygenation breathing, involves doing a lot of inhale exhale, inhale exhale. It's hyperventilating. It's deliberate hyperventilating, followed by exhales and breath holds, followed by inhales and breath holds. Now, the repetitive breathing more quickly and deeply, this kind of thing.

• 33:11Speaker 03

  Or some variant of that, all through the mouth or all through the nose, brings up the heart rate and causes the adrenal glands, which sit right above the kidneys, to secrete adrenaline. They make you more alert. And we know this, my lab's been looking at this with a number of different measures, exploring the nervous system and the periphery, like the heart rate. And you see these big inflections in heart rate when people do this. Typically, it makes people feel agitated at first. They feel a little bit agitated. And then when you exhale and hold your breath for 15 seconds or so, or longer in some cases, if somebody's skilled at this. What you're doing essentially is you're learning to be calm as your body is flooded with all this adrenaline and the heart rate is going. You're learning to calm your mind. That's right. So you're learning actually to separate the mind and body. Your body might be shaking, vibrating.

• 33:56Speaker 03

  And you're learning to suppress that. And you're just... And that is 100% top-down control. What you're doing in those moments is you're learning to take your forebrain and say, "Fight the temptation to move. Fight the temptation to breathe." Now, I don't want to suggest anyone do this to the point where it's unsafe. You should never do this anywhere near water, even in a puddle, because people have drowned, people have died, doing high oxygenation, breath packing type. And passing out. Passing out. It is, it can be quite dangerous. So people need to take the appropriate precautions before they do it. If people have pulmonary issues, it can, there are, you know, it can be problematic. If people get trained in how to do it properly, it can be relatively safe. Okay. And my lab's been doing experiments on it.

• 34:40Speaker 03

  Now, we have more than 100 people doing different types of breathing and exploring how it affects the mind and the body. This particular pattern of breathing,

• 34:49Speaker 03

  25 or 30 times, followed by an exhale and a hold, and then a big inhale and a hold, sometimes doing more inhaling and exhaling type repetitive breathing. That is really somebody training themselves how to self-induce stress. And we know from some good literature and some emerging science that's still ongoing, that... It is possible to get comfortable in these agitated states so that your mind is okay, feels okay, when the body is feeling like it wants to tremble or move, that you can learn to suppress that activity. The ice bath is another good example of this. Some people go straight to the ice bath because cold water will almost always induce a low level of stress in people. You have to, you have to kind of fight it.

• 35:34Speaker 03

  Even if you learn to love it.

• 35:36Lewis Howes?

  You still have to every time, jumping in there, okay, I gotta control the mind essentially to calm.

• 35:41Speaker 03

  Exactly. So the body is saying, this is really cold. This is really cold.

• 35:45Lewis Howes?

  Get out now.

• 35:46Speaker 03

  And you're pushing back on that and it's top-down control. It's pure top-down control. And you could do this any number of ways. There's actually a, something called the hour of pain, which is, before you jump to conclusions, the, the hour of pain was actually described to me by a friend of mine, a former military special operations guy, who said that you, they place you, this wasn't through military, but this is a kind of outside the military.

• 36:09Lewis Howes?

  Extracurricular.

• 36:10Speaker 03

  Extracurricular activities. Of placing you into one position on, on the floor, and you have to stay there for an hour, which can be excruciating. There's so much limbic friction where you want to move so badly because the stabilizing muscles of the body and the feedback in our muscular skeletal system says, move, move, move. I just want to move the tiniest bit. And so, all that practice is, is just a different version of the ice bath.

• 36:34Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 36:35Speaker 03

  It's, you're learning top-down control. So, you know, we started off with a question about trauma.

• 36:43Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 36:43Speaker 03

  And we'll get there. But I think it's very important, just to kind of summarize it, people understand, to just ask themselves the question, if I, am I feeling too much agitation, or am I feeling too much exhaustion? If it's too much agitation, emphasize exhales and do the physiological sigh. Yoganidra is also a wonderful practice that is kind of the mirror image of Super oxygenation breathing. It involves long exhale breathing, lying down on your back, completely relaxing your body and learning to completely turn off thinking, which sounds hard, but you can learn how to do it very quickly if you do that practice for about 10 minutes a day. It literally means yoga sleep.

• 37:23Lewis Howes?

  And probably the most commented thing we have on the previous interview is where are the links for this yoga nidra stuff? So we're gonna give them this time.

• 37:30Speaker 03

  So before I leave today, I'll send, there are several, but people can go on YouTube. Some of the better ones out there, these are all cost free. Komani Desai has a really wonderful one that she, I also just happen to like her voice, so it works for me. There's a guy named Liam Gillan who has one. If you like a male Irish voice, there's that. They're all, you have to pick a voice that works for you. So I'll make some suggestions, but if people don't like the particular voice that's walking them through the yoga nidra, find a different voice. So that's a practice that you can do offline, meaning not in the moment of stress, that will allow you to learn how to relax more. Then on the fatigue side, if you're in motion in the morning or in the afternoon and you need to keep going,

• 38:14Speaker 03

  you need to keep studying, you need to drive to the airport to pick someone up and you're exhausted, the, please don't drive if you're really, really exhausted, but inhale emphasized breathing, making your inhales just a little bit longer or more vigorous than your exhales will speed up your heart rate and will make you more alert.

• 38:29Lewis Howes?

  So deeper inhale, shorter exhale.

• 38:33Speaker 03

  Yeah. So it looks something like.

• 38:38Lewis Howes?

  It'll speed it up.

• 38:39Speaker 03

  Yeah. For, and even two or three of those, and you'll notice your heart rate will pick up because there's a neural signal from the brain stem sent to the heart to speed up the amount of blood flow.

• 38:49Lewis Howes?

  But at the end of the day, what I'm hearing you say is you can control the mind, the body or the mind with the mind to an extent for, for moments or even extended periods of time, hours maybe, but really we need to be thinking the mind and the body connection at all times. Because if you stop breathing, if you're, or if you're only doing short breaths the whole time for a whole day, it's going to affect the body and the mind. And if you're, so it's, it's using the body, using the breath, using it where it's connected to the brain to constantly support you throughout the day. But if you're just like. All day, it'll help you get to a certain point, but then it'll be detrimental to your health.

• 39:29Speaker 03

  Right, so these breathing practices are about shifting the gears, but they're not something that you continue doing throughout your day.

• 39:35Lewis Howes?

  All day, yeah.

• 39:36Speaker 03

  Really what I've described here are hardwired, meaning we were all born with these neurons and connections in our body, we were all born with these organs to be able to do these things. There's not a lot of learning involved. Once you know how to do it, it works the first time, it works every time.

• 39:49Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 39:50Speaker 03

  But it's sort of like shifting gears, there aren't too many manual transmissions these days, but let's say you're driving downhill, it's going too fast, you would, this is like taking it into a lower gear, so then you slow down, you're not going to constantly be riding the clutch, right? You're not going to constantly be in the shifting mode or riding the brake. Some people do that, but that's not good, right? You don't want to have to do that. Just like if you're going uphill, you might have to hit on the gas a little bit, otherwise you're not going to get up that hill, but at some point, you switch gears, and then you're just cruising uphill.

• 40:19Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 40:20Speaker 03

  Right? So it's a transmission system, rather than you're supposed to breathe this way all day or breathe that way all day.

• 40:25Lewis Howes?

  This is smart.

• 40:26Speaker 03

  And the fast breathing followed by exhales and breath holds, the superoxygenation Tummo Wim Hof type breathing. I look at that as learning how to drive on a slick pavement, you know? It's self-induced stress, it's like taking your car to a parking lot, you know, when you're, a kid's learning to drive, I was teaching a kid to drive recently, you teach him to drive, you go through the neighborhood, you do things, but when you really want to learn how to, for instance, drive through puddles, or drive in fog, or drive in heavy rain, you kind of want to be in a parking lot or a

• 41:00Lewis Howes?

  A safe environment.

• 41:01Speaker 03

  A safe environment for that. You don't want to be on a, you know, on the autobahn, right? So, these are ways in which you can teach yourself how to navigate the bad weather of the nervous system.

• 41:14Lewis Howes?

  So you're prepared for when it comes.

• 41:16Speaker 03

  That's right. And I have to say, from personal experience and from some emerging data, when I say emerging data, I mean studies in my lab and other labs that are still ongoing, it does appear that when people self-induce this stress, it can be beneficial for, I'm going to quote a colleague of mine, my colleague David Spiegel, who's our associate chair of psychiatry, says, It's not just about the state that you're in, the state of mind that you're in. It's how you got there and whether or not you had anything to do with it. So when you self-induced stress and then you say, oh, I can calm my mind even though my body is feeling agitated. That's a very positive experience for many people. Whereas when someone else is causing your stress and you're trying to calm down, it feels like you're battling 25 different things.

• 41:59Speaker 03

  So these are skills that anyone can develop. And they're skills that essentially require information of what to do, but zero training. I mean, it's like, I'm sure you played football. I didn't. You can probably, I'm certain you can throw a football way better than I can. That took some, some learning. Yeah. It would take me a long, long time, maybe forever, to be able to try and approximate that skill level. But these are things that we can all do right. Yeah, yeah. And so now I think we've kind of spelled out a, two tools on either side. Physiological sighs for calming down in real time. Exhale emphasized breathing of the yoga nidra sort, maybe even doing yoga nidra 10 to 20 or 30 minutes.

• 42:43Speaker 03

  A couple of times a week, daily if you want, to teach your nervous system to calm down. And then also having tools that emphasize inhales, so longer, more vigorous inhales. Or doing an offline practice of some point during your day, you decide, I'm going to do five or 10 minutes of this more rapid breathing followed by some breath holds. Yeah. And provided those are designated safe for you, the, the, the super oxygenated breathing you decide is safe for you. I'm not aware of any dangers of the exhale emphasized breathing at all. But people should always approach any new thing with caution, of course. But once you have those four tools in hand, you've really learned how to press on the accelerator. So that's inhaling more than your exhale. You've learned how to drive faster, be comfortable at higher speeds.

• 43:28Speaker 03

  That's kind of like the Wim Hof type breathing, comfortable at high speeds. It's like, oh, I'm, I can drive 65 and feel calm. I'm good here. Whereas previously you couldn't. As well as learning how to slow down by, with the physiological sigh, that's sort of a break. And then the yoga nidra is sort of like coming off the accelerator to slow down. Yeah. You're just turning off your system. The beauty of having these different tools and practicing them now and again is that There's this other phenomenon, which is neuroplasticity, which is that then you start doing it reflexively without even realizing it. You start doing physiological sighs when you're too stressed.

• 44:03Lewis Howes?

  Automatically.

• 44:04Speaker 03

  Automatically, and even before you start to hit the alertness threshold.

• 44:08Lewis Howes?

  Interesting.

• 44:09Speaker 03

  Yeah. People just start to engage these things. And so...

• 44:12Lewis Howes?

  It's kind of like when you see a dog who's just tired. It automatically does this sigh when it's like panting. It'll do like a big sigh, and then it's like, almost like it's relaxed.

• 44:19Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 44:20Lewis Howes?

  And it's just like, it goes to sleep.

• 44:21Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 44:22Lewis Howes?

  I see this with my dog all the time. It's like, running around, panting, and then it's just like...

• 44:26Speaker 03

  Exactly. And that little extra inhale, I know we've talked a lot about this before, but I don't think we can overemphasize the power of the physiological sigh, because that little extra inhale is what opens up those little sacs in the lungs just a little bit more, and that, when you exhale, it pulls a lot more carbon dioxide out of the system.

• 44:44Lewis Howes?

  Which, when you pull carbon dioxide out of the system, what does that do?

• 44:48Speaker 03

  You feel calm.

• 44:49Lewis Howes?

  Wow. There you go.

• 44:50Speaker 03

  You feel calm. In fact...

• 44:51Lewis Howes?

  This is a physiological mechanism to make you calm.

• 44:55Speaker 03

  That's right. And in fact, you know, in claustrophobic environments, or god forbid, if you're, you know, you're drowning, the reason you're stressed is because you have neurons in your brainstem that sense carbon dioxide in the bloodstream. And as that goes up, it says you need to find air, you need to offload this carbon dioxide.

• 45:11Lewis Howes?

  Oh, man.

• 45:11Speaker 03

  So, it's, it's a, these are all real physiological mechanisms that are really about balancing the oxygen and carbon dioxide in your system. And when we see these really extreme feats of breath holds and people doing all these really wild things, usually it's because they're learning to manipulate the oxygen-carbon dioxide packing, or ratios, or how they manage them. Free divers get very good at this. There's air packing. There's all sorts of dangerous stuff that should only really be done by highly trained, highly skilled people. But, you know, once people have these tools in hand, they can start coupling to the, to the tools that involve the mind. I mean, it's fine to do a physiological sigh and to tell yourself to calm down. We're not saying, "Don't think."

• 45:56Speaker 03

  Or be mindless. But what we're saying is it's powerful to look to these mechanics of the body mind relationship. And you said the body and the mind are connected. It's really a two-way street. You know, the mind controls the body, the body controls the mind. It's a loop. I just think of it like a loop. I don't even think of it as one controlling the other. It's just if one of those things is out of whack, you need to control the other one. You're not going to try and just think about trying to control your mind again is like grabbing at fog or at smoke. It's it just moves away. So that most of the time.

• 46:31Lewis Howes?

  In this third section, you'll first hear a quick clip from Dr. Wendy Suzuki, an award-winning professor of neuroscience and psychology at New York University. And then we'll go directly into a conversation I had with clinical psychologist, Dr. Nicole LePera, about why breathing is the most powerful stress regulator.

• 46:49Wendy Suzuki?

  So love is a natural counteraction to the stress that you were talking about. And in fact, so the part of the nervous system that is controlling all of those stress responses that we talked about, the blood going to the muscles, the high heart rate, the high respiration is called the sympathetic nervous system. Luckily, we have an equal and opposite part of our nervous system called the parasympathetic nervous system, not stimulating love specifically, but it helps calm everything down. It decreases the heart rate, it decreases respiration, it brings blood back into our digestive and reproductive systems. It's called the rest and digest nervous system.

• 47:32Lewis Howes?

  Yes, the parasympathetic.

• 47:33Wendy Suzuki?

  Parasympathetic.

• 47:34Lewis Howes?

  Rest and digest.

• 47:35Wendy Suzuki?

  Parasympathetic, rest and digest, sympathetic, fight or flight.

• 47:39Lewis Howes?

  Okay.

• 47:40Wendy Suzuki?

  Okay.

• 47:41Lewis Howes?

  So we want to be more in the parasympathetic.

• 47:42Wendy Suzuki?

  Yes. Yeah. You want to be able to control.

• 47:45Lewis Howes?

  Yes, be in that state.

• 47:47Wendy Suzuki?

  Yes.

• 47:48Lewis Howes?

  So that when we need to stress, when we need to take on something scary.

• 47:52Wendy Suzuki?

  Right.

• 47:53Lewis Howes?

  We lean into the sympathetic, but we're not staying in the sympathetic all day long.

• 47:57Wendy Suzuki?

  Right, right. And the best way to lean into parasympathetic, when you when you start to feel that really bad anxiety come on, is Deep breathing.

• 48:07Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 48:07Wendy Suzuki?

  Deep breathing, because that is the only thing in that list that I gave you that we have conscious control over. I can't make my heart rate go down. I can't bring blood into my digestive tract, but I can breathe deep and long. And people would be, if you haven't tried this before, just deep four-part breath where you breathe in for four counts, hold it for four counts, breathe out for four counts, hold it out for four counts. Easiest way to bring some of that calm back in because you are actively stimulating the parasympathetic nervous system.

• 48:43Lewis Howes?

  Absolutely.

• 48:43Wendy Suzuki?

  Yeah. So, but love can also stimulate the parasympathetic nervous system in the sense that it decreases your heart rate. But mainly, it's kind of a different animal.

• 48:57Speaker 00

  We have the access to the most powerful regulator of stress through our breath. We can learn two things. First, to be just present to or a witness around our body's just regular breathing patterns. As simple as this sounds, the way our body breathes, if we can cultivate a very full, deep breath, very calming breath, chances are our body in that moment is in that state of relaxation, is receptive to the world around, is feeling safe to express. The large majority of us aren't breathing in that very calm, rhythmic way. Most of us have evolved, become chest-based, very shallow breathers. And the reason why I even just talk about our natural rhythm

• 49:42Speaker 00

  is because our mind is constantly scanning our body and its processes, breathing in particular. Because for our mind, that's a marker of how aroused we are, how stressed our body is. So what I noticed when I dropped into my body was that I always breathed very shallow from my chest, and at times, I would stop breathing. And that correlated with stress. The more stressed I am, the more I'm actually holding my breath throughout the day. So just that simple act of witnessing to me showed evidence of wow, Nicole, your body is stressed out day in and day out. Regardless of what's happening in the actual current moment, your body continues to send signals of stress. And the reason why listeners who might struggle with anxiety or panic,

• 50:27Speaker 00

  as I once did, why this is problematic is because, like I said, our mind is scanning down and it's going to begin to then think stressful thoughts. It's going to scan the environment for what's wrong. And as we all know, we're very good at identifying what's wrong in that moment. And then before we know it, the reason why I offer this is now we're caught in a loop. Because now I'm thinking stressful thoughts, further activating my body. So dropping in, noticing our body's natural rhythms can give us some clues as to how activated we are. And then, of course, the next action step we can take, if you're living in an overactivated nervous system as I am, is to begin to harness intentional breathing, beginning to either direct my breath down into my belly

• 51:09Speaker 00

  if I am in that shallow, stressed out, activated state, or if you're like I described earlier, having no energy, almost feel like you're not here energetically. We actually want to cultivate that chest base, the more whim-haw, shallow, activated tool of breath work to activate our nervous system, to actually up our energy into our system. So we can use breath work in either direction to control our body's responses. And while this is great for the body, and why I talk about it is it can build body balance back in, as many of us need it, it's also so empowering. Now, right through an intention, through doing something differently, I can actually create change.

• 51:51Speaker 00

  And I speak as someone who did suffer from debilitating anxiety and panic attacks. And I know how overwhelming and out of control that can feel. So I mentioned that last piece of empowerment for all of those suffering with anxiety out there, because that can be the steps back to actually creating change and saying, hey, wait, I can control my body and my body doesn't have to control me when it hits that peak of panic.

• 52:16Lewis Howes?

  What is happening when someone is in a panic attack? Like, what were the feelings like? How long did it last? And how does someone get out of a panic attack moment?

• 52:25Speaker 00

  So panic, and again, I'm just simplifying it for understanding purposes. It's that ultimate state of nervous system activation. When your body is literally geared up to fight, flight, or flee, which is usually what happens next. We go into that old coping tool, or that old resource that we once used. It feels very different for each of us. Some of us actually think it can feel, as I once did, like a heart attack. I describe an episode in my book where I had just gotten home. I was in a psychoanalytic training program. And as part of my training, every Saturday, I would sit in courses to learn how to be a practitioner of the work of psychoanalysis. And one of my courses was a group model,

• 53:09Speaker 00

  where I was a participant in group psychoanalytic therapy. So, anyone listening who's been in any therapy, a lot of feelings can come up. So, it was a particularly emotional group I had had that morning. And I came home, and I was with my partner at the time. And long story short, I started to have symptoms. I started to feel sweaty. I started to feel clammy. I almost turned gray looking. And my heart in particular started to beat problematically, or of concern. It was pounding. It just felt weird. And I'm someone who had had panic attacks before. I know a panic attack can mimic a heart attack. Yet, I was in my down puffy coat, curled up in a ball with my cellphone in my hands, just waiting to call 911,

• 53:53Speaker 00

  because I was convinced that this must be something that's physiologically wrong with me. So, some of us, it can feel like a heart attack. Some of us, it's just that elevation, where my heart feels like it's through the roof. I might get that panicked feeling, like I'm crawling out of my skin. And it's very, very scary. And what it is, again, it's an extreme state of that nervous system activation. So, the best tool is to help our nervous system go back into that peaceful, calm, safe place. Now, this is where I want to acknowledge that those of us who are in the throes of a panic attack and have never practiced intentional breathing or breath work, probably aren't going to be successful. And this is, of course, what we want to do. We want to use the tool only when we need it.

• 54:37Speaker 00

  This is where we really want to learn how to cultivate that balance in our bodies outside of that 10 moment, outside of that acute where panic is crashing down around me. We want to consistently learn how to drop into our bodies. Take a temperature check. How safe is my body? Am I in activation mode or am I calm? And when I'm not calm, learning how to balance my body then, so that when, as I feel my panic obviously increasing over time, I can learn how to down-regulate myself.

• 55:06Lewis Howes?

  Is the panic attacks, what's the root of that? Is it someone not being aware of their body and breathing? Is it allowing stressful thoughts to come in? Is it all of it stacking up over time and then it's a breaking point? What is the root of panic attacks?

• 55:22Speaker 00

  It becomes all of it over time because our nervous system works outside of our awareness. And we have a function, it's called neuroception. It's essentially where we're constantly scanning the environment, energies even included.

• 55:35Lewis Howes?

  We're not even aware of it.

• 55:35Speaker 00

  We're not even aware.

• 55:36Lewis Howes?

  Our body, our eyes.

• 55:37Speaker 00

  And it's primed to look for threat. However, threat gets defined based on our past experiences. This is how we can't kind of extricate the two. So something that felt overwhelming back here continues to color my world in my now moment.

• 55:52Lewis Howes?

  Even if it's not really happening.

• 55:53Speaker 00

  Outside of my awareness, right? So that's really important to consider. That's the feeling that many of us get when we maybe walk into the room or up that alley and just something feels off. We're responding, our nervous system is always responding to everything in the moment. However, it's doing so based on our past moments. So we could be throwing ourself, unbeknownst to ourselves, into nervous system activation and some of us are living in it all day long.

• 56:22Lewis Howes?

  Crazy. When we feel stressed.

• 56:27Lewis Howes?

  Is it affecting the actual brain? Or is it affecting the mind? And how do we regulate the two? Of the thoughts, the ideas, the mind, the consciousness, I guess, the awareness, or the brain, the physical brain itself? What is stress going up into the brain? Or is it actually attacking the mind, kind of like, outside of the brain?

• 56:51Speaker 00

  It can affect both. It affects the brain structure in two ways. The first way is through actual inflammation. Stress, the cortisol that typically is associated with stress activates our body, activates immune system responses, where inflammation is the predominant response. Our brain is actually covered by a very thin film, a blood-brain barrier that's very penetrable, things can get through. And one of the issues is when inflammation actually lands within our brain. So that can begin to cause structural changes in our brain, as can our mind. The way we think, the way we process our brain can actually change the brain pathways,

• 57:34Speaker 00

  the systems, areas that we're firing up more frequently than other areas. With the most predominant one, so many of us are living from our emotional brain, our amygdala, our hippocampus, all of those deeper centers, as opposed to our prefrontal cortex. So this is why it gets complicated. And there are very many brain scans out there of depressed individuals, of anxious individuals, of individuals diagnosed with ADHD or ADD, of autistic, right? All of these diagnoses map onto the brain showing changes, though it's the chicken or the egg conversation. Because those changes, my argument is, occur as a result of the human's functioning. I believe as far back as in utero.

• 58:18Speaker 00

  I know that my system was impacted by my mom. By the hormones raging through her body because I was sharing that body. I was sharing a blood source. I go as far to believe my mom's beliefs, her thoughts about herself, about me as a baby in her belly, about what my future would be, were impacting, again, my developing. So our environments, I believe, begin to shape us. So hypothetically, I could have came out as a baby infant showing, like I likely did, structural changes in my brain, possibly even an upregulated nervous system. Hard to differentiate whether genetically that's just what it was for me, or again, whether my earliest environment shaped.

• 58:59Speaker 00

  And I believe in the science of epigenetics, that our environments are always shaping ourselves down to our physiology.

• 59:07Lewis Howes?

  Our genetics. Our environment is shaping our DNA.

• 59:10Speaker 00

  Shaping our DNA and then shaping our systems, shaping how our brain looks and functions, shaping how our body looks and functions.

• 59:18Lewis Howes?

  Yeah. Well, what's that study where they put like love and anger on water bottles? Did you ever see that?

• 59:25Speaker 00

  The ice, yes.

• 59:26Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, the ice. And then it's either like dark crystals, like dead crystal, you know? It's like these beautiful snowflakes. I can't remember what that study was or that test.

• 59:34Speaker 00

  Yeah, where they did the frequency of different emotions. And had that ice that would freeze, I guess, ultimately, and it would crystallize in different structural. And it's beautiful because what I see is that shows evidence of how impactful the things that we can't see are. And I think the collective is waking up to the reality that there are a lot of these things that we can't see. There are energies, there are inner knowings, there are messages of all sorts that, again, we're responding to outside of our awareness that are there, even though we can't see them or the science isn't showing it in the graph that fits very comfortably into our human mind. Anytime we're in that expansive unknown, it's very uncomfortable.

• 1:00:21Lewis Howes?

  In this final section, you'll hear from the extreme Dutch athlete Wim Hof, who is convinced that everyone can tap into their highest inner potential through cold therapy, breathing, and training the mind to have full control over your body.

• 1:00:37Wim Hof?

  I'm a dropout from school, but now I'm teaching the professors and the doctors in all the world that we have an ability to tap into the deepest part of the brain and solve all the matters related to mental disorders and having no control. And there is no pill, no medicine involved. It's your own awareness, your own power. And then you get into the cold and the breathing, and we skip the breathing and the cold at a certain moment. We get in our innate control by our mind, the way the establishment doesn't like it,

• 1:01:19Wim Hof?

  but the way we should have to confront ourselves with any stressor happening in the world to take care of our beloveds.

• 1:01:30Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, well, the establishment doesn't like it because it's not making them money. If you...

• 1:01:34Wim Hof?

  That is the disease. That is the big disease, the withholding. And I think making money, very nice, great. But I don't want pills, I don't want medicine. I want happiness, strength, and health. If you are happy, how much money do you need? You see? How much cars do you need? How much of this? If you're happy, you're happy. So if you are able to regulate your own mood, and we found the compelling evidence of the key components of the autonomous processes in the brain related to emotion itself.

• 1:02:11Wim Hof?

  I want it out there. I want to be professors and doctors. Prove me wrong guys, because we got approved already in the science. But now we are with the establishment. So the establishment is there, it's very nice, you can make bridges and big buildings and and all that and shoot people to the moon. Let's begin and start guaranteeing happiness, strength and health, because it's there. Boom.

• 1:02:38Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:39Wim Hof?

  There, your work and my work collide positively.

• 1:02:44Lewis Howes?

  Absolutely, man. Can we do a three-minute breathing exercise?

• 1:02:48Wim Hof?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:02:48Lewis Howes?

  Together, where you just work with me, guide me and

• 1:02:51Wim Hof?

  Sure.

• 1:02:51Lewis Howes?

  Tell me what to do and if someone's watching and if they only have three minutes a day to do some type of breathing exercise or a mindset.

• 1:03:00Wim Hof?

  You know, in four minutes.

• 1:03:02Lewis Howes?

  Four minutes, okay.

• 1:03:03Wim Hof?

  You got a push-up exercise. This is what we do. And the push-up exercise vacuums the oxygen out of you. But first we go into oxygen atoms, we're gonna alkalize the muscle tissue. And thus, when the muscle tissue is alkalized, it is the right chemical environment for the performance neurotransmitter to keep on going. Just to show it to yourself. Besides of that, you get deeply into the autonomic nervous system within four minutes.

• 1:03:43Lewis Howes?

  Do it. Can we try it?

• 1:03:45Wim Hof?

  Yes.

• 1:03:46Lewis Howes?

  Let's do it.

• 1:03:47Wim Hof?

  I'm gonna ask you to do push-ups.

• 1:03:49Lewis Howes?

  Okay.

• 1:03:50Wim Hof?

  Without air in the lungs.

• 1:03:52Lewis Howes?

  Without air in the lungs?

• 1:03:53Wim Hof?

  Yes. And that is because before, we are going to alkalize the blood. And that goes into the muscle tissue and that will

• 1:04:03Wim Hof?

  will create the right chemical environment for the neurotransverse performance to keep on going. And what's the matter? I'm not breathing, get no air in my self and I keep on going. What is that? That is the alchemist, that's you. Within four minutes thus, you get so fast in your biochemistry and you hold your breath, which is consciousness. And thus, the consciousness goes into the nervous system, into the depth thought of by science. It's not possible, it's the autonomic nervous system, within four minutes.

• 1:04:38Lewis Howes?

  Okay.

• 1:04:38Wim Hof?

  Thank you.

• 1:04:40Speaker 07

  I have four minutes every day. And you know what? You're gonna feel great, great, nice.

• 1:04:46Lewis Howes?

  So what do I do first? Do we breathe first? Do we do push-ups first? Do we?

• 1:04:49Speaker 07

  No, we're... You know how many push-ups you normally do. Okay. Keep that there. And now, that is your baseline.

• 1:04:57Lewis Howes?

  Okay.

• 1:04:58Speaker 07

  And now, we're gonna do more push-ups? Without breathing? Is that possible? Hey, be the alchemist. He's gonna show. And you're gonna feel. Okay? Relax. Your relaxed body is able to to store up oxygen. Four minutes. Huh? Four minutes.

• 1:05:17Lewis Howes?

  Do we sit or stand for this? Does it matter?

• 1:05:19Speaker 07

  Oh, if you stand, you know, you can go directly into

• 1:05:23Lewis Howes?

  Okay.

• 1:05:23Speaker 07

  push-up exercise. As you wish. As you feel. Relax. Okay, there you go. Fully in. And let it go. Fully in. Let it go. Fully in. Let it go. Get them up. Fully in. Let it go. Keep on going. Fully in. Let it go. Fully in. Let it go. Fully in. Have one thing in mind. You give the best,

• 1:06:07Speaker 07

  you get the best. There we are. Fully in. Light-headedness, losing body, tingling, whatever you feel, make it stronger. Breathe into it. Okay? Ninety. Eighty. We are synergizing the body, alkalizing the body. Muscle tissue is becoming alkaline. Don't go. Forty. Fully in, go. Fully in, go. Fully in, go. Get it in, get it in. Go.

• 1:06:50Speaker 07

  Ten. Nine. Eight. There you go. One thing in your mind.

• 1:07:03Wim Hof?

  Give it all, you get it all. Be a mean machine. You are the alchemist. Four.

• 1:07:14Wim Hof?

  Three.

• 1:07:17Wim Hof?

  Two.

• 1:07:20Wim Hof?

  One.

• 1:07:22Wim Hof?

  Here comes the last one. Put it in. Let it go. Stop. Angle. No breathing.

• 1:07:33Wim Hof?

  Let's go. Four, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, go. Forty, fifty, sixty, seventy, ninety, ninety. No antelox. Twenty, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven. Whenever you feel the urge to breathe, you can take a minute and keep on going.

• 1:08:02Wim Hof?

  Thirty-five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine. Okay. Fifty. Right on.

• 1:08:20Lewis Howes?

  Oh, man.

• 1:08:21Wim Hof?

  Well done. This is the way you get deeply into the autonomic nervous system. And re-regulate the adrenal access. It's all happening because you were not breathing. And you became vacuum within. Suddenly, you gotta survive. What a thing we never do. And it's good for you. You feel, hey. You tell what you feel. Easy does it. Easy does it. Well done, well done, well done, well done, well done.

• 1:08:52Lewis Howes?

  Oh, man. I wish I didn't do chest this morning, but I did a full, like, chest this morning.

• 1:08:57Wim Hof?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, sure.

• 1:08:58Lewis Howes?

  But it feels good, yeah.

• 1:08:59Wim Hof?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:00Lewis Howes?

  I was feeling, like, tingly and lightheaded. During the breathing. Yeah. But then I felt like I had a lot of energy. When I was.

• 1:09:09Wim Hof?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:09Lewis Howes?

  When I breathed all the way out. And I was pushing, I felt like I had a lot of energy.

• 1:09:13Wim Hof?

  That's it. That's it. That's it. That's the alkalinity in the muscle tissue. And the performance neurotransmitter acetylcholine is able to go.

• 1:09:25Wim Hof?

  And normally, when it becomes sore, acetylcholine is not able to go anymore. And this could be altered for football or anything.

• 1:09:34Lewis Howes?

  Sure. Do you recommend people do that four-minute exercise every day?

• 1:09:40Wim Hof?

  Yes, yes. Everybody has four minutes, no excuse.

• 1:09:45Lewis Howes?

  Should they do the exercise with push-ups or just the breathing?

• 1:09:48Wim Hof?

  No, no, with push-ups, a lot better, because you get the [BLEEP] out of your system.

• 1:09:55Lewis Howes?

  Really? Yeah, I'm like sweating, I'm toxifying it, yeah.

• 1:09:58Wim Hof?

  And you are, the adrenal access is on, and that resets the body.

• 1:10:03Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:04Wim Hof?

  And that means you get into this natural biochemical state.

• 1:10:08Lewis Howes?

  It's like a high.

• 1:10:09Wim Hof?

  Right on, yes.

• 1:10:11Lewis Howes?

  I hope you enjoyed this powerful episode with some of the masters on breathing and optimizing your breath to optimize your body and your mind. Make sure to check out the show notes in the description for a full rundown of today's show with all the important links. And also make sure to share this with a friend and subscribe over on Apple Podcasts as well. I really love hearing feedback from you guys, so share a review over on Apple and let me know what part of this episode resonated with you the most. And if no one's told you lately, I want to remind you that you are loved, you are worthy, and you matter. And now it's time to go out there and do something great.