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Everybody welcome to Sunday service. So today we’re going to talk about one of my favorite subjects breathing, breathing in is the first thing we do when we are born, breathing out is the last thing we do before we die. Everything else in between is what we call life and electric word life. That means forever. And that’s a mighty long time. So I’m here to say a tranq in Beverly Hills, you know, the one doctor, everything will be all right, instead of asking them how much of your time is left, ask them how much of your mind is left. Here we go. So let’s talk about breathing. So breathing, there’s a lot of talk about breathing and there’s a lot of misunderstanding about breathing and there’s basically one rule of breathing that as long as you follow this rule, pretty much everything is going to be okay.
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And that is don’t stop breathing. Okay. There’s a lot of talk about, should we be breathing in through our nose? Should we be breathing out through our nose? Should we breathe breathing in through our mouth? Should we be breathing out through our mouth? How long is the best way to breathe in or, or what is the best method of breathing? And depending upon who you listen to, the majority of people who teach breathing are going to tell you that their way is the only way and that every other way is the wrong way of breathing. Okay. So that’s a lot of pressure to be putting on yourself to believe that there’s only a correct way of breathing, which we know is not true. There’s something that I say over and over again, which is that there’s everything I believed prior to COVID.
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And then there’s the things that I think, and I’m finding out, or either, either think or finding out, or don’t know post COVID. And we are all on this journey together, which is to figure out what works. And if there’s one thing that I’ve figured out very quickly, it’s that there’s definitely not one method of anything that is going to work best for every person. So more so than me trying to give you a list of things that you have to gut bless you, Susan that you have to memorize or things that you have to, you know, get absolutely right, right. Because it’s a lot of pressure to be sick. It’s a lot of pressure to have COVID or any other chronic respiratory disease. The last thing you want is to think that, Hey, you don’t even know how to breathe, right? We don’t need any more pressure.
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In fact, that pressure is what, you know, stimulates sympathetic nervous system activity that fight or flight response. And we know that COVID is an extremely inflammatory mediated condition. And our goals are always going to be to reduce inflammation and to decrease sympathetic activity, which is to decrease the fight flight or freeze response and to increase or enhance parasympathetic activity, which is the heal a rest and digest portion of our autonomic nervous system. Does that make sense to everybody so far? All right. So let’s talk about breathing. Okay. So again, there’s a saying that I love, okay, it’s an oldie, but a goodie, but it’s an oldie, but a goodie, because it’s really true. If you give a man a fish, you feed him for a day and if you teach a man to fish, you feed him for a lifetime. And I don’t really like that saying, Oh, I love the saying, but I only don’t like it.
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Cause I love fish. And I hate to think of me being involved in the catching and killing and eating other fish. But the idea is that rather than again, give you a script. My goal is always to try to teach you how to safely experiment and how to observe yourself and how to listen and look and find out for yourself. Certain things that, let me tell you a secret here. Nobody really has the answer to, okay. So anyone who tells you right now that they understood, I’ll tell you how much I think I know about Kobe. I think I know about 10% about COVID of what I think I really need to know to be considered an expert on coven. Okay. With my other work cardiopulmonary, I think I know about 95% and that’s after 30 years. So at 10%, I still think that we’re onto some stuff that, that, that other people, I think the majority of people are less than 10%.
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So get the idea. I don’t say that to say like, we’re great and we know things that other people don’t know. But I say it only to say that even the most experienced covert practitioners are still novices in this game. And there’s things that we learn every single day and the people that we learn them from are you, and the more feedback you give us, the more we can collect that data and figure out what’s going on. So for today, there should be absolutely no pressure on you. Okay? There’s nothing to memorize. There’s nothing to learn that is going to be set in stone. It’s really just a matter of an experience where I’m going to show you some different methods and I want you to try them out and then talk to yourself, ask yourself, did this make me feel better or worse?
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And you know, I know that, you know, people are really desperate to get better. And many people are grasping at straws. The things I hear most are herbs and supplements. Okay. And I’m not saying that herbs or supplements are bad, but I don’t believe that herbs and supplements are kind of going to move the needle enough to make them either a make or break. And I think that, you know, I have friends who work in this place called Wilner chemists, which is like a very famous chemist in New York city. They sell everything and everybody who works, the floor knows everything about everything verbally. They’re like herb nerds, like they’re the ultimate urban nerds. And the thing is that they’re telling me that people are coming in and they’re getting like 12 anti-inflammatory stuff supplements. Okay. So I have to believe that if you’re putting 12 different anti-inflammatory supplements in your bite, that is going to in some way be inflammatory.
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Yeah. And I also believe that when it comes to, COVID kind of the less we ask our body to process the better it is because ultimately time is healing to people. And ultimately we need to not be doing something all day, every day that’s related to COVID okay. COVID camp. And when I say that, I am not quoting the president. Okay. I’m not minimizing anything that anybody is going through because I know it’s serious, but we also have so when it, it comes to breathing, there are many different theories. And we hear things like Wim Hoff, and we hear things like blue taiko method of breathing and a year. Things like Daya for MADEC breathing in pursed, lip breathing, and there’s all different techniques and this and that and the other things. So let me just start with a couple of experiences. And then I want some feedback from you on, does this make you feel better, worse or no change?
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And my philosophy on life is kind of, if something makes me feel worse or it doesn’t really change anything, then it’s taking away from the things that I could be doing that could make me feel better. So let’s start out with the idea of diaphragmatic breathing. Diaphragmatic breathing has been around since the beginning of time. And there are people who believe that you just have to practice diaphragmatic breathing and that, that will make you less short of breath, right? So if you sit here and you practice diaphragmatic breathing for five minutes or 10 minutes, three times a day, then you’re going to be short of breath. The answer to that is breathing exercises on their own will not make you short of breath, less short of breath. And the other thing to talk about is that unless you have a paralyzed diaphragm, Lorraine Smith look out, it looks like there’s a tiger sneaking up behind you.
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And the other thing is that unless your diaphragm is paralyzed and you can’t have a paralyzed diaphragm, then all breathing is diaphragmatic. Regardless of whether you breathe in through your nose or BR or breathing through your mouth or blow out through your nose or blow out through your mouth. And the thing is that what we want to try to do. And if you read Newsweek this week, when they asked me about the president’s breathing, what I said was that you see him using a lot of accessory muscles. So he’s using the muscles of his neck, shoulders, upper chest and back. And when you’re using those accessory muscles, that is a signal of distress because ultimately our diaphragm should be doing most of the work and the rest of our body and the rest of our thorax should be quiet. So the only caveat about diaphragmatic breathing, besides that everything is diaphragmatic breathing. It’s that trying not to be breathing
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Okay?
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If your upper chest, if your shoulders, if your back and everything else is moving, when you’re doing this, it’s a lot more work of breathing for you. So it’s not a judgment against you. It’s simply telling you that you’re increasing the workload of breathing. And what we want to do is we want to decrease the workload of breathing, the first thing we’re going to do, and I’m going to give you a choice. I’m not going to put any pressure on you for the exhalation. We’re just going to start with the inhalation. And this is called what I call a breathing scale. Okay. So if you think about it, when an opera single or a, or a performer or any singer warms up, they do scales, right? So they’ll say all of a sudden my heart readings, when I remember them pretty thin, and they’re moving up and down the scale, and what that’s doing is that’s stretching their vocal chords and that’s stretching their larynx and that’s stretching the muscles that they need to sing. So that’s like as if a sprinter we’re going to be leaning forward and stretching their hamstrings, okay. It’s warming up the muscles so that when they go for that high note, it’s not an overstretch and they don’t injure their vocal cord.
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The airways, we have smooth muscle. The smooth muscle is there to constrict and dilate it dilates to give us more air when we need it. It constricts to protect us from things entering our body that aren’t supposed to enter our body. So you’re standing on fifth Avenue in the middle of a hot summer and a bus blows by. And all of a sudden, boom, this exhaust hits you in the face and you know it, cause you can feel it. It’s a combination of solid liquid and air, and it’s all over you now in your airways constrict. So that that stuff doesn’t get into your lungs. But when we have this inflammatory response, the airways are hyper reactive and get tighter. And one of the ironies about trying to breathe hard is that the harder we try breathe, the harder it becomes to breathe. That’s why when you get a pulmonary function test and they ask you to take a deep breath in and blow out as hard as you can, that’s not because they’re trying to teach you how to breathe.
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That’s because blowing out as hard and as fast as you can, will elicit that Bronco constriction that we don’t want. So that’s the opposite of what we want. So we’re gonna say, start with a breathing scale and you can start your day with this. And let’s just talk for a moment about, you know, why do we breathe? We breathe to bring oxygen, which is our nutrients, you know, to our body and to blow off waste products, which are carbon dioxide. One thing I say all the time over and over again is that breathing is multifactorial, which means that there are many, many factors that affect how well or how poorly we breathe. They can be. Do you have a respiratory condition or not? Do you have COPD? Do you have emphysema? Do you have chronic bronchitis? Do you have pulmonary fibrosis? Do you have pneumonia?
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It could be your level of conditioning. So are you out of shape? It could be your weight. Are you 50 pounds overweight? And that weight sits right around your abdomen. Where every time you have to take a breath in, you have to lift 25 pounds on each side. So there’s usually not one single cause for breathing. And one of the tricky things when it comes to COVID, particularly with long haulers, is that people are winding up clear chest X, rays, right? Clear cat scans, oxygen saturation, 97%. Why am I still short of breath then? Right? The answer is we don’t really know, and it’s probably different for different people. So what I’m going to do today is I’m going to present to you as if I were trying to be your wedding planner and the entertainment at the wedding was going to be breathing techniques.
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I’m going to show you all of the tricks in my I’m going to show you the carrot cake of breathing, the red velvet of breathing. I’m going to show you the lemon merengue of breathing. And then I want you to try these out and practice them and see what works for you. And then the final caveat before we start is that breathing is not going to be the, the, the technique that you choose doesn’t have to be the same. And really isn’t going to be the same in all situations. So a breathing methods that you might use to try to wake up in the morning calmly, or if you wake up anxious every morning, like I do, I wake up in my mind, starts racing instantly. You know, I start the breathing techniques. Okay. Or if something’s bothering you or you feel that chest discomfort and you feel like things are escalating, that’s the time you have to talk to yourself and say, suck.
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I know what to do here. Okay. And then get into whatever breathing pattern is. That’s going to help you. So the first we’re going to start with the scale of breathing and with this, there’s absolutely no pressure on the exhalation. Okay? So you can exhale for as long as you want, you can exhale through your nose or your mouth. And I encourage you to try both at different times. And the only thing we’re going to do is we’re going to breathe for different periods of inhalation. And then you’re going to exhale at your own pace. Okay. So I will set the pace initially, but then I’m going to be quiet because I’m going to give you the opportunity to set your own pace. And it will be distracting for you if I just keep talking and throwing off your pace. So the first thing we’re going to do, we’re going to do two minutes of breathing in for a count of two through your nose. And then so, so that will look like this. So that will look like if you want to take a slight pause at the top, that’s okay too. And then just, you can blow out through your mouth.
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You can blow out through your nose, your call, but I just want you to get comfortable with this. And again, if you think about stretching, right by starting with two, we’re starting with a light stretch. And as we increase little by little by little, that’s like stretching our hamstrings more until we reach the floor. So let’s start out with two minutes of breathing in for two and go. So let’s breathe in, in and blow it out, Breathe in, in, and blow it out. And if you would like to close your eyes during this, that will help. Also, if you like, if it doesn’t help, then feel free to keep your eyes open. Let’s breathe in, in, and blow
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[Inaudible].
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And what you may find is that the longer you go on you become more relaxed and you’re able to lengthen the exhale, thereby lowering your respiratory rate, breathe in, in
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[Inaudible]
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And five, four, three, two, one, and stop just relax, normal, quiet breathing for a moment for the next exercise we’re going to do in for three hours at your own pace, breathing in through your nose. If you find it difficult to breathe in for a count of three at this moment, stick with a count of two, there is no wrong way, and there’s no pressure on you to do anything uncomfortable. So we’re going to start with breathing in for a count of three and begin. So we’re going to breathe in, in, in, and blow. Also feel free to experiment with different types of exhalations. If you want to make a noise, like feel free, breathe in, in, in, and relax.
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And you may find that as you do this, your mind starts to drift off or wander. And if it does that’s okay, let it go. Go with it. No pressure. You may feel your eyes getting heavier. In which case, let them close. You may feel your head getting heavier. In which case, let it fall. You may feel a yawn coming on. In which case go with it. 30 seconds to go breathing in two, three, breathing in two, three and five, four, three, two, one, and relax. Alright, so let me hear some experiences. So far, Suzanne, I found that when I made the noise, versus when I read the way I would normally breathe like that, that, that was the no noise lowered my heart rate better. It was more effective for me. Okay. So you felt that your heart rate got lower, right? It brought my heart rate down to go great like that, versus when I tried to do it with a or something like that for me. Okay. Well, that’s great to hear. And the fact that your heart rate got lower means that you were decreasing sympathetic outflow, sympathetic nervous system is mediated by adrenaline.
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I’m glad. So someone said, I found that loud exhaling helped, but I got lightheaded. Okay. Maria said she breathed in deeper as time
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Went by. So that’s awesome. So think about that and think about the fact that that’s like you bending over and stretching, and the longer you stretch, you’re able to get closer to the floor because our airways are relaxing and the smooth muscle inside our airways relaxed. So here’s something else. So if you get a Pedro to do you want to say something, you just have to unmute, you just have to unmute. Someone said, I could feel it going into the bottom of my lungs and more air coming in through my nose. Someone else said, I’m so relaxed, relaxed, I’m ready for a nap. I found not having to count on the exhale was much more relaxing. Pedro, have you found your mute button? There you go.
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Seemingly, when I’m breathing in deep in and blowing it out, it brings a little bit of cough, coughing. Okay.
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So when you breathe in you cough, okay.
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Breathing out,
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You cough, blow, breathing,
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Going out. Yes. Okay. Which is, I believe is helpful because instead of using any type of machine or any other device to bring out new, cause this breathing is very good for it
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Is very good. So is, is mucus a chronic problem for you? Yes, it is. Okay. Do you have a pulmonary condition that you’re aware of?
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I do write about chronic bronchitis. Chronic bronchitis.
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Okay. So let me talk about all the cons are, as it relates to some different conditions. So if you feel like you are getting lightheaded, okay. This happens sometimes when people hyperventilate my suggestion to you would be to breathe in for two or out for, in, for three, do the blowout and then skip a breath. So in other words, you would be breathing in, in blow it out. And then in your mind, you’re going to think, breathe in, in, blow it out and then you’re going to do it. So you’re just going to decrease the speed with which you do that. Okay. So there’s that. Now, if you do have so let’s talk about COVID first. So with COVID, there’s two types of shortness of breath that I hear most often from people. One is that I come to a point and it feels like I hit a wall.
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So in other words, it’s like if you get to 50% of what feels like your lung capacity and you cannot breathe in anymore. Okay. The other thing that I hear is that resistance is increased throughout the length of the inhalation. So in other words, I can take the deep breath, but it feels like I have to work harder to take the deep breath. Okay. If it’s the first one or the second one, okay. I always will recommend starting with breathing in for two and then building up over time and we’re going to build up over time, over the next couple of moments. Okay. Now, another thing is that for people with a respiratory condition, so Pedro, you mentioned chronic bronchitis, chronic bronchitis is part of COPD, which is an obstructive pulmonary disease. So for people with obstructive pulmonary disease, there’s always going to be difficulty on the exhalation phase of breathing.
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So there’s no problem getting air in there’s difficulty blowing air out, especially forcefully for people with restrictive lung disease, things like pulmonary fibrosis. There’s going to be difficulty with the inhalation, no difficulty with the exhalation. So Pedro, if your problem is obstructive pulmonary disease, what I would would, I would suggest might help alleviate your cough is when you breathe in for, to try to prolong the exhalation a little bit so that you would be breathing in for two and out for four or five. And the other thing that I would recommend to you is blowing out through pursed lips. So as you breathe in, you’re going to breathe in.
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And,
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And another thing for everybody is that the harder you try to blow out the more air trapping you’re going to get. So rather than think of it as actually blowing out, think of it as just kind of creating a little slit and letting the air come out naturally. So some of the coaching that I hear people give people sometimes is smell the flowers and blow out the candles, blowing out the candles is actually not a good cue for that, because that implies Oh, forced exhalation. So what I’d rather you try to do is think about Doing some soup on a spoon, but you don’t want to blow the soup across the room. Okay. We’re going to go to another set of infer three in through your nose this time, I’m going to ask you to blow out through your mouth, through pursed lips. So we’re going to breathe in two, three,
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And then
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Just let the air come out naturally. And we’re going to shoot for three minutes of this and I would like you to try to close your for this
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And let’s begin so close your eyes and let’s breathe in two, three out gently through pursed lips. If you’d like a little pause at the end, that’s fine too. And if you’d like a little pause at the end of inhalation, that’s fine to breathe in two, three. And again, if you’re one of the people that got lightheaded before you don’t have to go with the same count as me, take a longer pause in between each breath as you hear the lovely sounds of New York city in the background. One minute to go 15 seconds, five, four,
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Three,
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Two.
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Alright. Any feedback? So somebody mentioned that tightness in the ribs today makes breathing more shallow. How many people have tightness in the ribs from time to time? All right. So very common. Okay. So we have intercostals right. Meaning in between the ribs. So in between the ribs there’s there’s muscles. So when you when you normally have your resting rib position is at about 45 degrees at inhalation, or if you have an obstructive disease, they become more horizontal. And if you’re not taking enough deep breaths, they become more vertical and they squeeze. So imagine if you sat in the car with your arm in this position for a long trip, well, when you get done that arm is going to be stiff, and it’s the same thing with your ribs and your thoracic muscles. So I wasn’t planning this, but we can do this on the next one. We’re going to be breathing in for four. And if you, if rib tightness is something that you experienced, I’m going to ask you to just raise your arms up. As you breathe in, manually separating the ribs. And then
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After several weeks of this, we would increase the speed and we bring you to a fourth or fifth floor window and see if it actually works. And if you are actually able to fly, but we haven’t actually gotten that far yet. But but the idea is, if you, if you can’t get the motion of the ribs, just with the breath, then we can manually simulate that. So if my, if I want to stretch the ribs on the right side of my body, number one, just raising my arm up, like this is stretching them. Okay? If I want to stretch them even more, I can breathe over here And come back. If I want to stretch the muscles on the left side of my ribs, this is stretching them. This is stretching them even more. And then at the points of stretch, then you’re going to combine that with the breath in and you can do these things, either bilaterally, meaning at the same time, both arms breathing in
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And blowing out.
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You can also leave them up there as you breathe, both in and out so that when you blow out, they’re not going back to their original position. There’s many, many different ways that you can get the same effect. Somebody said after a few times I have to do a catch up breath and that’s perfectly fine. That’s like a sigh. Somebody says, when breathing in for one, two, three, is that gathering three breaths or is it holding for a count of one, two, three? So it’s not gathering three separate breaths. So we’re not going like we’re stacking the breaths. That should be a continuous. And then the pause is definitely helped the lightheadedness. And somebody said, I, I yawned during the last breathing cycle and that’s all perfectly okay. Show of hands. How many people feel more relaxed now than when you started? Is there anyone who doesn’t?
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I don’t feel less relaxed, but I am more breathless.
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You’re more breakfast. Okay. So then what I would say to you Katelyn is, is I would say don’t go for three minutes. Yeah. Okay. So like everything else we do, like we do with the walking. Okay. Like we do it, the walkabouts, if you feel like that. Okay. So let me just go back to, I’m going to go back to coughing right after answer this question, but in the same way as we do with the walk about, start with one minute. Okay. So what I’m going to do is I’m going to tell you when it’s one minute, I’m going to tell you when it’s two minutes and then I tell you when it’s three minutes and you make the decision as to when you are going to stop. Okay. Another way to do that, Caitlin would be to slow your speed down and spread one and a half minutes over three minutes by alternating every, every other breath.
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And you can also do that by alternating every third or fourth breath. Okay. But this also may be a lot of breathing for you. So in other words, your muscles, your respiratory muscles may be fatigued a little bit now, Pedro, I didn’t fully answer your question before. Okay. Let me go back to that. Thank you for reminding me so coughing during breathing. Okay. Many people, when they try to take a deep breath, they go into, what’s like a spasmodic coughing pattern. So they try to breathe in that’s a lot like trying to overstretch a tight muscle. Okay. So that’s like your lungs want to take the breath, but they don’t have the volume. So they, they start in a cough. So for somebody who’s having spasmodic, coughing on inhalation, my suggestion to you would be back off in the number of counts for inhalation.
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Even if it means breathing in for one, let it out, breathing in for one, let it out, breathing in for two. Let it out. And again, if breathing in for three or four or five, okay. Is too much for you. Then back it off to something that’s comfortable. That’s the first rule of COVID. Okay. So, you know, it’s the first rule of fight club. Never talk about fight club. The first row, anyone know any CrossFitters, I’ll tell you the first rule of CrossFit is never shut the hell up about CrossFit. Okay. If you know, a CrossFitter, everything they say is like, Oh, I was just cross fitting on my way to work. But the first rule of COVID is when in doubt, back off a little bit. Okay. Now, Pedro, your situation is a little bit different. Okay. Pedro, did you have, COVID also
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Pedro, did you have, COVID also shake your head. Yes or no? No. Okay. No problem. So for people with obstructive diseases, okay. What, what you’re you’re right in that chronic bronchitis, one of the hallmarks of chronic bronchitis is a chronic productive cough for three months of a year, for two or more years consecutively. So when you’re doing this, what you’re doing is you’re opening up the airways and you’re mobilizing those secretions to higher levels where you can cough them out. So in that situation, what you could do is every third or fourth breath, you can hold it,
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Hold your breath.
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And then when that cough comes and go with the cough. Okay. So that you don’t just have, like, you get a full to help clear those secretions and then take a break in between. Okay. okay. I yawn, I cough whenever I breathe in, that was that when I focus on my breathing, I have difficulty keeping my abdomen loose. It’s like my competitive nature takes over and says, you are not doing it. Good enough. And then I find my, my body gets very tight. I also have bouts of hoarseness, which sometimes get worse with talking. Okay. So how many people here would consider themselves a type, a personality?
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How many people would consider themselves competitive by nature? Alright, so competitive by nature is the opposite of COVID. Okay. I’m competitive by nature, but there are times in our lives where we must give in. There are going to be times in our lives, where we are brought to our knees by circumstances out of our control. And we will be unable to fight them and resist them. Okay. It doesn’t mean stop fighting. It means rest for a moment. Okay. It means listen to the sounds and the, see the sights and feel the feelings and experience the sensations of what your body is trying to tell you. Okay? Because in an arm wrestling match with us COVID will win every time we are not going to be stronger than Colvin. We are not going to overpower COVID. So we have to outsmart coping. And when that happens and when our nature says, you know what, no feel no pain, no gain.
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Come on. Was you better take a deeper breath? No, that’s when you say, you know what that’s like, I talk about, you know, I, I talk a lot about devil goofy and angel goofy on our shoulders. And I watched it again this week and I realized it’s not goofy at all. It’s actually Pluto. I thought it was goofy. I thought it was devil devil, goofy, trying to get goofy in trouble and angel goofy training, but it’s actually Pluto. But the idea is if your sensibility is telling you that you’re not doing it well enough, that’s not helpful to you. Okay. And I’m not just talking about like, I’m not trying to say like, good boy. You’re doing okay. I’m not trying to build up your self esteem. What I’m saying to you is physiologically that pressure that you’re putting on yourself is actually stimulating the sympathetic nervous system.
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And by stimulating the sympathetic nervous system, we are increasing inflammation. That’s the wrong direction that we want to be in. So at those moments you have to, if it means smacking yourself in the face, fail, if it means calling your wife into the kitchen so she could smack you in the face. That’s if that’s what it takes. So be it. Okay. And I know she’s going to thank me for that later. Okay. But the idea is you have to break this cycle, right? Because we all have these times where we feel like our bodies are out of control. We feel like our bodies are buzzing. We feel pain. We feel tightness. We feel fatigue. And at those moments, it’s time to say, you know what?
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Yeah,
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Breathe. Everybody. Just put your hands like this, turn them around. As you breathe in and then blow out and push them away. How many people feel different after that one breath. Right? And the thing that I try to show you over and over again, is that these things are in your control. One of the best quotes of all time is by basketball coach, John wooden. And he says, don’t let the things that you cannot do interfere with the things that you can do. So every day don’t get up and make the list of all the things that you can’t do get up and make the list of all the things that you’re thankful that you can do. And I promise you that list is going to grow. I’m seeing it over and over and over in people. But if we focus on the negative, trust me, that is spilling negative chemicals into your body. Someone said they’re more of a control freak than type a somebody said to me, watch out, I have a bear behind me.
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But but the idea is, do not put pressure on yourself. Okay? Accept it. Accept who you are, accept what you’re doing, except that your body is doing everything it can to heal and have faith that it knows what it needs to do. Okay. Other things we’re going to start now with something that a lot of people use, it’s called box breathing. Okay. People call it by different names. We’re going to start with threes again, and then we’re going to go up to fours. And what we’re going to do is we’re going to breathe in for a count of three. So we’re going to breathe in two, three. We’re going to hold it two, three, blow out to three and pause two, three. Okay. And I’m going to lead you through the first couple. What’s so funny, Amy. What’s self. You think the three is a funny, there’s nothing funny about threes, Amy, but but it’s just, it’s going to be hard.
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That’s a lot. If you think that’s a lot, then do twos. Okay. Let’s let’s all start with two. So let’s breathe in for two, hold for two out for, to rest for two. And, and trust me, I don’t expect that you’re going to get this perfectly today. Okay. Nobody does. And you may never perfect this. Okay. But we will strive to perfect this. And I guarantee you that if you do these things a little bit every day, your numbers are going to increase. Okay. Your numbers are going to increase for the better. So let’s start with twos. Okay. And we’re going to breathe in, in and hold, hold and out, out and rest rest. So we’re going to breathe.
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[Inaudible]
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In gain. Hold, hold out, out, rest, rest in, in hold, hold out, out breast breast
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[Inaudible].
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And when you feel ready, you can stop and open your eyes and come back.
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And yeah.
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Any experiences on that for that one. And Amy, I wanted to just give you that opportunity to do two and give everybody the option. But for some, for that one too, might even be too short for that. So it might be too short and it might be better to work in the threes or the fours with that. But experiences on that one.
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I agree too, was too short. That’s my opinion.
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Cause it’s like, you’re rushing almost. It’s like you’re rushing and that’s the opposite, right?
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What is the purpose of the box breathing versus the others?
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So the purpose of all of this is to make you feel better and help you heal. Okay. I don’t think there’s clean science on any of them to say one is better than the other. So, you know, again, there are people who will have find one to be very uncomfortable. Somebody may say, Hey, you know what I like with most of my patients, I start them off breathing in for a count of two and out for a count of four, we prolong the exhalation. But some people don’t like that. Or some people feel like, you know what, their breath is gone before they do it. So it’s, it’s really about giving you control, giving you something that, you know, you can go back to when you feel like you’re in distress. And also all of these breathing methods, anything that’s going to help to relax your airways, anything that’s going to help to slow your heart rate.
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And some people say, I feel my heart beating stronger, but not faster. And that’s great because what that means is that your heart is slowing down and you’re actually getting more return of blood to the heart, which is actually a very, very healthy signal. Okay. So somebody said they felt rushed with two or three would be better to take. So we’re going to do that one more time. Okay. And I’m going to give you the choice and you can, you don’t have to have one and stick with it the whole time, two, three, four. Some people may be Olympic swimmers. I saw my Michael Phelps was signed on earlier today. So you know, then you can breathe in for five, but but the idea is get comfortable with this. We’re gonna do a full three minutes of this. Okay.
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Okay.
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Yup. And then and then what we’ll do is we will we’ll do a full three minutes and then we’ll talk again and then, and then going to, we’re going to end with some stretching. So experiment, if two is too short for you. So be it if if, if three is, is, is, is good for you or still too short, go to four. If four is too short, you can try five. And that means you have a lot of breath control. Ready?
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[Inaudible]
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Two minutes down. Sorry. I forgot my own instructions too, but you know, we’re going to go to five minutes, total, two minutes down.
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[Inaudible]
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Four minutes down. One minute to go.
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[Inaudible] 10 seconds. [inaudible]
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Okay. Two comments. I’m a bit confused about what I want to accomplish with the hold and rest stages when you’re holding your breath. Okay. You’re sending signals to the body you’re allowing diffusion to occur. You’re allowing air to enter all of the areas of the lung. Most effectively, when you’re taking the rest, you’re just giving your body a little rest. You’re also giving your lungs an opportunity to turn around. So it’s almost like, you know, you breathe in, you can’t just go out in out. So it’s like, come in, hold. Hello.
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The recount was perfect for me. Therapeutic. I started getting lightheaded after you said three minutes though, and had to stop, pick back up last minute. So that’s a great thing Rose that tells me that you learn something about yourself and that’s okay. So again, think of this, you know, we don’t think about breathing, right? Because we feel like we should know about breathing. The breathing is an activity. Okay. Breathing is an activity. And think about it in the same way that you think about the walking walk abouts. And here’s some exciting news this Tuesday, we’re sending a film crew up to Vermont to film a short intervals of Tai Chi and Qigong with Brian Tresco. So we’re going to have a ton of tight chain chigong for you guys in the next couple of weeks, which is really what I believe that all long haulers need.
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And let’s talk about this. My exhale needed more time. Should I be pushing it out faster? Absolutely not personally. I’m not a lover of the box breathing my own personal opinion. It doesn’t mean it’s not good. It doesn’t mean it’s not beneficial. It doesn’t mean it’s not the single best breathing technique for other people. Personally, I prefer a longer exhalation than inhalation. And the reason why is because inhalation is an active process. And what I mean by that is that it’s, it happens because the diaphragm contracts downward and that creates a negative pressure and that brings air into your lungs. So it’s a muscular activity. Exhalation is a passive activity, meaning that it happens by the lungs, natural recoil. And so naturally it’s going to take a little bit longer. So we’re going to do one more before we, before we you know, before we do the stretching and it’s, it’s going to be what I, what I like, which is either going to be in for two, out for four, in, for two, out for five, in, for three, out for five or in, for three out for six. So let’s start off by breathing in for two, out for four. And that’s going to be like breathing in, in and below two, three
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Before,
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Breathe in, in and blow two, three, four, let’s go
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And relaxed. How did that feel to people? Does that feel more natural? Alright, so again, there is no right or wrong here. Okay. Experiment with all of them. Okay. any one that is helpful to you is helpful to you and don’t put pressure on you. Okay. don’t put pressure on yourself. Do what feels right. And you know, be kind to yourself and be gentle with yourself and be compassionate to yourself. As long as you’re giving a hundred percent of your effort, you’re getting 100% of the benefit of this. Okay. There’s no absolutes here. So I want to just, you can do this one, either sitting or standing. Okay. If you feel like standing up, but we’re going to just involve the upper body and the thorax and this just for a couple of minutes. And so get into whatever position you want to be in.
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And let’s just start out with our arms rising up very gently as we breathe in palms facing up, and then we’re going to turn our palms over and blow it out gently. So let’s try to breathe, raise up and breathe in for a count of two, breathe in, in and below two, three, four, let’s raise our arms all the way up as we breathe in, in and hold two, three, and blow out two, three, four, breathe in, in, and blow it out. Two, three, four, breathe in, in, and hold two, three. And out two, three, four, take your right hand. Put it over your head on your right ear and lean to the left. As you breathe in two, three, blow it out. Generally breathe in two, three, blow it out. Jen, breathe in two, three, and switch sides reading in two, three, blow it out. Gently breathing in two, three, blow it out. Gently breathing pain to rain, float out gently and just nice and easy breathing. Squeeze.
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Use your shoulder blades together in the back
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And blow out, breathing in, squeeze your shoulder blades together in the back and blow it out
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And breathing in. Squeeze your shoulder blades together in the back and blow it out and relax.
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Yes.
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All right. Questions, comments, feedback. Where should you feel the air when you’re holding the inhale in the chest? So you should try to feel it deep and throughout your thorax. So if you can get a deep breath in and bring it into your lungs, you should feel it everywhere, but just don’t, don’t get confused because the lungs, the sensory nerves of the lungs are not that specific. So don’t, don’t overthink it. I have wanted to learn. She gone. So there is she gong one day a week in bootcamp. So for those of you that are not involved in bootcamp yet get involved. So excited for touchy and chigong and I’ve been doing the exercises and they are helping me immensely much better love the relaxing fish tank sound in the background. That’s my koi pond in my backyard. When I stood and involved the arms, I experienced shortness of breath.
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I worked through it, but it was harder. So Maria, what I would say to you is start out sitting or start out standing. Okay. And when you feel like it’s becoming more difficult, because when it becomes more effortful than relaxing, then it’s detriment. Okay. So when it becomes like it’s too much work for its own good, that’s the opposite of what we want. So if that’s the case, so if you stand up and you do three repetitions and it feels good, and then you start to feel like it’s more work it’s okay. Sit down or take a break for 30 seconds or a minute again, no absolutes. Okay. Even if we wanted to even if we wanted to control it, we couldn’t okay. The bowl is not in our court. So at this moment we must give into the rapture of, you know, this is what it is.
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And trust me, what that does is it quiets the sympathetic nervous system. And it allows us to get out of our own way and to get out of our body’s way because our body wants to heal and our body knows how to heal itself, just don’t get in its way. And the other thing I want to tell you is that just because you don’t see the outward signs yet, that does not mean that you are not getting better. Okay. So keep the faith you know, again, it’s like two trains kind of barreling towards each other, digging out a mountain, they could be wanting to part. And until that final connection is made, then it’s still dark in there. Okay. But hang in there. Thinking about breathing helps bring more attention to my full body. Absolutely. So if I’m taking a short work in my chest starts to feel heavy, I need to shorten, I wouldn’t necessarily shorten the walk.
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What you could do is you could take a break so you could stop, you could do some deep breathing exercise and then continue the walk. I struggled with the walkabout, but actually managed to swim for 30, for 30 to 45 minutes in the sea. So if anyone has difficulty with walking without getting short of breath, we’d definitely, definitely recommend swimming instead. So that’s pretty amazing that you can swim 30 to 45 minutes in the ocean. And, and so just remember the ocean gives you the benefit of buoyancy. So that may be a great way to start and then continue to push for the walkabouts because unless you have you live in a place where you can swim everywhere then you know, then it’s going to get tough. You’re going to have to walk at some point. You know, exercise is very sports specific and very activity specific. So swimming is awesome, wonderful, beautiful exercise. But walking is something that should be a part of everybody’s routine, even if it’s a smaller part. Any other questions, comments, feedback, Mick Carlton.
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I know how you were talking about like type a personalities, competitive people I’ve had, costochondritis probably the last, like six months from COVID. So I seem to be doing a lot of like shallow breathing, like chest and accessory, muscle breathing. So I’ve been trying to work on like that diaphragmatic breathing and less movement from like my upper body. But I think like I feel like I can’t, like I hit a wall after, you know, maybe two or three, you know, the two or three count. I feel like I can’t get any more breath in there. Okay.
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Okay. So let me give you one simple suggestion that is going to make this immediately easier for you. Do your diaphragmatic breathing, lying on your side. Okay. When you’re doing it up and down, you’re resisting gravity. And when you’re low lying on your side, you’re actually eliminating gravity from the formula and just lie in your bed on your side, one arm up, do the breathing. You should find immediately that you’re able to take that deeper breath. And by working it in that position, that should eventually lead to you, but to be able to do it in all positions and you just have to get the of motion, but you know, that’s a great way to, to really elicit the diaphragm. And another thing you can try intermittently is instead of trying to take that long breath in, just put your hand on your upper chest right now, everybody could do this with me. Like just instead of like breathing in two, three, like I said before, take three sniffs. So go.
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So you probably feel that that really pushes your abdomen out, right? And that’s a great way to elicit the diaphragm too. And again, it’s retraining the nervous system and retraining the body of, of the things that it used to know how to do. But lying on your side and sniffing that’s two good suggestions and ways that we, we do that with people, you know, even for people who have paralyzed or partially paralyzed diaphragms the diaphragm is, is innervated by the phrenic nerve, which is, is, is innervated by your cervical vertebrae three, four, and five. So a lot of times when somebody has like a really bad neck or like a herniated disc and see three, four or five that can affect their breathing and they don’t even realize why it’s coming. But you know thank you. Thank God. Should help. Can you explain what the exhalation sounds do physiologically? I don’t know, but they feel good. I don’t, there’s certain things I do. I, you know, there’s a lot of a huge push towards evidence based medicine and that became the rage 10 years ago. And yeah, I’m a believer in evidence. But certain things you have to just feel out, you know, that’s, I don’t, I don’t, I don’t know the physiology behind what the activation sound is. Other questions, comments. Yep.
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Today when we did those stretches is the first time that I had had relief from what I call ragged breathing. And I, I, cause I don’t know how else to characterize it, but I, I start to take a breath in and then it catches and I can’t finish, you know, I can’t completely feel my lungs. And so then I have to exhale it and it almost feels like I’m panting. And I’ve been doing this a wow for over six months. I’ve been out of the hospital for six months. So today after I did all that stretching, then it just relaxed and I could sit here and breathe fluidly.
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Well, you’re going to have a good Sunday then that’s fine.
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Well,
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The thing is that, you know, in the, in the point I try to make over and over again is that there’s no one thing. Like you hear a lot of people tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, you know? And it’s like, we hear something like, like you know, we’ll hear a news article and they’ll say the heart and it’s like fish in a, in a tank. They all swim towards the heart. And then he said, no, it’s the lung and it’s and it’s pulmonary fibrosis. O’neil we don’t know. Okay. And it’s okay. Not to know. Okay. But it’s okay to not know something, because if you don’t know it, you don’t know it. But a lot of this is trial and error. Okay. And what I’m trying to teach you is things that definitely aren’t going to hurt you, but that might help you. Okay.
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And again, it’s, it’s experimentation, it’s experimentation. It’s like, you know, that I was going to make a bad joke about I’m going to make a bad joke, but I decided not to. But you know, it’s, it’s like it’s, it’s trial and error. And you know, if someone says something to you, like, you know, and, and again, hope it is something that there’s no real experts yet. Right. There’s a lot of us trying to get up to speed, but nobody knows. COVID like the back of their hand. Okay. If they say, if they try to present it, like they do, I would run because that’s a scary individual. I think there’s people who know more than others. But you know, the way I learned everything okay. Besides by watching house MD on television that’s how I learned most things. But but the thing is that I learned because I was into patients and, you know, right.
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As of this moment, I’ve seen 139 Colby, long haulers. And so that’s a couple of hundred hours of, of talking to Colby long hours. And I can’t tell you things, I can make suggestions, but I have to listen. I have to observe. And that’s what you have to do as individuals is you have to observe yourself and you have to say, did this make me feel better or worse? And you know, someone could say something in a book at work, it could work for every other person on earth. Right. And if it doesn’t work for you, then screw it. Don’t do it. Okay. It doesn’t matter what it is. And you know, anyone who’s going to get you into, like, if you don’t do it this way, then, then you know what? You can’t be my student. There’s only one way. There’s no, there’s not one way to do anything.
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Okay. And you have to be open to the fact that this is a time for change for all of us, right. For the world. Hopefully in some strange way, it’s going to be a change for the better. Hopefully we’re going to learn about things that we weren’t doing, right. Hopefully we are going to learn about ways that we were abusive to ourselves and to the earth and to the environment. And we will make things better. You know, it’s an opportunity in every tragedy, in every challenge, there is opportunity. And that’s what we have to look for, you know, after nine 11, which was a very, very tough time for me being a new Yorker, being someone who, you know, was down there being, you know, losing my best friend, who was a fireman. My sister said something to me and I’ve spoken about this before, but she said, well, maybe you learn something about yourself.
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And I said, what did I learn? And she said, maybe you learn that you’re not as strong as you think you are. I said, well, how is that a good thing? And she said, it’s not a good thing, but it’s a real thing. And it’s, it’s true. And you know, for me, the, the quality that I admire most in humanity is authenticity. And there’s so much bullshit out there. And there’s this constant assault on our senses from every direction you turn that at a certain point, we got to just shut up and listen, the signs are all right in front of us. We got to look and we got to listen. And, you know, we got to just stop, you know, and, and just, just be for a moment, you know, if you’ve seen this movie, I can’t think of the name of it. I was forget the name of it, but it’s like something like the social it’s not the social experiment, but it’s this thing about how social media control.
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I mean, it blows your mind. I mean, there are people like from Twitter and LinkedIn and read, they say, I invented the program and I get home at night and I can’t stop using it. It’s insane. And I think we have to go back and we have to shut up and we have to look and observe. We have two eyes, we have two ears, we have two nostrils. We have one mouth. Right? So feel the sensation, see the sights, hear the sounds, experience the sensations and sit with that and get back to living life as life is supposed to be lived. So there’s that. And I hope you guys have a great Sunday tonight at 7:00 PM. As we do every Sunday, we have a support group with dr. Lori needle, who is a psychotherapist and Erica Mastro bono, who is a social worker. And I occasionally heckle them from the sidelines from the peanut gallery. And you were all welcomed. Same, well, not the same. Yeah. The social dilemmas, that’s it, right? Yeah. That’s disturbing. When I saw that, I was like, I was like, there’s me right there. I don’t control myself, but we have to create this space for ourselves. We have to do it at all costs. So have a great Sunday, everybody hang in there. It’s going to get better. Big news. Tomorrow’s opening day of our post COVID clinic in New York city. So see there have a great one, everybody. Thank you. Thank you.
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[Inaudible] [inaudible].