#529 Science of Breathing and Mouth Taping
with Sachin Patel
Sachin Patel
Our lungs are responsible for about 70% of our detoxification. Every breath we take out, we’re detoxing CO2. People know when they’re drinking alcohol, our body uses our lungs to eliminate and get rid of the alcohol. So, it’s a major detoxification pathway for us. Some of the biggest lymph nodes in our body are underneath our diaphragm. When we breathe correctly, our lymph nodes underneath our diaphragm pump the lymph through our abdomen. The act of respiration supports our cardiovascular system, it supports our lymphatic system, it supports our mitochondria, it supports our immune system. So, keep in mind that we breathe in about 30 pounds of air every day. And for each breath that we take, that outside air is coming in through our nose, interacting with our immune system, that’s our first line of defense against the outside world, right? We consume more air every day than anything else. We breathe in and out about 23,000 liters of air every day. So, think about that. Our immune system is interacting with that air. It’s our first line of defense.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Our guest today is Sachin. He is the founder of The Living Proof Institute, where he pioneered a revolutionary approach to patient-centered health care. And he coaches hundreds of practitioners around the world that are empowered to deliver affordable and inspired care to their communities through his Perfect Practice membership programs. You can learn more about Sachin and his work at becomingproof.com.
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Sachin, welcome to the show.
Sachin Patel
Thank you Wendy, I’m so excited for our conversation today.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Yes, so why don’t you tell us about your expertise on somatic breathing? I know you’re really passionate about this subject. And so, tell us exactly what that is. And, you know, what kind of benefits people have from that?
Sachin Patel
Yeah, absolutely. So, somatic breathing, just to kind of create a definition for people who are hearing this for the first time, is using our breath to change our physical body and our physiological function in our body. So, we can breathe in specific ways and specific patterns to alter our spiritual state, to alter our physical state, and also alter our mental state. And, you know, my first experience with somatic breathing was something that most people might be familiar with, which is Wim Hof breathing, which is a specific style, modality, and methodology of breathing that makes you feel like ready to conquer the world, and raises your dopamine levels, and boosts your immune function, right, and just makes you more resilient to stress. So, that was my first introduction to breathing. And then, my second introduction to breathing was more of a spiritual experience, where I actually went through a 60-minute breathwork session where I was able to time travel, I was able to process trauma, rewrite some of the stories in my life, and have some pretty big breakthroughs personally and professionally. And so, then I started actually facilitating that style of breathwork for my peers and my clients. And I started witnessing that this was a reproducible methodology and modality to really create transformational shifts for people. So, it’s the thing I do the most now, and breathing and how it influences our health is the thing I speak about the most. So, it’s been a really fun ride these last four or five years, just understanding how breath is so impactful to our overall health and wellness. And I’m just on a mission, thanks to people like you, to spread this with the world and share it with as many people as they can, because it’s one of those things where literally the answer to the problem we’re trying to solve might be right underneath their nose.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Yeah, and I think so many people spend the majority of their day, or their life, just doing very shallow breathing, and really not getting enough oxygen. Our mitochondria run on oxygen; that’s the main fuel. And I know I spent many years doing yoga, and really, you just feel so good afterwards, with all that deep breathing and focus on the breath. But, how does somatic breathing differ from other breathing techniques?
Sachin Patel
Yeah, I think it’s more of a spectrum of somatic breathing. So, you can use somatic breathing, and it can be very intense and intentional, or it can be very calm and subtle. Essentially, the way I define somatic breathing is using our breath to change our state. So, if I want someone to be more calm and relaxed, and more in a parasympathetic state primed for rest, relaxation, rejuvenation, proper digestion, then I would have them breathe in a pattern that gets them more parasympathetic. And an example of that would be something like box breathing, where we breathe in for four seconds, hold for four seconds, out for four seconds, hold for four seconds, and then we breathe in again, and we go through a cycle of breathing that way. And within just a moment, between a moment and a few minutes, you’re instantly going to feel more relaxed. We can also lengthen our exhale, which helps us get into a more relaxed state. So, that’s one end of the spectrum. However, we can also use breathing, different breathing patterns to actually create more of a physical effect on our body that’s more related to a stress response. So, for example, if you’re sprinting, you would be breathing very rapidly in and out through your mouth. Now, the effect of that is changing our physiology and our physical body. Because as we breathe in and out our lungs, lungs rapidly could expand and contract, our diaphragm rapidly contracts and relaxes. And this causes us to really increase blood pressure so that we could run away from the thing that’s chasing us. And if we’re laying down, and we’re breathing in certain patterns, then we can also change and alter our spiritual and emotional state as well. So, essentially, somatic breathing is all forms of breathing. But we’re breathing with awareness instead of the lack of awareness or unconscious breathing.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Okay, great. And so, tell us about, you know, some of the benefits of practicing somatic breathing.
Sachin Patel
Yes, so we could just, you know, remove the word “somatic” and just call it breathing. And that, I think, will land a little bit better for people who are listening because I want people to really think about all forms of breathing as somatic breathing, when we do it consciously. So somatic breathing is basically using our breath to change how we feel. But with awareness, this is how we should be breathing all the time. So, I’ll give you a few examples. One of the most important things about how we breathe is how we position our tongue, and how we position our jaw. And so, the first thing that I want people to recognize is how they should be breathing most of the day. Most of the day, you should be breathing with your tongue at the roof of your mouth, gently placed behind your front two teeth. There are little ridges that you might feel at the back of your front two teeth. And that’s where you want to place your tongue, and then the rest of your tongue can be gently laid across the roof of your mouth. When you do that, you’re instantly going to feel more relaxed, because there’s a lot of nerve endings of the vagus nerve that are in the roof of your mouth. This is why children suck their thumb to pacify themselves, and they use a pacifier to hit the roof of their mouth because it causes them to instantly relax. So adults, we can do this as well, assuming we don’t have a tongue tie, and so gently resting the tongue at the roof of the mouth instantly helps us feel more relaxed. It forces us to breathe in and out through our nose instead of breathing through our mouth. And as a result of that, we purify the air, we pressurize the air, we increase the amount of oxygen that’s in the air by about 20%. We cleanse the air, and so our nose is perfected to create the perfect air to come into our lungs so that we can expand our lungs and contract our lungs appropriately. That expansion and contraction physically, as we expand and contract our lungs, it squeezes our heart, reducing the work effort of the heart. So, short, shallow breathing, you can imagine somebody’s lungs aren’t really expanding very much, but proper normal breathing, the heart is getting a lift from the diaphragm, and the lungs are also gently squeezing it. So, we can instantly reduce the amount of effort that the heart is utilizing to create blood pressure, and to pump blood and circulate blood through our body. So, those are some of the fundamental things: slow breaths in through the nose, six seconds in, six seconds out, tongue at the roof of the mouth, that should be our baseline breath. When we breathe that way, we get into a state of coherence.
And when we’re in a state of coherence, we’re in our most relaxed, creative, and rejuvenated state. One of the things that people should probably note about breathing is that we often overbreathe, so the average person takes way too many breaths per day. And breathing is one of the most important metabolic activities that we do. So, every day we burn about 1200 calories, just in normal respiration, just in normal breathing. Now, if we could get people to slow down the amount that they breathe, then they can actually instantly become more anabolic. By becoming more anabolic, because there’s less calories that are now required for them to function every day, they’re also able to get into a more relaxed state. Now, their body goes into a growth state without consuming more food, but by simply reducing the calorie demands by slowing down how much we breathe. So, little simple things like that just kind of help people understand why it’s important that we breathe, how breathing impacts our overall health. Our lungs are responsible for about 70% of our detoxification. So, you know, every breath we take out, we’re detoxing CO2. People know when they’re drinking alcohol, our body uses our lungs to eliminate and get rid of the alcohol. So, it’s a major detoxification pathway for us. And the other thing that happens when we breathe is the biggest… some of the biggest lymph nodes in our bodies are underneath our diaphragm. So, when we breathe in and out correctly, nice, you know, not deep breaths, you don’t want to deep breathe deeply all day, that would be kind of ridiculous, it would be like taking your biggest strides with every step you take when you’re going for a walk. They’d put you in a mental asylum, right? You want to take nice, meaningful breaths, six seconds in, six seconds out, but you’re only breathing in about 10% to 15% of your lung capacity. So, we’re not taking full breaths in, full breaths out. We’re taking, you know, six-second in, six-second exhale breaths that are medium range, so shallow to medium range. When we breathe correctly, our lymph nodes underneath our diaphragm pump the lymph through our abdomen. So, the act of respiration supports our cardiovascular system, it supports our lymphatic system, it supports our mitochondria, it supports our immune system. So, keep in mind that we breathe in about 30 pounds of air every day. And for each breath that we take, that outside air is coming in through our nose, interacting with our immune system, that’s our first line of defense against the outside world, right? We consume more air every day than anything else. We breathe in and out about 23,000 liters of air every day. So, think about that. Our immune system is interacting with that air; it’s our first line of defense. So, how we breathe also affects our immune system as well. So, it’s like one of those lead dominoes that, if we get right, then a lot of other things automatically start happening for us without any additional effort on our part.
Dr. Wendy Myers
So, let’s talk about how breathing can help to really relax the nervous system and help to reduce stress as well, which will in turn help with detoxification. You’re not going to detox when you’re super stressed out, which I think is a lot of people’s barrier to their body’s ability to release toxins.
Sachin Patel
Yeah, Great question. So, to get more parasympathetic, we would lengthen our exhale, we would breathe slower. So, let’s say you’re breathing in for six seconds, you would breathe out for longer than six seconds. You might do eight seconds, you might do 10 seconds. That’s going to instantly shift our body into a parasympathetic state. If you’re feeling a little bit wired and stressed out, then there’s something you could do called a physiological sigh. A physiological sigh is where you take a three-stage breath, breathing into the belly, into the lungs, and into the throat. So, it looks and sounds like this. (Breathing)
Holding and then letting it out with an audible sigh, and doing that three to fHolding and then letting it out with an audible sigh, and doing that three to four times will instantly relax your nervous system as well. We do this unconsciously when we feel a sense of relaxation or we feel a sense of relief. One of the first things that we do is we sigh with relief. That’s actually a form of breath work. So, we can use that methodology that our body uses, and then lean into it, exaggerate it, and create the effect. So, one of the things I learned Wendy that was really cool is that breath is a two-way street. So, our nervous system uses breath to instantly change our physiology. So, for example, if a lion were to walk into this room, I would instantly gasp, because that would rapidly increase my lung expansion. And that would squeeze my heart to pump blood instantly to my arms and legs, and instantly increase blood pressure. So, the fastest way to change our physical state is with our breath. And so, what ends up happening is our body is using, unconsciously, it’s using our breath to regulate our nervous system. I refer to the breath as the steering wheel of the nervous system. So, when we understand how it works, just like if I know if I turn my steering wheel left, my car goes left, every single time. Right, I know, go right, it goes right. I know, if I press the brake or the accelerator, there’s a predictable response from my engine. And breathing is actually just as predictable as steering your car or controlling your physiology. So, when we learn how to breathe correctly, or we’re breathing with intention to create a specific state, then we’re now in control of our body. And now we can regulate the function of every cell, organ, and tissue. Other ways to increase a parasympathetic state is humming. Humming mechanically stimulates the vagus nerve. So, when we hum, our vocal cords vibrate, and our vagus nerve comes off our brainstem, and so it gets a nice massage. And based on the frequency of our tone that we’re producing, the vibrational frequency that we’re producing, we can actually send a different message into our vagus nerve to tell it to heal different parts of us. So, it’s pretty amazing how you can use your breath to stimulate parts of you that are distal to the lungs themselves, so there’s a widespread effect. Another interesting thing is that the top of your fascial system is in the bottom of your tongue. So, your tongue is literally connected all the way to your toes through the fascial system. And the main pump that’s always moving up and down in your body is your diaphragm. So, your diaphragm is constantly, with every breath, it’s signaling the fascia, it’s signaling the fascia, whether our body should be in a fight or flight state, whether our body should be in a relaxation state. So, it’s that master communication system that is informing every cell, tissue, and organ in our body simultaneously, because the fascia is instantly connected through this matrix to every part of us.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Yes, absolutely. And that’s one of the main ways we communicate in our body is through this crystalline matrix that runs throughout our body. It’s interesting; I didn’t realize the tongue was so intrinsically connected to that. And let’s talk about using the breath to increase memory, focus, and concentration. Can you talked about some techniques for that.
Sachin Patel
Yeah. Absolutely. So, one of the techniques that’s been used by yogis for many years is Alternate Nostril Breathing. It’s a really simple technique where we want to feel balanced and centered. And so, when you breathe in from one nostril versus the other, it stimulates a different hemisphere of the brain, and it actually is opposites. So, if I wanted to stimulate the left side of my brain, my logical brain, let’s say, then I would start breathing through my right nostril. If I want to stimulate my sympathetic system, I would start breathing through my right nostril. So, think of it like the gas pedal and the brake in your car; if I want to hit the gas and go, I press the pedal on the right. So, same thing with our nose; if I want to hit the gas and go, get some work done, focus, concentrate, then what I would do is I would breathe through my right nostril.If I want to hit the break, slow down a little bit, get into my creative state, get into more of a flow state, and more parasympathetic, then I would hit the brakes, literally. And I would breathe through my left nostril. Now, if I want to feel balanced, right, and really bring the best of what both sides of my brain have to offer, then I would do something called alternate nostril breathing, where I would cover one nostril, take a breath in, take a breath out, cover the other nostril, take a breath out, and then alternate from side to side for anywhere from three to five minutes. And sometimes, people can feel it even faster than that. But depending on the state of their baseline nervous system, it’s going to vary from person to person. And you’ll feel almost instantaneously different.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Yeah, that’s interesting. I didn’t realize the left side of the brakes and the right side was at the accelerator. It’s really interesting. And so, let’s talk about some, maybe, techniques that people could use to incorporate breathing exercises into their everyday life. So, how can they kind of, you know, pepper this throughout the day to relax themselves or accomplish whatever they were wanting to accomplish?
Sachin Patel
Yeah, great question. So I’m going to start with actually how people should be breathing at nighttime. Okay, That’s the part that often gets overlooked. And technically, our day starts at midnight. So if we’re talking about breathing during the day, we’ll start right at midnight. So the average person… ’bout 66% of people will breathe through their mouth while they sleep. So statistically, the majority of people listening to this breathe through their mouth while they sleep, including myself at one point. Now, the problem with that is that there’s a catastrophic effect on our health over time. And for some people, the benefit of breathing through their nose can be experienced within the first one to three nights. So, it’s almost instantaneous how much people feel better. Imagine going to sleep and waking up more tired in the morning. That’s how a lot of people feel. They’re like, “I just, it’s like plugging your phone in, and you come back eight hours later, and it’s got less of a charge to it. Right? That makes no sense whatsoever.” And they’re turning to stimulants. And the reason for that is because they were breathing dysfunctionally while they were sleeping. While we sleep, it’s the most parasympathetic thing that we do; our detoxification systems are most active while we sleep. So, if we want to improve detoxification, digestive health, reproductive health, all of our organs, they need to be getting adequate amounts of oxygen. And when we breathe with our mouth open, we actually decrease the amount of oxygen that is being delivered to our lungs—a 20% decrease in oxygenation just by simply breathing through our mouth. We don’t clear out CO2 very well. So, that toxin, you know, kind of accumulates in our body to an abnormal level. We also dry our mouth out, so that affects our oral microbiome. When we breathe through our mouths, we produce 1/6 the amount of nitric oxide that we would produce if we were breathing through our nose, which means now there’s less microcirculation, less healing and repair going on. Blood pressure increases. When we breathe through our mouth, there’s also an increase in aldosterone. When we increase aldosterone, we increase blood pressure, but we also—it also acts as a diuretic, so we end up having to wake up and use the bathroom at night. So, by simply getting people to breathe through their nose, by using mouth tape or a chin strap, people immediately start feeling better. I’ve had people send me a message and say, “Hey, I just started mouth taping. And within two days, my brain fog is completely gone, my energy is restored, I can wake up and feel like I could work out in the morning. Before, I would wake up and I would want to go back to sleep. Right. It’s almost like eating something and wanting to eat more afterwards, it doesn’t make any sense—something is clearly not being done correctly.” So, when we started helping our clients with mouth taping at night, then their daytime breathing started to improve as well because they were actually feeling more recovered from the previous night’s sleep. When we were not rested, and we feel tired when we wake up, we usually turn to stimulants, right? So, people use caffeine, coffee, like you know, other forms to stimulate themselves to get themselves going. And so, what happens unconsciously because we’re tired is we also breathe slightly differently; we’ll take more sharp, shallow breaths, because that’s going to help us increase our stress hormones to help us get through the day. Right. So, we increase cortisol and catecholamine production by changing how we breathe. So, somebody who takes short, shallow breaths are going to be making more adrenaline and noradrenaline to kind of keep themselves going. And that makes sense. However, somebody who takes normal breaths, the six-second in, six-second out, you know, coherence breathing pattern, that person is actually going to burn more fat. And so, you know, we actually change what fuel we use based on how we breathe as well. So, during the day, what we encourage people to do, while they’re, you know, there’s a breath for everything. So, if you’re sitting at your desk, checking your email, then the best way to breathe is six seconds in, six seconds out coherence breathing. While you’re sitting there listening to me speak, the best way for you to be breathing is six seconds in, six seconds out. On a Zoom meeting, same thing. Okay, what I do is I have a timer through an app called I Breathe. And what that does is it dings every six seconds, or vibrates every six seconds to let me know that it’s time for me to breathe in and out. And so, that brings my awareness to my breath. And then, you know, obviously, you can turn that off. So, it sets the cadence for you. It’s like a pace breather, right. So, you play that for a minute. It gets you into that cadence. And then, I’ve attached breathing to something simple that I do, which is think of my phone, right, or anytime I think of my email, I think of my breath. Next, anytime I think of my phone, I think of my breath next. So, I’ve attached it to something I do frequently, which serves as my prompts. I’m always coming back to my breath. When I’m exercising, there’s three different stages of breathing. So, I’m always coming back to my baseline, six in, six out, or four in, four out, whatever is comfortable for people. And then, the next stage of breathing, if I exert myself, is in through the nose, out through the mouth, in through the nose, out through the mouth. So, as we call that circular breathing. And if I’m in an all-out sprint, to I really pushed myself, then I would breathe in and out through my mouth. So, that’s gear number three. So, I’d worked my way up the gears based on my level of exertion, and then always coming back down to gears. So, I’m coming back to my baseline breathing pattern. So, the fastest way for us to recover between a set is to slow down our breathing. That resets our nervous system as well and gets us ready for that next set.
Dr. Wendy Myers
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Is there a mouth tape that you recommend, versus just using duct tape or something?
Sachin Patel
Yeah, so I recommend something called 3M Micropore Tape, it’s a surgical tape. They have sensitive versions of it as well, it’s hypoallergenic. So, most people can tolerate it really well. And you know, I have facial hair. So, it works well for me. For women, what I recommend that they do is, is they just tap it on their T-shirt or a cloth. And that just takes a little bit of the stickiness of it away. So that, you can put it vertically on your lips, and then it comes off really easily. My friend James Nestor, showed me how it’s how he takes the tape off, he actually pushes it off with his tongue. So, instead of like ripping it off, which some people do, he just pushes it with his tongue and pushes it outwards. And that’s how he takes it off. So, there’s ways that you can apply it. We just apply it vertically. So, just like this, we’re not sealing the mouth, it’s not necessary, we’re just keeping the mouth in a closed position. So, I can still talk through my mouth, I can still drink through a straw if I wanted to, I could still breathe through my mouth if I wanted to. The intention is to just to keep the jaw in a relaxed position, tongue at the roof of the mouth. And then, some people might need nasal strips. So, these nasal strips can open up the air passages. And then, I also put out oil in my nose called Nasya Oil. And here it is here. So, Nasya Oil is a sinus oil that you can apply that lubricates your sinuses, nourishes your sinuses so that, as we’re breathing in and out through our nose at nighttime, it’s purifying the air even further and supporting our sinuses and our nasal airway to function better.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Yeah, because I’m sure your nasal passages can get dry, just like your mouth can get as well. So, that makes sense. I also wonder if this could help people with sleep apnea because my father had sleep apnea really bad. At a sleep study, woke up 70 times during the night. It just destroyed his heart, destroyed his brain over many years, but the sleep study way too late. So, somebody like this, I think, could really, really help people, especially with sleep apnea.
Sachin Patel
Yeah, I think it’s so overlooked and so catastrophic to our health. One of the reasons is because many times, people who have apnea, before they’re diagnosed, they end up being mouth breathers. And when we breathe through our mouth, it dries out our saliva, and it damages our oral microbiome. As a result of that, it creates inflammation and dysbiosis in the oral cavity, which then leads to—we know there’s a direct correlation between that and heart disease. And because their aldosterone stays high, their blood pressure is always high, so that now their cardiovascular system is always strained and stressed out. And because they either stopped breathing, or they’re breathing through their mouth, there’s less oxygenation with each breath that they take. So, it’s kind of a long-standing issue for some people. And if it’s not properly addressed, or addressed too late, then a lot of damage, a little bit harder to repair further down the road.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Now, let’s talk about emotional regulation and breathing. Certainly, using breathing techniques to reduce stress plays a role in regulating your emotions as well. And you know, kind of just having a good emotional stress release, so to speak. So, let’s talk about that tie.
Sachin Patel
Yeah, absolutely. So, I want to tie this in to how we breathe during the day as well. So sometimes, you know, when we think of emotions, it’s easy for us to think of depression and anxiety. But we can also use our breath to create emotions like happiness, and, and we can use our breath to create emotions of excitement. And so, one of the things that, if you’ve ever been to Tony Robbins, you would see them do this, they do something called bellows breath. And bellows breath is where we’re rapidly breathing in and out, throwing our arms up and down in the air, breathing in and out rapidly through our nose or through our mouth, rapidly expanding the lungs and pushing the diaphragm, you know, up and down, bumping the diaphragm up and down. And what this does is it increases adrenaline and noradrenaline. So, this will raise our blood pressure, this will raise peripheral blood flow, this will prepare us for exercise or running, that’s a good, good way to warm up your lungs and your and your circulatory system. And what it also does is it increases our energy levels. So, we also call this yogic coffee. So, instead of reaching for that cup of coffee, or a stimulant in the afternoon, which can affect your sleep, it’s better to just reach for your breath, and 30 rapid breaths of you know, inhaling with your arms going up, exhaling with your arms coming down, in and out through your nose or your mouth, whichever you prefer, that’s going to give you a jolt of energy and focus even faster than a cup of coffee would. And, and then the opposite of that is true as well, if I wanted to get into a more calm and relaxed state, or if I’m having a panic attack, then, you know, people say when they’re having a panic attack, the advice that they’re giving is to take a deep breath. Right, it’s actually the opposite, what they should do is take a deep exhale, or a full exhale. Okay, because one of the reasons that people get anxious, and they start taking short, shallow breaths, the short shallow breaths actually pack the CO2 down into the lungs even further. And so, what they need to do is they need to clear the CO2. So, our state of panic, when we feel like we need to breathe, or even, you know, when our CO2 levels increase, that induces panic in people. So, by taking a full, forceful exhale, and then inhaling and letting the air out again, just getting all that CO2 out of the lungs, that’s what’s going to help people almost immediately get rid of that panic that they’re in. And then, we slow down the breath. So, we go as much as we can, into that six and six pattern. And then, if we can lengthen our exhales, then that’s going to help us as well.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Yeah, really interesting. It makes sense that the carbon dioxide buildup would be contributing to anxiety or that feeling of panic, like you’re dying, or something.
Sachin Patel
Yeah, what’s interesting. You bring up such a great point: our tolerance to CO2 is our tolerance to stress. Alright, so whether it’s physical stress, the urge to breathe comes not from wanting more oxygen; the urge to breathe actually comes from not being tolerant to CO2. And so, what’s really interesting, Wendy, is that when we increase CO2 levels in the blood, we actually get more oxygen delivered to the cells, which makes total sense, because if, for whatever reason, somebody stops breathing, we want all the oxygen that’s in their blood to get dumped to the tissues, because there’s no more oxygen coming. So, as CO2 levels increase, oxygen delivery at the tissue level also increases. It’s kind of paradoxical. But we only consume about 20% of the oxygen that we breathe in; the. 80% of it, with each breath, gets blown out. So, we actually don’t need to breathe as much as we think we do. We just need to become more resilient to CO2. So, the more resilient you are to CO2, the more resilient you are to stress, whether it’s a panic attack, or whether it’s physical exertion, or whether it’s actually death. Because, if once we stop breathing, right, losing our ability to breathe is what, you know, within five seconds, kills our mitochondria, if there’s no more oxygen, and within three to seven minutes, like, you know, all of our organs are basically dead.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Yeah. Yeah. And let’s talk about using breathing in, you know, tying that into mindfulness and meditation practices and yoga. And, you know, how can you use breathing to enhance all of these experiences and practices?
Sachin Patel
Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, yoga is actually more of a breathing modality than it is a physical modality. We contort our body into different positions, and then we breathe into those positions because, by doing so, it stimulates different organ systems in our body. And it stimulates our matrix, our myofascial matrix, as well, in those positions. So, it’s quite interesting how yoga actually works. It’s a breathing practice with movement tied into it versus movement with breathing. And so, the greatest union—yoga means union—that we can have with our body is with our breath. And so, we’re really connecting with ourselves through our breath. So, just having that awareness, I think, makes a big difference. And it allows us to look at that practice just through a slightly different lens, that it’s a breathing practice with movement versus a movement practice with breathing.
Dr. Wendy Myers
And you really, you feel so high after doing an hour, an hour and a half of yoga. I’ve been doing yoga for, you know, almost 30 years now, I hate saying that, but it’s 25 years. But yeah, it really is a breathing practice. Your breathing, it’s all about relating your breath to different movements.
Sachin Patel
And then one of the things that I’ve facilitated for, you know, literally, probably a couple of thousand people now is breathwork experiences. And these are ceremonies that we take people through where we use the breath as medicine, and create an altered state for people. And what that does is it allows them, you know, to come face to face with whatever trauma they’ve stored in their body, and work on releasing it. So just keep in mind that any trauma that we’ve experienced, the first respondent is the breath. Right. So, if we experience something stressful, we gasp, right? I had a friend of mine that I met at a conference, it was my first time meeting him. So, I didn’t know this about him. And one of the things that we did was we did some diaphragmatic trigger point work during a breathwork grounding exercise I was doing, and he started crying uncontrollably. And he later told me that, you know, I didn’t see it at the time, he told me afterwards. And he said that when he was young, he would get bullied. So, he’d always have to keep his stomach really rigid. And so, he had all these trigger points, that when he started massaging them, and releasing them, it brought back all these memories, and he was guarding himself, he didn’t feel safe. So, a lot of our emotions are stored in our diaphragm, as well. Think of when we’re laughing, right? There’s a lot of great memories that we have of us laughing, that memory’s being encoded with our breath. So, breathing changes our chemistry in our body, and it’s also a form of breathwork. When we’re sobbing, if we’re crying, right, a lot of people resist sobbing, but if you leaned into sobbing, that’s actually the fastest way to actually regulate your nervous system. When children are crying. Or when something really emotional happens to them, the worst thing we can do is tell them to stop crying, because crying actually helps the nervous system release the trauma, and not store it in the tissue. When we tell them to suck it up, or suck it back in, right, then now our body has to find a place either in the matrix or in the brain or in the diaphragm to store that emotion.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Yeah, and let’s talk about athletic performance, and using the breath to enhance athletic performance.
Sachin Patel
Yeah, sure. I mean, I predict this, my friend Astrid told me this. And I agree with them, that within the next five years, every athletic team will have a breathing coach on staff, because it truly is like the next evolution. And probably, in my opinion, probably the first thing that athletes should be focused on. Because they get instantaneous results. If I put you on a stretching program, it might be weeks or months until you see an outcome. If I put you on a strength program, it might be weeks or months, right. However, if I teach somebody how to breathe, they can utilize that skill set immediately, and immediately witness and experience the benefits of it. So, like we talked about earlier, there’s three gears of breathing. So, we baseline when we’re sitting on the bench or waiting to get put into the game, then six seconds in, six seconds out, that’s going to give us the fastest recovery. When we want to then increase our stamina, we would breathe in through the nose, out through the mouth, right. So, that helps clear out that CO2 without resistance. And then if we’re going an all-out sprint, and we want to raise blood pressure, we want to increase circulation, we want to pump that blood through every little nook and cranny in our body, then we’re going to breathe in and out through our mouth. So, breathing in and out through our mouth is appropriate because we’re rapidly expanding and contracting the lungs, and the diaphragm is going crazy as well, because that’s assisting the heart in pumping the blood. If we stopped breathing while we’re exerting ourselves, the oxygen isn’t the issue; the heart just has to work so much harder because it’s not getting the assistance from the lungs and the diaphragm to really pump that blood out through the body as rapidly as we need to. So those are the three gears, and then we just work our way back down the gears. Other ways that people can improve their athletic prowess is using a nasal strip, sorry, and these nasal strips will help open up the airway. So, it’s easier for people to intake the air into their bodies as well. So those are some really simple ways that people can improve their breathing. And then we didn’t talk about this, but just something that’s worth mentioning is how breathing affects our facial structure. So, this will affect athletic performance. So, if you ever have children and you want to live vicariously through them and you want to set them up for success in athletics, one of the first things that you want to pay attention to is how they’re breathing as a child because how they breathe as a child informs their facial structure. So, where our tongue should sit in the roof of our mouth, positions it so that it spreads our palate outwards. Otherwise, the face gets long and falls inwards. The tongue, on the other hand, pushes everything outwards, creating a nice wide palate, which creates a nice open airway. And that reduces the risk of sinus infections, adenoids, tonsils, all kinds of things. But it also creates a nice open nasal passage for them to be able to breathe through. If they don’t do that, and their tongue sits at the bottom of their mouth, they’re going to have a long narrow face, their upper palate is going to be underdeveloped. And chances are, they’re going to need braces, and they’re going to have to have teeth pulled. And that creates it even that doesn’t solve the problem. It solves a problem cosmetically, but it doesn’t solve the problem anatomically; it just creates a more narrow face, a more narrow airway. So, pay attention to how your children are breathing. When they’re watching TV, are they breathing through their mouth? When they’re doing their work, are they breathing through their mouth? If their tongue isn’t sitting in the correct position, their face is falling inwards. You just have to visualize that in your head to understand the importance of this. And so, that’s really crucial for parents to recognize. And when children breathe through their mouth, they’re more likely to have anxiety. When children breathe through their mouth, and adults breathe through their mouth, they’re more likely to crave something sweet. So, for example, let’s hypothetically say that person A is a mouth breather and person B breathes through their nose, it takes more sugar for the person who’s a mouth breather to taste the sweetness versus somebody who’s a nasal breather. So, how we breathe actually changes our airways as well. I mean, it changes our taste buds. And then also, how we breathe: mouth breathing is the number one cause of cavities. So, you know, it just creates an oral microbiome that’s not favorable. And a situation that isn’t favorable, because the saliva dries up to protect the teeth from the bacteria. And so, all these things kind of play their role in how we end up breathing as adults. Because when we breathe through our mouth, we also get a decrease in nitric oxide production. So then our immune defenses go down. And then breathing becomes also a little bit more restrictive as well for people.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Yeah, I’m probably the poster child for mouth breathing, because we end up needing lots of dental work. But yeah, I just always opened my mouth when I was sleeping, and just kind of put the covers over my mouth. Sure, I’ve reduced my oxygen even more. But yeah, you know, I definitely had so many cavities. And it makes perfect sense. Your mouth dries out, the bacteria start flourishing. So yeah. And so, so tell us about some of the programs that you have, or the program and experiences that you have to help teach people these techniques more in detail.
Sachin Patel
Yeah, well, thanks for asking. So, we actually have a program that we call Living Light. And this is a metabolic reset program, where breathing is one of the modules that we teach our clients. We kind of take an outside-the-box, embarrassingly simple approach to helping people get healthy. So, we focus on things that are so simple, but so immediately impactful, like how we breathe. We focus on lighting, as an example. Circadian rhythm, as you and many of our listeners probably know, is kind of the master clock for all of our organs and systems in our body, and it regulates our hormones and our sleep and wake cycles. So, we address that; we really lean into sleep. So, sleeping more and breathing correctly while you sleep is one of the best ways to heal and restore your body. We, of course, focus on what people eat, but also how they eat. And so many people, probably even people listening to this, don’t chew their food. Our average hunter-gatherer ancestor used to chew four hours a day. And so, you can only imagine how much that oxygenates the brain because chewing oxygenates the brain. You can imagine how much saliva is being produced to cleanse the palate; you can imagine how much stimulation there is to the jaw to cause a nice, wide, open, broad, you know, wide jaw. And, and this is why, you know, our ancestors, their teeth didn’t fall out of their face, because there was adequate stimulation to create a healthy oral microbiome and to actually create a hormetic stress on the jaw to actually cause it to expand and the teeth to stay in their place. And so, for a lot of times, these simple things for a lot of people often get overlooked. And so, the facial structure component, I think, is huge. Chewing our food is massively huge; that allows us to extract more nutrition from the foods that we’re eating. It allows us to make more enzymes to digest our food, make more saliva, so we don’t just focus on what people eat, we focus on how they eat, and we help them understand these things. So, our program, there’s 12 key pillars that we address. And what we see are just fantastic results: improved energy, rapid, safe weight loss, and permanent weight loss because people make permanent changes once they learn these skills. People start experiencing significantly less pain in their body, less inflammation, and they wake up refreshed again. And they just literally, within a few weeks, have a new body that’s working the way it’s supposed to. So, it’s essentially a health creation system that we’ve developed, that taps into some of the primitive and fundamental aspects of what it takes to be a healthy human. So, instead of trying to fix things from the outside, we teach you how things work on the inside, so you can lean into them, and work with your body instead of working on your body.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Yeah, and that sounds so key. That’s a lot of what I teach too is like, people look for these, you know, these complex solutions and protocols for their health, but they really just have to get back to the basics and practice those and just see what symptoms are left over because many times, just not getting sun or circadian rhythm off, the mouth breathing, not taking minerals and proper hydration, all these very simple things lead up to really big results. So, you have to get back to the basics.
Sachin Patel
Yeah, absolutely. So, I’d love to, if it’s okay with you, maybe point people to a resource that we have, that can be helpful. So, we believe that a great day starts with a great morning. So, we’ve got an early morning resource. It’s our morning routine that we recommend to our clients. So, if you want to start your day the way our clients start their day, you can go to morningroutine.ca and access that. And I also have another resource called Breathwork with Sachin. And so, it’s breathworkwithsachin.com. And that’s a free set of resources, all about breathing that I’ve created as well. So, if you enjoyed today’s conversation, you want to go a little bit deeper down the rabbit hole, I’ve got slides, a slideshow presentation, you can have access to Stop Snoring Guide that shows people how to stop snoring in seven days. And then I also have a fully guided breathwork session where you could just plug in your earphones or play it on a loudspeaker with your family and go through the process and have a totally transformational journey. So, that’s all free for people as well.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Okay, fantastic, Sachin. Thank you so much for joining us for the Myers Detox Podcast. Why don’t you tell us what your website is and where we can learn more about your work?
Sachin Patel
Yeah, so easy direction to point people in is morningroutine.ca. And then the other one is breathworkwithsachin.com. Those are some free resources. If you want to learn more about our practice, you can go to becomeproof.com. And you can learn all about what we do.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Yeah, fantastic. Well, thank you so much, and everyone, thanks so much for tuning in today to the Myers Detox Podcast. I’m Dr. Wendy Myers, and I love doing the show. I love bringing you all these experts from around the world every week to really help you give those, give you those little tips, give you those little upgrades you need to help you meet your health goals because you deserve health and happiness. But thanks for attending.
Disclaimer
The Myers detox podcast is created and hosted by Wendy Myers. This podcast is for information purposes only statements and views expressed on this podcast are not medical advice. This podcast including Wendy Myers and the producers disclaim responsibility for any possible adverse effects from the use of information contained herein opinions of guests are their own, and this podcast does not endorse or accept responsibility for statements made by guests. This podcast does not make any representations or warranties about guests qualifications or credibility. Individuals on this podcast may have direct or indirect financial interest and products or services referred to herein if you think you have a medical problem consult a licensed physician.
