Speaker 1:
0:00 A suicide he witnessed. A woman jumped off the top level and she landed. Obviously she died. You know she killed me a suicide and I was on first level. But you know, I was looking down and I saw, you know, pretty much saw everything.
Speaker 2:
0:12 How long did that recovery process take, which led him to Speaking to you? You're so calm.
Speaker 1:
0:21 No, no, no, actually. No, I grew up very introverted, fairly insecure, very shy, growing up as a kid In Australia. It's more just in maybe the last decade or so since, kind of like finding these different tools that I'm teaching now that has helped me basically self-regulate. You know my nervous system, just my state, basically Asia's first certified.
Speaker 2:
0:45 Wim Hofbreath, work specialist. He was trained directly by Wim, nicknamed the Iceman with 26 world records in extreme conditions. Athletes go to him to reduce stress and improve their performance.
Speaker 1:
0:57 Public speaking was, yes, probably one of the biggest fears for many people. Myself was probably one of the top, probably the biggest fears since I was a kid and it's something that I never thought I'd get over Like I would. Probably I always thought I'd take that to my grave. If I was able to manage my breath, like be aware of my breathing right then and there and not let it get to a state of shallow breathing or breath holding or apnea. That's when I realized that I could really manage my anxiety. Try to fix how you breathe, just in your waking life, daily life. First, breathing is such a wide kind of topic, just in general, just for the average person at home that's listening, or at the office, I would say just Welcome to Transforming Purpose.
Speaker 2:
1:45 My name is Aaron Pang. I'm a father of two, an author and an industry advisor at Microsoft. Each episode will bring you an inspiring person or message to help you transform your mind and to think like a kid again. Walt Disney once said that's the real trouble with the world Too many people grow up. Thank you for spending time with me today. Let's begin our conversation. Hey guys, welcome back to the new episode on Transforming Purpose. I'm really excited to be hosting this new episode with our breath work specialist. Together with me, we are Brian Lai. Now, before we go into our conversation, I pick up a bit of research on the internet. About 80% of us would unconsciously hold our breath or drop into shallow breathing when responding to emails or texts. I spend a lot of time at the desk I'm not sure about you guys and there's one particular lady, linda Stone, a writer, researcher and former executive at Apple and Microsoft, and she first coined the concept of email apnea around 2008. And when I look into this even further, apparently a lot of us are doing this thing 20,000 times wrong for a day, and that thing is breathing. So it's my great pleasure to have Brian on our show here. Brian, how are you doing today? Welcome to the show man, I'm good. Thanks, aaron.
Speaker 1:
3:01 Thanks.
Speaker 2:
3:02 I'm going to kick off our conversation with a question that our previous guests, andrew Kos, want to ask you. So at the end of our conversation then that was episode 48, I believe and he wanted to ask the next guest what is the one behavior that you or anyone can do which can stick and which can help increase our energy and improve our vitality?
Speaker 1:
3:28 OK, well, seeing as I'm a breathwork coach, I would have to say mindful breathing. So just being conscious and mindful of how you breathe is already a huge step for most people, because most people don't even aren't even aware of how they breathe day to day. As you mentioned, most will breathe 20 plus thousand times a day and most people don't even pay attention to one of those breaths and usually, when they do, it's usually because they've gone through some sort of health issue or it becomes an issue.
Speaker 2:
3:56 So yeah, when does it become an issue?
Speaker 1:
4:00 It's. I mean, that's a it's a bit of a more complex question because the human body is very functional, so very resilient. So a lot of people they estimate, just in modern, modern cities, modern society, that roughly seven out of 10, eight out of 10 people breathe dysfunctionally or they breathe suboptimally. But the human body can basically survive for a long, long, long time breathing in an inefficient way or breathing in a dysfunctional way. So when does it start to become a problem? So for the average person, this is and this is based off something from Dr Belisa Vannage is that between the ages of five and 10 is when usually a human breath from usually kind of a perfect kind of breath, and then from between five and 10 years old is usually when it kind of shifts to a more dysfunctional breathing, so maybe something like mouth breathing, shallow breathing, stuff like that.
Speaker 2:
4:54 You know, while you're you're narrating the whole, the whole experience and trend. I think I subconsciously pay more attention on how I'm breathing, while I'm talking to you. Well, that's your breath work.
Speaker 1:
5:07 For me, it was just a personal kind of journey, so I had no aspirations to be a breathwork coach. I didn't even know what breathwork was before I found it, which was back in 2015,. I think that's when I discovered it and I was just basically going through a rough period of my own life, just going through like a bad period of just mental health, like depression, anxiety, stuff like that.
Speaker 2:
5:33 What was the trigger? You don't mind Sorry. What was the trigger for your mental health issue?
Speaker 1:
5:41 It's a bit of a long story but I was in finance before that I moved into trying to make a movie, trying to make films, and then what happened is like for that period of my life, like in my 20s and younger, I was chasing, I guess, that kind of stuff in life, chasing fame and chasing riches and so on, that kind of stuff. But anyway, I started doing this movie project with a friend of mine after I was bored at the bank. So we quit our jobs and then we started doing this project and we were trying to make a proper movie, like a feature film movie for Hollywood. It was a horror movie and basically we made the film, we filmed the film but we ran out of money for post-production. So I came to Hong Kong to start to raise money for the film, to finish the film. And it was during this period where I was in Hong Kong and I was kind of, I guess, trying to meet and mingling with more affluent people and some people that are famous, and in that process that's when I kind of realized that a lot of these people that I was really aspiring to be or had as role models, that they weren't really that happy. A lot of them were quite miserable or lonely or insecure, so they had basically a lot of things that I didn't realize. I only saw the surface of it. I didn't realize that underneath that it wasn't what I thought it was. So from that experience it kind of shattered my whole paradigm of what happiness was and what I was trying to chase in life. And then it was after that, that's when I kind of felt really lost and I'd just gone through like a breakup and I was like pretty much broke. How old were you? This was my late 20s and then pretty much fell into a state of like depression. Now I'd look, looking back, it was like a darkened out of the soul kind of thing. But during that it was, yeah, it was like a depra. It was probably lasted about three, four months, yeah, while I was in Australia, and during that time was when I started to kind of start to look at, you know, how the mind works, how the body works, and just pay more attention to it and trying to figure things out. And then my brother was the one that recommended getting into meditation, as he saw I was going through a bit of like a bit of a challenging period and he recommended maybe I should do meditation. So we actually signed up together to something called vipassana meditation and that's that 10 day retreat sign of retreat that you hear about that's all around the world and that was our first time basically getting to anything related to, you know, consciousness or anything like that. And then we did that, which was an absolute game changer for me, completely changed my life. But it wasn't the most practical thing back then for me, because they recommend basically meditating for one hour in the morning, one hour in the evening, for two hours a day, and for me I kept there for a while but it wasn't quite working for me. And then about Was it because? of the duration? Yeah, because duration when you have a busy life sometimes it's quite difficult to just allocate. At the end of the day it is priorities. So I'm not trying to make any excuses, so it was my laziness towards it. But at that time I then found I then randomly found him off and whatever he was saying in that documentary that was playing was the vice documentary on YouTube and I just randomly kind of auto-played and popped up and I just started watching it because I was just too lazy to change it and just everything he was speaking about was resonating with me. So he was speaking about how all the things that he could teach could strengthen your immune system, can strengthen your mental well-being, your physical performance and all these kind of different things that I myself have been kind of battling with for a long time. And I had been dealing with anxiety for probably like 15 years of my life, from high school, probably from maybe even before high school.
Speaker 2:
9:53 You're such a calm guy, Like speaking to you. You're so calm.
Speaker 1:
9:56 No, no, no, Actually no, I grew up very introverted, fairly insecure, fairly shy, growing up as a kid in Australia. It's more just in the last, maybe the last decade or so, since, kind of like finding these different tools that I'm teaching now. That has helped me basically self-regulate my nervous system, how I Just my state basically so, which is basically why I teach this stuff now, because I was mentioning too before the podcast started that public speaking was my biggest fear in life and that's basically now my job. So breath work does really work.
Speaker 2:
10:39 So what were some of the? So, when you feel anxious, what were some of the behaviors you mentioned that started like 15 years ago, when you was still in high school? Right, yeah, yeah, when did you start?
Speaker 1:
10:49 feeling anxiety. To be honest, I'm not 100% sure when it started, because when I look back, when I was actually experiencing anxiety, I didn't even know it was anxiety. I would just start to feel sick, I would feel nauseous, I would feel like sometimes like throwing up. But back then, when I was experiencing as a kid, and even after high school, in college and even during my first job, it lasted probably for most of my 20s and in my teens. It was really until it wasn't really until I became a breath work coach and I figured out how to fix it through breathing techniques and understand the nervous system. That's when I looked back and realized that what I was experiencing for that time was actually anxiety. But during that I had no idea. So I'm actually not sure what treated it. To be honest, I remember being a pretty confident kid up to a certain point and then I'm not sure what happened. But somewhere along the way I do have a theory and that theory is that I grew up in Australia and, because of all the allergies I had in Australia, I began to mouth breathe at a certain point in time as a kid and I have a theory that that was kind of that turning point in my life where I went from nasal breathing to mouth breathing and that caused that sort of causing anxiety in my life.
Speaker 2:
12:14 Right, right, okay. So I'm afraid you don't want to wait long enough to decide to go for the skills you have as a emb及 short introduction of like, why him? Why why when like why did you decide to follow.
Speaker 1:
12:26 Well, why? When I didn't, to be honest, didn't really pick him, he kind of just popped off, but everything he was saying just completely resonated with me, which is, you know, the reason why I went and learned from him. But at that time I had no clue who this guy was. I had no clue. I didn't know what breathwork was. I didn't know what you know, I didn't know any other stuff that he was doing the world records, the world records that he broke. But I guess something vibe, something vibe. I guess something that I was looking to. I guess kind of issues that I was dealing with in my life that I guess he offered an answer to, and I guess that's why I chose him. But at that point in time I didn't really know anybody else. And yeah, back in 2016 was when I first started training with women for those that don't know, when, women's is from Netherlands, I think is in his early 60s by now, and he is basically the guy that created the, the Wim Hof method, which is a very popular modality, which includes things like breathing techniques and cold exposure and and meditation, mindset, those kind of things. So Wim is someone that's quite famous. Now he is just to be, just to kind of make it clear that basically breathing techniques that Wim does is not something that he created. You know these existed a long, long time ago and he never claims to create these techniques. But what he has done is that he's and he's not even the first person to bring these methods to the west. I think he's like the fifth one or the sixth one to bring it to the west and there's, you know, there's monks and yogis that can do these kind of techniques in the in the east. But where Wim is really kind of where he's made his mark, is that he's basically aside from breaking all the world records that he's broken is he's let basically scientists test him for, I believe, the last decade and he's allowed them to test him like getting pig, to see that what these methods that he's been doing, how do they actually impact the human body, and they're still doing ongoing studies and scientific research. And I think every year or every two or three years, there's always some kind of new update that they release. So all these kind of new updates like scientific research updates that you can always find on the Wim Hof website. But that's what Wim is doing, that's what, and he has also changed basically a lot of people's understanding of how the human body works, in terms of he was using breathing techniques to basically influence a part of the nervous system that for the most part, you know, doctors and scientists thought that it couldn't be changed, it couldn't be influenced consciously by the human, by a human, and he demonstrated that you can, and that's one that I think they even had to rewrite some school textbooks or some physiology books in in Netherlands because of that.
Speaker 2:
15:25 Wow, I know that, other than Wim Hof, you're also certified in other methodologies as well, right? So one of the I don't know what are the top five back word approaches other than Wim Hof. What are? What are?
Speaker 1:
15:38 they. So I would, to be honest, I wouldn't say there's any top five. You know, because everyone is different and depending on you know how you are, where you are right now, your baseline, what your goals are then it really depends. You know there's different methods for different things. So there's not one standard like, okay, wim Hof is the best, or reburthing is the best, or Bredeco method is the best. So there's several different ones. I can tell you what the most popular ones are, but to say that they're the best ones is a I can't. I can't say that because it's just different. But you have things like, say, for example, wim Hof method, that it is popular. You have oxygen advantage. You have, like reburthing, holotropic breath work, shamanic breath work. You have, you know, people that are using all these different techniques together for performance, like XBT for example. Guys are doing really cool work, like Casper and Brian McKenzie, and so there's a lot of people doing. There's a lot of kind of stuff in the breathwork world, on the breathwork breath world, and I would say I'm still learning and all the stuff that I've learned has has its pros and cons. So Wim Hof method, for example, is, you know it's they call the Gwech, the, the gateway drug for breathwork, because for most people that try Wim Hof method they have this kind of, this kind of experience that they've probably never had before, in a very short amount of time, and it kind of gives them this kind of wow factor and it kind of it pulls them into that world of what else can breathing or breathing techniques do. But the Wim Hof method, for example, is not for everybody, you know, because it uses controlled hyperventilation for a lot of the techniques. For someone that's, for example, more prone to anxiety or panic attacks or something like that, then those people may not benefit the most from Wim Hof method. They may benefit from certain aspects of Wim Hof method, but they may benefit more from, say, for example, bredaiko method or something like that. So it really depends and with this thing it's something that if you're, if anyone is interested in working the breath, they should, you know, find a breathwork coach and you know, consult them and, yeah, consult them and and and see if you resonate with with what they're teaching, and but one of the most important things is also the, the teacher themselves, the guide themselves, the coach themselves, and and you know how do you resonate with them yeah, what should you look out for?
Speaker 2:
18:15 I mean, what should people look out for when they're finding a coach, right, because there's so many coaches out there, okay, and I think, just before the start of this conversation you were saying it's so easy to you know, with the internet and social media it's so easy to call yourself an expert or master these things like how do people judge and differentiate?
Speaker 1:
18:31 yeah it's. I mean that's. I have this conversation quite often with a lot of fellow breathwork coaches, breathwork mentors, and it's even trickier now in today it's breathwork already is something that's not it's not a very well regulated industry. You know, it's still a very it's kind of the wild west. You have people at Wim Hof who start his own school. You have people like Dan Brilay. You have people that stick. You know they start their own school and it's based on, kind of, I guess, their reputation and their experience, but there's no, for example, overall enforced governing body kind of thing. There's a lot of different governing bodies that are created, so it's still a bit like the wild west. So, in terms of how someone would pick a good coach, I would say is especially now these days is really do your research, which because, especially during the pandemic in the last two or three years you've had just a wave of new, brand new coaches in the industry that a lot of them don't have much experience. A lot of them have maybe got certified online, you know, because during lockdown you couldn't travel and a lot of these people don't have live experience. You know in person experience and I'm not going to name names. I even know certain people that I've you know kind of lied or even exaggerated about the experience and in this kind of industry it's very hard to kind of tell you know. So anyone can just say anything. You know, anyone can just kind of copy, you know. You know watch someone teach breath work on YouTube and then just kind of copy exactly what they say. But there's a lot more to it and that kind of shows in the experience. But on the surface level it's hard to, it's hard to kind of see these things. So what I would say is like look into that teacher specifically, look into who they've learned from the certifications that they have, and look into. You know, don't kind of dive straight into that person. You know, maybe just have a consultation call with them first, maybe just have a maybe just initial consultation session with them first, before you kind of invest, you know, a bunch of money or a bunch of time into this specific person because even though you know you might have found the right technique or the right modality that's works for you, but maybe that coach you don't resonate with that coach because with breath work, aside from, like, say, just the science, scientific stuff and the performance stuff, a lot of it is, you know, works on your trauma, it works on your emotions and you you're put in a very vulnerable spot. And in this kind of work, you know, when you're in a very vulnerable spot, there's this saying where vulnerability plus safety is healing, but vulnerability and when you're not safe it leads to trauma. So when you are opening yourself up to work with someone you know and you're opening up to work with, like your trauma or, you know, in a child or your past and things like that, you really need to work with someone you feel safe with as well, that can hold space for that session and be able to guide you. You know, and it's not just you know the techniques that they know, but it's also that as well yeah, I believe.
Speaker 2:
21:55 Yeah, so you touch on wind pop is not for everyone because he's a lot of hyperventilation technique, right? What is hyperventilation technique?
Speaker 1:
22:05 plus. So it's so with the windmuff method you'll notice that. You know they say that you can either breathe in through your nose, out through your mouth, or in through your mouth, out through your mouth, and you'll notice that you take a math like they'll. How they guide you is you take a big breath in and your breath, your inhale, is generally larger than the exhale. Okay, and that leads to a disturbance in your, in the basic auctions, to your two kind of ratios, and that basically leads to changes in your body's physiology. So when I say the windmuff method is not, is not necessarily the most productive for everyone, it's not a diss at all to the windmuff method. It's something I completely change my life and I love wind and I owe so much to windmuff. It's just that these are all different tools, basically, you know, and you just got to find the right tool for the right purpose or for the right goal. So even for example, you know, I myself have dealt with anxiety for a long time, but I've learned to kind of manage my anxiety now through breathing techniques and through different other techniques as well. But for me windmuff method works fine for me, you know. But back in, for example, maybe when I was in high school and I didn't have a good understanding of anxiety and my nervous system. And then, if someone just asked me that you know, do 30 hyperventilating or superventilating type of breaths that might trigger, you know, an anxiety attack or anxiety within me, you know. So it really depends. You know you can also, for example, do windmuff method in a much calmer pace and much calmer pattern, so you can always, you know, alter and shift kind of things to suit, to best suit that client or the person, the people that you're working with, which is why it's always good to just have, you know, a coach or specialist that you do work with. You know there are people, for example, that do things like the windmuff method that they don't follow the, the rules and the guidelines properly. And, for example, when you do things like hyperventilation and you go under water, there's a danger of shallow water blackout, okay, and that's not specific to windmuff method, it's just specific. It's just for kind of how, whenever you disturb your, your breathing, through things, a hyperventilation, you know it happens in free diving, it happens in all these different kind of things, but it's not specifically free diving or windmuff method because they give you specific and ample safety warnings. It's the people that don't follow those safety warnings. Or outside of boundaries, exactly right. And you know there's people that do these techniques go under water and sometimes they almost drown, or sometimes they do drown and they actually die. You know even someone really really smart, this guy called josh whiteskins, who did this. He wrote this book called art of learning and I think he was like like a tai chi champion, a chess prodigy, and he's a really really smart guy and even some like him, I believe, underestimated the how, basically, how powerful windmuff method can be and the dangers of it, and he almost died. You know he was found, I believe that he he basically passed out, he did the windmuff method, obviously not correctly went under the water swimming and then he passed out and luckily someone found him, I think you know, floating face down, so but same thing obviously saved him in time. But things like this happen when you know things like breathing practice aren't practiced safely. So, um, I'm not sure if that answers your question oh, you did.
Speaker 2:
25:38 You did. Now I'm gonna go back to breathwork in a moment, but you touch on public speaking Like before the start of our episode and you mentioned that you actually don't like public speaking and you have. Now you have ways to control that anxiety and fear. I think most of us we have public speaking. You know when we're, when we're being asked to speak on the spot, when we have that black moment, don't know what to say. People feel anxious, right? How can people calm their nerves?
Speaker 1:
26:04 I mean, it wasn't, it wasn't like an overnight process for me. Um, it was like public speaking was, yes, probably one of the biggest fears for many people. Myself was probably one of the top, probably the top the biggest fear since I was a probably since I was a kid, and it's something that I never thought I'd get over Like I would probably. I always thought I'd take that to my grave and it was when it kind of clicked. Was was when I was giving time to give workshops, breathwork workshops and, honestly, the first, the first, you know, I would say the first 20, 30 workshops I gave, I was a mess, you know. I was like sweating, like nervous, sweating, like I was there, I was there.
Speaker 2:
26:57 I was there, you were there.
Speaker 1:
26:58 Yeah, I was there, I can't remember which one that was, but I remember like not your workshop.
Speaker 2:
27:04 But you know, you know.
Speaker 1:
27:05 I remember like wearing I think I was wearing like a like a white T-shirt, which is just the worst mistake because, you see, this Did you play on the aircon?
Speaker 2:
27:16 I did.
Speaker 1:
27:18 I think I was saying the room was very hot but um, but yeah, I think everyone kind of does that, um, but it took me. Honestly, it took me about a year before I really got rid of my fear of public speaking, like a year of just constant practicing over and over and over again. But it was around maybe two or three months when I started doing this consistently. Was was when I realized that I wasn't really practicing what I was preaching like right then, and there was what I was noticing while I was holding my breath. So what you mentioned at the very beginning of the workshop with email app near, but this is just basically daytime app.
Speaker 2:
27:54 Yeah, that's what it. All your energy is to your brain, right?
Speaker 1:
27:56 Um, yeah. So basically I'll notice that when I was presenting in front of everyone that I was holding my breath, and when you hold your breath that kind of puts your nervous system into a state of mostly like stress. And that's when I know, that's when I realized that I'll wait, I'm not actually my breathing is causing my nervous system to be in this state of stress or it's exacerbating that stress or that anxiety. And that's when I realized that, okay, let me just breathe and just breathe calmly, you know, breathe through my nose, not the mouth, you know, and nice long exhales, nice calm breathing. And then that's when I noticed that if I was able to manage and regulate my breathing in real time during these presentations or during, you know, like podcasts that I was doing before all these things that would usually give me anxiety, if I was able to manage my breath, like be aware of my breathing right then and there, and not let it get to a state of shallow breathing or breath holding or apnea, and that's when I realized that I could really manage my anxiety. You know so, because my nervous system, it stops my nervous system from swinging into like a, like a fight, a flight state or survival state, and that's where you get anxiety. Yep, so just able to manage my breathing, to manage my nervous system.
Speaker 2:
29:16 Yeah, do you agree with the number? Like 20,000 times? Do most of us like, do this, like so wrong on a daily basis? Like you work with so many people?
Speaker 1:
29:24 Yeah, I don't know, because I've never sat there and counted, but most experts and most schools that I've been to would say it's somewhere between, like, say, 25, 25 to 30,000. But it really is. It really is different for everyone, but I would say, yeah, from what I've heard it's it's around between 20, 25 to 30,000, somewhere between there.
Speaker 2:
29:47 Yeah, so for people like myself, right, I spent a lot of time at my desk for professionals. What are the common issues that you're seeing by the people who come and see you?
Speaker 1:
29:58 One of the biggest issues these days is, basically, people are just dealing with a lot of stress, a lot of anxiety, and they don't know what to do. They have no tools or they don't have tools that seem to work for them. A lot of people are going through burnout. I work with a lot of CEOs, execs and like high kind of high performance, high level people, and a lot of these people are just either burnt out or on the verge of burning out and it's all. Just it all stems from just dysfunctional breathing patterns, just improper like dysfunctional breathing mechanics, just basically habits that don't really serve us, that we've picked up over the course of our lives, and, very simply, things like shallow breathing, breathing into using your auxiliary breathing muscles as opposed to engaging a diaphragm and breathing through your mouth instead of breathing through your nose for most of the day. So simple kind of things like that that can very easily be corrected. It might take a bit of time to correct, but it can be corrected or it can be greatly improved and it's just simple things like. There's a lot more to it, obviously, but just very simply for some that's sitting at the desk for people that based in an office mostly, especially in Hong Kong. I would check your posture, how you're breathing in, because a lot of times you're sitting at your desk like this. So when you breathe, it restricts you from or compromises you from expanding laterally instead of, and then so what happens is a lot of people, when they take a breath, they kind of expand this way instead. You know, vertically instead of horizontally, and you know, for example, they like your people that listen to this if they're sitting at the desk, you can just, for example, take a few deep breaths and just observe and assess, like, where you're breathing into. You know a lot of people that you ask them to take a deep breath, they will do this and for, obviously, they're expanding their body like this. You know, and that's optimally not how we should be breathing. We should be expanding laterally 360, all the way around, because the lungs are in our, in our thoracic cavity, in our chest, and it's not just in the front, it's also in the back as well. So it's, if you look at it, for example, at a kid or a baby they expand kind of all the way around, whereas because we see at the desk all day and you know various other factors, you tend to get kind of stuck in this position and then you're breathing kind of molds to that kind of it. It becomes functional to do to that position but over time it ends up being dysfunctional because it no longer serves you.
Speaker 2:
32:41 Yep Can exercise help with that.
Speaker 1:
32:45 Exercise can help tiny bit, it can help some of it, it can help certain aspects of better breathing, better cardio. But in terms of fixing your breathing mechanics, how you breathe, where you're breathing from, those generally need to be targeted specifically. You know, for example, we have like roughly like 11, I think you're like 11 pounds of breathing muscles or somewhere around that that are used for breathing or help assist with breathing, and a lot of these muscles aren't specifically. They don't get, they don't really get strengthened or they don't really get targeted just by doing exercise. You need to specifically target them and do specific exercises, and that's what we do in a lot of my workshops sorry, more advanced workshops and also with one-on-one clients is that's what we work on is kind of fixing those things over a period of maybe several weeks or a few months or maybe even a year or something like that.
Speaker 2:
33:45 Yep, can you talk about the, I guess, the mental, both the mental health and the physical health implication from prolonged, I guess, breathing apnea or shallow breathing, Like? How does it, how does it harm our body?
Speaker 1:
34:01 Well, it affects in various different ways, just from the chemistry just over breathing shallow breathing, it puts your body into very like over time, like respiratory acid, like acidosis, and you know if you hear about your body being alkaline and acidic, so it starts to lean more towards the acidic side and then over time, you know, if that lasts chronically, then that ends up being issue like healthy issues over time in basically in your body. And not just that, not just from like a chemistry point of view, but just from, say, for example, if you're shallow breathing, how that impacts your nervous system. You know, if you're shallow breathing, if you're breathing through the mouth, for example, a lot of times how your nervous system, how it's the information that's receiving when you breathe that way, is that you're in survival mode or you're in a state of stress or you're in fight or flight, you're in something like that or freeze or something. And when your body is constantly in a chronic state of stress then over time you know it leads to things like burnout, you know, or at least the things like you know depression and so on. So you know breathing is something that if you think about, you know the most important things to a human being. You know we can survive from what I believe survived several weeks without food, several days without water. But air oxygen is one of the few things that you know. A few minutes without it and you know we're done. But it's something that people don't really focus on. Yeah, because we can't see yeah, because it's it's something you can't really see, it's something that's you know it's not, like it's not tangible, you know, and a lot of those things. Because you can't see, it's, it's hard to quantify and measure and we don't really pay attention. Everyone thinks that you know, when you're born you breathe and you breathe perfectly and it's automatic and that's it, and that's really the furthest thing from the truth, at least in these days, in today's society. When you're born you're not breathing. Well, you know you're breathing. You know you're breathing naturally, well, up to maybe a certain age you're so young age but after that you're not breathing at a how an adult is supposed to breathe. You know just, and it's not just purely from breathing. You know, if you look at, for example, how your mouth is, your tongue posture, things like that, if you look at, say, john Mu and Dr John and Mark Mu they're people that look at those they, they did they create something called muing which has a lot to do with your tongue posture and where your tongue sits in your mouth. So all these different things have kind of led humans to breathe inefficiently and it's led people to basically breathe dysfunctionally across across the board. You know, I think I think I'm going off on a bit of a tangent here, but in like, I think, in this really great book on breathing called I think it's called breath, breathe or breath I think it's a breath by James Nesta came out in the pandemic a couple years ago. It's a really, really great book. I really highly recommend anyone that's even remotely interested in the topic of breathing or breathwork or just health in general and well being. I would highly recommend that book. But they, when I read that book, what I found out is that if you, for example, look at if you look at, for example, people's teeth in one society right, why is it that most people have to take out wisdom teeth or take out teeth? Right, that's. If you look at every other animal in the wild, that's not a normal thing to have a crowded jaw, to have to have teeth taken out, right. So what kind of went wrong? Because this is pretty much all across the world, almost right. And if what happens is if you look at, for example, humans or humans that come from tribes or places that are untouched by modern society, like your Africa, for example, you go to some really indigenous tribes there and you'll see that their jaw and their teeth are perfect. They have a perfect jaw structure, it's not crowded, it's not small and they have perfect teeth. It's like a toothpaste commercial and whereas you look at you know modern day society, you know, you look at people that don't get braced in stuff, it's you know, their jaws completely crowded, their teeth is complete all over. It's a complete mess. And what happened, like you would think it's opposite, right, but what happened is at least from what they explained. The research that was in the book is that it was due to the industrial age, and during the industrial age what happened was industrialization of food. So with industrialization of food, food became softer and more processed and what they were said in the book is that before this, the average human would be chewing on average six hours a day. I think it's six, I believe it's six hours on average, six hours a day. But after industrial age, chewing became a lot.
Speaker 2:
39:12 Wow, that's a lot of time spent chewing on food, exactly, and you know, in.
Speaker 1:
39:15 Hong Kong. You know, in Hong Kong and Asia, like you look at food like congee or you look at food like noodles. It would be nice if we get six minutes for yeah, you can just literally just like wolf it down and chew it like five times, you know, and you're done with your lunch. So the stimulus that humans were required to develop the whole mouth and jaw and skull in a certain way, in an optimal way, was basically compromised, taken away because of this. And what happened over time is not just that you draw a shrink, I believe over three generations after the industrial age, or three generations, I believe. It pretty much hit like a majority of people. And then what happens is it's not just you know, your teeth, your teeth are crowded, your jaw is crowded is that that also leads to a more restricted airway, so that compromises your breathing. So pretty much almost everyone in modern society across the board has compromised breathing just from that perspective.
Speaker 2:
40:14 Yeah. Can you tell us, or can you educate us, what is the right way to breathe?
Speaker 1:
40:24 The right way to breathe. Once again, it really depends. Just, if you just read a textbook or something, then the correct way to breathe would be, say, through the nose. Through the nose, you want to engage the diaphragm. You want to breathe low into your diaphragm. Your breath should be light, it should be calm, it should generally be slow. You want to breathe at roughly, say, five to six breaths per minute. Aim to get to that level or to that pace. Bear the posture and everything like that, having your tongue sitting at the roof of your mouth All the time, all the time. Yeah, your tongue. So when you breathe through the nose, your lips should be sealed and your tongue should be sealing the roof of the mouth. A lot of people that look into nasal breathing or you hear about nasal breathing being the ideal way to breathe or the optimal way to breathe. What a lot of people miss, or even a lot of coaches miss, is that it's not just closing your mouth and sealing your lips, it's also where you place your tongue. It's called your tongue position or your tongue posture, and your tongue should be If you say like that's the roof of your mouth, that's the teeth, your tongue a lot of people's tongue. It touches the kind of the bottom teeth and where the gum's me, but it kind of drops down. They should be sealing at the very roof of the mouth, for example. You see a lot of people that they might not be overweight, but you see a bit of a double chin there.
Speaker 2:
41:55 I feel like you're talking about me. I've got more than double. Now what is that?
Speaker 1:
42:00 For the people that aren't overweight. It's actually the tongue. It's a bottom of the tongue dropping down. When you have your tongue dropping down, that's what's causing that bit of a double chin. When you have a proper tongue posture and put it back on the roof of your mouth, that disappears. I need to see you.
Speaker 2:
42:16 after this episode I'm going to ask a question on behalf of our children. I've got two boys. My older boy is now four and a half and he grinds his teeth very often, almost on a daily basis. I've taken him to dentist and they've looked at this teeth and the dentist basically said it's normal. Most of the children do it. From your point of view, is it normal and is there any way that parents can do to sort of help alleviate it?
Speaker 1:
42:44 Okay, I'll just be upfront and I'm not an expert at that I can't really answer that question from I can't compare what the dentist is saying, At least because it could be various different factors that's causing this grinding. I can't really comment on that. If it's maybe from anxiety, or it's from nerves, or they're not able to kind of ground their nerve system back to a calm state before they go into sleep and maybe that's causing anxiety or causing them to be in a certain state that cause them to grind their teeth, I do understand that there's many other reasons that could lead to teeth grinding but, for example, if it's the maybe the reason that I gave the example I gave, then you could, for example, do things like breathing techniques or just calming your breath down before going to bed so that they're in a like a rest and rest and digest state of the nerve system, Cause that's when you're supposed to. When you go to bed. You don't want your nervous system to be wired and in a survival state or fight a flight mode which is in a lot. For example, a lot of times you get people to say you know, don't go on gadgets and don't, you know, don't go on anything too stimulating before you, before you bed. You know there's stuff in terms of your chemistry involved, like you look at Andrew Huberny talks about all this kind of stuff but at least from a nervous system point of view, and you're the state that you're in, then you know if you're wired and you're in that awake state, then you're in that. You know system is in this state and your body wants to go to sleep. But you know, even though you might eventually get to sleep, you know system is not in the optimal state to get, you know, some deep REM sleep or some optimal sleep. So, once again, like, try, maybe some, try some calm breathing techniques, maybe like leading, leading up to bed, you know, maybe half an hour, an hour leading up to bed, do something like maybe four, seven, eight breathing technique, or maybe a bit of tactical breathing or box breathing. And all these different techniques are very easy to find online, you know. You can find them on YouTube, you can find them on Google. There's any sort of kind of down regulating breathing techniques and fine, I do find the four, seven, eight breathing technique by Dr Andrew Whale W-E-I-L is very, very useful for sleeping right, For falling asleep or for people that wake up in the middle of sleep and can't get up.
Speaker 2:
45:15 Right, can you talk a bit more about that? Four, seven, eight and or even a box breathing.
Speaker 1:
45:20 Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, once again we're four, seven, eight breathing breathing method. So a lot of these breathing methods are, you know, originally from you know Pranayama, yoga, stuff like that, but it's, you know, used by certain people, some doctors and stuff these days and kind of re-named or repackaged in a certain way. But the four, seven, eight breathing method is basically it's a down regulation breathing method, so it calms you down and a lot of times it really kind of calms you down to the point where people do fall asleep. So I don't even teach in, I don't guide people with my workshops through it. I do share it sometimes, but I have noticed that some people actually do fall asleep, so I don't actually guide them through it. But this is a very simple technique that basically you basically breathe through the nose for the first four. So you close your mouth, seal your lips and once again the tongue has to sit at that right place, what I mentioned before, sealing the roof of the mouth. There's something more to it than just what I mentioned. There is some sort of like pranayama, like chi kind of thing connected to it as well. But just from a science point of view, you close your mouth, tongue sits at the roof of the mouth. Okay, so proper tongue posture. You then inhale through the nose, calmly, from diaphragm Okay, for roughly four counts. You know it doesn't have to be four seconds, but roughly four counts. And then you then hold your breath after the inhale for seven counts. And then you exhale through the mouth, through post lips Okay, like for eight counts. Okay, so that's what it's. That's why it's called four, seven, eight. So you breathe in through the nose, lip seal, tongue posture in the right place. You breathe in through the nose for kind of four. You hold your breath nice and calmly, for a count of seven, then gently exhale through the mouth for a count of eight. You can also exhale through the nose for a count of eight as well. And when you exhale, when you make that exhale, you want to make that exhale actually extend for the count of eight, instead of just exhale only one, go and then counting to eight. Okay, so you want to lengthen the exhale, the same as the inhale. You want to breathe in for four instead of just breathing in and then counting two, three, four, right, okay. So you're going to do four, hold for seven, exhale for eight, okay, and you do that about, I would say four times Generally should be enough to feel the effects of calming down. And you know, for most people usually by then they're either super calm or they may be falling asleep.
Speaker 2:
47:56 Like you right so mellow. It's a very different energy that you bring into the chat here, oh, okay, great. Yeah, can you immediately feel like a change?
Speaker 1:
48:05 in energy. At the moment you're sitting down sitting down here with me.
Speaker 2:
48:08 Yeah, great. So, you're breathing.
Speaker 1:
48:11 Yeah, so the box breathing is literally how the name describes. Okay. So there's generally, for most, for each breath is four corners of a breath. There's the inhale, then usually a bit of a pause and the exhale and a bit of a pause. So what box breathing is is it basically takes these ratios, so these four corners of the breath, and basically makes the ratios the same. So generally, the first ratio you start off with is with a count of four. So you breathe in for a count of four. So, once again, just like the previous method, you want to breathe in gradually for a count of four and then you hold your breath at the top, you pause the breath at the top for a count of four, okay. Then you exhale out for a count of four and then you hold your breath at the bottom of the exhale for a count of four. So it's like a box and it's through the nose. So you breathe in for the nose, you exhale through the nose, okay. So you, the important thing is you make the ratios the same, make it or as similar as possible and, for example, it doesn't have to be four seconds, you can just count to four. So you can, for example, count four faster if you're just a beginner, or you can count to a lesser number, like three, or you get better and better at it. You can extend that count to five, you know, gradually extended to 10, 15, 20, you know, you can get much more advanced at these techniques. For example, one of the guys that really is loves like box breathing and talks about box breathing a lot is a Navy Seal and I think is an ex Navy Seal now, mark Devine, and I think he was one of the guys that introduced box breathing to some of the people in the Navy Seals. And what he likes to do is he starts to like, he likes to add like an affirmation to the box breathing. You know, during the inhale he says so an affirmation, during the exhale say so an affirmation, or so an mantra, and he believes that that makes it a lot more powerful as well. But just from a purely scientific, practical point of view is just basically expand the four corners of the breath to an equal ratio.
Speaker 2:
50:19 So I mean, early in the introduction, I mentioned about email apnea, and then, from time to time, when we are concentrating on certain tasks, we have a tendency to hold our breath. Right, how do you? What's your comment on this habit? Is it a good habit, a bad habit, something that we should try to remove it, or is it okay to do it every now and then? What's your thought?
Speaker 1:
50:42 It's definitely a habit that we want to eliminate. Okay, Obviously it's not going to be that easy to just eliminate overnight, especially people who have been doing it for years or decades or for a majority of their lives. So breath holding, so unconscious breath holding, things like email apnea, is not good for you, okay, but that's not to say that breath holding is bad for you. You have apnea exercises in free diving. You have apnea exercises in breath training. You hold your breath in the Wim Hof method, for example, and there's certain exercises you do in oxygen vantage that you hold your breath as well. So breath holding itself is not a bad thing, depending on how you're approaching it. And there's definitely benefits of doing breath holding if applied in the right way. But in terms of when it doesn't serve you is when you do it unconsciously and that's when, for example, when you're email apnea and when you're doing email, for example. But if you look at it from a broader point of view, a lot of times it's actually when you're concentrating. When you're focusing and concentrating, a lot of times you hold your breath when you put this on. I read in, I learned from Dan Bralee, one of my mentors, one of my teachers, and he's the coach of the breath work coach of Tony Robbins and, like Mark Devine, the Navy Seal guy, and even just putting your key unlocking a door in that few moments of concentrating and putting your key in the door and locking it. For most people they hold their breath. So you don't necessarily hold your breath when you're stressed out. A lot of times you hold your breath when you're trying to focus and trying to concentrate as well, and that also doesn't serve us. So the more you build awareness towards this in your life. So one of the big things in breath work or breath training a lot of people kind of they don't focus on or they or they maybe they're not taught at all is it's not just breathing techniques or changing the way you breathe, it's breath awareness, just being aware of your own breathing patterns and developing an awareness, just like an awareness of you know how, like how you feel internally, inter reception, or how you feel externally, like. It's like almost like another sense of and it took me a while to develop. It took me maybe like a few months to consciously pay attention and check in with my breath every hour or every couple of hours and then over time obviously it sounds like a lot of work to probably the listeners of you know constantly checking your breath, checking your breath, but over time it becomes like a natural thing and even right now I'm aware of how I'm, how I'm breathing, you know and I'm aware of pretty much how I'm breathing for most of my, most of my daily life. So so, for example, now, when you know, I saw, when I started with breath work, I would have, you know, like an half an hour practice or maybe a two hour practice in the morning, a daily practice or after every single day, and I felt like that's how I would be getting the most out of my, out of breath work or my, or meditation or whatever I still do meditation I do that for different purposes, but in terms of breath work, what I do myself now is I don't really even have a practice myself. I don't wake up in the morning and do a breath of practice anymore. What I do try is really have that breath awareness and being able to manage my breath in real time throughout my daily life. I find that's the most for me. That's that works the best for me. It's just a really like, really integrated and weave it into moment to moment all your daily life. Because if you have you know, if you have a you know a 30 minute breathing session in the morning and you feel zen and calm after that session, but then you know, in the afternoon you're getting triggered or you're getting, you're reacting to that work, then that breathing session in the morning, it hasn't really. It hasn't really been that effective where it's translated to later in the day.
Speaker 2:
54:51 Yeah, or you need to do another session in the afternoon.
Speaker 1:
54:54 Yeah, another session, or you can do long term things. You can train. For example, you know you'll see two tolerance, you know which is a big thing in you know the day con auction advantage and that, for example, leads you to a more resilient nervous system or more resilient, you know, just less reactive and you can deal with more stress. So, like, just in general, you can deal with more stress. So there are certain shifts that you can do. You can, there's certain techniques you can do which helps you manage these things in real time, and there's also other techniques that you can do which train you, like long term, over time, and it's like a more longer term shift.
Speaker 2:
55:28 Yeah, you just mentioned CO2 tolerance. What is that?
Speaker 1:
55:34 So that's literally as the name describes, is your body's tolerance towards carbon dioxide. So I'll just briefly get into it because I don't want to lose people. It starts to get a bit more advanced. You know I'm not from a science background as well, so I don't want to, you know, butcher it and you know, leave people the wrong way. But you see it like, in terms of CO2, a lot of people how they think what stimulates a breath is they think oxygen is dropping in their system. For example, if I ask you to hold your breath, you know there's going to come a point in time, you know, maybe hold your breath for 40 seconds or a minute or whatever. So when it kind of hits that point, when your body starts to make you feel like you need to breathe, where you lower your breath, most people assume that that's because oxygen is dropped to a certain level and there's not enough oxygen in your system and then you need to breathe. So that's actually not what happens. Okay, it does happen in critical conditions where oxygen is the primary driver of your breath, but just on average, just for, like healthy human being, the trigger to breathe is CO2. So it's actually, for example, when you were holding. When you hold your breath, it's oxygen is dropping a bit, but it's actually the CO2 that's rising in your system, okay, and when it rises to a certain threshold, okay, and everyone has a different threshold when it rises to that kind of threshold, that's what triggers you to breathe, okay. So that threshold, that level of where CO2 rises to which then triggers you to breathe, that's your CO2 tolerance, that's your kind of your measurement and it's something that you can train, okay, something you can improve on, okay. So there's different tests. There's like the bulk test, there's like the maximum CO2 XL test. There's different kind of tests. You can kind of test these things and it should be done in a certain kind of set and setting, but generally you want a higher CO2 tolerance. Generally, a lower CO2 tolerance is it's not what's favored and there's, you know, various different things that that leads to. You know, for example, what they found is that CO2 is not just, it's not just the gas for your breath, okay, but there's a lot more to it. You know, it communicates stress to the body as well. What they, how they found this out was. It's very like if you traditionally how they think where fear comes from, it comes from the mucular, the fear center of the brain, the brainstem right, and that's generally where people understand where fear comes from. And what they did some experiments and what they some experiments and studies where they had some monkeys that had amygdalas that weren't working properly or they were damaged in some way and these monkeys, when they put out into a wild, didn't survive. Okay, because just having that ability to, you know, sense of fear, you know, is a survival mechanism, you know so. And then they started to to observe and research into some humans, and I believe it was a few women that they tested, and specifically there was one woman that had just, once again, like a damaged amygdala or the middle wasn't working to its natural capacity and she couldn't really sense fear like an ordinary human being. I think there was one case where she was picked up by a truck driver with intention of raping her and obviously with no sense of danger, no sense of fear. She just followed this guy, you know, and followed him to like the next pit stop and throw him off and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, but luckily nothing happened. You know. There were strangers that walked past, nothing happened, but she couldn't sense fear and so they, this woman was then put in a lab and tested, and I believe the scientists that were testing her, they tested all these different things and couldn't, couldn't, could initiate like a, a, a response of fear or anxiety or stress or anything like that. So the last thing they wanted to test was inhaling carbon dioxide, co2. And even then, when they designed the experiment, I do believe that the science didn't think that it would trigger anything. But to their surprise, when these women that had dysfunctional medulles, when they did inhale like a high level of CO2, they're not, they're normal they had a, they had a response, they had a responsive panic of fear, of stress, and so through that, what they realized is there are, there are other mechanisms in the body that communicate fear and stress to the rest of the body, and CO2 is one of them. So if you have a low C2 tolerance, that's going to impact that, you know, and it also, you know, someone with a low C tons also has a more reactive nervous system in terms of the sympathetic side, you know. So they might be more reactive, they might get more triggered or they might have less patience, less tolerance, and a lot of people think that. You know. These things are maybe a trait that you're born with. You know and you know like there are definitely personality things that you know you are born with. But you know, in terms of C2 tolerance, that can be trained. That can be. That can be trained to improve that. Also it can be with lack of training or bad breathing. It can also go back down. Okay, and a lot of during the pandemic. What I found is a lot of clients that I had that because I was locked outside of Hong Kong during the pandemic for about over a year. There was a several clients that I didn't physically have sessions with and we took a bit of a break and then these people would have. You know, whatever the high, high US C2 tolerance is before and then after I've come back and we start sessions again, it's plummeted back to soon to levels that would indicate that they're very reactive or they're very, they get triggered very easily or they're very prone to anxiety. It's kind of like that. But for more nervous systems, yeah.
Speaker 2:
1:01:45 Right, okay, I'm going to be a bit selfish and ask a question for myself. So about two or three months ago I went to a hospital to test whether I have obstructive sleep apnea. I've been a snore for many years and over the years. I'm now 39 and it gradually got worse, and I think more so in the last five years. I've noticed that I've short term memory loss. I tend to not remember things that are very recent, and also Last couple of years. In particular, I was getting, whenever I got up I was getting migraine, and it used to happen like six, like every six months, and then gradually just became more and more frequent. So, to fast forward the story, I went to hospital, did a obstructive sleep apnea test and it turned out that I'm quite severe for my age. Right Can for people who are snore, can breath work help?
Speaker 1:
1:02:47 Yeah, for sure. I mean that's one of the big things of focus in certain modalities of breathing, specifically like Budeco method, oxygen advantage, but more specifically Budeco method, they, which is which is named after the the created Dr Konstantin Budeco, I think, is Russian, and that was literally a method that they use for sleep apnea, for snoring. So I would highly recommend anyone that's dealing with you know sleep apnea to look into the Budeco method. But in terms of you know your sleep apnea, you know. Once again, I'm not a doctor, so I'm going to just answer the best way I can is from what I know and you know. You know. If there's any better answers out there, like, feel free to let me know as well. My dad, for example, has been suffering from sleep apnea for a long time and when I was living with him when I first moved to Hong Kong he's back in Australia now, but when I was the first something a year or so I was, you know, hong Kong I was with him and he was. He had really bad sleep apnea. Like I could, I could hear him from the next room. I can hear him from the, from the, the entrance. Oh, that's me, sorry.
Speaker 2:
1:03:54 Yeah.
Speaker 1:
1:03:55 It's like a chainsaw, like I had to wear earplugs in the next room to sleep and and it wasn't just snoring, but I would, I would observe him as in I would hear his, his snoring, his sleeping would literally stop for 20 seconds, 30 seconds sometimes, throughout the night and he's literally suffocating and he'll suffocate himself back to sleep. You know, like cause you can hear him like kind of just gasp for air and get back to. So in terms of I have personal experience in terms of I have family members that suffer from that and the way that I see Pat machine. So what people can look into and is firstly, are they breathing through the nose or the mouth? You know, and if you're not sure if your mouth breathing, it's, you know just when you wake up, just see if your mouth is dry, smelly or so on, or if you have a partner, just ask him to observe. But for a lot of reasons as to why, for example, you snore, okay is your mouth is open, like your tongue posture is low and your tongue is sitting at the back of your throat and it's kind of blocking the airway and it causes that kind of like the opening and closing open closing causes that snoring, so you're really like suffocating yourself throughout the night. You're starving, you're, you're starving yourself of oxygen, you know, throughout the night, basically, which I believe you know. People that do snore do have sleep apnea are more prone to things like Alzheimer's later on. I believe I've seen them, like I've seen scans Don't quote me on this, but I believe I saw some scans of some brains over time that were that had sleep apnea and they basically shrunk like Alzheimer's over time I've read the same which prompted me to do the test. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I would recommend people obviously it's always different case by case Try to get, try to fix how you breathe, just in your waking life, daily life, first, at rest, and those are things like mouth sorry, nose breathing, set of mouth breathing using the diaphragm, engaging, you know, your thoracic cavity, and so on. Start training yourself up to have proper breathing mechanics and just optimal breathing in your daily life first, and then when you sleep, for example. Obviously you're asleep, you're not conscious, right? So how can you start to adjust your breathing when you sleep? So there's all these different tools. You know, there's things, for example, these things that you put over your nose and it opens up. It literally opens up your nose, so something like block noses, it really opens it up. So some people have those tools. Some people, what they do is they tape their mouth. You might have heard about that or seen that, where people get some sort of like sports tape or some sort of surgical tape. You know, some sort of tape that doesn't rip your skin off, that's safe, does?
Speaker 2:
1:06:54 it work or does it depend on the person?
Speaker 1:
1:06:56 Well, the reason it works is because it's not sealing your mouth. It's not trying to seal your mouth and so you don't get any air in. What it's trying to do is trying to retrain yourself to keep your jaw shut, to keep your mouth shut when you sleep, so that you breathe through the nose when you sleep. Okay, because when you're asleep you can't consciously close your mouth. Right, you know, you need. You know when you're asleep you dream in your mouth is open, you're drooling or something like that, if you're a mouth breather but you. But there's other ways to do it. There's like I believe there's ones I've seen where it's like this strap you strap around your head and that's the same purpose is to basically keep your jaw shut, your mouth shut, so you, basically the channel for your breathing goes from your mouth back to your nose, and it's training yourself to do that. But, once again, it's not that simple of just closing your mouth and sealing your lips or your tongue posture and so on. So you know, sometimes just mouth taping might help for a lot of people, but for some people it might be a structural thing where they might need to mouth tap for the rest of their life in order to train themselves to nasal breathe. For me personally, it took about maybe four weeks for somewhere between four to five weeks of mouth taping for me to train myself to go back to nasal breathing when I sleep. And I remember the very first time I did it my back then my ex-partner was not there, she was overseas. I was home alone and I was very scared because, you know, you put your seal, your lips with it and you're reminded of like kidnapping movies or those kinds of movies, and I've always had, like your, phobia of like drowning or suffocating. So I literally prayed and I prayed that I'll survive that night there was no one watching your back.
Speaker 2:
1:08:48 Yeah, did you tell your partner. Sorry, did you tell your partner?
Speaker 1:
1:08:51 Yeah, I didn't tell my ex-partner because I didn't want to scare her, but you know, surprisingly, what happened was I woke up five or six hours later, so not even the usual like seven hours sleep, and I was like one of the most refreshed nights of sleep, of sleep that I've had in years and years and years. What are you trying to do now? So, give it a go, but always do it in a safe environment. I wouldn't, you know, you don't have to tape it from all the way and seal it. You can just get like a, like a Charlie Chaplin moustache, you know, like that down the middle you can leave kind of sides open so it doesn't trigger any sort of like phobias or fear or anything like that. And you can even use like mouth taping during the day. You know, you know, obviously not when you're in public, but if you're working in office, just to train yourself to keep your mouth shut, to train yourself to keep your jaw shut again, because a lot of times you know you're unconscious of it and your mouth starts open and you start to breathe through maybe both the nose and the mouth or just the mouth. So it's just something you need to develop more awareness of. And also people, for example, might use a wedge pillar, so like it looks like a door wedge, but it's just basically a pillar that you lie on that has a bit of an elevation and that can help some people, you know, keep the head in more upright position so their tongue doesn't fall back as easily and cause that obstruction in sleep, apnea and snoring and stuff. So all these different things. There's all these different hacks I would recommend checking out, like, I think, dr Matthew Walker. He's like a sleep expert, but there's all these different tools, like one of my mentors, casper. He's a pretty famous bio hacker in the world and he has all these different hacks that he does for sleeping. You know, check these people out. So there's all these different things that can be done to help your breath.
Speaker 2:
1:10:45 Thanks for sharing the insights and just a disclaimer, the audience before you try anything new at home, always consult a breakfast specialist before you do it Exactly.
Speaker 1:
1:10:55 You know a health professional, a doctor, an expert or something. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:
1:11:01 The next thing I want to deal with you is is there anything that our audience can do to check the quality of your breathing, like, how do they know? Like on a scale of I don't know, on the 10, how good are they now? What are they are? So you mentioned about whether they are a nasal breather or a mouth breather. You can check whether you have a smelly breath or a dry, dry throat, right? I think I both, actually, and I'll be mentioning that I always have a dry throat and sometimes my breath would smell pretty bad and I didn't know this related to snoring, to be honest.
Speaker 1:
1:11:32 Yeah, with mouth breathing, yeah, yeah. So I mean there's a lot there's really, because breathing is such a wide kind of topic. Just in general, just for the average person at home that's listening or at the office, I would say, just firstly, check you know where you're breathing from. You know, are you breathing from the nose or you're breathing from the mouth? Is it originating from deep, deep inside, from diaphragm, or is it from you know your auxiliary breathing muscles, like your chest, your scallions, your shoulders and stuff like that, your neck. And just how, in general, do you feel? Because a lot of people they don't pay any attention to their breath. But when they do start to pay attention to their breath, they start to realize that it doesn't feel effortless, it doesn't feel relaxing, it doesn't feel calm, it actually feels a bit constricted or it feels like they're not getting enough air, they're not getting enough oxygen in. So just pay a bit of attention and see how you feel, because breathing, should you know, good, optimal breathing should be effortless. It shouldn't be something that makes you feel off or makes you feel bad or makes you feel uncomfortable or anything like that. And just also, I guess one thing is to develop an awareness towards your breath I mentioned it before just your breath awareness, because when you really can develop awareness of your breathing patterns throughout the day, you can start to basically place you know, strategic interventions like different breathing techniques or other techniques, into your day. When you realize that you know you're going through something, because you know, for example, if you know all these different breathing techniques but you're not aware of how your breathing pattern is going, then how do you know when to apply or when best to apply these breathing techniques you know to your situation? You know, which is what a lot of people do, because they might get exposed to just one method. You know, like, say, for example, wim Hof method, and that's the only method they know. And then every time they sit down to practice, you know breathing or whatever, or even just some people, they don't. You know a lot of people these days. You know they don't really read instructions properly and you get people that have come to my classes or my workshops or my Wim Hof workshops to learn, you know, like, the proper way to do it. They didn't really check everything and they just do that kind of hyperventilation, breathing through the mouth even. You know in their day to day life, you know, even when they're exercising or even when they're. You know which, you know. Maybe there's a time and place for it in those situations. But you know, usually you know a good breathwork coach is going to say that you know there are other methods that are better for that. So it's, it's just developing that awareness, I think, is the most important. And just, you know, just having one breathing technique, you know, maybe something simple like box breathing or something like tactical breathing, or just breathing in through the nose for four, out through the nose for six, something calm and relaxing like that, and just have one or two breathing methods, but develop that awareness of your breathing pounds throughout the day and then notice, okay, when I'm starting to feel anxious or when I start to feel stressed, when I start to feel scared or I start to feel you know whatever you're dealing with, when I start to feel that way, how is my breathing? Because your breathing is directly correlated to your state and how you've, your mood, your state, how you are, how you feel, and it's it's, it's almost in real time. So if you can start to pay attention to that, you can start to even basically manage your breath in a way where it doesn't lead you astray, it doesn't lead you in a state of anxiety or a state of stress, whereas most people, it's their state that leads their breath. You know something happens in the external world and it causes the the, the physiology to react and the breathing to react. And then, whereas if you learn to be aware of your breathing, you can basically learn to control or have a have a degree of control of your breathing Before you know. Before, for example, maybe things happen from the outside world that trigger stress, and so you go from letting the external world or stimulus from the outside world basically dictate how you breathe. You dictate how you breathe and that dictates your state, to the like, how you navigate the world, how you navigate the daily, your daily life, basically.
Speaker 2:
1:15:58 Yeah, I love that. That was very profound. I love how you internalize, how, how, I guess how you gave us a choice to sort of internalize the, I guess, the stimulus that the external environment is giving us, and then that choice is by breathing in our own pace, right? Hey, I want to circle back to a point that you mentioned earlier in the introduction, when you mentioned that in your mid twenties you first went into the film industry chasing for, I guess, this thing that you thought it was going to be your thing, right, and it so happened that just on I think it was yesterday we had a celebrity who just committed suicide right in Hong Kong, and she's pretty big.
Speaker 1:
1:16:46 So I don't watch. I don't watch the news. Yeah, I've actually stopped watching news for three and a half years now, one of the best things that I've ever done. I never turn my TV on at home.
Speaker 2:
1:16:54 Yeah, but you know, every now and then I receive these screenshots.
Speaker 1:
1:16:56 Okay, okay Cool.
Speaker 2:
1:16:58 But no. So what I want to ask you is what was happiness to you before and how do you see happiness now? Okay, and why do you think people who are, and especially you, dealt with that industry? You've seen people from that industry, right why are people who are being perceived as, I guess, influential, famous and rich unhappy?
Speaker 1:
1:17:21 Okay, so pretty deep question. Okay, just to actually add something to it that I don't share that often. But you mentioned suicide. So, as I mentioned before, I had a fear of public speaking and that was pretty much stopping me from pursuing becoming a breathworth coach. After I got certified with Wim Hof I was, you know, I was, I loved everything, I loved the method, I was practicing myself, but I let that fear kind of take over, that mind chatter take over and I convinced myself that because of my fear of public speaking, like why would I want to put myself in that discomfort all the time? You know, it's my worst fear. What I deliberately to do that right. So I, mentally, I gave up on it. I gave up on coaching, you know, I was still going to practice it myself, but I gave up on going out there and actually sharing. And like, what happened was that was when I was coming back from Australia, hong Kong, and I landed in Hong Kong in the evening and then the next morning this is actually here in Gwantong. I sleep in Gwantong several, like seven, eight years ago, and it was actually at the mall next door, the APM, the shopping mall, and I was, uh, went to visit. I went to meet some family members to catch up. We had Yumcha in the morning and after Yumcha now, for those that don't know, that's lunch in Hong Kong dimsims and stuff. And I was walking through the shopping mall, you know, because I I would have to go through that shopping mall to go from the uh, mtr, this, the train station, back home. So I'd always have to go through that, that that area of the mall. And just at that moment when I was going home that day, um, a woman jumped off the top level of APM and she landed. Obviously she died. You know, she committed suicide and I was on the first level but you know I was looking down and you know I saw, you know pretty much everything and um, that was obviously quite traumatic but after I was able to process it and get through it.
Speaker 2:
1:19:32 How long did that recovery process take?
Speaker 1:
1:19:40 I, um, to be honest, I'm not 100% sure I I think I processed a majority of it within two or three weeks of it happening. Uh, I thought I did, but then, years later, when I went to drink ayahuasca um, which is like this plant medicine and that that people drink and um, the first image that popped up was that woman's dead body, and I had not consciously thought about it for years. So, to answer your question, I thought I had processed a lot of it at the very beginning, but then, years later, it was still somewhere in there. So I feel like I've, I'm, I've processed it now, um, but I probably, it probably took several years, um, but most of it was most of it had been.
Speaker 2:
1:20:26 You saw it and you heard the big bang.
Speaker 1:
1:20:28 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I saw, I saw yeah.
Speaker 2:
1:20:30 And that's how most of our memories work. Right Is related to our senses.
Speaker 1:
1:20:33 Oh, yeah, Of course. Yeah, I mean, that's how we, that's how we navigate this, this dimension as well, through our sensory organs. So, um, yeah, and then this, this whole thing was, was the catalyst for what kind of led me to help me overcome my fear of public speaking. Um, because now I had something that was, I guess, a bigger purpose than, um, it was overriding, you know, the personal fear that I had. You know, and I mean, one more thing to add to it was the reason why this whole thing resonated the most was because the Wim Hof's wife came in suicide from schizophrenia and mental health and she was, you know, taking all those pharmaceutical pills at. You know, a lot of the side effects is things like, you know, suicidal thoughts and stuff like that. Anyway, so that one of the biggest catalysts for Wim to pursue the path that he, that that he pursued, is because of that, is because of suicide and mental health. And and that's one of the biggest reasons I followed Wim was because of that mental health side, because I was going through that as well, and when this happened after a process, it kind of just like whether there's any meaning to it or not. It just kind of it kind of lit that fire it gave me all this. It kind of, you know, because I was being selfish. You know I was like because I was too, you know, shy or introverted or too scared about speaking. I was being selfish because, you know, I had learned something that was a great tool, that was going to help, can help a lot of people, but I wasn't sharing it because I was scared, I was afraid and I guess this, this instance, is what kind of it kind of pushed me to be like okay, you know, you've learned something from Wim that can help people with, you know, people with dealing with mental health. You know, and it's a shame that you know you don't share it, you know. So once I kind of took my ego out of the picture, then it became quite easy, you know, even though, as I said, I had so much fear in the first like year of presenting. It was very, it was never. I can never thought about quitting because I had this, I get this mission or this goal. That was bigger than that, than my own fear, and yeah, so it's one of those things that I, as I said, like public speaking was something I never I would take to the grave, I thought, and when I least expected it, in the process of teaching breath work, I lost my fear of public speaking.
Speaker 2:
1:23:09 No, thanks for thanks for sharing that, and I love it how you gave the experience a different spin and the user as a motivator for your purpose. So I started the episode by asking you a question that Andrew wanted to ask you about what's that one thing that we can do to improve our energy? And I'm going to ask you it's your turn what's the question you want to ask the next guest?
Speaker 1:
1:23:30 So thank you, andrew, for your question. I think I'm going on his podcast soon as well. I think there's a question you asked me that I didn't answer. I kind of went off on a tangent and I'll just ask that question, and that's just. You know, it's a simple question but kind of deep as well. But I guess to the next person how did they define happiness or how did they define success?
Speaker 2:
1:23:59 Yeah, All right. Thank you for coming to the chat and we love you having me there. No worries, thanks, aaron.
Speaker 1:
1:24:05 Thanks for your time, thank you. Thanks for the chat, thanks.
Speaker 3:
1:24:11 I hope you enjoyed the chat. I always say our live is very much like discovering what the next chapter is in our own book, and what we do today can change the narrative in the next chapter. Our life, given by nature, is short, but it's not the duration that matters. What matters more is how many meaningful things we can do and how many people we can help in our life. I hope you've gotten some inspiration and new ideas about what you can do differently today and, as you are doing it, remember to also change your ecosystem so that you can sustain it. I firmly believe our world will be a much better place if all of us are focusing on becoming a better future self, together with the people we love. See you in the next episode.
