Patrick McKeown: The Oxygen Advantage
EPISODE 156
In a career spanning 15 years, Patrick McKeown has since also become a bestselling author and expert on the topic of optimal breathing for improved health, well-being, and fitness.
His book ‘The Oxygen Advantage’ is based on 4 years of scientific research and tailors breathing exercises for anyone seeking to improve their fitness and sports performance. ‘The Oxygen Advantage can revolutionize how we train, by addressing dysfunctional breathing patterns and simulating high altitude training through specific breath-holding exercises as devised by Patrick.
SHOW OUTLINE
INTRO
Patrick introduces us to the idea of using your breath
Breathe consciously (2m37)
FOCUS
Patrick and how to practice moments of stress to stimulate focus
Breath-holding (3m20)
PRACTICE TIPS
Brian from Optimize and Patrick’s advice on chronic over-breathing
Don’t breathe too much (1m55)
Brian from Optimize and Patrick’s use of tape…
Hack your breathing whilst you sleep (2m01)
COUNTERACTING STRESS
Patrick and practicing good breathwork to decrease stress and build resilience
The cadence of good breathing (2m59)
Added reading for audience: https://buteykoclinic.com/the-buteyko-method/
CLIP CREDITS
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=alUt9XqlobE&ab_channel=DrRanganChatterjee
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iWXDdnsELOw&ab_channel=OPTIMIZEwithBrianJohnson
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mBqGS-vEIs0
Patrick McKeown: The Oxygen Advantage
TRANSCRIPT
And welcome to the moonshots podcast. It's episode 156. I am your co-host Mike Parsons. And as always I'm joined by the fully oxygenated Mark Pearson freeland. Good morning. Hey, good morning, Mike, I'm taking a deep breath, filling my lungs with oxygen and air. Ready to get into a brand new series with you today.
How are you doing? Mate, I'm pretty excited about a new show, a new series, bringing it into a whole new territory for the moonshots podcast. Where are we going today? Mike and listeners as show 156. We're getting into Patrick McCowen's the oxygen advantage (Buy on Amazon), which Mike is number one in our brand new series on.
This is a brand new direction for you and I and our listeners. And I'm very excited because I think we have such a roadmap of [00:01:00] fascinating books, individuals as well as topics for you and I, and our listens to learn out loud from, and today with Patrick Mckeown, the oxygen advantage. I think we are kicking off in an absolutely perfect way.
I totally agree. You can't get more fundamental than oxygen. Can you mark? If we just think about it for a second we breathe a gazillion times in a day why not think about how to do it a little bit better? And isn't it shocking if you think about something that's so fundamental to our existence, how little we talk about we'll do we breathe right?
Are we using oxygen, very interesting that we can be consumed with so many other topics, but is there anything more fundamental? This is more important than drinking and eating. This is take a breath and take a good breath. Yeah. I think that [00:02:00] for you and I and our listeners and those that we work with our colleagues, I would say that there must be a very small minority who have ever been sat down.
And taught how to breathe correctly. I think it's something that is very easy to get wrong. And obviously breathing it's unconscious as well as conscious, of course. So you're always going to breathe correctly some of the time on you. But I think what is funny for me as I reflect on.
Being a kid growing up, doing exercise, collaborating with different people. It's never, ever been something that has been demonstrated at all, taught to me before how to breathe correctly. And it's fascinating exactly. As you just said, it is one of the essential pillars that key. To me alive and it's important stuff pretty important stuff.
And it's [00:03:00] something that I totally take for granted. And what's interesting getting into Patrick's work is how important it is to so much of my life, my career, my general happiness and health is it's so essential for all of us to get through. Exactly. And that's why we chose Patrick McKeown's book (buy on Amazon), the oxygen advantage because we really do feel that as part of a health series breath, is that the underlying, the fundamental starting point, we're also going to do sleep diet and the body.
We've got some of my apps. Author's including Michael Polen author of in defense of food, which really changed my perspective towards food. So that's all to come in the series, but today we're delving into the oxygen advantage, which is based on something we always love in the moonshots podcast, four years of scientific research.
So there's the rigor, there's the data behind all of this. [00:04:00] And Patrick has studied this for many years, and it really brings us. Revolutionary approach and we can all take from it today. So if you're interested in improving your weight improving your, how you sleep, the energy you have during the day right through to concentration focus, or you just want to feel some pain.
And calm it's all ahead of you today. So mark, where do we kick off? When we go to this universe of the oxygen advance? I think it's only right for the author himself to kick us off Mike and get us started on today's show. First up we are going to hear from Patrick McCowen, introduce us to the idea of breathing conscious.
Stress makes people sick. And on the basis that stress makes people sick, relaxation will help to make them better. How can we negate the effects of [00:05:00] stress? How do we breathe? When we get stressed, we breathe faster. We breach. We breathe irregular. And this is keeping the body in that state of fight or flight.
So what are we doing? I'm saying to people, I need you to breathe through your nose. I need you to gently slow down your breathing. I need you to use your die from, and I need you to adopt a cadence of the breath because when we're looking at the breathing, we need to consider that it's not just about diaphragmatic breathing or it's not just about breathing into the nose and out through the mouth, or it's not just.
Take a deep breath when you're stressed the information, take a deep breath when your stress is absolute nonsense, it is based on nothing. And it helps nobody because if we have a belief that it's good to be taking in that huge, big Brett, are we really making any positive change in the body? And what I would say to people.
Start just gently slowing [00:06:00] down your breath, even to the point of a slight air hunger, by just relaxing your breathing, breathing through the nose and just even concentrate on dash. Does it change your body temperature? Does it increase the amount of saliva in the mouth? Do you feel different?
Yeah. There is so much to talk about with respect to how we breathe and those three elements or those three pillars of breathing. It's I don't know. It's one of those things take a deep breath. As we've already discussed, we made a lot of videos of people on that, but the whole light they're taking a deep breath.
You're not actually against it. You're just against the way most people interpret that. And what they do, we were demonstrates that if, to most people who say, Hey, take a deep breath, what do they do? Open the mouth, lift the chest up breathing from the chest, breathing through the mouth.
And you're saying there is a, another way to take a deep breath, which is using your diaphragm through the nose[00:07:00] slow, and quiet. I'm saying to do the absolute opposite to how you breathe when you are stressed. When we breathe, when we are stressed, we sign more. We breathe faster. We breach. Instead of saying, we want to achieve regular breathing instead of breathing faster, we want to slow down the breath.
Instead of breathing, using the chest, we want to breathe, choosing to die from such breakthrough thinking. And I really personally have experienced this in discovering that if you don't manage your. Breath. And you allow yourself to over breathe, which is the chronic problem that begins the inside of this whole book from Patrick McCowen, which is we chronically over brief too much, too fast.
The big thing mark is that when you breathe really deep and really fast, you're bringing more oxygen into [00:08:00] the body. You're making the heartbeat. So you're stressing yourself out. You're literally inducing stress. And personally, what I've discovered doing breathwork is if you take a slow breath, if you hold the breath for a long time, you exhale for an even longer time, you actually slow your heart down.
You slow your whole body rate down, and that's how you can get to a calm. Clear a mind and is simple as this sounds. I've discovered it in my forties, mark, like what have I been doing all my life? I think this is one of the really interesting. Lessons and topics and areas that I think we're going to uncover throughout the whole of the health series.
Some of these things are going to be simple, but not obvious. You're quite right. It's all about slowing down your heart rate through [00:09:00] solar breaths. Feeling more relaxed for me. It's never been something that I've really let the pennies never dropped for me either. So I've always gone through my life when I'm feeling stressed or maybe I've gone for a run, something strenuous.
I'll take a series of deep breaths because I'm assuming that's the right way of doing it, but you're totally right. What it's doing is flooding. With oxygen, which is of course great, but it's not doing anything to slow my heart rate down and get me feeling a little bit more comfort. 'cause instead, what it's doing is rising that maybe pressure as well as pulse in order to simulate and stimulate those stress and anxiety factors more so than before.
And I think this is really interesting. The breathing consciously idea makes again, total sense, but it's never been something that I've actively apart from going into a little bit of meditation or maybe yoga. [00:10:00] It's never been something that has been on my daily habitual list of things to do.
Like it, it is yours. I know for you, the breath work is really something that you stick to it in your to-do list each day. And I think it's fascinating to now be introduced to it for me, for myself a little bit more here to understand that it's not just about slowing things down, but it has this real advantage on actually slowing your heart rate down as well.
Yeah. And so when that happens, your brain is not being pumped with so much blood and running a muck. Your mind can calm down and you can be more present, more calm, but there's a ton of other benefits that come from this practice and we're going to discover together. You may and all of our lessons were we're going to go and discover not only how this is really fantastic for [00:11:00] being more present, being more relaxed, being able to think a bit clearer, but actually this is also a bridge to higher performance in your training and in your workout.
And here's a really interesting thing. Some of the greatest athletes when they are in very active performance, they breathe through their nose. They don't do their run. Through their mouth. They're not breathing through their mouth. They do it through the nose. So they slow the body down a bit. They don't overload it with that heavy panting through the mouth, breathing that the greatest athletes actually do nose breathing when they're running marathons.
For example, isn't that again? That same. Like a step away from what I would have always done. The habit that I have would be to go for a run. And I assume that I'm taking more oxygen if I've got my mouth open, [00:12:00] but that's clearly not the case. According to Patrick and all of the research that he's done, because the breathing through the nose, like you say, it's.
That oxygen probably to be absorbed maybe a little bit slower, as well as slowing down the rate of breath inhalation as well. So it has a far more body wide benefit rather than just the breathing. Again, it's not something that I've ever been exposed to or taught. So I've always developed those bad habits of panting.
So there is so much to get out of this. I hope everybody is really tuned in and ready to learn. But before we jump into the next part of this series, mark, we've been really fortunate. We continue to have more review our listeners signing up to be a member. Obviously, if you become a member of the moonshots podcast, you get access to our fabulous moonshots master series of which we are [00:13:00] building quite the collection.
We publish one of those every single day. To all of our members, but my let's give a shout out who are our members? Let's do a rogue roll call and really show our gratitude for all our meals. Mike, it's lucky that today we're doing Patrick McKeown's the oxygen advantage because I'm going to need a deep breath in order to do the full roll call here.
Introducing welcome rod Rica, Connor Monahan, and Yaniv Halena, and mark Byron, Tom Dettmer, Ken marshaling, Sandy Nile Brighty, and Terry John nails. Bob welcome to all of our members on the Patrion member site. Thank you so much for joining us every week and every month and being part of the moonshots team.
Yeah. And if you would like to become a member and show your support for their moonshot podcast, head over to moonshots.io, [00:14:00] click on the big members button become a member because you know what, your helping us pay some of our bills. We've almost got enough members now to cover all of our transcription costs.
Our hosting costs, we're almost. We probably need to get to about 50 members, I think to safely cover all of our costs. And after that, I think we're going to invest all that membership contribution to building the moonshots app. So there's just so much that you can do to contribute. And we hope to really share more of the good moonshots vibes with you.
Go on while you're listening right now, just go and open up moonshots.io become a member. We just use Patreon. It's super easy. And we'd love to hear your thoughts. Tell us who you'd love us to do a show on, but for now, mark, we're doing a show on Patrick McKeown and the oxygen advantage (buy on Amazon). Where do we go next?
So I think we [00:15:00] started to get introduced from Patrick into this idea of breathing consciously. And the next clip we've got is actually how to practice. Conscious breathing in moments of stress and Mike this is something that you and I, and probably all of our listeners have had to deal with before.
So I'm really interested and looking forward to getting into this. So the next clip we've got is from Patrick and how to utilize conscious breathing, to manage moments of stress. Now it's not just about slow breathing. As you pointed out, we do Bret toiling as well. Now why would we do Bret hauling? We want to stress the body a little bit, because we can cause adaptations to happen there.
Like modern life. Now it's all about comfort. Yeah. But throughout our evolution, We were always exposed to little stressors and I think it's good physical exercises, the stress, and going into a cold environment as a stress, we can improve our ability to cope by doing stressors and Bret hauling is a [00:16:00] stressor to give you an example.
If I get him to give a presentation, And I talked quite a last night I'm giving presentations to different groups of people and I used to get a little bit anxious of it because of course you're going out. And I don't like using PowerPoint. So I'll often talk off the cuff and you can be talking for an hour and you have no backup.
And the reason that I don't like PowerPoints is because people get hypnotized by this white light and they're not looking at me. I want to connect directly with the audience in front of me. So what would I do before the event? I would go into a separate room and I would really slow down my breathing and take my attention out of the mind onto the bread and bring a quietness to the mind and bring myself into this.
But then I'm too relaxed. I have focus, but I'm too relaxed. Then I do five strong breath tours because this increases blood flow to the brain. It opens up my nose, it opens up my lungs [00:17:00] and puts me into that state of preparedness. And how do you do those breath holds? So I simply, I will be in the room.
I know I'm about to talk and say five or 10 minutes. I'll take a breath in through my nose, a breath out through my nose. I pinch my nose and I simply walk around holding my breath until I feel a medium to stronger hunger. Then I let go. I breath from my nose. I count my. I wait a minute. Should I do it again?
I do about five of them and we also have added storage pre-competition and it's really good for alertness because you want to be going. If you're making a presentation, you don't, you want to be relaxed and focused, but you don't want to be too relaxed. I want to have absolute stillness of the mind whereby I can focus 100% of my attention under delivery, and I want.
I want my attention to move simultaneously. With time, I spent 20 years living in my head, stuck in my head [00:18:00] and with all of my attention, pretty much thinking all the time. And this is another topic for conversation. Western education. It has gave us a great ability to think we can decipher. We can break information into tiny pieces.
We can reason we have been trained how to. But we have not been trained how to stop thinking. We need also to be able to bring a solitude to the mind, how can you create gaps between torts? And it's not that we want to turn the individual into vegetable, but we want to have choice. We don't even hardly pay attention to what we're thinking about.
We're talking about lack of awareness of the Bret. How about lack of awareness of the mind? I cannot agree. More with what Patrick McCowen is saying that I think I am personally victim of monkey, mind the [00:19:00] mind running wild and thinking about 1,000,001 different things and the true blessing for which I am so grateful is discovering that I had a couple of years ago, I really.
I have to get in control of my breath because I can always, I always noticed mark that when I was really busy or experiencing stress, I just noticed how shallow my breath was and how rapid it was. And so if you're a listener and your. Experiencing that kind of feeling of very rapid, shallow breath during work, because you're busy, you're stressed, or maybe you have some sort of anxiety based on the situation you're in.
The most empowering thought that I can communicate to you right now is that you can totally get back in control of [00:20:00] your breath. Slow it down. Take active breathing exercises into your practice and slow. Steady breath from deep in your belly, not in the top of your chest. And. You can just slow down it's because you've D the brain is descending, not only your mind, but your whole body racing.
And then that's that's very triggering a fight or flight kind of conditions for us as individuals. And he makes the point that McCowen really makes the point. Like we're blessed in that we can think, but when then we just overthink and. Just like music. It's the space between the notes that makes music so beautiful.
It's the space between your thoughts that make sure thinking so power. I couldn't agree more with what you [00:21:00] were just building on what Patrick was saying. I thought there were a couple of pieces that really stood out to me in that clip that I want to revisit. One was we've never been trained to stop thinking.
And I think that's exactly what you were just saying, which is we all have this tendency perhaps to get distracted or maybe consumed by whatever it is that we're doing right now. So your natural body almost has to play second priority. And what happens is the body then does I'm very similar as well with shallow breaths.
Sometimes in fact, I'll do it when I'm hunched over my computer, on my desk. So my body doesn't have any. Space, I think almost to bring in those deep breaths and because I'm breathing unconsciously, it ends up being very shallow. So what I realize after time is I think, oh wow. I'm feeling a little bit on edge here.
Yeah. Sometimes it will mean our cattle go for a walk. I [00:22:00] walk around the office or I'll just stand up for a little bit. I know a lot of people have standing desks. I imagine actually that's a great alternative to sitting down because it does allow your body to be a little bit more stretch, bar. Yeah. Yeah. Your posture, it allows you to open up and You will remember that. One of the lessons that we had with Jordan Peterson was his Stan toll. What was his one stand tall with your shoulders? For your chest out. Yeah. And so I think what we're both tapping into is that if you're a modern knowledge worker, you can find yourself crunched over your computer for hours at a time and lost in your mind.
You forgotten to get up and walk around every half an hour you might be one of the things I noticed is. Trying to get my workload [00:23:00] done to meet deadlines and to not hold processes up. So to make sure that I'm delivering and that can be enormously stressful, because you're just like trying to produce it such a phenomenal kind of get the work out, get things moving and taking time to get your breath, right?
You can still be very productive, but it's go slow to go fast, which is which is a really interesting thought. Isn't it. If you think about this and look so far already, mark, I just want to point out how much we're just like. Looking at Allen, we're making the case for breath. Come on, everyone, breathe consciously, be aware, slower down.
It's such an important thing as you get into it yet. Hopefully we are disrupting and shaking. All of you [00:24:00] out of your coma is out of your zombie state and unlocking some consciousness. Yeah, that's exactly it, Mike it's the conscious breathing and something that I do just want to revisit again, in that last clip we just heard was the idea of hunger.
And this is a big topic within Patrick's work. And for those listeners who want to find out more or listen to some of the other clips that we've got coming up in the show, as well as. When you visit moonshots.io, we're going to have lots of different clips for you to go and check out and understand more about, but air hunger.
Whereas Patrick was just introducing us to, within that last clip. Mike is a way of building resilience because that's stress in any part of your life causes, evolution, adaptation, and a little bit of resilience. Doesn't it certainly does. VIM half talks about breath and a cold shower because we leave such [00:25:00] comfortable.
Lives. We actually need to stress the body to provoke our physiology to to grow. It's no different from working out and being a bit sore after you need to actually do these things to stimulate the body. And if you look at any of those sorts of sin centenarians, one of the key things that they do is they're constantly doing things that stimulate body growth.
They put themselves in challenging situations. You'll get the famous. Japanese communities that all live way past a hundred, they're still doing their karate. They're doing all sorts of things like this to grow the body. And that's where that I'm breathing a little what does he call it?
Map? What was the term that you mentioned or the air hunger? Yes. This slight air hunger. It's really interesting because [00:26:00] what I noticed when doing breath work is just actually how nice it is. To breathe out fully and just empty the lungs slowly, bring it in and then hold it. Even just holding the breath before you exhale.
All of this is actually deeply satisfying and I would never have imagined such calmness and such satisfaction from doing something like just some breath work. It is really just so powerful. Mark. I'll tell you what else is pretty bad. Are you ready? I'm ready. It's very powerful. And it's available in apple iTunes podcast application.
And do you have any idea what I might be talking about? I've heard of it and I believe it might just be the moonshots master series. Is that right? You are [00:27:00] correct. So listen, if you love Patrion you should jump over there and become a member and you get access to our moonshot master series.
But we acknowledged that for a lot of people, they love to listen to their podcasts in their app of choice. And I am delighted to share with everybody that you can now go into the apple podcast. You can look up the moonshots master series and you can get a free trial for our master series. Now it doesn't quite have all the bells and whistles of Patrion, but if you do love to get your podcasts through that app and you're listening right now in that app, just actually try it, try that out.
Moonshots master series, you can do a free trial and you can have a listen to all of our master series. Which is an ever expanding catalog. Isn't it mark? We're having a lot of fun putting those master series together. We are creating some pretty comprehensive, deep dives [00:28:00] into a number of different themes and topics, as well as somewhat mindsets.
The most recent one that we did episode five was on the circle of influence. And that was really, I think, again, an extension of where we've got. With breathing focus how we can be confident, how can we control the things that are in our inner circle as opposed to our outer circle.
So if you're interested listeners in understanding a little bit more about Mr. Stephen Covey and all the work around the circle. Become and come join us in apple podcast and be a subscriber. And you can check out that episode number five, but Mike we've gone deep into a number of other topics. We also covered habits.
We've covered teamwork. We've covered motivations. First principles. We were starting to amass quite a library of breakdowns actually. [00:29:00] Indeed. So just head over to the apple podcast app, give it a go and you can take a free trial. Why not? And you can get into the master series.
All right now, back to regular programming. Now it's time for us to go on a bit of a blitz and really get into some of the practical tips from Patrick McKeown's book, the Oxy. At advantage and look, we're going to go to one of our classic. YouTube is Brian from optimize. We love his work and he's going to kick things off and he's going to talk about not breathing too much about breathing and the fact that we can live for a weeks without food, we can live for days without water, but we can live for only minutes.
Without oxygen yet. We don't think a lot about breathing. Vis-a-vis eating and obviously drinking water and moving our bodies and other fundamentals. So for me, as I got into breathing, I realized, okay, we've got eat, move, sleep. Right then [00:30:00] we've got our focusing of our mind. We need to add breathing. And in fact that perhaps should be the first and most essential thing breathing.
We take it for granted, but we don't breathe the way we used to both when we were born and a hundred thousand plus years ago due to a lot of different factors. So here's the number one obstacle. According to Patrick. He says that we in short breathe too much chronic over-breathing. Here's a hint to see if you potentially chronically over breathe.
Do you breathe through your nose or do you breathe through your mouth? Primarily? What do you think? Can you tell if you snore at night, you're breathing through your mouth. You may know pretty obviously, but that's the basic thing that we want to think about is the fact that we are chronically over breathing.
Patrick tells us that we think about both the quality and the quantity of what. And what we drink, but we don't think about it [00:31:00] with what we breathe. We think about the quality of the air. We breathe, of course, we don't want to breathe in toxic polluted, Smaug, infested air, or other toxins that might exist in an indoor environment.
But we're not thinking about the quantity of oxygen. We breathe the quantity of air that we breathe. And he says, we shouldn't be thinking about that because just as overeating, eating too much food, We all know isn't a wise thing to do breathing too much. Air is not a wise thing to do. I love this connection, Mike, and as usual, Brian from optimized, not only is he breaking down for us in a really nice, simple way, but actually he's reinforcing the series that we've, we're starting today.
Mike thinking about body and sleep and food, but starting with breath. Brian would be very pleased with the order of our show. Which is great. I think we'll get a vote from him. What struck you about that clip though? [00:32:00] As he broke it down? The connection of that for me at least was not something I'd ever considered.
The connection between I might eat too much and become unhealthy. I might drink too much. I might become unhealthy. If I breathe too much, it's also not good for me. This connection between oxygen, this connection between breath and being over stimulated and over exposed to it is never something that I would have anticipated being a bad thing.
I would have always assumed breathing. Of course I'll breathe as much as I possibly can. But what Patrick is really saying, and what Brian's breaking down for us in that clip is when you are, over-breathing, it's almost as bad as overeating because you're exposing yourself too much to that as a stimulus in your body.
And that's a totally brand new idea for me. Yeah. And it's it's this really disciplined, [00:33:00] almost stoic way of living, because you might say. It's not just over-breathing over eating, but it's overdoing everything. Trying to have too many possessions like being so obsessed. Like on this big kind of treadmill of acquiring more, and not just taking a step back and saying, I have enough, I can breathe.
I can eat. I'm good. Let's just pause right there. I think this is really important thing. Just slow down on your consumption of some of those basic things. And this is why we see a boom in things like intermittent fasting. I think there's a real connection here that people are becoming aware that actually it's been, it's become so easy to eat, sleep, and drink and breathe and all that sort of stuff where we're way over revved, we're weighed pumped up and it's all about just taking.
Back and what's really interesting about this breath thing, mark [00:34:00] is that it's not only. Some of the, you can do during the day, but market something you can do at night as well, right? Yeah, that's right. Patrick's work really, as he caught out in one of the earlier clips as well, if you snore, it's going to be a result of your breathing out of your mouth and this next clip, Mike, this comes from a lot of the teaching that Patrick's done with his team and the oxygen advantage.
It's pretty powerful. I'm going to be in shit to know whether you've given this. So without further ado, let's hear from Brian, from optimize again, introducing you and I, our listeners to how Patrick suggests we can hack our breathing while we see. So Patrick makes the point that we want to breathe through our nose while we're sleeping.
As I sat in that little first idea kind of introduction, if you're snoring at night, that's one of the greatest and quickest ways to know that you are almost certainly breathing through your. Mouth the way to [00:35:00] handle that may sound super weird. I thought it was anyway when I first read it, but I'm all in you guys pay me to test these things and be a professional optimizer.
So I immediately went online and I bought what Patrick recommends, which is a 3m surgical tape. I think there's a few different sizes. He may even recommend a smaller one. I don't know how thick this one has maybe an inch and a half, but basically you take this tape. And you put it over your mouth.
I will do so now to show how ridiculously absurd it looks. I do this every night. So you put it over your mouth.
Nice and tight that might freak out some people, I didn't really have a problem putting this on. When I'm all into something I'm all in caveats, don't do this. Your kids need to be older than I think six years old. Don't do this. If you're drinking, if you have significant respiratory issues, obviously think about it.
But this is something, a practice that I've done. That's been amazing. Alexander does. And we have fun with it. So putting tape over your mouth is basically Patrick says the only way to [00:36:00] know whether or not you're actually breathing through and to get yourself to consistently breathe through your nose.
He still does that. I'm almost certain, he said, share that with me in our last chat. He still does this every night. I do this every night since I read the book and it's tough to track the things that I do in which has the biggest impact on my wellbeing, but I am absolutely certain that training myself to breathe through my nose has resulted in a deeper level of calm, a deeper level of comfort and confidence.
And it makes sense as we discussed we just didn't evolve to breathe through. And that level of kind of chronic over-breathing is unconsciously eliciting that fight or flight response. The interesting thing here is that he he talks about how over-breathing triggers that fight or flight.
So this is really good. If you feel any sort of stress or anxiety at work, just employ, slowing down your breath. [00:37:00] You can take up a number of practices that are within the oxygen advantage program. So you can get the book. You can go to the website, we're going to have a complete set of links to all the materials around oxygen advantage on moonshots.io.
So you can just head over there. We'll have the whole package there for you. I think this is crazy. I think my wife is very excited about the idea. I think we may, I may have seen an Amazon transaction for this very tape that Brian was mentioning. I think the interesting thing here is that there is a ton of work being done now on how you sleep, how it relates to hayfield during the day.
So anything you can do with your breath to improve your sleep for me. I'm all up for it, because I think this is really at the heart of how we are encouraging everybody to learn out loud whatever it takes to be the best version of yourself. And [00:38:00] frankly, if it means taping up your mouth while you sleep well, then why not?
I think this. Firstly, my good luck. And speaking on behalf of the listeners, I know we're all excited to hear how this experiment goes. I think what's interesting to what you're just saying is a familiar topic that we've run into a lot particularly recently on, on moonshots show as well as the master series.
And that's the idea of ownership. So like you say, we're more aware nowadays. The impacts of stress, the impacts on our sleep the importance of having a good diet. And I'm almost doing this sales chat right now for the health series, which obviously we'll dig into over the next few weeks with our listeners.
But I think what's really interesting for me as we remind ourselves of Patrick's work and what he's really fundamentally saying here, it's all [00:39:00] about taking ownership of. Not only how we breathe, but also how much we breathe when we breathe and almost putting into our daily habits. Exactly. As you already do, you make time for the journaling.
You make time for exercise. You make time to see your family, or maybe your pets, but having time to yourself to also practice breathe. It's not something that's currently in my agenda each day. I think what's fascinating is as we've learned from Patrick, as well as Brian is how important it is at setting your mindset, setting your physical practice.
Yeah. There's elements of VO two max that you can improve of course from an athletic perspective. And I think historically, at least for me, Reading up about how to breathe better is predominantly orientated around just improving athletic performance. But I think what we're discovering today is that it [00:40:00] has an impact on so many other more normal aspects of life.
That for me, at least I would have taken for granted and not really ever made that connection. So just to remind you using. Yeah. Programs like the reading books, like the oxygen advantage and using the practice in there. There's a particularly name for this practice, right? It's let me try.
And it's called the boot Jayco method that is promoted by Patrick McCowen in the oxygen advantage is, and that's he's like a grand master in this and he was taught by Constantine bull Geco himself in this manner. That's exactly right. It very scientific it's revolutionizing how you breathe, but from a historical perspective.
And I like the connection, Mike, that you had earlier to the Okinawa ladies in Japan, and there's a great website, the blues zone[00:41:00] which breaks it down there. I believe that this is just again, additional proof. Th there's so much science and history behind it that we're all forgotten about.
So you need to be introduced to it via somebody like Patrick and suddenly you and I, as well as our listeners can now go and dig further into this method, which I think is just so fascinating to start picking. Yeah. And look, if you want to kick, start yourself and look if you say to yourself, I want to improve my concentration, my sleep, my energy levels, maybe manage your weight better.
The best thing you can do is go to our show notes@moonshots.io. We're going to have a link to the fundamental test. That is the basis of the work from Patrick. McGowan's called. Bolt test. And that stands for body oxygen level test. And this is very handy because it's an accurate way of determining your [00:42:00] breathing volume.
And it's a very good starting point for you it to improve how you breathe. It's really good. Just to have a measurable number, to know that you are improving. There's some other goodies that you found as well, mark, that he offers on his on his way. That's right. There's also a, an hour long, 60 minute workout that you can follow, which is all orientated around the air hunger and breathing light approach.
And I, for one, I'm going to give this a test mic. I'm going to see if I can stick to this. And by the time we have our next episode on health, maybe this is what I'll do each week. I'll pick up a new habit, but there's a great breakdown. And again, we'll have the link in our show notes and moonshots that I own that will help you understand how to maybe be a little bit breathless.
Or for me, at least Mike, he's also going to help me improve my fitness. During injury. [00:43:00] So when you can't go for a run, you're able to maintain a level of ability with your breathing. So I'm the fantastic. It's just incredible. Isn't it? There's this whole world to breath that you just didn't know about.
And that you just haven't worked on and you I'm like kicking myself. Like, why didn't I get into to breath, work and breath exercises earlier? Hey, it only took me 40 odd years, but I got there. I got there. Look, I think it would only be fitting to wrap things up to go back to the author of, in himself to anything that's right.
We've got one final clip today in our show and Patrick McCowen and the oxygen advantage. And this is Patrick again, introducing us to the cadence of good breweries. By gently slowing down your breaths. And a lot of the research is centering around six breaths per minute. So when I'm working with a client, the first time we will do [00:44:00] is we work in the biochemistry of breathing.
So we generate your air hunger. Then I will spend so much time working on the biomechanics of breathing. Then I would work on the cadence of the Bret and I have the client simply breathe in 2, 3, 4, and 3 4, 5, 6. And I continue with that and we are changing the responder to rage from their normal, spontaneous breathing down to six breaths per minute.
Why? Because the research shows that you can influence the autonomic nervous system. Bodily systems, which have been disturbed by stress, especially long-term stress. And the research is looking at post traumatic stress disorder irritable bowel syndrome, anxiety, and also the oppression has been featured that when you slow down the respiratory rate to six breaths per minute, it's stimulating the vagus.
It's increasing heart rate, variability shape. [00:45:00] It's increasing the synchronicity between your respiration and the timing of your heart patient. And it's also exercising are increasing the sensitivity of Baro receptors that are just talk about those for just one moment. Our body has an innate capability.
And a need to be able to respond well to the environment. We need to have a balance between the parasympathetic and sympathetic. If a challenge comes our way, we should be able to adapt to it. Life is always going to throw us a curve. How does our body react to it? This is about resilience and people with really good functioning of the autonomic nervous system.
They can cope measure which what life is throwing at them. Now, in terms of, can you improve that? If you read a paper or an article by Mark Russell, it's called slow breathing, you will see that they have done quite a lot of [00:46:00] research looking at the application of slow. Too general. When you slow down the breath to six breaths per minute, you stimulate Baro receptors, which are pressure receptors in the major blood festivals, in the aorta and in the carotid arteries.
And they become more sensitive. So when there's an increase of your blood pressure, the bar receptors send an immediate message to cause your blood vessels to dilate. And your heart rate to slow down so that it brings down your blood pressure. But conversely, if your blood pressure is low, the bar receptors immediately react that by causing your blood vessels to constrict and your heart rate to increase, to normalize your blood pressure.
But the sensitivity of your bar receptors are a very good marker of your resilience in life. Good staff, Mark Pearson, Freeland. Good cadence for breath. And it's just, I think what strikes me [00:47:00] is how natural and obvious and our common sense, what Patrick has to say really is. And then in a second thought is like, How little I've thought about it in my life.
I don't know. It's good and bad all at the same time. Isn't it? It's I think you've summed it up really well, that it all makes so much sense, but for me, it's so obvious I think the physiological and psychological benefits. Breathing correctly, consciously, slowly makes so much sense. But I think for me, I've collected so many bad habits, whether it's being hunched over the desk or whether it's just naturally breathing very shallow when I'm focused on something, which then leads to an [00:48:00] overstimulation that then recreates a feeling of the fight or flight.
Moments in your life. It's not something breathing is never something I've explicitly spent a lot of time in, but what I'm learning from Patrick's work is. It actually is a great way of creating a daily habit is a great way of not only calming yourself down, but also being able to create that resilience that he was just talking about in our closing clip.
I love this concept of building the resilience that then whether it's athletic performance. Or maybe it's just dealing with stressful situations at work, better rise. So much benefit from truly taking on a ship and I'm walking a better breathing pattern platform in your own life. That transcends pretty much every touch point in your life.
I think that's really what Patrick's saying to us [00:49:00] breathing is it impacts everything. And I I really thought a VIM half it, this is like VIM Hoff's brother
has got this raspy Dutch accent. Patrick's got this beautiful Irish lilt but nevertheless, I'm sure they're related somehow the point here for me is that when he looks at the science and the response of the nervous system there's some real sciences worth investigating there.
If that doesn't work for you, just try this approach to breath, work, slowing down the breath. And it just feels good because your calming down your heart rate, you're coming down your blood pressure and you're just being more calm, more, still more peaceful, more present. It's an advantage on the field, in the office at home.
It is just so damn good. [00:50:00] And one interesting thing, mark is like my natural companion to breathwork is journaling. I feel like if there were just two things I could recommend to you and all of our listeners do some breath, work in the morning, do some journaling in the morning and you will have. A good day.
You know what I mean? Yeah, I totally do. And I'm going to definitely add this into my. Daily habit of what I function and what I do, because I'm just totally convinced. There's so much science and data that I can't push back on this idea. And like you say, where you got introduced to it probably a little bit via them half.
And I think Patrick's, again, making the case that if you start with your breathing, then that can lead to a healthier and maybe having. Mindset and life. So start me up today. Good on you. I'll be typed up in bed. You'll be [00:51:00] doing your one-hour course. Let's see how we go through this health series markets.
It's just great. Doing a health series. How have you found, like kicking it off with this sort of it's a little bit of a sleeper topic. Breathwork but I think. Really struck a chord with both of us, hasn't it? Yeah. It really has possibly more than I anticipated. Actually. I knew that we wanted to start with breathing before we get into the next few episodes we've got in our health series, but I didn't appreciate.
Before getting into Patrick's work, just how important breath was going to be to our approach, to sleep, to eating right, to having a good, flexible strong body. Having a good mindset, some a way to deal with stress away, to be focused, to be patient all star. With that [00:52:00] simple act, we do instinctively from birth, but we never necessarily take the time to learn to do it properly.
And that's breathing. And for me, this has been a big penny drop moment where suddenly I'm, my eyes are open and now I can see that it is going to be such an important thing to actively maintain and practice and do correctly because of how influential it is and everything else that I do. Yeah, to be honest, Mike although it's going to sound a bit.
Superlative and maybe a bit too chatty. I think this has been one of the most practical tips that I've found that I can start to put into my daily practice. And I think it will have a big effect. Yeah. And surprising as well. Isn't it? I think that's the, it's Ooh. Okay. Didn't think about this.
That's right. Surprising. And although again, perhaps similar to VIM Hoff, it sounds simple, but [00:53:00] it's so not obvious. It's not obvious until you really have that. Opening effect. Yeah, exactly. Mark, I want to say thank you to you. And I want to say thank you to you. Our listeners and our members today has been the start of a wonderful new series on health, and we kicked it off with the most fundamental, the essential.
Oxygen advantage by Patrick McMullen. And in the introduction, he called us to arms. He asked us to breathe consciously and in moments of stress or to get focused, he said, hold your breath because we're in a war against chronic. Over-breathing. His simple rule is. Breathe too much. And you can do it both day and night.
You can even hack your breathing while you sleep type up the mouth. You'll not only stop snoring, you'll sleep better and have more energy in the new day, in the new morning. [00:54:00] And in the end of the day, whether it's evening or night, this comes down to creating a cadence of good breath of building resilience, giving you the capacity, not any to fight stress, but to become.
Yeah, in all respects. And that truly serves our mission here on the moonshots podcast, where we learn out loud together on how we can be the very best version of ourselves. That's it for the moonshots podcast. That's a wrap.