Speaker 1: 1:11

late nights, unpredictable rosters up and down some days, some days nights, some days days, and then relying on coffee to stay awake and stimulants to stay awake, and things like that. They are living predominantly in a sympathetic state, and what's really important to know is there's no good or bad between these states. It's just how long you're in it, and we need the nervous system to be in a sympathetic state. Sometimes, if I jump in the car and go for a drive, I'm going to be more sympathetic than I am parasympathetic, because I need to focus. If I'm learning a new subject and I'm in a lecture, I'm going to be more sympathetic than I am parasympathetic. I'm more sympathetic right now on this call than I am parasympathetic, and so it's important to know that. As you said before, it has its place, but it doesn't have to be.

Speaker 2: 2:00

Welcome to a healthy shift. My name is Roger Sutherland, certified Nutritionist, veteran Law Enforcement Officer and 24-7 shift worker for almost four decades. Through this podcast, I aim to educate shift workers using evidence-based methods to not only survive the rigors of shift work but thrive. My goal is to empower shift workers to improve their health and wellbeing so they have more energy to do the things they love. Enjoy today's show and welcome to another episode of a Healthy Shift podcast. And welcome to another episode of a Healthy Shift podcast.

Speaker 2: 2:39

I'm your host, roger Sutherland, and today I'm really thrilled to finally have located a breathwork trainer and mentor and public speaker by the name of Chris Payton. This is really important for us as a shift worker, and the reason why I've actually brought Chris onto the podcast is because Chris grew up in a really tumultuous environment himself, which was marked by drug addiction, domestic violence and untold instability. But Chris turned his pain into purpose in this area and he overcame these challenges to build a life dedicated to actually helping other people to transform their struggles into strength. Starting out as a personal trainer at just 17 years of age, chris has since used his modalities like personal training, learning about nutrition, nlp, hypnosis and, most notably, of latest times in breathwork, which has actually empowered thousands of lives. Now Chris has personally facilitated thousands of transformational breathwork experiences and helps individuals to heal, to grow and to actually thrive. So, as the co-founder of Infinity Training and Coaching, which is one of Australia's fastest growing breathwork certification companies, chris now focuses on educating and certifying the coaches and also health practitioners, so he's the coach coaching coaches. Now, through the Infinity Breathwork training system, he actually equips them with the tools to build an impactful business and create meaningful change in their lives of clients.

Speaker 2: 4:15

Chris is a great listen. This was a fantastic podcast, one that I thoroughly enjoyed recording, and you'll hear how we cover off on everything the benefits of breathwork. It's free, we all do it. How about we learn to do it properly and learn all about the benefits of it? Now I've already introduced Chris Payton to the show, so I just wanted to say thank you so much for actually joining us and sharing your knowledge in the area of breathwork and the importance of it for our shift working community. So, chris, can you just share a bit about your background and what led you to your breathwork training and, as a holistic health coach, yeah, roger.

Speaker 1: 4:55

Firstly, thanks for having me, yeah, roger. Firstly, thanks for having me on, mate, I'm really excited to be able to speak to your community. I think that we've had discussions. Breathwork is an absolute necessity in our opinions, and so just a little bit on me. My name's Chris. I run a company called Infinity Training and Coaching. We actually certify people in breathwork, so whether they want to go out and work with athletes, whether they want to work with people with disordered breathing patterns, whether they want to help people with trauma, we teach breathwork in a way that really covers the full spectrum of what it means to breathe.

Speaker 1: 5:23

And a little bit about, I guess, my backstory. I have always been in the space of coaching people, ever since I was little, actually growing up in a pretty crazy household, coaching parents and dealing with adult issues, and then I left school actually and I knew straight away that I wanted to help people. So I was very fit, I was very active and the thing that made sense for me to do was actually become a personal trainer. So my cert three and four was offered in year 11 and 12. So I was fortunate to come out on the other side of year 12 and get straight into running a PT business and I really loved that because it allowed me to help people and it was a passion of mine as well. So not an easy industry to be in, I'll say that, especially when you're 17 years old and you step into a big box gym with lots of experienced trainers, but stuck it out and just kept honing my craft, from rehab to sports nutrition and everything in between, and really built this amazing one-on-one personal training business that went for just over a decade and what really sort of changed the path of, I guess, my career into breathwork was.

Speaker 1: 6:22

I actually went through quite a big mental breakdown when I was 26. During that time I kind of followed the societal footsteps of like you go and get counseling, you go and get psychotherapy, you take the antidepressants. I walked that route and I'll be honest with you, roger, like it just didn't help me in the way that I needed to be helped. I walked out of a lot of those sessions feeling no better really and in my personal experience all I did was I got more awareness of the things that were wrong and I overanalyzed it even more and I spent more time in my head and you know this is not to you know shit on psychologists or counselors. It all has a place. But it was actually when I stumbled across a friend. They were like you need to try breathwork. And I thought what the fuck is breathwork? Like I've breathed my whole life and you know, being in a PT space and the performance space, I'm like, well, I understand respiration, right, but they're like, no, this is different, you need to try this.

Speaker 1: 7:14

Went and did this workshop and I will say that it was one of the most profound experiences of my life and you know I was able to process a lot of trauma and stuff that I experienced as a child, and it wasn't just in that one session, it was the sessions following it.

Speaker 1: 7:31

There were many sessions that followed it where I was able to really get back into my body and understand how the nervous system, you know, plays a really important role in our healing.

Speaker 1: 7:38

I didn't really understand that at the time, but the more I dove into it, the more I studied, the more I researched, the more I, you know, really took an obsession to this field, the more I realized that it's not so woo-woo, like everyone thinks that it's a very woo-woo thing. Oh, it's breathwork, it's this. You've got to charge your crystals, you've got to have sage and no like. There's so much science to it too, and something that we really do well here at our company is we bridge these two worlds together and we translate this in a way that the everyday person can understand. We talk in the language of the body, we talk in the language of the nervous system in the brain and we help people make sense of it so that they're not intimidated by it a few few years later. That's led me to here, where we're running a certification company and really helping people, certifying them so that they can go out and help people as well.

Speaker 2: 8:22

Absolutely. What a great summary. You've done this before, okay. Now I personally think we get an awful lot of resistance from people because it's so easy but it's got the most benefit. And I'm talking about the woo-woo stuff that we talk about meditation, journaling, breath work, gratitude, practice. All of these things are the things that literally change our lives, whereas people are in supplement stores looking for supplements or at the doctors looking for medications.

Speaker 2: 10:00

I think once we can balance our autonomic nervous system and we get ourselves right there, it really does have such a massive impact on the rest of our whole entire body. And I know you're going to agree with that, because once you get your central nervous system on the right side of where it needs to be and as a PT, you understand that there are times when we need to be in the sympathetic side, right, because that's where our adaptations to the training comes from. But we can't live there Now. Our shift working community lives in a sympathetic state, whether they realize this or not, and you must see a lot of this yourself. So we'll get to all of that. What are some of the biggest challenges that you faced in your own journey and how did you overcome them to build the life that you actually have today.

Speaker 1: 10:52

Great question. You know, a lot of my biggest challenges started early on in life, roger, and I feel like they created patterns in relationship and in connection with people, and some of the biggest challenges that I've actually had to overcome is, you know, learning to trust and you know, learning to be open. For a long time there I was very cynical and I was very cautious, and you know I think it's important to have a level of discernment in things, but you know I was very closed off from a lot of things, and that closed off nature would have kept me away from the very thing that saved my life, which is breathwork, if I kept it up. I had to find a way to open myself up to new things, to new ways of learning, new ways of being, to be open-minded, not to be too married to my perspective on things, and so I think the biggest challenges that I've had along the way is overcoming the side effects that have come from some of the experiences that I had earlier on. You know, learning to trust and be open and explore new things, and as a result, you know I was able to find something like Breathwork, which, I'll be honest with you, like going back even a year before I found it, I probably wouldn't have looked at it, I really wouldn't have thought it was a load of shit and I honestly would have done the blokey thing and went nah, that's weird, that's probably just for feminine chicks who, you know, in touch with their spirituality and all these things and just made all these judgments.

Speaker 1: 12:11

And it took me working on myself and doing that inner work to become more open to some of these what you said before, these woo-woo modalities which are really not that woo-woo at all to actually get the magic that I needed. And what I really learned about myself was that anything that I had a resistance to, anything that I said no to or I judged when I had no reason to judge, I needed to explore that thing, because every time I explored the thing that I rejected or had resistance to, there was always magic on the other side. And so that's kind of like a mantra that I live by. Now, if I ever say I don't like that person, when I've never met him or spoke to him, I'm like why don't I like that person? That's strange. Or I don't like that food, but I haven't even tried it, how would I know that? So, always exploring those resistances and the rejections have really been so transformative for me in my journey.

Speaker 2: 12:56

So good the ability to question. I think one of the things that defies my logic in my mind is and it isn't until you start to understand, from the evidence-based side as well, that you'll find people with kitchen benches loaded with supplements that they're taking that are not having any benefit, with zero science behind them at all. And yet the things that are pretty much free that have ridiculous amounts of evidence behind them are the things that are pretty much free that have ridiculous amounts of evidence behind them, are the things that they're not doing, like breathwork. And this is where your questioning comes in why, blokey? I'm not going to sit there and do breathwork, but we'll get into why, and I think it's important that we do how as a male, right, because males are very resistant to this sort of thing. So what was a defining moment along the way that lit the light bulb for you in your experience, that made you realise my God?

Speaker 1: 13:53

this works. That first experience stands out to me and, if I'm honest, when I went to that first experience, it was a very woo-woo vibe to it. Put it that way. It was a full-day workshop. It was very sort of yeah, up in the ether, very abstract, very high chunk. And you know, I sort of have two sides to me, roger, where I can appreciate that, Like I can appreciate things like quantum physics and things that are unexplainable, I do believe that there is more to than just what we are 3D Then, in the same respect, like we are a human and we are living and breathing and science does support things. So, you know, having that balance of the two is really important.

Speaker 1: 14:27

So, after that experience, I kind of just went on the journey of there's definitely something in this and I don't just believe that it is all abstract and woo woo. I need to somehow find some reasoning as to how these experiences are happening to me, how I'm getting some sort of healing because something's happening. And so, as I started going to more and more workshops, doing different types of workshops being facilitated by different people, I actually came across a mentor of mine who I did two of my certifications with, and it was the first time that I'd ever seen breathwork taught in a way that was mystical and woo-woo but also so heavily grounded in science. And he's actually a researcher at the moment. He's researching, you know, the effects of certain breathwork styles and altered states of consciousness on healing, and I loved it because what it did was it brought my two worlds together. It brought the curious, woo-woo side of me in and it also allowed me to tap back into my roots, which was biochemistry and sports, nutrition and things like this and understanding how the body works.

Speaker 1: 15:27

And so then, following on from that, as I started to study it more, I realized that the things that were so woo-woo and unexplainable were actually explainable when they had this really strong link to each other. And I started to learn about how these types of breath work you know, hyperventilation and things like that affect the brain and affect the body and the body's physiology and what that does. And it kind of just glued it all together and I thought this is beautiful. I've always wanted a way to help people physically, emotionally, spiritually, mentally and breathwork was just that. It was the thing that glued it all together for me amongst all the other modalities that I'd ever done. So I would say that that was a real defining moment for me, understanding and really realizing that there was a place for both of those worlds in this space and both are necessary and needed.

Speaker 2: 16:08

I totally relate to that. I told you prior to our starting that with the meditation, I went and learned meditation from an actual doctor, a psychologist that had done her doctorate and gone off and was specializing in neuroscience. The way she taught me meditation was to talk about the science, and this is what you're saying. Once you understand the science behind it and the biological like the neuroplasticity of it all and how it works, you then start to go. That makes sense, like everyone calls it happy clapper, and it's happy clapper for a reason, chris, isn't it? Yeah, because it works.

Speaker 2: 16:48

Yeah, when we think of happy clapper, we think of people all out there, but you don't see a miserable, sad, depressed happy clapper. No, absolutely, there's something in that isn't there. So you've talked about that. Once you understood the science side of it, you then understood, you got buy-in from it because you knew that the science worked, and I think that's important. Now we're here to talk about the power of breathwork for our shift working community, and I think majority of the people that do follow me or listen to this podcast are either frontline health or emergency services, so they're first responders as well. So why is breathwork just so important for first responders and, in fact shift workers themselves in particular.

Speaker 1: 17:33

Yeah, the first thing that stands out to me, roger, is that if we talk about first responders and we do have first responders come through and do our training, which is really great to see you're subject to things that the normal person doesn't see. You're subject to things that can be quite traumatic. All of this has an effect on your nervous system and there's a really, I guess, common thing that I hear amongst first responders and people in the fields where they're dealing with life or death situations and really full-on situations where they almost they say that they become desensitized to it. And I honestly challenge it a bit. I challenge it in the way of, yes, you a hundred percent of becoming desensitized, but how much of that is actually just being stored, ignored, put in a box, compartmentalized in your mind, to just get on with the thing, cause you have to like, you have to keep it together. And you know, I know for a lot of friends and stuff that have been through the force and everything that when they've left they've struggled and when they've had the time to actually stop they've struggled, like things have surfaced. And you know we see this in the military and things like that as well. I used to train paramedics and the same thing. They see things that people normally don't. So I think when you're dealing with things that are confronting and that put your nervous system into a state of stress, then we need to have a tool to be able to regulate that stress in real time.

Speaker 1: 18:46

Often what I'll do is I'll draw a line between animals in the wild and humans. Animals are so brilliant at instinctively releasing stored tension from their body. When the fight or flight system kicks in. They move. They either fight or they flight. But one of the things we do as humans with neocortex parts of the brain is we block it, we dissociate from it, we put it in a box, we ignore it, and what that actually does is it stops our natural nervous system cycle, the process of happening. When we need to move. We don't move, we stop and we freeze, and then we think about it and we ruminate and all that tension gets stored in our body.

Speaker 1: 19:19

So if we have a tool as you said before, roger, like it's free, it's right there, and if we can use that along with some movement and really just honor the way the nervous system works, then you know these first line responders are going to be able to deal with things in the moment before they manifest down the track into something bigger. They're going to have a tool that can help them then and there. And, of course, there's probably going to have to be the collaboration of other sorts of help with certain things. You know, I believe that a collaborative approach is the best approach. You know working with the mind and the body, but if we can have something to really work with the nervous system in real time, you know some of the things that they may face. They may get through with less scars and less wounds on the other side and less mental torment on the other side.

Speaker 1: 19:57

And then, if we're talking about shift workers, late nights, unpredictable rosters up and down some days, some days, nights, some days days, and then, you know, relying on coffee to stay awake and stimulants to stay awake and things like that. As you said before, they are living predominantly in a sympathetic state. And what's really important to know is there's no good or bad between these states. It's just how long you're in it, and we need the nervous system to be in a sympathetic state.

Speaker 1: 20:21

Sometimes, if I jump in the car and go for a drive, I'm going to be more sympathetic than I am parasympathetic, because I need to focus. If I'm learning a new subject and I'm in a lecture, I'm going to be more sympathetic than I am parasympathetic. I'm more sympathetic right now on this call than I am parasympathetic, and so it's important to know that, as you said before, it has its place, but we're definitely not supposed to live there. So if we can have a tool and a resource to go, hey, all right. I can't take away the fact that there's certain stresses that are involved with my occupation, but I can do my work on the other side of it to balance that scale out and to really bring my nervous system back into a state of harmony where I can rest and digest and heal and recover.

Speaker 2: 20:58

That's a really good summary there, because even just getting in the car and driving puts us into a certain amount of the sympathetic side of our autonomic nervous system and we don't have to be facing a person holding a gun pointing a gun at us to be in a sympathetic state. Of course it's going to put us in a sympathetic state and we've got to be able to switch sides very quickly, but just simple things and we do have to learn to regulate back to that parasympathetic side. But I think the other thing that's even totally overlooked as to the problems that we have with our nervous system as shift workers is simply circadian misalignment as well. You know, like it's not just sympathetic, parasympathetic, it's also. The circadian misalignment creates all sorts of confusion in the body which throws everything out, and I honestly believe that the breathwork is a way to just help to control that back into that parasympathetic state, because shift workers need to be able to learn to rest to get themselves into that parasympathetic side.

Speaker 2: 22:01

I hear it from shift workers all the time I just can't sleep, I just can't sleep. I know you would know exactly why that is right, exactly why it is, but they're not prepared to accept that, so they're taking medications to help them sleep and they're not sleeping because of that. They think they're sleeping but they're unconscious. They're then on caffeine all night and can't sleep and they come out of a high functioning emergency department which has been going all night. Next minute they're trying to lie down, scrolling on their phone, trying to go to sleep Long way less than ideal.

Speaker 2: 22:36

So how does shift work in high stress environments impact on our breathing patterns? What is there? Because it's one thing to talk about this, chris, but what is there that? If there's a takeaway in particular from this today, I think people need to learn what to look for. I always talk about it in the world of are you okay? We always ask people are you okay, but do you really know what you're looking for? You're just asking and hoping for a response. Okay, how does a shift worker tell if they're in a sympathetic side according to their own breath work?

Speaker 1: 23:08

Yeah, I love it. Great question, roger, and it was actually what was in my head. Funny enough, you picked it out. The most important thing to understand when it comes to breathing is that you know there's a part in your brain that's always spying on your breathing. It's right at the back in the medulla and what it's doing is it's assessing you know. Is Roger breathing fast? He's stressed. There's a threat, there's a perceived threat, okay. Is Roger breathing slow and relaxed? Oh, he's calm. There's no threat right now.

Speaker 1: 23:43

So this is the communication between the breath and the nervous system and it responds accordingly to what's happening with our breathing. A rough 30-ish percent of the population are over breathing right now. When you consider 8 billion odd people in the world, that's an enormous statistic. Now, the thing that creates over breathing, which is essentially breathing too much air or breathing too fast per minute, the thing that creates over breathing, is stress. Stress speeds up our respiratory rate.

Speaker 1: 24:02

If we think about what happens in the fight or flight system breathing picks up, heart rate picks up, blood goes to the major muscles, food digestion turns off and we're just focusing on output, output, output. What happens then is if we are experiencing stress and all stress is interpreted the same through the body. It doesn't matter if it's financial stress, relationship stress, lack of sleep stress, physical training stress, it's all the same. The adrenals fire. Cortisol goes through the body long-term.

Speaker 1: 24:29

So what's really important to know is we are experiencing stress, which we just do, and if we don't have tools to be able to down-regulate our nervous system, down-regulate our breathing, then what ends up happening over time is our unconscious breathing rate, which is just the way we breathe without thinking about it, starts to become quicker and quicker and, before we know it, we're breathing faster than normal. Our breathing is happening in the chest instead of the belly. We might be switching to mouth breathing. We're further activating the stress response. It's a vicious cycle that's going to keep feeding each other and it's keep feeding each other, and there's so many people out there that we've worked with that believe that they have anxiety, but they're breathing their way into an anxious state.

Speaker 2: 25:09

Totally agree. Yeah, spot on, I'm right there with you on that. If you controlled your breathing, you wouldn't have the anxiety.

Speaker 1: 25:15

And that's it. And so I would say that you know. How do you know you're in a sympathetic state? Well, think about how you feel when you're really scared. Think about how you feel when you're really overwhelmed. Think about how you feel when you're angry, like these are the sympathetic symptoms that come up. You're going to notice that you're really hypervigilant. You're going to notice that you're short and snappy. You're going to notice that your gaze is dialed and you're going to notice that you're not emotionally open. You're going to notice that your heart's beating out of your chest. You're going to notice that you don't want to digest food. There's going to be a lot of different symptoms that come up, and I think the best way for people to really get truly in touch with what that looks like for them is I just get them to remind themselves of a time in their life where they felt really pissed off, when they felt really overwhelmed or really scared, and if they can pull from some of those symptoms, they can go okay. That's the signs.

Speaker 1: 25:59

What's really important to know is that you know I believe in the concept of the feather brick and truck. I don't know if you've ever heard about it, but you know there's, go ahead, tell us. There's little whispers, right? So initially, when we're starting to get symptoms, it's like a little feather tickling you and you go oh yeah, like that's a bit out of the norm, I don't feel a hundred percent. And then, if we don't keep listening to it, then eventually we get the truck, and the truck is when we go into chronic fatigue, the truck is when we have, you know, burnout. This is where the truck comes in, and I think there's a lot of power in learning to understand and listen to the whispers of the feather before we get to the truck. And so identifying your breathing patterns early on, identifying your stress levels early on, be proactive and preventative rather than reactive and trying to fix the shit once it's hit the fan.

Speaker 2: 26:44

Such a great point because we do ignore it and one of the biggest problems that I see in particularly my field like I've done 40 years in the police a lot of what I see in young police in particular is they keep ignoring it and then they hit the skids and they get to the very bottom of the barrel and it's a long way back from there.

Speaker 2: 27:03

That's when the trucks hit them. It's a really long way back and I try and be as proactive as I can with people to, as you said, listen to the feather and notice the feather and then go from the feather to managing that so that it doesn't get any worse. So is there a way that we can tell? I always say to people be vigilant of whether you're breathing through your nose or your mouth. That's one way, Like if you're heading to a job and the sirens are going and the job's happening and you're starting to go through it in your mind, if you're breathing through your mouth, then there's a pretty good chance that you need to close your mouth and start breathing through your nose and start controlling it. Is that fair?

Speaker 1: 27:42

Absolutely. That's the first thing, roger, I'll always say to people when we first start our trainings, or if I'm doing a workshop or a presentation, I'll go. Guys, the best piece of breathing advice that I could give you before I go into science, before I go into anything else, is that your nose is for breathing and your mouth is for speaking and eating. Yes, and the more we can keep it that way, the better your nose has evolved for you to breathe through it, and there's many benefits to nasal breathing that you just do not get with mouth breathing. The writing on the wall. If you just Google nasal breathing versus mouth breathing, you will get a list of symptoms and benefits and drawbacks from mouth breathing and it's clear as day what one's made for and what the other one's made for and drawbacks from mouth breathing and it's clear as day what one's made for and what the other one's made for. So I think breathing is an interesting thing because it's the only system really in our body apart from the ability to control our thoughts or, I guess, have conscious thought. Our thinking and our breathing are the only two things in the whole body that happen by themselves without thinking about it. Yet we have control over it. So with these two things, your thoughts and your breathing, this tells me a lot. If we can somehow control them and manipulate them in certain ways slower, faster then we're meant to do that for a reason. That's there for a reason.

Speaker 1: 28:56

The control over that is there for us A lot of the time. It's about becoming aware and I'll say to people set an alarm on your phone. For every couple of hours that will go off and it'll be your reminder to tune in and do some nasal breathing. You know, just start to make it a habit, because it's unconscious. You will keep doing it if you're not aware of it. And then you know. Furthermore, after nasal breathing, there is specific, very simple tests that we can be doing on our breathing to determine whether we're breathing poorly or well. And you know, those tests can take 60 seconds or less and it can give you so much insight into your breathing health. And then from there you know exactly what to do to work on your breathing moving forward.

Speaker 2: 29:34

Fantastic. Okay, so we've spoken about breathing and how important it is, but it's really influencing our autonomic nervous system. So can you explain to us when we slow our breathing down and we're breathing through the nose, which is what it's designed to do, not through the mouth, how does it influence our autonomic nervous system?

Speaker 1: 29:53

Great question again. So, first things, first, understanding that with the autonomic nervous system you have two branches. So you have your sympathetic, parasympathetic. Realistically, what we have with breathing is, I like to say, it's the remote control to your nervous system. Right, we can use it to ramp up and ramp down.

Speaker 1: 30:07

Now you mentioned nasal breathing. So one of the things that happens when you nasal breathe is you typically breathe lower. And when I say lower, you breathe deeper. Now, deeper doesn't mean big breaths. Deeper means deeper into the lungs. Right, we breathe the lower third of the lungs, but not only that.

Speaker 1: 30:28

As we go deeper beyond the chest, which is typically involved with mouth breathing, by the way, as we breathe through the nose we get greater recruitment of the diaphragm. Now, the diaphragm is the major breathing muscle. It's the main breathing muscle sitting below your rib cage. Attached to that is a nerve called the phrenic nerve and there's also another nerve attached to it called the vagus nerve. And these two nerves, right here, we can really use to our benefit to create a bottom up approach to nervous system regulation. So as you breathe slowly through the nose and you engage the diaphragm muscle, it also contracts the vagus nerve. The vagus nerve is the chief nerve of the parasympathetic nervous system. So what we're doing is we're using our body to send signals to our brain to tell that part of the nervous system to switch on, and as it switches on, we experience the relaxation response.

Speaker 1: 31:11

So that's why, when you're breathing through your nose, you'll feel calm. If you exhale longer than you inhale, you'll feel calm. You'll notice your mouth starts to produce more saliva. You'll notice digestion turns back on. You'll notice your heart rate and blood pressure slow down and drop and you become relaxed. You become open. And, conversely, on the other side, if you're breathing too fast through your nose or just breathing through your mouth, you typically breathe up higher into the chest and across the chest, in the middle. Here you actually have a lot of your sympathetic nervous system fibers, and so what's happening is this movement here is like the constant activation of the stress response, and it's's like shit. There's a danger, there's a danger, there's a danger. So until we learn to shift our mechanics of breathing down, lower, slower, lighter, through the nose, then we're going to be breathing our way into some form of a stress response, whether that be mild or whether that be major.

Speaker 2: 31:55

If I said to someone, as you're heading to a high pressure event, a critical incident, as a police person or as a paramedic or as a nurse working in ED department, if you were to breathe in through your nose for four seconds and hold and then hum as you're breathing out through your nose, it's the perfect scenario, people around you will think you've absolutely lost the plot, but the hum actually completely activates that vagus nerve, doesn't it?

Speaker 1: 32:24

Yeah, and I would go one step further too, roger. If you don't want to look like you've lost the plot, you can actually do an exercise that involves little breath holds. So the reason why this is so effective, without going too deep here, is when we're looking at breathing. We breathe in oxygen and we breathe out CO2, carbon dioxide Now CO2, too much of it in the body is actually poisonous. However, not enough of it, and we also have impairment to our breathing too. So one of the things that carbon dioxide actually does is it allows the oxygen that you breathe in that goes down into your lungs and jumps onto hemoglobin, which is the protein in your red blood cells. Hemoglobin is like the ferry, so it carries the oxygen around, and you've got all your cells going like I need energy, like I need energy. And so what happens is, in the absence of a certain amount of CO2, the oxygen actually binds harder to the hemoglobin and it doesn't release. It holds onto it, and so what happens is you've got oxygen circulating in your bloodstream but not actually going into the cells and the tissues to actually do what it's designed to do. So when we start to over-breathe, say, we're going to first responder in a tragic event like that. Right, we're going to know where there's an anticipation. So naturally, what's going to happen is our breathing is going to pick up, which means that as our breathing picks up, we're going to be losing more CO2. The more CO2 we lose, the less oxygenation we get to our brain, which means that we don't think as clearly too. I was just gonna say that, yeah, and what happens if we can? Just, it's so simple bring your awareness into your breathing while you're driving or whatever. Do about 10 to 30 seconds of just nasal breathing only and then, after about 10 to 30 seconds, blow the air out of your nose, exhale it, hold your nose, hold your breath on the exhale for just 10 seconds and then repeat 10 to 20 seconds nasal breathing 10 second hold. 10 to 20 seconds nasal breathing 10 second hold. So what you're going to do is you're going to combat over breathing in its tracks, because when you hold your breath, you can't have a breathe.

Speaker 1: 34:10

Secondly, two, one of the biggest fears that a human has on a very deep, primitive level is to suffocate. So, as we may be sort of thinking in our head and getting very anxious and wound up here, if we then go, okay, I'm going to hold my breath. Your whole entire being now goes fuck, that doesn't matter, he's holding his breath. I'm going to die. Yeah, I'm going to die. If he doesn't stop this, in like a minute or two's time, this is going to get bad. So then what happens is it takes people out of whatever's happening here and it resets them here, and it just allows, at at the same time, for CO2 to rise. More blood delivery to the brain, oxygen to the brain. You'll be able to think clearer. So I'm a big fan of breath holding too. Breath holding and improving our CO2 tolerance is actually the secret to improving your breathing. That's where we start with all of our students. If you want to fix someone's breathing, you've got to fix their biochemistry first, and then everything follows from that.

Speaker 2: 34:56

This is not something, again, that you literally just do in the moment. This is something that you do regularly, all the time, so that it becomes second nature in that moment, isn't it? So it becomes like a muscle memory. Okay, I can feel the stress coming on. I need to do this, and you'll subconsciously do it because you've trained yourself to actually do that.

Speaker 2: 35:20

Training our body to function better on that CO2 in it instead of seeing it as a toxin, and one of the biggest problems. We do that. Training our body to function better on that CO2 in it instead of seeing it as a toxin, and one of the biggest problems we do have. The more stress we get, the higher in the chest we breathe, the more we activate it, the more we stay in that sympathetic state as well. What are the dangers of living in this chronic sympathetic state? Because I honestly believe that majority of our first responders and frontline health have an over-activated amygdala and they live in this chronic sympathetic state without them even realizing. Like they think, oh no, I'm not stressed, I'm okay, but they don't realize that they checked in with themselves just how stressed their body. So how does this impact their long-term health by living in this sympathetic state if they don't take action today.

Speaker 1: 36:04

I love it. Great question, rodo, and I love that. You said that you know that they think that they're not stressed, but it's become their new normal.

Speaker 1: 36:10

Yes, correct, yeah. And if you were to just look at the HRV or if you were to just look at their resting heart rate or if you were to look at, you know just the way that they felt, their digestion, things like that, they, things like that they would start to notice that they are stressed, they are quite stressed. So you know, there's a lot of damages that can happen, both physically and mentally, when we live in that state for too long. If we look at mentally, then you know we're going to be more hypervigilant, our relationships are going to suffer, we're going to be more triggered, we're going to experience more mood swings, ups and downs, poor emotional regulation.

Speaker 1: 36:39

If we look at the body, what the sympathetic nervous system does is it puts the body into a state of catabolism, yes, meaning that it breaks things down, and it needs to, because what it's doing is it's breaking down glucose, it's using things to fuel the intense amount of energy that we're needing.

Speaker 1: 36:54

So when you consider the fact that this part of the nervous system isn't there to help you digest food, recover, sleep well, sleep well, be regulated, have great, beautiful relationships, then we can start to really see why staying there for too long would be detrimental to the body and I first started to learn about this when I was a personal trainer and looking at like eating disorders and stuff and people who had like anorexia.

Speaker 1: 37:17

You know, their bodies are in such stressed out states that anytime they did put food in, the catabolic state that they're in is so strong it just breaks it down. It breaks it down so they can't actually put the weight on. And if you think about stress as almost like a big hammer, right, like it's designed to just smash through things over time, if you can imagine that your body's just lots of building blocks, stress is just there with this big mallet just breaking things down, breaking things down, breaking things down. So if we were to really zoom out without going too technical, like guys, it's going to break you down over time. That's what it does and that's why it's important to not be there other than when we have to be there.

Speaker 2: 37:53

Stress causes cancer. Because of that and this is what I need our shift workers to understand that it's not okay to say, oh, I'm stressed, I'm getting burnt out, oh, that's okay, that's part of the normal, which you quite rightly pointed out before we slowly go into this state over a period of time, and then what happens is it becomes our new normal that we have completely lost sight of what a relaxed state is actually like. And the longer you're in a stress state, then what happens is Chris has said you're breaking your body down and it's not functioning properly, which is when we end up with cancerous cells in our body that literally manifest and take over because you haven't looked after yourself in that autonomic nervous system, which we have to do. Agreed?

Speaker 1: 38:41

I would go one step further and say, like every single condition that exists out there, whether that be a disease or a mental health condition or a disorder, they all have one thing in common and that is stress. When we look at genes and our genetic makeup and epigenetics, like, we can have a certain set of genes, but if we grow up in an environment that's really calm and loving and relaxed and our nervous system is balanced and cared for, then we might not ever express the genes of bipolar or anything like that. But if we're under a lot of stress and it turns on certain genes to try and adapt to the stressor, that's what our body does. It's designed to adapt to stress and it will adapt to stress. But a lot of those things we can end up becoming quite maladaptive rather than adaptive down the track. Initially, at the time, it's adaptive, at the end of the day, though, it becomes maladaptive. So you know, any disease, any illness, anything like that, it involves stress. So by learning to control your system and its factors that do influence, you know what we get in our lifetime.

Speaker 1: 39:37

Like genetics does play into certain things, sure, certain things, sure. But if we can manage our stress, be aware of what stress looks like for us and even go beyond that and remove things that you wouldn't even typically consider. Stress like drinking clean water, cooking with the appropriate cookware, just all these little things like brushing your teeth with the right toothbrush and toothpaste. Sorry that all these little things cause internal stress on the body. So you could be doing your breath work and you could be doing all the right things with sleep and nutrition. But I also say to all of our students and our clients you have to audit your life as well, because you could do all the fucking breath work you wanted, but if you knew you were going home to live with a murderer, you ain't going to be relaxed. No amount of breath work is going to help. It ain't going to do it. So it's the environment too.

Speaker 2: 40:20

Totally, it totally is. I love this and I know another person that would certainly agree with you and I think if people don't read his work, you need to understand it. And that's Dr Joe Dispenser's work, you know, because he talks about all of this. The breath work, the meditations, are how we relax ourselves to prevent disease, live how we want to live in the future, and I've only just discovered his books and I'm reading Becoming Supernatural at the moment, which is mind-blowing, like absolutely mind-blowing. Have you read Breaking the Habit of being Yourself? No, not yet, but it's been recommended to me as well, but I believe it's very good.

Speaker 1: 40:57

Yeah, that was the first personal development book I ever read and it absolutely changed my life.

Speaker 2: 41:02

Stuck with you. Yes, I've been told that A good friend of mine read it and highly recommends it as well. So I think Breaking the Habit of being Yourself and also Becoming Supernatural both those books are by Dr Joe Dispenza, Highly recommended reading from a number of people. I hope you're enjoying the show. If you are, please don't forget to rate and review once you've finished. This helps the show's reach enormously. And have you got my free ebook, the Best Way to Eat on Night Shift? Well, this is a comprehensive guide to the overnight fast, why we should fast and how to best go about it. I've even included a few recipes to help you. I've put a link to the ebook in the show notes. And are you really struggling with shift work and feel like you're just crawling from one shift to the next? Well, I've got you. If you would like to work with me, I can coach you to thrive, not just survive, while undertaking the rigors of 24-7 shift work. I also conduct in-house live health and well-being seminars where I will come to your workplace and deliver evidence-based information to help your well-being team to reduce unplanned leave and increase productivity in your workplace. I've put the links in the show notes to everything mentioned. You can find me at ahealthyshiftcom or on Instagram at a underscore healthy, underscore shift.

Speaker 2: 42:30

Now let's get back to the show. We've talked about what the common signs are that if someone's stuck in a sympathetic state. So what are some implemental breathwork techniques that our shift workers can actually use in their daily routine? Now we've got to keep in mind too and this is important shift workers do need to be in a sympathetic state to a certain degree. Going to a job it's a fight or flight job, like police or paramedics, so that they're performing. They can't be, it doesn't matter, like all happy clapper and woohoo, it doesn't matter. What sort of implemental breathwork is there that they can put into place?

Speaker 1: 43:11

Because there's different styles depending on where we're at. Isn't there Totally, yeah, yeah. And when we teach breathwork at our trainings we kind of don't get lost too much in the should you do box breathing, should you do triangle breathing, should you do coherence. So what we do is we teach how map your own nervous system, so we help people understand the window of tolerance and polyvagal theory where we have, you know, your sympathetic, your parasympathetic or the shutdown state, because the parasympathetic state can also elicit the freeze response. When we've had too much stress, we can move into a freeze response, whether that's low grade or high grade freeze. And so you know, over a period of time, if you exhausted your sort of window of tolerance in the sympathetic system, then you can actually become quite sort of immobile and shut down too. And people can relate to this. Like, think about times in your life where you've slept well, you've fed yourself well, but you just can't seem to find the energy to get off the couch and do the things that you want to do, and maybe you just feel a bit out of source, you're not yourself, you feel a bit disconnected. These are signs of a bit of a freeze response, right?

Speaker 1: 44:06

So what stands out to me, roger, is that I'm going to assume that the sympathetic nervous system is probably very dominant in industries like yours, and so you know that's a given that's already going to be there. So what we really need to think about is well, if that's already going to be there, how do we balance it enough that we can still be really focused and have that clarity, but also to not become too stressed to the point that we lose the ability to think clearly and make silly decisions? So what stands out to me is really equipping frontline workers and shift workers with some slow breathing techniques in particular, and also to some breath holding techniques. So that one that I said before, roger, like that will help anyone in an anxiety attack, a panic attack, an asthma attack, like all these things, will just completely just shift you back into more of a focused state.

Speaker 1: 44:54

So I would say little breath holding, slow breathing exercises, because every slow breathing exercise that you do, whether it's box breathing, triangle breathing, physiological size, ultimate nostril they all activate the same branch of the nervous system. You just get to pick your favorite flavor, the one that feels best for you, and so having a couple of slow breathing practices maybe box breathing right, maybe triangle breathing, maybe a physiological sigh where you're in and then out. These are going to be great ways just to downregulate a little bit of that autonomic arousal that kicks in when you're in a high stress situation, so that you can still be in it Like you're still in it and you're still focused, but you're calm, focused. Does this make sense? You're not a chaotic focus.

Speaker 1: 45:33

You haven't gone too far, that's right and that's what it is and this that you know, box breathing was created by the Navy SEALs, these guys with life and death situations all the time, totally. So what they did was, with this slow breathing of like four hold four out, four hold four, those breath holds and the controlled breathing pattern in between was enough to keep them laser focused, not chaotically focused, but also not too relaxed at the same time. Yeah, so we can find that sweet spot because you know we are, it's like a pendulum, it's always swinging between the two. And you know we are, it's like a pendulum, it's always swinging between the two. And you know, if we want to go that one step further, if there is periods where frontline workers, shift workers, are feeling quite shut down and lethargic and things like that, and they might be in more of a freeze response, then we can use very short bursts of rapid fire breathing to just bring our autonomic nervous system up into a more functional state. So you know, things like rapid fire breathing in and out of the nose, like just 30 seconds, just gives you a quick whack of adrenaline and then you're functional, off you go and keep moving through your journey.

Speaker 1: 46:28

So I think the power really roger is going. How do I actually understand these different states of nervous system and how do I then apply the right tool for the right job at the right time? Because with breath work, what's really common now since you know, I guess, guys like wim hof and that coming out is a lot of people are already over-breathing, they're breathing too fast, they're stressed as fuck and then they go home and they're doing more hyperventilation and they're further ingrained in the habit of breathing too much. So we need to know what we need as an individual, and that's why we pride ourselves, I guess, on having like a screening and assessing model where we screen each person before we work with them to make sense of what they actually need Right Now.

Speaker 2: 47:04

I want to cash in on this and I want to put a disclaimer on this right here. This podcast is to actually explain to people about the benefits of breathwork and how breathwork works for them. This is not an educational platform to tell you that. This is what you should do in every different scenario, and Chris will totally agree with me on this, because of literally what he just said. You've got to be assessed for where you're at and what you're doing and what's going to work best for you to get you to that stage. Fair call, Chris 100%, Rona yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 2: 47:34

Yeah it's not an educate. You're not going to listen to this and walk away and go. Oh, I now understand completely, ron. You can understand the benefit and I hope that you do understand the benefit, because that's the purpose of this podcast. But I would still highly encourage people to invest in themselves, to go and learn breathwork properly, how to assess and how to do breathwork properly, because it's going to be and I'll categorically say this it's going to be the best investment you'll ever make in your health, bar nothing else. Yeah, I 100% agree. I mean, I know you do, you're the breathwork coach, but it's going to be the best.

Speaker 1: 48:08

One of the things that we do, roger, is we help a lot of coaches. We help coaches incorporate breathwork into their already established practices, or we help aspiring breathwork facilitators, and we also help them build their businesses too. So that's a big part of what we do. We help people build their coaching businesses, but we have people come through and go. Can I just learn this for myself? I'm like yes, yes, please do Like.

Speaker 1: 48:35

Even the only thing that separates whether you use this personally, professionally or both together is your intention behind it. But you are a human with breathing and a nervous system and a brain and everything else and the things that you learn from a breathwork. Training and learning how to use this tool, which is foundational to life, yes, will set you up for a far better life in your relationships, in your health, in everything in between. And I might be a bit biased, but I think people are absolutely mad not to go and invest into themselves to learn a foundational life skill that you're not taught in school, you're not taught at sports, you're not taught anywhere properly. Totally agree. We're sold a lie on how to breathe and we're not breathing well. So many of our issues can be resolved through learning to control the nervous system through breath.

Speaker 2: 49:16

Totally agree. Disease digestion issues Particularly, and I coach a lot of females in shift work. Obviously majority of my clients are all females. A lot of them have digestive and bowel issues and that's caused by desynchronized circadian rhythm. If they understood that, the sympathetic side of the nervous system shuts down digestion, shuts down your bowel, everything, because it's ready for fight or flight right. Learning a breathwork practice and understanding to get back into that parasympathetic state is amazing. I know myself when I go to bed at night and I lie in bed and I do four, seven, eight breathing to go to sleep because it just knocks me out straight away, I'm gone right. But I know that by putting my hand on my navel, one hand on my navel, one on my chest, and breathing down into that hand, I can literally feel your digestive system switch on and relax. Yeah, you can literally feel it relaxing. You don't realize how tense it is until you can feel it relaxing. Yeah, it's mind-blowing. How much that does. Let's just talkblowing. How much that does. Let's just talk about our shift worker again for a second. Are there any specific techniques that work best for a shift worker, like before a shift, during a shift and then maybe after a shift, to help them I talk about shift workers in a scenario of which one's going to come home better from work.

Speaker 2: 50:44

The person that stays in uniform jumps into their car, walks straight out of work, puts the doof-doof music on on the way home, drives home about 20 kilometres an hour above the speed limit, speeds inside, gets in, has something to eat, scrolls on their phone, jumps into bed. Or the person that gets changed out of their uniform, walks to the car, sits in the car, does a few minutes just to calm themselves, drives home listening to piano music or something calming, walks into the house in the darkness, has a shower with Lero Blue light, goes to bed. Who's going to sleep better? Yeah, it's night and day, isn't it? Yes, but this is what they do. What is there that? If someone was preparing for a shift a nurse and she's going into emergency department, what would you recommend? Would you recommend that she does a bit of a breathwork practice as she gets out of her car or before she goes in? And then what would you do during the time that you're at work and then coming home? How would you go through those?

Speaker 1: 51:39

yeah, yeah, I think you know. Again, it would come back to just that person having fully understanding what's happening in their nervous system at any given time. So I can't generalize, but it's hard to know like one person might be waking up, going okay, I feel pretty good going into work today. One person might be going I cannot get out of bed, I'm so tired. So it's going to change depending on the person, but what stands out for me is, with any sort of job where we have to be on which is most jobs, to be honest but we want to improve brain function, we want to improve oxygenation to the body, and so the way that we do that is we breathe less and we breathe light.

Speaker 1: 52:11

And you know some really simple ways to prep yourself before going in for a shift that may bring a lot of stress would just be to spend a couple of minutes two to five minutes in the car before you walk in, doing something like coherence breathing five in, five out. The reason why coherence breathing is one of my favorites is because, when we look at the way breathing works, when we inhale for a longer time than the exhale, we actually activate the stress response, and when we exhale longer than the inhale, we calm the stress response and it doesn't take much to work this out. If you locate your pulse when you're breathing in, you'll be able to feel the heart beating faster, and then when we breathe out, the heart beats slower. So what we need to think about here is well, if we can do a breathing pattern that's five in, five out, which means it's matching the exhale to the inhale, then what we're going to do is we're actually going to balance the nervous system and this is the key. We're not going to become too relaxed where we're not motivated to walk in the doors, and we're also not going to become too activated that we're walking in, stressed and chaotic. So some breath patterns where they have an even inhale exhale could be a great way to start, because they're going to bring your nervous system into a really nice grounded central spot.

Speaker 1: 53:15

Throughout the shift I would be keeping an eye, and most simplest piece of advice I could say is keep an eye on nasal breathing as much as you can.

Speaker 1: 53:22

In between talking to people, working with patients, whatever you're doing, focus on nasal breathing and if there's periods throughout the shift where you start to get stressed, do some slow breathing and some breath holding that's going to immediately shift you out of a stress state and back into a more coherent state, and then I think it goes without saying that after the shift, the thing that you need to do is you need to wind down.

Speaker 1: 53:40

This is where we want to put more of those extended exhale breathing techniques in here, really winding down the nervous system. There's another breathwork exercise that I like and it's just called reduced breathing and you just literally imagine that there's a feather under your nose and you just breathe really soft and light, and this increases CO2 in the blood, improves oxygenation to the brain, and one of the things that CO2 also does is it's a vagotropic part of the nervous system, right, or our breathing. It's vagotropic, meaning that it has a calming effect on the parasympathetic nervous system. It has a calming effect on the vagus nerve. So having slightly higher levels of CO2 in your blood will actually make you feel more relaxed.

Speaker 2: 54:16

Yep. So that basically answers the next question was can breathwork play a role in improving sleep quality? Now, we're not talking about going to sleep, because majority of shift workers I know come home from work and they're exhausted, so they crash, but then they wake up. So does breathwork help in the quality of sleep? So give us more REM sleep, Give us more of that deep, restorative sleep.

Speaker 1: 54:39

Yeah, it absolutely does. And it comes back to what you said before, Roger. When people are maybe using assistance through medications and stuff to get to sleep, you think you're sleeping deep but you're not sleeping deep. It's like people that have come home after drinking heaps on the piss they think they're out to it but they're not sleeping well. So not getting into really good deep sleep and good REM sleep. Really again, just keep circling back. What certain breathing techniques is going to do is it's going to downregulate your nervous system enough that you can actually drop into a deeper sleep because you might get off to sleep but say you're breathing through the mouth during the night. This is where snoring and mouth breathing and apnea is so terrible, because, as we're breathing through the mouth, there's a stress response. Yes, we're not fully conscious, but we're not really in a deep, deep sleep.

Speaker 1: 55:22

I used to have insomnia for years, Roger, Like insomnia. For years I had to take medications. I had such high anxiety, you know, once I started, instead of laying there listening to my head, which is not always easy to do. Easier said than done. The committee meetings yeah, Easier said than done.

Speaker 1: 55:36

I totally get it and I understand that when we put our head on the pillow, things can get loud. If we can come away from the thoughts just for a moment and just focus on a breathing pattern and down-regulate ourselves, that's the thing that's actually going to drop you off to sleep. I never got to sleep by thinking more about needing more sleep. I got to sleep by working with my body and my nervous system, and that's the biggest thing that stands out to me. Yes, if you wind yourself down enough, five, 10 minutes of breathing before bed, you're going to be able to stay in a deeper sleep and keep you out longer. And I think this probably ties into, though, Roger, with the circadian disruption, right With melatonin and stuff. Totally, it would all come into the same sort of thing?

Speaker 2: 56:12

Yeah Well, because there's pineal meditations and breath work that you can do as well, which Joe Dispenza talks about, and it's quite fascinating to activate Activate melatonin, which is just mind-blowing stuff. To be perfectly honest, had I read this five years ago, I would have gone, yeah, nut job, nut job. But I now understand more of this sort of stuff and oh gee, I don't know. But anyway, one thing that's a catch cry in society today is resilience. We've got to build resilience. We have to build resilience. So what is the connection between breathwork and emotional resilience, right, and how can our shift workers use it? And is it good to help us to manage our stress better? To start off with, Totally.

Speaker 1: 56:49

Yeah, I like to explain this with a bit of a story, right? So you have three brains, not three literal brains. You have three parts of your brain. So the deepest part of your brain, at the back, is your reptilian brain, or the crocodile brain, and this is the oldest piece of your brain. At the back is your reptilian brain, or the crocodile brain, and this is the oldest piece of your brain, like this is where lizards and stuff evolved from. This is dinosaurs, this is crocodiles and alligators and all those things that you still see out there. They have a reptile brain, they don't have a middle brain, they don't have a front brain, so they operate purely out of fight or flight. They operate. And the language of the crocodile brain, roger, is should I eat it or should I mate with it? That's basically all. It's. Yep, that's all it is. It's eat, sleep, reproduce and get on with life.

Speaker 1: 57:29

I don't experience emotions. You know over time what happened is. You know, if you look at mammals in the wild, their brains developed one step further. We have the midbrain, where we have the emotional center of the brain. This is why mammals, they survive in packs, because they realize that they're safer that way. And then we have the human brain, which evolved on top last.

Speaker 1: 57:45

So what happens is when we go through a lot of stress if we talk about emotional regulation, when we experience a lot of stress, typically what happens is too much breathing, reduction of blood flow to the front part of the brain which helps us actually make decisions. So it stops impulsive behavior, it stops one of our outbursts and things like that. And if we're breathing too fast, losing blood flow to the brain, we become more impulsive, we become more reactive, and so when we can implement a tool like breathwork to maintain blood flow and oxygenation to the brain and to also maintain a level of balance within the nervous system so we don't shift into the crop brain, then what's going to happen then is that resilience that we're looking for is just going to come by nature of being in a better brainwave state, because we're going to be able to access what's both emotion, so we can feel our emotions, but we can access logic and reason at the same time. Both exist. Rather than becoming totally emotional-based or totally logic-based, we've got the room in between to be able to honor our emotions, feel our emotions, understand our emotions and, most importantly, communicate them in a safe way, rather than flipping the lid, rather than getting angry, rather than saying things we don't mean.

Speaker 1: 58:55

So emotional resilience is built off the foundation of a strong and stable nervous system. You ain't going to have emotional resilience if your nervous system's out of whack. And stable nervous system. You ain't going to have emotional resilience. If your nervous system is out of whack, you're pushing shit well uphill, like Mount Everest Hill, huge. And so if we can work on the nervous system being the foundation to emotional resilience, then you know the tool is there. We can use it.

Speaker 2: 59:13

That's what we want, because a lot of people have no emotional resilience and capitulate. And again, chris, it comes down to it's not going to happen out of one experience. It's got to come over time. And you don't realize how much resilience you're actually building by your breath. You know when your mom used to say to you take a deep breath. Moms always know, don't they? Like you know, when you're getting yourself hyped up, hey, stop, take a deep breath. And it worked. Nothing has changed and your mum actually knew right, and that's it. So you've got to stop and take a deep breath and that's how you actually build space between the stimuli and your response to that stimuli isn't it?

Speaker 1: 59:57

That's exactly all it is, mate. The breath actually just offers you a pause, and in that pause is how you choose to respond rather than react.

Speaker 2: 1:00:05

And that's what I learned about meditation, which is hand in glove anyway, because generally in meditation you're focusing on the breath and coming back and returning to that breath.

Speaker 2: 1:00:14

And I think over time the one thing that I did learn was and with my diagnosis of PTSD as well that I was hypervigilant and highly reactive to a lot of things. And the more I learned meditation and the more I went down the line of meditating, with the breathwork that goes with that, the more I realized it doesn't happen straight away, but it happens over time that you start to realize that when a car cuts you off on the road, you just go. Meh, because you had that chance to choose that response and it can't slow your time down. It's physically impossible, but it does slow the time down between the stimuli and that response that you're choosing, which is the power of that meditation and breath work as well, which is great phenomenal. For me, it made such a difference because I went from highly reactive yeah, steering wheel fist pumping to yelling and screaming and tooting to. You know, I just don't care anymore, like I really don't, I just go.

Speaker 1: 1:01:10

Yeah, you know what it is, and I'm so much more relaxed around that and I think it's easy to overlook it and, in some cases, roger like it's the difference between some people making a decision that could potentially change their entire life. It's the decision that stops you assaulting someone when you're angry. It's the decision that stops you smacking your kids when you don't want to. It literally is the space that's going to allow you to become the human that you're here to be, rather than get flooded, do shit that you don't want to do or you're not proud of, then feel the guilt and the shame. Later you have the opportunity to, quite literally, take the space and respond.

Speaker 2: 1:01:45

It's funny you should mention that because I had an incident at the front door of my house here that a bloke confronted me, highly aggressive, and I was just basically standing there and was just telling him just get off the property, get off the property. People said I can't believe you didn't drop him, or why didn't you do that? What for? Yeah, but he got off the prop. People said I can't believe you didn't drop him, or why didn't you do that before? And they go what I would have just dropped, and people might look at you as weak because you didn't do it, but at the end of the day he walked, I walked and that was it. That was the end of the incident and I didn't put myself in any stress or put myself under any pressure or anything in any way whatsoever. The outcome was far better than what it would have been had. I have reacted in that way and that's where you notice the power of that meditation and that breath work.

Speaker 1: 1:02:27

Yeah, absolutely, it's in the little moments that could be really big moments.

Speaker 2: 1:02:30

Totally. Now a lot of people are going to be skeptical about breath work right and we sort of open with it. But how would you respond to someone that just says hey, listen, chris, it's just breathing right. It's not actually a real solution to the problem. What would you say to that?

Speaker 1: 1:02:44

Yeah, I would say then you know, like, firstly, you're right, like it is just breathing. But then I would question them and I'd say but did you know that there's a difference between breathing and breath work? Because breathing is just the thing that we do. It's like thinking. You're always thinking right. There's the difference between conscious thought and just mindless thinking. So I would say to them you're right, it's just breathing, but have you ever tried breath work? Have you ever tried using your breath to actually change the way you feel?

Speaker 1: 1:03:13

I would say to them Roger, have you ever felt angry before? Yeah. Would you like a tool to be able to deal with anger better in the moment? Yeah, absolutely yeah, that's right. And have you ever felt shut down and lethargic and unmotivated before? Have you ever felt anxious before? Yeah, and so would you like a tool that can help you with all of that? Because that's what we have here.

Speaker 1: 1:03:32

And I would say, furthermore, like take from my story, if anyone's listening, whatever you have a rejection, to just explore it. Open yourself up to it. My life's completely changed. I run an incredibly successful business now around breathwork. When, once upon a time, I had thoughts of like I don't know if I want to do that, the thing that's actually allowed me to go on a mission of changing millions of lives with this thing. Had I not opened myself up and gone okay, well, let's give it a go I wouldn't have got that, and I get it. Like there's a lot of people out there that are, I guess, ago, I wouldn't have got that, and I get it. There's a lot of people out there that are, I guess, teaching it in a way that is very left field.

Speaker 2: 1:04:04

So find people that teach it in a way that communicates and translates, that makes it more mainstream and easy to understand, and for you, because when I went to learn meditation, hannah went through a number of different meditations and there was two or three meditations that did not resonate with me in any way whatsoever until I hit on the one that absolutely resonated with me. Now, what resonated with me didn't resonate on somebody else in the room there, and that's the beauty of learning from someone who understands all the different types and can teach you all the different types, isn't it, chris?

Speaker 1: 1:04:37

Totally yeah yeah. Find yourself someone who's well-versed and really swings the pendulum both ways.

Speaker 2: 1:04:42

How can a shift worker integrate breathwork into their busy schedule without it feeling like another task? Because shift workers do suffer horrendously from decision fatigue, because they're working really hard in their jobs and they are on and they're really good at what they're doing with their job, but when they get home they feel like everything's just so overwhelming that they can't do it. Now I really would love to see 100% of shift workers as master breath workers. That's the goal, and I know you would too right. If you could convert 21% of society today into breathwork masters, then you'd be a very, very happy and very rich man too, by the way. How can we sort of slowly integrate this into their life without it feeling like it's oh my God, it's something else I've got to do.

Speaker 1: 1:05:28

Yeah, I love it, roger. And what's really important to know and if you are a shift worker, listening, there's a lot on your plate, right, you are tired. What we need to think about here is the human brain seeks the path of least resistance. That's just what it does. Seeks the path of least resistance. That's just what it does. So how can we position this in a way that doesn't create too much resistance for you?

Speaker 1: 1:05:47

If I said to you, roger, you're a shift worker and we're going to master breathwork, all you've got to do, mate, is when you wake up, you have to do breathwork for 45 minutes straight before you head off to it, your brain's already like I ain't fucking doing that. Nah, I ain't doing that. I haven't got time for that, no. So the things that we need to consider is how do we keep it short and sweet? For a start, this is one of the most beautiful things about breath work it takes a couple of minutes, that's it. Yes, you can actually start to feel it within seconds. So I get that everyone's busy, but I honestly believe that shift workers have five minutes. You know what the best part about that is? We can then layer that, we can habit, stack that into another thing that we're doing. Maybe while you're having your shower in the morning, you're doing your coherence breathing while you're having a shower. Yes, maybe when you're driving to work you're doing your slow breathing practice because these are safe to do while you're driving.

Speaker 1: 1:06:32

You're doing your slow breathing practice while you're driving to work. Like, layer it into what you're already doing, instead of just listening to the news or plugging into something that's shit for your mind. Like plug in something that's good for your mind. Put on a pre-recorded, guided slow breathing on the way to work and listen to it so you can guide yourself through it. You know, have these sorts of things and focus on, like stacking it on top of something you're already doing. That's positive, rather than thinking it as another thing that you just have to add to your life. Do it when you're already doing something and that's the beautiful thing about it. The only thing that I need to put a disclaimer on, roger, is that fast breathing practices please never do them behind the wheel of a car oh no, don't pass yourself out, yeah. Or operating heavy machinery. Or definitely do not do it around water or anything like that. Yeah, just in case. But slow breathing practice there's no contraindications, there's no concerns.

Speaker 2: 1:07:22

It's perfectly fine, so just layer it in with tasks. Even if you're on the train and you've got your earbuds in, it doesn't mean you have to be listening to doof-doof music or a book or a podcast. You can literally be listening to just sounds, because a lot of stuff is noise cancelling now. But just listen to a nice background sound and just close your eyes like everybody else on the train, and literally just focus on your breath work or in your car or whatever. Keep yourself in that state and do the same on the way home and watch how much better you sleep. Mark my words you will sleep so much better with a calm, parasympathetic nervous system. It's going to make a big difference.

Speaker 2: 1:07:57

A lot of people will start and try meditation and it doesn't work for them, so they just give it away. So what are some of the common mistakes that people need to look for when they're trying breath work for the first time, chris, because obviously you're an educator and you would see so many mistakes. How do we navigate people to start it slowly and move into it until it becomes just like muscle memory?

Speaker 1: 1:08:18

yeah, great question. Look, first thing is just don't set expectations on yourself. The first thing that I ever say to our students, and even when I'm facilitating people through breakthrough styles of breathwork, I'll be calling out like you can't do this wrong, just keep breathing. You can't do this wrong. So my first thing would be don't overcomplicate things. It gets to be really, really simple.

Speaker 1: 1:08:36

The thing that we need to do is fully make sense of where we're at in our nervous system so that you're applying the right breathing technique to you at the right time. So you could be very stressed out for all you know and you might think that you're doing the right thing, or incorporating breathwork in, and there you are, wim hof, breathing, you know, making yourself even more wrapped up, and then you're coming to me and going. I don't understand. I'm doing my breathwork. I'm like there's different types of breathwork for different times. That's the important thing. Yes, there's different types, yeah, and they do different things to the nervous system.

Speaker 1: 1:09:03

So if you're trying to calm down, you definitely don't want to do upregulating breathworks. These are one of the biggest sort of if you want to call it mistakes. We see early on people just not really understanding how the breath communicates with the nervous system. Once we get that, then people understand okay, well, I'm here, so now I need to do this type of breath work. Or now I'm here, I need to do this type of breath work, and now it becomes this tool where, when they're using it, they're actually tangibly feeling the improvement, rather than if they're really anxious and they go and do Wim Hof, they're like I'm still anxious, they don't have the relief. So there's no buy-in.

Speaker 2: 1:09:48

Whereas if they can feel a change quickly and notice kitchen bench and every time you walk past it, you picked it up and you did 10 reps with it in both arms and then put it back down again every time you walk past. It won't be long before it's nothing in your hand and you'll want a two kilo, yeah, and you'll do that, and then you'll want a three kilo, and you'll do that, and then you'll want a three kilo and before you know it, you've got like a 10 kilo dumbbell sitting on your kitchen bench and it's progressive overload, but it's progressive overload in something that's going to benefit you. You go to the gym and people go to the gym because why? They enjoy it, they get the benefit out of it, they feel great.

Speaker 2: 1:10:19

So breath work is exactly the same for people get the benefit out of it, they feel great. So breathwork is exactly the same for people. And what will happen is it's not a chore. It might start out as a bit of a chore, but when you feel and you start feeling the benefits for it, you honestly and sincerely use it as your first tool to go right, this is what I need, and you'll do this and then you'll go oh, I just feel so much better Right now. I can go back into the room and deal with whatever I've got to deal with.

Speaker 1: 1:10:44

It'll land for you and you said it earlier in this episode, roger where it becomes like a muscle memory, and it'll really land for you. When you feel yourself, get stressed and then you do like a little breath hold technique or you do a slow breathing technique without any thought, it's like your go-to thing, like I feel this, any thought, it's like your go-to thing Like I feel this. So your brain starts to associate when I feel this, I do this and, as you said, like you've trained yourself to do it and it'll really land for you, then If you can get through those early learning stages of I'm just going to do this frequently to create a pathway in my brain, then when that pathway fires without any thought and you feel better for it, it'll really land and you'll be happy that you started and kept with it.

Speaker 2: 1:11:22

You'll be happy that you started, and I think that's the key. If a shift worker wanted to start with just a simple breathwork practice today, what would you actually recommend? I've got it in my mind because I hadn't heard about what you said before, as you're going into a comprehensive breathing. Is that what you said? Coherence, coherence, breathing. I would suggest that to balance your nervous system. Five seconds in, five seconds out, balance it. If you look at box breathing too right.

Speaker 1: 1:11:52

Four in four hold, four out, hold for four. Anything that has an even ratio of inhale to exhale and even a little breath hold in there is going to be fantastic for balancing your nervous system, improving oxygenation to your brain and just slowing down everything.

Speaker 2: 1:11:59

And I think that's where the box breathing comes in, doesn't it? Because it combines everything. It's an even in, even out, and it's a hold at both ends as well. Amazing. Are there any apps, books, resources that you'd recommend for listeners to actually learn a little bit more about it?

Speaker 1: 1:12:13

Yeah, so one of the best breathing books you could read is Breathe by James Nestor. It's a very common one. It's the best it's the best.

Speaker 1: 1:12:19

It's what put me onto it yeah just to really help you fully understand the history right and how long certain cultures and tribes and stuff have had awareness of the negative impacts of mouth breathing. And, as he reports as him and his friend I think it was they go through the journey of clogging up their nose and breathing through their mouth for a week or two and then switching it and just really noticing the changes in their health and wellbeing. It's a great place for you to start to make sense of how fundamental breath is to life and how negative it is to have impaired breathing. Outside of that too, I would just honestly spend a lot of time learning from people like Constantine Botteco, the Oxygen Advantage crew I've done some training through Oxygen Advantage as well.

Speaker 1: 1:12:59

Patrick McEwen, because in a world where really sort of glamorizing the fast breathing techniques, where people are having these huge breakthroughs, it's important we teach it. But when we can really start to teach people the foundations of what it means to breathe well and to functionally breathe, then it's just such a good place to start. So you know, whether you tune into our stuff, whether you want to come and learn and become a facilitator yourself which I would highly recommend whether you want to do it personally or professionally. Go and learn from people like that. These are some of my greatest mentors. They've taught me the real science and the foundations to just healthy breathing. Because that's the reality of what we need, roger. Like we can go and participate in breathwork sessions every now and then and have a nice release and stuff, but the thing that we're doing every day is we're breathing.

Speaker 2: 1:13:47

Let's make the thing that we're doing over 20,000 times a day work the best we can for us, fantastic. I will put the link to James Nestor's book Breath in the show notes, along with all your references as well, but I will definitely be putting that in because I heard James Nestor on a podcast and then I went off and searched him and listened to other podcasts that James Nestor had been on. He speaks very well. I highly recommend that people don't read Breath. I suggest they listen to it, and there's a reason why I suggest they listen to it is because he explains things really well. It sounds more credible to me because you're not imagining a voice and trying to read it in a strange voice. And also at the end, his colleague that he went through. His colleague goes through a whole heap of breathwork practices in there and you might hit on something that really works for you as well. So I will link to the Audible book in the show notes for that.

Speaker 2: 1:14:38

Where can people find you? Because I've got to put the links into you as well. Chris, I've so enjoyed this chat with you, so where can they find you? The academy or what you run in relation to your breathwork course? Talk all about what we do and how it go about it.

Speaker 1: 1:14:51

Yeah, yeah, best place to sort of hang out would be Instagram. I'm most active there. I'll share my personal link in there, roger, as well as the company Instagram Infinity Training. Infinity training and coaching. So we run breathwork certification programs. We run four intakes a year for our level one certification.

Speaker 1: 1:15:07

February just finished up, so there's one in may, there's one in august and there's one in november and it's basically like a three-step process. You pick your training dates, which is a three-day intensive. You come and study with us on the gold coast for three days or you can do it via Zoom. We've actually created a hybrid model. Now People can tune in on the three days live, like it's still live in the room, but if they're overseas or anything like that, we do have people fly in.

Speaker 1: 1:15:32

Like last training, we had people come in from New Zealand, a lot from Victoria, sydney, places like that. They fly up, but you can do it hybrid now. So you pick your three days and then, once you've picked your three days, you have some pre-learning material to go through, so it's like a self-paced online course. And then after that we have a four-week online program too, where we support you post-training as well to help you get clients to help you take it out there and to just really spread the magic of breathing exercises and breath work. So yeah, we have a few spaces left for those intakes. Best place to probably get in touch is, like I said, through Instagram. We're currently moving our website across from one platform to the other, so once we've got that fully sorted, I'll send you the website that you can chuck in there.

Speaker 2: 1:16:10

Wonderful Into the show notes. That'd be fantastic. Oh, I can understand. As a Victorian, I know me personally. I'd rather go up to the Gold Coast and study in person. I'm an in-person type of person that wants to learn. I honestly I mean I've done the meditation, but I would love to learn more about the breathwork because I think the benefits to being able to add that component into coaching and being able to assess it and also bring that component into coaching for our first responders and also introduce it into my live seminars to help understand it better, to be able to talk to first responders about that, would be excellent as well.

Speaker 2: 1:16:48

Chris, I have a closing question. You already live on the sunny Gold Coast, so happy days for you. But if I bought you a holiday house anywhere in the world because I always say thanks to my guests every guest that I've had on the show, and I think I've had about 40 of them so far I've had to buy a house for. So I'm a multi-billionaire. I buy a house for them and they have to live in it for six months of the year, but I tell them they can have it anywhere they want in the world. Tell me, where would Chris Payton want me to buy or build this house. Great question.

Speaker 1: 1:17:18

I would say in the mountains somewhere, roger, I'm thinking like Nepal, oh, of course Nepal, something like that. My partner and I were actually going to do Mount Everest base camp trek in May and, incorporating some altitude work that we've been doing with breath as well, I've been studying Amazing. Yeah, I prefer a little bit more of a colder environment and I'm obsessed with mountains. I don't know what it is, so if I could just have a little block of land, like with mountains in the background, oh, roger, like six months a year, mate, that'd be me.

Speaker 2: 1:17:47

No worries, we can do that. Did you say you're going to do the base?

Speaker 1: 1:17:50

camp in May. Yeah, because then beyond that we're going to trek it ourselves and then beyond that we're going to take them and actually go into a track.

Speaker 2: 1:18:02

That is unbelievable. I love that. I had friends that have been to base camp and done it and they've written about the experience and what they've done. No doubt you've done your research. Phenomenal and that first time you see Everest, the peak, in the sun, with the sun shining on it, it would just be the most exhilarating thing ever, I'm sure, because the photos all come back with this golden peak Phenomenal. Fantastic, chris. Thank you so much for sharing your knowledge on this topic. It's a bit longer than what I normally do, but it's been so engaging and well and truly worthwhile.

Speaker 2: 1:18:33

Shift workers will definitely benefit out of this podcast and that's why I wanted you to come onto the podcast to actually discuss this such important topic for them. I know they don't realize just how much they need this, but they really, really, really need it. Yeah, all right. So thank you very much. Welcome, mate. Thanks for having me. And there you have it. That's Chris Payton.

Speaker 2: 1:18:54

I know I banged on about it in the podcast, but I do want to make a really important point again in relation to this. I know it seems happy clapper, but honestly it really does make such a massive difference to your life. And when you can just reach into your toolbox and pull it out, subconsciously, and use it. It will make an enormous difference to your life. We can't go on this way. Shift workers, we have to do things like breathwork Stress, as you've heard by what Chris has said. It's so toxic to our body and it becomes a new norm and we don't realize just how much of an impact that that is actually having on our general wellbeing, with cancers and our whole body and, as Chris explained, being catabolic, which means our body is literally starting to break itself down as well through stress. Not good Breathwork, it's free. It's something that you can do anywhere. What a great chat. I thoroughly enjoyed that. A real highlight for me in podcasting, because I think that something like speaking to Chris Payton as a breathwork coach really does emphasize just how much we, as shift workers, really really need this in our life.

Speaker 2: 1:20:04

If you've got anything out of that podcast, can you please do me a favor, because you guys have been really slight. Can you please on Spotify, just go back to the main page and hit the stars right and you can write it. Give it five. And on Apple, scroll down to the bottom, hit the stars and you can actually just take an extra 30 seconds 60 seconds to just write a short review to help other people to find and hear people like guests like Chris Payton and listen to me, of course Fantastic. It just helps people with evidence-based strategies around shipwork. Thank you for listening. If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe so you get notified whenever a new episode is released. It would also be ever so helpful if you could leave a rating and review on the app you're currently listening on. If you want to know more about me or work with me, you can go to ahealthyshiftcom. I'll catch you on the next one.