Speaker 1: 1:42

Shift work can be brutal, but it doesn't have to be. 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 rigours 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 hey there, welcome back to A Healthy Shift.

Speaker 1: 2:22

I'm Roger Sutherland, and today we're going to be talking about something that's literally right under our noses Our breath, specifically how breath work, can literally be a game changer for our frontline health and first responders. In fact, it is a game changer for everyone. This will help you to manage the incredible pressures of your job. So pull up a chair, sit down, grab a cup of coffee, and I want you to just breathe gently through your nose and have a listen to this. For those of you that follow me on social media, you will know that last week, I attended a course in breathwork facilitation, with Infinity Coaching and Training. Now, this is something that I've wanted to do for quite some time, because I have got a lot out of breathwork since my PTSD diagnosis because it helps you to auto-regulate. And what I want to do is even though I didn't understand that what I was doing was auto-regulating I now do. I just thought I'm breathing to change what my parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous system or the autonomic nervous system is actually doing. But what I did was I actually went away and learned how to be a breathwork facilitator at all levels and I've found it life-changing. I think what we don't realize is we just have no idea that we don't know how to breathe. The other thing is we don't realize just how much trauma we actually hold onto in our bodies and in our brain for things that we've been through in our journey in life. And I'll be talking about that a little bit more as I go down and go through this podcast, because I want to talk about the different levels of breathwork, what it's doing and why we do it, of breathwork, what it's doing and why we do it. Then I want to talk in depth more about transformative breathwork and my experience with it, because it was something that has left me really quite perplexed for a number of days, but it is now something that I can actually guide people through, and I'm thrilled to be in a position to be able to do this with our community to change their lives, and I mean literally to change their lives. So I am now a certified breathwork facilitator and I'm able to conduct group sessions or I can conduct individual one-on-ones for people. So have a listen to this. There'll be a little bit more about this at the end of the podcast, so you better stay tuned, because there could very well be some form of an announcement Good one, rog. Keep them to the end to find out. That's it All.

Speaker 1: 5:09

Right, let's get into it. First responders actually live in a world of really high stakes and constant stress and I don't have to tell you this, you know this and even our frontline health. We suffer from stress, we suffer from burnout, we suffer from compassion fatigue, and we do all of this because we're not breathing properly. And you might think, rog, what are you talking about? But it's because our autonomic nervous system is literally responding to the way we breathe. So if you're rapid breathing and breathing through your mouth, your autonomic nervous system thinks look out, there's a problem out here. So what we need to do is we need to activate this fight or flight mode, this sympathetic side of our autonomic nervous system, and we need to get going. And this is the problem, and it keeps us highly stressed. It elevates cortisol, it elevates all sorts of problems in our body, shuts down processes, hence our digestive issues. We can't think properly. There's all sorts of issues that go on when we get like that. So what we need to do is we need to learn how to regulate this, because once we learn how to regulate it, you'll be surprised and I mean truly surprised at the difference that that actually makes. Your nervous system is always on a high alert. It's ready for the next call. Keep that in mind. When you're at work, you're always thinking what's next, what's happening, who's that? What do they want? What's going on? And I know this because it's a lift experience that I've had for, you know, 40 years. I did it, so I know exactly how it works and what it's like.

Speaker 1: 6:44

Now, what this means is we as first responders frontline health and people in stress jobs generally spend a lot of time in this state of fight or flight. Now this is our sympathetic nervous system running the show now, and when this becomes your default, it literally takes a toll on your body and mind, and what happens is and the saddest thing for us as frontline health and first responders is that this becomes our new normal, because we don't recall what it was like to be back in a parasympathetic state, because we are always in this fight or flight mode. We're always thinking, we're always hypervigilant, we're always so much is going on in our lives that what happens is we don't ever drop back. We just drop back a little, but we don't ever drop back into this parasympathetic state. And it isn't until you've actually experienced that that you really realize just how your new normal has become incredibly poor and I mean incredibly poor for your health.

Speaker 1: 7:51

The good news is we actually have a built-in tool that can manage this, tool that can manage this All of it, and that is our breath, believe it or not, the way we breathe. So by consciously controlling our breathing, we can literally learn to either upregulate or to downregulate our nervous system, and this is where so many people misunderstand it, and I want you to keep this foremost in your mind as I go through this. It's free, you have to do it anyway. We all breathe, so let's get it right and let's talk about it. We need to upregulate or downregulate. So let's talk about what those two terms actually mean, because what we want to do is we want to live in the green zone, which is right in the middle.

Speaker 1: 8:40

What a lot of us do is we actually have this green zone and it's hard to imagine on a podcast, but you've got the green zone in the middle and I want you to imagine it like a traffic light. So our red light at the top is where we become what we call hyper-aroused, which means we are highly aroused, which our fight or flight. This is a big problem that we actually have and we need to bring ourselves down. Now, when we're going to the gym or we're in a position where we need to be hyper aroused, it's okay to go to there every now and again, but it's not a good place for us to live and this is what we actually do. We need to be down in this middle zone, this green zone, because then we get to the and this is what we actually do. We need to be down in this middle zone, this green zone, because then we get to the very bottom, which is also another red zone, and that is hypo-aroused.

Speaker 1: 9:29

Now, hypo-aroused is when we're just flat. You could put this down to something like depression or we just can't get going, which is something where you can breathe your way out of it. Don't believe me, listen up, because you can literally breathe your way out of that and stimulate your system a little bit more by just controlling your breathing in a certain way. And this is what we now teach as a breathwork facilitator, so that we can look at a patient or client, we can diagnose what they're breathing, how they're breathing, how they're going about it, we can assess their breathing and then, once that breathing is assessed, we can actually write breathwork programs to help you to put strategies in place.

Speaker 1: 10:09

So upregulation is about getting your body and mind ready for action. So this is something like you might be feeling a bit flat and you've got to go to work and you need to sharpen it up, sharpen the brain up, sharpen the body up. Now you might need this before a demanding shift or a tough workout or when you need to feel more alert and focused. You can literally upregulate yourself into a stage where you are thinking sharper, you are behaving at a much performing at a much better level, and that's what upregulation is much performing at a much better level, and that's what upregulation is. So we come from the down to the up. We're going to upregulate ourselves.

Speaker 1: 10:46

Now, when we get people who are highly strung or highly aroused or hyper aroused or stressed, then what we need to do is we need to do the exact opposite with them. We need to calm them down, because we need to get the body down into its rest and digest mode, which is the parasympathetic side of the nervous system, and this helps your body to actually recover. This is vital for you to manage stress, to help you to actually improve sleep and just winding down after a long and a very intense day. This is where we can actually get to the stage where we're going to bed and then we can downregulate, which helps us to get into this nice parasympathetic state ready for sleep. So how do we use breathwork for this?

Speaker 1: 11:35

I'm glad you asked so for the upregulation a great and very simple technique to upregulate yourself, and a lot of SWAT teams and people like that use this, and that is box breathing. Now, you might have heard of it. It's very simple and it's just a repeatable pattern that helps you to sharpen your focus. Now I want to be clear. Okay, you don't have to announce to everyone I'm about to box breathe and count. You can literally just do it by breathing in through your nose, inhale for a count of four, and then you hold your breath for a count of four, and then you exhale for a count of four, and then you hold your breath for a count of four, and then you just keep repeating that. So it's four, four, four and four. Very, very simple to remember. And we're breathing down into our stomach, and one of the ways that you can actually breathe down into your stomach is by putting your hand on your navel and breathing down into your hand. That's probably one of the better ways, because we want to be breathing nice and deep, we want to be getting that breath done. So we want four, four, four and four. Now what you're doing is you are then creating a simple and a rhythmic pattern that gets your brain and your body engaged, and it's a quick way to switch on and get in the zone ready.

Speaker 1: 12:55

And you find that, as I said before, a lot of these SWAT teams use this box-type breathing to get themselves in a really good state of mind for when they're going to go and execute entries or things like that as well. It works really really well. So if you are a police or fire or ambulance or you're heading to a job and you are highly stressed, or you're in a hospital and you're going to a code or something like that, just as you're going there, practice box breathing all through the nose, not through your mouth. We don't want to be breathing through our mouth because it's designed to eat and it's designed to talk. That's it.

Speaker 1: 13:34

Breathing through the nose actually performs certain functions around breathing that are essential to good health and good breathing Very important. So, breathing through the nose all the time and if you box breathe as you're doing it, you will think clearer, you will actually make better decisions and everything is online and ready to go properly. Because if you're mouth breathing and running around like a lunatic and you've actually you lose control. Your brain goes offline and doesn't think. It's only thinking two things we're either fighting here or we're running away.

Speaker 1: 14:09

Now let's talk about a downregulation, because we've been to a job, we're really heightened up and everything's going on, or we're in a hospital and there's been a code, we've saved the patient and everything's calmed down. What do we do to down-regulate, to go from that high back to down-regulating, because we needed to be up and about for that, but we need to now calm down. Well, the best thing to do for this is something that we call 4-7-8 breathing, and it's perfect for when you are trying to wind down after a major event or if you're going to bed, or you just need to go off into a quiet room somewhere and sit there for five minutes and just de-stress. This is how simple it is. What you do is you inhale quietly through your nose for a count of four, you hold your breath for a count of seven Remember, we're breathing down into our stomach and then what we do is we exhale completely, but this time through the mouth, making a whoosh sound, for a count of eight, and then we repeat that cycle a few times. And this is the best thing that you can do to wind down now. If you've done this right and you've calmed yourself down on the way home from work, and then you get into bed and you do cycles of four, seven, eight breathing, you probably won't remember the fourth cycle. It gives you something to focus on because you're counting the breath, you're feeling the breath going in and out of your body and it stops that brain from having a goddamn committee meeting. When you're trying to sleep, the longer exhale when you do this signals to your nervous system it is time to relax. You are actually communicating with your nervous system. Now. This held breath also helps to deepen the calming effect, and it's a really, really powerful tool to turn down the volume on your stress response and actually calm you right on down.

Speaker 1: 16:00

So, beyond these simple daily practices, there's a deeper form of breathwork as well, which is called transformative breathwork. Now, this is not something well, it's not really something that you can do by yourself. It's not like the other two. It's not something that you do at your desk or in your car or when you're operating machinery at all. Transformative breathwork is a really powerful and I mean incredibly powerful guided practice that literally creates quite profound change in your mental thinking and your body. So let's just go through transformative breathwork. Listen carefully as to what it is and what it does. It's perfectly safe, but it's something that you've just got to listen to. This involves a very specific breathing pattern that temporarily alters the balance of oxygen and carbon dioxide in your blood. Now, this changes your body's chemistry and it can lead to a state of heightened awareness, a massive emotional release and a deep sense of clarity. It is a practice that can really help you to process and release a built-up stress or an inbuilt held trauma, and it actually helps you to release emotional baggage that comes with that job that you do.

Speaker 1: 17:22

Now, when we talk about a transformative breathwork session, we're looking at a specific biological process that changes the chemistry within your body. Now this in turn affects your brain and how you feel. Now it's not just about taking deep breaths. It's not about that at all. It might be what it looks like, but a facilitator will guide you into this breath work. That is about altering the balance of gases actually in your bloodstream carbon dioxide and also oxygen the two key players in our bloodstream, which are oxygen and carbon dioxide.

Speaker 1: 18:00

Now, normally, your breathing rate is quite regulated by the amount of carbon dioxide in your blood, not oxygen. We all think oxygen, but it's actually regulated by the amount of carbon dioxide. Your brain's respiratory centre is highly sensitive to carbon dioxide, so when you breathe normally, you maintain a steady and a homeostatic balance of both of these gases. Your body is amazing at maintaining this homeostat. Now, in a transformative breathwork session, you intentionally breathe faster and more deeply than you normally would.

Speaker 1: 20:02

Now this is called hyperventilation, but it's a controlled hyperventilation, and here's a breakdown of what actually happens internally and biologically. We get a carbon dioxide release because when you hyperventilate, you are exhaling a lot more carbon dioxide than your body is actually producing, and this leads to a rapid decrease of carbon dioxide in your blood. Now your normal blood pH is slightly alkaline and around about 7.4, and your body fights to keep that homeostat at around that level. But when the CO2 levels drop, your blood becomes more alkaline, which is a condition that's called respiratory alkalosis. All right, so that's what we're doing. It becomes more alkaline, and this change in pH, which is ever so slight, has a direct effect on your body's physiology.

Speaker 1: 21:01

Now, oxygen and the Bohr effect. Now, oxygen and the Bohr effect. Now, while you're bringing in a lot of oxygen because we're hyperventilating, so we're breathing a lot of oxygen in the decrease in carbon dioxide actually makes it harder for your red blood cells to release that oxygen into your tissues and organs, and this is actually known as the Bohr effect. Now think of carbon dioxide as the key that unlocks oxygen from your hemoglobin which is floating around in your bloodstream. And less carbon dioxide means that the oxygen stays locked up, which reduces its delivery to your cells. Now this leads to a feeling of extreme lightheadedness. You get tingling sensations, which is paresthesia, all over your body, in your hands and your feet, or you might even experience muscle spasms, which is tetany, as your nervous system becomes really excited. Now what's the brain's response? This is the interesting one, and this is what blew my brain. Literally.

Speaker 1: 22:03

The drop in carbon dioxide and the shift in pH significantly impacts the brain. Remember, this is all control. We get vasoconstriction. Now this low carbon dioxide causes these blood vessels in the brain to constrict and this reduces the blood flow to the brain. Now, what this does is contributes to an altered state of consciousness and lightheadedness, which is experienced during the session. We get a nervous system shift because the rise in blood pH also makes the nervous system more sensitive and excitable, and this is a key reason for these intense physical and emotional sensations that people report and I've actually witnessed myself. And what I did also notice in a very big way is the emotional release, because the combination of reduced blood flow to certain parts of the brain, being the prefrontal cortex, and the heightened nervous system activity can actually lead to a release of pent-up emotional energy. The physiological changes create this temporary but a very safe environment where the emotional brain can be accessed more easily than during normal consciousness. It takes that thinking part of their brain offline. So in a nutshell, so that you you understand, a transformative breathwork session works by intentionally disrupting your body's normal homeostatic balance of carbon dioxide and oxygen, and this drop in carbon dioxide leads to an increase in blood ph and a decrease in blood flow to the brain. Now this creates a temporary physiological state that allows for a profound mental and emotional experience, which is why it is often described as transformative.

Speaker 1: 23:49

Now let me just talk about my experience last week. The first transformative guided breathwork session that I did last week was quite. You're in like a dark room. You've got a face mask on, you're lying on the floor on a yoga mat, you might have a blanket over you and you're listening to instruction on how to breathe and it's quite intense breathing and you've got to focus on the breathing and keep breathing like that. And you know yourself that if you breathe in quite hard and you breathe out quickly as you hyperventilate, you can get dizzy or you can start to feel quite funny, and that's literally what happened. But when you're doing it. For as long as we're doing it, you actually go tingly all over, for the reasons that I explained before, go tingly all over for the reasons that I explained before. And what I noticed the first time was was when we went into our final time of holding our breath. At the end, I just felt incredibly peaceful and I've never felt anything like that before.

Speaker 1: 24:54

And when I talk about incredibly peaceful, I do find it a little bit difficult to talk about Not so much the first one, but definitely the second one. But the first one that we did, I remember lying there and I remember thinking I just feel so calm, I just feel so peaceful, so calm and so peaceful, and what I found was I couldn't even be bothered breathing. I have no idea how long I held my breath, and it's not a and hold your breath. You literally have expelled all the air out of your lungs and you are literally just lying there and you are aware that you're not breathing and you just don't care. And I would imagine I'll be honest with you I would imagine that it would be very much like the feeling of slipping into a death. To be perfectly honest Now, your brain won't allow you to just stop breathing and then just die. It won't allow that to actually happen, because something will trigger it and it will come back online and you then go through this really peaceful state of just lying there where you just don't want to move, you don't want to do anything at all and you're just letting the emotions run over you. And I've got to tell you it was the most incredible and most unbelievable experience that I have ever experienced in my whole entire life. That was the first one.

Speaker 1: 26:12

The second one that I went through is when I had the actual breakthrough and I can get really quite emotional when I talk about this one, because it was difficult. It was something that I never expected. It was something that it brought up a feeling. I felt the wave come and I remember thinking, oh, I feel a bit weird here, but I kept going, because I can remember Chris, our facilitator, telling us that it's like climbing a mountain You've got to keep pushing to get to the top. You don't just get halfway up, because if you go back down you don't get the transformative experience.

Speaker 1: 26:52

And I went all the way and I kept going and I kept pushing, and I remember continuing to pushing and by that stage I was at the one second in, one second out, quite intense breathing and there was a lot going on in the room and what happened in the room stays in the room. We don't talk about that and I think it's highly respectful to the other people that were taking part in what was going on. But I remember being aware of what else was going on in the room and then suddenly I was one of them, what else was going on in the room, and then suddenly I was one of them and I just remember having this massive wave of emotion come over me and I could not stop crying, I was. It just kept on coming and I couldn't control it and I was really. It was just the release out of my nervous system of the trauma. Release out of my nervous system of the trauma and it leaves you feeling quite numb and quite perplexed. Afterwards I remember feeling it was very, very profound, to say the least. It was.

Speaker 1: 27:52

As awful as it might sound, it's actually the most incredible experience that you can ever go through and something that I'm absolutely so excited to be able to bring to other people and help other people through this, because I can assure you and promise you it has actually released the trauma out of my brain and out of my body and I just feel so different. And my new normal now is very, very different to the normal that it was a week ago, which is something that I've had to come to terms with because I think, oh, when will I ever get back to normal? But you see, the thing is you don't want to go back to that, because that's the reason why you're doing it. If you think about all the things that are going on in your life and how your life is today, the one thing that you do want to do is you want to not go back to that. So what I'm doing now is I'm learning to adjust to the new normal, which is really interesting. And it's quite incredible how I feel and how differently I feel, and it was really strange and that was the breakthrough that I actually had.

Speaker 1: 28:57

And I remember someone in the room, because there's assistants walking around the room as well. You're not just left there. There's assistants walking around the room keeping an eye on you and what's going on. And I remember someone coming and putting their hand on my third eye and I also remember them putting their hand on my chest at the same time, and I can remember grabbing their hand for security because I just was really emotional and, as a 61-year-old man going through that, it was something that was really quite unique and I've got to be honest with you. I highly recommend it to anybody. Anybody that gets the opportunity to do a transformative breathwork session, properly guided by someone who really knows what they're doing and is monitoring you. Don't go into a room where 30 people are and there's one instructor, because that's unsafe. It's not the right way of going about it. We had I don't know how many eight, nine people in the room that were monitoring us all the time and it was just quite incredible. Anyway, I won't bang on about it anymore, but I will say this Wrapping up, understanding your nervous system and learning how to use your breath to actually control it isn't just a wellness trend.

Speaker 1: 30:12

I can assure you. It's actually a fundamental skill that people need to learn today, especially for our shift working community in frontline health and also our first responders. I actually think it's something that we all not think, I know it's something that we all need to learn. It's not stress. It's where our breath is actually signaling to our autonomic nervous system that we're not doing it right, we're not breathing right. So, therefore, you are telling our body that it's time to be stressed. We need to learn to go from this state of high alert to one of calm, because doing that and being able to do that is an absolute superpower. If you are on your way to a job and you find yourself quite heightened, to be able to calm yourself down and self-regulate is a superpower, and vice versa, to be able to bring yourself online and be able to focus properly, to do it literally by doing something that you're doing anyway, but by controlling how you're doing it, makes just such an enormous difference Anyway, incredible. So by learning and practicing these simple breathwork techniques, you aren't just managing your stress. What you're doing is you're actually taking control of your health and wellbeing, and people need to understand this Now. Whether it's using your box breathing to get yourself ready for a shift, or 478 breathing to wind down and go to sleep at the end, think about it. These tools are always here with you and ready to use immediately once you learn how to go about doing it.

Speaker 1: 31:45

Now, for those of you that are listening, who are local to where I am in Melbourne and you would like to experience a guided, transformative breathwork session that I had described earlier. I'll ask you that you keep your eye on my socials in the coming weeks because I've got some really big announcements that are coming around this and I'm going to be running some sessions. And I'm going to be running some group sessions and I'm also going to be running some individual private sessions as well for people, for them to go through it, to learn about it and talk about it, because that's what I want through it, to learn about it and talk about it, because that's what I want. It's really, really important and I'm excited. I'm very, very excited to bring this arm to a healthy shift, because breathwork, education and training, I can promise you, is going to become one of the strongest arms of a healthy shift.

Speaker 1: 32:33

When I saw the problems that shift workers were having and gaining weight and body fat, I thought nutrition was the issue, and I've now gone down through this whole journey of learning body image, learning eating disorders and disordered eating. I've also learned about women's health and now I can add breathwork facilitating to this and I honestly believe that, out of all of that, if you can control a person's nervous system through that and release the trauma from their body, their whole world will actually change. I want you to remember that a healthy shift is actually all about getting you from a poor place into a better place, where you, the shift worker, you, the member of the public make a healthy shift. However, that actually looks to you and for you. So thanks for listening, stay safe out there and practice breathing properly for your health, and I will see you next time on a healthy shift.

Speaker 1: 33:38

Thanks for listening. 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.