Speaker 1: 1:35

We're seeing this a lot. You know people that have this undercurrent feeling of anxiety and they're like I don't know why I should be anxious, like there's nothing wrong right now. Oftentimes it's not being triggered psychologically, it's being triggered physiologically the breathing that's been affected after years and long periods of time under stress and potentially trauma that people haven't processed.

Speaker 2: 2:00

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 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 back to another episode of a Healthy Shift podcast. Today I have brought on my breathwork facilitator coach. We're bringing back Chris Payton to the podcast today.

Speaker 2: 2:49

As you would be aware, recently I certified as a breathwork facilitator and it was under Infinity Training and Coaching, and Chris is the founder of that and I've got to tell you it was quite an extraordinary experience. Last time I had Chris on the podcast, I thought I knew a fair bit about breathwork and the benefits that it could bring to shift workers. It wasn't until I completed this course under Infinity, with Chris being the master educator, that I realized that I was literally just scratching the surface of breathwork and I've learned so much about it now, so I wanted to get Chris back onto the podcast to talk about it. Really important conversation, more so now that I've got more knowledge around it, and it will give you more insight into the power of breathwork, how important breathwork is for particularly our frontline health and first responders. They're exposed to an awful lot of trauma and breathwork helps us to self-regulate. So doing this course was something that was really important to me, and the reason being these days.

Speaker 2: 3:55

When I first started, I started out as a nutritionist because I thought, oh, weight gain, it's all about nutrition and so therefore, people are just eating far too much. So therefore, what they need to do is they need to just go on a diet and they'll lose weight. Then I realized it was so much more complicated than that. It was not only about that. It was about body image and that brings disordered eating and problems. And then I looked at eating disorders and disordered eating, because dieting brings about a lot of disordered eating and problems with that. And then I went on down the line of women's health and understanding women's health and the fluctuations in that. But then what actually happened was I then learned a lot of self-regulation needs to come from our breathwork, and I wanted to go somewhere and learn how to become a breathwork coach properly, and this is where it started for me.

Speaker 2: 4:51

I had Chris on the podcast. I learned about the session that he was running and I thought what the hell, invest and go and do it, and it was the best money I've ever spent in this business. It was next level. I really, really enjoyed it. I want you to hear from Chris again and I want you to hear from a perspective. It went into a lot of areas around just normal breathwork and then it went into the breakthrough breathwork. You'll hear I didn't anticipate it, but you'll hear I got quite emotional talking about my own breakthrough session. You'll get to that and it was truly special for me. So, without much further ado, let's bring on Chris Payton and have a chat about breathwork for our shift working Well, actually for everybody. It's really important. Welcome back to the show.

Speaker 1: 5:36

Chris Payton. How are you, Chris? Fantastic Roger, so good to be back. Man, I'm excited.

Speaker 2: 5:41

Let me tell you to fill people in. You've been on the podcast before, but my goodness me, did that lead to something truly special, didn't it? Oh, my God, yeah.

Speaker 1: 5:50

Fantastic. Hey, yeah, it was. I had a feeling it probably would. It was good to see it all come to life.

Speaker 2: 6:01

Oh, it was amazing. What I'm referring to is last weekend, I attended Infinity's breathwork facilitator training and walked away from there as a quiet and shy retiring flower, didn't I? Just a little, but what I've done is I've actually come away with the breathwork facilitator certificate that I can change lives, and I will be changing lives as a result of it, but I took so much away. My brain was exploding after this weekend, chris, and what I wanted to do.

Speaker 2: 6:25

Now that I've got more of a handle on everything that you'd spoken about on the last podcast, I want to have a conversation with you around some of the things that actually occurred and why and how because I understand this now so much more actually occurred, and why and how because I understand this now so much more. Most importantly, I want to get the message across to people about how important breathwork actually is as a modality for people to really have a handle on. Can you just do us a favor, though, tell us who you are for those that haven't heard from you before, and tell us where you're based and what it is that you actually do. Yeah, I love it, roger.

Speaker 1: 6:59

As Roger mentioned before, this is my second time on the podcast, so for anyone listening watching, it's so great to be back. My name is Chris Payton and I'm the founder and head trainer here at Infinity Training and Coaching. Alongside my beautiful partner Shani, we run a certification company where we certify coaches, aspiring coaches and anyone really just wanting to learn breathwork on a deeper level. It's a space for them to come in, get the education, get the certification, then go on to be able to incorporate this into their businesses or take on clients, run events, et cetera, whatever they want to do. A big, I guess, mission and vision of ours is to just make breathwork more mainstream and put it in the hands of more people and have them realize, as Roger just said, how important it is and demystify some, I guess, the woo-woo stigma around it as well. So, yeah, that's why we exist. Matt, it was a pleasure to sort of bring you into our world just a couple of weeks ago.

Speaker 2: 7:53

I'm so glad you were there and got to experience it firsthand. I'll tell you now you won't be getting rid of me, because I just I found my people. I felt like I was in my tribe, because we're all on the same page and I know that it was something that you can't put into words the feeling, the vibe, the Mabo of the whole thing, if you know what I'm saying. But it was really really quite incredible and I want people to understand that are listening to this. Watching Chris and Shani at work in their playground educating other people was something that I've taken an awful lot away from, not just from learning about breathwork and understanding breathwork, but how to run these events, because it was unbelievable. Now, the event had 40 people in the room, didn't it? Like it was quite big.

Speaker 1: 8:38

It was like, yeah, high 30s in the room and then another, I think maybe 13 inch online.

Speaker 2: 8:45

It was incredible. Now I want to say and I've emailed Abby personally to say what a great job she did as well pulling the whole thing together in the background as well, but having people online as well as having people actually in the room was a real feat in itself in keeping everyone entertained and engaged for that whole time. You did that. You crushed it. Now I've stroked your ego enough here, so let's just go into a few things. Let's talk about the event. Let's talk about what I learned out of the event, now that I've got more of a handle on it, so that we can share this with other people. Because you touched on it. A lot of people think that breathwork is just, oh, it's happy clapper, woohoo stuff. I'm going to say it actually is happy clapper, woohoo, but you know what Happy clapper and woohoo works right and it does, and scientifically, it actually is supported. So, chris, for people that are hearing about breathwork for the first time, how would you describe breathwork in simple terms? We all breathe, but how would you?

Speaker 1: 9:46

describe it. My favorite sentence is you know, breathing is something you just do, meaning that you let it go. There's parts of your nervous system that just make it happen without your awareness, and breathwork is something that you consciously do. Breathwork is taking control of that system and going hold on a second, like I have a tool here where I can actually slow it down, speed it up, hold it and all of these ways that I can actually, I guess, intervene and manipulate my breath in certain ways, create certain outcomes in the body and in the nervous system. So breathwork is really just that.

Speaker 1: 10:17

It's not just, as you said, this happy clapper, woohoo stuff.

Speaker 1: 10:20

It's actually just realizing that there aren't that many systems in your body that if you let them go, they happen by themselves, but then you can also control them as well, and anything like that screams to me that it's important to actually learn about. And so the two things that I see is you know you can somewhat control your thoughts and your thinking patterns. You can, you know, consciously think and you can somewhat control your thoughts and your thinking patterns. You can consciously think and you can consciously breathe, but if you let those two things happen by themselves, they continue to happen. That's why I've become so fascinated with breathing and breathwork in particular, because once I realized that I did have this tool quite literally right under my nose free, accessible at any time, I was like I can't unsee it. Now it's there and it's always going to be there. So for us now, as I said before, it's really just about de-stigmatizing it and making people realize that they have so much power right there within themselves at any given moment, absolutely fantastic.

Speaker 2: 11:14

You're right. If we don't think about it, we do just breathe, but we don't do it correctly, and that's the issue, and this is what I took away from the weekend. It's like exercising a muscle, isn't it? And you were a PT? So you pick up a one kilo dumbbell and you bicep curl a one kilo dumbbell and then you bicep curl a two kilo dumbbell and then a three kilo and breathwork is the same, isn't it that all of a sudden, you grow and you grow and you strengthen all of those pathways to get you to the stage where it happens automatically and you know what style of breath you need in certain situations, which we're going to get to actually in this podcast. I'm really excited to get to that. Why do you personally think that breathwork has gained so much attention in the recent years? Is it just a trend, or is it really something a lot deeper than that?

Speaker 1: 12:02

I think it's gaining popularity because it works. In a world where we are, I guess, given so much information on what we can do to better ourselves and feel better on a day-to-day, there's this thing that happens with breathing. That's so instantaneous, it's so tangible and it's so immediate that it's pretty hard to ignore. And so, I guess, from the outside, what I see is the growth in popularity is due to the fact that it is very effective and it is very simple and, to be honest, most people can do it. They sort of need to, don't they? That's right On the other side of the fence.

Speaker 1: 12:36

What I also think we're sort of experiencing now, roger, is that people are somewhat waking up to other ways of taking care of themselves and they're sort of steering away from, maybe, some of the traditional methods of, well, we go to counseling or we just go to therapy, or this is what we do because society tells us to do that. Particularly when we enter the realms of trauma therapy and when we enter the realms of, you know, people who have been chronically stressed, there comes a point where you have to realize that you can't talk your way out of trauma and stress and there's a felt experience that needs to happen, and that's one of the things that breathing does it just brings us immediately into the body. You know, I think that more people are realizing that and maybe seeing that you know other forms of self-help or therapy. Things like that are just not as effective for them, and so they're curious and they're exploring other alternatives.

Speaker 2: 13:25

As someone who's had personally six years of psychology and six years of psychiatry as well, and I don't want to be detrimental to these people because I have them in utmost respect. They're very hard to get into these days, right, ever since COVID in particular. Extremely difficult for people to get into and get help and get seen. Psychiatrist is someone that says you're going okay, you're going to be all right, take this and it's fine. A psychologist, I'll sit and listen to you for an hour. But then what are you given to help you? Outside of that?

Speaker 2: 13:58

What I'm loving more than anything is strategies, is the holistic approaches are all free Free, you breathe for free, but you've got to pay to learn, to get educated how to do it. But once you've done that, you've got it. It's not like you've got to take an antidepressant forever in your life. It's not like you've got to go and take a medication or a supplement that you need day in, day out. It is literally a practice that you learn and then, over time and I can see, because I'm very, very aware of it since last weekend, I thought I knew breathwork.

Speaker 2: 14:35

I actually had no idea. I was literally just scratching the surface, had no idea. I was literally just scratching the surface, which brings me to my next question of you, which I thought was, without doubt, the most profound thing that I took away from the whole of the workshop last weekend. I thought it was amazing and that is stress. Is your nervous system responding to your breath, not your breathing responding to stress? What do you mean? I feel stress. Do you mean that my breathing is actually telling my body that I'm stressed?

Speaker 1: 15:08

Yeah, this is a two-way feedback loop, because when we perceive stress or when we perceive a threat, then our nervous system goes into a fight or flight response, and part of that response is increased heart rate and respiratory rate to be able to push blood and oxygen to big muscles to be able to fight or flight. And so it's a two-way street. What ends up happening is, initially, we have the signal from the nervous system that says, hey, there's something wrong, we need to fire up all cylinders and get out of there. So respiratory rate picks up.

Speaker 1: 15:39

The problem we have on the other side, roger, is that so many people are unequipped and uneducated on how their nervous system actually works and how to support those stress cycles, and so, without those tools and resources and awareness, people end up staying in these stress loops and they don't actually allow it to complete.

Speaker 1: 15:54

So then what happens is we end up storing a lot of that tension from the stress in the system and then, as we continue on with life it's what you just said before our breathing stays elevated and that increased breathing rate ends up sending signals back to our brain saying, hey, we're still in a stress response, we're breathing 15, 16, 17, 20 times a minute.

Speaker 1: 16:14

There's a problem and we're seeing this a lot People that have this undercurrent feeling of anxiety and they're like I don't know why I should be anxious, like there's nothing wrong right now. Oftentimes it's not being triggered psychologically, it's being triggered physiologically the breathing that's been affected after years and long periods of time under stress and potentially trauma that people haven't processed. So it is a two-way feedback loop. Initially it's, you know, the stress doing that to the nervous system, doing that to breathing, but then often it's the lingering effect of the increased breathing rate that ends up telling the nervous system that we're not safe anymore. It's just a vicious loop that people get stuck in and they don't know why they're there or how to get out when you acknowledge and recognize that your nervous system can't see.

Speaker 2: 18:19

It can't see and it can't hear. It's got no idea. It's sitting in there and we are cuing it with exogenous cues, aren't we? The cues are coming in from the outside. So when you say we get stressed because we've seen things, we get wired, we're ready to go, or put it this way, for a law enforcement officer, someone pulls a gun on them or shapes up to them to fight, obviously your IC, your heart rate, comes up. It tells you you've got to fight or flight. But we have to get out of that afterwards very quickly. We can't leave that. We don't close that loop. Then what happens is we end up storing that in our nervous system and it hides in there, doesn't it? That's exactly right, and this is where, when we get to, we talk about the breakthrough sessions, where I get excited about it too. So I think that's the first one that I wanted to talk about. The next one that I want to talk about as well is that stress makes you stupid, and you use this term on the weekend, and I thought that makes sense.

Speaker 1: 19:17

Explain it. Yeah, yeah, when I said stress makes you dumb.

Speaker 2: 19:22

Yeah Well, I said stupid, but you know same thing.

Speaker 1: 19:25

It's always a funny line, like people look at you and they're like what I almost think, like some people feel like I'm insulting them when I say it and I'm like this is just a statement. What I mean by it. I obviously teach with a lot of humor as well. Absolutely, you do. I deliver things with, deliver things with humor, and I try to make my learning experience as fun or my teaching experience as fun. But what I mean by that is that when we do get stressed, as I said before, our breathing is affected.

Speaker 1: 19:52

And what's really important to know here is, as we start to experience that stress, when our breathing rate gets faster, we're losing a lot more CO2 than we're normally getting rid of on the exhales. And one of the things that CO2 does is it pushes oxygen from our red blood cells in our hemoglobin and it pushes it into the cells that need oxygenating. So what happens is, with hyperventilating, when we're under stress, we temporarily lose excess amount of CO2. And, as a result, then what happens is blood and oxygen actually drains away from the frontal lobes of the brain, which is where our higher order thinking, impulse, control, all these sort of functions come from. And so then what starts to happen is we have the limbic system, the midbrain and the reptilian brain at the back. These parts of the brain really fire up and we shift into more of a survival state. And this is why people make pretty terrible decisions when they're under a lot of stress, because, quite literally, from a brain perspective, you're getting less oxygen to the part of you that thinks like a human being and you do become more animalistic in nature.

Speaker 1: 21:01

And you know it's very easy to relate to this. You know you may have been in a disagreement with a loved one and you say something you don't mean and then you feel bad about it later. That's because this part of the brain is coming back online. When our breathing returns to normal, our nervous system shifts back into a more of a regulated state, and so in those moments it quite literally does make us dumb. In a way, it makes us make silly decisions that we wouldn't make if we were regulated. And that's the difference. It's helping people understand that there's actually nothing wrong with you. There's nothing wrong with you for getting stressed. There's nothing wrong with you because you said something you didn't mean. It's about understanding that you are actually an animal at your core as well, and there are certain things that happen to your system when you do get flooded, and so, when we consider the fact that we can get flooded, it really becomes about learning how we don't get flooded as easy and putting strategies in place, and again, breathing gets to be one of those things.

Speaker 2: 21:54

There'll be a lot of people, a lot of first responders and frontline health that will be listening to this that have clashed with their partner. They've said something. Then, in the cold light of day and this is where, when you realize once that comes back online later, you think what on earth did? I say that, for that was because it was that dumb part of the brain that wasn't thinking that it just came out. Then that comes back online. Everyone that's listening to this will be able to relate to literally that, and that is the physiological explanation for why that happens to you. You're stressed. I know that with a lot of first responders as well, chris, that they would find that their new normal is very stressed all the time, and that's where they end up in more and more and more arguments and they don't have those realization moments because it really comes back online, because they're so highly strung, 100%.

Speaker 1: 22:46

This is the danger, not just from a health perspective, of chronic stress, but also the danger that it poses to other really important aspects of your life. I'm sure that many people have been divorced because they're just stressed Agreed Totally. There are many people who have ruined relationships because they're just stressed, agreed Totally. There are many people who have ruined relationships because they're simply stressed and they can't connect and they can't talk and understand each other properly and hold space for one another's feelings. And because when we're in a survival state we are wired to protect ourselves, that comes at a cost of, you know, cutting off people that we love and saying and doing things that we wouldn't otherwise do. And I think you know if you just took a minute to observe how animals behave in the wild, that's literally what you become when you get too stressed you become animalistic. There's repercussions to that if it's not addressed.

Speaker 2: 23:34

Yeah, and that's where the breathwork has taught me. And the good thing about this is there is a solution, and it's a really good solution when you are aware of it and you're educated about and we talked about this all weekend. It's about self-regulation teaching yourself how to bring yourself down from that hyper arousal to a stage where you're not only socially accepted but you're socially accepted in general, everywhere, not just in your relationship, but everywhere. It was a really key point for me that I realized that when you put it like that, a lot of people will be going, oh my God, I can relate to that, like I can really relate to it. So let's talk about the mechanics of it, right, because I think this is really important to step through it this way so that people understand mouth breathing versus nose breathing. Now, we talked about this a lot on the weekend so that we all understood what's the difference between nose breathing and mouth breathing. Does it make a difference? Why does it make a?

Speaker 1: 24:28

difference 100%. I mean, if you just look at what the nose was actually made for, if you went online right now and you just Googled what are the functions of the nose? There's something like 21 or 23,. I'll butcher it. Functions of the nose. There's something like 21 or 23, I'll butcher it. Functions of the human nose.

Speaker 1: 24:44

And the way I sort of like to break it down again in one of my I guess, funny teaching points is you know, your mouth is for talking and eating and your nose is for breathing. But we've got it backwards because somewhere along the line our lifestyles have led to a society of over breathers and mouth breathers. And one of the biggest contributors to breathing through the mouth, or people turning to breathing towards their mouth, is the fact that they're stressed and because when we're stressed, remembering that everything speeds up. So what the body does is it asks for more air, and the mouth is a bigger entry point for that air than the nose. So I guess from that perspective, it thinks that it's a good route to go down, but not until you realize the detrimental effects that breathing through the mouth actually creates. When you breathe through the mouth, you breathe slower. Your nostrils are 16 times smaller in airway size than your actual mouth. So just by breathing through the nose you're slowing down your breathing. You're breathing less. When you learn to breathe less, you're actually oxygenating your body more because by effect, you're not actually losing some of that CO2 that you should be keeping in. It warms and humidifies the air. You've got nostril hairs that capture the nasties that are trying to get in there like pathogens and particles. You've got nitric oxide, which opens your airways and your blood vessels. All of these things happen in the nose but they don't actually happen in the throat. You couple that with dental structure issues and things that you see nowadays. Mouth breathing is a massive contributor to all these things Crowding of the teeth, bad breath, snoring, sleep apnea. The list goes on and on and on.

Speaker 1: 26:16

I first started to really become aware of this in my breathwork journey when I read the book Breath by James Nestor, and he was talking about these tribes like back in the day, these cultures that would. They would literally go around at nighttime and look for children's mouths that were hanging open and they would close them. And they knew this before science. They knew this before any research. They just instinctively knew that this was made for breathing and they wanted people to breathe through there at all costs and from a nervous system perspective, I think, understanding too.

Speaker 1: 26:43

When you breathe through your nose, you're directly accessing your parasympathetic nervous system a whole lot faster is a cheat code in itself. Some people just learn to just breathe slower and lower through their nose. They'd feel completely different Part of what I normally get people to do if they're just totally unaware of this. As I say, just take a few breaths through your mouth, maybe just for a minute, and now switch to your nose and just feel the difference. Now imagine if you were doing that on autopilot for hours a day, all through the night. How are you going to feel? You're not going to feel great. Not at all.

Speaker 2: 27:13

Tell me when you walk around and I know because it's your skill can you tell by looking at a person whether they're a nose breather or a mouth breather? Yeah, absolutely. What's the difference? What are we looking at? I don't expect people to be able to go out and identify, but when you actually look at people, you can tell whether a person is a long-term mouth breather or a nose breather.

Speaker 1: 27:32

Facial structure is a big thing and it's not the be all end, all telltale sign. But what you'll notice with nasal breathers is their jaws are more pronounced, their cheekbones are more defined, they have lighter sort of brighter eyes and their head is not as sort of sunk forward. Their jaw is not as sunk forward, so they have a better jaw posture. Typically, what we can see is a lot straighter teeth as well. So visually they're some of the things that you might notice.

Speaker 1: 28:01

Something else that you might see is where they're breathing in their body. So if they're walking past, you might notice that they're breathing a lot higher into the chest. That's probably more of a mouth breathing pattern. A nose breather typically breathes a lot lower into the diaphragm. So they're some of the visual things. And then, second, is it's auditory right, like when I go for a run along the waterfront and I'm just nasal breathing, the amount of people that are coming past me, or even in the nose and out the mouth and it's. You know, you don't want to be that annoying breath worker that goes shut your mouth, shut your mouth, shut your mouth, shut your mouth, shut your mouth. But like in my head I'm like man, you're leaving so much on the table by not knowing this, you really are yeah huge amounts.

Speaker 2: 28:44

I think if athletes understood and I'm sure they will they'll catch on, like they have with light and phase shifting light and things like that. I think once sports clubs start to get onto who's mouth breathing, who's nose breathing, the way to go about getting their teams to nasal breathe and control it low and slow. Their performance is going to increase. Their tank will increase. They will be so much better won't they?

Speaker 1: 29:08

Absolutely, and their recovery will get better, their sleep will get better and everything will just get better as a result.

Speaker 2: 29:13

And that's right, and that's what we want. We want that 1%. If you can walk into a sports club any sports club up there in Queensland and say to them I will give you a 1% increase in performance with one simple step, they would pay you anything for that 1%. Yeah, they would. There's a clue for you, chris, because that's what I'm going to do. Anyway, that's beside the point. If someone's been a mouth breather for years, can it be reversed? We've got people that have gone long-term high-stress jobs, haven't realized they're doing this and now they're learning the art of breathwork and breathing through their nose. Can their facial structures and the damage that's been done through mouth breathing be?

Speaker 1: 29:52

reversed Absolutely 110%. We're quite malleable. So you know, we are a species that adapts to the stimulus that we put ourselves under. We are a species that adapts to the stimulus that we put ourselves under. So, just like your body has learned to breathe a certain way under stress because it's thought it's needed more air, the same can be said that when we start to reprogram that and we start to repattern the way that we breathe and we start to lower our stress levels. So, by all means, if you can start to switch your awareness to patterns of the day of breathing through your nose, you can quite literally reverse a lot of these things going on. I think the only thing that you'd probably want to consider when it comes to mouth breathing is is there a structural issue as to why they might be mouth breathing? So you know, is there something with the nose? An obstruction? Yeah, An obstruction.

Speaker 1: 30:35

Has their nose been broken, you know? Are they a fighter? Do they have enlarged adenoids, you know? Like what's going on up there? That could be creating a structural issue and if that's the case and it's bone, it's pretty hard to move bone. So it might be that surgery or an intervention might be needed to actually open up the airways. But most times it's behavioral and it's a response to stress. So in that respect, it's really just about creating micro moments of awareness throughout the day. To just start, remember that you're on autopilot, so you actually need to do something as simple as setting an alarm on your phone, maybe three, four times a day, and tuning in and going I'm going to nasal breathe for the next five minutes. Just by doing that, you're creating a new pattern of how you breathe, and that's what it's all about. It's teaching your brain to do something different to what it's already doing.

Speaker 2: 31:23

Yeah, and being aware we need reminders. I tell clients to set reminders to do certain things every day. Why not set a reminder to check in with yourself when you're breathing? The other thing that I do when I talk about stress during my seminars to first responders particularly police paramedics or nurses that are going to a coded job, which is a high-pressure job check in with your partner and just say breathe, Breathe. And we all say that breathe, but it doesn't mean breathe, it just means check in with and breathe low and slow, because you will start to make a lot smarter decisions on your way to the event instead of getting there and it's just all over the place, because it's a massive panic station and learning what I learned on the weekend reinforces this so much and in fact, it's going to add a whole component to that stress side for me in my own seminars that I'll be delivering. So it's going to come through in everything now because, honestly, it's free. Anyone can do it anywhere. It's just you've got to get the education to know the best possible time to do it.

Speaker 2: 32:28

One thing that I did want to ask you about when you were talking about people breathing, one thing that I took away, and this is not on our running sheet, but I did want to ask you about this because I found this fascinating For an asthmatic asthmatics panic and they go to mouth breathing because they're just panicking, trying to get air in. Can you talk about if someone is with someone who is about to have, or is having, an asthma attack? Can you give us the advice that you gave us on the weekend, Because it really did blow a lot of our minds?

Speaker 1: 32:59

Yeah, this works really well for asthmatics and people who have a lot of high anxiety and even like panic disorders and things like that. Two things that these type of people have in common is they will typically have higher than normal stress levels and higher than normal breathing rates. And, as I sort of alluded to before, you know, we get really fixated on oxygen, you know, being the thing that we breathe in and live off, but we kind of miss how important CO2 is, and the magic in this is actually in the CO2. Asthmatics and people with panic and things like this, they'll have quite a low tolerance to the gas of CO2. What this means is that we have these cells in our body called chemoreceptors, and what they do is they essentially detect how much CO2 is in our blood and then, when it hits a certain amount, it gives a signal to our brain telling us it's time to breathe out and get rid of some. So what ends up happening is, if you've got this sort of ceiling that a normal person might be, yay big for those who are watching. It takes a while for CO2 to rise in between each breath till it hits the ceiling and creates that signal. But with someone with a low CO2 tolerance, such as an asthmatic, that ceiling gets hit a lot faster. And so what happens is then they breathe more and then, when they breathe more, they lose even more CO2. And so when they go into an asthma attack or a panic attack, hyperventilation occurs and they continuously lose heaps of CO2. And, as a result, that loss of CO2 actually creates something called bronchoconstriction and it actually tightens and narrows the airway even more and even more, and that feeling of air hunger gets even stronger, and even stronger, and even stronger, and then the panic gets even bigger and even bigger, because we quite literally think we're going to die. And so in those moments, what I've done with a lot of asthmatics it's been incredible to watch them incorporate this, not only to improve their daily breathing, but some of them have even come off their medications, which is just fantastic. I'm not anti-medication, but I definitely am having strategies to do our best to not be on things. If we can negate that, I'm all for it.

Speaker 1: 35:02

The secret's in holding their breath so short, sharp breath holds, and I'm talking holding your breath for five seconds on the exhale and then breathing normally through your nose for another 20 to 30 seconds and then doing another breath. Hold on the exhale for five seconds, just these short little exhale holds. What they do is one they stop you over breathing because you're not taking any air in. So all of a sudden you can't keep over breathing. Two those breath holds slightly bring CO2 back up in the blood. What that does is it opens up their airway again. It opens up their blood vessels again so they can learn to breathe better.

Speaker 1: 35:40

And then the last thing is it pulls on the really instinctual, primitive fear that we have as humans and that is to suffocate. And as soon as you hold your breath, whatever's going on in your head is no longer a problem, because you're built to survive. So your brain goes why isn't he breathing? Hold on a second. He's still not breathing. Holy shit, don't worry about this. Why the fuck are you? I don't know if we can swear on this why the are you not breathing like?

Speaker 1: 36:05

And the longer we hold it, the more our attention focuses to the fact that there's no air coming into the body. So what we can do as well is we can actually not only change things physiologically in the body, but we can shift where our psychological patterns are going and we can favor this fear response to get us out of our head for whatever's causing the stress or the panic over here. And this is why we've seen in the movies and things like that when people have panic attacks, they breathe into the brown paper bag because they're actually re-inhaling the CO2, which is what's creating the feeling that it's easier to breathe. Except with the paper bag they're just not taking as much fresh oxygen in, so breath holding is a little bit more effective and you might not have a brown paper bag everywhere you go either.

Speaker 2: 36:49

Just to summarize that for people that have got children, that are asthmatics, and also people who may be suffering from bronchitis because a bronchitis attack can be horrendous and I suffered from that the idea is our body fights all day, every day, every second of the day, for homeostasis. Right, it's always trying to balance our pH and what I have learned it's always trying to balance our CO2, which is carbon dioxide, with oxygen, and your mother would always tell you go out and get some fresh air. And we think oxygen and we're always thinking oxygen. And if you think about an asthmatic, when they start to feel things constricting, they start hyperventilating hyperventilating, which throws that balance out.

Speaker 2: 37:32

Holding your breath and Chris made a point and I want people to make a note of this it's on the exhale. You don't inhale and hold your breath. You exhale and hold your breath, which is important, and then you're going to have to do it for five seconds, but that can be a real battle for someone who's struggling, but it will get easier and easier and all of a sudden they'll come out of it going. That is unbelievable. That's made such a difference to my life and we talked about this and it was a big takeaway as well for people because, let's face it, people have died from asthmatic attacks, and there was people in the room that had lost children from asthmatic attacks. It was very raw to them as well. I just wanted to bring that up because it crossed my mind as you were talking about that.

Speaker 2: 38:12

I think it's a really important point for people to know. What's even better, it's free. You don't have to carry it with you, you don't have to go anywhere, you don't have to get it, you don't have to have the bag with you. Just hold your breath on the exhale for five seconds and then breathe through your nose and then hold it. It will rebalance your system and stop that attack Absolute gold. So how exactly does the way we breathe communicate with our nervous system? Because we talk about breath controls our nervous system, which is what we've touched on. How does it communicate with our nervous system?

Speaker 1: 38:41

Yeah, yeah, well, I mean a couple of things here, like there's mechanical aspects to it.

Speaker 1: 38:46

So we spoke about the mechanics before.

Speaker 1: 38:47

When we talk about breathing low and slow, what's happening is we're essentially activating the vagus nerve, which is the chief parasympathetic nervous system nerve, and so when we breathe low and slow and we do activate that muscle, we are interacting with that vagus nerve, which is sending signals up to our brain saying oh, we're good, like it's rest and digest time, everything is good, we're breathing soft, we're breathing light, and so there's this feedback loop back to the brain and the nervous system. Because of that, on the other side of that fence when we look at nerves, is a lot of your sympathetic nervous system fibers run through your chest, right through the middle here. So if we are breathing higher and maybe we're breathing through the mouth and we're activating through here, that's going to send signals to the brain that you know we're in a stress response. Then the physiological aspect of it is when we hyperventilate and we lose a lot of that CO2, it actually creates stress in the body and that stress creates anxiety, and then that anxiety just further feeds back into faster breathing, which feeds back into more CO2 loss, which feeds back into more anxiety and it's just this loop that goes around. So it's part mechanical in the way we're breathing and it's also part physiological as well in what's actually happening with our blood gas balance.

Speaker 2: 40:00

But the breath can change that. Yes, that's the thing. We've got to break that cycle, and we have a tool with us all the time to break that cycle.

Speaker 1: 40:08

Yeah, and, as I said before, you know, like that is what will happen to you, like it will happen to you when you're not thinking about it. The kicker here is you can actually take control of your breathing and you can breathe in certain ways. And, roderick, you spoke before about state control Like you can quite literally control your state of being using your breath. You can come up, you can come down, and it's just knowing when to use it. That's the biggest thing that I've seen. A lot of people are dabbling into the world of breath work, but they might not be applying the right sorts of techniques to what they actually need.

Speaker 2: 40:41

I admit, I was one of those and I'm sure before I came up and did the course, you might've looked at me on social media and thought no, no, wait, wait for this one. I thought I knew what I was doing, but I was literally scratching the surface and had no idea. And had I have known what I know now, going back four or five years ago, chris, it would have been a totally different story, because I would have controlled how I was feeling so much more. And this is a great segue into talking about regulation, because I've spoken about self-regulation. Can you explain what self-regulation is? What regulation means when we're talking about our nervous system, because it's massive? So what is self-regulation when we come to this?

Speaker 1: 41:22

I think the best way to look at it is really just understanding that you kind of had like three primary states. So you have a hyper aroused state, and what we mean by hyper aroused is that's your fight or flight, like green light go system. Then we have, as you mentioned before, roger, we have these hypo aroused states, which happens when we typically experience too much stress and we don't allow ourselves to discharge that tension out of the body and we can end up quite numb, lethargic, shut down, dissociated, etc. And then we have this space in the middle where we are socially engaged and we call this our window of tolerance. Where we are socially engaged, we can access emotion and reason, and what that means is when we're in that state, we can just deal with stress far more effectively, we can keep our head, we can make good decisions, we can stay connected to people and not lose our humanness. And so regulation simply means staying inside of that window more often. Regulation means learning to map those three states at any given time during the day, self-check in and go.

Speaker 1: 42:23

Where am I at? What symptoms am I feeling right now? Is my heart beating faster than normal? Am I a bit scatty? Am I feeling worried. Am I feeling anxious? Or am I feeling lazy, flat, numb, lethargic, dissociated, lacking in apathy, things like this? And when we can start to really know ourselves and know the signs? It gives us so much agency over how we can control our state, because no longer do we just think that that's the way we are and we start to see ourselves as this transient being that does move through different states. Even the people with the most resilient nervous systems get stressed, they get angry, they get upset, they get depressed from time to time, but the difference between them is they understand how to transfer into another state a lot quicker and they know the signs and symptoms and they don't stay there. And so really what it's about is, yeah, that added layer of self-awareness, knowing who you are, knowing what those states are like and then having those tools to get back into that space.

Speaker 2: 43:24

Spot on. It's such a good description. I think about this with my first responder community as well, because they do go from the highs to the lows. If I could educate people and I will, and my mission is to touch a million people in this so at this stage, so what I want to do is I want to educate that when you're home and you've flatlined like you've really flatlined, you will learn how to self-regulate, to bring yourself back up into that. Oh, I feel okay, I'm back normal again. I feel okay. But then when you're going to an event or you're going to a job, the blood's pumping and the adrenaline's pumping. You can control things and bring them back down into that. I can make good decisions, I'm feeling good and you'll do that automatically. This is the key to this self-regulation for people. As I said, it's not like going to the gym. No one goes into the gym and puts 140 kilos on a barbell and squats it first up. You start with the bar or the broomstick and you work your way up to it. So I think if I put 140 kilos on a barbell, I'd probably be lying on the floor under it, but that's beside the point. But anyway, I think a lot of us would.

Speaker 2: 44:27

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.

Speaker 2: 44:53

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 rigours of 24-7 shift work. I also conduct in-house live health and wellbeing seminars where I will come to your workplace and deliver evidence-based information to help your wellbeing 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. Now let's get back to the show. We're getting to the trauma side of things, the exciting part of this, which is fantastic. You touched on this earlier, on that, when people get stressed, you know like the body sees, feels it. It goes into fight or flight and then it goes into a never ending loop and this leaves trauma trapped in the body. What does that actually mean, chris?

Speaker 1: 45:59

Yeah, a lot of times what you'll hear out there is trauma is stored in the body, and what's really important to understand is how this actually happens from a physiological perspective. So trauma is what lives on after a experience that is not emotionally integrated or physiologically integrated. It's what lives on after the fact. It's who you become after it. Do you become more hypervigilant, do you become more shut down and reserved? Do you go into isolation? What are the symptoms of that event that's not processed properly?

Speaker 1: 46:33

What happens with any traumatic event or any really stressful event is that the nervous system shifts gears and it goes into a hyper aroused state. Because that's what it does. It's like shit. This is not right, this is scary, this is dangerous. I have to either move towards fight or I need to move away flat. But those two things, although they're polar opposites, they have one common denominator, and that is discharging the tension that has been gifted to us by our adrenals. We're flooded with adrenaline in that moment, and that makes us faster, stronger, more powerful, and what we typically see.

Speaker 1: 47:07

I love to reference the animals in the wild with this. They're just masters at it. They do this so instinctually because they don't have a frontal lobe. They either fight and they get rid of that energy that they've been given in their system, or they fly and they also get rid of that energy in their system. So what happens is, if you think about a loop opening at the top in a circle, the nervous system responds with hyperarousal. And then, as you come around and you use that energy, you have this big completion where the nervous system gets rid of it and it goes cool, beautiful, and now I'm reintegrated and I'm back into my parasympathetic state. I've discharged all of that out of my body and life goes on. And that's what animals do in the wild. They just repeat that. They get chased, they run away, they fight, they get away and then they just go back to life, just eating grass again Eating grass, drinking water but humans don't.

Speaker 2: 47:54

As part of the course, you recommended a book to us, chris and I must admit I'm three-quarters of the way through it which is the book by Peter Levine and it's excellent Waking the Tiger. If anybody wants to learn more about this side of things, waking the Tiger by Peter Levine is an excellent book. Now I'm listening to it, so it is on Audible. Wonderful because you refer back to the animals all the time and how they just fight and then go back to eating grass like nothing even happened. They just integrate back into it.

Speaker 2: 48:22

Now we as humans don't do that. We as first responders and frontline health that are working in emergency departments and things like that, continually exposed to trauma over and over and over again. I will tell you categorically those traumas are going in and getting trapped in your system all the time because you're not closing out of it. Now you will have seen, chris, we'll get to the breakthrough sessions, but you will have seen a lot of first responders that have a lot to let go right and it comes out in completely different ways and I get emotional talking about it. So just give me a sec. But how can breathwork actually help someone process or release that trapped trauma?

Speaker 1: 49:01

Yeah, I love that you asked this and thank you for your vulnerability in that too.

Speaker 2: 49:04

Roger, I can see that it's you know it's why you do what you do, man, you know, this is exactly why you do what you do.

Speaker 1: 49:10

You live and breathe this stuff for your clients, and it's just so fantastic I do. Thank you. Yeah, I love that. And you're right, there are certain types of occupations, such as frontline workers, veterans and things like that, that see and are exposed to things that we are not supposed to be exposed to really ever, let alone at the frequency that you guys are subject to, and with that it does create that stress response opening and with that and the lack of tools it does store in the system. And so what ends up happening, as you said before, is we're just cruising around with all this stuff stored in our system and it's screaming for a way out, but we don't know how to let it out. And then we end up, I guess, following societal sort of I guess advice sometimes on. You know you just go and talk about this stuff, and that is only one tiny piece of the puzzle.

Speaker 1: 49:58

In fact, what I've now realized anecdotally and through working with a lot of human beings, is that that part is often what's needed after the discharge, because as humans, we have to make meaning of things. It's an important part of our healing journey. We have to make meaning, but before that, we have to get rid of what's happening under the surface, and so, with breakthrough breathing, what we are quite literally doing is we are breathing in a way that maps the exact response that your body goes through when you encounter a really stressful, traumatic situation. But we're doing it consciously, we're doing it with certain types of breathing patterns that put us into an activated state and we are consciously actually dumping a lot of CO2 out of our system so that we get a reduction of blood flow to the brain. And this is why people have these moments where they report really mystical, strange experiences, cathartic experiences, because what it does is it puts us into an altered state of consciousness and with that altered state of consciousness, we no longer really are in our human form and we essentially just allow these other parts of our brain to come online, which is the limbic system and the reptilian brain.

Speaker 1: 51:13

That's typically what we see in a breathwork session is, people get out of their minds and they get into their bodies and, when their inhibition is lower, whatever's been bubbling under the surface, whatever the prefrontal cortex has been blocking, is no longer blocked and we are now primed and open to actually discharge that tension and taking the woo-woo-ness of breathwork. That's really all it is. We're manipulating our breathing, we're putting ourselves into a stress response, we're reducing oxygen to the frontal labs of the brain, we're putting ourselves into an altered state and we're priming the nervous system to get rid of what it's being held onto. And then, once it's closed that loop, so there's a release period at the top and, roger, you would have felt it there's a release period where tension leaves the body, emotions might leave the body and there's this sense of completion in that moment where the nervous system relaxes and the body goes finally like thank you, I've been wanting to get rid of that for God knows how long.

Speaker 1: 52:05

And with that integration piece, then it becomes important to create some sort of meaning around our experiences. How can we move on from that experience that might've been really traumatic and how can we create some sort of positive outlook on the experiences that we've been through? But we're trying to often do that before the fact, when we've got all the shit stored in our system. It's kind of a reverse way of doing it. So I think, as we start to bring more awareness to this sort of work and we transition humans to understanding that the nervous system is playing such a big role in what's happening inside of our minds, we'll start to realize that the more we can empty the vessel out of these stress loops that we're just allowed to live there, the freer we become.

Speaker 2: 52:47

Totally Now I will talk about. You've seen this hundreds of times, probably thousands of times, in your journey, but we did three breakthrough sessions over those three days. The first one we did I came up to you afterwards and said not a hundred percent sure what I was supposed to feel there, but I didn't feel anything. And you said be patient, right. And you said we're doing it again tomorrow night. And anyway, we went into the next night.

Speaker 2: 53:08

Now, one thing that I do want to say to people about this is it's perfectly safe, right, it's perfectly safe to do. It's in a controlled environment. It's not, like you know, when we talk about cutting certain oxygens off and taking the brain offline and blah, blah, blah. One thing that we're doing is, as Chris has explained, we're replicating the stress in the body and then we close that loop. And I found and Chris explained this perfectly which is really important and this is the way that it's described to clients is when you're going through the particular breathwork practices, which obviously we're not going to discuss on here, but we go through the particular breathwork practices. As you're going through it, you literally feel yourself, and you described it as swinging like a pendulum and you can feel yourself going up and then you can go oh, that feels a bit uncomfortable and you can let it go. It comes up and then you let it go. It's like a pendulum swinging backwards and forwards. Suddenly it breaks through, because you've got to persevere with it. You can't be petrified of it. You've got to keep going and persevere with it.

Speaker 2: 54:07

This is something that I learned from the first night. I'm not 100% sure. I think maybe I might have resisted it the first night. I'm too tough for this. I don't like this. I'm just going to stop it. Obviously, you would have known that, and then I embraced it more, with more of what I had learned for the second. Now, in talking about this one, for the second one, I didn't make no secret of it and I still get emotional talking about it, but I and it was hard and I was there and Chris and the team at Infinity were very good because they've got a lot of volunteers in the room that are watching you very, very closely and they just knew. And someone the room fairies, which we called them came to me and, yeah, it just gives you the chance to let it go.

Speaker 1: 55:00

It does, man. It's such an honor. On the other side, you know even these, what we call the room fairies. These are students that have gone through our program and they come back because one they want to learn more. They genuinely love holding space.

Speaker 2: 55:13

Oh, I know that because I know the people and I would be the same because it's important for people. It is very enlightening because it's very important for people to get this out of their system. Now I will say this as well I found it. It's taken me a week to process. It's taken me a week and a bit to just work through it. I'm not terrified, I'm not scared of it. But I know one thing that I felt.

Speaker 2: 55:37

I was very aware after my breakthrough that I was lying there. We're lying on the floor on a yoga mat. It's a dark room People would call it the woohoo music going and you're quite in a moment and you're aware that you're not breathing and you don't care. I don't know what it is about that, but I just didn't care. I was just so calm and I was so relaxed. It was an experience that I've never, ever experienced anything like that before. It was the calmest, I reckon, I've ever been in my life and I just didn't want to come out of it ever. I just wanted to lie there, stay there.

Speaker 2: 56:11

I was aware I wasn't breathing. I knew I had to at some stage, but I remember clearly you saying that your brain won't allow you to just stop breathing and die. It won't allow that to happen. So I remember thinking I'm safe and I knew people were there watching anyway, but it was weird. In fairness, so that people understand the picture, I'm not lying there with a hundred people over the top of me, almost 40 of us in the room all doing the same thing, and what happens in the room stays in the room, because there was a lot that went on in that room. There was a lot of people. But the one thing that I do want to talk about, with that as well, which was a first for you and Shani out of that, someone burst out laughing and then it started a whole rumble of laughter right through the room, didn't it? Yeah, it was really bizarre, and I've heard this happening, and you've obviously heard of it happening before, but you'd not experienced it, not like that.

Speaker 1: 57:05

I'm a bit of a giggler now, occasionally when I get the chance to go and receive myself. My first few breathwork experiences were not pleasant in the way of cackling laughing. They were very heavy and I had to move through a lot of my own trauma from childhood and et cetera. But as I've done more work and as I've emptied the vessel out, I often can encounter that reaction myself. And that was the first time where we saw the real chain reaction of it, where one person sort of just had that expression and then you know at least another seven, eight in the room that had that expression too, and it was a really beautiful moment.

Speaker 1: 57:39

And I think you know, as you sort of spoke about earlier, rog, like Shani, created that post earlier in the week where I think sometimes people can get a little bit sidetracked and think, well, it's just all trauma and it's all crying and it's all screaming and it's really not. There are so many layers to this experience and it's so deeply personal, depending on who you are and where you're at in your life. Part of doing these experiences too can help you tap into the most incredible sense of joy and elation and peace. So there's just so much to this space and it's not to be taken, I guess, by the first glance of the cover of the book. You've got to go a little bit deeper to really find it for yourself.

Speaker 2: 58:16

Yeah, I totally agree with that and I think, unfortunately, it's like putting common sense out on social media. It's not clickbait, no one cares, they want the screaming, they want the exorcisms, they want all of this. But that was special and I think Shani sums it up really well in her caption that we all look for this clickbait stuff but we don't actually see the people at that stage and laughter is infectious. I don't care what anyone says, it's very infectious and it got a lot of people. So I think that's fantastic, the whole thing around this for shift workers and I want to be quite categorically now that I've got myself back. But I've not done that and I'm not a vulnerable person, but I've become quite vulnerable when it comes around this and I honestly believe that I fought for so goddamn long that I'm sick of fighting and I'm done. And I think the way you summarized it yourself, with the prefrontal cortex thinking and actually protecting everything, as in no, we suppress this, no, we suppress this. And then all of a sudden, we take that offline, it allows it to flow out, and then all of a sudden, you just feel well, what I thought was the new normal. It was the new normal, it wasn't right, and now I feel like I'm back down to what is normal yeah, what is normal and we don't realise how far we've lost ourselves. Yeah, I could go on for hours, chris, I won't.

Speaker 2: 59:39

I just want to talk about a few practical takeaways for people here as well. So, if a shift worker, a first responder, frontline health, highly stressed people or anybody and I talk anybody when we talk about trauma, it's very easy for us to talk about our first responders and frontline health and, oh, we're exposed to a lot of trauma, but a lot of people which and when I look at the other 40 people that were there with us on the day, everyone had a story. Every single person had a story that came out that they weren't really aware of, in that that they'd been suppressing from childhood, from teens, from 20s, from 30s it really was quite incredible. If a shift worker listening to this wants to start with something simple today, what is one of the first breathwork practices that you would recommend for them? To actually just help them to self-regulate, because generally the people listening to this will be up, not flat, yeah that's great context.

Speaker 1: 1:00:36

You read my mind now. Regardless of what sort of breathing techniques are out there, the most important thing we need to teach people is how to breathe lighter, less softer through their nose and slow. And you know, as we just spoke about before, roger, like there's breakthrough breathing, which is this spectrum where we hyperventilate at crazy speeds. And you know, from a functional breathing perspective, a practicality perspective, that's not what you would do on a day-to-day, it's for a specific purpose and I'm a big fan of you know, as breathwork coaches, as much as we can take people through these powerful experiences, we need to equip people with what's actually going to help their breathing on a day-to-day basis and I think anything slow breathing and teaching them some breath holding techniques is going to be one of the most effective strategies for downregulating super fast. So you know, one of my favorite go-tos when I'm stressed is those little breath holds, the same thing that the asthmatics do, the same things that the people that suffer with panic do. You can use it even when you're upregulated, learning to do something as simple as box breathing or coherence breathing. You know two one breathing, a physiological sigh, any of these sorts of down-regulating breathing patterns they all do the same thing to the nervous system, and so you know you're going to, probably when you step into the world of breathwork, hear about all these techniques, and what I really aim to do in our training is help our students understand that you know all fast breathing techniques, no matter which ones they are, they'll upregulate, and all slow breathing techniques downregulate. And so go for your life in the huge ass library of techniques that are out there, find the one that really works for you best and just be consistent with it. Do it regularly so that when you go into a stress response, your next unconscious thought is now I do this. Now I do this Because the goal of doing breath work, which is a conscious breathing thing, is to then not have to think about doing breath work, and it's just something you do and it's who you become, and that's really what it's all about.

Speaker 1: 1:02:29

How can we create patterns in our brain that go oh, I'm down and I'm flat right now, I could use a little bit of fast breathing. Oh, I'm really upregulated, right now I could slow breathe or hold my breath here. And you're not even consciously thinking about it, you just do it. That's the secret. When we get there you'll be in a better place far more often.

Speaker 2: 1:02:44

And when you talk about breath hold I know I emphasized this before, but I want people to realize it's not about breathing in and holding your breath, it's about breathing out and holding your breath. You can't hold it for as long, but it's more beneficial, a lot more beneficial right.

Speaker 1: 1:03:03

It slows down the heart rate a lot quicker too, because on the exhale there's less pressure inside the thoracic cavity, which means that the heart pumps slower In your experience over this journey because you're well-versed in it.

Speaker 2: 1:03:10

now, what's been the biggest light bulb moment that people seem to have after learning proper breath work?

Speaker 1: 1:03:16

The first thing is teaching the whole nervous system mapping concept and really just showing them that breathing is a remote control of whole nervous system mapping concept and really just showing them that breathing is a remote control of their nervous system. I think it's so amazing when people go, oh, wow, like that makes a lot of sense when I'm up here, I can use this, when I'm down here, I can use this and seeing the realization just tick over in their brain of like what do you mean? I don't have to be stuck here anymore, their whole world's been opened up. And I think sometimes, roger, I forget about this because I think that this stuff is just common knowledge, but then I go and teach it and the reality is that people just don't know it and it continues to blow them away. And so I have to remind myself of that that, albeit very simple, it's very powerful.

Speaker 1: 1:03:57

And secondly, it's being able to scientifically, I guess in an evidence-backed way, to help people understand how a breakthrough breathwork experience happens, so that they don't just perceive it as this woo-woo, hippy-dippy, full spiritual experience, and we can actually add some practicality to it and we can sort of expose it in a more mainstream sort of way.

Speaker 1: 1:04:19

So when we can explain, hey, this is what happens, we're putting ourselves into a conscious stress state where turning off the frontal lobes here and this is what's happening in your body here and this is why you have the release here. I think that information satisfies the curiosity for people to actually dip their toes in and not be scared of it. Yes, that's one of the most beautiful parts like watching people heal before your eyes as a coach or facilitator and watch them process things that they may have not have processed for a lifetime. And watching them just walk out completely different to how they walked in is something that I don't think I'll ever, ever get sick of and something I'm sure as hell no, I'll never, ever take for granted. It's just so special.

Speaker 2: 1:04:58

So Yep, and it's something that I'm really looking forward to as well, chris, because I run health and wellbeing seminars and we do all this sort of stuff. But I know what direction I'm going in. I've got a few people who are going to help and support and we're both going to go in that direction anyway. But this education is going to be massive, particularly in 2026 and beyond as we go, because our society is so much more stressed and we can self-regulate all of this, and I think it makes a big difference if we can just educate and get that education out there for people.

Speaker 2: 1:05:31

The one thing that I did want to just go back over for people when we talk about those breakthrough breathwork sessions, when you go and see a psychiatrist or a psychologist, you go there maybe once a month and you sit down and you have a conversation with them and then you walk away from that. You don't go and see them every day, and a breakthrough breathwork session is not something that you deal with every day. It is taxing on your body. I'm going to hear to tell you after three in a row, in three days, it's taxing mentally. So it's something that I think with a breakthrough breathwork session that I think people, we can call it breakthrough, transformational. I think it's something that you do and then you give yourself time to process what's actually occurred. You can become quite addicted to it and make no bones about it.

Speaker 2: 1:06:17

I think people would become very addicted to what actually goes on and what they see and what they experience and, as I said, what happened in the room and what people have spoken about. I'd never, ever, breached their privacy on any of that. We talked about that, but it was really interesting to hear what people experienced out of it, and everyone was totally different. Absolutely Amazing, chris. Is there anything that we haven't covered today? I mean, we've covered a fair bit of last weekend, and that is. Is there anything that we haven't covered today that you think's important for people, especially our frontline health and shift workers, our highly stressed people, should know about?

Speaker 1: 1:06:53

breath work. We've covered most of it, roger. I kind of just wanted to echo what you just said before. I think there's a lot of strategies out there that are disguised as regulation these days that are actually quite activating and stimulating. In effect, breakthrough breathing and fast breathing, like Wim Hof, and all that is quite an activating style of breath work and because society are very conditioned to operating at high stress levels, thinking that's normal, we can often seek out things that make us seem like they're helping, and they might not always be helping. So I love that you said that. I just wanted to echo that.

Speaker 1: 1:07:23

I guess, from a professional lens, that it is very taxing and it's not normal for someone to do three breath works across three days. But you are at a training, but it is very taxing. And Roger sort of put it really beautifully that if you do go and go to these sessions, first and foremost do your research, make sure you're being instructed by someone who really understands this from a trauma-informed lens. There's a lot of cowboys out there, unfortunately, as there is in any industry. Secondly, though it is, give the space in between. I get asked this question all the time, like Chris, how often do you do them and I'm like do you know what? The last time I've done a breakthrough breathwork, maybe six plus months ago, because now it's a thing that I do when I have the call, and what I mean by the call is I just know there's just this silent sort of I think it's time for one. I don't use it for any other reason, but what I will say is that I'm working on my breathing every day and that's different to transformational breath work. So you know, that's why it's important to really, I guess, give people both sides of the coin. And so if you're a frontline worker and you're listening to this, you could potentially get tremendous benefits from doing a breakthrough session every now and then.

Speaker 1: 1:08:29

I wouldn't say doing it more than once a month. I would give yourself at least that amount of time, I agree. And outside of that, it's really the biggest piece of advice I would have to shift workers, frontline workers is developing more awareness and education around your nervous system and how it works and what it looks like for you to be in different states. And, with that awareness, learn the tools like Roger's. Come and learn to be able to, you know, help yourself through those states and change states. Go and hire a coach like Roger, who's done the training you know, know. Put someone in your corner that understands this, because you know I might be a bit biased in saying this, but I personally believe, all shit to the side, it is the best investment you'll ever make into your health I totally agree, because once you learn it, it's free and you can practice it all the time.

Speaker 1: 1:09:14

You don't need a gym membership that's what I say to people sometimes. You know they'll get on the call and obviously we work with a lot of coaches and people like yourself. But they're like can I come and do this if I'm not a coach? I said you can, you can I highly recommend it.

Speaker 2: 1:09:26

You can Highly recommend it because you understand it. One thing that I did want to say to people we talk about breakthrough breathwork. It seems to be the Mount Everest See, I've there, but it's the Mount Everest of everything, right. But we are breathwork coaches to teach people different breathwork practices, assess them and then take them through a program to improve their breathwork. I probably forgot to cover a lot of that, but we've been educated to actually sit down with someone, assess their breathing and then design a program and then continually have them come back to us every week.

Speaker 2: 1:10:03

How did you go? Where are you at? Tell me what your scores are, what's actually happening? How are you feeling? Do that for four to six weeks and then go. This is great. We've done the down regulation. What about we do some up regulation and work through the up regulation, so it becomes second nature as well. I haven't really mentioned that, but I think it's a really important point that we mention that it's not about all the screaming and doing those breakthrough sessions. It's about teaching people to goddamn breathe and how to go about doing it, isn't it Well?

Speaker 1: 1:10:31

that's why we do it on day one. When you come to our training, day one is it's Foundations Day we teach you how to screen and assess. Look at people's different pillars of breathing. Day two with all that information and knowing how to screen, assess, how can you create tailored breathing programs to help them work on their breathing where it needs to be worked. On Day three now, we teach you how to do transformational breathwork. Now, transformational breathwork is a big, exciting shit, but there's a reason why we do it on day three, because it actually isn't the most important thing and unfortunately, people get lost in that. So what we've really done at Infinity is given the education, so that our students are not just coming out of it saying I'm a facilitator. They don't just facilitate a session, they're a coach. They know how to coach people when it comes to breathing programs, and that's the difference. It's knowing what to give that person to best serve them.

Speaker 2: 1:11:20

Now you're going to have to shut up and listen to what I'm about to say to you now, but I want to tell people Infinity, I could not recommend it any higher. I haven't done it anywhere else and I confess to that, but I just figured that I do my homework, I do my research and if I'm going to do something, then I'll invest in it and I'll do it properly. You've got to spend the money to invest in it. But, chris and Shani, running this session, it wasn't walking into a classroom and going through a keynote. It was an experience, right the whole three days. They were long days, but my God, they were unbelievable and they held us.

Speaker 2: 1:11:58

If I said to you you're going to be stuck sitting in a room for 12 hours, you'd go oh, my God, it's going to be death by PowerPoint for 12 hours. It is far from that. It is an epic and fun event. It's something that I thoroughly enjoyed from the very time we walked in and I miss it. They do a fantastic job. But the other thing that I do want to help people with that I want people to understand here, chris, is this it's the business aspect that you wove into it to help people with the business side of things, as in how to set it up, how to run it, how to go about it. Give them people, key points, options for them to move on. It was fabulous.

Speaker 2: 1:12:36

I also want to tell people that from the day you start, you are in a WhatsApp group of your peers, your alumni. That we've graduated, we've finished, that WhatsApp chat is still going flat every day, with people adding their bits and pieces, their wins, their successes. It's very, very motivating. I think the WhatsApp group afterwards and the connections that I've made have been a lot out of this as well. Well done, chris, you and Shani unbelievable, I mean. I thoroughly enjoyed it and I have already recommended it to a number of people. And if anyone wants to explore Breathwork, chris, where can they find you? How do they find you? What are the events coming up? Tell us about the different types of events that you run as well, so that people can understand. There's a one day or a three day, and then there's a stage two and a stage three. Go through that let them know.

Speaker 1: 1:13:28

Love that. I really appreciate your kind words, roger. It's one of those things and and I mean it when I say this like your intake was one of the most amazing groups of people. It's always an amazing group of people. There was something very special your intake and I can sit on the other side, often a couple of weeks after, sort of missing it too. It's a special moment in time and it is an experience, and we do set it up that way because we want to, I guess, take people out on the other side of it, not just educated, but we're designing this thing so you can have your own breakthrough. I think that that's the power. We want you to walk away as a different human. So what you went through is our level one certification experience.

Speaker 1: 1:14:04

You come into our world in lots of different ways. Some people message us through Instagram, some people see an ad, some people come to a one-day event. We hold one-day events all around the country. We actually have one this coming Sunday in Sydney which is like two tickets away from being sold out. I think we've got close to 50 people coming there.

Speaker 1: 1:14:21

We basically just open the doors to our world and the world of breathwork and people who are aspiring coaches to come in and not just have a breathwork experience.

Speaker 1: 1:14:31

We're not there and we're not the type of people that you come to if you just want to have a breathe.

Speaker 1: 1:14:36

We're the people you come to when you're serious about wanting to explore this world further, and so we educate, we make it a really fun day.

Speaker 1: 1:14:43

We do deliver a transformational breath work at the end, and there's the opportunity there for people to come into our world, which a lot of people do.

Speaker 1: 1:14:50

And then there's the level one certification that you came to, which we run in person on the Gold Coast or you can train on online, as we mentioned at the start of this podcast. And then, for a select few people that choose to and want to, we have a couple of other offerings. People can go into our advanced training, which is really for people who want to take this and start facilitating transformational breathwork at a larger scale. So running big events, workshops, retreats, things like that I guess have a bit more of a business outlook on it. And then we have our academy as well, which is a 12-month business mentorship and what I really realized through doing a lot of certifications myself and watching people come out the other side really excited and passionate and hungry to change lives with really powerful skills, but then not getting their thing off the ground because they didn't know the steps that they needed to take to actually start generating business.

Speaker 2: 1:15:39

Like you didn't when you first started as well, so you can educate people on your own journey.

Speaker 1: 1:15:43

You know that's right and that's really what it is. It's like you know, here's a platform where you can get 12 months of support. It takes a while to get something really off the ground Sure does, and so initially it was a six-month thing and recently, roger, at your one that's the first time I transitioned it to 12 months and I went. You know I'm doing this as a 12 month program. I want to spend a year with people. I want them to come into our world and be nurtured. Now in the next steps on, how do you actually now take breath, work and any other coaching that you've done, and how do you generate a living from helping people become better people? There is nothing more important to me than people waking up every day excited to do what they do and knowing that they're making a positive impact, and if they can make a living out of doing that and if I can know that I've been a part of that, that's just the creme de la creme for me.

Speaker 2: 1:16:29

I learned this from Dane McDonald, clean Health. Are you helping people? Yes, get paid for it, and that's the bottom line. You're helping people. You're getting self-fulfillment in yourself doing that. Once again, I go back to everything that Infinity's doing. I do endorse it fully and I can see Chris and Shani are very genuine people with what they're doing. They're enthusiastic, they're very high on it and they absolutely love doing what they're doing.

Speaker 2: 1:16:55

I'm another person. I'm sort of in a different stage. I'm already running a business. I've been doing it for a while, but I'm going to tell you this, and I'll say this on the podcast now that I run my seminars and my one-to-one coaching. But my one-to-one coaching is going to take a bit of a back step with the seminars, but I'm going to. Actually, once I've got the seminar set up and running, then I'm going to go down the whole line of building up a whole arm. That is going to be about running breathwork coaching for people. I've already got a gym that wants help and things like that, which is fantastic, but I'm just suppressing it all at the moment while I get everything else, because I'm a bit of an octopus. I need to stay focused. So I've got Mary, my VA telling me no, we're on this. No, we're on this. It's sort of like your Abbey. No, we're back to this.

Speaker 2: 1:17:39

You're an entrepreneur, mate you just want to do all the things I want to do all the things, but what I've done is what I've recognized is my biggest weakness is running off and doing too much of everything, and I need to just put it in place and I'm becoming quite good at that. So, anyway, as my alexa shows, my music is breathe. But anyway, you won't believe that. But, chris, thank, thank you so much and once again, because you and Shani were so good and I'm now rich in life, I'm going to buy you a holiday house to put anywhere in the world that you want.

Speaker 2: 1:18:08

This is my closer for every podcast that I do. You guys can take the dogs, you can take the kids, you can go by yourself if you want to just do it quietly. I know you don't, because you'd take Shani anywhere you went, I know you would. Where. I know you don't, because you'd take Shani anywhere you went, I know you would. Where do you want me to buy it or build it for you? And you can't say about 100 feet down from the peak of Everest.

Speaker 1: 1:18:28

I won't let you say that, mate, this is a really hard question because I've traveled to a lot of amazing places and I also haven't been to a lot of places that look amazing. So I'm actually going to go out on a limb here, I'm going to pick somewhere where I actually haven't physically been before and I'm just going to take a risk, take a punt. The punt would either be Alaska, like up north, like North America, interesting, I appreciate a cold climate. I just feel like I probably have some sort of lineage that is like Scandinavian. I don't know what the fuck it is, but I like the cold and I hate the heat.

Speaker 2: 1:19:02

You live in Queensland, you hate the heat. What are you doing? I know Come to Melbourne.

Speaker 1: 1:19:06

Just ask Shani what I'm like in summer. It's terrible. On the flip side of that, I've been quite drawn to Africa lately. South Africa, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2: 1:19:15

If I can have one of each Rog, that'd be great man. Yeah, well, one in each. And if you don't like the Alaskan one, you can just leave it and move on to the South African one, or you can just go back to the Gold Coast or back to Brizzy and live there. Chris, thank you so much. I'm going to ask you a question. I want to put you on the spot here before we go. What about Melbourne? Melbourne never gets mentioned. You keep putting it in the Q&A, you keep putting it in there and I keep hitting Melbourne. What about Melbourne? Our turn it's coming, it's coming. I'll turn the recording off. I'll chat with you afterwards. Thank you, chris. I sincerely appreciate everything that you've done. Continue to do, and I'm actually honored to call you a friend and thank you so much for coming on the podcast and having a chat.

Speaker 1: 1:19:52

You're welcome, mate. Thanks for so much having me on anytime.

Speaker 2: 1:19:53

Roderick and that's Chris Payton Extraordinary. I know I spoke about it and colored it up, but I've got to tell you I was really honored to be part of that experience and you heard, obviously I got quite emotional and I had to take control. It's been edited a bit there, but I had to take control because I do get quite emotional. Just the release that I got from the Breakthrough Breathwork sessions that we actually did it only happened to me once but, geez, it was profound and it was just great. The people and the community that we're involved with around all of that I highly recommend to everybody. If you get the opportunity to get a breathwork coach to learn just how to breathe, pay anything for it, because it's absolutely worth it. I can tell you it's one of the best investments that you'll make in your health ever. We're all running around looking for supplements and devices and tricks and hacks and things that work. Breathing is free. All you got to do is learn how to do it and that's really important. All the links to Chris are in the show notes into Infinity Training. I highly recommend that you go and have a look at the website and attend one of the one-day events and see where it leads you from there, because they are so well run and they really are such a profound experience for you. So there you go.

Speaker 2: 1:21:13

All right, that's the podcast. Thank you so much for joining into us. If you got anything out of this podcast at all, please share it with a friend. Grab a friend and go along and do one of the breathwork days. Don't just go to any happy clapper place. It's important that you get educated really properly around that, and if you want to ask me questions around it and talk to me about it, obviously I'm here to talk to you if you need. Thanks for listening. Don't forget give us a rating or a review. It really does help us to get more information like this out and about into our space. It's super, super important. I'll catch you on the next one. 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.