Treatment Table Podcast

The 5-Minute Breathing Tool That Calms Anxiety, Improves Sleep & Boosts Focus

• Mathew Ah Chow • Season 1 • Episode 13

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In this episode, Mathew shares a personal story of how one simple breathing technique completely changed how he handles stress, parenting, and daily pressure, helping him stay calm in moments that would normally lead to frustration and overwhelm. 

He’s joined by breathwork instructor Chris Sulfa, who explains:

  •  Why your breathing directly controls your stress response 
  •  How breathwork can shift you out of anxiety in minutes 
  •  Different types of breathwork (from calming to high-performance) 
  •  How to use breathwork in real life (work, parenting, sleep) 
  •  Why most people are breathing incorrectly without realising 

This is not just theory; you’ll walk away with practical tools you can use immediately.

What You’ll Learn

  •  The link between breathing and your nervous system 
  •  Why you feel “wired but tired” 
  •  Simple breathing techniques to calm anxiety fast 
  •  How to improve sleep without relying on supplements 
  •  How to stay calm under pressure (kids, work, life) 
  •  The difference between relaxation vs performance breathwork 

Who This Is For

  •  Busy parents feeling overwhelmed 
  •  Professionals dealing with stress or burnout 
  •  Anyone struggling with sleep or overthinking 
  •  Active people who want better recovery and focus

Find out more: 

We’re currently planning Season 2 — let us know who you want on the show.
Send us a message on Instagram or email us at treatmenttablepodcast@gmail.com.

🎧 Episode Resources & Links

See you next week on the Treatment Table!

SPEAKER_03

Breathwork is just another system. There's a lot of different styles of breathwork and techniques and approaches. It's like a Swiss army knife. There's so many different tools on that one Swiss army life. The breathwork can be sort of thought of in that way. Breath work is like a remote control to our nervous system. And the way that we breathe influences the way that we feel. And conversely, the way that we feel is affecting the way that we breathe. I often say that breathwork changed my life, and now it's become my life.

SPEAKER_01

Welcome to the Treatment Table Podcast, your guide to a healthier, happier you. I'm your host, Doctor of Physiotherapy Matthew Archow, and each week we share simple strategies to help you move better, feel better, and live healthier. So before we dive in today, please make sure you follow and subscribe to the Treatment Table Podcast so you don't miss out on our weekly tips to helping you stay active and pain free. If I could give you one tool, one habit, or one exercise that will have a drastic effect on your life, today's episode is it. If you feel like you're wired but exhausted, if you feel like you struggle with overthinking, anxiety, stress, if you wake up tired, fatigued, if you're like me and you struggle to turn your brain off and get to bed at night, or if you also like me struggle to keep you cool when your kids are fighting and screaming, this tool will help. So before we get our next guest, I want to share with you a bit of my story of how this tool has impacted my life. So it was about three years ago. My daughters would have been about one and three, and I still remember this vivid vividly. The kids were in the hallway, and we just moved in, and we're trying to renovate, so it was a very stressful time. The kids were fighting, they were screaming, and normally I'd be yelling at them, stop fighting, stop screaming, and something happened. I caught myself in that moment. I stopped and I took a big breath. And as I breathed out, I sensed myself and I was able to diffuse what would normally end up in tears and anger and take a long time to settle the kids myself. And things in that moment went calm and carried on normally very, very quickly. And she goes, What just happened? Normally you'd lose your shit. And I had to stop and think for a moment and be like, I think it's the breath work. And see, the reason why I'm telling you this story is that this one tool in the last three years, out of everything that I've done, has had a profound impact on my life. It's made me calmer, it's made me more productive, I'm clearer, it's given me a lot more energy. I used to drink on the weekly to get through the week. And now I don't need alcohol. My communication, my relationships have all improved. And that's all what I attribute to this one tool making such a big difference. And that's why I wanted to get Chris Selfur on the treatment table today to share with you what is simple but extremely, extremely powerful tool to reduce your stress, your anxiety, improve your sleep, and really to take back control of your life. So Chris Selfur is a master breathwork instructor at Align Breathwork. He runs workshops all across Sydney and overseas. He still managed to work full-time as well, but is an amazing parent and dad to two kids as well. So thank you, Chris, for coming on the treatment table. Thank you, man.

SPEAKER_03

What an amazing intro and a great summary of breath work and how it can be applied in your day-to-day life, in your parenting. Um, you summarize it so well. There's a phrase that I hear in the breathwork space sometimes: change your state, you change your story. And what better way to do that than with breath work? Um, I feel really honored to be on the podcast with you and to jam with you. And, you know, we we're friends from high school, so it's cool to catch up in this way. And um, you know, we've been on each other's journey recently, and you've invited me along to um support what you do and and to share what I do, which has been really awesome. Um, but it's cool to get a little bit more in depth with breastwork and share a bit about my story, how I got into it, um, and how I like to approach teaching and sharing breathwork. Um, so I might start there if that's cool with you.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, definitely, man. So yeah, the the backstory is pretty cool. Um, so you know, we we haven't been in touch for quite a while, but you know, like you said, our journeys have aligned back together. And um, you know, you you helped us out at a uh women's health events last year, and the feedback was just amazing. Everyone loved your breath work shop and really kind of raved on about it afterwards.

SPEAKER_03

So appreciate that, man. Yeah. Oh, thank you. Thank you. I think that's also just testament to breath work in and of itself of how effective it can be and how um how much people can realize and experience the shift through breath work in such a small frame of time. Um, but yeah, you know, for me, how this all kind of started, breathwork, um, I wasn't, I I like six, seven years ago before I even got into this space, I would have never imagined this is what I'd be doing. Um I'm a creative by day. I still am. I'm a graphic designer and a video editor and a photographer and all things creative. I've always loved that. And I've been in this space for in this industry for a while. Um prior to getting into breathwork, I used to work in the fitness and supplementation space. I worked for a company called EHB Labs. I was a senior designer there. And then uh around the time COVID hit, I transitioned and I worked at Fitness and Lifestyle Group, they're the company that owned Fitness First, Barry's, all the major gym chains across the country. And I've always been really passionate about um fitness, personal development, and mental health and how they all kind of tie together. Around the same time I was learning about breath work and it was starting to kind of make its way into the mainstream with Wim Hof and um, you know, cold exposure therapy and all that kind of stuff. I was also running a studio event space uh in Surrey Hills. It was a bit of a wellness space. We hosted all sorts of different wellness-styled events and workshops. And um, that's kind of how I got introduced to Breath Work. I actually um hosted a few speakers. One of my mentors, um, he was a Wim Hof instructor back in those days. Shout out to Johannes of Breathless Expeditions. He's gone off and he's started an instructor school from there. Um, but also at um that space I hosted uh a couple that from New Zealand called Awaken Breathwork. Uh, a guy called Lucas Mack and Helly Weston. Look them up online to the listeners out there. Um, they're really amazing. They've done some amazing um stuff in this space and and continue to do so. Uh they work with pro-sports athletes. Um, one of the most noticeable um people that they work with is Jake Paul. They work with him in the ring, they help him ahead of the fights, like Mike Tyson, for example, to help him get grounded into flow state and um ready to compete. Um but yeah, that workshop it blew my mind. It sort of put me on this trajectory uh that I'd never imagined that I was going to go on. And it and it kind of rocked my world. Uh and this is all, yeah, pre-COVID. This was literally a week prior to COVID um lockdowns that we hosted them, two-day session. Um, and it just completely transformed my life. Um, I often say that breath work changed my life, and now it's become my life. Um that two-day workshop, it rocked my world. I couldn't believe you could do what you can do simply through breathing. Um, in that session, this was more of the trauma-informed emotional release styles of breath work. And we'll get into that. There's various styles of breath work out there. But this style of breath work called holotropic breath work is the deeper kind of breath work. It's the stuff that you see on social media, people having these big emotional releases. Um, and that was kind of what was contained in that session. COVID came and closed down the studio. And um I had to transition from there. I had to, you know, really just focus on work. And um, I had a a young girl at the time. She was probably about six months. And um, you know, it really helped me throughout that time. Like COVID lockdowns was a very inward, insular kind of time. We had to spend a lot of time indoors. And so we had this, I had personally this extra time to work on myself. And breath work was probably the most beneficial thing for me throughout that time to help me manage my stress, to help me with my parenting, as you touched on earlier, helped me to be more calm, less reactive. Um, and I really developed a relationship with breathing and breathing practices. And um, from there, I sort of fell down this rabbit hole. Like I literally became obsessed with breath work. I'd practice breath work, you know, in my mornings to start my day before I have my coffee. I would do it um in the evenings to help with sleep and insomnia because I also that's something I used to struggle with. And as you touched on, you know, with my parenting, so that I don't have a short fuse. Um a big motivation as to why I got into breathwork in the first place is uh in the first place is that I was sort of on a healing journey at the same time. I grew up in a pretty stressed-out single-parent household. No one told me anything about emotional regulation. Uh, you probably remember back in high school, I was a bit of a rough kid and I'd I'd always be getting into trouble and everything. Um and yeah, I realized that uh I needed to work on some things and I needed to learn some new tools, especially as a new father. And um, breastwork was one of the main sticking points for me. Now, fast forward to today, um, I teach regular classes, I teach workshops, as you mentioned. I've been very fortunate and blessed to work with athletes, been sent out to fitness retreats. I've worked out of um men's retreats, women's retreats, both men's and women's retreats. Um very blessed to also have worked out of a rehab center here on the Central Coast, uh, working with indigenous men who are, you know, trying to learn new things and trying to get their lives on track. And yeah, I've been very fortunate to work in all these different settings, whether it's corporate, whether it's yoga, whether it's just working with the general population and teaching down regulation classes. I've been very fortunate that um this has opened up a whole new world for me. So yeah, that's just a little bit about like my history, how I got into all of this and why it matters to me. Um, yeah. But the biggest motivation for me, if anything, it's not about the accolades, it's not about all these different opportunities I've had. Mainly it's um my kids. Like if anything, I'm trying to impress them. I'm trying to be a role model for them. And um, you know, it it makes its way into my parenting. It makes its way into my co-regulation with them. Perfect example that you shared before. I had a pretty uh a bit of a rough start to this morning. My kids were getting on my nerves a little bit, one of them in particular, and I needed to bring myself back down. And I needed to regulate myself so that it wasn't going to end up into a tantrum or a meltdown on both ends through him and myself. And so, yeah. Simple things like that, that this powerful tool can be practical.

SPEAKER_01

Man, so much you uncovered. Hey, so much we can dive into. But um, like I said, that that moment really stuck with me. And and just like you explained today, why do you think we don't get taught emotional regulation? That's a really great question. Um Because it's not something that, again, I've ever thought about as something that um is a tool. And even if someone had said that to me, I mean, my emotional regulation used to be just punching and kicking through karate and and you know, physical outlet. Um but you know, once kids arrive, if you you need to be able to do that very quickly. You can't run out and go punch the puncher bag and then come back to parent.

SPEAKER_03

Yeah, 100%. That's very related to what you just said, because I was the same as well. I was a pretty angry teenager, and Muay Thai was my outlet kicking a bag and and hitting some pads. Um but yeah, in the heat of the moment of parenting, especially, having this as a, I think of it as like a life skill. It's a it's a tool that we all should learn at some point. Even if you haven't got kids yet, it's still helpful in other areas of your life, and we'll get into that as well. Um but yeah, to answer your question, I think a lot of the reason why we don't get taught emotional regulation is intergenerational. I think that um access to information wasn't as widespread. Like you think about our parents, they didn't have books on parenting as much as they exist now. They didn't have the internet like we do now. They uh didn't have resources like we are so like it's so accessible to us now. We have apps for breath work, we have YouTube videos, guided videos. We didn't they didn't have that. Um and so we're and it's not like not to shame them, like they didn't they didn't know what they didn't know, but we're very fortunate we live in a time where we can have this information and it is so widespread that ignorance is kind of an option, it's choice.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah. I I never thought of it like that. And you know, my dad lost his dad quite early as well. And I don't think he was able to kind of spend enough time to learn um and get past down those those things. And when I think back to how he grew up in South Africa and and the challenges he had, a lot of it is, you know, in South Africa, um, there's dangers, and you know, again, a lot of it is survival. Um and to self-regulate and to have the time and the space for that is a luxury. 100%.

SPEAKER_03

It's a privilege to have it. It's a privilege.

SPEAKER_01

And you know, it's something that I am extremely grateful for now because we we are um in Australia here very privileged to be to have the time and space to not have to fight to live and fight to survive. And, you know, when you think of it in that space, it it's not on them. You know, um, they did their best to survive and to get through what they needed to do, but we have, I guess, the luxury um now to not carry that on. And we can have the tools to and the information to better regulate ourselves so that doesn't get passed on.

SPEAKER_03

I'm glad you mentioned that. That's an important nuance because um, you know, like one of my mentors said, you know, the people in Gaza, for example, or people in war-torn areas around the world, they don't have that luxury. They're probably not even thinking about emotional regulation. They're just trying to get through the day. Um, and we're very fortunate that we do have access to it. Um, so yeah, once again, like as I mentioned, it's not about shaming. It's not about putting any kind of blame or responsibility on others that are not, you know, um investing in themselves in this way. It's just that there is enough information out there and science and data to prove that it helps. But yeah, obviously circumstantial, not everybody has access.

SPEAKER_01

So, Chris, we've talked a bit about how breath works impacted your life and my life. Can you give our listeners a basic understanding of what breathwork is?

SPEAKER_03

Yeah. I if I had to give you an elevated pitch, um, we were chatting about it before the podcast, that I like to think of breathwork as yoga. Um, in fact, the New York Times has an article about it. They refer to breathwork as the new yoga in terms of its popularity. You can actually see if you look on Google Trends, there's a chart that shows from 2019 onwards, breathwork has been on this upward spike. Um, the way I kind of like to refer to breath work, one of the few analogies I like to use is that it's like saying yoga. What kind of yoga? There's a lot of different styles of yoga, right? There's Hatha yoga, there's hot yoga, there's kundalini yoga, there's restorative yoga. And the same kind of thinking can be applied to breath work. Breath work is just an umbrella term. There's a lot of different styles of breath work and techniques and approaches. Um, but to summarize it, I like to put it into categories. There's breath work for performance. There's a lot of um athletes out there that use breath work, just to name a few: LeBron, Novak Djokovic, Ronaldo, uh, Jake Paul, as I mentioned before, that are using breath work on the court, um, on the field, wherever they may be, to get control over the physiology, to bring down their heart rate, to get more out of their performance. So that's one approach that you can use breath work from a performance lens. Then there's breath work that you can use for retraining your breath. So people who deal with asthma or struggle with sleep apnea, you can incorporate breath work in a way that's going to help you to retrain your respiratory rate, um, improve your heart rate variability, and get control of your overall rhythm of breath, your your breath rhythm. Uh, there's restorative styles of breath work, and this is one that I'm quite commonly teaching, more down regulation techniques. So these are breath work techniques that are slower paced. They're intended to calm, soothe, and regulate the nervous system. And um, then there's the firework styles of breath work. So touched on it before, holotropic breath work, the trauma-informed styles of breath work, the more of an emotional release, stress release, tension release styles of breath work. And we can get into that and unpack that a little bit further down the line. But just to kind of summarize it, there are there are other fields, there's free diving as well. Um, there's other ways that you can kind of approach breath work. But another analogy that I like to use is that it's like a Swiss Army knife, right? There's so many different tools on that one Swiss Army knife. Breath work can be sort of thought of in that way. And you can use breath work to improve your sleep, to help with focus, to um, say, for example, like you've got a presentation in front of a bunch of stakeholders, and you're a busy corporate life individual, downshift your state ahead of that presentation. So you're less in your head and your thoughts can come more freely to you. You can actually oxygenate yourself in such a way that you increase blood flow to the brain, which is going to help with that focus. And so that's why I love breath work, is that it can be applied to all these different areas. And you can, like even for myself, for example, I like to incorporate breath work while I'm at the gym in between sets to bring down my heart rate in case I'm feeling a little bit fatigued. There's so many different ways that you can approach it.

SPEAKER_01

It's very interesting. When I was at university studying physio, one of our areas of, I guess, physio um is cardiorespiratory. So we work in um hospitals, working, you know, with people who have um asthma and, you know, severe lung conditions or come out of surgery. One of the really interesting aspects of that, of just touching on what you were talking about, is that how closely related our breathing affects our blood. And so we used to regularly check our pH levels, and it's particularly ICU, more so as you start to play around with that. But but I never made the connection. And because it was in such a clinical state, it was like, okay, well, oh, you have to be very sick for that to change, for your breathing to affect your blood. And like you've mentioned, you're able to really affect very quickly your physiology all the way down to your oxygen levels, all the way down to your blood pH, just through your breath. Amen.

SPEAKER_03

Yeah. I love that you touched on that. Um that's so spot on. I often use the phrase that breath works like a remote control to our nervous system. And the way that we breathe influences the way that we feel, and conversely, the way that we feel is affecting the way that we breathe. So um, you know, example of that is when you're stressed out, um, when your stress buckets really High or your allostatic load is really high, your there's a there's a phrase that gets used that under stress we digress. So what I mean by that, when we're when we're in a state of chronic stress, blood flow and oxygen to the brain reduces. We can reverse this. We can use breathwork techniques, certain breath wave techniques, like you said, to um to uh affect our chemistry, to change our blood pH levels, um, alkalize our blood. We can um and we can also use breath work to bring ourselves down when our heart rate's too high, for example. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah. I often will explain to clients in terms of the reaction of their body to injury, um, to pain, and particularly chronic pain and chronic stress. It's like you're constantly being chased by a dinosaur. When our nervous system responds to stress, it is out of survival. And this comes back to what we were talking about earlier, right? We have the luxury now to not be chased by dinosaurs. We're relatively all safe, but the way that our nervous system receives stress is the same. It's the same physiological response as if we're gonna chase, getting chased by a dinosaur, but maybe we're just stuck in traffic. Maybe we're late, maybe the kids aren't listening, maybe they're screaming.

SPEAKER_03

Maybe you've had once and many coffees and your cortisol is a little bit higher than it it it should be in the morning.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, that's right. And you know, that response is is just keeps going up and going up and going up because very, you know, the lives that we live now are very busy.

unknown

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01

And we're constantly fed with more information, more notifications, more buzzing, more noises, more meetings. And there's not enough moments in our day where we can downshift, like you're saying.

SPEAKER_03

Yeah, it's a skill to learn. And um, I think you you couldn't have put it more like obviously clear. The current world that we're living in is systemically dysregulating. Everything from notifications to you look down at your phone, what's in the news around war, oil crisis, energy crisis, cost of living crisis, um, the fact that we have such abundant amounts of screen time. And I'm I'm not, this is not shame anybody. I'm guilty of it too. Sometimes I like to scroll at night and watch funny memes. But the thing is, the amount of screen time that we're getting is harming us. It's even affecting the way that we breathe. There's actually um this interesting study that was done in in 2000 where they um they coined a term screen apnea. This is when we spend too much time staring at our devices and we're getting all these threat signals. And you think about it, right? When we're staring at our screen like that, our sympathetic nervous system is getting hijacked constantly. Um, not only that, dopamine and serotonin and the feedback loop that we get from our devices, but yeah, screen apnea refers to um it's also referred to as ema apnea, when we're staring at our screens for too long and we actually forget to breathe. And what's that doing? It's affecting our physiology, it's affecting our ability to think clearly, to recall words. This is why I say it's an important skill to learn how to downregulate and to downshift your nervous system. Because if we're constantly in that state of fight or flight, there's a cascade of negative side effects that occur from that. You you probably um approach this with your clients as well. This I referred to before, allostatic load, your stress bucket, when it becomes too high, it compounds. When that bucket overflows, it compounds in in several ways. Irritable bowel syndrome. Um, you could you could probably think of a couple other things as well. You know, when when we're stressed, it's it's it's gonna affect our physiology in so many other ways. But not only that, it's gonna affect us socially. You know, when this buildup becomes too much, it's gonna affect us in our parenting. It might spill over onto our kids, um, in our relationships and our interpersonal relationships. I often say that um regulated people not only regulate themselves, but they regulate others around them. They regulate their children, they regulate communities. Co-regulation is the term for it. Um, I really think that there's a ripple effect that if we can maintain a state of homeostasis and look after our well-being in this way and prioritize caring for our nervous system on top of everything else that we do, that's one of the best ways to optimize your overall well-being. Prioritizing physical, mental, emotional well-being as well as the state of your nervous system. And we sort of touched on this before. You know, most of our lives are hijacked in this our central nervous system that is already overworked and overtired. And because we live in this like always-on society where you got to respond to messages and you've got to hear the deadlines, and you've got to get the kids to school. It's no wonder people stress is like one of the highest factors that people deal with.

SPEAKER_01

Sorry, there's a lot there ramble there. There's a lot there. You know, something that stuck in my head when you were talking, and I just, you know, sometimes you'll meet someone and they just have a really positive energy and really you just feel inspired and lifted. And then sometimes you'll meet someone or you'll have a conversation and they just drain you and they kind of like feel you just leave that conversation feeling exhausted. Imagine if society-wise or a bigger community-wise, was more regulated, less stressed, and the impact that flow that would have on everyone is quite incredible to think how much of a nicer place it would be to live.

SPEAKER_03

100%. You feel it when you get around like good people. Like if you're in a funk yourself and you're around good people with good energy and they're they're optimistic, it kind of has like a it rubs off on you. And conversely, if you're around like low energy people who drain your energy and all they do is complain and moan about things, you start to feel that way too. And there's a term uh called vagal authority, which comes from polyvagal theory. I won't unpack this too much. Basically, you can think of us as like tuning forks and that our vagal tone, which can be stimulated by the vagus nerve when we do breath work, we s we stimulate the vagus nerve. If we can improve our vagal tone, this affects everything, a tone of voice, how the the kind of energy that we can put out to others and they can pick up and receive. So, yeah, I kind of like to think of it as like a tuning fork for others.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, that's really cool. And touching on the vagus nerve, I was just recently looking at a study. And even reducing the vagus tone, which is, you know, again, links into a nervous system, it has a positive effect with deep breathing exercises, been found to have a decrease in inflammatory markers. So if you're chronically stressed and you're chronically inflamed, the research says if you do deep breathing, it will reduce your inflammation. And that's incredible because it's not a tablet. You know, it's not something you have to go out and buy. Like it is something that we do all the time. And it's under your nose.

SPEAKER_03

It's automatic, but it we can also consciously control it.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, amazing. Amazing. One of the misconceptions that I had, and you know, it took me a while to get my head around. What is the difference between breath work and meditation?

SPEAKER_03

Yeah, so breath work, so meditation, firstly, I like to think of it as a passive process. Um, I kind of psych at meditation myself, but I did practice it quite some time. And it's the process of sitting with your thoughts and allowing them and um being the observer. Whereas breath work, I like to think of it as more of an active meditation, but there's so much more going on underneath the surface. We're affecting our physiology with the way that we breathe. Um, and you know, simply put, down regulation, up regulation. If you're practicing faster than usual breathing practices, you're you're changing your blood pH levels, your chemistry, um, you're increasing your focus, clarity, um, and so forth. And then conversely, down regulation techniques, as we kind of spoke about before, we're bringing things down. We're shifting from sympathetic into the parasympathetic. And that's why I use that example of the remote control.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, it's it's really good. I I used to try and force myself to meditate, to try and really sit there. And it's something that I struggled with a lot and I guess found different ways to meditate, which helped. And I still alternate between sometimes I feel like I need to practice that meditation um and really kind of just sit and be quiet and trying to quiet those thoughts down. Um, particularly my brain doesn't stop. So it's for forever going on. Um, and then there's times where uh I will need a guided breath work and and switch that on. And so I would generally do 10, 15, 20 minutes either of meditation or breath work um every morning. So I try and link that to my uh to my coffee. So I make sure that I have have that done before I reach. And uh that's been that's been really, really good. Really, really good. I think before I used to wake up, grab my phone, flick through socials, check emails, and again, coming back to that, already now your cortisol is through the roof because it's now processing. You just get out of bed, you get all these stress notifications going through your brain.

SPEAKER_03

It's no wonder people feel anxious. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01

And then you jump straight to the coffee, you know, it's it's not a great way to start the day. So at least now I feel a lot more calmer and my energy is actually better because it's not, you know, I'm not exerting, you know, off a cold start, getting out of bed and burning through all this energy just trying to get out. Um, but you know, chance to calm myself, think about the day, what do I want to get out of today? What's what are the big things I need to do? And it's yeah, it's made such a difference, such a big difference.

SPEAKER_03

Yeah, I'm a big believer in that. There's a phrase, win the morning, win the day. And I think if you start your day off right and you, you know spend some time on your nervous system, on your mental health, on your physical well-being, that's gonna, it's it's called habit stacking. It's all gonna pay off and the rest of your day can only be uphill from there.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, which leads nice into I think what I was gonna speak about next. It's breath work is not is it something that you need to do as a class or a course, or is it something that you need to integrate in terms of your daily habits?

SPEAKER_03

This is really great for framing it for beginners. Um, there's a few ways you can look at this. Firstly, there is the um the daily techniques, and they can be done formally and informally. So some of these techniques are referred to before, down regulation, up regulation. Uh we can share more info in the notes and everything, but they're um you know, they're techniques that you can either do formally, as in like you mentioned 10 minutes before your coffee, you do this technique. Or you can do them informally. So you can do them in the car. You're you're driving, you've had your coffee, the kids are being a little bit irritating. Do some box breathing in the car.

SPEAKER_01

What's box breathing?

SPEAKER_03

Box box breathing. Okay, so uh it's also referred to as tactical breathing. Okay. Um so for the listeners out there, you breathe in for the same ratio. You inhale, hold, exhale, and hold. So for example, in for five, hold for five, output five, and hole for five. Um, it's commonly known to be used by the Navy SEALs, and they refer to it as tactical breathing. They don't actually um they they use it um ahead of, during, and after a stressful scenario to bring themselves back into baseline with their heart rate variability. Um, and so they use it in this practical manner, um, formally and also informally, because they need it in the heat of battle. And you can think of parenting as being in that scenario as well. It's stressful um at times, not all the time. It's a blessing as well. But um, yeah, box breathing is a really simple and effective technique anyone can do. I do it in the car. I do it while I'm cooking dinner. I do it sometimes like if I'm brushing my teeth, like just wherever I need it, if I need it, it's one of those tools in the tool belt you can pull out and practice. Yeah. Um, but also to further answer your question, you know, there are workshops and there are classes out there. Um, there are those, like I said, the transformative styles of breathwork, the firework styles. If you're a beginner, I wouldn't necessarily recommend you jump straight to that. Like you can also attend a class where you're learning like in a 45-minute class with a group of people where it's more of a slower pace or a faster pace. Depends on the session that you go to. So you can get a bit of a feel for what's happening in your physiology and what comes up. Um, because you might not necessarily be needing that. Like, for example, when I first got into breath work, all I knew was Wim Hof and the transformational styles. And so I was doing Wim Hof every single day, but I didn't necessarily need Wim Hof every single day. That was actually too much for my nervous system. And like you said before, these other compounding factors, coffee in the morning, poor sleep the night before, you're already swimming in a bucket of stress. Activating your sympathetic branch of the nervous system is keeping you elevated. So you don't need that particular technique. So, does that make sense? And I think I hope that you for your listeners that make sense. You don't always need to go straight to these hard and fast approaches.

SPEAKER_00

Hey, it's producer Renel just jumping in here. We had some technical issues and actually lost the audio for the exercise of the week and the outro, so we had to use it from the camera microphones. So it will sound a little bit different, but hopefully nothing too jarring. All right, let's get back to the show.

SPEAKER_01

So, Chris, every week we have an exercise of the week. And so if our listeners now are feeling a bit stressed, a bit anxious, uh, lots of thoughts running through their head, what's one simple exercise that they can run through that will start to help reduce those overthinking, stress, anxiety?

SPEAKER_03

Uh, we spoke about it before. I think it's a perfect easy intro-level breathwave technique. Most people know this one. Um and uh as I mentioned before, some of these athletes that are referred to. They use it box breathing, real simple. So maybe we can practice that together. Listeners, if you're not driving, or just find a safe place to do this. Uh closing down your eyes. We're gonna do I'd say we'll just do four rounds of this just to get a feel for it. So just closing down your eyes.

SPEAKER_02

Just bringing all your focus and orienting all your attention into your breath here.

SPEAKER_03

Just take a gentle breath into the nose for a counter.

SPEAKER_02

Three, two, one, hold air. Exhale it out, through the nose and the milk. Hold M D at the bottom.

SPEAKER_01

I just felt like my shoulders dropped. Thirty centimeters.

SPEAKER_03

I feel a little bit more awake after that. Like I feel like a a little more alertness and noticing the lights in the room. Um but yeah, it's so clearer, isn't it?

SPEAKER_02

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03

So an interesting thing about this uh technique, there was a study done um and looked at police officers, two officers arriving to domestic violence situation, and they both had EEG scanners, heart rate monitors on them. Um one of the officers practiced breath work, the other one did it, and they looked at their heart rate throughout. And you could see the graph. The officer that practiced breath work head of that stressful scenario during and after was able to bring their heart rate back down. And this was a pretty stressful domestic barber situation. The other officer who didn't practice breath work, their heart rate stayed elevated and it took some time for them to actually come back down. Like not until like the next day did they come back to baseline. But this was a study done by the Heart Math Institute. Um, and there's a perfect uh example of in practice in situ how this technique works. And you know, it doesn't have to be just a police officer, it could be a mother who's out of edge and she's stressed out, and her and her child are going through a bit of a wobble. They can practice that together, they can co-regulate together. Um, you know, maybe a stressed out individual working corporate, like I mentioned before, ahead of a stressful scenario like public speaking, which is the one that gets everybody, even myself sometimes, is practicing that ahead of that situation. I promise you, you're gonna feel clearer, your heart rate's gonna be lower, and you're gonna be feeling less anxious. So just simple, practical technique like that makes all the worlds a difference.

SPEAKER_01

Amazing. Thank you, Chris. Thank you, bro. Where can our listeners find out more about you and breathwork?

SPEAKER_03

Yeah, so um align.breathwork at align.breathwork on Instagram, I'm most active there. You can also find my personal account at sulfur. Uh, but either one of those, but mostly aligned breathwork, I'm most active there, sharing all things breathwork.

SPEAKER_01

Amazing. Thank you so much for coming to the treatment table, Chris, and sharing your knowledge, not just with our listeners, but you know, across the world, and it's a new term that I've learned from you today and co-regulate. And I think the more we can spread this and the more everyone can just take a moment to breathe, decrease the stress, get a bit more in tune with their body. We're gonna be living healthier, happier together. Amen to that. Amazing. Thank you so much. Thanks, bro. We are fast approaching the end of our first season on the treatment table. We have covered so many topics from exercise, nutrition, woman's health to different forms of movement from jujitsu to pole dancing. So we would really love to hear what episodes or topics you've really enjoyed and what you want to hear more of for next season. So make sure you send us a message on the Treatment Table Podcast Instagram account, or you can email us at treatmenttablepodcast at gmail.com. So before you go, please make sure again subscribe and follow so you don't miss out on our future guests and tips. And don't forget, as a listener of the Treatment Table Podcast, you also get 20% off your initial appointment at ActiveMovement Studio. Simply head to our website, active movement.com.au and use the code treatment table20 in the booking section. We'll see you next week on the Treatment Table.