Patrick McKeown - How to stay concentrated and focused under stress?

[Music] hello everybody and thanks very much for listening i'm going to impart just some of the traits and what i learned back in 1998 and when i was in secondary school and going into university i had great difficulty concentrating at the time i had sleep disorder breathing and it was undiagnosed i wasn't aware of it but i was told that i was snoring and then i was stopping my breathing when i would wake up in the morning i was waking up with absolute exhaustion and when i was studying i would be looking at the page but i my focus was not on the page my focus was in my head and with fatigue and with a racing mind i could not concentrate i got my grades but it took a lot of work now it was back in 1988 so in 1998 that i heard about the importance of breathing through the nose now that might sound so simple but i will say this when you breathe through your mouth during sleep and if you wake up at a dry mountain in the morning you are not waking up feeling energized you are not going to be focused during the day you are not going to have the concentration that you need and when we think of concentration what is it concentration is your ability to hold your attention on a subject matter for a period of time without distraction it's when you can place your undivided attention on what you were doing many of us go through the motions i was going through the motions for the first 25 years of my life the latter 25 years of my life my concentration now i'm nearly 50 years of age is better now than it was when i was 16 and 17 years of age now this is something that's often overlooked in the corporate world and it's absolutely overlooked in our education system because we are demanded to concentrate but we are not trained how to concentrate and what's more social media text messaging social media alerts um emails they're constant distractions to the mind so the mind has reached an ability that we're often in this incessant and repetitive thought activity and if your mind is racing if there's a lot of thoughts going through the head now it's all relative to person to person that will in turn affect our concentration i remember i was studying for one exam in third year that was in trinity college in dublin and i'd spent three three months studying for this exam i was in the berkeley library which is a library on campus and i was studying just in the last moments before the exam i was joined by a friend of mine terry cloon and terry didn't open the book for the three months he didn't open a book for the exam full stop but he spent 20 minutes just prior to the exam looking at my notes and i could remember i was a 20 year old and i was thinking to myself this guy has something that i do not have because he was not just looking at the note but he was looking at the notes with an intense concentration and alertness that that information was going in my habit would be i would be looking at the notes i would get to the bottom of the page i wouldn't remember what i was what i was supposed to be learning i would have to start off again and that's a lot of that's very inefficient it's very uneconomical and it wastes a lot of time so the short story is the two of us went off we did our exam and we both got the same result it took him 20 minutes and it took me three months now i'm sure that many of you are in the same position that i am concentration is often influenced genetically there's no doubt about it that some people have naturally got a tremendous ability to concentrate they have a calmness of a mind they can enter that flow stage which is often coveted you know psychologists talk about how can we enter this flow state how can we have solely on what we are doing and that our attention is moving simultaneously with time terry cloon had it naturally most tremendous business leaders have it naturally i had to learn it you can learn it what was the first most important thing that i did was getting my mouth closed at night and you might think well that's so simple but back in 1998 i remember after learning about the importance of nasal breathing and also by breathing through the nose that is the calming effect on the mind that you're more likely to breathe lower into the into the lungs and not only that you're likely to breathe lighter and i'll talk about that because there's a way to improve blood flow to the brain and it's not how most yoga instructors traditionally talk about it it's not how most breathing instructors traditionally talk about it because the thing about breathing is with more sorry the thing about breathing is that less is more so my first night back in 1980 1998 with my mouth taped and i woke up the next morning feeling okay kind of getting used to it i went to sleep the second night i had my mouth taped my nose was stuffy i had nasal dilators and i woke up in the second morning and i had an alertness that i had never experienced in my 20 years now we are sending kids to school we are sending teenagers into into secondary school and into university we are demanding that our employees have good concentration we are not looking at their sleep and statistics show that obstructive sleep apnea is a very common sleep disorder breathing ninety percent of people are undiagnosed and to give you an example it affects 26 percent of men between 30 and 50 years of age and it affects 43 percent of men between 50 and 70 years of age now if you were ever told that you are snoring and then you stop breathing you have to consider the quality of your sleep nasal breathing during sleep we should always wake up in a moist mountain in the morning now you could say that this is for the birds that breathing is something the tree huggers do the guys with the open sandal brigades it's not about that i work with swash i work with special weapons and tactics we've worked with delta forces which are above navy seals we are working with olympic athletes i have 200 instructors across about 40 countries and we have 14 master instructors doing what i'm doing my books are going into 14 different languages i have wrote papers on sleep disorder breathing and breathing so coming back to flow state you can never achieve flow state if you don't have the energy to focus on what you're doing so number one get them out close at night how do you do that well as i said i taped up now you don't have to go through the drastics of having duct tape or masking tape or anything like that i'm going to show you a simple tape and it's called myotape and it's developed for the dental industry and quite simple as it's as follows we stretch the tape surrounding the mouth and the tape because it's elasticated and it's going in a bi-directional relationship it's helping to bring the lips together it's safe it ensures nasal breathing and it ensures a good quality sleep and any of you who are tracking your sleep if you're tracking it via oral ring if you're tracking your heart rate very very which by the way is a clinical measure of stress in the human being now we as human beings we cannot cope with long-term chronic stress you think you can but sooner or later it's going to catch up to you and if you look at the statistics on burnout syndrome if you go to your medical doctor and you say to your doctor doctor i can't concentrate i'm stressed the doctor traditionally has no way of measuring the impact of stress on your body but with heart rate variability which is a very simple tool and measurement you can imp you can measure and qualify that the impact of stress has on you if we look at elite military and elite athletes they track their heart rate variability they train when they are in this in when the autonomic nervous system which is the automatic functioning of your body when it's in balance but if they are stressed out they will not train that day because they have an increased risk of injury so for the human being in terms of the stress response and the parasympathetic response we need to achieve a balance and it's about resilience and if we're constantly stuck in that stress state if our mind is racing if we're constantly running from one thing to another if we're not able to hold our attention on doing what we are doing that is having an impact on the body don't think that you're getting away with it you're not and i've worked individually with about 8 000 people over the years i've seen people coming in with depression anxiety panic disorder agrophobia to elite athletes and we have to train the brain we have to train the mind now how would you do that focus on your breathing and what's more it's not just about focusing on the airflow coming in and out of your nose but it's about gently softening and slowing down the breath there are three ways to help bring a calmness to the mind the first way of course is to breathe through your nose both during rest during physical exercise and during sleep the second way when you have your attention on your breathing and you are feeling the airflow coming in and out of your nose gently start slowing down the speed of the airflow coming in and out of your nose really focus on softening the airflow coming into your nose and at the top of the breath to bring a total feeling of relaxation to the body that you are having a relaxed and a gentle breath out the objective here is to breathe slightly less air i'm looking solely at the biochemistry of your breathing now when you breathe slightly less air you will experience an increased watery slide in the mouth which is an indication that you've actually activated the body's relaxation response and not only that you start noticing that the temperature of your fingers and hands are getting warmer people with poor breathing patterns normally have cold hands and cold feet but they don't just have cold hands and cold feet they often have brain fog if you think of it this way if you breed more air if you're in a habit of breathing a little bit faster and a little bit harder and a little bit upper chest breathing that is causing your blood vessels to constrict you have 70 000 miles of blood circulation throughout the human body and if you breed more air your blood vessels are constricted think about how would you feel if i said you take five or ten big breaths in and out through your mouth you will often feel lightheaded mouth breathing is a stress response mouth breathing is activating the upper chest the second aspect about breathing is that we should be breathing low we should be breathing deep but normally the interpretation of a deep breath is absolutely incorrect and the reason that it's incorrect is because people when they do take a deep breath they will often take a big breath but a big breath as i said what's happening is it's causing your blood vessels to constrict and not only is it causing your blood vessels to constrict but less oxygen is delivered to the brain now if you have a habit of habitually breathing too much air too fast air your mind is in the state of agitation the central nervous system which is including the brain and the spinal cord is aroused in order to activate the body focus on your airflow coming in and out of your nose and have a gentle and prolonged and relaxed exhalation when we look at the breath itself the inspiration or the inhalation is more sympathetically driven that's when there's a nerve in the body that's wandering throughout the body called the vagus nerve the vagus nerve steps back the exhalation is primarily the main driver of that is the body's relaxation response the parasympathetic nervous system if you want to bring your body into relaxation if you are exposed to stress and you feel that stress and that stress is eating you it's impacting your sleep you go to bed at night your mind is racing you cannot sleep you wake up feeling exhausted and you have you're in a vicious cycle how do you bring the body into relaxation slow down your breathing breathe light and breathe deep i already touched on breathing light breathing light is about breathing less air and it's about breathing less air for a short period of time to the point you feel air hunger and check the saliva in your mouth and check the temperatures of your fingers slow breathing slow breathing for the last 30 years it has been shown that when you slow down your breathing to a rate of six breaths per minute and that's five seconds in and five seconds out that that helps to improve heart rate variability and when we're talking about heart rate variability the timing between our heartbeats shouldn't be the same the timing between our heartbeat should be both random and in rhythm and therapists really exceptional therapists they will want to know if their patient is in the sympathetic stage if that person is in a stress response or are they in relaxation and one very simple way to determine this is you locate your pulse and as you feel your heartbeat you also synchronize it with your breathing and as you breathe in you are checking is your heart rate getting faster or is your heart rate getting slower and as you breathe out you're checking is your heart rate getting faster or as your is your heart rate getting slower now at heart rate variability during rest during the inhalation your heart rate is faster and on exhalation your heart rate is slower that's called respiratory sinus arrhythmia now you can imagine this heart rate variability is a measurement but how do you improve it and heart rate variability is that measurement of resilience that word resilience and resilience is about being able to cope with whatever demands is placed upon you because human beings we should have resilience and this ties back into if you are in a challenging environment you know some people are well able to cope with that and others aren't but as i said before i had to learn it by slowing down your breathing to five seconds in and five seconds out and you shouldn't hear it it should be light because remember when we're talking about breathing we're talking about three dimensions we're talking about the biochemistry which is like breathing we're talking about resonant frequency or improving heart rate variability which is slow breathing and we're talking about deep breathing and i will come to deep breathing in a moment so by breathing in very slowly to five seconds in and five seconds out and five seconds in and five seconds out that will help to stimulate the vagus nerve the vagus nerve which is wandering throughout the body secretes a substance called acetylcholine and this causes a slowing of the heart rate and it helps to activate the body's relaxation response the third thing that we need to be talking about is whereabouts in the body are we breathing are we breathing fast upper chest that is a stress response look at your children look at your own breathing we should be breathing low and a very simple way to to determine this is simply put your hands on either side of your lower ribs and as you breathe in you should feel that your lower ribs are gently moving outwards and as you breathe out you should feel that your lower ribs are gently moving inwards and as you breathe in you should feel that your lower ribs are gently moving outwards and as you breathe out you should feel that your lower ribs are gently moving inwards a few things you may be going to yoga you may be doing pilates etc if you are great but don't hear your breathing because it doesn't make sense to go to a yoga studio and start taking in more air because remember if you breed more air you blow off too much carbon dioxide and carbon dioxide is not just that waste gas but blowing off too much carbon dioxide by breathing too much air is causing your blood vessels to constrict and less oxygen to be delivered to the body slow down your breathing for periods of time during the day breathe in for five seconds breathe out for five seconds breathe in for five and breathe out for five because then you can influence the autonomic nervous system to give you an example if you look at heart rate variability and you look at any major and most common conditions of civilization look at the relationship between heart rate variability and high blood pressure low blood pressure fibromyalgia chronic fatigue burnout syndrome high stress copd asthma irritable bowel syndrome individuals who are either physically unwell or emotionally unwell depression anxiety post-traumatic stress disorder they have reduced heart rate variability so you can improve that you can improve that by simply three things one nosebleed during sleep that will improve your hrv many people who are tracking their heart rate variability via ring and other tracking devices have reported this and we have experts in our field including clinical psychologists who are our instructors and we get this feedback number two breed slightly less air if you're relaxing this evening and you might be having some downtime or watching television have your map closed breathing in and out through your nose and gently slow down the speed of air that you are breathing and breathe about 30 percent less air 30 percent less air continuous gently slowing down your breath to the point you have air hunger air hunger doesn't signify that oxygen has dropped in the blood what's happening with air hunger is it signifies that carbon dioxide has increased in the blood the primary drive to breed is not oxygen the primary drive to breathe is carbon dioxide as you breathe less air carbon dioxide increases in the blood and as carbon dioxide increases your blood vessels dilation but not only that discovered back in 1903 it's called the bore effect the ohr when you breathe too much air you get rid of too much carbon dioxide your red blood cells don't release oxygen so readily to tissues and organs including the brain now remember my story going back to secondary school and university i had no concentration and i was the child who was admonished in school by school teachers i was the guy falling asleep for the desk i went to uni upsell university for one year erasmus program and we were staying in student dorms and the students used to report that i would be snoring so chronically loud and then i would stop breathing and of course we had no idea what that was but it was called obstructive sleep apnea now the very same principles that i spoke about for improving concentration breathing through your nose breathing light breathing slow breathing deep or breathing low those traits will also improve your sleep quality so what i would say to you is you we cannot look at concentration alone we have to look at sleep and we have to consider how is your concentration can you stop thinking at will if i was to say to you i would like you to switch off your mind i would like you to focus on the subject matter how long can you switch off your mind for how long can you focus on the subject matter before your mind wanders or do you find that your mind is in the constant state of distraction that you're constantly living in your head and 20 years ago i remember you know another story as well was i went on this meditation um class and it was in the shelburne hotel in screen and i spent two hours gently bringing my attention back to my breathing my mind wanders off i bring it back my mind wanders off i bring it back and for that two hours yes it's challenging because you really do realize just how active and incessant and repetitive and in control that the mind is we are not in control of our mind but our mind is in control of us and we have to consider this the mind is the filter through which all of your life experiences unfold and yet we never ask the question how does my mind work now i'm not talking about a phd in a mind you could write a phd on how a banana tastes or you could taste the banana what i want to do is i want to taste the banana so back in that two-hour class focusing on breathing and came out of it walked down grafton street it was the first time that i actually seen the street i seen i remember the colors i remember the sound i remember walking down that street now i went to school in sink street in dublin i never seen grafton street all those times because i walked from one end of grafton street to another living in my head the next time you go for a walk are you really there or are you living in your head you're sitting at your desk are you really focusing or are you living in your head and thinking is a habit and as oscar wilde said he said thinking is a disease and people die of it just like any other disease and again we are told we need to concentrate but nobody shows us how i'm showing you how and i'm showing you how based on 20 years of experience working this field i'm showing you how based on you know my self-application of putting it into practice and the benefits that it has gave me to my own life and you may think sometimes you know we are so busy in the western world that we feel guilty about giving ourselves attention but remember this social media is now consuming about two hours of most individuals attention every day people are lost in the screen those companies must be absolutely delighted facebook instagram these social media these tech giants they must be delighted to consume two hours of your time every day spend less time at social media and spend more time focusing on your breathing your mind wanders off you bring your attention back onto the breath don't just live in your head that's how i lived that's how many people live and if we live in our head we have increased anxiety we have increased stress we have reduced focus we have reduced concentration but above all else a study carried out by a harvard professor matthew killingwort they looked at an app called trackyourhappiness.org and they collected 250 000 data points and they asked the question if you were doing something where is your attention because they noted that many people are carrying out a task but their attention isn't on that task their mind is wandering and they found that those individuals whose minds wandered the most were least happy of course it makes sense because if we consider that 90 percent of taught activity going through the human mind it's absolutely repetitive and it's often negative and it's often self-critical and we are sabotaging ourselves i was sabotaging myself and i was sabotaging myself even if i was to set goals then i would have all of this negative self-criticism coming in and that would get in the way of me achieving my goal and it's not about setting a goal and constantly in a rush to get to the future but it's about setting your goal and it's having your attention absolutely in the present moment it's about the process of it it's about not reaching and getting to the end because too often we set a goal but we don't have our attention here our attention is moving to the future but this does all come together you know when we think about breathing don't just think of tree huggers don't just think of these open sandal brigades because i will tell you this if you want to improve your intuition if you want to improve your creativity and if you want to improve your resilience and to better handle stress we need to take control of the mind we need to be able to create space and gaps between thoughts we need to be able to hold our attention on what we are doing without distraction and flow state is that it's effortless you are absolutely immersed in what you are doing there is no distraction there is no mind wandering and time flies and you actually enjoy the process and what's more your quality of work is better if you look at the quality of work of individuals with a distracted mind they are in such a race to get to the future the carpenter who might be putting down skirting board in the house the carpenter if that carpenter has an anxious mind the mind is racing to the future that he doesn't have his attention on doing what he is now he started the job but his attention is in the future that's a poor quality work and you often know as well yourself and the mind is in this state of agitation our work quality is suffering how many times have you sent an email in a state of stress and then you went into your sent box the following day and you just looked at the quality of your email and that's just a simple thing so if i was to have a choice between an m.a degree which i earned from tcd and for me which was very challenging because of poor concentration and it took a lot of time for me to get and it's not necessarily that people are stupid or people are lacking intelligent it's that people very often have poor sleep quality that's not addressed and they have poor breathing and that's not addressed and if we look at individuals with anxiety people who are predisposed to stress the literature shows that 75 percent of these individuals have dysfunctional breathing patterns if you breathe through an open mouth if you wake up at a dry mouth in the morning i would strongly encourage you get your mouth closed at night and one sure way to do that is to breathe in and out through the nose wearing a support such as a tape don't live your life stuck in your head give your itself some attention focus your attention on your breathing take your attention out of the mind slow down your breathing breathe a little bit less air and breathe low it's very very simple but that is that is one way of bio hacking that is one way of activating your body's relaxation response and with practice your concentration your focus and your productivity will improve well thanks patrick um so that's really interesting and hugely technical for a lot of us and as somebody who's been to yoga and has done the deep breathing i now have to rethink all of this kind of stuff um and it's going to be particularly challenging i guess in today's climate where people are wearing masks and face masks so that's an immediate issue how would you address that yeah you know a lot of people are wearing face masks and face mask is pool and carbon dioxide carbon dioxide is not that waste gas as we said carbon dioxide is the primary drive to braid now by wearing a face mask and by pooling carbon dioxide you are breathing that carbon dioxide back into your lungs to increase in the blood but that's actually opening up your blood vessels that's also causing more oxygen to be released from from the red blood cells to the tissues and organs so if there's two ways to breathe we can breathe in efficiently or we can breathe efficiently if we're wearing a mask absolutely and only breathe through the nose and breathe slow and breathe low and with that then you improve what's called alveolar ventilation but you improve gas exchange if you want to get rid of the feeling of suffocation while wearing a mask don't map breed don't shallow breed don't fast breed even though that's a natural reaction and that's what many people are doing and then they're in a state of panic because of prolonged wearing of the mask to improve alveolar ventilation and this is not just about wearing a mask i've worked with people with chronic heart failure people climbing kilimanjaro how to breed to optimize what's called alveolar ventilation nose slow and low great so masks for everybody really if that encourages our better breathing but okay let's take this to the business world yeah so you you've spoken about the obvious advantages for example for athletes for somebody climbing kilimanjaro how can one of the you know 100 or so people who are watching here take what you've been talking about now and implement that not just for them but in their workplace yes this is not theory you know we have to consider burnout and exhaustion and reduce productivity because of stress can you imagine how much that is costing economically socially to a company and to the employees this is about practice and it's very simple get your mouth closed at night if you're walking down the street make sure that you are breathing in the knife through your nose if your nose is stuffed you can help them block your nose by doing breath tool exercises those exercises we have available free up in youtube for example and the more you breathe through your nose your nose works better and individuals with asthma because ireland here we have you know seven to eight percent of the population with asthma they often have a stuffy nose they also will have if anybody has rhinitis or a stuffy nose you are 1.8 times more likely to have a sleep problem you're waking up feeling tired so observe your breathing and really pay attention as well just simply start off you're sitting down at night you have some quiet time take your attention out of the mind and focusing focus it on your bet and see how often does your mind wander are you in control of the mind or is the mind in control of you and when you have your attention and your breathing slow it down read light breathe slow breathe deep and an easy way to remember it for those 1990s generation is lsd light slow deep light breathing you can improve your blood flow you can improve oxygen delivery throughout the body including the brain slow breathing you activate and harness the body's relaxation response and low breathing you have a calming effect on the mind i have absolutely no idea what you mean by lsd so uh but let's take it to the business world again so i've got a team of 10 people and we are distributed working uh we're stressed yes um how can i get that team of 10 people to even consider what it is you're talking about because you've convinced me because you're very persuasive but now i got to get nine others on board and they're kind of going he wants us to do what yeah you know like i wouldn't call this i remember when i'm working with a police department in the united states they said they wanted to introduce mindfulness and i said don't use the word mindfulness okay this is not about mindfulness this is about how can you improve focus and concentration and you know first of all the team has to have buy-in in terms of they have to realize do they have concentration and focus and it's not just about the workplace because if the mind is racing in the workplace the mind is racing outside of the workplace if you're not if you can't focus on the workplace you can't focus in your family life i was in that state of a racing mind and it is not as a nice state to be and normally in western society we want to drown out the racing mind and we drown it out with alcohol by watching tv by immersed in computer games because we're going into us you know anything to avoid the taught activity and this is not about mindfulness because we have to look at the physiology of breathing if you have an individual who is in the constant state of stress they are not being productive anyway and i would even say if you are having 10 people together you have a project at hand spend 20 minutes 30 minutes looking at the project then take three minutes out and have people focus and then they're breathing now people might think it's very fairy but what i'm saying is this put it into practice there is a reason there is a reason that elite military are doing it there is a reason that elite athletes are doing it this is just as i said this is not for the tree huggers this is for everybody in society and look at the concentration levels of people who are productive look at the concentration levels of people who are creative and look at the concentration levels of people who achieve they are not living in their head okay so if there's one takeaway and i'm going to sum up now because we're we're running out of time uh it is that last one that's what they can do right now is actually start practicing that straight away yes patrick thank you very much for insight into something most of us take for granted so thank you very much patrick okay

Channel: Oxygen Advantage®

Views: 45,625

Keywords: patrick mckeown, oxygen advantage, stress, concentration, breathing, stay focused, stress relife, stress mangement, pressure, pressure manege

Id: Au7VmZhPdBg

Length: 34min 9sec (2049 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 24 2020