The Power of Breathwork for Long Covid | The Most Underrated Tool for Managing Symptoms

in this film we're going to talk to one of the world's leading breath work experts richie bostock about why it's one of the most powerful tools we've got to manage long covet as a condition adding the medical perspective on the discussion are dr tamzin lewis and dr assad khan and it's worth staying to the end for a short introductory exercise from richie which might just show you what you've been missing ricky could you briefly just tell us a bit about your background well i wasn't always teaching people how to breathe for a living it's not something that people will usually come out of university or try and do a university degree in i actually started my professional life in the corporate world working in one of the big consulting firms worked there for about six years left that and and ended up moving to to asia and working in the world of digital entrepreneurship for a few years but it was around that transition um of moving and shifting careers that my family was rocked with some pretty bad news and that was that my dad was diagnosed with ms and so through my research to try and work out what can help him that's how i came to the wim hof method for the first time and the wim hof method uh as tam explained is a breathing technique but also couples it with cold exposure um so in in a daily life it might be something as simple as just taking a cold shower every day um and this was my first experience with with breath work and and what the possibilities of it are and i ended up traveling to to poland and doing a week-long wim hof retreat uh you know in the middle of winter hiking around in your shorts and your pants minus three degrees outside in the snow swimming around in the ice water climbing the tools mounted in poland just in your shorts minus 19 degrees at the top you know really just having quite a profound experience as to what actually we are capable of as human beings um but all the cold stuff aside what actually blew me away was the breath work that we did we would every morning go into the basement of the hotel where we were staying and do these breathing techniques for 30 minutes 40 minutes and just have these absolutely profound experiences whether it was just moving into those beautiful states of peace and calm and equanimity to um you know emotional cathartic releases or even just experiencing elevated emotions of just deepest joy and love just not knowing that these were all possible just by breathing which is quite profound but that was really what kickstarted me into thinking what is possible with the breath what else are people doing with the breath this is something that we all have every single one every single human being in this earth has the capability to access so what is possible with this tool and that led me all over the world to learn uh from all sorts of different people all who approach the breath in different ways with different lenses but all with this single idea in mind that we can do something just by breathing so whether they were you know breath work masters yogis psychologists university researchers doctors physiotherapists elite athletic coaches you know all sorts of different people who all use the breath to create a different benefits and now this is what i get to share and what i get to teach and i'm very excited to do it thank you um so richie like for people who are just coming into this fairly cold um like i would have done you know before i had covered um i would be like breath work i mean what how how is that different to the breathing i do normally like what is it and what does it do and what's the point of it like in the most simple terms of people who may be just coming to this for the first time of course and actually you know i even think that word breath work is quite a confusing one because it's like breath work do i actually need to work on my breathing then i just do it and then i stop when i'm dead basically um but what a lot of people don't realize is actually how from breath to breath um the way that your breathing is actually making changes to what's happening inside of you and vice versa what's happening inside of you particularly from a mental emotional perspective is changing your breath literally from breath to breath and we take somewhere between you know 17 to 29 000 breaths per day and not many people are aware of actually how much their breathing is affecting you although i feel like this is changing and perhaps it took a respiratory virus to get people to think about their breathing as something that's maybe sort of important um but yeah so so breath work itself is really any time that you become aware of your breathing and then start to change it to create some sort of physical mental or emotional benefit for yourself and that is quite a broad definition because it is actually a very broad you know scope of of work it can be as simple as using your breath in a reactive moment when you're feeling stressed to calm down your nervous system takes as little as a couple of minutes um to using your breath in more involved ways to improve let's say athletic performance or improve recovery or even to you know change various physiological symptoms in your body or improve various physiological symptoms to emotional therapy work to you know spiritual experiencing and voyaging there's really so many different ways that you can use the breath and that's what's so exciting is we all have it as long as you have one working nostril a mouth and at least one working lung then you're good to go it's definitely true and that was that was my experience but i think you know there's a range as you said of breathwork and there's a range of expertise out there and it can as i've seen through my time out here working with different breathwork petitioners you know it can go wrong sometimes so it's important to work with someone that potentially goes gently but let's bring it back to long covid because you know that's why everyone's kind of here and why how it can be helpful and um you know jaz you can give a bit of of your experience i know because i i was new to um you know i wasn't new to breath work but i have used it um through long covered where my lungs really didn't you know didn't work i know your lungs weren't as affected as as mine um but i think getting the diaphragm and retraining the breath was was really helpful i also think the uh the nervous system reset that breathwork can encourage so that's in terms of you know there's a lot of muscular tension held in the rib cage etc and around the costochondrial joints um and i think breathwood itself by increasing the blood flow can really help there but i think for me it's it's the emotional release and um that really that really helps um with with breath work but also you know thinking more about long covered being a trauma for for many people right it it literally is a shock to the nervous system um and i know that's that's that could be seen as a sort of very fairy way of just you know describing long covert but it really for many people suffering you know almost ptsd symptoms from long covert because of the you know the the lack of knowledge around it the hospitalization the multiple medical tests you know that that is that is a trauma and i think working with with a breath worker and and someone that can help um release release some of that nervous system tension is it can be really profound that was certainly my experience but just i know you know you came across breathwork as a result of well in indirectly my influence by introducing you to someone who i was introduced to by ritchie so it all comes back to to richie here um that really helped you with some of that nervousness contention could you talk a little bit about that yeah so i mean i found that um and i think something else that happened around the same time was reading um about the work that dr petrino was doing out in mount sinai where he discovered that the majority of long haulers had basically weird breathing they were building breathing too shallowly uh they didn't have enough end tidal co2 and this is obviously some manifestation of you know dysautonomia essentially and and i thought is it possible that i'm also breathing weird without having realized it and there's two aspects i think in which the breath work helped me from this sort of point and one of them was just trying to do five or ten minutes of it before i went to sleep um just to try and calm my body down out of whatever state it got itself into during the day and i would find i would sleep much better through the night if i managed to do that my heart rate would drop and then increasingly trying to do it during the day as well um where any time i felt like i had over exerted or i'd been on the go to too long to sit down and actually do some breath work light and do some breath work and heart rate would suddenly come down from whatever it was doing at 90 100 or whatever at rest down to something more normal it clearly was very very effective at doing that and actually getting the nervous system back into line which has all sorts of beneficial consequences as well because your body isn't trying to fight and flight the whole time you might be resting digesting and healing a little bit which is kind of useful sometimes um and then the secondary part of breath work with it was incredibly helpful for me was the emotional release side of stuff and that was with a practitioner called lena who is who works with sam who's uh an incredible i've mentioned it before on the channel incredible um osteopathic acupuncturist and the work there was more breath work was more about the emotional release and for me the the trauma that you mentioned tam wasn't so much the sort of the physical stuff i think it's the trauma of being ill and the trauma it's had on your life and the life change that long covered has enacted on it and the grief that you have for all the things that you can no longer do and the anger that you feel towards the illness and towards yourself and towards also there's all sorts of emotions that long covered creates because of the drastic impact it has on your life and you have to let go of some of that tension because otherwise you're just tied up and again it's another thing that just ties you up in this tight knot and increases this nervous system malfunction in my opinion um and and i've found sort of that those longer terms of one-to-one sessions with a breath worker incredibly productive for emotional release and getting there and i know we're sad can probably talk to that too and then maybe richie if you could maybe talk about why that works of course yeah i just mean so can i say one thing because i think it's really important to frame what you're going to say as well i think coming from a medical background and clearly you as a respiratory consultant as well like people are people will be sitting here thinking the soul sounds very well and good but you know we've got a disease like how does breathing or the you know retraining our breathing and all this emotional how does that affect a disease process um yes i mean i i was actually gonna touch on that anyway but i think it's really important that people who are watching this uh don't think well you know this is another one of those um videos that is asking us to think our symptoms away and whenever we have talked about a technique that isn't a pill then we have had that sort of feedback and but uh i'm sure richie would expand on this but this is producing physiological changes inside our body that are having effect on our internal organs uh and in particularly in in my case on i would say my autonomic nervous system i mean jess and i are quite similar in terms of how our disease is presented with the fatigue and with the dysautonomia i have crippling pots and you know my heart rate can be 140 150 at times but since i started the breath work uh nothing is as effective as that at bringing it down to a horrible level i can actually bring it down to the 60s now with my own practice and that's just through regular breath work and meditation and the emotional release as well um having this disease even if you're not hospitalized is traumatic because it's like a bereavement as is any other chronic disabling condition where you go from this person who was high functioning had uh you know an on the shop floor job 12 hours a day you know in our cases you know looking after other people uh being physically active also having a life at home to being somebody who's just in bed and you know can just about wash and dress yourself uh and that goes on and on and on for months uh it's it's hugely traumatizing and i can say hand on heart that if it wasn't for breath work and mindfulness i would not have reached the level of acceptance that i have got now nine months into my illness if i hadn't been introduced to these techniques through jazz um so i still don't fully understand how all of it works um but certainly you know the effects on the sympathetic nervous system and on the release of that trauma that you sustain due to the illness and also pre-existing life experiences um that has been phenomenal and perhaps richard you could expand on what brethren actually does to your physiology of course well uh both i just want to really just say a big thank you to all of you for all your your sharings you know and and just being so open and and and vulnerable with what you've experienced because of course whenever we move into the world of emotion uh it's not always easy to talk about so i really just want to honor you guys for for doing that um so let's talk a little bit about but maybe what we can do right now is focus on um a lot of the emotional release work we've been talking about because again breath work very broad let's let's zone in a little bit so when it comes to the what we call integrative breath work sessions that you guys have been having and people all over the world are experiencing as well typically has a few things in common with um well sorry there's many different types let's just say but they all have generally a few things in common and one of them is what we call super ventilation or another way to talk about is controlled hyperventilation so quite often breathing through the mouth a little faster and a little deeper than you would usually breathe so this actually has multiple effects uh on your physiology one of which is a reduction of carbon dioxide in your blood and what carbon dioxide is is acts as a vasodilator in your blood so if you have more it's going to open up your blood vessels you have less it's going to constrict them so if you're blowing out carbon dioxide slowly going into a state that we call hypercapnia then you're actually starting to create a light restriction in your blood vessels now in some ways that might sound a little bit weird or a little bit scary like is that a good thing to do but it's perfectly safe and it's perfectly okay um and you can you know breathe this way for hours and hours and hours on end and it'd be totally fine um if you were doing it 24 7 every single day at the week maybe you'd start to have some issues but just for a short period of time it's perfectly fine and perfectly okay now what this actually does is this this constriction is particularly evident in your brain so it's talking about the blood vessels in your brain and it's almost as though it starts to slowly slow down the the resources that are act being accessed by your brain and what that means is the brain goes okay it's time to make sure that we survive here uh we don't want to so what we might start to do was turn down the parts of the brain that aren't so useful for survival just to keep the body running and of course what happens is that the higher cognitive centers start to slowly quieten down a little bit so specifically the pfc prefrontal cortex and what that allows then is a greater accessibility to what's underneath that what's underneath the conscious mind and this is where we start to look at the limbic system this is when we start to look at what are we holding on to emotionally what's encoded in there and that is obviously then the seat of being able to access the autonomic and central nervous system in the rest of our body where we might also hold other tension where we might hold other stress other trauma so it's as it's as though we are taking the lid off the jar and we're able to see what's inside and actually get to it and so much of the time whenever we experience things that are emotionally traumatic we we lock up we go into our fight or flight or freeze response and in most uh scenarios these days you know where we're not necessarily allowed in many cases to be able to run away from something or fight something off in a very physical sense so many people go into their freeze response automatically block up hold it in don't show the emotion don't act just and what actually happens then is we not only tense our bodies but we stop breathing you know if you think about when you're trying to hold in crying what do you do you hold it in if you're trying to stop yourself from laughing the exact opposite what do you do you you literally hold your breath and the breath is a very natural mechanism for us to be able to process motion when it becomes overwhelming so if we're not allowing our body to use this natural mechanism that it's supposed to use needle to be able to work through emotion then it's not going to get processed in the right way it gets stored it gets remembered in some way throughout our nervous system throughout our limbic system and it acts there and affects us unconsciously in our behavior and also within the systems inside of us so you know so many people i guarantee you are working from a mildly sympathetically stimulated place all the time and it might not just be because they have busy schedules or a busy you know hectic work life or whatever it is it might be because of that thing that happened to them when they were seven years old that they haven't been able to process they haven't given the body the opportunity to know that it is safe so so this is what this type of breath work presents an opportunity is to be able to essentially do a little bit of digging find out what's there and to be able to process it in a very safe way knowing that i'm in a safe environment being looked after by somebody the story has a happy ending i'm here i'm alive and it allows us that allows us to close that loop of trauma great love that love the way you described that aside of you do you want to comment um yes yes i mean um i i would just say that you know the changes in acid-base balance that you're describing are absolutely fundamental and rooted in physiology therefore it's it's no surprise that um the changes your body experiences are so profound because there are actually very few ways to manipulate your acid base by it's very stable unless you ingest acid or alcoholy or become seriously ill you know your acid-base balance is pretty homeostatic um so richie can i just ask you in what other conditions would you say breathwork is the most useful oh that is a tricky question there i saw because i've just seen it been so useful in so many ways and i'll use my dad as an example actually so i came across breath work in the first place to try and help my dad diagnosed with ms and through his implementation of breath work daily cold showers daily that kind of forms the the wim hof method aspect of of what he was doing uh added with a change in diet as well has meant that from the moment he started this program the progression of his ms completely stopped in its tracks and you know i've shared this story quite a few times in various places and so people are trying it and it's not just ms whether it's other autoimmune issues as well you know rheumatoid arthritis crohn's what have you it seems to be very very useful for people who have autoimmune issues um you know people for example who might struggle with various other respiratory issues for example asthma you know there's a lot of really interesting work being done around the trauma basis the emotional trauma basis of asthma um resulting in a you know a chronic um hypercapnic state that causes the sniffing of the the um the smooth muscle in in the airways and so there's lots of really interesting work around that um what i find really fascinating is you know there's a there's some brilliant brilliant work being done by a man called dr gabo mate who is really striving hard to understand at the correlations between physical symptoms disease and illness and the potential emotional basis there are for it and he's done a pretty good job by examining a lot of you know very clear research and and evidence-based research and case studies showing these interesting combinations of personality type and trauma leading to certain um diseases and symptoms of illness so if breath can you know help to sort of address those some of those fundamental things that perhaps were from an emotional basis we're holding on to then who knows what kind of physical uh relief of symptoms uh it might present um but of course you know there are many other things that that the breath is useful to be on the emotional piece um some of the things you were sharing before around you know feeling your heart rate go up to 140 and being able to bring it back down using your breath you know that is so useful just every day for anybody who is struggling with whether it is a disease or just something is you know something as common as anxiety or panic attacks you know i did have one person who came and did a breath session with me um wasn't even a one-to-one it was actually in a group setting and she struggled from panic attacks daily two or three a day and after one session she did not have a panic attack since um so it's really starting to understand i think to a greater degree how your nervous system works and there's no better way to have fun with your nervous system then with your breath because it really does have such a correlation you know whether you change your breath you change your nervous system um so if you start to understand that understand what does what how it affects it now you have something that you can take control of that ultimately has flown effects on every single other part of your life whether it's physically mentally or emotionally so that's kind of exciting i think what i was gonna just add is that what some of the symptoms a lot of people are experiencing with long covered are related to inflammation and we know that if you activate the parasympathetic nervous system which is the sort of the for one of a better word for brain fog at this time of night the the um like the counter poser to the sympathetic the fight and flight so if you activate the parasympathetic nervous system the vagal nerve etc we know that that signaling actually reduces inflammation in the body so some of the symptoms that long-haulers are experiencing joint pain headache um migraine uh brain fog all of those things that are related to inflammation can be improved by breath work um so there is that there's that impact too plus the effect on the serotonergic system which can be indirectly impacted by the vagus nerve so all of that is you know it's proven science you know we know that that happens um and you can measure it you know i measure it through the aura ring for example you can measure your parasympathetic nerve function so all of this is is certainly um you know all credible um science that's uh underpinning it and there have been some great studies sorry to jump in but they've also been a couple of studies specifically around things like wim hof method around how it can reduce the levels of inflammatory cytokines so by breathing that way seeing a reduction in il6 il8 and i think tnf alpha as well so absolutely you know that shift into the parasympathetic nervous system triggering that rigid that relaxation and that restoration response but also at a very direct level working on your immune system to reduce inflammation yes i mean um i think these things are a challenge to medical thinking in the conventional sense but i do look forward to the day when you know um we practice truly integrated medicine uh where you've got a doctor you've got a meditation coach you've got a breadth of practitioner all sort of on site and so if that would be that would be so good and uh yeah you can't bring your heart rate down to 140 to 70 in one goal it takes months of practice that's what i clarified um so final thing from me really um unless anybody else wants to think later is that i mean how can those viewers of ours who perhaps can't afford to pay for sessions with a breath work coach incorporate it into their lives then perhaps you could just give a really brief demonstration of a practice um right now of course well in the easiest place to start truly is actually to seed into your awareness that breathing is kind of important and does affect you in some way because if you're able to sort of like get your head around that fact then maybe you'll actually start to pay attention to your breath throughout the day of course we can do certain techniques here and there but you know how you breathe for the other 23 and a half hours that you're alive throughout the day is also going to have a big effect on your physiology so noticing how you are breathing throughout the day and how it actually makes you feel so the first step of breath works always breath awareness always going okay where am i at right now and it might start in a very physical way where you just start to notice okay as i inhale where do i feel movement in my body do i feel movement in my lower my in my um in my sort of abdomen region do i feel it more in my rib cage am i through my thoracic do i feel it up in my my neck and my shoulders where is the movement what's happening how do i do this thing called breathing and even beyond the physical as soon as you start to pay attention you might also start to notice certain qualities of the breath for example you might even start to notice that as you inhale it feels a little bit jagged or it feels a bit strained or sort of raspy the exhale you might notice various other things start to notice what are the characteristics and quality of my breath because that then leads on to the next thing which is actually well what is my nervous system trying to tell me right now with my breath because our breath is so intimately linked to our nervous system that it's going to be a direct reflection of where your nervous system is at so if that those sensations combine all the physical together it gives you a sort of uneasy or you know a stressful or tight quality then you go okay i know i'm a little bit wound up right now or if it feels beautiful smooth flowing and easy then you can say okay great i know where my where my nervous system is at so it's just starting to bring in a little bit of awareness and noticing and if you actually want to go to the next step of starting to change your physiology with your breath so use taking control of your breath and using it as a tool then we can start to do something very very simple and as a general rule of thumb uh take this away that if you're slowing down the breath that is generally going to help you to relax generally if you start to speed up the breath it's going to activate your nervous system it's going to move you into a sympathetic response so if you can play with those two principles to begin with okay i am feeling quite stressed out right now i need to relax let me just close my eyes perhaps notice where my breath is at and then start to slow it down maybe breathing in for four seconds breathing out for four seconds maybe getting to five seconds in five seconds out um then that can straight away start to send signals to your nervous system and say okay everything is fine i am safe and you only need to repeat let's say a five seconds in five second out breath for a minute couple of minutes maybe five minutes if you have the time for it to start to have a very measurable effect um this specific technique five seconds in five seconds out um is something called coherent breathing which was and there's been plenty and plenty and plenty of research done around how this can drastically shift uh heart rate variability in a very very short amount of time so just yeah that's a very easy easy takeaway because i think for most people rather than being under activated we're all a little bit over activated the pace of the world a global pandemic all these things you know are going to really throw us off and then of course if you're uh working with long covert as well then there's going to be that activation there as well so being able to relax slow things down breathing a little slower in and out through the nose five seconds in five seconds out for two to three minutes there's a great place to start um something that you can do just before bed as well to help you to sleep to kind of wind down your nervous system perhaps after a crazy day or you know what it's like so that's perhaps just a very easy place to start um i've also been using the flourish app and i don't know if this is your app um could you guess okay good i know you're i know obviously you're talking and you're leading the breath work um i've found it incredibly helpful i use it two or three times a day um yeah uh just to wake up with and to calm myself down at night um i have also had emotional release from some of the longer meditations in there as well they've got me to a place where suddenly i've just been able to i mean for once a better word cry and my whole body shakes and this emotion comes out um so you so i mean from my experience i haven't necessarily always needed to have a one-to-one session to be able to access that and i think assad may have had similar experiences too uh yes absolutely i think you know we must have been joined at the hip when we were born uh because uh i i think kick-starting with a um sort of you know a hands-on face-to-face session was really helpful uh as an introduction but uh you know in between those sessions certainly i employ the flourish app two or three times a day and with the longer journeys there is that same kind of uncontrollable emotional release that kind of jerking at the end of exhalation that's um you know almost involuntary and it's it's like the energy in your body is shifting that's the only way i can describe it um and the way you feel afterwards it's um it's a lot lighter it's almost like you've had a really good massage without having had one and have had your head cleansed um so yeah i mean i think it's um it's difficult to put a silver lining on having had long coverage but i would say that i have learned so much um from the tools that i've used um to deal with this illness that you know hopefully one day even when the disease is gone uh you know they're gonna be a part of my life and i'm sure i'm not the only one there oh that's that's really a powerful thing to say and you know there are never to ever discount anybody's suffering or anyone's experience of course we always hold everyone's experience with the greatest compassion um and empathy but i can at least share with people that i know in my life and my clients that you know quite often it's the it's that dark night of the soul that leads to something absolutely brilliant and you know it might take time uh but i think the more patience that you can show with yourself that you know what quite quite often these kinds of experiences are what will change you and how is it going to change me you know the cool thing these days is that with the unlimited information that we have out there in this world you know ignorance is almost a choice you know there is there's so much out there for you to be able to ingest and to try and to experience um and who knows how many how many times do you hear the story of i had something really bad but to be honest it was the greatest thing that ever happened to me i had that really bad experience that person broke up with me and but you know what it was actually the best thing for me at that that i just didn't see it at the time so we always treat ourselves with all the empathy and all the compassion that we can to go yeah you know what this sucks and you know i i will give myself all the space i need to grieve and to feel all of that feel it you know that's the important thing so you know i'm sure plenty of people who are suffering you know with long covert you know they have busy lives responsibilities families crazy jobs and so we have to put on a brave face as much as we can and you almost need to un give yourself opportunity to undo that in some ways to be able to be really vulnerable to be really raw with yourself and to to to express how you're feeling underneath um you know so so uh but i'm so happy to hear you guys that that the flourish app has helped in some way uh yeah it is it is my app and you know it has a lot of guided breath journeys on there for different reasons for different purposes to create different benefits and results for people um and uh it is you know like you said uh assad it's you know if you can get hands-on with somebody it's definitely very very beneficial you know there's there's nothing like hands on bodies when it comes to this kind of work but at the same time whether it's you don't have access to anybody or you just want to do things in between the sessions something digital like flourish is a very very good option i think i agree and i have to sort of just say that i don't want to come across as patronizing to any of our viewers you know we all grow through the stages of grief don't we so there has been the anger the sadness the screaming into the dark night you know the thoughts of self-harm you know all of that does happen um and then you know the the acceptance um and the sort of seeing the silver linings that uh that does come when it's your time uh but uh there's something to be said for early adoption of these things because i think it's been really helpful um so yeah if you're able to then if you could perhaps just take our viewers through a couple of minutes of practice and then we shall take the leaf oh wonderful okay i would just bring it on you yeah what would you like me to share some what will be useful for your viewers right now do you think well i was gonna say something that's a very uh something that gives them something they can practice themselves afterwards that just helps calm themselves down i will definitely let's definitely do that one thing i would love to share is um i want to give people i would love for everyone to start to build a relationship with their breath so what we're actually going to do is a little bit of an experiment together and what that's going to look like is actually seeing what the difference is in how we feel the sensation and what we feel as qualities in our body when we breathe fast versus when we breathe slow so you can actually experientially start to go oh wow the things change so we're going to do two different techniques then one's going to be breathing a little bit faster and one's going to be breathing a little slower the first technique of breathing faster let's just keep it super simple nice deep breath in through the nose nice forceful exhale through the mouth so it goes a little something like this [Music] so it's a nice punchy exhale and then we're going to move into some slower breathing as well which will be breathing in and out through the nose so if you're going to be doing these techniques i encourage you to do this in a safe place preferably not driving or in water or operating any kind of machinery on your couch on your bed on your sofa and if you feel ready you can even close your eyes and what we're going to do together is just to a few seconds maybe 20 seconds or so of this faster breathing inhaling through the nose nice big deep breath in punchy exhale out through the mouth so i invite you now to exhale out and let's do this together so in out in out nose mouth nose mouth and keep that going at that pace nice big deep breaths if you can and by now you might be already starting to feel some things happening in your body maybe uh feeling a bit of heat generating feeling a bit buzzy or feeling a tingling or some lightheadedness finishing the next breath you are on just relax close your eyes and just let the breath come and go naturally and take a little journey into your body and notice what sensation or change can you feel if any now sensation is the language of the body it's how it tells us that something is going on or something is changing so what do you feel maybe you feel a bit light-headed or spacey you feel a change in temperature you feel your heart beating a little faster perhaps so we can sort of note okay this is what breathing fast does to me and funnily enough you know you can breathe that way for a really long time if you wanted to but now we're just going to do the opposite we're going to breathe a little slower now so let's start by breathing in and out through our nose for a count of five in count of five ounce it's that coherent breathing i was telling you about before so maybe just exhaling out through the nose and i'll give you a little count here we go in two three four five out two three four five in two three four five out two three four five and continue yourself now counting to the count in your head and just noticing how it feels to breathe in this way now breathing slower as i mentioned before sends a signal to the body to relax that it is safe that it can rest and what also helps when you do this technique is not to create any strain through your respiratory muscles when you breathe and what i mean by that as you continue to breathe nice and slow is that quite often what happens is because it's a long inhale in and people aren't used to breathing like that by the time they get to maybe count four they're at the top of their inhale and they don't feel like they can breathe in anymore and it feels like there's a contraction through all those big breathing muscles and then when they exhale it's a nice long exhale they get to count four or so and then they feel like their lungs are completely empty and they can't exhale anymore so they're sort of squeezing so if from a scale of 1 to 10 where 10 is completely full and one is completely empty you want to be working at this sort of 8 to three range where you're not over inflating your lungs not feeling like you're having to tense or put in lots of effort when you inhale and same with when you exhale it doesn't feel like you're trying to wring out every last drop of air you want to keep it smooth and soft and comfortable this is something that often gets overlooked when you learn these kinds of breathing techniques if you're trying to breathe to relax then it only makes sense that all your muscles are going to be relaxed as well not striving or trying to do too much so if you would like now you can even just finish the next breath you are on and notice what is happening in your body now let your breath come and go naturally what do you feel as a sensation maybe notice your heart rate what's your heart rate doing [Music] how does your how does your head feel how does your chest feel even your belly how does your belly feel and whenever you're ready you can open your eyes and just know that that slower breathing technique is there for you anytime so if we talk about relaxation trying to bring your your nervous system back into a place of balance five counts in five counts out all through the nose nice and slow controlled calm and relaxed is a very very useful tool thank you thank you that was uh yeah that that was really really a great introduction to some techniques that people can practice at home i'd also like to give a shout out to your book um which i am currently listening to because reading is challenging so yeah it's called exhale what else and it's a fascinating read so i'd encourage all of our viewers to um have a look if they can we'll link to it in the notes final words from you jazz uh only that this is some of the most important stuff i have learnt in the last 18 months to help me deal with long cavity this is possibly up there at number one up over and above any sort of other intervention that might have happened or might have been done this is the one i rely on the most and has made the biggest fundamental difference not just to me being able to cope with the illness but possibly also to my i mean i i i lurch desperately into woowoo territory here when i say my growth as a human being right i think it's it's kind of made me a better person and there are identifiable times in the last 18 months where i can tell i've i have behaved differently as a result of this not just through a constant of being more at ease or more at peace with myself through the emotional release but even in moments of high stress where i've been able to pull myself back when previously i might not have been able to so it adds dimensionality to all sorts of aspects of your life and uh and i kind of i don't really want to say thank you to long covered for making me aware of this and making me listen to you three times a day richie but but i am because it's uh it's been incredibly powerful so thank you yeah i decode that and actually i'm going to say this now uh so when i'm better i'm going to train at the restaurant coach it's out there you can all hold me to account there we go amazing assad well i just want to share two jazz that you know there's nothing we will about growing as a human being my friend you know that's that's what we're here to do on this in this planet right every day just taking little steps at a time so uh you know i and for me i can share my own personal journey too that breath has been the number one thing you know i dedicated my my life to this work and it's only because of the effect that it's had on me the people around me um that i've decided you know what this is too important not to share so um but this is the thing because it's breathing it seems like almost too good to be true in some way so rather than think too much about it everyone just go out and experience it in whatever way that you can just give it a go it's just breathing what you got to lose so see what happens and you might be surprised that was one of the most invigorating chats i've had so far for the channel and i can't recommend trying breathwork more highly if you haven't already it's great for managing dysautonomia extremely good for your state of mind and the increasing amount of evidence for hypoxia playing a key role in long-covered is the cherry on the cake so till next time

Channel: Gez Medinger

Views: 14,714

Keywords: breathing, co2, putrino, long covid, pasc, psac, symptoms, managing, condition

Id: lTcM0JO4PRA

Length: 47min 1sec (2821 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 20 2021