How Breathing Can Transform Your Life with Brian MacKenzie #113
Brian MacKenzie, co-founder of the Health and Human Performance Foundation, discusses how breath control optimizes physical, emotional, and cognitive performance. He shares experiences like a near-paralysis accident and swimming with great white sharks, highlighting breath as a tool to manage stress and foster self-awareness.
Deep Dive Analysis
14 Topic Outline
Introduction to Breathing and Autonomic Control
Outside-In vs. Inside-Out Understanding of Stress
The Importance of Environment and Downtime
Breathing as the Foundation of Movement and Yoga
Brian's Near-Paralysis Accident and Breath Control
Voluntarily Swimming with Great White Sharks
The Danger of Victim Culture and Identity Attachment
The Role of Oxygen and Carbon Dioxide in the Body
Understanding Carbon Dioxide Intolerance and Panic
The State App: Personalized Breath Practice for State Change
Making the Space Between Stimulus and Response Bigger
Chasing Contentment Over Happiness
Learning and Dismantling Belief Systems
Brian's Daily Breath Practice and Top Life Tips
6 Key Concepts
Autonomic Control of Breathing
Breathing is one of the only autonomic systems in the body that humans can consciously control. This ability allows for self-regulation, influencing emotional and metabolic states by intercepting the body's natural, unconscious breathing patterns.
Psycho-Metabolic Reactivity
This term describes how individuals emotionally and physiologically react to the metabolic waste product of energy, carbon dioxide (CO2). It reflects one's relationship to CO2 and their ability to optimize or manage this reaction.
Carbon Dioxide Intolerance
Many people chronically hyperventilate, or over-breathe, expelling too much carbon dioxide. This intolerance means the body struggles to utilize oxygen efficiently, as CO2 is necessary for oxygen to detach from red blood cells and be used by cells, leading to a less optimized state.
Bohr Effect
This physiological principle explains that carbon dioxide is essential for oxygen to be released from red blood cells and made available for use by the body's cells. Having enough CO2 creates the optimal acidic environment for oxygen utilization.
Stimulus-Response Gap
This concept refers to the space between an external stimulus and an individual's reaction to it. By cultivating awareness and breath control, this gap can be expanded, allowing for conscious choice in response rather than automatic, reactive behavior, leading to personal growth.
Vision and Autonomic Control
Alongside breathing, vision is another way humans can volitionally control their autonomic nervous system. Shifting to peripheral vision, such as looking at a sunset, can induce a downshifting or calming effect on the body's physiological state.
7 Questions Answered
Breathing is one of the only autonomic systems we can control, offering a direct way to self-regulate our emotional and metabolic states. By consciously managing our breath, we can choose how to respond to situations and optimize our body's functions, rather than just reacting automatically.
Conscious breathing practices allow individuals to intercept and control their physiological responses to external stimuli. This helps to reduce the 'outside-in' overload and brings focus to the present moment, counteracting the chronic stress response that many experience.
During a panic attack, the body often hyperventilates, blowing off too much carbon dioxide (CO2). This reduces the body's ability to utilize oxygen, as CO2 is needed to release oxygen from red blood cells. Controlling breath, like re-breathing CO2 (e.g., into a paper bag), can help restore CO2 levels, calm the nervous system, and improve oxygen utilization.
Begin by experimenting and trying different breathwork techniques to find what works for you. Simple practices like being aware of your breath for a few minutes daily, or using an app like the 'State App' that provides customized exercises for different emotional states (alert, present, calm, sleep), can be a good starting point.
The two primary ways to exert volitional control over your autonomic nervous system are through conscious breathing and manipulating your vision. By focusing on breathing patterns or shifting to peripheral vision (like observing a sunset), you can influence your body's stress and relaxation responses.
While CO2 is a waste product, it is crucial for oxygen utilization. It plays a vital role in the Bohr effect, ensuring that oxygen detaches from red blood cells and becomes available to the body's cells. Without sufficient CO2, even with ample oxygen, cells cannot effectively receive the oxygen they need.
Attaching one's identity to roles (e.g., 'runner,' 'vegan,' 'alcoholic') creates a 'cage' that limits freedom and resilience. When these identities are challenged or changed, it can lead to a fight-or-flight response and a shattered sense of self. Detaching from these stories allows for greater adaptability and authenticity.
27 Actionable Insights
1. Prioritize Daily Breath Practice
Establish a consistent breath practice as the most fundamental self-care activity, integrating it into your daily routine even for just a minute or two, as it influences all other activities.
2. Expand Stimulus-Response Gap
Actively work to enlarge the space between a stimulus and your response, as this choice point is where personal growth happens and leads to improved decision-making and relationships.
3. Detach from Personal Identity
Avoid attaching your identity to achievements, roles, or labels (e.g., ‘runner,’ ‘vegan,’ ‘alcoholic’) to prevent self-limitation and experience true freedom beyond self-imposed ‘cages’.
4. Seek Contentment, Not Happiness
Shift your focus from chasing constant happiness to cultivating contentment, understanding that life will have tough times but you can develop tools to manage stressful situations.
5. Find Life’s Meaning & Purpose
Recognize that living a life devoid of meaning and purpose is profoundly stressful, and actively seeking these elements can significantly reduce unhelpful stress.
6. Take Nothing Personally
Strive to reach a point where you take nothing personally, understanding that others’ actions and judgments often stem from their own internal workings and not from you.
7. Control Response with Breath
In high-stress or panic situations, consciously control your breathing to prevent emotional disruption, facilitate an appropriate response, and maintain calm.
8. Improve CO2 Tolerance
Understand that sufficient carbon dioxide is necessary for oxygen utilization in the body; improve your CO2 tolerance through breath patterns to gain greater control over shifting your physiological state.
9. Process Between Stressors
Focus on effective recovery and processing between stressful events rather than just jumping from one exposure to the next, as this is crucial for managing modern life’s demands.
10. Challenge Negative Narratives
Take ownership of your personal narrative and actively change it to break free from negative patterns, as the stories you tell yourself can imprison or liberate you.
11. Cultivate Simple Breath Awareness
Practice being quietly aware and conscious of your breath for 2-10 minutes daily, as this simple act is enough to teach you more about yourself and your environment.
12. Quiet Mind with Breath Focus
Focus on specific breathing patterns to quiet the ‘monkey mind’ and reduce distracting thoughts, allowing you to be present in the moment.
13. Experiment with Breathwork Methods
Approach breath work by giving different methods a try, experimenting, learning, and finding out what specific rhythms and patterns work best for your unique physiology and emotional state.
14. Conscious Breathing Signals Safety
Consciously control your breathing to send signals of safety to your brain, influencing your internal state and helping you manage stress responses.
15. Utilize Vision for Control
Recognize that both breath and vision are volitional controls over your autonomic nervous system; use peripheral vision, like observing a sunset, to downshift your state.
16. Address Chronic Over-breathing
Be aware that chronic hyperventilation or over-breathing leads to excessive carbon dioxide loss, which hinders the body’s ability to utilize oxygen effectively.
17. Use Brown Paper Bag for Panic
In a panic attack, breathe into a brown paper bag for a few breaths to re-circulate carbon dioxide, which helps calm the brain and restore oxygen utilization.
18. Prioritize Learning Over Beliefs
Adopt a mindset of continuous learning over rigid beliefs, actively dismantling self-imposed limitations and embracing new perspectives.
19. Cultivate Laughter and Perspective
Develop the ability to laugh at everything, as this enhances intelligence and provides a crucial perspective on life’s challenges.
20. Be the Experience Fully
Fully immerse yourself in every experience you are having, and apply profound lessons learned from significant events to even the most minute details of your daily life.
21. Authentic Social Media Expression
Use social media authentically to share information and express who you truly are, avoiding the creation of an inauthentic identity that is mentally fatiguing to maintain.
22. Shape Your Living Environment
Actively manipulate or change your environment to align with your desired quality of life and self-awareness, even if it means significant changes like moving to nature.
23. Utilize the State App
Download and use the State app for customized breath exercises that adapt to your carbon dioxide response, helping you achieve state change and build CO2 tolerance.
24. Access Free Breathwork Courses
Take advantage of one month’s free access to PSE Pro online training programs by visiting powerspeedendurance.com/PSEPro and using the code ‘feelbetterPSE’.
25. Engage in Positive Movement
Choose a movement practice (e.g., hiking, CrossFit, running) that positively stimulates you, ensuring it remains a fun, learning experience rather than becoming a rigid identity.
26. Wear Minimalist Footwear
Consider wearing minimalist shoes like Vivo Barefoot for comfort and to improve your movement, taking advantage of their 100-day trial and 20% discount for listeners.
27. Support Oral Microbiome Health
Use Zendium toothpaste to support the health of your oral microbiome, which is an important part of your immune system, and can be ordered from Amazon.
6 Key Quotes
To understand how you feel you have to go in, you have to go to the base layer of what's going on and at the fundamental layer of all of this is breathing.
Brian MacKenzie
Maybe it's not that we have a disorder. Maybe it's not that, you know, anxiety and all this stress is, is actually a disorder. Maybe this is just a natural reaction to the amount of stimulus, to the stimulus that we're taking in from the outside and not paying attention to things from the inside.
Brian MacKenzie
Mind is the king of the senses. Breath is the king of the mind.
Brian MacKenzie (quoting BKS Iyengar)
If you act like prey, you will be treated like prey.
Brian MacKenzie
Fuck happiness. Like they're going to have times where things are tough, but you should have the tools to understand that gap.
Brian MacKenzie
We're either believing in something or we're learning.
Brian MacKenzie