Living A Full Life

The Art of Breathing for Mental and Physical Harmony

• Full Life Chiropractic • Season 3 • Episode 5

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Unlock the transformative power of breathwork and reclaim control over your health and well-being. Ever wondered how a simple shift in your breathing can lead to profound improvements in mental clarity, stress reduction, and immune function? Join us as we sit down with Dr. Enrico Dolcecore to explore the science behind conscious breathing and its ability to harmonize the autonomic nervous system. We break down the art of balancing your sympathetic and parasympathetic systems, revealing how this ancient practice offers a holistic approach to counteracting the stressors of modern life.

In our conversation, we dive deep into effective techniques, including the popular 4-4-4-4 breathing method, which you can easily incorporate into your daily routine. Learn how apps like Calm and Breathewrk can support your journey by keeping you accountable, especially as the holiday season adds its own layer of stress. Whether you’re an adult wanting to manage blood pressure or a parent seeking calm for your children, we’ve got insights to help you establish lasting, healthy breathing habits. Commit to these practices for 30 to 40 days, and witness the shift in your health and resilience. Join us and take the first step toward a more balanced, stress-free life.

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Speaker 1:

Hey everyone, welcome to another episode of Living a Full Life. I'm Dr Enrico Dolcecori and this week we're going to be going through the power of breath work. You may or may not have heard of breath work or breathing in general, but there is an amazing ability to control our breath, to help and unlock a lot of health effects. Did you know that simply changing the way you breathe can improve your mental clarity, it can lower stress and it can even boost your immune system if it's done properly? This is going to be a series of things you can do to help improve your nervous system and having a deeper understanding about how the nervous system works. Breathwork can be just a simple exercise that almost anyone can do that can help neutralize or stabilize the nervous system's overall ability to adapt to stress. So we're going to go behind the science of breathwork and we're going to go through a little bit of what you can do to help do some breath work on your own and learn some easy and basic steps that you can start implementing immediately in your life.

Speaker 1:

The way the world's going right now, everyone's just super stressed. Everyone can agree on this, and what I'm trying to do as a healthcare professional is empower my listeners to understand that our health is our utmost priority, because without it, we can't do the things that we all do every day. So we end up stressing about things like work, finance, time. But really we should be putting our health number one so that we can do the things to get finance, buy ourselves time and get the things that we can do the things to get finance, buy ourselves time and get the things that we were trying to go for. But we have all of our values inversed and we wonder why we're getting sicker and sicker as a nation, and what's happening is we're trying to find quick fixes to these things, and the reason we're looking for quick fixes is because we're in deeper trenches with our health and we need to get out of them. We get to a point where the symptoms are so heavy or so engulfed or entrenched in our lives that they're impacting the way we function. So we end up trying to find the quick solution and maybe pharmaceuticals come to mind when it comes to that. But we live in this culture of this finding ourselves in a situation that we don't like and automatically trying to find the fastest way there and not do the work and, as I talked to other healthcare providers in mental health therapy, physical therapy, chiropractic, whatever it may be the things that take work and time to restore, repair and heal the body is almost becoming more and more difficult to convince people and patients that you need to take the time to do this. There are no quick fixes, there are no quick surgeries, there are no quick drugs. There are none. We call it the ozempic world right now, right, where that's just a great analogy as to we've been living away for a certain amount of time in our life, that we've ended up somewhere where we're not happy and we can just take this oseptic and, you know, kind of falsify everything that we've done over decades and think that we're now better off for it. And there is no solution to this.

Speaker 1:

But our nervous systems control everything in our body and one easy way to help help it, help you, is breath work. So the respiratory system is the circulatory system of oxygen and carbon dioxide and other gases and wastes that we breathe out of the body and breathe into. But this system is what pretty much breathes life into our body. Every cell in the body needs oxygen to function. Everything. Red blood cells carry this oxygen from the lungs into the arteries and across all tissue in the body. Once they transport the oxygen into the tissue that it needs to go to, it then goes back to the heart through the veins and gets pumped to the lungs where it then picks up more oxygen and repeats the cycle over and over and over again.

Speaker 1:

Our brain, subconsciously and automatically, in the autonomic nervous system, controls breathing on a rhythmic scale. It can change based on work and output. But this is subconscious. You don't have to think about breathing. You can stop and hold your breath, you can not think about it and you will continue to breathe. But what happens if you take some time and do think about it? Now? You can turn a very parasympathetic event into a sympathetic event and control and balance the nervous system between its two branches.

Speaker 1:

So the nervous system, the automatic or autonomic nervous system has two branches to it the sympathetic the fight or flight you may have learned in high school biology or the parasympathetic side, the rest and digest. So when we're sleeping or after a meal and we relax, our parasympathetics kick in and have gut motility. They're bringing oxygen through the body. They're doing all the restful things. And once we go and pick up a basketball and start playing and running around, our sympathetic nervous system kicks in, we have more motor function, our arteries dilate, we get more blood flow and we can exercise and move. Stress can control these things as well. But breath work is pretty much on autopilot and if we take it off of autopilot and take some control of it, we can then now bounce between parasympathetic and sympathetic and help us overall decrease stress. Because what stress is is moving us towards the sympathetic side. That's what stress really does Higher cortisol, a mental stress, work stress, lack of sleep, stress, kid stress, whatever the stress is coming from, it starts to gravitate us towards the sympathetic side. And if we could do something naturally to help immediately interfere with that process or that slide towards sympathetic, we can then move ourselves into parasympathetic.

Speaker 1:

And let's dive into this and understand it a little bit better. So that's how the nervous system is kind of working and we're going to use breath work in between this to help do this. So here's the benefits by learning this over the next few minutes. Is the physical benefits of breath work? Is it immediately reduces blood pressure? You can test this on yourself. You can take blood pressure. You know you come home, you're a little stressed. You take your blood pressure. You're like, okay, in a few minutes I'm going to sit down and do five minutes of breath work and you can keep the blood pressure cuff on and then you can redo this immediately after you're done breath work, or as you're doing breath work, and literally watch your blood pressure go down.

Speaker 1:

It's pretty amazing. It enhances lung capacity and circulation. The more you control your breathing, the more you can expand the lungs, the rib cage and all the fascia that works around our torso and help train it to increase lung capacity, which then increases circulation, and it supports better digestion and detoxification. Bet, you've never heard that before, but that's what breathwork can do there for you as well. It's got mental and emotional benefits as well. It lowers stress and anxiety, it increases focus and mental clarity and it promotes emotional resilience as well. And, of course, when we have these things jiving in the right rhythm, we get better sleep and energy. It helps regulate our sleep cycles, our circadian rhythm, and it helps provide natural energy boosts during the day as well. All you have to do is just stop and breathe Pretty amazing. So there's really different types of breath work and this is how you can kind of get started with it.

Speaker 1:

The proper popular breath work techniques are the box breathing, the 4-4-4-4 technique, 4-4's technique, where you take a breath in hold for four seconds, slowly breathe out for four seconds, relax for four seconds and breathe back in for four seconds. You alternate nostril breathing as well. You can go from left nostril to right nostril just by simply plugging one side or the other. And then there's diaphragmatic breathing, where you hold the breath in for as long as you possibly can feel the strain of the diaphragm and then slowly exhale through the mouth. And you can research more and other techniques as well, but these are the popular ones where you're timing breath work, one that I teach my patients as a chiropractor.

Speaker 1:

The biggest thing that I see is mid-back or the thoracic spine or the rib cage getting very tight and it becomes very difficult to adjust. Very rarely do children or infants need their thoracic spine adjusted and then when they become you know, middle school, high school they're very easy to adjust. If they ever come in and they need a mid-back adjustment, you barely have to do anything and their entire spine just cavitates and moves and we can get them better fairly quickly. But as we age, in adulthood, we find that the mid-back starts to get more and more tense. And there's two reasons for this. One, it's chronic posture over time. Just having bad posture over time can really put a lot of stress on the thoracic spine.

Speaker 1:

But number two is what ends up happening as life becomes more, we go through more and more stress. Our breath starts to become more and more shallow. We don't think about this over time, but that's what stress does it bogs down our entire system. We get shallow breathing, we get increases in cortisol, we get fatigue in the hormone system, we get fatigue in the endocrine system and everything just starts to cascade in the wrong direction. So for shallow breathing, what ends up happening is we go from these deep, full breaths as a child to the shallow breathing that lives 24-7. And when we sleep at night, instead of getting deep breaths and a nice rhythm of deep inhale and deep exhale, we start living our lives with shallow breathing shallow inhale, shallow exhale, shallow inhale, shallow exhale. And it just makes it that much harder to get oxygen pumped to all the cells and tissues in the body and over time that creates its own stress.

Speaker 1:

So the one I teach is deep breathing, for two reasons. One is to take a deep breath, fill your lungs as deep as you can and you hold, and then you try and breathe in more, and then you try and breathe in more and you just keep pushing more. It becomes very, very difficult to get more air in, and then you slowly breathe it all out and you try it again. What you end up feeling is the ribs expand a little bit and then, when you breathe in a little bit more, they expand a little bit more and you're stressing the ribs to the entire rib cage to expand a little bit. It's a great exercise, especially for people over 40 years old, because what you're doing is retraining the rib cage to expand for breathing, and the more you practice this just for a few minutes every day you can turn yourself from a shallow breather into a deep breather. Just naturally and subconsciously it will happen even when you sleep. That's a great one From a chiropractic perspective and from a biomechanical perspective.

Speaker 1:

What happens to the patients is they get more rib motion, and the better their ribs move, the better their thoracic spine moves. It just makes my job easier to adjust them and they just get more motion spinal motion, which is absolutely fantastic, but the nervous system effect is immediate. So the best way to do it is go on YouTube. I don't really send people to YouTube a lot, or Google, but you go to YouTube and you put in beginner breath work and some great videos pop up right off the bat. You get physical therapists, you get breath work practitioners, you get a whole bunch of people that come in and you can watch some beginner stuff and as you get good at that, I highly encourage it.

Speaker 1:

You can learn a lot from those videos. Pick the ones that jive with you. Sometimes when you watch videos, you'll learn about meditation with them. Some people like that, some people don't. You don't need to do that. You can just do the breath work. Some other things they have is movement chair exercises with it, actually learning how to breathe as you exercise or do cardiovascular exercise.

Speaker 1:

So there's a whole bunch of ways to focus on your breathing. But how many times can you say you've taken time to sit there and focus on your breathing? Even for 30 seconds? None of us do that, but if we do decide to do that, it becomes such a simple technique. You have to breathe anyways. Might as well do it as an exercise, right?

Speaker 1:

So there's a lot of, there's a breath work apps. And there's calm. I don't know if you've heard of these. These are the two most popular apps you can download. Calm is C-A-L -M. It's a meditation app, it's to calm the nervous system. And then breath work app. That's a great app that I've crossed is B-R-E-A-T-H-W-R-K. No O in there. Check that app out. And these are tools and resources to help you hold yourself accountable to make sure you're doing the daily exercises. Pretty cool stuff there on breath work. So now you want to integrate this. You learn a little bit about it.

Speaker 1:

Like I told you, maybe that you do the 4-4-4-4 technique. The 4-4 is where you breathe in over four seconds. You hold for four seconds, you release for four seconds, you hold for four seconds, you release for four seconds and you hold an empty breath for four seconds and you just repeat that maybe 40 times and you just make it part of your breathing routine every day. You find a nice quiet spot to do it, or you can do it at the desk. Nobody even knows you're doing it. Whatever, do it once a day and help yourself. Gets your mind focused on how you breathe.

Speaker 1:

It's a great tool to use during stressful moments at work or at home as well. They can immediately calm you down, because we talked about the sympathetic effects that it has of lowering blood pressure, neutralizing the nervous system and helping you in stressful moments. It's a great time to breathe. It's also an anger management technique that's taught as well. Once you get really angry and you just want to break something, you stop and you breathe. Just either count your breaths or breathe in for 10 seconds, out for 10 seconds. These are all techniques that have been used for a very long time to help manage emotion and stress.

Speaker 1:

For families, a great thing to do is teach your kids simple techniques to manage stress or before bedtime. They can just focus on breathing before bedtime or use it whenever they get emotionally, whether it's excited or angry, whatever it may be. They can use breath work to help calm their nervous systems down. Kids who do this have shown better behavioral management than kids who don't management than kids who don't and combine breathwork with exercise or meditation or whatever it is to help optimize a lot of other health benefits as well. So these are great things you can do with breathwork.

Speaker 1:

So once you get into this, just keep it a routine and keep it going. That's why the apps can hold you accountable. Or you just set a timer on your phone that goes off every day at the same time. Maybe it's in the evening or early in the morning to remind you to breathe. And then there's things you can add to it. You're going to sit in a chair with good posture and breathe. You can stand up nice straight and tall, or up against your back against a wall and try and breathe, and just at the same time as you're breathing you can correct posture. You can do other things as well and make it very useful with your time by practicing breath work. So I encourage a lot of people to look into YouTube or just all these free trainings about how to learn to breathe better, because the benefits are amazing.

Speaker 1:

We see it through a lot of things, especially physically through motion. Amazing, we see it through a lot of things, especially physically through motion. From my perspective, I'm a huge advocate of it. I love breath work. I think a lot of people.

Speaker 1:

Because of decades of stress, we just don't breathe. We breathe very shallow and that leads to other issues as far as circulation and all it's. Actually a lot of research out of Europe has shown that long periods of shallow breathing or low oxygen deprivation leads to things like high blood pressure, diabetes, other issues, where, because the systems and the organs in the body start to fatigue, the heart has to work harder to pump when we shallow breathe, the pancreas has to work harder to produce and stimulate insulin, the liver works hard, all of our organs start to work harder and if we get all of these factories and these systems working harder, they fatigue and break down faster, which leads to rapid aging. So that's my perspective and how I came into this, and, as we're in the holiday season, I think it's the most stressful time of the year. Honestly, with all the things going on, it piles more onto our plates.

Speaker 1:

With the already day-to-day things that we do, like work and taking care of the kids. Now we've got a plan for cooking more food, having people over, cleaning the home, all these great things. These are all wonderful things People and love and support and families. It's all great, but it adds more stress. There's more traffic. We've got to buy gifts right, I mean you got to get everyone a gift. I mean it's just financial stress, time stress, emotional stress, familial stress. A lot of things add up.

Speaker 1:

So I highly encourage you to look into breath work. It can be a simple tool that just calms you down and calms your nervous system down. There is no fast solution to things, but what an easy tool in the moment to teach your kids or to use yourself to help you get through stress. A calm nervous system leads to a foundation of optimal health. It really does. I truly believe that the nervous system is the first keystone, that if it starts to crumble, everything around it starts to fall apart as well. So here's one great tool. Of course, good sleep, good food, all that great stuff, good nutrition, good exercise all these things help supplement a healthy nervous system and brain.

Speaker 1:

But breath work just came up to my mind recently. I was like man. I got to do one on breathing just because it's really important. But my favorite one is the 4-4 breath technique or the seated deep breathing technique, where you expand the lungs for range of motion. Find one technique that works best for you. Stick with it. Try it over 30, 40 days that's what they say. It takes 28 days to develop a new habit. Do it for 30 consecutive days. You've develop a new habit. Do it for 30 consecutive days. You've created a new habit. You've taught yourself something new. And it can take seconds to minutes each day Very simple to add to your day. See how it goes. Report back, let me know how it goes. Have a great and healthy week. Stay well, stay healthy and take care.

People on this episode

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Dr. Enrico Dolcecore

Host
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Dr. Christine Hafer

Co-host
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Dr. Crystal Corona

Co-host