Ed Harrold is an author, inspirational leader, public speaker, coach and educator. Ed’s mastery in the science of mindful breathing blends the fields of neuroscience and the wisdom of contemplative traditions into effective strategies to improve health, well-being and performance. Ed is the author of Life With Breath IQ + EQ = NEW YOU & BodyMindBusiness: The Business Of BE’ing Within. Ed’s Breath AS Medicine Trainings offer Continuing Education in the healthcare, health & wellness, fitness, allied health and sleep medicine communities. His trainings were also a CME course with George Washington University School of Medicine & Health Sciences. Ed’s breathwork was studied by the Harvard Medical Research team with IEL. Ed is the Breath Expert for Goldie Hawn’s MindUP organization. Ed is a Breath Master on The Breath Source breathwork app (Android & IOS). Learn more about Ed at www.edharrold.com
BIO:
Ed Harrold is an author, inspirational leader, public speaker, coach and educator. Ed’s mastery in the science of mindful breathing blends the fields of neuroscience and the wisdom of contemplative traditions into effective strategies to improve health, well-being and performance. Ed is the author of Life With Breath IQ + EQ = NEW YOU & BodyMindBusiness: The Business Of BE’ing Within.
Ed’s Breath AS Medicine Trainings offer Continuing Education in the healthcare, health & wellness, fitness, allied health and sleep medicine communities. His trainings were also a CME course with George Washington University School of Medicine & Health Sciences. Ed’s breathwork was studied by the Harvard Medical Research team with IEL. Ed is the Breath Expert for Goldie Hawn’s MindUP organization. Ed is a Breath Master on The Breath Source breathwork app (Android & IOS). Learn more about Ed at www.edharrold.com
SHOWNOTES:
😴 How can breath be the missing link to deeper, restorative sleep?
😴 What role does nose breathing vs. mouth breathing play in your sleep quality?
😴 Why do racing thoughts at 3 a.m. hijack your rest and how can breath reset your nervous system?
😴 Can your diaphragm muscle be the key to better sleep, posture, and emotional balance?
😴 How does controlling your breath lower stress hormones and improve immunity for better sleep?
😴 What simple breathing practices stop panic when you wake up at night?
😴 How can alternate nostril breathing calm anxiety and bring you back to sleep?
😴 Why does exhaling longer than you inhale calm your body for deeper sleep?
😴 How can breathwork shift chronic insomnia patterns and retrain your brain?
😴 Why does closing your mouth at night dramatically improve sleep and breathing health?
😴 What is the connection between sleep, breath, and your vagus nerve?
😴 Can slowing your breath rate to 6–8 breaths per minute unlock calm, restorative sleep?
😴 Discover how intentional, therapeutic breathing can transform health, wellness, and performance with Ed Harrold’s Breath AS Medicine e-learning series 👉https://www.edharrold.com/breath-medicine-elearning-trainings
😴 And so much more!
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DISCLAIMER:
The information contained in this podcast, our website, newsletter, and the resources available for download are not intended to be medical or health advice and shall not be understood or construed as such. The information contained on these platforms is not a substitute for medical or health advice from a professional who is aware of the facts and circumstances of your individual situation.
Welcome to the Sleep As a Skill podcast. My name is Molly Eastman. I am the founder of Sleep as A Skill, a company that optimizes sleep through technology, accountability, and behavioral change. As an ex sleep sufferer turned sleep course creator, I am on a mission to transform the way the world. Thinks about sleep.
Each week I'll be interviewing world-class experts, ranging from researchers, doctors, innovators, and thought leaders to give actionable tips and strategies that you can implement to become a more skillful sleeper. Ultimately, I believe that living a circadian aligned lifestyle is going to be one of the biggest trends in wellness.
And I'm committed to keeping you up to date on all the things that you can do today to transform your circadian health and by extension, allowing you to sleep and live better than ever before.
Welcome to Sleep As a Skill Podcast. Our guest today is a wonderful human being and a long time expert in his domain, so that you're gonna really, really enjoy hearing and learning from him. Ed Harold is an author, inspirational leader, public speaker, coach, and educator. Ed's Mastery in the science of mindful breathing blends the fields of neuroscience and the wisdom of contemplative traditions into effective strategies to improve health, wellbeing, and performance.
Ed is the author of Life with Breath IQ plus EQ equals New You and Body Mind Business. The business of being. Within Ed's breath as medicine trainings offer continuing education in the healthcare, health and wellness, fitness, allied health and sleep medicine communities. His trainings were also A CME course with George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences.
Ed's breath work. Was studied by the Harvard Medical Research Team with IEL. Ed is the breath expert for Goldie Han's Mind Up organization. Ed is a breath master on the Breath Source breathwork app, and you can learn more about ed@www.edharold.com. All right, we're gonna jump into this episode, but first, a few words from our sponsors.
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Blockout, your not just investing in a blackout shade, you're investing in your health, wellbeing, and quality of life. So again, go to you, blockout, spelled the letter U. Block out and use code sleep as a skill for a discount. If you're listening to this podcast, you're likely looking to improve your sleep, and one of the first questions people ask me about sleep is what supplement they can take.
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And welcome to the Sleep is a Skill podcast. We are gonna be speaking all things breath and more today, so welcoming our gets. Ed, thank you so much for taking the time to be here.
Molly, I'm honored to be here. Thanks for the great work you're doing with the Humanity.
Oh, well thank you so much for saying that, and right back at you.
I'm fascinated by the work you do, and maybe we can start at the beginning of how did you find yourself as such an expert in this area?
Well, about 30 years ago, I was going through the crisis of the ego. And I was not being an authentic person. I wasn't a good son, a good father, and, but there wasn't anything wrong if you asked me.
Yeah. And, uh, my body was broken from years of competitive athletics and professional sports. And I staggered my way some way, uh, into therapeutic yoga. And one of the biggest parts about therapeutic yoga is breath control and all the various different ways that we can use breath to control our hormonal secretions.
How our body can come back into symmetry as the DNA and RNA are constantly searching for balance that we had when we were born, how we can bring our brain into a flow state and just being most efficient. With where we've been in our life and what we're doing right now and maybe being more efficient a little bit tomorrow than I was today.
So I was totally turned on by the therapeutic yoga. The breath work was really powerful for me 'cause it was, it was gentle. Like you didn't have to go out and like there was a scoreboard or anything, or compete or judge, you know, it was gentle. And I began to see that some of my greatest strengths. We're hidden in my weaknesses or what I perceived as my weaknesses, and then I began to rework my mind and began to let the universe work for me rather than me pushing all the time that wheelbarrow up the hill of life.
Wow. I love that. Okay, so, so well said. So quite the transformation from the sounds of it. And then what did we see, you know, on that journey as it relates to this whole world of breath? How did that kind of all weave together?
Well, everything on the planet is breathing. Uh, when you think about the crisis we're going through in humanity, it can easily be traced back to a respiratory disorder.
We are not respiring the cells of our body efficiently as the other animals on earth. I became aware that the fastest animal on the earth was the cheetah. The cheetah can run 80 miles an hour, but does it all through its nose. I noticed the humans, we are turning into habitual mouth breathers. And what this does to our sympathetic switches, our adrenaline and cortisol, how this drains our immunity, how this puts weight on in our microbiome, around our hips and buttock, and we've somehow lost our rhythm.
From a winter, spring, summer, and fall.
Oh, absolutely. Okay. And then for you, did it just click for you of, this is my path, I'm going to dive into this full force. How did you see it relating to sleep? For the listeners that are like, wait, breath, sleep, podcast. How does it all connect? If you, I know there's a couple of questions at one, but how did you decide to take this on fully and did you notice those immediate connections with sleep?
No, I didn't notice the immediate connections to sleep. When I first started to work on the breath, I was really just working on myself, trying to get my emotional awareness back intact, trying to be neuroplastic in my brain, keep my heart rate down, not be triggered by people, places, and things outside of me.
And then I began to weave it into my athletic training, the therapeutic breathing into my athletic training. So I wasn't getting injured anymore. I was getting the heat from my organs and keeping my heart rate down and burning fat, not storing fat. Being more productive with my immune system. And then I began to see the interplay between the inner world and, and the breath and the movement, uh, with athletics.
Then I tie that into corporate performance, and then I tie that into the health world. Uh, I'm one of the few non, uh, medical doctors that's licensed to give ces, continue education, uh, to nurses and doctors through George Washington Medical School. So I found a huge medical model on it. And then about 15 years ago, Arianna Huffington wrote this beautiful book, the Sleep Revolution, and I was part of that transformation with her.
And I began to see that our breathing is a master autonomic switch, which the breath being autonomic. It has a dual switch. In other words, if I want to control my breath, I can control my breath and my autonomic function. If I don't want to control my breath, my autonomic nervous system will breathe for me based on the quality of my mind.
If I'm thinking fearful, insecure thoughts, my heart rate will go up. My blood pressure will go up. If I'm thinking loving, compassionate, courageous thoughts, my heart rate comes down, my blood pressure comes down. I'm more energy efficient.
Wow. Okay. Well. Considering for a Sleep podcast, the quality of our thoughts does come up quite a bit in kind of the conversations of how to help support people with their sleep, especially as it relates to things like insomnia or difficulty falling asleep or staying asleep.
So when you are working with people on helping to support their breath, is that something that you're also working with them on the kind of the thoughts and the patterning, or does that kind of just naturally shift as their breathing shifts? Is it a chicken or the egg thing? What do we see there? Yeah,
great question.
Great. Que you know, the breath is the bridge between the mind and the body. I'm a big believer of taking care of the first five minutes of the day when I'm coming out of the deeper brainwave patterns and coming up into the beta waves and the last five minutes of my day when I'm going from the beta waves down through, into the, into the delta waves.
So setting those bookends. Early on in the process, like I wanna be fully present for the first five and I wanna be fully present. With the last five, and I wanna breathe with affirmations of what I want to occur in my life. I want to choose the best version of myself as I move through the challenges of my day.
Striving for perfection in the eye of adversity. So early on in the day, you know, something opens my eyes in the morning. I know it's not me. There's something greater inside of me and my eyes open. I just fill my mind and body with breath. Gratitude, just I have the opportunity to go out and, and serve myself and, and serve humanity.
And there's a bigger calling to maybe just what my individual needs might be. So as soon as you open your eyes, fill every cell of your body with gratitude because you're here on earth and you're making a difference, and what you're doing has value. Slow your breath down as soon as you open your eyes and just try to listen deep inside of the rhythms that are available to you this particular morning.
'cause they're gonna be like unlike any other morning. And you want to tune into your uniqueness and then decide intuitively, you know, how's this day gonna roll out? And then there's certain ways that we can breathe during the day that push back against the environment, that push back against how the sun and the moon chase each other so that we can remain in automatic balance as we move through the stressors of our day.
I love that. Yeah, because a lot of people that are tuning in and we've found are often in kind of acute situations with their sleep. So maybe something happened, they got a divorce, death of a loved one, whatever, or just chronically frustrated with their sleep and the quality of it. But however you cut it, like often stress levels are high and anxiety or depression.
And so coming from that. State, is that a thinking that one of the things you'd like to have people just take away is like beginning your day with checking in with your breath and shifting that and then kind of dosing it throughout the day? Or is that not quite how you would have people approach that?
Well said. Well said. You know, life has many peaks and valleys and you know, when you're on the mountain, you know, enjoy it because something's gonna happen down the line and you're gonna be in the valley.
Yes.
And that's just part of this amazing thing. And we'll begin to see the bigger picture of our pain.
We begin to see that the universe isn't trying to cause us pain, it's trying to wake us up to a finer version of ourself. Hmm. And something needs to fall away. An old habit, an old whatever it may be that has to go so something else can be born and flow to the best of your ability with what's happening.
If any emotion comes up to you and takes your breath away like you're drowning out of water, your first. Awareness might be, wow, I'm breathing really shallow right now and I'm scared, or, or, or there's fear there. And, and, and the breath is a tool for overcoming or neutralizing fear. So as soon as you begin to bring your attention to a slow motion, inhale breathing in slower than you normally do.
You're gonna stabilize the mental world and you're gonna light up this beautiful part of your top of your brain, the executive part called your hippocampus. And the hippocampus is the place where all new awarenesses come around. Old habits, desires, and needs. So slowing the inhale down, stabilizing the mental world, just for a moment, that's all you need to do is slow down the film in your head.
And then remember, you have this amazing thoracic diaphragm muscle. Mm-hmm. It's the most important muscle out of all 610 muscles. It mediates all your gases and fluids, and it separates your beautiful belly from your chest cage. And when you inhale, this muscle vertically presses down, and as it presses down, it straightens your spine.
Notice how posture in your body plays such a huge role in regard to how we read our emotional state. So a straight spine, we can immediately snap out of the doldrums and then pull ourselves back into a space of neutral. So the diaphragm is a great muscle for posture. It's also the primary muscle of inhale.
So right below your diaphragm muscle is a minor nervous system called your enteric nervous system. As this muscle presses down, this is where all of your body's serotonin and half of your body's dopamine is. So you're gonna calm down and feel good about yourself as you thicken and strengthen the diaphragm muscle by pushing vertically down into your body, getting grounded and centered.
Now this creates a vacuum in the lower lobes of your lungs. And the lower lobes of your lungs are a place where you want your inhale to be first, not in the upper lobes of the lungs. The bottom lobes are imbued with oxygen rich, hemoglobin rich, so you're transporting bonded oxygen from the soles of your feet to the crown of your head.
Serotonin, tryptophan, things that down regulate you as you come into the moment. Then as the inhale evolves from the bottom of the lungs to the top, the physiology totally changes. The top of your lungs are sympathetic. They have adrenaline, cortisol, hot thermodynamic energy there. But since it's hot, it's wonderful because you've already cooled the moment by bringing a straight spine and cooler hormonal secretions from the lower lobes.
On the inhale. Up into your upper lobes.
Wow. Okay. So then would a check-in on posture be another access point to kind of getting an another angle in at this? Or is that too kind of basic? Do you wanna really have, be connected to that breath and then just the posture kind of works? Curious if that can be access point for people?
Yeah, so as long as you can visualize your inhale, you're gonna be fine.
You are gonna
straighten your spine. Your feet are gonna be on the ground. You're gonna be centered and grounded, and you are going to choose what's gonna occur in the next moment.
Hmm.
It's not gonna be chosen for you based on who you were five, five weeks ago.
You are gonna be present. So following the diaphragm muscle down on the inhale, straightening your spine, getting grounded through your legs and your feet, and just standing tall in the moment in your mind. Then riding that inhale to completion. As soon as you begin to inhale deeper, longer, in a slower pace, you're gonna have more energy, but it's gonna be calm energy.
The movie of me in my head is going to move slower with the flashcards. So the slower it goes, the greater ability you have to interact with the moment, pivot where you need to attach yourself to things that you know work, and then just kind of get outta your own way.
Ugh. Well that is the dream 'cause for so many people coming on this, you know, listening here, one of the things that we hear is like racing thoughts.
You know, they're waking up a wake. Ups are a big thing. We hear a ton where people are waking up at three in the morning and now they're starting to panic. 'cause like they got a big something the next day and they need to be bringing it. And yet now they're scared because now they feel like they're not sleeping.
Or maybe they couldn't even fall asleep at all. So would those all be the similar practices, even like while they're laying in bed, that you would bring in?
Oh, well, let's, let's break that down just a little bit. Okay. Sure. Okay. Your, your body makes melatonin releases melatonin somewhere between 10:00 PM and 2:00 AM Now we know that getting out in the morning and getting that sunrise sun activates your pituitary gland, and then melatonin stored.
For when your body perceives the sun has gone down, and then melatonin will start to be secreted between 10 and two. So if you've awakened at two o'clock in the morning, it simply means at this particular moment, your melatonin secretions are low. Now, this could happen from a stressful day. You've used too much energy.
Your breathing wasn't, your heart rate was up because your breath rate per minute was too high. You didn't. Burn any fat. You stored fat all day long and you burned up all your glucose. So what happens when we wake up at night is the melatonin secretion stop. It's not the end of the world. Okay? We can break this down.
Two reasons why your eyes open. Number one, it could be a spike in low blood sugar. This'll panic amilia, and the Amy to get that. Sweetness is gonna bring up adrenaline and cortisol, which is gonna bring your heart rate up, which could bring you from unconscious to conscious. So maybe taking a really high quality little bit of sweet before you go to bed could get you through that melatonin.
Crash it. At, at at 2:00 AM Try that, that that's something that really works. Number two is your nostrils are amazing. They're so much more than just the nose. They know everything.
Hmm.
Your right nostril is part of your autonomic nervous system. Your right nostril is sympathetic. In other words, it has adrenaline and cortisol nerve receptors that are deeply connected energetically to your left prefrontal lobe.
Where you analyze, strategize, think, and get through your day. Your left nostril is parasympathetic on the inhale and it feeds your right prefrontal lobe. Your curiosity, your intuition, thinking without thoughts or math. So what happens is sometimes at night, your right nostril will become more efficient than your left, and there'll be a spike in your blood pressure, a spike in your heart rate, and it'll trigger the left prefrontal cortex in the ths.
As it does that, we might wake up. Once we wake up, we've totally blown it because then we forget we have a body and then we go through this cannibalism in our head yes, about how the future is gonna suck because I've awakened in the middle of the night, alas, everyone, we can easily fix, fix this. So if you awaken in the middle of the night.
You simply have a sympathetic overload of either the right nostrils become more efficient than the left that has awakened you or your blood sugar's low. Mm-hmm. The easiest way to re-pattern this is to bring parasympathetic activity to the brain to secrete tryptophan and serotonin to help the melatonin get you back to sleep.
Long story short, the easiest way to do this is you take your thumb. You close off your right nostril, which is your sympathetic nerve channel, and you inhale as slowly as you can, only up the left nostril, which is parasympathetic. You inhale slowly up the left and then you close off the left nostril. You release the thumb and you exhale down the right and slow motion.
When the exhale's complete, you take your thumb, you close off the right nostril, you open the left. Now the inhale needs to be low and slow. Nothing bumpy or jumpy. At the end of the inhale, you close off the left. You exhale, right slow rhythmic, complete exhale, CO2. So you close off the right nostril, you open the left slow motion.
Inhale, close off the left, release the thumb. Exhale, right. So you would do this five or 10 rounds and you'll fall back asleep.
Oh my goodness. And for anyone just listening, so just bringing that hand up to your face, doing that alternate nostril breathing, but it sounds like mm-hmm. Especially being mindful of what you said, the breakdown of versus the right, versus the left and being mindful.
Yeah. So
we're cutting off any excessive cortisol or adrenaline bleeding into our brain or our bloodstream.
So as soon
as we be, bring. The breath to just the parasympathetic nasal channels, it's gonna have a cooling effect on the hormones of the body. Our bloodstream, we alkaline our blood, turn off the acidity and slope down the brainwave activity.
Mm-hmm. Now, if you don't fall back asleep in five to 10 breaths, another little hack for that would be when your inhale is complete, hold the breath in. For two seconds when the exhale is complete, hold the breath out for two seconds. And in that silence, give yourself something like an affirmation, like I would prefer a restful night's sleep.
Hmm. I
would prefer a. I de I deserve rest. Mm. Like fall in love with yourself all over again. Don't send up all the fire alarms and the smoke alarms. Yeah, you've just awakened in the middle of the night. It's not the end of the world. You have choices to get yourself back to sleep. Panic is not going to work.
Panic is not gonna work. If you've tuned into the show or followed any of our content here at Sleep as a Skill, you may have heard that everyone that we work with wears the Ora Ring, and as a result, we have amassed a very large database of Ora Ring users and get to see what really moves a needle for people when it comes to their sleep measurably.
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You could also check out in the show notes for that same link as well. What about for the folks that tune in and they've maybe gotten themselves into a bit of a chronic state, where now this has been sort of ongoing, and so maybe those hormones that you were speaking to circulating through the bloodstream in the brain, that's the howl, the habit has gotten created for maybe months or for some people years, unfortunately.
Sure. Is this something where they're gonna need to have a longer practice and make this something by day and into the night or case by case? Great.
Fantastic question Mo. You know the body works on preparation, right? If you can prepare this system for something in the future, it will perform for you. It is nature.
Nature hasn't missed a day of work in billions of years. You kind of know how the day's gonna roll out because you were here yesterday. Yes. So how are, what are things that we can do with this body to push back against nature so that we remain in autonomic balance during the day? So we know in the, in the morning, the sun comes up and you've got all this energy, the most energy you've had.
Since yesterday is the first hour or two when you've gotten up, you wanna be respectful of that energy. You want to be calm, you wanna be centered, you don't wanna be running around. You wanna be linking breath With movement, the way we were doing it a hundred years ago, mm-hmm. You control the environment, you control the emails.
The emails don't control you. You can only do one thing at a time. So when the sun is hot, free, noon, you always want to be exhaling in length. Longer than your inhale. If you think of the inhale as heat and sun, and think of the exhale as cooling in the moon. So if the external environment, the sun is rising and it's warm, you can push back against the external environment with cooling with a longer exhale.
Now this
longer exhale triggers the amygdala of the brain into saying, wow, she's safe right now. Because her exhale's longer than her inhale, there's no threat. She's not gonna get eaten or attacked, or she's not running to get food. The lower primitive part of the brain will turn off. So as soon as you begin to exhale longer than your inhale, the amygdala tones down your vagus nerve turns up.
And in that your body will organically start to burn fat, not store fat. Why do you wanna burn fat? Because fat energetically you number one, you have a lot more of it is fuel and, and number two, calorically. It's a lot more energetically efficient than glucose. When you get up this morning, you have 30 days of fat stores that you can burn as fuel.
You've got 90 minutes of glucose. You wanna save the glucose for your brain, and you wanna burn fat all day long at the workstation. So if you could just exhale longer than your inhale, pre noon, you're gonna lose a pound a week. Right. Without even changing your diet or your exercise routine. Now when you get to mid noon,
mm-hmm.
You're just not really in that transitional state of the sun going down, but you're in mid noon before your lunch. If you can get outside, get some sun. Get some walks, get some controlled breath. Inhale, pause, exhale, pause, and just kind of move into that midpoint of the day as your body automatically is gonna be making transitions.
Now, as you reach the afternoon hours, your energy levels are dropping and the sun is dropping, and the moon is going up, but you've already set in motion, fat metabolism in the morning, so you're becoming stronger, not weaker mentally and emotionally. Now, staying on that inhale. A little bit longer in the afternoon, you're gonna be bringing more heat to your internal environment while the external environment is losing heat.
Hmm.
This is gonna get you through the rest of the workday at a high level of mental focus, attention and competency. Most mistakes at work occur between. Three and five when our energy levels are the lowest, because we misused our energy in the morning. So imagine your nostrils. One is the sun, one is the moon, one is warm, one is cool.
One has warming hormones, one has cooling hormones. This interplays with your brain, so the way your breathing can push back against the external environment so you're more imbalanced as you move through the day. Think about always taking less breaths per minute. Okay. Less breast per minute. It means a lower heart rate.
Yes, lower heart rate means a lower blood pressure. Lower blood pressure means better neurochemistry and hormonal secretions, and it means your body's gonna burn fat like an endurance athlete rather than store fat as you move through the mental challenges of the day.
Wow, so good. So for people listening and saying, okay, I've gotta start bringing this into my life more, if they immediately jump to like, oh, should I get a gadget or a gizmo?
You know, there's, uh, the heart mass, there's the moon bird, there's HRV, you know, kind of measurement tools. Is that necessary or can we just do like simplifying things like you were doing the alternate nostril breathing. Are there different kind of methods that you would suggest for people and at different points of the day?
Or how do you think about that?
Exactly. So you wanna be taking brain breaks during the day. You wanna get at, most folks are in their left prefrontal cortex all the day, strategizing, rationalizing, actualizing, and they're not really using their right prefrontal lobe. And if you wanna get a good night's sleep, you're gonna need your right prefrontal lobe.
Yeah. And if you've kinda walled your consciousness off of that felt sense of yourself. You're stuck in that left prefrontal lobe. It's really tough to navigate your way out of there. Hmm. So brain breaks during the day, you know, when you're feeling stressed, you know, humans, for thousands of years, every time we were stressed, it was because we were being chased for food.
Or we were running away from food. So now as humans, we're trying to deal with this stress, which are basically thoughts. There's no real danger. Yeah. Uh, in a, in a chair, at a workplace, in a confined environment, the stress is in your body. So for thousands of years, we were always moving our bodies when we were stressed and we were stressed, and then we'd come right back to homeostasis.
Now we hold all these cortisol and adrenaline. Uh, symptoms in our body and it's become, we've become our subconscious. Yeah. Uh, we have to awaken above that. So when you are triggered, get control of your breath. If you can get up from your workspace and go for a walk for maybe just 30 seconds, yeah. At least you're dissipating the stress load.
You can take a chair at your workplace and you can turn it into a gym. And you can use breath control in the chair to create cardio. In other words, if I hold my breath in 10 seconds, my heart rate's gonna go up at a manageable way to release the tension and bring my heart rate variability score up and I can settle back down in my body and not have some, uh, episode or insane activity.
Yes, exactly. So
there's different ways you wanna be breathing when you get up. There's different ways in the morning. Midday mid-afternoon and then making your transition from work. Back into family life. This is the most important part of your day. There's techniques you wanna do there so that you can fall in love with your family all over again at the end of the day.
Mm-hmm. I love that. How do you think about, so a lot of people that are listening are tracking their sleep in some way, shape, or form, and they might have data about their respiratory rate while they're sleeping. So say if it's like aura or whoop or what have you, they might. Fall somewhere in between, say like 12 breaths per minute to 20 breaths per minute, or you know, plus or minus, but just commonly while they're sleeping.
And is that anything that you use as a marker? Like if you see it too high or any call outs with that? Or do you just not like to go in the data direction?
Oh gosh, you asked the best questions. Right. So science kind of puts us all underneath one big umbrella and it, it's okay. It, it's really not addressing your individual needs as a human being and what you're going through in your life right now.
Yeah.
Uh, with that being said, there's, there's enough research out there that indicates if you're taking more than 12 breaths a minute, you're living your life in a constant sympathetic fight or flight response.
And this is
gonna, this is really, really bad. And what we want to do is number one. Get the mouth closed.
Hmm. Okay. As soon as your tongue comes off the upper palate, your amygdala senses danger. Your eyes begin to cinch and you become hypoxic. In other words, you stop breathing because your brain thinks that you're gonna get hit, or you want to hit something else. So tongue on the upper palate opens the airway, and you can't exhale through your mouth.
With your tongue on the upper palate, right? So we must stabilize that old mammalian brain first before we can deal with any of the other intuitive or, uh, actualization parts or uh, emotions. We've gotta get that lower brain under control. Closing your mouth. When you're exhaling is so important. You know, most folks don't understand when you exhale, you're exhaling as much oxygen as you're inhaling.
Mm. CO2 two oxygen molecules. O2 coming in. You're shortchanging yourself energetically by letting that air come out through your mouth. Now when you exhale through your mouth, you're dehydrating your tissues. You're dehydrating your thyroid, and if your breath is off and your thyroid's off, you will not be sleeping, ladies and gentlemen, for sure.
Yeah. So getting that air to come out through the nose, think about your brain. It's the highest point against gravity. Gravity's pretty strong. When you exhale through your mouth, that exhale is not going through the brain and out through your sinuses and nostrils. You're depleting your brain of oxygen.
That's a surefire way to have stress. Then screw up the next inhale. So you're coming into the next moment In a fear state, not a free will state. Yeah, so when your mouth is closed, it forces the CO2 to recharge the brain, and then you have another inhale. So you're grounded and center with a straight spine.
So you're always looking to get the most out of the least. Nature doesn't waste energy. Nature doesn't have an ego. Everything is designed to create balance. And when you create balance through this inhale and exhale through your nose, you start to harness the oxygen molecules that are in the CO2, much like an athlete would.
Hmm. 'cause every day is an endurance event. It's not a sprint, it's a long day getting that breath rate down. Somewhere between eight breaths a minute or six breaths a minute. Is really cool. You know, one of the ways you can really do that really easy from the yoga schools, there's a breathing called the UJA breathing, or the ocean sounding breath where you valve the air.
Through the top of your trachea, through a piece of cartilage called your ops. And when you valve the air through your throat, you create heat in your throat, which creates resistance. On the inhale and exhale, it balances your thyroid. It strengthens your inspiratory and expiratory muscles. So you take pressure off your heart so your heart doesn't have to fix everything with a high heart rate.
You're fixing it by securing your breath in and out, which is also gonna strengthen not only your physical immune system, but face it. Your spiritual immune system.
Hmm. I love that. Such a good point. So with every guest that we bring on, we do ask four personal questions around how you're managing your own sleep.
But before we get there, any kind, I know this is a huge topic, uh, that we've only just scratched the surface, but any kind of well on this topic before we move into how you're managing your.
Yeah, I invite everybody to just do a little dive into the thoracic diaphragm, do a little Google search, and see how the thoracic diaphragm is actually like an organ in regard to balancing the various systems of the body, optimal posture.
So you're getting younger every day, you're not getting older. Yeah, and think about that thoracic diaphragm, and that is the primary muscle of inhale. And then maybe do a Google search about the primary nerve that gets activated by a long nasal exhale. Your vagus nerve. So you have energy, but you have relaxed energy.
Ugh, the dream. I love that.
It's right in our nose.
Right in our nose. Okay. It's so good. And so it's available. It's free.
You can do it. It's free.
Yes, exactly. So good. Okay. And now, since you've been in this world of health and wellbeing for many, many years, I so appreciate your vulnerability in sharing kind of your own journey of the ego states and what have you, where we've all been there and what you've taken your life to in this whole other direction.
So, fantastic. So I'm very excited to hear how you're managing things now. So our first question is, what does your nightly sleep routine look like? At the moment,
I'm pretty regular. I, I try to get down around eight o'clock. I don't do any thinking. Yeah. After the sun goes down, I don't try to create anything new.
I can deal with it with fresh energy in the morning, so I'm really honoring myself.
Yeah. And
my internal space. So no heavy thinking or creativity after sundown and then getting to bed at eight o'clock and preparing myself for this. Quantum experience that we call sleep.
I love that. Wow. Beautiful. And then what might we see in your morning sleep routine?
And we say that with the thinking that I know you've already alluded to the importance of how we start our day can impact the quality of our sleep.
Well, I always get up before the sun. Yes. And, uh, I just love the silence, uh, where I can really, like what is really going on with Ed and how do I really feel about Ed.
And, uh, I just try, you know, but when it's quiet, I can hear what my heart has to say. You know, my heart always whispers and my brain screams. Yeah. You know, I can't hear the whispers of my heart, you know, which are real. That's the real me. Like the, like, yeah. The stuff in my head is great, you know, it's been a great life, you know, I love it.
But at the end of the day, my, my purpose is really to hear the whispers of my heart, not what's going on between my ears. And, you know, getting up before sunrise, before anybody's up in the house and it's quiet and you know, maybe just lighting a candle and just sitting quietly, you know, whether in its chair or, or cross-legged, just taking a few breaths and, you know, I always try to get the ambiance, sunlight.
Uh, I try to get some sun really early and follow the sun. And there's little apps that you can get that, uh, show you circadian biology. It'll tell you, you know, when you should be getting up, when you should be exercising, when you should stop eating, et cetera. You know, there's a lot of tools out there to really maximize what Molly's giving you guys.
Well, thank you so much for saying that. I love your connection to that, those rhythms. And as far as apps, if anyone's like, oh, I need some of these apps, I'm a couple that we often suggest for people are. Circadian life app and then the new friend, um, my circadian, and there's of course more, but those are a couple places that people could begin.
So great points. And then the third question would be, what might we visually see on your nightstand or in your environment as it relates to your sleep?
The book I'm reading right now is bridging the gap between science and Spirit, and it's just blowing my mind
really how there's
a spiritual system, a apparently.
Underneath every physical system and that we are just scratching the surface as a species. There's something waking up inside of us right now that is so beautiful in the world, individually and collectively, and, and I want to be part of that. I
love that. Wow. Okay. I've gotta check out that book immediately so you're reading a little bit, but I, I love that.
What something we've seen for a lot of guests now, like, I don't know, we've had like over 200 episodes or so. Wow. Yeah. And what, you know, some in the can to be released or what have you, but lots of conversations and lots of people sharing what they're doing for their sleep. And one thing we have seen at people that seem to be quite at peace with their sleep, there's not a lot of things commonly that they're relying on.
Right.
No tv, no. You know? Yeah.
Animalism, your
bedroom is sacred space. It's a place. Ritual, it's not a place of passing out.
Hmm.
You know, get some stones in there, get some things that mean something. Like when you look at it, there's a visceral response when you see your daughter, you know, your mom or your, whatever it may be.
Whatever. Yeah. But just reach into the. Of who you are as a human being. It's time. It's 2024.
Yes. Ah, preach. I love it. And then the last question would be, so far to date, what would you say has made the biggest change to your sleep game? Or maybe said another way. Biggest aha moment in managing your sleep.
The biggest thing for me has probably been the biggest one for everybody else, is not panicking when the melatonin secretions stop between two and three and then getting out in front of the next day with my mind and this, this ego telling me it's not gonna work out. You know, you're not gonna have the energy and you're gonna fail and you know, you have all this fear consciousness, the fear energy coming into the next day.
You know, there there's a deeper reason, there's a physical reason, obviously why we're waking up in another. Yes. I mean, there's no doubt about it, whether it be blood sugar or a nasal channel, uh, switch that has taken place, that it's wakened up. But, you know, I think spiritually, you know, there, there's messages during the day that I'm missing because I'm moving so fast.
Yeah.
And if there is a greater source to all of us, you know, two and three o'clock in the morning, you got my attention.
Yeah.
So it's like, why, what is the spiritual meaning? Why I'm awake right now.
Mm. Rather
than like, tomorrow's gonna suck. Yeah. Why is the staying in this moment right now, taking care of this space right in front of me, right around me in my bed?
Why am I awake? And just inviting that inquiry in the silence of the evening. Sometimes amazing things can come out of the depth of our mind if we just don't have this big pity party about how the future's gonna suck.
Yes. Oh my goodness. And for you, with part of that transformation was noticing that tendency, which, you know, yeah.
All the time of people really struggling there, noticing that tendency, and then bringing in the shift with your breath, and also managing the blood sugar piece. Has there ever been times where you do the, you know, nostril breathing or alternate nostril breathing, and then you're still awake? Like are there other things that you bring in or any call outs there?
Well, another thing I noticed is that when I, when I have these events and I wake up in the middle of the night, I forget I have a body.
Oh, interesting. You ever
noticed that? Yes. It's like everything is going on between your ears. It's like a pinball machine and you forget you have a body.
Hmm. So
what are some of the tools that, that we can do?
Number one, I can just take my hands and I can rub my ribs. Or, or I can, I can touch, I can scrape r rake my legs, you know, just something to get the mind off the ticker tape in my head. Just touch your body, massage your shoulders. Maybe release tension around your low jaw or massage your eyes. Get some blood flow around the four brainin region of the brain.
Or if you have to, just get up and walk around the house. Take a lap, break the energy, come back to bed. Fall right back to sleep.
Yes. Oh, so good. I love this like agency that you're bringing to a very common problem for people. So beautiful. Thank you. Yeah. Okay. So people listening, loving your energy, I am sure.
Wanting to know how can they follow you? How could they work with you? How can they be a part of your world?
Well, you can reach me on my website at www ed Harold, H-A-R-R-O-L d.com. There's all sorts of different ways that, that we can work together. I have professional trainings on there. I have trainings for, uh, health and wellness, sleep medicine, uh, 24 hour balance.
Uh, you know, it is, it's just amazing to be in the space that we're in. Molly. It's very exciting to be a spoke on folks wheel as we all evolve. So just drop into my website. I have all the social media stuff on there that, uh, goes out all the time and I have a great team of people around me and I've been blessed.
In my life, and hopefully I can share some of my blessings with you if you feel it's appropriate.
Oh, fantastic. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to be here. This is fascinating, and just it's clear to me the mission and the passion that you have behind every word that you're uttering here. And I love some of what you brought in too, around like this affirmations as you're bringing this breath work in.
It doesn't have to just be one thing. Some of the, you know, health space, some sometimes can be this like functional breathing approach, which is beautiful, but maybe missing the spiritual side of things or the connection of the mind body. Right. Thoughts. Right. Uh, I love how you're marrying those. It's really great.
Yeah.
You know, we are, we're all choosing our reality. It's not being chosen for us. We all have the ability to choose and never give that away. Never give away your power. Don't leak energy. Every moment of our life if we can pull back from it, it's a moment to fall in love with ourselves all over again.
Totally. And I think it really hits home, I think, for a lot of these listeners, because many of them are in this cycle of, yeah, well if I could just sleep then I could be more positive and this, that, and the other. But it sounds like you're pointing to that We can interrupt that no matter how long sleep maybe has been a issue, that this can really fundamentally transform that,
you know, we don't do well with fear.
Yes.
So. If you're dealing with high levels of anxiety, high levels of fear and insecurity about how the future might not work out during the day, and this is a repetitive habit that's become part of your Rolodex of thoughts, your your breath is, is uniquely designed. To transmute that energy. Mm-hmm.
There's no way that you're gonna be able to sleep restfully during the night if you're amygdala hears all day long that there's something wrong or that you're in danger. Yes. I mean, that is like so debilitating to our energy levels. It drains our immunity. We start to get, you know, we spin our tires.
Yeah. So, you know, try to find ways to interact with our fears. In a way that we can overcome them one day at a time. Try to look for little ahas, and it takes a tremendous amount of energy to change your brain. Okay. I mean, being neuroplastic is, you know the fancy word, your brain is plastic. You can change your, sure you can, but it takes energy.
Yeah. So if you wanna change a habit, you have to consciously become aware of a new awareness around that person, place, or thing, and then sell it. Habitually to your subconscious to override the old program.
Hmm. So
don't waste energy. Less breath per minute. Straight spine and remember, a smile always works.
Ah, love that. What a good queuing mechanism. So smart. Yeah. Well, thank you, ed. I really, really appreciate it. Thank you. And we'll make sure to have all of that information in our show notes so that people can quickly follow you, be a part of your world and appreciate it.
Well, I hope everybody knows how, how much you care and how hard you work for your audience.
You know, you're a tireless worker. To get us over this hump in humanity and it's so obvious that you care deeply about your clientele.
Oh, well thank you for saying that. I don't know if, um, if I shared my story or not, but this all came because I went through my own period of insomnia years back. So really know what that can look like and just the stressors and just all that that can bring about.
Yeah, and not the only problem in sleep. We've got over a hundred sleep wake disorders. We have lots of people are dealing with other respiratory issues, sleep apnea and other things. But I will say, you know, that. Struggle with the falling asleep, staying asleep. Mm-hmm. This can be so maddening for people, so really appreciate like yourself, that are really healing.
The worlds really beautiful.
We're doing it everyone. We're doing it.
We're doing it. All right. Thank you, ed. Appreciate it.
God bless.
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