Campbell looks at health from a 'nervous system' first approach, teaching the importance of movement and breathing as it relates to the nervous system. He combines his background in physiotherapy with a specialisation in breathwork that focuses not on the experience, but on the restoration of optimal breathing. His outlook focuses on systems over symptoms and people over problems.
Campbell looks at health from a 'nervous system' first approach, teaching the importance of movement and breathing as it relates to the nervous system. He combines his background in physiotherapy with a specialisation in breathwork that focuses not on the experience, but on the restoration of optimal breathing. His outlook focuses on systems over symptoms and people over problems.
SHOWNOTES:
😴 How does your breathing during the day influence your ability to fall asleep at night?
😴 What’s the difference between “offline” tools: daytime breath practices, and “online” tools: in-the-moment fixes at 3am?
😴 How can slow, intentional breathing (SIB) switch your nervous system into recovery mode?
😴 Why is remembering moments of relaxation as important as the breath itself?
😴 Can short, 2–3 minute practices throughout the day actually improve sleep more than long sessions at night?
😴 What role does self-awareness play in breaking the cycle of stress and insomnia?
😴 How do unconscious habits like “email apnea” silently disrupt your physiology?
😴 Why is training your “breathing autopilot” the secret to long-term resilience?
😴 What does outcome-based breath work mean, and how can it reshape your health strategy?
😴 Can breath work really support those with sleep apnea or disordered breathing?
😴 How does the nervous system’s plasticity mean it’s never too late to change, even after decades of poor patterns?
😴 Why is recovery just as crucial as performance, and how can breath work bridge the two?
😴 What’s the most powerful daily shift: waiting until bedtime to relax, or sprinkling “mini off-switch” moments across your day?
😴 What has been the biggest personal aha moment about breath and sleep from our guest?
😴 And so much more!
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Welcome to the Sleep As a Skill podcast. My name is Mollie 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 the Sleep is a Skill Podcast. Our guest today is Will Campbell and Campbell looks at health from a nervous system first approach. Teaching the importance of movement and breathing as it relates to the nervous system. He combines his background in physiotherapy with a specialization in breath work that focuses not on the experience, but on the restoration of optimal breathing.
His outlook focuses on. Systems over symptoms and people over problems. So we really get into the nitty gritty around how to support your nervous system through breath and more. So I think you're gonna really enjoy this episode. First, we're gonna hear a few words from our sponsors. Please give a listen to the sponsors that we have partnered with.
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And welcome to the Sleep is a Skill podcast. I have been on a mission to start bringing more conversations around breath work into the things that we're doing here at Sleep is a skill because I think it's been long overdue. We've had so many episodes and just not enough on this huge topic of how we're breathing and how that can impact our sleep results.
So today we have a wonderful guest to help guide us on this topic. So thank you so much for taking the time to be here.
I'm super excited, Molly.
Yay. Fantastic. Well, maybe just a little bit about how you found yourself such a expert in this area of breath work and beyond.
Yeah, so for me it started, I went down the pathway.
I'm a physiotherapist and we call it a physio in Australia rather than the physical therapist, but Oh, nice. Same. Okay. Um, from there, I, you know, the first job that I got, which I didn't even know physios were involved in, was a respiratory physiotherapist. So I was actually working in hospitals. I worked in ICU, um, where my job was really to make sure that people were breathing in a way that sustained life honestly.
But I kept coming up against this. The amount of patients that told me I was the first person to talk to them about breathing really, like, struck a chord with me. I'm like, why in intensive care is the first time anyone's actually spoken to you about the importance of your breathing? Yeah, it just like stuck with me for a while.
I had a, a number of experiences in my own life and then in my kind of professional expertise that just kept nudging me up against this world of like, you need to look a little bit deeper into this. Um, around that time, I, I stumbled across Wim Hof and was just like, oh, this guy's doing some crazy things, climbing mountains in the snow.
And
yes, I,
I kind of dove into the practice more as a personal experience, but the outcomes that I saw in a really short space of time, like made me recognize that I, I need to focus a bit more on this. And so I went and flew to the Netherlands and I did the Wim Hof certification, hiked a mountain with him in the snow, but that was really the kind of tip of the iceberg.
Where recognizing that the intentional use of breath is amazing, right? I can breathe in a way that's gonna give me this transformative experience. But below the surface was this idea that breathing, the thing that's happening 20, 25,000 times every day has an outsize impact on every aspect of our health, right?
When we look at the kind of interdependent systems in the, in the human organism, right? Like breathing touches everything. And even as I reflect back on, you know, the five years of school I did to become a physio, we had one lecture on the diaphragm. Mm. You know, it was on like neurological injuries. You know, if someone severs this nerve, what happens?
Like it wasn't on the. Potential of what happens when you start to get someone to reconnect with their breath and what patterns people develop from trauma or pain or stress, and all of these things that impact breathing and then breathing, impacting everything else from our energy production to our nervous system state, our emotional management or regulation.
So it just kept kind of this rabbit hole that never has ended. Yeah. But I've gone deeper and deeper into and recognizing that hey, breathing is something that almost no one has really taught. You know, I, I often joke to people, I'm like, who taught you how to breathe? You're like, what? Yeah,
exactly. It's
skill.
Like, it's not just something we take for granted that like, oh, I'm breathing all the time. What do I need to know? It's, it's a fundamental skill. That a lot of people, when they acquire that skill, start to recognize how much more influence they can have over their experience of the world.
Wow. So for you, from someone, from your vantage point, when you hear someone coming your way that's struggling with sleep, what are some of the unique ways that you're thinking about it as it relates to their breathing?
Yeah, honestly, so that I would cut this in two parts, right? We can talk about like sleep disordered breathing, things like sleep apnea, but I honestly think sleep disordered breathing is just disordered breathing that's happening at night, right? Like, yeah, you can't do good functional, optimal breathing during the day, and then something happens and it doesn't work at night, right?
There's an underlying. That needs to be addressed, but when we are not talking about a specific pathology, okay. Right. Or condition, we're just talking about sleep.
Yeah.
Then for me, it comes back to the nervous system.
Mm-hmm. Right? Like
our level of arousal is something that is informed by our breathing.
And so not just like, how am I breathing at night, but how am I breathing from the moment I wake up until the moment I go to bed?
Mm.
If managing my arousal level right. The state of my nervous system. Then I get stuck in this perpetual state of stress leading me to a sympathetic state, which is high arousal.
It's harder for me to switch off. Yeah. At the end of the day, I might be exhausted, but if I'm, if I've struggled to shift from this sympathetic state to the parasympathetic state, I can be asleep, but not really be in that truly restorative state. My sleep can be broken, right? I'm in that shallow state of sleep and I have frequent wakings or I really struggle to get to sleep.
That sleep latency, to me, I'm always looking at like, well, how are you managing your nervous system throughout the day? Mm. 'cause as you can probably speak to, well definitely speak to more than I can. Like good sleep doesn't start half an hour before your bed with your bedtime. Right. Like preach. Yeah. You can try and do a couple of things.
Yeah. But it really starts arguably that morning or even the day before, like this compounding. Mm-hmm. And so for me, I always look at like, how are you managing your nervous system from the moment you wake up till the moment you want to go to bed? And if you are having struggles with getting to sleep and staying asleep, what can you be doing about it during the day rather than like cramming in some optimization the last hour of your day in your sleep routine or your bedtime routine versus like developing a little bit more self-awareness of what you're doing throughout the day.
Ah, so well said. Okay, so, and I love that you distinguish between disordered breathing, 'cause certainly there are people listening that are dealing with things like sleep apnea, upper air resistance syndrome, difficulty nasal breathing, maybe obstructed nasal pathways, et cetera. So we've got that kind of more disordered or convoluted issues as it relates to breathing.
But then there's also that group that we might be dealing with difficulty falling asleep, staying asleep, or when they do wake up, now they're stressed out and they can't get themselves back to sleep. So maybe focusing a bit more on that group for now, that's just because we see that all the time, like some form of stress bleeding into their ability to get.
Just consistent and reliable sleep and they feel very at a loss. Like, what do I do? So I wake up at 3:00 AM like, what do I do? So how do you help guide those people from a breath perspective?
So let's take it two ways, right? Yeah. What can I do? What I like to term offline tools, right? So what can I do during the day to reduce the likelihood that I wake up at 3:00 AM
Yes.
But then
also kind of address the online tools. Like, Hey, I woke up at 3:00 AM what do I do? Right? Like, let's give people both. Okay. Managing it from a an external perspective is like, yeah, that's the long-term play. Yeah. But you're also probably gonna wake up tonight, you know, if you've been wake up 3:00 AM every day, like it's not gonna click your fingers and it's fixed.
Yes. In terms of the offline stuff, for me, it really comes back to, I like to talk about finding your off switch, right? So most people that listen to you have probably come into contact with the autonomic nervous system. We can kind of describe this in a simplistic way of two branches. One being the on switch, the sympathetic nervous system.
This is our kind of stress fight, flight action, survival, and the other branch being the parasympathetic, which is this more rest digest. It's our recovery, it's our restoration. I really like to look at those two things kind of as points on a spectrum rather than just an honor off. But yeah. Just for the sake of language, we're gonna talk, talk about the sympathetic as the on and the parasympathetic as the off.
Okay. Through, you know, we could argue the entirety of evolution. We've cycled between states of high arousal and low arousal, right? Like I have to chase my food, high arousal, and then I sit down and I eat by the fire. Low arousal, right? You know, that's always been the case. Except if you reflect on like the last 50 years, you know, iPhones, social media, the internet, ai, right?
Like we can now just be in this constant on state. I wake up in the morning, I check my phone, there's emails from my boss. I get my kids ready for school. I'm in traffic. I'm at work, I'm at home. It's just all pushing us into that sympathetic state. At no point during that someone's day have they touched the off switch, right?
Have they truly accessed that parasympathetic state yet? They expect at 10 o'clock that night they're just gonna be able to turn off, right? Like, but you haven't turned off once from the moment you woke. And it's really interesting when we consider like our nervous system, our brain is really this kind of predictive machine, right?
So what it gets a lot of it then starts to predict. So you are stressed from the moment you wake up and then at 10:00 PM all your nervous system is doing is predicting more stress. Right. So the appropriate state to be in is one of sympathetic high arousal because that's how you deal with stresses,
right?
Right.
Yet we are just hoping that the exhaustion takes over and I flip into that parasympathetic. So what we can do is actually learn to hit the off switch throughout the day. And I'm not talking 20, 30 minute practices, I'm talking two, three minute practices. It's that. Oh, good. Doing that five, 10 times is like you are trying to teach your nervous system.
This is how we switch off. This is how we switch off. This is how we switch off. Yes. So at 10:00 PM you can switch off. Right. And you can actually move down that spectrum from higher ale to lower arousal, which is where sleep happens. It's the simplest thing and. I've kind of, I refrain from giving people like practices of like, breathe in for this long and breathe out for this long and this pattern, right?
Because your physiology, your nervous system is different to mine and is different to everyone listening. So rather than giving this one size fits all, what I find is like an approach to your breath is far more effective.
Mm. If
I remember is SIB, right? Slow intentional breathing.
Mm.
The slow component of this is, is slow relative to you, right?
If everyone right now takes a moment and reflects on their breath, they're gonna feel it coming in and they're gonna feel it going out. They don't need to count. They don't need to measure their respiratory rate, but they could then breathe 10% slower, right? They could just extend the duration of the inhale by 10% and extend the duration of the exhale by 10%.
What we are doing when we slow the breath down is we're informing the nervous system. Right. We don't breathe slowly when we're running away from a tiger. We never have. We never will. So your brain is listening to your breath and saying, okay, if I'm breathing really slowly, I'm probably not in immediate danger.
Uh, there's no threat, right? Looming. And so I can start to shift, right? The nervous system from stress and action to rest and recovery, the intentional part is just where we start to kind of layer a little bit more effectiveness, right? You can breathe slowly, but still be worried about the presentation you have to do this afternoon and it's not gonna be that effective.
Right. Right. You can breathe slowly and be worrying about what someone said to you yesterday, not that effective. Right. We need to bring the intentionality.
Mm-hmm. And I
consider help people consider like, you know what not stressed feels like you might not be feeling that right now, but you've been relaxed at some point.
Yeah. You've felt grateful at some point. And there's a really powerful tool that we all use unintentionally all the time, which is memory, right? I remember the stressful thing, and it starts to make me feel a bit stressed right now, right?
Mm-hmm. But if you
remember a time that you felt really relaxed, right?
That holiday you went on with your partner, with your kid, looking at a waterfall doesn't really matter what it is for each individual, but the experience of that memory starts to shift your state in the moment. So when we combine, I slow my breath down and then I bring some intentionality to it, right?
Whilst I'm feeling relaxed, I'm probably not following my eyebrows. I'm not clenching my jaw, or I'm not tensing my shoulders. So I start to bring that intention to the body and we see a pretty immediate impact, right? Brainwave slows down heart rate, slows down, heart rate variability, improves. All these metrics that we understand are reflective of the nervous system.
So we are kind of in this one, two, maybe three minutes. Manually shifting the nervous system towards that off switch. And let's say I do that five or 10 times in a day, my ability to then do that at night is gonna be far easier, right? Mm-hmm. It's like I've walked that path a couple of times, now I know the way there, right?
Yes.
Kinda like, how do I get to somewhere where I've never been? Uh, good luck, you know? Yes. That's unintentional breathing. It's kind of a recipe, right? It's like find my breath, observe, right? Disconnect from all the distractions. Observe my breath. Go a little bit slower, a little bit slower, every few breaths.
See if you can slow it down slightly more. And as I'm doing that, bring this element of intentionality. Relax the parts of my body. That may be a tense. Reflect on times that I've felt really relaxed in the past, right? Use the visual component of our memory and all that's being done to just suggest to the nervous system that nothing threatening is happening right now.
It's okay to switch off, to drop the guard to move into that restorative state. So that, that night we can do the same thing with a little bit more ease.
I love that. You know, it's funny because we've been having more breathwork experts on the podcast recently to start, you know, upping this conversation.
But I like what you're saying 'cause I, I feel like I haven't heard it said in, or shared in this way of also the importance of that intentionality, kind of pulling from memory. And really layering in kind of a whole foundation of intentionality of how we are bringing that breath work in. Because if we are bringing all that stress, which many people that we're working with that are dealing with sleep issues, they're frustrated, they're tired, they just want, you know, this, to work and to bring that piece of that puzzle in, I think is often the missing component.
For a lot of our sleepy people, so really well said. I love that. And would you say similar things for that group that we were mentioning with the disordered breathing or any other distinctions there?
I honestly, I think I, I've shifted my perspective on this quite a lot over the last minute, two, three years.
Sure. But I think we move more away from the treatment of pathology mm-hmm. Towards the support of health. Then as we start to remove some of these diagnostic labels. And we start to address is like, how can I support you as a person and how can I support your system, rather than how can we manage this problem and focus on these symptoms?
Yeah. I think a lot of time. Right. Of course. I, I wanna be clear that there is a distinction right there. There are some true pathologies, you know? Yeah. Whether we're talking genetic or otherwise, I'm not talking about like, this solves everything, but for a lot of people that are dealing with stress related dysfunction.
Yeah. Emotional dysregulation, nervous system dysregulation, these kind of broad categories. The, the symptoms that their body manifests can be different for everyone. We're at a point with the way that healthcare is set up is that I take the list of symptoms you give me and I give you this diagnostic label, and then I base your treatment on that label.
But someone else could have a different set of symptoms, but it could be from the same core disruption. Right. If you and I, Molly went the next three or four nights and we just had broken, broken sleep,
yeah.
I might start to express anxiety and you might start to express fatigue.
Yes. Right.
If you went to a practitioner and you gave them the symptoms, they're like, oh, you've got chronic fatigue and you've got generalized anxiety disorder.
Yes, different treatment, but same core disruption. It was like, you're not sleeping right. One of your biological needs isn't being met, and your body is expressing an alarm system to say, Hey, we need to course correct you.
Yes. And
so, yes, like we can talk about the certain phenotypes of sleep apnea and be like, is breath work going to correct that structural issue?
Probably not. Right, but. Can we support someone's physiology, their biomechanics, and their nervous system? And is that likely to have an impact on their experience of sleep disordered breathing or disrupted sleep? Absolutely.
Mm. You know,
and I just, again, I wanna stress, because sometimes people throw stones at this and I, I'm not saying, oh, we can just treat all sleep apnea with breath work.
Right. But a lot of people get lumped into this diagnostic label. Oh, you've got sleep apnea. And I ask people like, what type of sleep apnea do you have? They're like, what do you mean? I've just got sleep apnea. Right? And they just told me to go on a sleep AP machine and that's it. I just, I have a C AP now.
No one has identified whether or not that person has really obvious dysfunctional breathing patterns, right? Like,
yeah,
forcing air into your airways is gonna prop them open. But we should probably also address things like your tongue posture and your breathing strategy, and are you using your accessory respiratory muscles and do have forward head posture that is compounded by your breathing?
If we don't address those things, I think we're just doing a disservice to people and saying like, you've got this disease or this disorder and you just have to have A-C-P-A-P. Now, like I think there's a little bit more nuance where we can actually start to, again, support a system and hopefully the system has an ability to eliminate some of those symptoms, not because we've.
Beat them back with a stick, right? Yeah. But, but we supported this innate capacity that every human has to, to generate health.
I love that, that nuance that you're speaking to. I think it's so important with something like sleep apnea, because often to your point around so many individuals just maybe having this diagnosis, but not even knowing some of the.
Components here, there's a severity kind of scale that occurs with sleep apnea, where we can be doing certain things that could be flaring up the number of apneas and we can also be doing certain things that could help reduce the number of apnea. So to your point, maybe it's not the whole story. Maybe there's a whole treatment plan that we bring in, but breath work could certainly help facilitate of potentially the reduction of the severity of the number of apnea.
So if we're going from 30 apnea events an hour. Could we be dropping some of those down potentially by shifting some of the mechanics of how we're breathing and stress response and all of that. So I think there's a lot there. So smart. Okay. So if someone comes to you and they're dealing with difficulty sleeping, are you approaching this conversation any in a different way than you would with anyone else that wants to bring a breath work, practice into their life?
Like maybe guide us through how you think about this.
Yeah. Like, I really like this term outcome-based breath work, right? And it's really what I teach in our practitioner program is like the outcome that someone wants should inform the practice that we prescribe to them, right? Like, mm-hmm. So someone coming to me and, and they're wanting to optimize their sleep, well, that's gonna determine the type of breath work that I teach that person.
Rather than this kind of one size fits all approach of like breath work's good for everyone, like yes and no. Yeah, you can get a little bit more directive with the type of breath work for the specific outcome that someone's looking for. And so I find that that is the kind of determining criteria as to like what type of breath work.
I'm, I'm teaching someone. The caveat to that is that we can understand that most people's breathing dysfunction comes from environment, right, and environment. I'm talking about do you sit at a desk eight hours a day? Do you sit on your phone five hours a day? Are you chronically stressed? You know, like, do you deal with anxiety?
All these things are gonna show up in your breathing,
okay? And so
we can actually start to establish the causative factors of dysfunctional breathing and address those. Rather than just try and again, kind of manage the downstream effects of dysfunctional breathing, like you can give someone great corrective exercise that can say, Hey, you need to stretch your diaphragm, and here you go.
But if you go and hunch over a desk for 10 hours a day. What makes you think that five minute mobilization at the end of the day is gonna be enough? Like it's not true. We need to talk to you about lifestyle design and environmental influence, and why your diaphragm is so tight and why it's easier for you to breathe with your neck, right?
Like, I don't think we can use just a, a set of exercises to override the fact that. All day, every day for the last 10 years, you've put yourself in a position that predisposes you to crappy breathing. Hmm. And that's how to impact your physiology and impact your nervous system and impact your energy production.
And so again, this idea of kind of going upstream
Yeah. To
find like, why do you have this issue? Is there something that we need to change environmentally or, or lifestyle wise? Yes. We can give you corrective exercises and I will. But I want to kind of address the root cause rather than, again, manage the dysfunction.
You know, that's downstream of that root cause.
Totally. So good. Okay, so as part of this then a really in-depth kind of diagnostic in the beginning of what's going on to get a full picture of what people are doing, but then even having said like even if it's been like 10, 20 years or something of people managing themselves in this way, I.
Get the sense that not all is lost, that we can start to reverse engineer this, but it just might take some time. Is that all accurate?
Exactly. And there's this beautiful grace of human biology, right? That it might have taken you 20 years to get here. It's not gonna take you 20 years to get back. Woo.
Yay.
I I
my hat on that. You know? And I also have never met anyone that has lost the ability to adapt. You know, I work with 75 year olds, 80 year olds that are there. Like, I need to fix my nervous system. Like, hell yeah. Like. Just because you've, you know, lived under certain patterns or you've had certain behaviors or something has been this way for a really long time, the nervous system never loses its plasticity.
Yeah. It never loses the ability to adapt. We just need to start changing the inputs. And so instead of thinking like, oh yeah, it took me 20 years, what's the point? It's gonna take 20 years. That's not the case. Mm.
Right.
Sometimes it's really dramatic how quickly people change because the nervous system, you know, I believe there's an innate knowing of like, we're doing something wrong, right?
Like, yes, or we've been doing something wrong for a period of time. And, and when you force correct that, how rapid that transformation can be sometimes fascinates me. Because I, I do, there's this innate, you know, resonance or coherence when the system is starting to work, right? It's like all the ducks fall into a line and it's like, oh, there we go.
My sleep got better, my energy got better, my digestion. I think it's kinda like this domino that we push over.
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So you've seen some really, so in case people are like, oh my lost cause, or some people how will talk about like when they start meditating or breath work, they actually get more nervous and more anxious 'cause Right. And I'm sure you could speak to that, but you've seen even those types of people being able to come out on the other side.
Absolutely. And I, and I think a lot of. Let's talk about quote unquote, those type of people, right? Yes. Because I put my, in that category and a lot of people I work with. Totally.
Yes. Same
meditation, not for me, right?
Yeah. Yeah.
Why is it not for me? Right? Mm. And breath work, I sit down and do breathing and actually makes me feel more anxious, or I feel more claustrophobic, or I feel really tight in my chest when I try and do breathing.
And this to me is a really big indicator that you are just so familiar with this state of stress, with this state of your nervous system. Your parasympathetic state, right? This relaxation state is unfamiliar.
Yeah. And
one thing that your nervous system dislikes more than anything else is uncertainty.
Yes. Right? Yes. It loves predictability. It loves to know how many resources it's gonna spend and what's coming. Right? So like being in that state of this sympathetic high arousal, go, go, go. Do, do, do. It's like that's been my state. Forever, right? Yeah. So it's like I'm familiar with it. Yes. And I start to sit down and close my eyes and breathe slowly and I'm directing my nervous system to a different state.
And it's like, uh, don't really know what that, let's go back to what we know. Here's your to-do list. You should call your mom. You should clean the house. Like, yes. And I think it's like bubbling up of like, what am I doing meditating? I'm too busy. Right? Like me, that's my nervous system, is just trying to go back to what it knows, right?
Yeah. What it's familiar with, which is high arousal. And when we understand that, it's like, okay, you have to, you know, weather this valley of despair sometimes called, right? Where it's like it's gonna be hard, isn't gonna feel like bliss. It isn't gonna be this magical antidote to your stress. Like it may well feel quite challenging right at the start.
Yeah. But once you become familiar with that parasympathetic state, now we've got access to both branches. Right. Oftentimes what comes up for these type of people where it's like,
yes, you know,
I'm successful because I'm stressful. Uh, you know, it's like my set success is driven by anxiety, by my stress.
Like, don't take that away. That's my peak performance. Right? Yes.
And didn't
get rid of your sympathetic to give you parasympathetic. Right. It is like, let's just give you another channel, like you don't lose. Access to that channel, right? Yeah. Like all my peak performers are like, I need that level of arousal and stress and pressure.
I'm like, cool. Right, and me too. Yes. I'm not trying to get rid of it. Right. I'm just trying to give access to a different channel.
Mm. Because
whether we're talking athletic performance, business performance, life performance, right. Your ability to perform is deeply dependent on your ability to recover. Yes.
Right? You don't have access to the recovery channel. There's an expiration date on your performance, right? Like whether we're talking totally, whether we're talking illness, whether we're talking, you know, just like everything falls apart, like you have to learn how to recover so that you can sustain performance.
Totally. Do you feel like there's some sort of ratio that you like to see, like for yourself, for the people you work with to be hitting kind of like portion of the day, like 50 50 or something like sympathetic co parasympathetic? Or is it just subjective and too hard to quantify?
I think it's too hard to quantify in terms of like the duration of time.
Sure. But I would argue the more opportunistic. Style. Looking at this is when I have high stress. Yeah. I need to prioritize or allocate time after that to recover. Beautiful.
Yeah. So
some days there's gonna be longer stretches of high stress, high arousal. Okay. Which probably means I need to allocate a little bit more of my resources after that to recover from.
Mm. But it's Right. It might, you might be spending less time in that sympathetic state, which requires less, you know, intentional recovery. So I think rather than it's like 50% this, 50% that, yeah. Can you choose a recovery when you've been under a lot of pressure? A lot of load, yes. Right. Yeah. That might mean you need to up your self-care practice for a period of time, or you might need to manage your calendar in terms of like, I do need to prioritize a day or an hour, or whatever it might be because this deadline is looming or you know, the family are in town.
Whatever the stress all might be. Yeah. I think that's determine how much time we're allocating to recovery.
So good. The groups that we've worked with around sleep that seem to really excel are often to athletes, you know, so really athletes that are attuned to the fact that if they are really performing at a high level, they also need to recover at a high level about how we could for, for all of us be able to kind of.
Glean some of that information or take that practice in our own life, as you put it so beautifully, if we have been stressing our nervous system for a stretch of time to have kind of equal and strong opportunity to recover thereafter, I think that's really beautiful. Is. So we're taking a gauge or awareness of what we're at.
Maybe if we've been trending too far, too commonly into that sympathetic nervous state, helping to build in more of that parasympathetic response more frequently. And as you pointed to maybe dripping it throughout the course of the day, not necessarily saying like, oh, I gotta have these luxurious, you know, recovery sessions.
Maybe it's like a couple minutes here and there throughout the course of the day. Is that how you like to guide for people to bring this in?
You know, and I think it's more accessible that way. Like,
yeah,
I just posted on this the other day and it was something I was reflecting on and, and it probably took me five years to learn this in terms of.
You know, five years have been really immersed in breath work that like one minute of intentional breathing done 10 times a day is exponentially more effective than 10 minutes of intentional breathing done once. Mm. Right. This idea of kind of clearing the cumulative load, right? Like what's known as allostatic load, which is like what's kind of stressing out my system.
Yes. Yeah. If you could let it build up all day and then try and like. Do breath work for 20 minutes of the day, or as it builds up, you clear it. As it builds up, you clear it. As it builds up, you clear it. Mm-hmm. So you're getting to the end of the day without this accumulated debris. Right. Of stress.
Yeah.
And that
seems the same as what we're talking about in terms of, rather than like trying to cram in this nighttime routine.
Yeah.
Well, what could you do moments throughout the day to reduce the need for this like nighttime routine? Mm.
So good. And so that sort of
like drip fed pieces is more where I, like, I think a lot of people's interpretation or expectation with breath work is like, I gotta lay down on the yoga mat and do 20 minutes.
I gotta have the music on, I gotta do breath work.
Yes. And
that's, you know, I, I fell into that was my understanding of it as well. Sure. Until I started realizing that everything's breath work, you're intentional about it or not is the question. Right? Yeah. Like you take a sigh of relief. You hold your breath when you're a bit anxious, you breathe rapidly.
When you're a bit, that's all breath work. You're informing your nervous system about the state of the world. You just dunno your
yes. And so
taking control of that line of communication for one or two minutes repeatedly throughout the day has far more impact on, you know, your nervous system as a whole, has letting it all build up and then trying to press the reset button once at the end of the day.
So true. I don't know if you've heard of that term email apnea. So the idea that like, we're holding our breath differently when we're looking at our email or calendar, whatever do you suggest for people to then be blending this into their lifestyle routinely? So maybe like they get off a Zoom call, they get off, you know, a um, presentation or whatever.
They, uh, are going through their email, they're on their calendar planning out the week, and that stress response comes in then, then and there right in front of your computer or whatever. You start doing that breath work or does it look different?
No. That you just hit the nail on the right. Okay. Requires, which is the hard part that no one wants to do.
Yes. Is self-awareness, right? Yes. It's, Hey, this Zoom call stressed me out. Hey, this presentation I have to do is giving me a bit of worry or anxiety. Yeah. Hey, this conversation I have to have with my partner is actually feeling a little bit challenging, right? Yes. Like the self-awareness behind what causes or influences your stress, your anxiety, your worry, you know those things.
That's gonna determine how effective you can be with breath work. '
cause I
give you like this magical protocol, right? That's just like dialed in for your nervous system.
Yes.
But if you don't ever do it, it's not gonna work.
Right. Exactly. Like
you just wait until 7:00 PM and go, God, today was just a terrible Right.
And you missed all of the opportunities of when I hopped in the car and when I hopped off the call and when I, you know, it's like all of those opportunities were missed. It doesn't matter that you've got a great tool, you didn't use it. Yeah. And so that has awareness. Before we jump into control, right?
Mm-hmm. Like a lot, one of the most common questions I get is like, Hey, what's a breathwork practice to help with my anxiety? Mm-hmm. And the easy answer is like, oh, extend your exhales, right? Like, sure, it's likely to maybe reduce the arousal in your nervous system, but the bigger question here is like, what's making you anxious?
Yes. Is it because holding your breath? Is it because your posture? Is it. Blood sugars? Is it nutrition? Is it lack of sleep? Is it over caffeinated? Like, right. Why are you anxious? Let's, let's ask a bigger question. Let's do a little bit of self-inquiry. Mm-hmm. And so often when I do this with clients, they find out like, oh, my anxiety is preceded by me holding my breath.
And I never knew that, you know? Yes. That's a really common occurrence, right? Like there's a beautiful research by a guy called Justin Feinstein that is probably the lead researcher on looking at how our brain responds to oxygen, carbon dioxide, right? So breathing, and there's this whole model that when, when people feel a little bit anxious, right?
And it could be something I'm thinking about or something that's actually happening in my environment. They stop breathing. Yeah. The key point though is they don't know, they stopped breathing. There's no awareness of the fact that my respiration is stopped. Right. The amygdala is actually inhibiting breathing.
Mm. It's like what happens when you hear that little twig break? If we go back evolutionary, you stop everything, you stop moving, you stop breathing and you'll listen. So
true. There's
that threat, right? And so my amygdala's designed to stop everything so I can scan the environment to be like, what's threatening?
But what happens when we stop breathing is our chemistry changes, right? We're getting a buildup of carbon dioxide. That increases the arousal. Right. My brain is looking at that increase in CO2 and being like, uhoh, if this continues, oxygen's gonna go down. That's how I stay alive. This is a problem. Yes.
And so now we've got this physiological trigger that's creating anxiety after the fact. Right. I thought of something right that caused me to stop my breathing and I didn't know. And now it's my physiology that's making me feel anxious.
Mm-hmm. But I didn't,
it was eye that stopped my breathing. Right.
Right.
Someone recognizing, Hey, when you feel anxious, like what's going on? Where are you? Who are you talking to? What are you thinking about? What position are you in? Yeah. Always at your desk. Are you in? Or like it gets them to start, what? I like to call walking upstream. Mm-hmm. Right? Like what was upstream of this experience of anxiety?
Oh, I'm holding my breath. What was upstream of you holding your breath? I was worried about the meeting. What was upstream? You know? It's like,
yes.
Then we actually get to address why you're getting to the point of experiencing anxiety. Right. Hey, breathe slowly to reduce your anxiety. Wouldn't it be more effective if we just got in front of the anxiety?
Yes. You know, it
actually came back to you maintaining a, a cadence of your breathing whilst you are presenting. Right? It's like, or leading up to that board meeting that you get really anxious around. You count in your head so that you don't go into unconscious breath holding, which triggers your anxiety.
Mm. Right. So,
so much more kind of like. Influence that we can have if we walk upstream from the actual experience of symptoms that, you know, we may be encountering.
And do you feel like, so for the framing for all this, that while in the beginning people might have to do this counting and kind of be really intentional and thoughtful about this over time, do you feel like, like for yourself and others, that eventually becomes a bit more second nature and you are tend to be more aware and then you just naturally are.
Bending those exhales, et cetera, or still needing that intentionality
that, that's the good news. I, the ba, the people like, oh God, I have to be like ultra selfing all the time and Yeah.
Yeah.
If you think of, if you consider, you can't be aware of your breathing all the time, like it's literally designed
right
to be under the level of your awareness, right?
Like. Imagine if you're aware of the 25,000 breaths you took every day, you'd go mad, right? Yes. It literally gets relegated by your brain to unconscious process, like you're not meant to notice it. So this idea that you could be aware of your breathing all the time is kind of contradictory to biology.
Yes. But
the concept that I always teach people is like, we need to train your autopilot, right? Mm-hmm. With intentional training, your autopilot begins to pick up right. What you're practicing,
right.
You know, again, coming back to the idea that your nervous system is, is plastic, right? It's adaptive. So it's not necessarily that you are gonna have to be aware of your breathing and do this counting all the time, but you do need to invest a little bit of time in training your autopilot.
Sure. And that's
a lot of people don't do, right. It's like they stay in the reactive part. It's like I'm stressed, I do breathing, I'm anxious. Breathing instead of the offline tool is like, how do I build my breathing into a habit so that when I'm stressed, I revert to an optimal pattern? Right. That calms my nervous system rather than I go into breath holding.
Yeah, 'cause I'm just unconscious of it. And so that training of the autopilot is the good news.
Love that
the intentional, you know, allocation of resources in the short term will provide you a return on that investment, that the autopilot is actually supporting you rather than pushing you in the wrong direction.
So great. Okay. Amazing. These are such great kind of perspectives to come at from this whole journey so that it feels like there's this kind of game we're playing where while it might be more of a challenge in the beginning or newer, eventually this becomes a bit more second nature, and you're always gonna need to.
Presumably put in some time, energy, and effort, but it might get easier and easier over time from the sounds of it. Perfect. Okay, so we do ask every person that comes on the podcast for questions around how you're managing your own sleep, and so I'm excited to learn kind of how breath work fits in here for you.
But anything before we get to that, any closing thoughts on this big topic of breath and sleep? I know it's a huge conversation, but anything before?
Yeah. Honestly, a few things come to mind, but the first is. Is just kind of this recognition that your breathing plays a role, right? In your nervous system, which plays a role in sleep and everything, right?
So like sleep is the conversation we're having today, but nervous system being this kind of piece that influences everything else. Breath being one of the lowest hanging fruits for everybody, right? Like there's no barrier of entry. It's not complex. It doesn't run our equipment, you know, it's more or less instantaneous.
So like we have this leverage point, we have this access point to the nervous system, yet most of us are not aware of it, have not been talking about it. And I think a lot of people real think that, you know, well, breathing's like super simple. It's like it, what possibly could it do for me? I've struggled with 10 years of insomnia.
How is breathing gonna change that, you know? Right. And so I think people just to maybe have a little bit of a leap of faith, maybe just through this lens of curiosity, maybe my breathing does play a really important role in the state of my nervous system, which then is, you know, informing how well I sleep, you know, or my emotions, or my energy.
And I, I think for so many people, they kind of disregard breathing because it feels a little bit too simple.
Yeah.
I believe that you either start with breathing or you end with breathing. You know, it's like you need to find your way back there at some point. So you may as well start, you know, with this foundational piece of your biology, and then upon which you can build all these other tools and strategies.
But if not, you're kind of like walking up the down escalator, right? It's like, yeah. Trying to like optimize an ice bath and HIV and do all these things. Totally. Whereas like the thing that's telling your nervous system about the state of the world is continually informing it that you are under a lot of stress, right?
Like yes, you're, it's an uphill battle. And so like for those that feel like breathing is a bit too simple, I, I'd encourage you just to adopt this lens of curiosity and be like, what if the simple thing was actually gonna be the really high leverage thing that impacts, you know, my experience of. Certain symptoms, certain situations like what's going on in my life.
So good. Yeah. If you're familiar with leaf, the HRV trainer, so it basically trains your HRV moment to moment. When we had one of the representatives from that company on the podcast, one of the things they spoke to is, you know so many people that tune in here looking at sleep optimization, they wanna improve their HRV, they wanna lower their respiratory rate, they wanna lower their heart rate, all these things, and yet.
The takeaway from that company was like, the fastest and most clearest and obvious way to influence HRV really by second. Second is through your breath. So we might wanna do all these other things to improve those metrics, but stepping over the most clear and obvious one. So beautifully said. Okay, so then of these four questions, can't wait to hear where breath fits in for you.
So the first question is, what is your nightly sleep routine looking like right now?
Right now it's, it's adapted. So we've got a, a six week old, so. Right.
I'm sure. Totally. It's an
interesting topic right now, but it's actually, I, I'd love to actually touch on this, right. Like, okay. It's been fascinating for me to observe Yeah.
How much of a shift in my emotional state, my propensity to feel anxious, my decision making, my brain. Totally. Because I'm on six weeks of, I haven't slept through the night in six weeks, right? Yes. And again, I think people feel these symptoms or have these experiences. And they think they've got some condition or diagnosis or disorder where maybe they haven't had a quality night sleep in weeks or months.
Yes. It's like, it's so interesting to me to observe like this. Feeling of anxiety that's creeping in and it's like, no, no, no, nothing. There's nothing wrong with my business. There's nothing wrong with like, yes. But I'm just so undersleep that yes, I can't help feel that level of arousal. Totally. And it feels so much harder and everything feels kind of a little overwhelming and yeah.
'cause you know, the perspective of like, okay, new baby haven't slept, I understand the impact that sleep has on my restorative capacity of clearing away the, you know, it's like, so I'm able to look at that more objectively and be like. I don't have anxiety, you know, I'm not right on the burnout. I'm just chronically undersleep, right?
Yes. And so like to have that little bit of grace. But, so for me now, like after the kids are down, I, I've usually got maybe a 30, 40 minute window, which I really like to address first body and then breath. And so a little bit of kind of just whether a, a gorgeous ball or a little kind of tissue release ball and just kind of finding some spots.
You know, I, I have to sit more than I would like to during the day, so getting in. Restoring and relieving some pressure and some tension in the body. And then just jumping into a, about a 10 minute breath practice. Mm. Before I go to bed, which is, for me, I really like this kind of one to two ratio. You know, I'll start with an even cadence.
Breathe in for five, breathe out for five, and then every couple of breaths, I just add one to the exhale. Oh, okay. Until, breathe in for five, breathe out for 10
mm. And I'll just follow
onto that pattern of a double length exhale. Sure. Until I'm. And that's my kind of the, the other part of that is before I engage in that is a very much a mental thing of like, now I'm done.
Right? Like, I'm not reopening my laptop, I'm not checking Instagram, I'm not texting anyone, like phones on airplane. This is my transition to inform my nervous system that we are done with that part of the day. Because I think a lot of people, you know like totally, oh wait, I should send that email, right?
And I've just, yeah. A lot of that practice, so I make a really hard boundary that before I engage in this kind of wind down practice, I make sure that I am actually done. You know that I'm not gonna be to add something to the to-do list. Oh, I forgot to message that client back, or whatever it might be.
Yes. Tomorrow I, I'm not re-engaging in that part of my brain.
I love that. Yeah. Those clear, it sounds more of that intentionality that you mentioned with your breath work, bringing that into your life and your structures and, and I so appreciate you sharing too the, the experience of that uptick in anxiety and kind of rev upstate when we do have these natural periods of time, which, you know, we're all gonna have certain periods of time where our sleep is just not as great for various reasons, and yours is so clear.
We know the reason why, but it. Really does, I think, help for people to hear that they're not alone or that's not like some weird phenomenon. Like, why am I feeling like this? I mean, to your point, and people might think they have like a condition, they might think that, oh, I gotta get antidepressants or an anxiety medication, all these things.
And not to bring in medical advice, but certainly being aware that. Doing that work to understand just what a difference the sleep component plays on our physiology and having that awareness can help us know that maybe nothing's wrong innately, and it's just how it is for now. Okay. So then what might we see in your morning sleep routine with the idea that how you start our day could impact our sleep?
Yeah, so I love early morning sunlight. You know, if I can, uh, it's usually our 2-year-old that wakes up first and he is like, pitter, pattering up the steps. And if I can get. Deck and just get some sunlight. Um, I like to move my body and I like to just do some simple kind of like opening, right? Open my chest, open my shoulders, get nice and tall and just like warm up the body a little bit.
Yeah, combine
that with some nice deep breathing. Like we are kind of turning up the volume, right? I, my arousal level is going up, my cortisol is rising, the sun is up. Like I want to embody that with the movement and the breath practice that I choose. Um, and then hydrate. Like my non-negotiable is like a big, big glass of water with a squeeze of lemon and some salt.
You know that that's before anything else. You know, like I might feel like, oh, I was up three times last night with the kids. I really want a coffee. Coffee gets delayed, right? I need my sunlight, I need my movement, and I need my hydration before I engage.
Sure. Totally. So good. Okay. And I'm similar to you too, like the magic of the mornings and, but, and you, especially in Hawaii.
Oh my God, beautiful. So, great. And then what might we see in your environment on your nightstand or in your space before bed?
So blue light blockers, right? If I, I really try and. Steer away from doing any work at night, but sometimes it's unavoidable. You know, it, sometimes I do have to be on my laptop or I have to finish something off.
So if I need to be working after seven o'clock, I've got blue light blocking glasses on. Yeah. Um, and have a, a nice sleep mask, like a Amanda sleep mask. Like the house we live in here has got like amazing skylights right above the bed. Beautiful for stars. But our room is so bright.
Yes, right,
because like there's no light pollution where we are in Hawaii.
Like so it's really bright night skies and that like beams into these skylights. And I could walk around the room in the middle of the night and I can see, I'm like, uh, I have a nice man to sleep mask because I need that kind of darkness.
Totally. I love that. And I also like the simplicity of that.
That's like a theme we see for throughout this podcast that a lot of people that are like pretty settled on their sleep, sleep's working. It's like minimal too. So they have like 80,000 gadgets and things to try to sleep. Yeah. Other
thing is a little roll of tape. I, I do tape my mouth. Um, I've been a, I was a lifelong mouth breather, and if I don't have that time, I'll, I'll revert back to that.
Um, totally. I get it all nights that I'm up with the kids and I'll wake up and I'm like, oh, I can really feel that. I was probably breathing through my mouth while I slept last night. Like, yeah, just compounds the broken sleep. Like it's totally, even.
Yeah. So for the sleep that you're getting, we want it to be quality.
Totally. Yeah. Okay. And then the last question would be to date, what would you say has made the biggest change to the management of your sleep? Or maybe you said another way. Biggest aha moment in managing your sleep.
To me, it's definitely that management of my nervous system throughout the day Yes. Is what determines whether or not I'm gonna sleep well at night and look.
None of us are perfect. I forget this sometimes, and I'll get to the end of the day course, and I'm laying in bed being like, why can't I fall asleep tonight? Yeah. And I like, I'm like, I didn't do, I didn't stop and take a pause today. You know? I didn't do any practices that I am so heavy on and informing my clients.
Yes. And it's like, I really didn't manage one of the systems today. And here's the evidence, right? Yes. I'm laying. 10 o'clock I'm exhausted, but I'm awake.
Yeah. Like
nervous system is struggling to shift into that restorative state because I didn't help it do that throughout the day. Mm.
So that, I
like, as we've been mentioning, that my sleep quality doesn't start the hour before bed.
Actually, I need to be a little bit more intentional with my state throughout the day if I'm wanting to be able to fall asleep, you know, and stay asleep that night.
So good. And I so appreciate you kind of sharing, even for someone like yourself that is in this conversation around breath, that we can still have these peers, oh shoot, the day got away from me.
But by seeing that, knowing that. It's such a difference in empowerment versus the person that has no idea that that could help make a difference. So just kinda shedding light on that is gives people an access for Pathway for Action. So really great. And then lastly, for people listening to you and all this wisdom, how can they follow you, work with you?
I know you've got cohorts, you know, tell us all the things.
Best places to find me on Instagram at Breath Buddy therapy. Yes. Um, that's where I'm kind of most active. We run a, a practitioner program, so those that do work in health and work with clients or in education that are wanting to really integrate this idea of, as we've spoken about today, you know, health creation and supporting the system and supporting the person.
Um, I don't see breath work necessarily as this kind of method over here that's independent. It, it's really a function of biology. And when we correct that and we restore that and we support that, some pretty cool things happen. Um, for those that aren't practitioners that are more maybe interested in, in looking into their own breath, we've got kind of a five week self-paced course.
Um, I'll pop you a, a code, but if you just use money, that's 20% off. If anyone just wants to dive into, you know, the biomechanics, the physiology, the nervous system, the emotions, right, that can be influenced by breath. Um, that's put that course together as like, where do I start, right? Yes. This world of like, what can I do to begin to.
One, identify maybe some issues that I have with my breathing, and two, start to correct those. Um, and that's where people can go for that.
So, great. Thank you so much for all the work you do. The, you know, eloquent way that you share this information and then all these resources for people to be able to dive in more deeply so it can truly be life changing and certainly support sleep.
Well, it's, I I mirror the same back to you, Molly. Like, I, it's funny, I was actually talking with one of our students about this today. Like, I look at breath and sleep the same way. You know, like,
yeah,
these tools are like, I'm gonna correct my sleep to manage this symptom. It's like, no, no, no, no, no. Yeah.
Without this piece, nothing else works. And I, I feel the same. You know, it's like, without this, this isn't like a, a nice to have, it's a must have. Like if you're not sleeping and if you're not breathing well,
yes. There's
only so much you can do to manage the dysfunction that comes from that. So true. And, you know, rather than seeing these as like isolated tools, we see them as, you know, like integral pieces of this entire system and, and how it functions.
Ugh. So true. And these two conversations are so bi-directional, so interconnected. So I so appreciate you taking the time to share with our audience about this. 'cause so many people are just at a loss of what to do for their sleep. And this is such a clear and tangible path. But, and then beyond even just sleep, of course, impacting their sleep, but their life and their experience of life as a whole.
So really beautiful.
Well, it was amazing to chat Molly. I always enjoy our conversations.
Oh, me too. Well, thank you.
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