Beyond Deep Breaths: Surprising Ways to Reset Your System

Season 4- Episode 46

Today, we're diving into the power of breath—but with a twist. You've probably heard about deep belly breathing or box breathing, but what about humming, sighing, or even yawning as breathwork? In this episode, we’ll explore non-traditional breathwork techniques that help regulate the nervous system in gentle, accessible ways.

If you haven't already, check out Five Ives to see how strategies like this can be applied to adults, especially in the workplace. Five Ives works with staff in high burnout jobs to help them incorporate regulation strategies into their daily routines.

Try at Home Tip: Try one of the techniques from the episode!

References:

Dr. Don Wood Instagram 

Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art by James Nestor

Other related resources from The Behavior Hub: 

Blog Post: 

Podcast:

Our Online Courses: 

Do you have a question? I can answer it in a future episode!

Are you struggling with behaviors and not sure where to begin? Let me help!
Schedule a free discovery call and let me be your Guide.

As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases. 

All Episodes

Transcript:

“We're back.

I love doing this.

Okay, what we're talking about today, because we've just gone through so many episodes on like, what is the nervous system. How does it affect your brain and body? What's the polyvagal theory? I have a lot of sciencey stuff which I love. But some people are like, okay. I'm never listening to this podcast again. Hopefully, I broke it down for you in a way that felt digestible, a little bit more relatable. That's the hope the science is so important. I am such a medial mix of like woo and science, and I like a lot of naturopathic stuff, and I got a lot of preventative care stuff. But I also like things that are grounded in science and research, especially biological science and neuroscience. So nervous system science, it's important to know, but it is sometimes hard to digest all of it. So my goal is always to help you understand the science, but to break it down in a way that you can understand it. So today we're going to stick with the nervous system, but not talk so much science. You, you have the foundation now of what's going on for yourself, your family, your partner, your parents, your in-laws, your children like this is how our brains and bodies work some a little nuanced differences depending on neurodevelopment and trauma histories and things like that. But overall like, that's how the nervous system in a nutshell works.

Today in the next couple episodes I want to talk about. What are some things that you can do now to reset, and I know I threaded some of that throughout the last couple episodes. But I want to take a couple episodes and talk about some specific things. So today we're going to talk about beyond deep breath. So breath work. But I feel like breath work has been so overly talked about that people are like, Yeah, I need to slow down my breathing. Yeah, I need take deeper breaths, whatever. Whatever. Yeah, there are some alternatives to breathwork. There are some different types of breathwork that are more non traditional. So I think sometimes we get bored with hearing the same thing or seeing the same thing.

 

Let me give you some options today that are a little bit different things like breathwork, but with a twist. So possibly a little bit of breath work in here, but exploring some non traditional breathwork techniques that help you to regulate your nervous system and do so in like a really easy, fast, cheap, affordable, affordable, cheap way. Okay, so if you haven't been here for the last couple episodes, in a nutshell, let me try to explain to you the nervous system. You basically, let's like visualize 3 boxes stacked on top of each other, the box in the middle or zones. 3 zones talked about each other. The zone in the middle is what we call your window of tolerance. It's how much can you tolerate before something triggers you or stresses you out and makes you either go up into the top box or down into the bottom box, and neither box on either side is bad. but we don't want to get stuck in either side. So if you go into the top. You're more prone to anxiety. You're more like defensiveness, reactive, tense things like that. But if you go into the bottom box you're more like dissociative, disconnected, numb, withdrawn. So like kind of opposing forces there, one more outward, one more inward again, neither wrong, both designed for our safety, both necessary. The problem is, we're we're leaving our window tolerance a lot, and we're getting stuck in one or both of those other zones up or down, and it's causing our window of tolerance to shrink and those other 2 zones to grow, or one of the zones to grow, and when your window tolerance shrinks and your other zone grows, it becomes a stable state, meaning, if you are a person more prone to anxiety and you keep leaving the window of tolerance and feeling anxious. Your anxiety grows, it's like a muscle, and your window tolerance shrinks. So you're able to tolerate less before you are in that state again. So let's reverse that. Get you back into your window of tolerance. Get you staying in your window of tolerance, and that's going to reduce anxiety and depression. All these things that come from a dysregulated nervous system.

Okay?

So that's kind of the nervous system in a nutshell.

The breath work. Why, it's important or why your breath matters is because of its connection between what it's doing, like physiologically in your body and how it helps to regulate the autonomic nervous system and different breathing patterns or exercises signal different things to the body.

So it's important to find the right breath work options. For where you fall on that nervous system spectrum, because not one thing will work for everyone. So, for example, if you're a person like me who's more prone to anxiety and more in the upper tier, your body's already tight and tense and defensive. So even if that's all on a subconscious level, the last thing you need is to be doing like fast, quick breathing techniques. So I don't want to be breathing like I'm already in anxiety attack. That's not what I want to do. I want to do the opposite. So I want to have really long, slow in and out breath versus someone who's down in that bottom tier. That's more disassociative, disconnected. Their body is kind of like, almost like non alert, like a sleep like in a sleep like state frozen. Think of that like freeze Fawn State. So what they might benefit from, maybe is some some long breaths after they 1st do some short quick in and out breaths, so that like that actually often helps people on that side, because it what it does is it carries blood through the veins. Blood circulates your body better, the blood carries the oxygen, the oxygen goes to your brain and your brain like comes more alert and more aware, and wakes up a little bit. That's a good thing we want that when you're in that like disconnected state that said, When you, when you do come out of that, you're like, Okay, I'm alert and I'm awake. Maybe you feel good, and that's great. Maybe you come out of that. Oh, alert! You come into alertness, and and you need to do something to like just down. Regulate a little bit, so you might do that quick, slow in and out breathwork, but then you might just follow up with just a few slow breaths after it, to just like balance it all out. Okay. So, huge, breath work is huge. It's free. It's easy. I know it's talked about a lot, and it's like, maybe over, talked about. But it it really does have a lot of scientific benefits. We tend to find the time and ways to do it and find the types of breath work that work for us. So what are some nontraditional types of breath work? There are a handful of things I talked in the previous episode about the vagus nerve and the poly vagal theory and vagal toning. One of the things that you can do is a vagal toning activity that's humming. You can look just, and it activates that that vagus nerve and promotes relaxation. It's telling the body the way that it vibrates and the way that it works. It's like chill out, body calm down. So, all you do is you get like, breathe a breath in and hum on the exhale out, or you could just hum, but like a breath work version of this would be, breathe, breath in your nose, and hum on the exhale. And if you want to like do it with kids, you could even differentiate and experiment with like different pitches of humming out, but really helps to address your heart rate variability and and neutralize that and produces your stress. So it's something that could be fun and really easy for kids. Anyhow, it could be really fun. I think it's something to consider adopting.

The other one is, how many of you like when you stressed out, you're overwhelmed. You don't really realize you do this, but you probably do it. It's a really big sigh. a sigh is a reset. So we might do it subconsciously, like our body's actually trying to regulate itself without us being fully aware. But you could actually, just intentionally sigh. And that's the body's built in way of reducing that and releasing that tension. So it's just what we call a psychological sigh. It's a quick inhale, maybe even 2 quick inhales through your nose. followed by a slow exhale through the mouth with a sigh. It's just as it sounds easy as it sounds. It will probably feel a little bit more forced when you think about like a psychological side versus your just natural size, but I would just take 2 breaths in through the nose, and one big, slow exhale with a sigh through the mouth. Think of you know, Yoga, in some senses it's not a spiritual practice. It's a scientific practice. That's why it's called a psychological sigh. But in some ways it might make you think of the like Yogic practice at the end, where they do something similarish, but it helps to shift you from the upper tier. The sympathetic side into the parasympathetic relaxation. It's the opposing force is what we're after here. Another one that's really similar to a sigh is just a yawn. I think sometimes we think we're yawning because we're tired, and that may or may not be true. But sometimes we're yawning because we're not getting enough oxygen into our body and brain. Your body is trying to bring in more oxygen. Take it to your brain, help you relax, help you, calm down, help you think more clearly so. Yes, we can do it when we're tired, and yes, we can do it when we're dysregulated on a subconscious level, but much like saying, you can do it on a conscious level as well. So it helps to reset the brain and to get it into a better place of thinking and acting by taking that oxygen to the brain. So just try like, literally, just try intentionally yawning, and maybe even stretching your body while you're yawning. I talk a lot about when nervous system practices don't work. Try stacking and stacking is when you do 2 regulating things on top of each other, maybe even 3. There's a really soon, probably, to be infamous stacking practice by Dr. Don Wood, where he puts like these 3 things together, to like immediately reset the nervous system. It makes sense to me it's just stacking. But he stacks 3 things here. You could stack a yawn with stretching. and the 2 of them together actually, will dually benefit you and dually regulate you.

Okay, so then I just wanna bring your awareness. This is not like a type of breath work, or even like really a technique, but just trying to bring some awareness to kind of how you breathe or the way that you're breathing. I'm not sure we're all aware of this. So if anyone has ever heard of James Nestor, he wrote a book, I think it's called Just breath or Breathe breath. I think it's called Breath. Beautiful Book. It's been a long time since I read it. I think I read it right when he came out with it. I think it was like during or near the pandemic. But he talks a lot about how we in today's society are mouth breathers and why we are mouth breathers, and why we need to breathe more through the nose and how all of this shapes regulation so essentially what he's saying in the science it's behind it is we, we don't want to be breathing through the nose because it supports more optimal oxygen exchange, which sounds kind of scientific, and it is, but it's just better for you to breathe through your nose like a filtration system, and it just kind of controls the amount of air coming in versus your like big, wide, open mouth. Let's a lot of air in. So I think about this a lot. I read his book. Remember, there's a practice in there about like the native Americans when they have infants, and they see their infants with their mouth open and breathing with their mouth open when they're sleeping. Only when they're sleeping. When the infants are sleeping. They're really they're supposed to have their mouth closed, and a lot of people at night breathe through their mouth when they really should be breathing through their nose. So what they do is when their infants go to sleep, and they can see that their mouths are open. They take their fingers and just lightly lift up the jaw until the mouth closes, forcing the infant to breathe out of the nose, and they'll hold the jaw there until the lips stay closed and they'll keep doing that and what they're doing. It sounds like, I guess it doesn't sound very nice, but it's not painful. It's not intrusive. What they're trying to do is to train the infant's mouth to stay shut when it sleeps, forcing it to breathe out of the nose, and when you do so, having the mouth closed, allows the tongue to actually rest on the roof of the mouth, which actually helps with their jaw and like teeth development. A lot of people have a really narrow like a dentist. I'm like, how do I describe this really narrow? I'm trying to think of the word like your teeth are too narrow, your jaw is too narrow, but if you close your mouth, I mean it doesn't work so much as when you're a doll. It works better when you're a child, and you're like mouth parts. Your mouth parts are forming. but you would, by closing their mouths by allowing their tongue to rest on the roof of their mouth, trying to visualize this while I'm talking about it. The tongue, like forces that the the jaw. The top of the mouth kind of like out like it forces it to develop like out like appropriately. To be honest, it would prevent the jaw from developing so narrow. I guess I'll be really the jaws, the roof of the mouth from from being too narrow, and I think that's so fascinating. I did it with my infant, when I would see his mouth open, or if he would go to sleep, I would close his mouth, and within a second or 2, holding his his jaw up to his lips, his mouth would close, and he'd start breathing out of his nose. And it's interesting now that he's 2 and a half. I watch him sleep, and I'm like, Wow! He always sleeps with his mouth shut like that's kind of crazy. Part of that may have been for me like correcting that as as an infant, or maybe it was just luck. I don't know. But either way the hope is that now he'll develop with a wider mouth, and that that will all be good, and he won't need so much orthodontal work, and I'll breathe better and breathe out of his nose more than his mouth. So all of this, I'm sharing all this because it all goes back to. We get used to breathing through our mouth all the time, and we're not even aware that during our day we're during our day, during the day, during our day, that we are breathing so much through our mouths. If we could be a little bit more intentional about breathing through our nose, it would actually regulate our nervous system a lot more. Okay.

I digress on that one. Wow! I went off on a serious tangent. There breath pauses and extended inhales. So we talk a lot about what breath work of like in and out, and slow and fast, and all these things. But you can play around with some breath, holds and slow exhales to really start to like I'm gonna call it, challenge your nervous system or develop improve. I remember I used to have my nervous system tested for those of you that are curious to know you can actually have this done. I don't. Trying to think what you would do is search to find. We may be a naturopath. But I would just search like nervous system, practitioner or ways to get nervous system like you. You. There are a series of tests that you can kind of do on your own. I worked with a practitioner who I don't even know what his title was. I guess he called himself a chiropractor, slash like natural path. But he had a really deep history that had to do with breath work and breath holds. It was like a series of 6 micro tests, and I would go in like every 8,1012 weeks, and we would do these little micro tests, and he would score me and put me on this like whatever it was graph. And he would say, You're in the parasympathetic side. He never said you're in the parasympathetic side. He would always say you're in the sympathetic side. I would go in there and be. I'm not even sure why I'm having you. I don't know why I'm paying you to have it tested anymore, because I'm always coming in here on the sympathetic side. But it makes sense to me because of my childhood, because of my history because of how I conditioned my nervous system to stay stuck in that side. Naturally, every time I'd go visit him the data would say I was stuck in that side. So all of this said, that was tested through a lot of breath holds and and breath work exercises to get a score. I'm not a nervous system tester. I may be like a nervous system specialist, or like, I have more knowledge than the average person in the nervous system, because I study it, have studied it for a while, but I'm not a practitioner that that tests people's nervous systems. I looked for a while for stress levels and your heart rate variability, which is a part of this, too. But I didn't find a test that like told me you're on the sympathetic side versus you're on the person like a tech test like I couldn't find a watch or a ring or device that would tell me which side of the nervous system I was on. It may be existent now, because it's probably been 2 or 3 years since I've searched for that. But even if you do something like. Inhale for 4 seconds. Hold for 5 seconds and inhale for 6 seconds, or it could be 5, 7, 9, whatever it is. But the point being, you take a longer breath in you, hold it for a couple seconds, and then you breathe out. One of the things that I like for fun would would do is like, see how long I can hold my breath and try and train myself to hold my breath longer. You could say that that's like sounds kind of crazy, Lauren. Maybe I mean, think about I don't know if any of you've ever watched that. It freaks me out because I'm not a big fan of like open water, but open water without an end, like the ocean. Lakes are fine, but diving if you've all ever seen them like professional open water divers, that's all they're doing. They're teaching themselves breath work. They're teaching themselves. Breath holds. They're teaching themselves. Some real serious breath holds. So they do a lot of this type of work to help the nervous systems reset, but also, like scan their lungs, to be able to dive really deep into the ocean, which I think is absolute just chaos. But hey, what we enjoy is different for everyone. So anyhow, breath holds can be really beneficial. But don't go until you're like uncomfortable like. With all of these things, you have to really make your own personal judgments of like, okay, holding my breath that long makes me feel lightheaded or holding my breath. That long makes me pass out, or I just feel freaked out. But then don't, then that's not a good one for you, or consult a medical specialist or a nervous system specialist only to the level of which your body is telling you to stop or slow down. So be very mindful of of all of these things as we. We say them, because breathwork is powerful, but sometimes more powerful than we think.

Okay, how do I integrate these practices into my daily life? That's the biggest thing. It's like, Yeah, great. Okay. I heard all the things I learned all the things, and tomorrow I go back to real life, and I won't remember anything that you said, or at least not remember how to use it. So trying to integrate it into an already existent routine, like if you're having a cup of coffee, but you can come and stuff in between brushing your teeth, driving in the car when I'm trying to adopt a new habit, I really try and pair it with something that already exists, that I naturally do or like sign before I walk in a doorway like if it's an office doorway or a meeting doorway, just whatever it is I need to do to regulate my system, and we might forget we're probably going to forget to do these things. So it's helpful to put sticky note reminders or some type of reminder visually to let you know. Like, Oh, yeah, don't forget to do this thing when you walk through this door, or you make your coffee, or whatever it is, so sticky note reminders. Then try and pair with routines, and then kind of to the best of your ability. I mean, you can put this in a journal, but also just like in the moment track the sensations that come from doing these things, and even the emotions that follow like, even if it's just pausing for a second, just to see how you feel after, to see if it's good to continue, if you need to modify it, to even see if it really works. Sometimes we just go through it. And we're like all right, moving on to the next thing. Well, then, you haven't like integrated it fully, and you somewhat have missed the purpose. So trying to stay present. I think we're as a society such in a rush. And that's the problem, because these things slow you down, but you're only half doing the practice when you slow down to actually do the practice. But you don't do the integration work after. And I say that as I'm preaching to myself to do the same thing. But I'm just sharing with you because it's been shared with me, and I'm trying to adopt it myself. We're all trying to do better. All works in progress. Okay?

And then just again, experiment, trial and error and definitely listen to your body's own feedback, and if you're getting some weird responses, make sure you schedule with a medical, professional or therapeutic practice practitioner, whatever it is that you feel like you need to get the feedback from a professional that you may need just always check in with your body.

Okay, here's the last thing. Oh, note that breathwork or your breath is like the simplest, yet the most powerful. I think, one of the most powerful tools for regulation. So don't forget that you don't have to do just standard breath work. You could hum, you could sigh, you could yawn, you could experiment with breath patterns or breath holds. It's not necessarily a right or wrong way. It's just feeling out what works for you. So the try at home tip I'm going to share with you is just to choose one of the above and integrate it with a routine or a sticky note, whatever it is, but humming, sighing, yawning, focusing on nasal versus mouth breath again. You're trying to focus on nasal, and then breath holds your breath pauses. Those are the the ones the 5 different to try and integrate. So that's your try to home tip.

And that is it for today's episode of returning to us podcast. Don't forget your try at home tip, which is to pick one of the 5 breathwork ish options from above. And don't forget that if you are looking for more support in the areas of stress trauma behavior, the brain, just like organizational wellness really is what it's under, Jessica, Dr. Jessica Doring and I would love to be a part of that shift for your organization. So we created 5 Ives to work with organizations that are in a more like survival, stressed out state declining culture and burnout of organizations with secondary trauma exposure. Some medical policing, some educational nonprofits like these are all organizations that are like high stress or higher stress fields that people burn out of, not because they don't love the work so much, but more because they just it's a lot. It takes a big toll on your body and your your brain and your nervous system. So how do we? Here is how this is one of the ways of our many ways. We come in and we run programming as an organizational whole, not just the frontline staff, not just a leadership. Both. We address the practice, the policy, the people and we help everyone get from a stressed out survival state into a thriving, hiving state of well-being and wellness. So 5 Ives website has all the data and information that you need about that. It also has our contact on there. If you want to reach out to us, we would love to work with you, or if you know anyone who could benefit from our work. Send them our way. And don't forget to lock in what you learned today by actually by actually doing it by doing the integration work. Okay? And don't forget to subscribe to future episodes so that you can learn more ways to hack your brain and nervous system until next episode. I'm Lauren Spiegelmeyer, and thank you for joining us.”

 

Calming & Coping, Emotional RegulationLauren SpigelmyerComment