Barbell Shrugged - The Three R’s of Building Resilience w/ Emily Hightower, Anders Varner, Doug Larson, and Dr. Andy Galpin Barbell Shrugged #665

Episode Date: October 26, 2022

As an Educator and Coach at SH/FT, Emily Hightower leverages her expertise in the neurophysiology of trauma and resilience to help clients master their stress response and improve their quality of life. By combining over 25 years of experience as a breathing expert, yoga teacher, river guide, and wilderness EMT, Emily empowers high performers to disrupt limits, align with nature, and heal their bodies and minds. Emily developed SH/FT’s Skill of Stress course and teaches the N=1 Exposure Experience and Mentorship program with Brian MacKenzie. Her experiential teaching approach enables clients to understand and direct their stress response to drive optimal performance under pressure while promoting long-term balance. Before joining SH/FT, Emily founded Intrinsic, where she helped combat veterans, athletes, and clients recovering from substance abuse resolve past traumas and gain clarity using a science-based approach and tools such as breath, exposure, somatic yoga, archery, and integrative nutrition. Earlier in her career, Emily’s practice was based in a neurology clinic, where she integrated her approach with cutting-edge neuroscience and research. Her clients include the United States Special Operations Command Adaptive Care Unit and other Veterans services in the US and Abroad. She also served as the Education Director for the Headwaters Institute, facilitating river education seminars on 28 watersheds in the US and Chile. Emily is a Master Yoga Teacher with 16,000+ hours of teaching experience specializing in Pranayama Breathing. She lives with her husband, Brian Hightower, and their son and loves to ski, run rivers, and bow hunt. In today’s episode of Barbell Shrugged you will learn: How to participate with you physiology and stop fighting it How respiration affects your state of being How to test CO2 sensitivity How to test your metabolic fitness through breath work How to get someone to calm down without telling them to calm down The three R’s of building resilience Why movement is so important to connect with breathing and bracing Surface work vs. Deep work Should you be meditating or hyperventilating to build resilience To learn more, please go to https://rapidhealthreport.com Connect with our guests: Emily Hightower on Instagram Anders Varner on Instagram Doug Larson on Instagram Dr. Andy Galpin on Instagram Coach Travis Mash on Instagram Dan Garner on Instagram

Shrugged family, this week on Barbell Shrugged, we are hanging out with Emily Hightower, which is super cool. She runs a company with Brian McKenzie called Shift Adapt, and they have a mentorship to help you build stress resilience. Dr. Andy Galpin actually went out to a seminar that they were hosting and immediately came back

and said, we have to get Emily on here. And as the universe aligns itself, I obviously haven't spoken much about this on the podcast, but I'm going through some very crazy, stressful, high stress situations in my own family. So this, not in my immediate family, my dad was in the hospital for a couple months, had emergency aortic valve replacement, super crazy stuff without getting into all the details, but it's been a very stressful time. And I talked a little bit about that in the show here, just some of the like physiological changes that happened to me over the couple of months of dealing with that stress, as well as

just like the day to day happenings of life and family and business. And it's been a it's been a wild couple months. And what Emily walks through in this podcast is not just important as far as physiology and health is concerned, but it was also very topical for me and very helpful. And it's kind of like understanding where I'm at and there's a very strong possibility. I'm hoping to join her mentorship actually here in the couple in the coming weeks, just because I recognize that there's stuff in me and stuff in my physiology and my stress levels that has really changed that I don't want to be permanent changes. And I think we do a good job in the show of kind of like breaking down what does stress and stress resilience look like and how can you start to work on these things if you are going through traumatic experiences or do have

anxiety? And it feels like the weight of the world is like piling up on you and there's nowhere to go. So I hope we do a good job of helping you through some of that stuff. I want to thank Emily for coming on. This is a phenomenal podcast. And as always, if you want to go check out rapidhealthwithwork.com, that is where you can see Dan Garner read my labs. And that is all we're going to talk about as far as Rapid Health Report today. So get over there and check out the video. Schedule a call with me if you have anything that you would like to discuss on training, health, nutrition, and we'll get you rolling. But friends, Emily Hightower, let's get into the show. Welcome to Barbell Shrugged. I'm Anders

Varner, Doug Larson, Dr. Andy Galpin on the show today, and Emily Hightower from Shift Adapt. As Andy was just saying, he went to your seminar and immediately ran over and said, we need to have you on Barbell Shrugged today. And you are partners with Brian over at Shift Adapt, and you need to know everything that happens at your seminar. And as we were talking about before the show, the idea of stress is really kind of like this big bucket that nobody, that people really struggle to understand. They know it exists.

They know some of it's good, some of it's bad. But I really like framing it in the idea of understanding like how to build resilience in your body. Is that a, is that a decent framework and kind of like walking through your background on how you got to this place and who you work with and how stress and resilience kind of play together? Yes. For me, it's always been about helping people participate with their physiology, understanding that, you know, stress

is stress and it isn't that sexy to talk about. It's exhausting just to say the word stress. We're all tired of talking about it, but to both Brian McKenzie and myself, stress is the opportunity. It is how nature builds and evolves intelligence adaptations. So we like to change and kind of flip that on its head and even go beyond resilience into like adaptations that really help you take agency over your life. Yeah. And your mentorship, you guys break this down into two main pieces, which I'd love to dig into. Really like the surface work, you call it, and then the deep work. What is the difference in those?

Yes. The surface section of mentorship, you know, it's an 18-week program. It's almost five months long. And the whole first half, we are training people to participate with their physiology, with surface stress, and just understanding the physiology of the respiratory system and how that impacts states in the human nervous system. So we do this robust training on the window of tolerance, helping people identify their signals in their body when they're exposed to different types of stress. And then in the second half, the deep work is where we apply the skills from

surface work to your personal life. So everybody's got trauma. Everybody's got some kind of trigger addiction, behavior, and perception patterns that are holding us back. And rather than talk about those problems or medicate to change your mood, we help people use the surface work of physiology, not the surface, but the surface work from mentorship to apply intrinsic skills, to carve capability and adaptation to those triggers. Yeah. Can we hop back a quick second? I think it's important. People will need to understand a little bit about your background and who you actually work with.

To clarify, this is not yoga. This is not clinical psychology. So we're not talking about therapy. This is a whole, it's not different. It's not better. It's not worse. It's just different. So this is what you do professionally. So can you, you know, maybe walk us through that, that the types of people you

work with, the situations you deal with and that whole kind of background that'll understand. Sure. I got my start in mountain medicine, emergency medicine. So I was learning about physiology through illness and trauma. And I worked on a mountain ambulance for five years, and then had that point where I either needed to pursue emergency medicine deeper or go on to something else. And so I went on to the preventative side. And I studied pranayama breathing with some yoga masters, Deborah Cohen, Rod Stryker, Ed Harold, and now Brian McKenzie is another teacher and partner. And through 20 years or so, I've worked with movement, breath as medicine, and the neurology

of trauma. So I've been really lucky in my career to find myself in really unique populations. I've worked for about, I don't know, since 2003 with Challenge Aspen. And so we do a military-based program called CAMO. And so year round, I work with combat veterans that are experiencing post-traumatic stress disorder, the so-called, and all kinds of physical and neurological challenges from war, from combat. And then I worked, I was based in a neurology clinic before COVID. So I got to really learn a lot about neurology care, biofeedback, breath applied to certain conditions about neurology care, biofeedback, breath applied to certain conditions

in neurology care. And lastly, I worked at a trauma center that focused on substance use and abuse. So all of that gave me this exposure to humanity to realize that it truly doesn't matter what happens to you. I can tell you that from personal trauma and from the work I've done with these populations, there is something special inside of people who truly transcend trauma. And it's not because they talked about it the most. It's because they learned how to really engage with their physiology to make different adaptations to those conditions. Yeah. So one of the things I think is so unique about what you've done and the work that I experienced was that last part.

It is saying, okay, let's, let's use, let's work through, we'll just call it psychological, but how's that connecting to physiology? And how do we actually train both these systems as a bi-directional loop rather than treating them as separate things, right? So, oh, your physical fitness is over here and then your mental health is over here. These are one, and then we can actually work together. I've just never seen a system that actually runs full circle like that until I saw what you're doing. And that's why I got so excited. Oh, that's so cool. Well, it works

for people and we're learning more all the time. And so for me, it's just incredibly rewarding and aligns with a deep purpose rooted in my own history to kind of figure this stuff out. Yeah, there's a way to connect people to more than just their pain or their desire. And in real time, feel this intelligent system of the body that like you said said there's no separation between the heart the head the lungs these three different systems the gut for they're all the same they're an ecosystem yeah i feel like i have a a good general sense of what you do but can you

and for the audience as well can you provide some like tangible examples like some case studies of people you worked with where you can like tell their their before situation kind of how you helped them and then the the post results uh sure well you guys are are strong humans so i can think of one example i got to work with a uh strongman competitor So super power lifter, athlete who had a very traumatic incident in the gym. And I won't go into details. And it's his private story. But it was the kind of trauma that took months, a year to recover from surgeries, all this stuff. So when he came to me, he wanted to understand why he would walk into the gym now that he was prepared for training again. And he would get this systemic trauma response.

His breath would jack up. His heart rate would jack up. You'd get tunnel vision. He couldn't connect to this thing that gave him so much purpose and joy before. And so with him, like with everybody, I started with the surface work, let's understand and assess your breath. And real quick, a breath assessment showed me that he had, first of all, specialized in bracing the diaphragm through powerlifting. And it's chicken and egg, right? If you are bracing that sucker all the time,

which you need to do when you're under load to protect your spine, that's going to have an impact on your respiratory mechanics, which will impact your physiology, which will impact your chronic state. So I always do a breath and stress assessment. I have some clinical instruments I use to help people identify symptoms and take inventory of what their what their body's telling them. And then the work progressed where where I could give him some tools to identify what his story, what from his story was traumatic. So, yes, we talk about what happened. But then instead of going over it to analyze, like, how did that make you feel? Tell me again, let's talk through it. And instead of that, we identify, okay, when you stand under that barbell, preparing to do a squat, what is going through your breath, what's going through your muscles, and there's a somatic, a physical response where his feet are no longer grounded, right? He's, he's lifting up in his stress response into his brain and the brain starts to flip. The higher mind goes offline because the squat was his position that caused the trauma, right? So I help people rebuild capacity by titrating that stress with things like, like really

productive breath skills that downregulate system, change your neurology. So I'm packing a lot into this description. But basically, he through training is learning how to go into that environment. And when his body hits a certain threshold, rather than push through it, he's got to back off and downregulate, reconnect, use some neuroplasticity tools to change the thought associations. And then so you're training differently, instead of reacting to the conditioning. Now he's using physiological neurological tools to engage with his stress response and change his association with that. So now he's back to lifting full time,

regaining strength and capacity. And lastly, there's an ongoing breath training that doesn't happen in the gym to improve those functional breath waves so that he can manage physiology throughout the day. So it's in sleep, all of it's connected, right? So, um, he, like many people I've worked with have identified those limbic. I can talk about that if you guys are interested, like some of the brain-based stressors, but we encode stress in the midbrain and the limbic. I would actually love to hear about that. And hopefully this helps lead into it because a lot of people, when they hear that word stress or trauma, there's like a scale of one to 10. And I actually recently went through an experience where my number 10 was such a new level 10

that I didn't even know was possible. Full body collapsing, unable to stand up, a level of just emotion that I didn't know existed inside me. And had you asked me before that experience, I've been like, yeah, I have stress. Yeah. I'm sure there's traumatic things that have happened to me in my life, but all of it plays out on like a spectrum of, this is very easy to, this is very hard. And then the mental side of like how you perceive all those. And many people may not have had some giant traumatic single incident that has happened in their life. And their level

10 is really like someone else's level four. So how do we meet them where they're at on a physiological level, as well as like, what is the intervention in there? It's like, you've, you've probably worked with people that have had these massive traumatic, actually like experiences. And then all of a sudden you hear someone that like hates their job and they keep going back and you're like, how do we have a conversation that meets people where they're at? And then what are the interventions along the way to be able to scale that up and down to meet people where they're at? Shrug family, I want to take a quick break. If you are enjoying today's conversation, I want to invite you to come over to rapidhealthreport.com.

When you get to rapidhealthreport.com, you will see an area for you to opt in in which you can see Dan Garner read through my lab work. Now, you know that we've been working at Rapid Health Optimization on programs for optimizing health. Now, what does that actually mean? It means in three parts, we're going to be doing a ton of deep dive into your labs.

That means the inside-out approach. So we're not going to be guessing your macros. We're not going to be guessing the total calories that you need. We're actually going to be doing all the work to uncover everything that you have going on inside you. Nutrition, supplementation, sleep, and then we're going to go through and analyze your lifestyle. Dr. Andy Galpin is going to build out a lifestyle protocol based on the severity of your concerns, and then we're going to also build out all the programs that go into that based on the most severe things first. This truly is a world-class program, and we invite you to see step one of this process

by going over to rapidhealthreport.com. You can see Dan reading my labs, the nutrition and supplementation that he has recommended that has radically shifted the way that I sleep, the energy that I have during the day, my total testosterone level, and my ability to trust and have confidence in my health going forward. I really, really hope that you're able to go over to rapidehealthreport.com, watch the video of my labs, and see what is possible. And if it is something that you are interested in,

please schedule a call with me on that page. Once again, it's rapidehealthreport.com, and let's get back to the show. That's a great question. Anders, I love it. Right? Yes. Every time I have a good question, use that one.

And every time I have a bad question, you'd be like, well, Anders. Well, Anders, you know, this is really at the meat of the work Brian McKenzie and I are doing

together and speaks to the trauma work and the approach that I found over the last 20 years or so, which is that you cannot compare pain and trauma. You can't compare stressors because, you know, riding horseback, bareback is thrilling for one person and traumatizing for another.

We can't compare. There's too many variables. I know a lot of people that I work with that quote, have it all, that don't feel deserving of their problems, but they're operating at a level 10, level eight, and they're stressed, stressed, quote, every day to a place that's causing chronic health conditions. And so what we do is we teach people the data and the science of healthy ranges of state in the respiratory system with sleep, with basic tests that we have that help you participate with the central nervous system,

so that people start to develop a baseline, you know, CO2 tolerance, these things, and they are, they are objective enough that it helps people see what their body, this is the surface work, learn what the body's trying to tell you, regardless of your lifestyle, your stressors, et cetera. And then the next step is to really deeply validate someone's experience that whatever your problems are, whatever's causing you stress, it's valid. And Hey, if you can't point to that, then you're dealing with modern life, which is a state of extreme physical disconnection and extraordinary mental overstimulation. And that alone without any trauma in your history that you can point to can cause the conditions of instability, reactivity, and chronic health problems.

So the first step is to start learning what your body's trying to tell you. And then learn how to engage skillfully with breath, not from a protocol perspective of like, use these breath protocols to change your state. No, learn how breath feels in your body. Learn what the signals are for anxiety and tension at the top of the inhale. And maybe don't hyperventilate if you've heard that that's great, but you now have the data and the inner resources to feel what a breath is doing to you. Then we give you a full quiver, if you will, of breath techniques that you can match to your physiological needs. Yeah. I actually, for the first time while going through this, recognize the physiological changes that happen when real anxiety, like real stress comes across

you. And I started to notice that just in like regular conversations, like driving down the road to whatever with my wife and talking about literally like nothing, like household things going on. And I would stop in the middle of a sentence and go, like, just like this, like massive deep breath. And I'd be like, why am I so out of breath right now? Like, I'm not out of shape. Like I know how to breathe, but all of a sudden, like it felt like there were like the amount of weight that I was carrying and like everything had moved into my lungs and into my chest to the point

where I was like, I could feel the anxiety building, even though like nothing was actually happening at that specific time. And I can only imagine like, luckily we were able to get through all of the stuff in a positive way and everyone's good. But like, if that were to carry on in your life for one year, two years, like you're just carrying this for extended periods of time, getting into the, like the physiological side, you were talking about the getting into the brain and how it all links together. What

actually happens as your body starts to break down? Because I was legitimately terrified when I started to feel these changes inside myself. The lung breathing itself felt like it was step one. And had I carried this thing on for months and months and months, it would have clearly gone to like the next, the next phase, whatever that is. So how do people start to recognize that and then take action before it gets to, it's okay. You're like upper lung breathing or upper respiratory breathing at stage one, but how do they recognize that? And then before it gets to what is stage two, three, four? Yeah.

Well, first of all, what an intense experience. I'm glad to hear that things have stabilized for you. And what a doorway for you for compassion, because you are a high level coach who work with people who have probably experienced that and you see it. And doesn't it give you a different level of compassion for what it takes from your life to feel like that? Anxiety has to be the most crippling thing that exists in this world. Yeah. And over time, the idea of being scared of what's about to happen is terrifying.

Yeah. Well, you just said it really well, being scared of what's about to happen. And so on a biochemical level, what's happening when you're experiencing those states is basically when you are in a rested, ready state, you, your breath matches your rate of exertion. So the breath is cued by levels of carbon dioxide in the bloodstream. And as that, as those levels build through exertion or exercise, it triggers a faster breath rate to manage the pH of your blood, right to kind of time the breathing with that metabolic demand. So in our brains, we have some chemoreceptors, like in here on the neck that are sensing those levels of carbon dioxide in the blood, and they are anticipatory. So it will change your breath, based on those levels to anticipate your metabolic

needs. When you have what's called interoceptive fear, which means a felt sense of fear in your tissues in your body. And that can include pain, physical pain. It can include a sense of inflammation. Something's wrong in my body. My systems aren't working right. Or being so-called triggered or activated by something that you associate with danger. When you have interoceptive fear, your brain becomes more sensitive to carbon dioxide. So this means that means that the brain now thinks that your levels of CO2 are higher than they are.

And it triggers a more rapid breath rate. Why? Because when you breathe more rapidly, you breathe more shallowly, more likely through the mouth. And this upper lung tissue releases stress hormones when it's activated and pumping faster than your metabolic beat. Anytime you're over breathing, you're pumping stress hormones through your body. So that's kind of step one is like understand your breath rate and what that's doing to your physiology. And so all that is to say on a biochemical level, it's happening in these layers of limbic conditioning, what you're afraid of, tissue health, fatigue, those can trigger over-breathing. A lot of people have low CO2 tolerance scores

that we start working with. And then they start to take care of themselves and sleep better and eat differently and mostly breathe better. Yeah. And the CO2 tolerance numbers rise pretty quickly. Now they're not making metabolic gains in a two week time. They're not changing their metabolic efficiency that quickly. They're getting back to their healthy baseline. They've been operating with CO2 sensitivity chronically. And when you operate like that, everything starts to feel like a threat.

Yeah. We do the CO2 tolerance tests with our executive clients. And Andy, you can jump in here and comment on this as well. But for the CO2 tolerance test, can you explain how to do that and kind of what good standards are for the results? And then really, you just stated a few things about what those scores mean, but how to improve those scores and just kind of a general idea of what CO2 tolerance test is for. Sure. On our website at shiftadapt.com, you can go to get started with breathwork. And there's a whole page to help you learn how to take the test, enter your scores, and then get started with breathwork with cadences and apnea protocols that match your CO2 tolerance fingerprint. Mackenzie and Rob Wilson helped develop some of that on the shift site. They borrowed a lot from the free diving community. The CO2 tolerance test is not a, like an official evidence-based test.

It is really helpful for people because there is enough data to show a range of, of like a range of where you should quote should be for different health parameters. So, um, what we've learned over time is that, you know, when you take the CO2 tolerance test, well, first, how you do it is basically for smooth breaths. And on the fourth one, you time the slowest exhale you can make. You press start. When you start exhaling, you press stop if you hold your breath or run out of air. And so the test itself requires cognitive engagement, mechanics of respiration. So you can really participate with a full breath wave.

It's also a great teaching tool for that when you're leaking out air as slowly as you can. So it usually takes people four or five tests before they can trust their data. But what we see is that anything under 20 shows that you are either operating in that high sympathetic zone of anxiety, and you've got CO2 sensitivity. And you'll see that in your executives or your athletes right away. As they're trying the CO2 tolerance test, there's like no sense of like, there's a fear almost to managing and controlling the breath. Just by managing that slow exhale, there's a sense of anxiety. Or it means that they're extremely deconditioned, that there's a sense of anxiety. Or it means that they're extremely

deconditioned, that there's a lot of inflammation, injury or health issues going on COPD, whatever it is. And then the range from 20 to 40 is kind of average. 40 to 60 is someone who has worked on their metabolic fitness, and probably has some breath control. And then 60 to 80 is more of an elite athlete, or breath practitioner, anything over 80 is like free diver freak show. Incredible. So if that's helpful, and then so I don't want people to freak out if your numbers under 20. That right back to the beginning of the conversation, that's your opportunity to start listening to what your body's trying to tell you instead of beat yourself up. There's no gold star

for having, you know, 45 or 50 to your CO2 tolerance test. Nobody cares. The breath doesn't lie. And if you can learn how your cells are working with carbon dioxide, you can train it, and you can widen your tolerance to all kinds of stress. One of the things I love about it is you get two metrics, and you've sort of said this already, Emily, but number one, you get a crude, a very crude, but estimate of someone's actual metabolic fitness, and so that number is going to give you a range. And so let's say if you do this test every day and you're at 30 seconds, some days you might be 35, some days you might be 25, but you're not going to go from 30 seconds to 60 the next day. So that range is,

it's generally like five to seven plus or minus like that. So that, that, that, that alone tells you kind of roughly where you're at but that change up five today or down five today is a very good indicator of your acute stress and so i love it because it tells you a little bit about fitness but then it tells you a lot about uh psychological stress or whatever the proper term is there so you can kick kind of like both of these insights from the exact same very simple test and then you can kick kind of like both of these insights from the exact same, very simple tests. And then you can use that for quite,

quite literally state and trade anxiety, which is quite nice. There were like three areas from your seminar I would love to get into. And I'll throw these out there and we can probably don't have time for all of them, but we'll see which one you guys want to do first. Or Emily, what you're most excited about. One of them is, you talked a lot about proper ways to help people calm down, and the whole idea of telling someone, take a deep breath, is probably a terrible cueing strategy. Is it as good as telling somebody,

just calm down. Calm down. Scream it at them. What's wrong with you? Just calm down. Get your shit out what's wrong with you just calm down get your shit together i always like this that's one uh your three r's of stress control i thought was just brilliant um maybe that's actually a good play to start and then last one is um this entire idea of stress resilience what's that mean and then kind of on that like who should be doing be doing upregulation breathing? Who should be doing down? Who is it bad to do downregulation breathing for? Who is it bad to do upregulation for? Like giving a little bit insight on those things, because we hear Wim Hof and we hear, you know, all these other, like, take some relaxing nasal breath. But as you showed, that's not a good idea for some people,

in most cases. So that stuff would be awesome. So I don't know any of those you guys want to start up, but those are the three major areas. I was like, man, I would love to, for people to hear more about these things. I love it. It's so fun for me that you were there. It was great to meet you first of all, and really always great to meet me. Always.

It's always so great to meet Andy. That's a unanimous thing that he gets all the time. Well, I'll start with the three R's because that's sort of the most helpful framework that's worked for me with these different populations I mentioned. And it really emerged through working with the military the most, because talk about a population that you're not going to go in talking about wellness and even psychology. They have been through most of the people I work with have been through a lot at the VA trying to get well and haven't found anything that works. So I was excited over the decades of doing this to see that if I could teach people to read their state, meaning really read what your body's trying to tell you. Then regulate is the second R.

And by regulate, we mean connect, not fix, but really connect to these intrinsic tools to coax your nervous system in desired directions. And the third is reinforce to start having long-term practices that have some momentum. And that's where the neuroplasticity and some of the neuroscience comes in with practices like NIDRA to reinforce desired healthy response patterns. So that's really the pattern that I've coupled with Brian's work with N equals one, which I love. It's just, you're the only sample in the experiment.

One sample size and yeah, read, regulate, reinforce. Yep. So read, understand better what your body is telling you, control that, or at least acknowledge it. Maybe it's a better way to say it rather than control it. And then three, actually reinforce the pattern that you want to happen. So instead of having every time you do X, you get this response that you don't like, reinforce a new pattern with this combination of physiology and psychology. So little things like,

I think you give the example of public speaking. So instead of saying like, I'm nervous because I hate public speaking, it's just I'm nervous. Yes. Or, you know, hey, when you're about to give a presentation, if that makes you nervous, now the body is running hot in the sympathetic. You've got some anxiety. If you don't use this approach, you're likely to fall into the way that our brain and body are wired, which is you feel a threat assessment, and it makes you more anxious. And so now you're tethering the association of public speaking with anxiety, unless you do something to read and disrupt that response. And it doesn't happen through thinking about it. It doesn't happen through pumping yourself up, although thoughts are things and they're helpful. Things like your breathing and some somatic reflexes we did in the training.

If people want to go deeper into how your nervous system in the body's positions actually affect your state. So yes, once you read it, instead of spinning into story, you regulate, you connect and coax a desired arousal state for the situation. I'm not sure if you guys are familiar. Most people have heard of things like, oh, I'm a night owl or I'm a morning person, right? Like everyone thinks that these happen and there's good research on that. There's also good research on the fact that that is mostly pattern groups. And so you're a morning person, probably because everyone in your house was a morning person, quote unquote. So it's just a pattern you've had for a very long time. And when you actually switch that pattern, the body

changes very quickly to the other one. And so this is just another example of, this is a situation that you have established. and you actually take that to be an internal thing that is you like this is your genetics. And that's actually not the case. Oh, my mom hated public speaking. I hated public. It's really just it could be. It also is in large part a pattern association that you had happened and then you just reinforced with your, with your practices. Yes. Always reinforcing something. It's just, are you participating in it consciously or not? The I believe it was in the Buddha's brain when I read that book. And there's the analogy of like throwing darts and that we only really need to throw one dart at ourself, the initial stressor.

And that and story that goes along with it is always the one that actually creates the most stress where it's like, I hate public speaking and I've always been bad at this. And I always throw up from nervousness and no one's going to like, and it's like the first dart is that you're just standing in front of a bunch of people by yourself and presenting the next seven stories that you tell yourself about how bad it's going to be, or just that is the reinforcement of why you suck at it, why you struggle, why you're going to fail, why you're going to not do well at whatever this, this thing is. And that's really like that analogy kind of always stuck with me. And I actually, now that I, in like thinking about it many times, I recognize it in so many people where that, that and piece of the initial stressor is always the one that actually causes the biggest problems. Because if you said, I'm scared of public speaking, it's like, okay, well, I'm scared of a lot of things, but it doesn't mean we have to stop doing it.

We just go face it. And it gets less scary the more we practice. But if it's, and I do this and I do that, and this is going to have, and these people will think this about now, all of a sudden we're reinforcing how terrifying this thing is and all the bad consequences that maybe don't even actually exist. We call that story fondling. Look at that. Fondling the story.

I like that. Just got interesting. The Buddha and fondling the same conversation. Here we go. So what is the proper response to the situation? So you're about to go, I hate public speaking. I'm on there. I sense, I feel that all these are going on.

What should I do? Well, first read the state, read those signals. The more you practice it, the better you get at identifying early onset of anxiety, which as you know, research shows, I think it's 47 minutes before a panic attack. There are really strong signals from your body that most people miss. So the better you get at reading state, the earlier you can intervene and intercept anxious tension in the muscles and the belly and the breath. And then regulating means that you are very simply connecting your state of arousal to the situational demand. So if I don't want to be

super anxious, because anxiety is not always bad, there's a place for it. Sometimes flipping your lid and being, you know, operating from past conditioning is a survival response. But if you don't want to be in survival mode on stage, then you've got to participate with great breath mechanics, extending your exhale, working with our breath gears to get to nasal breathing, which is not always available. And you don't want to force that either. So in the training, we help people understand two basic things with breathing. One is that the nose is a carving tool. It helps you carve connection to the mind and body and to certain, certain states of awareness. The mouth is a release valve when we're talking CO2 sensitivity. So if you're too amped up to use your nose and you force it,

you're going to create more CO2 sensitivity and more fear. So we use a gearing system to help people participate with the release valve of the mouth in a gearing setup until they're ready to gear down into that deep downshift nasal only. And the second thing is that horizontal mechanics instead of vertical, like reading that you're breathing with your secondary stress, vertical muscles, and participating with those more lateral intercostals and ribs and more full diaphragmatic, even pelvic floor practices can instantly create a chemical shift without you needing to change what's happening. You're still about to give a public talk. That's not changing unless you get so anxious, you can't do it. Um, I'm curious how movement and the breathing side play together in this. Anytime I'm around Brian, we were just out in a Boulder together. And then

when we all get together and Galpin puts us through the workouts, there's always a movement piece to it. And I think this is one of the things that really separates kind of like, maybe like the yoga side of the breathing where people think like, I'm just supposed to sit here and meditate. And maybe like the more performance side that you guys are working on.

What is the relationship there? And why is the movement piece so important with the work that you guys do? Well, Anders. Great question. See, great question. This is how you get on the show a lot. Basic. Breath is a movement. So if you're not employing movement to create healthy mechanics with your breathing, then your breathing's going to be less optimal. And that's going to limit your tolerance to stress and limit shapes you can make in your body. So they're bi-directional, right? If you're moving well, you're breathing well. If you challenge your breath in certain shapes and movement patterns, you're going to improve your efficacy in those shapes. And in those movement patterns,

you're also going to be improving the mechanics of how you breathe. So they're, they're inseparable in the work that we do. You know, um, Danny Yeager is our head of daily training on the shift membership site and every workout he programs includes different breath practices to tune you in to how, say at the bottom of the squat, what's your opportunity to employ breath with gearing systems and with bracing in the right way to create more power, more presence, more awareness. And just like we did with that case study, I mentioned having the conversation the whole time around your breathing so that you don't just go into a stress response and lose it.

So there's so much information there, but basically with trauma in my work, I support people to use movement as another doorway if breathing is too difficult. So that's a separate topic, but it's important to know that with the executives and athletes that you guys work with, there are people who will have a braced diaphragm because of a fear response or mechanical conditioning. And you ask them to just breathe deeply into the diaphragm. There's, there's a note that might happen there. They'll bypass it into the belly. They might not be actually functionally breathing unless you're assisting with some feedback. So movement is a way to bypass the pressure, mental pressure associated with breathing is

just so connected to the nervous system, right? So you've got to sometimes use movement to help people feel and open up doorways to healthy breathing without the pressure. Anders just mentioned meditation just a second ago. It seems like there's a lot of crossover with what, when i'm reading about meditation or or mindfulness um you mentioned uh something similar to to the concept of non-judgmental awareness where you're just you're just feeling your feelings without without adding a narrative or adding a story or putting any judgment on how you're feeling um to what extent does what you do cross over with meditation and or mindfulness type training uh of which breath work seems to, you know,

at least like following your breath when meditating or practicing mindfulness seems to be often a part of it from what I understand. Absolutely. In our mentorship with Brian McKenzie, we work with some meditation techniques like open monitoring and connecting body scan work, Nidra, yoga, Nidra or what I call neuro Nidra, are all techniques that we teach to help people drop into that neutral observation state. Because the more you practice it, in your off time, the more it's available for you, when you are flipped out or starting to feel those signals of tension in the body. The more that you can witness your state instead of getting fixated in the story of what's

happening, the more opportunity you have to really connect to those tools. But then there's this whole other side of it with archery, which is something I use with the veterans in our programs a lot. And the archery practice is an example that correlates to a study that HHPF just put out last week. And it's new research in 2022 that studied. They're actually creating a new neurobiological framework for meditation that distinguishes between relaxation-based practices and arousal-based practices. So it turns out what most of us that are into body-based practices have noticed, arousal-based things can create a meditative state.

So in archery, it's an example where there's, there's tension, there's sympathetic stress. It's a weapon. If you're not paying attention, bad things can and do happen. So it's not this passive mindfulness kind of, you know, open monitoring practice. No, you're recruiting sympathetic arousal in order to focus. And so I'm curious about how that relates still. There's more research that needs to be done, but we encourage presence, whether it's through resistance training, trail running, archery, seated breath work. Can you be here now? Can you return to that observer instead of the subjective, subjective pain of your story about what's happening? Yeah, just to hop in there.

Guys, sorry, I was going to throw out that study actually for people because I know exactly which one you're talking about. This is beyond mindfulness and arousal driven modulation of attention control during arousal based activities. So it's just that differentiation between mindfulness and arousal type of breath work, which had previously not been done, but it's just starting to happen now. So these are not the same things and they probably have best practices for each. So I wanted to throw that in before, if people are interested. Sorry, go ahead, Doug. Thank you. Yeah. Something very similar to what you're saying about the archery.

I got invited out with the guys that run a company called Design, not like designing something like graphic design, but like I think it was like a German term, like they sign something like that. But it was a bunch of Navy SEAL guys that were basically doing like long range shooting combined with breath techniques and meditation. And then they had a lot of veterans that came through that program since it was run by a bunch of Navy SEALs. Do you know those guys? I feel like it would be a good matchup. I know those guys. That's amazing. Yeah. I'll take up their information and send it your way. It seems like you guys could collaborate in some way. I would love it. I mean, this is really where a lot of these things we're talking about started clicking for me was through shooting. And I got a chance to coach team SOCOM at the warrior games. And then they're one of my regular groups that comes out. And my archery mentor was a green beret, I guess once and always is a green beret who served for 17 years. And he taught me so much about myself

because of his no bullshit, direct communication style and having the method of shooting to help us kind of merge our work. So I became his breath coach. He became my archery coach. And together we started doing these retreats for combat veterans to, you know, come learn about the breath through something that's fun and engaging and difficult and skill-based. And it's a great time. It's an incredible experience with these guys. So there's a lot there to learn from for me, it's a lifetime thing.

I'm scratching the surface five years in. So can you tell us, Emily, how the two things we got to get out of you for real? I got to know. What do we tell people to calm down when they're freaked out? How do we actually get them to do that? Maybe we can do that one show. But I want to get into the heuristic that I sort of took, which is understanding who should be doing down regulation,

who should be doing up regulation. Yeah. Things like that. So maybe the start, what do you, what do you tell people? You shake them vigorously, look, slap them in the face. Yeah. How do we get those people to calm down? Well, if I want to get punched in the face, I tell them to take a deep breath. If I don't want to get punched in the face, then I first help them understand that the breath gears are something that can be trained. But if they don't

have those, then if they're in a full blown panic, they're in the top gear in and out the mouth, rapid oral. We train that if you can get to the nose on the inhale and to don't worry about the pace, just get to the nose on the inhale. The nose creates suction and pressure that can deepen the range and location of motion of your breathing. And the moment that you're bringing oxygen into the lower lung tissue, you're changing the chemistry. So inhaling through the nose, focusing on horizontal breath on that inhale, exhaling out the mouth with pursed lips to slow the exhale down. And just like a gear on a bike, you don't want to or in a car, you don't want to slam the gear down to nasal nasal, you've got to take your time. So you go from mouth mouth to in the nose out the mouth. And then you can add a pause at the top if that's available. And that will slow things down even more.

Because as you know, we're not needing more oxygen in that moment. We're needing to use CO2 well and slow the breathing and the brain down. So I help them add a pause and then still out the mouth. And once I notice slowing, I'll have them try in the nose, out the mouth, without in the nose, out the nose, without a pause. And so, yeah, they're just gearing down to that nasal nasal working with physiology and mechanics to change the state. Yeah. So in general, the inhale is more associated with sympathetic. Exhale is more associated with parasympathetic. So if you tell someone, take a big, deep breath, their most likely response is to do a bigger,

more exacerbated inhale. Yes. Which is then going to then exacerbate the problem, right? Exactly. Yeah. That's what we went deep into in the seminar. It's like, you don't need to take big breaths to calm down. You need to give an exhale.

And mechanically, the better you exhale, the more rebound space you have to receive an inhale. And when the inhale is with a tone of receiving, you're training the nervous system to receive that life because inhale is sympathetic. It's life inspiration. You've got enough of it when you're panicked. You can't take any more in. So give a fluid, strong, full exhale and just receive the inhale and gear down to the nose when you're ready without force. Love it. Second part then,

getting into those situations. So I'm going to test and see if I got a little bit of the interpretation correctly out of what I got, but a little bit of backward context, but not too much. We've different ways to manipulate your breath will, will bring you up and make you more aroused, more focused. Other ways will bring you down. Right. And we sort of hear in general, the quote unquote Wim Hof style is hyperventilation stuff. That's going to generally give you more arousal. That's why it feels good in the moment, right? Like you're going to feel charged and energized. You will feel something immediately, right?

Yeah. As a sensation. Not always necessarily the best thing for people. Down regulation is the opposite, right? Where it's like you will feel more calm, more tranquil, probably potentially more focused. However, being too down is also sort of problem. So can you walk us through those sides? Who should be doing what? And are there ways to figure out, oh, I should be doing more up regulation? Things like that.

Yes, it's so great. So when we look at how you mentioned it, breathing as a, it's a blade, it's a sharp tool. It affects the nervous system quickly. And we are designed to upregulate extremely quickly as a survival response. We are designed to downregulate when things feel safe. And so, like you said, upregulation practices that highlight the inhale, superventilation or hyperventilation practices will give you a really quick sympathetic response. And now, as we've talked about, if you have CO2 sensitivity on board, and maybe you're breathing at a rate of 18 breaths per minute or more at rest, then hyperventilating is

not for you. You are going to get a response. It might feel good. It might feel like a quote trauma release or an emotional release. And I don't want to take anyone's practice away from them that they might be enjoying. But at the same time, I want people to know the science and understand that you are pulling on some levers here that could create long-term chronic dysfunction. And they will be expressed as mental health, but they are holistic. They are systematic changes that you're making in your conditioning. So if you do upregulate, you've got to follow what the pranayama yogis suggest, which is take 10 minutes afterwards, laying down on your back, integrating down, regulate afterwards.

Who does that? Who does that? Right. So the super ventilation practices we teach always include a breath hold for that reason to just, you know, and Wim Hof does as well. Like there, there's nothing wrong with those protocols. It's just, people aren't necessarily being trained to read their bodies, to know their breath rate patterns, their CO2 tolerance and sensitivity thresholds.

So who should upregulate, you know, somebody driving at night when you're exhausted and you've got to get somewhere. Maybe some of our first responders who need acute energy, but my God, those are the ones that need to down-regulate 80 times more. Maybe use that acutely 1% of the time in emergency situations. You can't create more energy. You've got a certain amount. how are you going to throw it around i use it uh you'll see a lot of our protocols of people who are used to stimulant use in the afternoon but that's hurting your sleep yeah so it's it's not the same like there's no hyperventilation you can do that will be the equivalent of you know six cans of red bull

it's not gonna it's not gonna be the same but you can take that out be the equivalent of, you know, six cans of Red Bull. It's not going to, it's not going to be the same, but you can take that out, feel a little bit of alertness increase and then not have the sleep compromise. So that's, that's, I use that a lot. I'll do that a ton of driving too. Like I'm always doing that. Yeah. Great example. You can use it to upregulate and give yourself some focus and energy, some mental acuity. Fantastic. Then the downregulation side, if you're struggling with depression and depressive states, and you've learned how to read those, not read the stressors in the stories, but understand your body. Are you slow to heal? Are you puffy? Is your heart rate too low? Is your breath depressed and shallow? Then doing down regulation practices, it's not going to benefit you. Doing balanced practices, coherent breathing, NIDRA, things that actually replenish and create the conditions for healing. And that's when upregulation can actually be really beneficial. Unless there's like dual diagnosis of anxiety there.

Some people are wired and tired, gas on, brakes on. And all of this is really covered in the skill of stress and in our mentorship programs so that people can start to relate this to their own bodies. Because there's nothing prescriptive about this. I can't say, do this breath when you feel this way without having an asterisk that says, do some training and learn about your system before you try these things. Yeah. It sort of tags onto what Andrew's talking about earlier.

When you mentioned the idea of high anxiety people. So from a training perspective, like we figured this out a long time ago, if you do high intensity stuff to the max, very consistently, you're going to burn, right? And it just took a lot of people a long time. Like I won't mention any names, CrossFit. It's like, it took a while. And then people were like, oh shit, if you do that.

That's fine. I don't know. Sorry. But that's also a very good thing to do. Like it is incredibly important if you don't have that in your life and all you're doing is tapering and there's no high intensity work, like you're going to be too far down the lane, right? So how do we build enough high intensity stuff in, which is more than we probably used to

think we need, but it's less than what we got excited about a few years ago and build this like really high intensity stuff in match with these real nice peaks of, of down regulation and recovery and bring back. So if someone is, is in a very high demand, extremely high stressful job, perhaps going and then doing a bunch of high, high intensity, quote unquote, breath work, maybe not the thing they need, right? They may need more down regulation. The inverse, somebody that has anxiety. Anxiety can be thought of as excess energy.

Yes. That person needs to burn the energy, right? They actually need to go do more physical training and then maybe more up regulation breath work as long as it's matched in with learning what happens when you get way high and you then work on bringing yourself back down so you use the physical activity to burn the energy to get really really high and you the breath work to practice here's how you bring yourself down when you get out of control i love it doc that's so well said that's it right there yeah there. Nailed it. I mean, whoever's listening,

go rewind and repeat that because that really touches on a few important things, which is, like you said, anxiety needs to go somewhere. It's not always about calming down, but if you add really sympathetic hyperventilation practices to anxiety, you're not releasing energy. You're ramping up the sympathetic. But if you go do some add some metabolic demand to that, go exercise. Now let your breath rate match your rate of exertion metabolically, even gearing down to create some nasal thresholds in that now you're yoking the energy and channeling it somewhere and it it's productive and it's helping dissipate the nervous sensitive tension into a place of productivity.

Better yet- I never put that together. That's actually super interesting. So if you're thinking about anxiety as excessive energy and the issue with breathing related is breathing above what's needed metabolically. But then if you push the metabolic demands up and your breath rate is lower,

you've actually quote unquote downregulated. Bingo. Aha, see, more CrossFit, more CrossFit. Yeah. The answer to too much CrossFit, more CrossFit. More CrossFit, yeah. Unless you're huffing out your mouth the whole time. If you're in there.

Then you're just, you're ramping it up. You lost like 20,000 Instagram followers, but they're all back now. Awesome. So dope. Yeah. Emily, this has been fantastic. Where can people find you?

Shiftadapt.com. When's your next seminar? We don't know. We've got some, did a private event yesterday up at a law firm, which was super fun. Um, so I'm teaching the skill of stress privately. Brian's running around doing the same with the art of breath. Um, and then we are primed to do another live event. It was a blast. Yeah. Tell me about the skill of stress. That sounds like an awesome course that many people need to be taking online course. It's about seven and a half hours of training and read,

regulate, reinforce. So everything we talked about today and more 120 page workbook, lots of research cited and links to learn more from the course. Yeah. Is that the course or the workbook that you accidentally sent me? Yes. Yes. It's a great chapter two. I wish I you accidentally sent me yes two of yes people it's a great chapter two i wish i accidentally added to the rest of the email list but she somehow she somehow caught that before i got access to the whole whole thing that's right that's right so you're on the inside you're on the inside and brian and i are doing another mentorship next uh winter so january february we'll open up another group training for people so stay tuned you're interested

beautiful dr galvin yeah instagram twitter doug larson on instagram doug larson i'm anders warner at anders warner we are barbell. We are Barbell Shrugged at Barbell underscore Shrugged. Head over to RapidHealthReport.com. RapidHealthReport.com. That's where you can see Dan Garner go 90 minutes reading my labs, taking down all the things that are wrong with me, how we're going to fix them. And super, super cool to watch the man do his work. RapidHealthReport.com.

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