Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee - #288 BITESIZE | The Power of Breath to Transform Your Life | Brian MacKenzie

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Starting point is 00:00:51 10. And these packs are perfect for keeping in your backpack, office, or car. If you want to take advantage of this limited time offer, all you have to do is go to drinkag1.com forward slash live more. Welcome to Feel Better Live More Bite Size, your weekly dose of positivity and optimism to get you ready for the weekend. Today's clip is from episode 113 of the podcast with human performance specialist Brian McKenzie. In this clip, Brian explains how we can all use the power of our breath to become more present and help counteract the inevitable stresses and obstacles of everyday life. A lot of people these days are suffering with the effects of stress, the consequences of being chronically stressed and not actually adequately recuperating from that. And

Starting point is 00:01:55 everyone's looking for the hack. What can I do to keep my life super, super busy? But what can I do that's going to somehow magically de-stress me? And it's fascinating for me that breathing could well be one of the simplest and one of the most accessible things to all of us, yet it's something that very few of us are actively looking at and actively practicing. Yeah. Why do you think that is? I think we've moved ourselves far enough away from inside out understanding that outside in has become our go-to default. I'm on social media for things, for answers to things. I look at heart rate monitors for things. I look, you know, it continues to add up on the outside in trying. So we're missing the, there's a big variant in that. Like there's a big variation in that because to understand how you feel, you have to go in, you have to go to the base layer of what's going on.

Starting point is 00:03:03 And at the fundamental layer of all of this is breathing. And so actually taking the time to actually reorganize and feel things, you know, people are so stressed out and it's like, that's all just a conceptualization. That's just story. That's just a narrative. We are designed to handle stress at very high output. designed to handle stress at very high output. And maybe, and then I'm stealing this from a friend of ours, David Bidler, but maybe it's not that we have a disorder. Maybe it's not that, you know, anxiety and all this stress is actually a disorder. Maybe this is just a natural reaction to the amount of stimulus, to the stimulus that we're taking in from the outside and not paying attention to things from the inside. Because when I, I've met and worked with a lot of high level people, whether athletes, executives, whoever, right? The people that are functioning

Starting point is 00:03:58 the highest are shutting out everything else. They're in their environment and what they're in, like the conversation you and I are having right now. I'm not thinking about the drive that I've got to go do, except right now when I say that, right now I'm distracting myself. And so this is where the context of things starts to happen. And then I start to overload more because I'm in an environment I should be paying attention to, and I'm not feeling what's going on with that and present in that situation. And so breathing is that thing that I can go and bring myself right back and stop a lot of the physiological ramifications of that stuff. If we were still out there, meaning still out in nature, still trying to survive, right? Like cave people, right? Like we wouldn't even need to be worrying about breathing because we'd be existing in a

Starting point is 00:04:52 natural environment, responding to that natural environment in the way that we should have, right? Versus putting ourselves into places where comfort and convenience and the illusion of safety becomes this very, it encompasses our entire life. A lot of people will listen to this, will probably be thinking, well, you know, it's all very well moving out to nature, but I don't have access to that. And so why the breath really fascinates me, because I've worked in many different areas. I've looked after affluent patients. I've also looked after very deprived patients. And I guess breathing is free.

Starting point is 00:05:32 Breathing is accessible to everybody. And then what that naturally lends itself to is if you have control over your breath, even if you are living in an inner city where there is a lot of noise around you and there's a lot of inputs that you are constantly having to fight off, well, at least you have a tool like a shield where you can use for your body to help you survive in that environment. This is where that hack world has to come in if we're existing in these places, right? Is we have to actually start to hack things and breathing is one of those hacks.

Starting point is 00:06:07 So I can't exist in a big city or in a city or in not in nature. And I just have to manipulate my environment or listen to my environment in a way that allows me to kind of just be in that place, right? And breathing is that one of those things that literally brings you, it's why every meditation practice has breathing at the foundation.

Starting point is 00:06:29 Having an awareness of your breath, understanding your breath, being able to manipulate your breath for certain situations is arguably one of the most powerful tools we have. Yet most of us don't, we do have access, but we don't feel we've got access to it. And we don't have the knowledge to access it either. Yeah. I mean, Eckhart Tolle talks candidly about, you know, like, well, he just openly will just say, just be aware of your breath. Like, just be conscious of your breath.

Starting point is 00:07:01 Like, you know, get awareness of that. He doesn't give anything else up, right? Like, he's not like, Hey, use this pattern to do that. You know, there's none of that. Just sitting there and be just being quiet and paying attention to your breath for maybe two minutes or five minutes, or if you can do 10 minutes and you can just continue to do that, that is enough. That'll teach you more than most things will. And the reason is, is because your breath is connected to everything we're doing. This becomes a very big opening if you can just be aware of it. Now, the optimization factor comes into where I start learning how to manipulate that to bring myself more present or to downshift myself more. I think having a breath practice is

Starting point is 00:07:52 probably the most fundamental thing you can do for yourself. I don't think there's anything more fundamental. There's this thing that we have the ability to optimize ourselves with. For me, the next level of sort of self-exploration is to sort of get control of my breath and understand it and actually start to, you know, really start to play around with it and see how it impacts my mood, how it impacts my state. I get the impression that underneath the breath, there's also been a lot of personal growth with you. Oh yeah, yeah. It transformed everything about what I've worked on.

Starting point is 00:08:34 I mean, I'd been in the self-help stuff for 20 years, like looking at it, reading it, going through, seeing therapists, going to programs, workshops, all this stuff, this guru, that through, seeing therapists, going to programs, workshops, you know, all this stuff, this guru, that guru, like all of it, like, Hey, what, what can I learn here? And it wasn't really until I invested in this, that any of that really made any sense. And now it's like, I, you know, I, we joke about it, but I like the real depth of things, like the true depth of it, like looking

Starting point is 00:09:05 at the heart of what my reaction is to something, you know, and, and, and I think that is like, that's the gateway opening. Final question, Brian. Yeah. This podcast is called feel better, live more. I genuinely have seen time and time again, when people feel better in themselves, they get more out of their life. What I'd love you to leave my listeners with are some of your top actionable tips, things that people can actually apply into their own life immediately to start improving the way that they feel. I would say, if you can get to the point where you take nothing personally, work towards that work towards that because there is nothing personal and that's going on this is all just an exacerbation of other people's internal workings you know we we judge ourselves by what's going on internally

Starting point is 00:09:57 you know but we judge everybody else by their actions and intentions and so thinking that it's a personal thing against you just don't know the framework of everything. And I, so that's something I literally have to work on every day. Like, I'm like, this isn't personal. This isn't personal. Right. So I think that's huge. Right. You know, I, I've come under this idea that it's like, we're either believing in something or we're learning and, and I'm trying to dismantle the belief section of what it is i've boxed myself into my entire thing you know it was i had this talk with a good friend of mine the other day and she was we were talking about how 98 of the world goes left and then two percent goes right right

Starting point is 00:10:39 and i i looked at her and i was like i go to every, like, I want to go to the start and see it for the first time every time. I want to, and that's what breathing, that's what breath work does. That's what self-actualization does. That means that I can go into any experience and it could be the same, like I could do the same workout, but I'm looking at it differently under a different light. I could do the same workout, but I'm looking at it differently under a different light. I'm going into the same job and the same thing. And I get to look at this as a brand new thing every single time. That is a choice, right? And I have that power. That is, that is what power is. I just look at myself as I want to go and understand something for the first time every time that's learning that is what it is and and that brings a beauty to life that i've never experienced in 45 years

Starting point is 00:11:31 really hope you enjoyed that bite-sized clip i hope you have a wonderful weekend and i'll be back next week with my long-form conversational Wednesday and the latest episode of Bite Science next Friday.

Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee - #288 BITESIZE | The Power of Breath to Transform Your Life | Brian MacKenzie

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