The Wellness Scoop - How Simple Tools Can Revolutionise the Way we Feel

Episode Date: March 14, 2022

We’re joined by Max Strom, speaker and global teacher of personal transformation, to discuss the simple tools that can transform the way we feel, the importance of regulating our emotions, the loneliness epidemic and the power of the breath to alleviate crippling anxiety, depression, PTSD and sleep problems.   We discuss: The connection between our body and our emotions The stress and loneliness epidemic  Why we don’t practice emotional self-regulation in modern society Alleviating stress, anxiety, and sleep disfunction naturally The importance of expressing our emotions to heal Why breathing practices enable us to release unreconciled emotions The power of processing grief with others Why we need to come together to overcome crises Vulnerability, fulfilment and social media The power of slow, steady breathing with mindful movement Max Strom: ‘A Life Worth Breathing’ https://maxstrom.com See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Visit BetterHelp.com today to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp, H-E-L-P.com. Hi, I'm Ella Mills, the founder of Deliciously Ella, and this is our podcast, Delicious Ways to Feel Better. Each episode explores various aspects of both our mental and our physical health, helping you make the small, simple changes to your life to feel both happier and healthier. And today we're going to be looking at the power of emotion, of breathwork, yoga, of vulnerability, and of grief. So this is part of my work.

I teach people how to communicate during a crisis and after a crisis, both from the point of view of I'm in the crisis and I need to ask for help. How do I do it? Or my friend is in trouble. They're not going to be left behind. I'm going to them right now. And this is the way we build our strongest friendships

is whoever shows up in your crisis, those are the people you now trust the most and hold the most dear. So this is how we build, really build a tribe is the crisis as bad as they are. They're the opportunity for us to come closer and more intimate, emotionally speaking, than we were before. Before we delve into today's episode, I wanted to introduce you to our sponsor and also a little note on sponsors, which is that we'll only be working with brands that I personally use and personally love and that will never promote something on here that isn't totally authentic or that we don't really, really believe in. So for the next few months, our podcast sponsor is going to be Simprove,

a supplements company that I've been using to support my gut health for about five years now. So I've been using it for years and years before I started working with them. The gut microbiome is made up of trillions of bacteria that support pretty much all aspects of our mental and physical health from digestion to our immune system, energy production and mental health. And keeping the right balance of good bacteria in our gut is just so important. Our diet and lifestyles have a huge impact on that, but adding in live bacteria can really help too. The bacteria in Simprove, which is a water-based supplement, can really survive the long journey from the mouth to the gut, where they can then multiply and support our microbiome.

I truly swear by it. And I hope you love it too. For anyone wanting to try it, they've shared a 15% off code with us. So you just need to use Ella15, which is valid on Simprove.com for new customers based in the UK. But they also have a subscriber subscribers package if you're an existing customer. Our guest today is Max Strom who is an author, a three times TEDx speaker and a global teacher of personal transformation and after a very different career as a lead singer in a band and then as a screenwriter, Max began his path towards being a yoga teacher at

the age of 38 and he is now known for inspiring and impacting the lives of people worldwide through the talks he gives, the breathing patterns that he teaches. Max's work focuses on bringing about immediate results in relieving stress, anxiety, depression, grief and sleep dysfunction and all those things that impact the emotional aspects of our lives and through that is able to produce physical healing as well as giving these keynote addresses at medical and corporate conferences max has also presented at both the inner peace conference and the wisdom and business conference in amsterdam the first wellness symposium in saudi arabia and the world government summit in dub. His TED talk, Breathe to Heals, had almost 3 million views so far.

In addition to all of this, Max is the author of two books, Life Worth Breathing and There's No App for Happiness, and gives trainings to individuals from all walks of life and from all over the world. So at a time of an extremely strange time in the world right now, following a pandemic and now with a global crisis happening with the war in Ukraine. As I said last week, I have undenied about whether it's right to continue with the podcast to talk about what can feel trivial to some extent for those of us lucky enough to feel safe in our homes today, talking about health and happiness. But I think Max is incredibly sage. His words are so wise and his thoughts on grief and how we have to come together feel very pertinent.

And so I hope they do feel sensitive and supportive to everybody listening today. So welcome, Max. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you. It's my pleasure, Ella. So I know just reading a little bit about you and your work that you actually went to your first yoga class at the age of 35. And that was when you got started on this journey into breath, the body, the emotions, a journey of spirituality and personal transformation.

Could you tell us a little bit about that? Yes. When I did my first yoga class, I was already well acquainted with meditation. I practiced Qigong for a number of years, but I hadn't been introduced really properly to Hatha yoga. And I was dragged to the class by a new girlfriend that I was with, a relationship that didn't last nearly as long as my yoga lasted. She introduced me to it, dragging me on my birthday of all things. I really wasn't interested to go. And I was a little bit disappointed when we woke up in the morning on my birthday. And she said, I have a surprise for you.

I'm taking you to your first yoga class. And I tried to act like I was happy about it, but I wasn't. And because I was quite fit, she decided to take me to a more advanced class, which was partly a big mistake because I almost vomited in class. It was so intense for me. But because I worked so hard, it had, I think, more of an effect than it would have. And so my sleep was very different that night. I woke up feeling very different. And that next day, people said that I seemed to be happier that something had changed. People not knowing that I had done this yoga class. In other words, they could tell something had shifted in me. And I knew I was on to something. So I started going regularly right away and of course, taking general classes to begin with. And Max, what was it, do you think,

that had shifted in that class for you that started this extraordinary exploration? Well, partly it was the combination of doing steady deep breathing while moving slowly. I think this is one of the algorithms of yoga that even a lot of yoga teachers don't really understand, to be honest, is that slow motion movement is advanced fast movement is more for beginners so this really fast vinyasa

classes they're good but they're the beginning not the end and they're certainly not for advanced practitioners the slower you go and you can't push it you can't go super slow or just frustrates you you never want to do it again but you have to gradually move it to a slower, slower pace so that you're much more aware of everything you're doing. You know how when you send a photo, it gives you a choice on your phone, actual size and then large, medium, small. When you move fast, it's like sending small. You don't get a lot of data. And you move in slow motion, it's like actual actual size so you absorb a lot of data so moving like this in slow motion for the first time with breath in this way i think it opened a lot of energy meridians in me that were stifled that were shut down and also the body tends to store stress as

you know and i had been under a lot of stress, like a lot of people, and it just released that. And so my sleep instantly improved. It was astonishing how much it affected my sleep, in other words, improving the quality. The other aspect, which we'll talk more about later, I'm sure, is that when you do steady deep breathing, especially with movement, it releases old grief. So anything that you've suppressed from the past, like someone that you love that passed away or a relationship that ended that you're not happy about, anything where we've lost a great deal, a crisis. In other words, in Northern European societies, we're taught to suppress all that. There's a price to pay for that emotionally. And so it releases this old

pain, this old distress that we've been holding onto. And of course, it frightens us to do that. But once we've done it, we feel like the weight of the world is off of our shoulders. And suddenly we have a smile on our face when we don't even realize it. And so breathing exercises and a conscious breathing pattern for you is a technique of peeling back those layers and getting deep into who we are more intrinsically in ourselves and our emotions and start to get to know ourselves better? Yes, very much so, Ella. And you could say that the breath accesses the subconscious. So that involves memory, insights, dreams, everything that we call the subconscious,

which some argue that we store in the body. And for people who are skeptical of that, remember that the whole nervous system in the body is part of the brain. So it's still the brain functioning through the entire body. And it seems that we either store it in the body or it's triggered from entire body. And it seems that we either store it in the body or it's triggered from the body. Either way, any massage therapist can tell you that. When I work on Mr. Smith and I work on his shoulders, it becomes emotional. When I work on Mrs. Smith and I work on her hips,

she starts to become more emotional and crying sometimes. So we know that when we release the body, it releases emotions, not just stress, so to speak. And so is that something that we can start to really shift our beings by tapping into on a regular basis? Yes. I mean, if you think about it, when I think about myself at that age in my early 30s, for example, although I led a pretty good life, I would say I was constantly going from stimulus event to stimulus event. So, for example, what do I need now? Well, I want lunch. Okay, what do I need now? I want a snack.

What do I want to do? I want to work out. What do I want to do now? I want to go out on a date. I want to date someone. I want to meet someone. I want to watch a film. I want to have a glass of wine. It's always the next thing to stimulate us, which could be said as a way of distracting us from our own loneliness, from the larger questions

in life and so on. And so whatever is driving that, which could be said a bit of suffering, is driving this, a hole we're trying to fill when that starts to be healed you don't start craving all of these things anymore you just don't it's no longer an effort not to do things which are suboptimal for us you just stop desiring them so i'd find that once i started practicing six days a week i I started changing what was important to me, what I did in the evening after class. I just became a happier person without needing to acquire something to become happy, what I called happy, to feel better. So it could be said this way. I started to be happy instead of just trying to not suffer. That's a really interesting way of putting it.

And I'd love to just pick up on that. Obviously, happiness is such an intangible concept. It feels so fleeting. It feels so hard to really hold. And yet it's something that I think so many of us chase on a moment by moment basis. It forms so many of our decision making processes throughout any given day any given year but I think a kind of record number of us are feeling that it's a long way removed from our day-to-day life at the moment how do you feel this fits into

the concepts that that you work on in this idea of kind of true more lasting happiness that sits within us versus those moments as as you said, that are much more linked to when I achieve this goal or when I buy this, moving away from perhaps that more modern definition of it. We humans are very funny, particularly humans who live in cities where we have removed so many basic things that we need. So in one way, the modern city in the first world nation provides us with everything we need physically. We have warm water, we have access to healthcare, we have shelter through the winter, et cetera. We have enough food to eat, maybe too much food to eat. But what we don't have are some things that we still have an instinctive drive to have.

And I don't know if you've ever had a cat before, but if you've ever had a kitten, and the kitten has never been outside yet, let's say the kittens are born in your apartment, you have them in a box. And then they eventually, a few weeks later, they start eating solid food. And the first time they eat solid food, after they eat, they start digging at the ground around them, meaning the floor, the kitchen floor. And that's their instinct to bury the food, because that's what a grown cat does. So they're born with this knowledge of how to hide their food after they've eaten it, even having never seen their mother do it and never been outside. Human beings have these drives as well. We have the desire to see blue sky,

and we really feel that at the end of a winter in northern Europe. Once you see this blue sky, you just immediately feel better. We have the desire to see fire, and I think that the TV has taken the place of the fire pit. We love to look at fire. Anybody who doesn't have a fireplace and then goes to see a friend who has one, just comments over and over again

how much they love staring at the fire. Or when we go camping, of course, the same thing. We have the desire to feed each other at the fire. This is how people used to bond. If I refused you food, you were the other. We want you out of the tribe. If I gave you food, you're one of us. It's a basic way of telling you that you matter and you're one of us. You belong here. We have the desire to be around forests, natural elements, and so on. You go into the city, you have none of that. All that's taken away from you.

Anonymity prevails. So even today, the reason people are friendlier in small towns generally is because if someone commits a crime, everyone knows who did it. You can't hide in a small village. Everyone knows who's doing everything, which can also be a pain. The busy body nature of a small village. I live in a small village. Everyone's very friendly. But if I go to, you know, I live in the Navamans. So if I go to Amsterdam and I walk down the sidewalk, people aren't saying good morning to me. Here they are. Because here everyone knows who I

am. And that's how human beings lived for hundreds of thousands of years in small groups. Now there's negatives to that, as have been said, but the positives are we belong. We know who everybody else is. It feels safe. No one's going to harm us here because if they do, they'll pay the price. You go into a big city, now you have an anonymous crime. Just somebody has stolen my car. Somebody has broken into my apartment. So I have to rely on these other somebody's police officers to do something about it. So we don't feel safe and we don't feel that warm camaraderie that we feel in a village. In fact, if you look at the difference between the very old people in a village versus a city, it's really remarkable. In a village, the village is looking after them,

more or less. They're patient with them. Shopkeepers take their time with them and chat with them. But in the city, I watch people a lot. And in the city, you can watch an old woman or an old man walking down the street, and no one even makes eye contact with them. And they just walk around them as if they're opposed post or something that's in the way. They don't even really see them. When that old person goes into a shop and buys an apple, usually it's a very small purchase. Then they try to find their money or figure out how to use their PIN code. And they talk to the cashier for 10 minutes to buy this apple.

And everyone in line is frustrated with them. What I remember is this is probably her only conversation today with someone else in person. And that's why she's lingering and making it last. This is it. Because as soon as she steps out of line, she's a ghost again. She just walks the city like a ghost and no one sees her. And so that's why older people are terribly lonely. But now, according to a UK study actually that came out in 2018, the loneliest strata of society are millennials.

Lonelier than the older people that walk around like ghosts. Because the millennials say although they're online all the time, they don't have any real friends. They don't feel like they can really rely on anybody. And they feel extremely lonely. So it's flipped in that regard. And it's very sad because that's why we have suicide rates going up and addiction going up and anxiety going through the roof. And that's what I help people with, is how to alleviate their anxiety. I'd love to get more into that, Max. But before we get more into that, I just had one more question

actually with this, which very much relates to addiction and anxiety. And you touched on it earlier, this kind of constant busyness that so many of us, especially those who probably have busy jobs in busy cities, we get sucked into this kind of what is now a very normal cycle of just being so busy all the time, running around really in a chronic state of stress that we don't even necessarily always recognize as a chronic state of stress, because it's just become the default. And, you know, we rush in the morning, and we rush onto a train, it's busy, busy, busy, and then we rush into the office, and we rush to the gym class, and we rush to see our friends, and we rush, rush, rush. And again, as you said, we've got this kind

of epidemic of mental health and of loneliness and of anxiety and depression, absolutely skyrocketing. And I'm absolutely not trying to dismantle the complexity and the nuances of all the various different mental health conditions with a sweeping statement, but equally it feels a miss not to just ask the question of how you see that hiding from our emotions in many ways because we don't really have the time and so many of us don't necessarily have the tools to really connect with ourselves on a day-to-day basis and actually check in with how we really are feeling and what we really may need and I'd love to understand how you see the role of breath work and of practices like yoga of being able to, in some ways, alleviate a little bit of that by providing the tools to

have a little bit of an antidote. Well, first of all, regarding the pandemic and what's happened recently toward the end of the pandemic, because so many companies have told their employees that they don't need to come back to work, that they can continue working from a home. As everybody knows who's listening, there's been a mass exodus out of the cities to small cities and villages, because I think people have discovered the need for this. Having been in the pandemic, people are now having a yearning to be in a small, close community. I think that's why that's happening. And to put in perspective how difficult things are for people right now, I'm going to give you two statistics you might not have heard of yet because there's so much

in the news. And this is true, what I'm telling you now, and this is current, not some time in the past, but right now, there's a country in the world where the leading cause of death amongst adults between 18 and 45 is the overdose from opioids. And the number one profession that takes their own life are physicians. Now, what would you say about a country like that? Would you say that perhaps they have some issues? I certainly would say that that country has deep problems. It's obviously a first world country, but they're having extreme problems emotionally. And that's the United States I just described. Just about four weeks ago, it was announced that

opioid deaths are number one over every other form of death between 18 and 45 and the people who write the prescriptions are the ones who are taking their own lives now that the doctors are not the they do not have the highest rate of suicide in the uk but they're near the top i've checked so that's how much trouble we're in as a society. And it's not that different in the Northern European societies. So that's how I like to put it is Northern European culture, which would include North America, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa. Our cultures are not so different from each other between Between Poland and the UK, not that different ultimately. We're all taught that to show emotion is a weakness and it's something to be ashamed of.

We're taught nothing about how to communicate to each other, with each other, about emotions during a crisis and after a crisis. And I put this to the test. I sometimes talk to very large groups. And the last time I did that just before the pandemic was in Amsterdam at the Wisdom in Business Conference. And I will ask the group this question. On this case, I said, if sometime in your life, you have been trained in CPR, and for those of you who live in a country who don't know what CPR is, that's heart massage. So if someone drops over with a heart attack and they stop breathing, you massage their heart by pressing down on it. That's what I'm talking about. In America, it's called CPR.

So raise your hand if you've been taught CPR at some point in your life and 75% of the hands went up for this international audience. I said, good, hands down. Now, raise your hand if when you were a child or a young adult, you were taught how to communicate with others about the emotion of grief, yours or theirs, either one, raise your hand. 500 people, nobody raised their hand. So what this means to me is that if someone, if their heart stops, we know what to do. If their heart breaks, we have no idea at all. That's where we are.

It's incredibly powerful. And do you feel that's symbolic of the fact that we're not taught, I certainly feel it is, how to both regulate, and by regulate, I don't mean suppress, our emotions and communicate them effectively? Yes, Ella, what you say is true. There are a couple of central causes for this. One is that we don't know how to regulate our emotions, as you said. And that's why when someone is used to going to the fitness gym, but they're just introduced to yoga, they say, this has changed my life. And their friends say, how could stretching change your life? Because that's all they think yoga is. They don't understand, first of all, that person in the fitness gym is always trying to contract their muscles. I mean, think about it. You're trying to lose weight. You're trying to change the shape of your muscles to look better. That's all contracting exercises. Contracting exercises trigger fight or flight. When you stretch a muscle, it triggers the relaxation response. Breath work triggers the relaxation response and also, as I said, releases the past

essentially. So you're not carrying around this burden of the past anymore. And you learn, as you said, to self-regulate your stress that you're feeling today. And most people do that by going to the pub or at home having two or three glasses of wine. That's the way they self-regulate, but it doesn't really regulate. It just numbs because the next day you feel exactly the same way again. So it didn't change anything. Whereas when you have a breathing and yoga practice, it does change something. You do not feel the same. There's an accumulative effect.

But the other part of this is how we interact with each other as a species, really. Like I said, in the way we look after each other or don't look after each other. Can I give you an example? So a couple I know, the man is about 40, I think she was about 30. They fell in love. They had only been together a few weeks. And then I'll call him Mark. Mark told me, he said, you know, this woman, she's extraordinary. He said, she's one of the smartest people I've met in my lifetime. She's very kind and generous. She never says a negative word about anybody. She's very funny. He just went on about what a special person she is.

And then he said, it doesn't seem like she's ever been looked after by anybody, not really by her parents or by previous boyfriend. She just doesn't have any kind of sense of safety or belonging. She has this perfectionist side to her where when she works, she's always trying to be perfect. Everything she does, she's trying to be perfect. Everything she does, she's trying to be perfect. But where does that come from? Feeling like you don't belong and you're trying to make up for it by proving to the world that you are worthwhile. And he said she has some anxiety and she really has a sleep problem. She's 30 years old and it's hard for her to fall asleep. And she'll wake up at three, four or five in the morning and she can't a sleep problem. She's 30 years old and it's hard for her to fall asleep. And she'll wake up at three, four or five in the morning

and she can't fall asleep again. So she's tired a lot of the time. So he said, we went on this little vacation and the first night I said, listen, get in bed and stick your feet out of the covers because I'm going to give you a foot massage. She said, a foot massage? And he could tell that she was actually quite surprised.

And he said, haven't you had one before? She said, well, I've had body work before by professionals and they've massaged my feet, but no one else has ever done that. He said, okay, well, get in bed, get out of the covers. He said she had this big grin on her face like it was Christmas morning she just was just so happy at the idea so he massaged her feet and he said Max I I didn't know what I was doing I have no skill with this I just was making it up but I thought if I try to transmit the love through my hands the love I feel in my heart through my hands, that she'll feel it. So I massaged her feet about 10, 15 minutes each foot, and she was sound asleep.

And she slept longer, and she felt better the next day. So I said, you know what? I'm going to do this every night. And he said, so now for the last three months, I've been massaging your feet almost every night. Now she doesn't use sleep medication anymore. And now her anxiety is practically gone. Now, if she would have gone to a doctor and said, I have sleep problems and some anxiety, she's going to get a prescription for pills, probably for anti-anxiety drugs, as well as sleep medication. The doctor would not say, have your boyfriend give you a foot massage before bed. But that simple act of love, which was not used for foreplay, it was just used to help her go to sleep, made her feel like she mattered.

She belongs. She's loved. She's safe. And she started sleeping just fine so this is symbolic to me of the root of the problem stop sitting on your aeroplan points and get big savings so you can be somewhere you actually want to be, like on a beach. Right now, you can save up to 25% in Aeroplan points when you book a trip to one of 180-plus Air Canada destinations worldwide. So stop sitting on your next trip and start saving on one. Don't miss out. Your chance to save in points ends February 23rd. Book at aircanada.com. Conditions apply.

You're a podcast listener, and this is a podcast ad heard only in Canada. Book at aircanada.com. Conditions apply. this one across thousands of shows to reach your target audience with Libsyn ads. Email bob at Libsyn.com to learn more. That's B-O-B at L-I-B-S-Y-N.com. No, I couldn't, I couldn't agree more. I certainly myself have found, I probably would have sat in the camp of being a little bit skeptical of how small practices, even 10 minutes of breath work 10 minutes of yoga could affect your life and certainly for me it has completely changed a emotional pattern I've seen shifts in myself that I wouldn't really have imagined possible in relatively short periods of time from relatively simple practices and it it is completely extraordinary. And I wondered if you could talk to us a little bit more about your work. And I know you said earlier about how you help addiction, anxiety, a lot of the challenges that people represent today, grief, sleep

dysfunction, as you mentioned, and also relieving stress, which is obviously, again, an absolute epidemic. How do the techniques that you teach work? How is it that learning to breathe properly is able to soothe these medical conditions? Okay, so first of all, what I'm focused on mostly in my work is helping people who have anxiety, which is post-traumatic stress,

alleviate it so they don't have it anymore. Not so they can cope with it, so they don't have it anymore. Not so they can cope with it, so they don't have it anymore. And this just shocks people to hear because they aren't even aware that that's possible. They think, well, I have anxiety. I'm an anxious person. That's the way it's going to be for the rest of my life. So I have to take my pill every morning for that, drink my wine at night to cope with it. Coping is not healing. Sometimes we need coping mechanisms. I'm not saying it's always a bad idea, but not as a way of life, not for a real problem. So the first thing that people ask me is what does breathing have to do with our emotions?

It's just oxygen, CO2, gas exchange. What does that have to do with my anxiety or grief or any of my emotions? They ask that because, once again, there's been zero education about it. But the answers are really right in front of our face. First of all, it's not about oxygen. If you were having a panic attack, and I said, here, wear this oxygen mask like the one they give you in the hospital. It would make it worse, right? Because when people have a panic attack, the old homespun way of dealing with it is to breathe in a paper bag. That's to decrease the oxygen and increase the CO2. That's the state you're in because of the panic attack. So you actually need more CO2, not more oxygen when you're having a panic attack. But let's say it's not even that bad that you have a panic attack, but you're feeling all

these symptoms of anxiety. Once again, if I gave you extra oxygen, it's not going to change anything. So it's not the oxygen. We have to get rid of that idea that it's the oxygen. So people will say, well, then what is it? Well, think about what your lungs do. What's the other primary function of your lungs? Well, we have this thing called the voice box and the lungs are the engine that powered this voice box that communicate with our tribe. And the first time you used it was when you were born. I wasn't there Ella, but I'm pretty sure the first thing you did was you started crying when you were born. That's the first thing we did. So like the kitten covering its food, it's instinctive knowledge how to cry. We don't have to

learn it like speech. We just do it. First thing, we cry and all the adults in the room want to come to us and try to soothe us. So crying is an inherent genetically encoded behavior of calling out to the tribe that we're in trouble, emotionally or physically or both. But somehow in our culture, by the time the person's a teenager, we reverse it. Now you're not supposed to cry in public. And if I see you crying, I'm going to think, let's leave him alone. He's crying. We'll go to the other room.

We actually abandon people who cry rather than go to them if they're adults. And people are made to feel ashamed of their tears like it's weakness. We mistake tears as a weakness. I think it's a tragedy because tears are generally shed when we feel loss for something we love. So they're really an expression of love, especially if we've lost a person, the relationship ended, or they've moved away, or they passed away. These are tears of love and they're nothing to be ashamed of. And a lot of the time we do need to suppress our feelings until we get to a place where it would be best to feel them. But when we are in a safe position to have our feelings, we need to do do it but we don't know how so we're constantly withholding

as if we're still on the tube and we're not supposed to feel it we're not supposed to show it it's funny because in the military there's this expression of no one left behind and if someone is wounded everyone goes to them they try to as soon as they can pick this person up and carry them out on their shoulders if need be. And you know that if you're hurt, that they're coming. My tribe's coming for me. They'll do everything they can. They'll risk their own life to get me out of here.

But in civilian society, it's not like that. If you find out you have cancer, first of all, you might not even tell most people you know. And when they hear that you have it, they might actually avoid you rather than come to you. Why? Because we have no education on what to say, on how to behave. And this follows us around. And you're going to have another crisis. We just had one. Now we're having a new one with the

current situation in Ukraine. But besides national or global crises, we have personal crises. It's the crises of our mother, the crises of our younger brother or our children or our teenagers. Someone around us, close to us, if not us, is going through some sort of crisis most of the time. There's very little time. It's a joyful time when everybody you know is as well, happy, and safe. Those are times to rejoice. But it seems like we could learn something about this and get better at it since we're going to have another crisis. And I think it's easier than learning CPR or heart massage. And so this is part of my work. I teach people how to communicate during a crisis and after a crisis, both from the point of view of I'm in the crisis and I need to ask for help. How do I do it? Or my friend is in trouble. They're

not going to be left behind. I'm going to them right now. And this is the way we build our strongest friendships is whoever shows up in your crisis, those are the people you now trust the most and hold the most dear. So this is how we build, really build a tribe

is the crisis, as bad as they are, they're the opportunity for us to come closer and more intimate, emotionally speaking, than we were before. And in that work that you do, Max, in that teaching of learning how to communicate and how to express our own emotions, what are the key learnings that you impart on people? Well, regarding breathing, I teach a breathing system

called Inner Access 30. That's a 30-minute practice to do every day. I have it on YouTube so people can access it for free. Inner Access 30. So I recommend that people do that every day. If you don't have time to do 30 minutes, do 20, do 18, whatever you have. Do five minutes of it three times a day. Whatever you can squeeze in every day, it'll make a big difference in how you feel and how those around you feel about you. As we know, if we're not in a good state, we don't treat others well. We have this word hangry, for example. Secondly, I have a breathing practice that's more for not to do every day, but as needed to release the old, submerged, unfelt, unreconciled, unseen emotions that we've been pushing down since childhood. And releasing those, people are afraid to do that, I have to say. Everybody, including me, I was afraid to do this. But once you do it, you're not the same the next day. In my recent facilitator training,

I have a 40-hour facilitator training where I teach people to facilitate my breathe to heal method, which is how to help people with breath and communication. We had two men, one just out of the Dutch Marines, special forces, not a sissy. And another guy was international martial artist competitor, also not a sissy. Great guys. Both of them went through the process. And at the end of that week, they felt different. And it changed the course of their life in terms of what they decided to do with their family, with their businesses, etc. They were not exactly the same as they were when they came in.

Because so much that drives us are our emotions. Things that we think we want, things that we say we want, relationships we think we want, and so on. So when you shift emotionally, it shifts your trajectory in terms of your goals as well. I brought up the men simply because I want you to know it's not just a room full of women that are going through this, but men, and not only men, but fairly macho men as well. Alexander the Great knew the wisdom of grieving. Alexander the Great is still studied in military schools today. Julius Caesar looked at him like God. Julius Caesar is one of the greatest generals of all time. He thought he was nothing compared to Alexander. I'm bringing him up because he led armies from the front in battle for 10 years, never lost a battle.

And he had an amazing horse, battle horse. And after a few years, eventually, of course, the horse was killed in battle by a spear. And Alexander loved that horse. And the way I try to explain it to my students is imagine a pet that you love with all your heart. And now imagine that that pet saved your life 10 times, because that's what a war horse can do also for you is it can save your life. And then it dies. Imagine what you would feel if your best friend just died. So he went into his tent after they won the battle and he grieved for two weeks wouldn't come out.

His men heard him cry. No one thought the less of him. At the end of it, he came out, says, get me another horse. He named the city after his horse and went on to attack some poor other kingdom that had done nothing wrong to him. I'm not saying I advocate him as a completely as a human being, but I'm just trying to put into perspective, no matter how macho you are, no matter how tough you are, nobody is as tough as he was, I don't think. And he understood the necessity for grieving. And if I can add to that, I interviewed for my book, which I'm writing now, a retired Lieutenant Colonel in the United States Army. We talked a lot about this subject.

And I said, in the Army now, if you've had a gunfight and someone's killed and you go back to the base or the camp, what happens? And he said, oh, well, within 24 hours, we get together as a group, everyone who was in the gunfight. We talk about our feelings and the person or people that we lost that died. And the commanders also have to be there, the ones who sent them, even if they weren't with them, they all have to be there with them. And I said, what's it like? He says, well, we talk about it. Some people cry. We hug each other. He was in American expression. We hug it

out. Very guy thing to say. They hug it out and it's amazing. And it really helps the whole team. And I said, suspiciously, I said, but a lot of these 19, 22 year old guys, they're not going to go to that meeting. They're going to skip out, aren't they? They're going to avoid it at all costs, really. And he said, oh, it's not an option. You absolutely have to go. We'll come find you if you want to hide everyone has to be there and I thought that's amazing too bad we don't have that civilian life I know and it feels that we need it need it more than ever I mean we've been through I think as a collective across the world a very it it doesn't even feel right to say strange few years. It's almost at

this point a dystopian few years. You know, I remember 2020, it started with those savage fires across Australia, and then it went into the pandemic. And we're now, you know, we're recording this on day five of the invasion into Ukraine, where there's this collective sense of fear of helplessness. But of course, during those last two years, we've seen countless other wars as well across the world, it really feels dystopian to an extent. And it's absolutely that, you know, what's currently happening in Ukraine, it's certainly not about us as individuals having this conversation today. But as peoples, as human beings, as European citizens, you know, you can't help but

feel heartbroken and desperate and helpless, but also completely terrified watching what's unfolding. I'm sure so many of us have images of what we've seen, and we've seen nothing compared to what people are really going through, absolutely etched in our minds. And, you know, at the risk of sounding trivial or selfish, you know, how do we cope with this collective sense of grief, but also of something that feels like it's unfolding in a way that none of us could have imagined? How could you have imagined the last few years? Yes, we've been quite sheltered prior to 2020. The First World Nations, of which I am a part of, have not been heavily challenged. And I think that's why our society has really gone south in some ways, emotionally speaking, but also the politics, everybody getting upset about everything at any given moment and labeling people as the other and trying to ruin their reputation and their lives and their livelihoods

because they said one thing that you disagree with as opposed to just calling it a disagreement like we used to. All that gets swept off the table really quickly when the bombs start dropping. That is over. And I think one of the things that I've noticed is the younger generations who don't remember a serious war are seeing for the first time something called courage and heroism, and also patriotism and the willingness to fight as a virtue as opposed to as a fault. The president the other day of the Ukraine said,

when he was offered by the United States to get him out, said, the fight is here. I don't need a ride. We need ammunition. And the whole world was kind of shocked in sort of a joyous way, I think, by this. Because in my opinion, he probably isn't going to live two weeks more. And I think he knows that. He's targeted. He's already said they have people out looking for him. The Russians are looking for him. He's the head of state. He's

not going to survive. And he knows that. And this is his point of view. And he's standing up. And this has galvanized his country and also people across the world are realizing oh that's what a leader looks like we haven't seen one of those for about 20 or 30 years that's what a leader looks like like in your worst moment they don't run they stand up and they actually make a joke about running it's like why would i run you know this is who i am and all the petty politics so i'm sure they're ukrainians who don't like each other and disagree with each other politically they're all one suddenly and they're proud to be ukrainians and they don't apologize for that

and they're going to get together and try to resist a foe that they have extremely little chance of winning. Yet it doesn't matter. People are going out in the street with a weapon. We've never held one before. And this is playing out on TV and the internet. So it's shocking in that way as well. And it will affect the world, I think, in unforeseen ways

by remembering what it's like that there are governments that will attack you. This does happen. It's not just from World War II. And this is what it looks like. And it's extremely ugly and you don't ever want it to happen. So everybody quit trying to talk about, for example, the United States, people talk about having a civil war. It's like, you want a civil war? This is what it looks like. Shut up. That's not what we need. We need to learn to talk to each other. We need to learn to disagree with each other. We need to learn to negotiate with each other. You don't want a war no matter what. It's the worst case scenario. And in terms of looking out for each other, it's difficult because this war, from our point of view, it's like a tornado or a pandemic. It's something we have no control over.

We can't control it. But we can control ourselves and we can help those close to us and we can set examples of behavior. And I hope that this is a sobering, I mean this in the best of way when I say sobering, moment where we remember to look after each other and to comfort those who need comforting and to be courageous. Now, courageous basically means to be vulnerable on purpose. There's involuntary vulnerability. That's when something's happening to you. You can't control it. You can't stop it. Voluntary means, for example, my comrade is injured in the field. I'm going to run over there and get him. I'm terrified, but I'm still going to do it. I'm going to carry him out, her out.

So voluntary vulnerability is what courage is. and we need to see more of that. The pandemic was horrible because it was a worldwide catastrophe where we were told, instead of doing what your instincts drive you to do, which is to come together and be with each other and comfort each other and essentially breathe together in the same room. We were told, step away from those that you love, cover half your face and never breathe on each other. Everybody is the other now. Everybody can kill you with their breath. And this caused our anxiety to go up so much because we couldn't congeal as tribes,

which is what our instincts ask us to do in this time. But with this one, with war then we can we can actually meet be with each other look after each other and do what we can and whatever our conscience dictates us to do in terms of whether we want to help in some way really really profound and so well said. And Max, if I could ask you one last question. I know I'm really drawn to the name of your book, There's No App for Happiness, because I think it's a very succinct way to me of implying that so much of this is, as you've so eloquently said, is about our ability to understand and process our own emotions so that we can help those around us. And I wondered if there was one thing you could tell us about that

title and about what that means. There is no app for happiness. It came from a comment I made to a friend who had just opened the box and pulled out their smartphone. This was in 2007, I think, when smartphones were brand new things, brand new toys. And she was scrolling through it and she said, wow, there's an app for everything. I said, I'll see if there's one for happiness. And we had a laugh about that. And of course there wasn't, I'm sure there is now. Something that's called that.

And I was trying to make a point that the things we really need aren't in there. It's a fantastic tool. I mean, the smartphone, social media, the internet in general, fantastic tools. But not to live our life and then not to try to stuff our life in our phone. Because I like to tell my students,

I say, if you have a baby, you don't want the nurse to take the baby into the room and send you photos on your phone. You want to hold your baby. If you fall in love, you don't want to just get messages from your lover. You want to hold them. You want to feel their face pressed up against yours and hear their breath in your ear. And we were really reminded from the pandemic how important nature is. Here in the Netherlands, after the first lockdown, they put it up June 1st, I remember.

And all of a sudden, every highway in the Netherlands was traffic jammed. Everyone was trying to get to the forest or the beach because they were starving to get outside. That's also not in our phone. Basically, everything that's most important to us is not in there. But when we get lonely, it's easier to go online than it is to approach another person because it's less vulnerable to go onto social media. But it's also less fulfilling. It's like white sugar.

It's a very good analogy. And so, yeah, I think social media's like white sugar. It's a very good analogy. Yeah, I think social media is the white sugar of our time. The more you use it, the worse you feel. We need to connect with each other in real time, real space. Tell each other we love each other on a regular basis with eye contact. And also tell our loved ones, you matter. You are important. I don't know what I would do without you. I will always be here for you. You can count on me.

Such a broad topic, but if there were three things that you wish everybody knew that you think would make a tangible impact to their lives? What would those three things be? Let's start with the breath. Number one, take on a breathing regimen that you do every day, even if it's just for a few minutes. You'll notice the difference and then move it up to 20 or 30 minutes a day. It will be life-changing to you and everyone who loves you. That's number one. Number two, understand that your presence is important. People don't love you because of what you do. They don't love you because of your money, your beauty, your career. They love you because of who you are in your heart. That's the most precious thing you have. And so when you go to sit with someone who is in crisis, just being with them is a treasure to them.

You don't have to say anything like roomie. You don't need to do anything. You can't fix their problem. They don't expect you to fix their problem, but they want you with them when they're in crisis. And lastly, learn to ask for help. Our great fear is if we reveal that we're in trouble, I do one-to-one sessions and a lot of CEOs come to me for one-to-one sessions because they have panic attacks.

They don't want anybody to know they have panic attack because it makes them seem weak. That's how they see it and vulnerable to losing their position. you're a CEO, a house mother, a father, or anybody else, you have to learn to ask for help and to tell someone that you love when you're really not doing well. A friend of mine taught me how to do this through her action. She wanted to tell me something that she was very ashamed of, that it happened to her in the past. Extremely difficult to say. Before she said it, we were sitting beside each other in a car. She put her hand on my shoulder and she said, I want to tell you something that's really hard for me. I said, go ahead. And she put her hand on my shoulder and she said, please don't run. I would never run after that. So I realized, of course, that's what our fear is.

She's going to tell me something that is heartbreaking to her and she'll never hear from me again. And so let's live a life where we have the same attitude as the military of nobody left behind. We're all in this together and that means nobody left behind. And we look after each other when we're in a crisis. We do this, our life has meaning, whether we're rich or poor, and our heart is full. Well, Max, thank you so much. I think it's been a real pleasure to talk to you today. And I think it's always an amazing pause for thought to take time to reflect on these types of conversations and what really matters. And that

does feel more important than ever before. And I just I so appreciate your time, your wisdom. And thank you for being here today. I hope you all have taken a lot from this conversation as well. So thank you so much for listening. And we will see you back here very soon. offering host endorsements or run a pre-produced ad like this one across thousands of shows to reach your target audience with Libsyn ads. Email bob at libsyn.com to learn more. That's B-O-B at L-I-B-S-Y-N dot com.