The science of breathwork (Emily Hunter & Mike Haney)

Many factors impact your glucose levels, and a big trigger is stress. One innovative way to manage stress is through guided breathwork exercises. Emily Hunter is a Registered Dietitian and the Co-Founder of Othership Breathwork, an on-demand class that makes breathwork effective, beautiful, and fun. She recently wrote an article for us on the Levels blog called Breathing Exercises for Better Metabolic Health. In this episode, Emily and Levels’ Head of Content, Mike Haney, discuss the many health benefits of breathing exercises.

4:56 – Emily’s introduction to breathwork

As her husband worked to overcome addiction, the couple worked together to find answers. One of those solutions lay in guided breathwork.

In terms of breathwork, I think I was first introduced just through following the optimal health and longevity community, and really understanding that there’s so many different practices that affect your health. You know, nutrition is this amazing piece. Of course, it’s not everything that’s involved. Whether that is saunas, or ice baths, or fasting, or breathing exercises, or community, having an amazing social foundation. I think there’s just so many different aspects to optimal health. I began getting more involved in breathwork. Actually, my husband Robbie, he struggled with addiction for many years, and actually had a really impactful experience with plant medicine, and when he came back from that experience, we were working as a team together, to just try out many different options that could help to support him through this recovery pathway, and breathwork was one of the practices that we found together. So through that, just learning more about breathwork, and then obviously through my background in nutrition, really diving into the science and what it does in the body was really interesting to me. Yeah, that’s how everything got started.

9:49 – Breathwork vs. meditation

Where meditation is a passive practice, breathwork is an active one.

People often ask what is the difference between breathwork and meditation, and I think that’s kind of a good starting place, because people are becoming definitely more familiar with meditation and the benefits there. A nice way to compare it, I mean breathwork and meditation are both mindfulness practices. Meditation is more of a passive practice, where you’re observing your breath. You’re not necessarily trying to make any changes to what’s going on in your body, just more of an observational practice, whereas breathwork is an active practice. You are actively changing the pace of your breath, actively extending the length and depth of your inhales and exhales, and that can have a direct impact on your physiology, exactly like you were saying. So where the breath can be this direct link to the nervous system, in a way that usually we don’t have any sort of control over our autonomic nervous system, and the breath is just this direct access point.

12:00 – The benefit of deep, guided breathing

Breathwork has incredible effects on the body, such as relaxing you from a tightly wound fight-or-flight state.

When you’re taking these long, slow, deep breaths, deep, diaphragmatic breaths, you are activating these nerve endings inside of your lungs, and actually the vagus nerve as well, which people speak of, and that just simply sends signals to the body that tells us to relax. So yeah, a lot of people, exactly, we say, “Okay, the breath is the one autonomic response that we can control,” and we understand that, but what exactly is that doing? It’s having so many different effects throughout the body. It’s so simple and accessible, and it just tells our whole body to relax and that we’re okay. It’s getting us out of this fight-or-flight state that we talk about, this sympathetic state, and it’s telling us that we’re safe, we’re okay to relax, and that we’re allowed to enter this deep state of rest and relaxation. It’s incredibly powerful. I mean, you can feel it right away. When you take one long, slow breath, your body is just telling itself that it’s okay to relax.

15:30 – Upregulated breathwork (Wim Hof)

The most popularized breathwork is upregulated, which switches on your body’s sympathetic response.

There’s also upregulated breathing, which is a different type that you may have heard of, Wim Hof breathwork, or any of these rapid-paced breathing. They’re actually giving the opposite response, which it’s really interesting in the article. I was thinking about it before. Dietitians are always recommending balance in everything, and that’s exactly what it is here. In this article, we were talking about how slow breathing can reduce cortisol, and that is an amazing effect. But there is something called you eustress. You don’t always want to be in this relaxed mode. Our body naturally wants to undergo certain periods of relaxation and then also stress. That’s a healthy response. So sometimes, if we do this upregulated breathing, we can switch on the sympathetic response, and that actually releases hormones such as norepinephrine in the body, which can have a positive effect as well, in reducing inflammation, and boosting mood, boosting mental clarity, and focus, and things like that. That’s kind of the other side of breathwork.

18:37 – The link between breathwork and anxiety

Learning to hold your breath can ironically train your body to be less anxious and stressed.

There are a variety of different benefits of breath holds. The main, you are actually activating this – I think in James Nestor’s book, he speaks about this as well, in terms of having more carbon dioxide and how that actually activates the fight-or-flight, but how if you get more comfortable with this feeling of the breath holds, you can reduce your anxiety overall, and get more comfortable with reducing anxiety and this feeling of stress. Also, it’s amazing to improve your blood’s oxygen-carrying capacity. Breath holds have a variety of different health benefits.

21:02 – Breathwork and insulin resistance

One of the pillars of metabolic dysfunction is stress. Breathing combats stress by alleviating the fight-or-flight response.

You’re stimulating this fight-or-flight so much in our day-to-day lives now, that we’re causing this acute insulin resistance, and also constricting the arteries, all a function of cortisol. Also triggers gluconeogenesis, so we’re actually making our own blood sugar in the liver, and pushing this into our bloodstream as well. Yeah, we’re just triggering the body we’re ready to go, the fight-or-flight’s on. We’re ready. We’re ready for the fight-or-flight, but there’s nothing to be done, so exactly like you said. It’s just in our day-to-day lives now, and this becomes an unhealthy mechanism.

22:20 – The long-term impact of breathwork

Breathwork doesn’t just help your body in the moment. The beneficial effects linger on.

A lot of the studies, especially on insulin resistance and blood sugar, looked at the effects kind of before eating, right after eating, and showed that there were beneficial effects in terms of our blood glucose there, and I was just looking back through some of the studies, and you’re completely right. I remember one said 24 weeks after the trial was over, they still showed this beneficial effect on doing these practices regularly. I think because we’re able to decrease our stress over time, this isn’t just something that happens one time and then it comes back. If you’re able to really have this decrease in cortisol, then that’s something that’s going to stay with you for quite a while.

27:20 – The Buteyko Method

One method of breathwork is called The Buteyko Method, and focuses on taking gentle, quiet breaths.

The Buteyko Method is about creating this air hunger. Similar to coherent, we’re breathing through the nose, but you’re going to keep the breath as gentle and quiet as you can, so rather than taking really deep breaths that you can hear, you’re going to keep it as quiet as possible, so just breathing through the nose, but you’re not going to go all the way to the top of the exhale. You’re going to leave a little bit of room, where you feel like you kind of want to breathe a bit more at the top, and then exhaling all the way, so creating this really quiet, slow pattern. There’s not a specific number or count that you do here. You just want to create this slight air shortage.

28:16 – Downregulated breathwork

Sometimes overlooked, peaceful and slow breathing techniques can have a wonderful cascade of effects on the body.

There’s a lot of people talking about the different types of breathwork, but I feel that the downregulated types specifically are getting a bit overlooked, and people are referring to this upregulated Wim Hof style holotropic-type style when they think of breathwork specifically, so just the fact that you could do these really peaceful, slow breathing exercises for two minutes at a time and get this amazing cascade of responses throughout the body was really exciting to me, so I made sure that the team was aware of how amazing these downregulated practices were, and we really shifted the focus of even our platform, to encourage more of this downregulated breathing.

31:40 – Getting started with breathwork

Breathwork practices don’t need to be long and formalized. Emily suggests starting with a YouTube search and identifying a guide you trust.

You don’t need to do these super long practices to get the benefits out of breathwork. I think when I was reviewing the article, just thinking, doing some self-reflection on which type of breathing do you think will benefit you? Because some practices, like the activating your sympathetic, if you’re already stressed out all the time, if you’re in this fight-or-flight mode, if you’re drinking coffee, and go, go, go all the time, then maybe you want to start with one of these downregulated practices. Or if you’re feeling kind of blah, like you don’t have a lot of stress, like you want to kind of increase your focus and enhance productivity, then maybe trying one of the upregulated practices. I think practices like on your Apple Watch, exactly like you said, can be a great guide. There’s lots of YouTube videos available. I think just having someone, a guide that you can trust and just follow along with is one of the beautiful parts of breathwork that makes it so accessible.

Emily Hunter (00:06):

There’s a lot of people talking about the different types of breathwork, but I feel that the downregulated types specifically are getting a bit overlooked, and people are referring to this upregulated Wim Hof style holotropic-type style when they think of breathwork specifically, so just the fact that you could do these really peaceful, slow breathing exercises for two minutes at a time and get this amazing cascade of responses throughout the body was really exciting to me, so I made sure that the team was aware of how amazing these downregulated practices were, and we really shifted the focus of even our platform, to encourage more of this downregulated breathing.

Ben Grynol (00:54):

I’m Ben Grynol, part of the early startup team here at Levels. We’re building tech that helps people to understand their metabolic health, and this is your front row seat to everything we do. This is A Whole New Level.

Mike Haney (01:07):

About six months ago, I found myself lying on the floor of my son’s bedroom, among scattered Lego sets and stuffed animals, holding my breath until it felt like I might pass out. And the reason I was doing that on a random, I believe it was a Thursday morning, was that it was part of a guided breathwork session that we were doing as a team on Zoom, as part of our quarterly all-hands retreat, we call assemblage here at Levels, where we get together remotely and do all kinds of interesting activities related to health and wellness. That session, while being pretty intense, led to further conversation about what breathwork is, and how it can affect the body.

Mike Haney (02:07):

The session was led by a guy named Robbie Bent, who runs a platform called Inward Breathwork, along with his wife, Emily Hunter, and Emily is our guest on today’s show, because Emily, following that session, in our subsequent conversations, wrote an article for us on the Levels blog, called Breathing Exercises for Better Metabolic Health. The idea was to look at how does this kind of breathwork actually affect our physiological systems, and in turn, affect our glucose and insulin control. It turns out, there’s actually some pretty good research around these connections, that the way that breathwork slows down our nervous system can actually have knock-on affects to all of the hormones and other systems that control glucose.

Mike Haney (02:52):

So, Emily wrote a really great piece for us a few months ago digging into some of this research, and also sharing some of the breathing techniques that are discussed in this research, with some really good video walkthroughs of those exercises. We asked her to come on the podcast today to talk through the article a little bit, talk to us more broadly about breathwork, what we know about it, why it works, and how we can incorporate it into our lives. Here’s my conversation with Emily.

Mike Haney (03:16):

Before we dive into some of your background, and breathwork in general, and breathwork and glucose, I wanted to share with people how we sort of came together, or how this idea and you came into our orbit, which was you and your other co-founder at Inward Breathwork led a remote breathing session for our team during one of our assemblages, which is sort of our version of an all-hands retreat that we do remotely, because the company’s fully remote. It was a Zoom breathwork session, and I think the universal experience… I shouldn’t say universal, but I think the broad experience across the team was that everybody was surprised at how effective and sort of immersive it was, just even doing it over Zoom. I don’t know. I think people brought different degrees of experience with breathwork to it, but it was a pretty intense session, and I think everybody walked away with kind of a new respect for what breathwork can do, and the sort of depth that it can go into. I’d love to hear about your background, and what sort of brought you to that moment of connecting with us, and then what led, post that session, to more discussions, and then the idea of, hey, there actually is some research between this and glucose. Maybe we write an article on it. Tell me a little about Inward and about your background, and how you got there.

Emily Hunter (04:36):

Yeah, absolutely. Well, I’m so happy to hear that the experience is so positive, and my background in nutrition and dietetics, I’ve been following Levels for a long time, so I was really excited to get the chance to collaborate on something like this. In terms of breathwork, I think I was first introduced just through following the optimal health and longevity community, and really understanding that there’s so many different practices that affect your health. You know, nutrition is this amazing piece. Of course, it’s not everything that’s involved. Whether that is saunas, or ice baths, or fasting, or breathing exercises, or community, having an amazing social foundation. I think there’s just so many different aspects to optimal health.

Emily Hunter (05:31):

Yeah, I began getting more involved in breathwork. Actually, my husband Robbie, he struggled with addiction for many years, and actually had a really impactful experience with plant medicine, and when he came back from that experience, we were working as a team together, to just try out many different options that could help to support him through this recovery pathway, and breathwork was one of the practices that we found together. So through that, just learning more about breathwork, and then obviously through my background in nutrition, really diving into the science and what it does in the body was really interesting to me. Yeah, that’s how everything got started.

Mike Haney (06:12):

That’s super interesting. I didn’t realize that that was how you and Robbie came together into breathwork. That sounds like a very powerful experience. How has that stuck with you? I assume that breathwork is still a very active part of your wellness routine?

Emily Hunter (06:27):

Yeah. Yeah, it definitely is, and I think really, learning about the different types of breathwork. I mean, what we talked about in the article is mainly the downregulated piece of breathwork, and what we led for the Levels team was a little more upregulated, and then there’s also these long, more transformational experiences that you can go through with the breath. There’s so many different elements, and yeah, finding actually Wim Hof, and doing the ice bath, and sauna, and breathing, that was all just a piece that fit together for us, and all of them are still really core pieces in our routine together.

Mike Haney (07:03):

I want to come back to those different kinds of breathwork and unpack upregulated and downregulated a little bit, but just sort of rounding out your background. I noticed when I was looking at your LinkedIn, you have a master’s in nutrition communication. What is that?

Emily Hunter (07:18):

Yeah. That’s a great question. Basically exactly this, which is really interesting how these different life experiences that you have always come back around in a different way. The focus of a program, to become a dietitian, you do an undergrad in nutrition, and then you either have to do a practicum, I think it’s the same in the US and Canada, or a master’s degree to become a registered dietitian, so I chose to do this master’s degree, and the focus was research dissemination, so how to take these studies and disseminate them to the public and also into nutrition policy, and any different way that you can communicate nutrition and health research was mainly the focus of the degree.

Mike Haney (08:03):

That’s amazing. That is very much speaking my language. It explains why this article was so good. I know we were so happy when it came in, of like, “Wow, this is a really good piece.” It’s like, well, you have a master’s in doing this.

Emily Hunter (08:18):

Well, thank you so much. It’s really great to put it to use.

Mike Haney (08:18):

Yeah, and how does that play out in the breathwork, and particularly with Inward? Maybe you can say a little bit more about what Inward is and what you guys do there, but you mentioned before we started that breathwork could still kind of have a little bit of that woo-woo vibe to it, and I feel like it has… It’s crossed into much… seems to me anyway like it’s crossed much more into a mainstream thing in the last few years. I think that James Nestor book, Breathe, was probably a big moment. At least it was for me. I know my wife read it and then said, “You’ve got to try this,” and then I heard him on a podcast, and I think that really took away from me any sort of remaining skepticism that there’s some real legitimate physiology and science behind this. And of course, once you learn more of that, it makes perfect sense. The physiology doesn’t seem shocking. Of course this sort of works, but I would imagine that in getting more people to try this out, and people coming into your studio, that that communication part of it is still really important. How do you talk about the value of breathwork, and what can be done, and why it’s not some sort of fringe thing that you should sort of dismiss, but is in the same camp as things like nutrition, in terms of helping to impact your health?

Emily Hunter (09:29):

Yeah, I think that’s exactly right. I do believe that it’s also crossing this threshold of becoming a more legitimate and respected practice, but yeah, I was mentioning before can still be a little seen on the woo scale, depending on what type of breathwork you’re talking about as well. I think I usually start by… People often ask what is the difference between breathwork and meditation, and I think that’s kind of a good starting place, because people are becoming definitely more familiar with meditation and the benefits there. A nice way to compare it, I mean breathwork and meditation are both mindfulness practices.

Emily Hunter (10:08):

Meditation is more of a passive practice, where you’re observing your breath. You’re not necessarily trying to make any changes to what’s going on in your body, just more of an observational practice, whereas breathwork is an active practice. You are actively changing the pace of your breath, actively extending the length and depth of your inhales and exhales, and that can have a direct impact on your physiology, exactly like you were saying. So where the breath can be this direct link to the nervous system, in a way that usually we don’t have any sort of control over our autonomic nervous system, and the breath is just this direct access point, so it’s really, really interesting.

Mike Haney (10:50):

Yeah, and maybe let’s dive lab deeper into that, because I think that physiological piece of it, again, once you sort of read it and make the connection, it makes sort of obvious sense, that of course breathing being one of the core function we do to provide oxygen to our body, and that it impacts every cell. It reminds me a bit of the way we talk about metabolism or metabolic health, that because glucose affects literally every cell in your body, its effects can be very wide ranging, from immediate to long term, and I feel like breathwork has a similarity, in that it is almost so obviously crucial to our wellbeing that we can kind of overlook the fact that it can have… that we can control it, or that modulating it in some way can have an impact on how we feel. What’s actually going on, in just a sort of 101 kind of way, with controlling your breath to control the amount of oxygen or carbon dioxide that’s in your body, sort of beyond what your body is naturally doing in any given moment? What’s that actually doing inside your body, inside your cells? Why does that have these sort of knock-on effects?

Emily Hunter (11:58):

Yeah. I think to put it in simple terms, when you’re taking these long, slow, deep breaths, deep, diaphragmatic breaths, you are activating these nerve endings inside of your lungs, and actually the vagus nerve as well, which people speak of, and that just simply sends signals to the body that tells us to relax. So yeah, a lot of people, exactly, we say, “Okay, the breath is the one autonomic response that we can control,” and we understand that, but what exactly is that doing? It’s having so many different effects throughout the body. It’s so simple and accessible, and it just tells our whole body to relax and that we’re okay. It’s getting us out of this fight-or-flight state that we talk about, this sympathetic state, and it’s telling us that we’re safe, we’re okay to relax, and that we’re allowed to enter this deep state of rest and relaxation. It’s incredibly powerful. I mean, you can feel it right away. When you take one long, slow breath, your body is just telling itself that it’s okay to relax.

Mike Haney (13:02):

Yeah. I think another thing that brought it into the mainstream for me was having the breathing app on my watch, which for the first… The Apple Watch, and for the first whatever months I had it, I had turned that off. At some point just on a whim, I turned it on, and then I ignored it for about six months, when it would ping me several times a day to breathe, and then finally I thought, “All right, I’m just going to try this. Every time it pings me, no matter what I’m doing, even if I’m out watching my kid play sports or something, I’ll just stop and do the five breathe, inhale, exhale,” and was amazed at how, maybe not every time, but probably 80% of the time, I could really tell an actual effect from that, and the fact that it really doesn’t take much to…

Mike Haney (13:46):

As you said, you can feel it even with one breath, was really shocking to me, but also felt like this incredible hack, where I was like, “Oh, if I actually stick to doing this four times a day or whenever it pings me, that might actually help.” So I’m wondering if you could talk a little bit more about these different kinds of breathwork. What does downregulated and upregulated mean? What am I doing when I do this, this Apple Watch thing that it tells me to do? I think it’s like five seconds in and five seconds out or something like that.

Emily Hunter (14:14):

Yeah, absolutely. The Apple Watch, exactly like you said, it’s an amazing tool, and it reminds you to do this practice throughout the day, and even some of these studies that we’re referring to in the article, they were only referencing a session of two minutes, so it’s extremely quick and powerful practice. Downregulated breathing, there’s so many different kinds. It’s really amazing how many different exact types there are of breathwork, but when we speak of downregulated, we’re usually just talking about exactly what we have so far, so these really long inhales and extending the exhale, so extending the exhale is really the most important part.

Emily Hunter (14:53):

It’s funny. We were talking about doing the ice bath and sauna before, and where this really clicked for me with guiding people through the ice bath, because when we first get in, it’s really clear you’re going through this sympathetic response, and your immediate reaction is to tighten everything and have really short breaths, and as soon as you coach people to relax their breathing and extend that exhale, I usually coach people to extend it for eight, a count of eight, and you really see them drop into the experience and get relaxed. So the downregulated breathing is really long exhales are the most important part.

Emily Hunter (15:30):

Now, there’s also upregulated breathing, which is a different type that you may have heard of, Wim Hof breathwork, or any of these rapid-paced breathing. They’re actually giving the opposite response, which it’s really interesting in the article. I was thinking about it before. Dietitians are always recommending balance in everything, and that’s exactly what it is here. In this article, we were talking about how slow breathing can reduce cortisol, and that is an amazing effect. But there is something called you eustress. You don’t always want to be in this relaxed mode. Our body naturally wants to undergo certain periods of relaxation and then also stress. That’s a healthy response. So sometimes, if we do this upregulated breathing, we can switch on the sympathetic response, and that actually releases hormones such as norepinephrine in the body, which can have a positive effect as well, in reducing inflammation, and boosting mood, boosting mental clarity, and focus, and things like that. That’s kind of the other side of breathwork.

Emily Hunter (16:35):

Another type, which actually, there is amazing research too, that mainly stems from holotropic breathing, are these long sessions, that can almost mimic an altered state of consciousness, where this is decreasing the default mode network, and giving you this space from your day-to-day life to have really nice insights, and to release emotions. That’s getting more on the woo scale, as we were talking about before, but it also has an amazing amount of research as well, so it’s all really interesting.

Mike Haney (17:08):

Yeah. I remember there’s a passage in the James [Paulin 00:17:11] book about psychedelics, where he undergoes a session of that kind of breathing, and talks about the effect being very similar to a psilocybin or an LSD kind of experience, and right, that what it’s doing is calming that default mode network, which is sort of our almost sort of ego center, right? It’s sort of the thing that makes us us, and if we can shut that down, it opens things up a little bit.

Emily Hunter (17:34):

Exactly. Yeah, he spoke about it really eloquently. Even in his book, like you were referring to before, there’s also the element of just day-to-day breathing, and how breathing through your nose versus your mouth can have amazing effects on our overall health, so yeah, it’s really interesting.

Mike Haney (17:50):

Yeah. I remember, when you were talking about the downregulated breathing and the long exhales, the thing that I remember from literally laying on my son’s bedroom floor doing the exercise when you guys were leading our company, I have a very visceral memory of sort of being on the carpet and looking up at the ceiling. The thing I remember being, I guess I would say hardest, really to the point of being uncomfortable and a little bit scary was an exhale and then a holding the exhale to the point where it started to feel a little suffocating almost. Like, your body really wanted to take in air, and it felt like we were fighting that urge. Am I remembering that correctly? And if so, what’s the point of that, of really holding that exhale for as long as you can before you give into that urge to sort of replenish?

Emily Hunter (18:37):

Yeah. There are a variety of different benefits of breath holds. The main, you are actually activating this… I think in James Nestor’s book, he speaks about this as well, in terms of having more carbon dioxide and how that actually activates the fight-or-flight, but how if you get more comfortable with this feeling of the breath holds, you can reduce your anxiety overall, and get more comfortable with reducing anxiety and this feeling of stress. Also, it’s amazing to improve your blood’s oxygen carrying capacity. Breath holds have a variety of different health benefits.

Mike Haney (19:14):

Interesting. Yeah, I remember that from the book, that a lot of breathwork is actually much more about carbon dioxide than it’s about oxygen. Is that right?

Emily Hunter (19:21):

Yeah, exactly.

Mike Haney (19:24):

In the article, we talked a little bit about, and you touched on this before, that really, sort of physiologically, what’s happening when we control the breathwork is we’re controlling sympathetic nervous system. It’s tapping into that sort of fight-or-flight response, and it seems like cortisol is really the core hormone that we’re affecting with the breathwork. Is that right?

Emily Hunter (19:43):

Yeah. In terms of metabolic health, cortisol seems to be the main hormone that we’re affecting.

Mike Haney (19:49):

And cortisol, as we walk through a little bit in this article, cortisol actually has so many effects. I think most of us know it as kind of the stress hormone, but it actually interacts with a lot of other hormones within our body, insulin being one of them. If I am remembering the mechanism correctly here, basically, when cortisol goes up, it’s sort of prepping our body for, “Okay, something crazy’s about to happen. We might need a surge of energy right now. The lion’s about to get us on the Savannah,” so it creates acute insulin resistance, which basically means less insulin, cells able to sort of take up more glucose, get ready, get more glucose in the blood, tell the liver to produce more glucose, like basically give us a surge of glucose because we’re ready for this energy. But the way in which that system is broken in our modern day, that cortisol response, is that the stresses that produce that cortisol surge, and the subsequent blood sugar surges, are things like a stressful email, or traffic, or somebody’s Instagram post that you don’t like, and we don’t actually need all that glucose, and then it just kind of sits in our system, and the point of the breathwork is to sort of pull that cortisol down. Does that all track?

Emily Hunter (20:59):

Yeah, no, that… A beautiful description. It’s exactly what’s going on. You know, you’re stimulating this fight-or-flight so much in our day-to-day lives now, that we’re causing this acute insulin resistance, and also constricting the arteries, all a function of cortisol. Also triggers gluconeogenesis, so we’re actually making our own blood sugar in the liver, and pushing this into our bloodstream as well. Yeah, we’re just triggering the body we’re ready to go, the fight-or-flight’s on. We’re ready. We’re ready for the fight-or-flight, but there’s nothing to be done, so exactly like you said. It’s just in our day-to-day lives now, and this becomes an unhealthy mechanism.

Mike Haney (21:43):

One of the things that I was reminded of going back to the article, what’s interesting about some of these studies is that it appeared to me that there are studies that look at the effects of breathwork both sort of acutely in the moment, “I’m stressed out. I’ve got this cortisol surge. I could do some breathing exercises. You know, I could feel it bring me down, same that when I feel following my Apple Watch prompts.” But it also seems like there are some studies suggesting that breathwork over time, done consistently over a period of weeks or months, produces more durable effects. Can you talk about that, the difference between sort of the acute effects and what we know about its ability to produce durable effects?

Emily Hunter (22:18):

Yeah, I think you’re exactly right. A lot of the studies, especially on insulin resistance and blood sugar, looked at the effects kind of before eating, right after eating, and showed that there were beneficial effects in terms of our blood glucose there, and I was just looking back through some of the studies, and you’re completely right. I remember one said 24 weeks after the trial was over, they still showed this beneficial effect on doing these practices regularly. I think because we’re able to decrease our stress over time, this isn’t just something that happens one time and then it comes back. If you’re able to really have this decrease in cortisol, then that’s something that’s going to stay with you for quite a while.

Mike Haney (23:07):

Yeah, I’m looking back at one of the studies we looked at here, which uses alternate nostril breathing, which I’m going to make you explain in a minute. It’s that regular practice of slow breathing for 30 minutes each morning and evening, for three months, had a statistically significant effect on reducing sympathetic nervous system activity. That’s not an insignificant amount of practice, 30 minutes morning and evening, but it’s interesting that it had that kind of lasting effect over months. What is alternate nostril breathing?

Emily Hunter (23:33):

Yeah. Alternate nostril is actually something… My mother’s a psychotherapist, as an aside. This is a practice that I know she’s been talking about for years, which is really interesting that it’s coming back around in the research that I’m seeing here. Great for calming down the nervous system and that fight-or-flight response for reducing stress and anxiety is, I think, something that she uses it for in her practice. But just sitting comfortably, if you start by just taking a normal breath in and out through the nose, then try using, depends what hand you use. By using your right thumb to close the right nostril, so you’re putting your thumb all the way over one of your nostrils, and you’re just going to inhale through your left nostril, so one at a time. Once you inhale through your left, at the very top of the inhale, take your thumb off the right nostril and then close your left nostril with your left index finger, and exhale through the right nostril. Then you’re just going to continue to repeat this, so at the bottom of the exhale, switching back to your right thumb on your right nostril. I’m hoping that’s making sense and translating okay.

Mike Haney (24:45):

Absolutely. I’m doing it as we speak, and it feels very strange.

Emily Hunter (24:50):

Yes, absolutely.

Mike Haney (24:51):

Do I remember correctly, that doing inhale through one and exhale through the other, is there a different effect if I’m inhaling through the right versus inhaling through the left?

Emily Hunter (25:00):

It’s a really great question, and I have seen some articles on activating different sides of the brain, but I don’t have enough evidence there to really speak about that eloquently.

Mike Haney (25:15):

I do want to go through some of the other ones. You mentioned the videos, and you guys do have, at Inward Breathwork, you’ve got some great videos, and you shared some really excellent ones, so we’ll of course link to Inward in the show notes, but we’re also going to link to this article that we’re discussing here. There are several videos that you shared there, along with some breathing methods. I wonder if we could just talk through what a few of these are. You’re good at describing these even without videos. What is coherent breathing?

Emily Hunter (25:38):

Yeah. I would say of all the types, I was most excited about coherent after writing the article. I just think it’s extremely powerful, and a lot of interesting research, and a lot of the academic studies do cite this method specifically. Coherent is basically just downregulated breathing, the same as we talked about. It’s also called resonant breathing. Breathing in this way tends to align your breath with your heart rate in a really nice way that can increase your HRV over time, your heart rate variability, which is also linked to metabolic health. It’s breathing at a pattern of around six breaths per minute. The inhales and exhales are the same length, but you’re just slowing it down. It translates to around six counts in and six counts out.

Mike Haney (26:27):

Okay. That’s basically what my Apple Watch is telling me to do when it pings me several times a day, right? Is some-

Emily Hunter (26:32):

Exactly.

Mike Haney (26:32):

… equal amount of in and out, right?

Emily Hunter (26:34):

Yeah, equal amount of in and out.

Mike Haney (26:36):

And primarily through the nose, correct?

Emily Hunter (26:39):

Yes, exactly.

Mike Haney (26:41):

Okay.

Emily Hunter (26:42):

These downregulated practices are all through the nose. The only time we’re doing through the mouth is to activate the sympathetic nervous system when you’re doing the upregulated breathing. So yeah, day-to-day, and for any of the downregulated practices, through the nose.

Mike Haney (26:55):

And what is… I’m going to butcher this pronunciation, Buteyko breathing? B-U-T-E-Y-K-O. How is that pronounced?

Emily Hunter (27:03):

Yeah, Buteyko is how-

Mike Haney (27:07):

Buteyko.

Emily Hunter (27:08):

… I pronounce it, but I can’t 100% say that’s accurate, so we’ll go with that for now. Yeah, the Buteyko method is about creating this air hunger. Similar to coherent, we’re breathing through the nose, but you’re going to keep the breath as gentle and quiet as you can, so rather than taking really deep breaths that you can hear, you’re going to keep it as quiet as possible, so just breathing through the nose, but you’re not going to go all the way to the top of the exhale. You’re going to leave a little bit of room, where you feel like you kind of want to breathe a bit more at the top, and then exhaling all the way, so creating this really quiet, slow pattern. There’s not a specific number or count that you do here. You just want to create this slight air shortage.

Mike Haney (27:54):

You mentioned the resonant breathing was something that struck you when you were research this article. I was curious, knowing all you do about breathwork, and with your background, what did you learn when you were writing this article? What surprised you?

Emily Hunter (28:05):

Yeah. I think all of the research on the downregulated practices really surprised me in general, because I think, like we were talking about, breathwork is becoming a hot topic recently. There’s a lot of people talking about the different types of breathwork, but I feel that the downregulated types specifically are getting a bit overlooked, and people are referring to this upregulated Wim Hof style holotropic-type style when they think of breathwork specifically, so just the fact that you could do these really peaceful, slow breathing exercises for two minutes at a time and get this amazing cascade of responses throughout the body was really exciting to me, so I made sure that the team was aware of how amazing these downregulated practices were, and we really shifted the focus of even our platform, to encourage more of this downregulated breathing.

Mike Haney (29:01):

Maybe talk a little bit more about the platform, about Inward and what you guys are up to there.

Emily Hunter (29:05):

Yeah, absolutely. Really exciting. We actually just rebranded, so we’re called Othership now. We’ve transitioned away from Inward. Yeah, it’s really exciting. Our brand before COVID, we had this physical space. I was speaking about ice baths and saunas, so that’s what our physical space is about, and throughout the pandemic, I mean, it was a really challenging time to have a physical business, and we transitioned online to help continue to serve our community, when especially in Toronto, it was a pretty intense year of lockdowns here, where we had to be closed, so we had been offering breathwork alongside the ice bath and sauna a little bit in the physical space, and every Sunday on Zoom, we would lead a class, free for all our members to come, and it grew from 25 people, to 50, to 100, to 200 people.

Emily Hunter (30:00):

I’d always been experimenting and tinkering around with online businesses for my nutrition background and nutrition counseling online, so I saw a nice opportunity when people were asking for the recordings, to try to build out a little web platform and offer all the recordings online. So I built that using Kajabi, the software, and which I’m a huge fan of, as people have come to know. It’s a great way to easily start a little online business, and yeah, throughout that process, we grew our platform. We grew to have over 1,000 members, which was really exciting for us, and our user base, you know, the web-based platform wasn’t the most successful to use. Everyone really wanted an app, so yeah, now we built this beautiful app, and we’re really excited. We’re just beginning our transition over the last couple weeks, to bring all our users onto the new platform, and now it’s great, because we can offer these different types of sessions. We have a daily up and a daily down, which is a daily upregulated practice and a daily downregulated, slow breathing practice, and then we have a weekly, more released, altered consciousness based practice, which is the all-around.

Mike Haney (31:12):

Interesting. What do you recommend to people, besides joining the platform and jumping into those? If somebody wants to try, somebody who’s very new to this, hasn’t done it before, maybe is not ready to go deep into their default mode network, shut down with holotropic breathing, what’s the way in? What kind of breathing exercise should people try? How long, sort of how often? What’s the way to get people sort of hooked on using this as part of their just day-to-day life?

Emily Hunter (31:40):

Absolutely. I mean, you don’t need to do these super long practices to get the benefits out of breathwork. I think when I was reviewing the article, just thinking, doing some self-reflection on which type of breathing do you think will benefit you? Because some practices, like the activating your sympathetic, if you’re already stressed out all the time, if you’re in this fight-or-flight mode, if you’re drinking coffee, and go, go, go all the time, then maybe you want to start with one of these downregulated practices. Or if you’re feeling kind of blah, like you don’t have a lot of stress, like you want to kind of increase your focus and enhance productivity, then maybe trying one of the upregulated practices.

Emily Hunter (32:21):

I think practices like on your Apple Watch, exactly like you said, can be a great guide. There’s lots of YouTube videos available. I think just having someone, a guide that you can trust and just follow along with is one of the beautiful parts of breathwork that makes it so accessible. So yeah, I would just go on YouTube and try to find a video that suits your needs, and if you like coherent or box breathing, or if you want to try one of the upregulated, even one round of Wim Hof breathing is a nice place to start.

Mike Haney (32:52):

I think that’s a really good point about going to look around, because the little bit I’ve done, I’ve found for me it’s very much like yoga, in that I really like yoga, but for years, I didn’t. I didn’t think I did, and it was because I didn’t like the vibe of the instructors I was going to or the videos I was watching, and once I found folks who sort of fit my level of… I also sort of say the level of woo-woo, or the level of sort of spirituality versus athleticism, or even just the style of sort of encouragement. I’ve found instructors I really connect with and I enjoy, and it makes me really like the practice, and I’ve found that breathwork is sort of the same. There seems to be a real range of some really lean pretty heavily spiritual. I suppose it also depends on the kind of breathwork you’re doing. Obviously, the holotropic stuff gets more into that space. Some seem much more sort of straightforward, and almost scientific, and kind of, “Here’s what we’re doing.” So I think that’s a good point to make to folks, to if you try it once and you’re not quite connecting with it, feel free to look around. There’s lots of styles out there.

Emily Hunter (33:49):

Absolutely. I think that’s been one of the most fun parts of developing our platform too, is there is just so many different ways that you can go with it. There’s so many different types of music you can put in the background. We’re overlaying these amazing breath sounds, and then exactly like you said, there’s different types of instructors. I mean, we’ve had members tell us they want more of a drill sergeant type instructor, that really gets them going, whereas some people resonate with the more spiritual side. Or sometimes you don’t want any direction. You want it to just be a breath sound that you breathe along with. I think it’s been really fun and a really creative project that way.

Mike Haney (34:27):

We talked about how much research we uncovered doing this piece, which I think is great, and when folks take a look at the piece, you can click out, as with all of our articles, and read the studies themselves, which is always interesting, to just look at the methodology and the kind of specific results. I’m curious as you looked through that, and as you think about breathwork, and you watch the sort of progress of it into the mainstream, what don’t we know? What do you think are some of the sort of bigger still unanswered questions or areas you’d like to see more research, or study, or sort of scientific backing in, whether it’s the effects of breath on different parts of the body, or the effectiveness of different kinds of breathing? What are you still curious about and hoping to learn when it comes to breathwork?

Emily Hunter (35:07):

Yeah, that’s a great question. I think I’m really curious, even in reviewing this research for our call today, was just about dose. Exactly like you were asking about, you know? There’s a large range of do this for two minutes, do this for 30 minutes, and then what style. If you’re doing these upregulated practices, is that safe to do every day? Should you only do it once a week, to activate your nervous system in that way? There’s a lot of unanswered questions in terms of dose that way, and I think with a lot of these practices… I mean, it’s the same with fasting, same with ice bath, same with a lot of these various upregulating practices, is how often should you do them to get the optimal response? I think it’s a difficult question to answer, but I’m sure we’ll get closer to the truth over time.

Mike Haney (35:54):

Yeah, that’s a great point. I feel like with so many of these things, dose response is really the key. So yeah, I’m sure there will be much more research in this space, given how mainstream it’s become. Last question for you. If you don’t mind sharing, I’m curious what your breathwork practice is? Is it something you do every day? What kind of breathing do you do? Do you use it just when you need it? What does it look like for you?

Emily Hunter (36:15):

Yeah, absolutely. I think during the pandemic, when we were meeting on Zoom every Sunday to do these long sessions, I really, really enjoyed that, so I’ve started… That’s why we recommend doing the longer practices, once a week is our estimated dose for now, until we have more evidence, but I think doing those practices once a week allows you to really tune into yourself, and to go inward, and to feel the sense of grounding, and get that restoration, even if it’s a little bit more on the woo side.

Emily Hunter (36:48):

Then, currently, I am really go, go, go with our business, so I’m doing a little more of the downregulated practices. I feel I’m at the computer all day, which doesn’t do the best things to your breathing. Even you can start to recognize when you’re at the computer, and you hold your breath. You’ll start getting these kind of… doing breath holds, but just by accident. So I’ve been really focusing on doing the long, slow breathing, and I’ll either do it first thing in the morning or I’ll do them around 2:00 PM in the afternoon, when I’ve kind of finished my batch of work for the morning and I’m ready to slow down.

Emily Hunter (37:24):

Another really interesting thing I’ve heard from our members is that it’s like a nice beer after work, to do these slow practices in the evening, and one of our member’s wives will tell him to go do his breathing after work when he’s feeling too wound up, which is hilarious. But it’s also a really nice part of the day, nice time of the day to incorporate, and even just like an evening wind-down practice, when especially working from home right now, I think it’s difficult, that transition into evening, when I’m just in my living room, and then I’m still in my living room after. So try to break up your day a little better, and I find doing a nice downregulated practice around 6:00, 7:00 is a great place as well.

Mike Haney (38:11):

That’s excellent advice. I love the idea of using it as a transition moment, especially because it’s something that you can do without changing clothes or going outside. You know, regardless of the weather, I’m thinking of exercise as something I use a lot as a transition, but I live in San Diego, so I can sort of do that whenever. But for a lot of folks, a 15-minute walk is not always possible, so I like the idea of taking that same 15 minutes, finding some relatively quiet spot in your house, and just focusing on the breath as a way to transition from one mode to another is great advice.

Emily Hunter (38:40):

Yeah, I love that as well. I think it’s a really great transition and a great way to just shift your state. You’re putting yourself into a completely different mood afterwards, which is amazing. I mean, similar to the way we were using the hot cold practice before. You go in, and you’re feeling stressed and overwhelmed, and then in such a short time period, you’re able to come out feeling grounded, or relaxed, or energized, or whatever it might be. It’s really interesting. And I was also reading before, how it is super accessible, exactly like you were saying. You don’t have to go outside. You don’t need to change your clothes. Then someone else had mentioned, you know, no one even knows if you’re doing it, because you can just do it quietly to yourself. You can count your breaths, and you can be at dinner with other people, and maybe you just feel anxious for a moment, where if you were going into meditation, people might notice, but you can change the speed of your breath, just internally.

Mike Haney (39:36):

That’s a really great point. I remember doing that as I started to try to incorporate. That sort of became my challenge with the Apple Watch, was when it pings me, no matter what I’m doing, driving, whatever, sitting, I’ll do this, because it’s so minor that it doesn’t feel like it’s greatly affecting my state. It doesn’t feel unsafe and anything, and yeah, can I do this in such a way that even the people sitting right next to me don’t notice it, and I still feel some sort of knock-on effect?