Harry Turner 0:05
Welcome seekers of truth to another season of "Is That SOO? Here we embark on the journey together a quest not just for answers, for the right questions that lead us to the core of who we are. Season Four unfolds with many insights and revelations that challenge us to peel away the facades and meet our authentic selves. Let's be illuminated, transformed, and indeed become lit. The knowledge of our true selves. Welcome outlier.
Harry Turner 0:35
So now we have Mr. Richard Blake, and the title for today is, well, the topic rather, is breaking through boundaries. Richard Blake on the power of breathwork and biohacking for mental health. So this is a long awaited meet up between Mr. Blake and I. And I won't keep him waiting backstage because I want to hear from him. But I also want to talk to you today, the theme for this year and moving forward. It's really about living in truth. We are in an age of information. And with so much information out there and so many different messages being said on the television, we got to remember that that's their vision that they are telling to us. And you have a choice to make, whether that's in alignment with the truth. And again, the truth is the accurate expression of things essence and sense. The mind thinks and confuses thinking with knowing and thinks that it knows the truth when it sees it. But it's truth is based off of its logic, which is limited to this 3d dimension of humaneness where we subjectively choose what is right and what is wrong for us. But as Carl Jung says, the pendulum of the mind oscillates not between right and wrong, but since a nonsense we do would make sense to us. Given our level of psychological and spiritual maturation, or our level of awareness or our level of consciousness, however you want to term it. But it is our inner conditions that are projecting the outer world, our interpretation of the outer world. That's what we're actually looking at our very own, in a world being projected on to the outer world superimposed on to the outer world. And so we truly don't see things as they are but as we are in the inner world. And so I know that my brother is gonna drop some jewels on biohacking for mental health, and using breath work, you know, life and death is in the breath. I'm happy about this meeting a share in this space. And so I want to give a shout out to everybody out there.
Harry Turner 2:47
Hey, Heidi, all happens at the time. It's meant to be yes. Yes. You see how I just translated that I'd be right there. Yes. When it's meant to be, it will be, you know, que sera, sera. So I'm going to invite my brother on the stage right now. Welcome to the stage, Mr. Richard Blake. Hello.
Richard Blake 3:13
Hi, Harry. Hello, everyone. Thank you for having me on.
Harry Turner 3:18
A is it a pleasure to have you in this space, man. And so I'm glad that we finally got it. The stream yard is up and working, you know, everything. Tech is working out for us. And so now we can finally have this meeting. So thank you for rescheduling and coming back on so we can do this. Yes, sir. Look, I'm gonna step off for a second, I just allow you to just you know, talk to the audience that out loud audience and let them know who you are, man and what it is that you actually do. You could say it better than me. Okay, thank
Richard Blake 3:45
you. Yeah. So my name is Richard Blake, I go by the "Breath Geek" on Instagram. And the reason for that is because I'm a bit of a nerd, or a geek when it comes to breathwork. So I've been teaching breathwork for, I don't know, four or five years, but I've been doing it for a lot longer, probably. And most people would say, Well, I've been breathing for my whole life. Yes. I've also been breathing for my whole life, but not necessarily in the most optimal fashion. And yeah, so I'm a PhD candidate at CIIS in California. And I've just finished running what at the moment is the the largest randomized control trial on conscious connected breathwork. I got into this from my own struggles with mental health. I had anxiety, depression, eating disorders. Eating Disorder is kind of how I transitioned from nutrition and fitness. I was a fitness model. I was in like Men's Health and I was doing dieting down for extreme photoshoots. And then that led to some extreme eating behaviors that I couldn't resolve on my own. And that's when I turned to things like psychotherapy and ultimately breathwork and breath work was this thing that really just flipped a switch for me breath work that I'm talking about is civically conscious, connected breathing. So conscious connected breathing is an umbrella term for many different schools of breathwork. That includes the most famous ones, Holotropic breathwork, or others like transformational breath, work, clarity, breath, work, breath guru, all these people do this type of breath work and this type of breath work is I would say it's the deepest, it takes you into an altered state of consciousness, where healing can happen, they have now put people in fMRI, and shown that people's brains change to the same extent, as someone who's taking a moderate dose of psilocybin mushrooms to big changes. They say it's changes in cerebral hemodynamics. And it means changes in blood flow. And these as most people know, psychedelics are very hot in research right now, for good reason, because they work very effectively for mental health. But I think that breathwork can be just as effective as psychedelics, and more importantly, it's accessible. It's legal right now. And hence, that's why I'm doing this research and trying to get the message out there about it. Maybe
Harry Turner 6:03
I should have did the intro because you will still in some of my thunder right there, man. So we're gonna get right into it, man, I just said you're doing the largest trial Say that again.
Richard Blake 6:13
Yeah, it's the I couldn't finished it now. But it was It is currently the largest randomized controlled trial on conscious,
Harry Turner 6:20
connected, breathing, conscious, connected breathing. Yeah,
Richard Blake 6:23
so that's this umbrella term for a load of different sort of brands of breath work include transformational breath, work, clarity, breath, work, rebirthing, breath, Guru, therapeutic, breathwork, BBT, Rs, they're all private schools, whereas I just said, I took the threads that run through all of those, which is, it's a mouth breath, your breathing, your inhale is, is longer than your exhale. So you're actually actually activating the sympathetic portion of the parasympathetic nervous system. So some people think I'm gonna do breath work. And it's going to be like a massage or mindfulness meditation, I'm going to be really relaxed, but this one is quite stimulating. And one of the reasons for that is because I don't know if you know, Peter Levine and his work on trauma, but one of his ideas is that trauma gets stuck in the nervous system, because we truncate our survival process when a traumatic event happens, we don't let that process carry on. If you look into mammals in the wild, like a deer who nearly gets hit by a car, after they liberate that survival energy to run away from that car, they go off into safety, and then they shake, they shake out all that that potential trauma or that survival energy, and children do it as well. And dogs do it after they get into fights as well. And we, for some reason, have decided that we shouldn't let people do that when we see a child shivering. We're like, no, don't shiver, you know, don't everything's fine, don't, don't, don't cry, don't let that energy out, that energy gets stuck in the nervous system and this type of breath work. One such hypothesized method of action is we're completing those survival processes. So during this breathwork, you'll see people shaking, they do this like involuntary shaking, they also do other things like clearing from the nervous system. So people have these earth shaking yawns, the biggest yawns you'll ever see, and they're not there, say I'm not tired, and there'll be their eyes will be streaming from these yearnings and telling them Don't worry, that's just your nervous system, letting go of this truncated survival energy.
Harry Turner 8:19
Could you share with us your initial encounter with breathwork and biohacking? And what drew you into this field?
Richard Blake 8:26
So yeah, I started out doing the fitness modeling. So I was always just trying to look as good as I could and lose weight as much as I could. I'm not like that at all. I have had my DNA tested. And I have a very high propensity for obesity. It's many, many of my family members are obese. So I have to work really hard to stay in shape, which has helped me because it means I'm very motivated to learn about strategies for staying in shape, and, you know, trying new things and being quite experimental and probably quite risky and stupid. A lot of the time. But yeah, that's what I desire to be a successful fitness model is what got me into nutrition. But then that session, really that dangerous obsession with trying to look, Cover Model readily led me to some mental health issues like depression, anxiety, and that eating disorder I mentioned. So then I had to switch into the mental health aspect. I had to recover from my own, you know, self inflicted harm. So yeah, I started with regular therapy. And that really helped me that's what got me off rock bottom, I did the 12 step program, Overeaters Anonymous for my food problem. And it nothing quite clicked until I discovered this form of breath work. So I was in a therapy session with my old therapist, and he said to me, you know, whenever you talk about something particularly troubling to you, I notice your breath goes really, really shallow. And you often look like you're short of breath when you're just sitting here so obviously, you can't be short of breath from exercise, and he's like, you should check out this guy. I've heard great things about him is called the breath guru. His name's Alan Dolan, when he tried booking a session with him. So I booked in with I'm a London based practitioner, and I just thought he was gonna go and teach me how to breathe, you know, functional breathing, you know, how to breathe and relax. But he taught me this conscious, connected breathing school. So I, you know, in the session, I went to his studio, lie down on the couch, he teaches you the technique. And it's a really difficult technique, you're never going to accidentally get into this technique, thankfully, because, as I said, it alters your brain chemistry as much as a psilocybin mushroom word. Hence why I do it. I don't think it'll ever be like, as big as headspace or calm, because you need a facilitator to be sort of coaching you through at every step. So he did that. He coached me through this step. And after about 4050 minutes of breath work, I came back from a another dimension, it quite, quite, quite not literally, but I was just like, I look to look to him. I was like, well, where have I been? Oh my god, wait, how the 50 minutes has gone by I've been in this space with just pink fluffy clouds. And I feel amazing. And yeah, we talked through some of my staff and then immediately booked my wife in the next day. And then we trained with him. He started a mentorship program that he still runs. And yeah, it's something I started doing monthly with him. And I think the, you know, one of the hypotheses for why this is really effective, is because, particularly for for trauma is you know, some people say that the function of the prefrontal cortex is to protect us from pain. So
Harry Turner 11:31
how do you define breathwork and biohacking in the context of mental health and wellness? Yeah,
Richard Blake 11:38
well, biohacking is a very loosely defined thing. I don't know of anyone who has really nailed down the definition but I think biohacking is a is a kind of a mindset. It involves things like using technology things such as red light panels, or hyperbaric oxygen chambers, or neurofeedback. And it also includes nature, so things like grounding, going barefoot on the grass, cold exposure, swimming and cold bodies of water, or heat exposure and eliminating toxins. So using clean, non toxic cleaning products wearing blue light blocking glasses, so it's about making a healthy environment as well as using technology. Self quantification is another big part. So using things like the aura ring or the whoop to track your body metrics and things like that, so biohacking. It's not the best term. I think some people really roll their eyes at it. I think it's good. biohacking, a big part of it can be about emphasizing mental health. So using things like ice baths for mental health, because you know, an ice bath can spike your dopamine as much as a line of cocaine and you also get like a 250% increase in and norepinephrine, this adrenal and you do and eyespot. So that can really high so health as well.
Harry Turner 12:55
It's Heidi said the biohack. And it's like cheat codes for the avatar. Know About like that. You have such rich knowledge like I love this. I love this. I love what I have somebody on the stage that actually know what it is that they're talking about and have thoroughly been in it. So I have my own questions, personal questions, but can you walk us through a basic breathwork technique that someone can use to begin their journey towards improved mental health?
Richard Blake 13:20
Yes, absolutely. So as I said, there's many, many different forms of breathwork probably the most famous one right now is Wim Hof. You know, he's this Dutch guy, the Iceman, he's climbed Mount Everest in his shorts. And he does, he has like 56 World Records for cold exposure. But he also kind of re popularized this breathwork technique called TUMO, that he says get high on your own supply, you really do get a lot of neurotransmitter releases from this type of breath work and involves breath holds is pretty intense. We're not going to be able to do it right now. Because I think people would, it would be a little bit too overwhelming to do it on a podcast. But if you just go to YouTube, there's loads of people who are doing free guided Wim Hof breathwork techniques, they take about 20 minutes, I really recommend that for anyone who hasn't tried it. So that's the most famous one. There's this other type of breath work called functional breathing. And that's made famous by this guy called Patrick McEwan, and the oxygen advantage. And that's more about breathing apnea and people who are over breathing and people who are too sensitive to carbon dioxide. So that's, yeah, that's a really useful one for athletes. And for people that have asthma and other breathing problems. Just a really basic one would be this one popularized by Andrew Huberman. So you know, Huberman lab, he's a pretty well known Stanford neuroscientist, and he did a study on this breathwork technique called cyclical sighing. This is a really useful one just for sort of day to day use when you're getting a little bit stressed. You know, you're stuck in traffic or something like that. So this one is you would you take a big, deep inhale through your nose, and then you take a second inhale at the top. So yeah. And then you let it out with like a And ah, and it's good to do that vibration, it's good to make a little bit of noise because that vibration creates a little bit of vagal nerve tone. So that yeah, tones the vagus nerve, which also helps to us to relax. Nitric oxide is something else that opens up our lungs. And it also can help us relax. So you just do that a few times. So it goes like this. Ah, ah, and you can just keep doing that until you feel completely at peace. Whoa,
Harry Turner 15:31
whoa, I, in your experience, what are some of the most common misconceptions about breath work? And how do you address those, you know, because there's a whole lot of paths out there, you know, so, you know, people that barely go into it, there are people who barely do anything in every field, you know, in every space. And so this is where the poor experiences may occur, because they themselves don't really believe in it. And so that leads to a lot of misconceptions about breath work, and cynicism is always gonna be there even without those out there misrepresenting it. So how do you address these? What are some common misconceptions? And how do you address those?
Richard Blake 16:10
Yeah, there's lots as he said. So one is that we should take a deep breath when we're stressed, and we should take it through our mouth. And we should just like breathe really, really strongly. That's not what we want to be doing. If we're stressed and we're anxious, we want to be slowing the breath down, we want to be breathing deeply. Yet take a deep breath. That's, that's, that's the absolute wrong thing to be doing. We want to be slowing our breath down. So we want to be breathing in and out through our nose almost at all times. So the nose is a breathing device. The mouth is a speaking device, a swallowing device, a chewing device, a vomiting device is not designed specifically for breathing. When we breathe in and out through our nose, the air gets filtered and conditioned by the mucosal lining as well as the hairs, it filters out viruses, bacteria, mold, all those things. If you're breathing in and out through your mouth, it's all that stuff is getting in there without any challenge. The nose, also humidifiers the air. So when we're breathing out through our mouth, we dehydrating ourselves so another reason to breathe in and out through the nose. Another reason is nitric oxide, I mentioned it earlier, it's a bronchodilator. That means that opens up the lungs. When we breathe in and out through our nose. It helps us to you know that that gas exchange in the lungs becomes more efficient. Nitric oxide also relaxes us as well. So it's good to keep us in that relaxed parasympathetic state. And breathing through the mouth activates the sympathetic portion of the autonomic nervous system, whereas the nose activates the parasympathetic. So the parasympathetic is the rest and digest. And the sympathetic is that fight and flight. So breathing it out through our nose is going to help us relax in those stressful situations. Yes. Thank you.
Harry Turner 17:57
Yes, sir. Yes, sir. Yes, sir. You know, your shirt, sir.
Richard Blake 18:02
Thank you. That's why they call me the bear breath geek. Actually, this is how I got the name. I was doing a breathwork training. And it was great, amazing, like healers, the trainers, but people would ask technical questions like sometimes you know, things happen in breath work where people get cramps, and someone asked a question, you know, what's happening in the body? And the facilitators said, like, oh, we think that it's, you know, people who have problems letting go, they get cramps in their hands because of that. And I kept on putting my hand I'd be like, Oh, no, that's actually called tetany. It's called respiratory alkalosis. And I kept on hours aren't answering questions about the scientific stuff. And eventually, the facilitators got sick of me and they just like, oh, whatever, breath geek, and that's how
Harry Turner 18:47
I got into it with a few pretty much at every stage of my academic career. There was at least one teacher that couldn't stand me because I was just, you know, being authentic like authentically engaging and participating. But apparently when I do that, sometimes people see me as a No at all. Okay, this engage airy, but I thought you had a be engaged man, you get help that this is how you, you know, anyway, man, I love that. Oh, all right. So you already answered this question, but I'm asking it again. Yeah. How has integrating breathwork into your daily routine transform your approach to stress management and emotional regulation? Hmm,
Richard Blake 19:32
yeah, I like that part about emotional regulation. So one of the big themes of the clinical trial I ran was about maladaptive emotion regulation strategies. So supposedly, maladaptive emotion regulation strategies are the biggest causes of anxiety and my trial. It was a six week program where people did 90 minute breathwork sessions online with me. We had groups of people from around the world, doing breath work, once per week, and then We had a placebo group which was just a waitlist. And we measured their anxiety symptoms before and after the the program or the waitlist. The results were great that people in the breathwork group had like 1,000% greater reductions in breathwork compared to the placebo group. And yet one of the things that's sort of part of this psychoeducation that I did for people was explained about maladaptive emotion regulation strategy. So these would be things like, ruminating, or avoiding or suppressing their feelings, whereas adaptive emotion regulation strategies are things like accepting and yeah, feeling those feelings. You know, I like that saying, feeling better is about better feeling. If you want to feel light and positive and generally happy, you need to feel all the full gamut of the human emotions including grief, sadness, anger, frustration, and then you can also feel the excitement, joy, love gratitude. And so one of the ways that I think breathwork functions or this particular conscious, connected breathing functions is I mentioned about the cerebral hemodynamics. So what there's this other phrase that was coined by Ryan wine and Williams in 2009, paper on conscious connected breathing, called transient hypofrontality to transient meaning short
Harry Turner 21:14
term, sorry, and we hold up is here word again, transient
Richard Blake 21:19
hypo frontality. So that what that effectively means is during this breathwork, because you're over breathing, you it's kind of like a type of voluntary hyperventilation. Because of the Bohr effect. I don't want to bore anyone with this call Paul pan there. But the Bohr effect, basically, the blood, the hemoglobin won't release oxygen from its cells without carbon dioxide. And when we hyperventilate, we blow off all our carbon dioxide. So the blood clings on to that oxygen, and it doesn't release it to the brain. And in that sort of, like semi stressful state, the prefrontal cortex gets less blood flow to it. And the prefrontal cortex, you know, that is our sort of like most irrational part of our brain, one of its job is to protect us from pain. And sometimes that part of the brain gets over protective. So it won't let us feel our pain, our emotional pain, it won't let us feel our sadness, it won't let us grieve the people we've loved. When that part gets lost those emotions sort of spring up, they come up into our awareness, and they can be processed, and people would see in these workshops after sort of five to 10 minutes of this breathing, they'll just start crying, I just be like, I can't believe I've been crying over you know, this dog I like I lost 10 years ago, I never cried about it, or this is really helped me, you know, grieve, another loved one. So that would be an adaptive emotion regulation strategy, those people had suppressed that memory. And it was causing them anxiety, it was still in their awareness, it was still in their nervous system. So this breathwork is sort of like going to do a warm one where we like to say it's like when we get into fight or flight, you know, what do we do, we take a deep breath, and we don't process our emotions. When we're under like a really stressful event. We don't want to be processing our emotions, when we're running away from a tiger or we're getting a dressing down from our boss, we want to look composed, so we store those emotions away in a filing cabinet. And during the the breathwork, the conscious connected breathing, I say we open up that filing cabinet again and see what pops up processing hands.
Harry Turner 23:20
I love this. Okay. In regards to the so much verbiage out there, right, but the words Theta Healing, so going into that theta state in regards to breathwork can you make that connection for me?
Richard Blake 23:34
Yes, absolutely. Yeah, that's a good point. Supposedly theta Brainwave. So yeah, we have different levels of brainwaves, you know, starting with high beta, that's the sort of anxious planning type stuff. That's the one we want to be avoiding when we're sleeping. And then we go down to alpha, that's the kind of relaxed focus, that's where we get into in meditation. And then theta is our dreaming brainwaves. So when we're when we're in REM sleep, that's when we're in theta brainwaves. And I think also, when people are having visions with things like peyote, Ibogaine, psilocybin mushrooms, we're having a lot of theta brainwaves during that state. So people, when they do ayahuasca, they say they go and watch the jungle television, they're seeing things in their forehead effectively. And it's similar to dreaming. So for people who kind of remember their dreams, they may feel like oh, yeah, it's at the front of my forehead, that's where I'm seeing the dreams. And in breathwork, we get that same thing. We get people who have visions during breathwork. Some people think that breathwork releases endogenous DMT so die Dimethyltryptamine, which is the active ingredient in ayahuasca, because during hypoxia in mice, they found that mice release DMT under low oxygen states, and people think humans are doing that as well. That's why we get visions during breathwork. I don't think it could be wrong. It could be right. Those theta brainwaves. I think that is the key to breath work. It's we're getting into theta brainwaves. That's where trauma resolution happens. That's where we can go over and reprocess old potentially traumatic or maladaptive. restored memories.
Harry Turner 25:01
So it's very important in trauma work, then, for breathwork to be included, you know, I'm thinking about different approaches, I'm pretty sure you know, especially you'd be in the bread geek, like, I know that you've come, you've had, you've talked to a lot of different people. And so you've had different perspectives come at you. I find myself in this season, I'm being intuitively led to deal with those and well across across the board, everyone, but definitely those in the spiritual and religious communities as well. So how would you put forth the case to someone who was religious? Who says, you know, prayer is enough for me? Why would I need to? You know, I mean, it sounds wonderful, what you're saying, but I pray, and I'm good to go. You say to someone in that community,
Richard Blake 25:48
I would say great, I mean, I would say, this type of breathwork is not for everyone. And I wouldn't push it on anyone. Certainly, I think healing has become very sort of trendy on Instagram, and Tiktok. Not everyone needs to heal. You know, some people don't have trauma, I hate this idea that everyone has trauma, and everyone needs therapy, I don't think that's the case. And I really think that the placebo effect is such an important thing. And in all medicine, you know, whether it's a morphine injection, that still has a placebo aspect to it, so people have really got to believe in it. So I would never try and convert anyone to this type of thing. However, for people who are interested, there are many people who have spiritual and mystical experiences from this type of breathwork. So there was a study by Pressman in 2013, where they had, it was like, I think it was a mental institution of some sort, where they have 13,000 people over like 12 years do conscious, connected breathing, and they would do it quite regularly. And they found that 60% of those people, so nearly 8000, people had some form of mystical experience with conscious connected breathing. So mystical experiences could be meeting God, it can be meeting deceased loved ones, a lot of people have been telling me stories, like I was just with my sister, she passed five years ago, and she, you know, she told me, everything's okay. And I, my anxiety is gone from that. And another sort of key thesis that I had from my PhD is that these non ordinary states, so they like a vehicle to another place, you know, I think it was Freud said, the dreams, the royal road to the subconscious. And then Michael, Poland said, psychedelics are the superhighway to the subconscious. And then one of my mentors, Jim Morningstar, says breathwork is the Rainbow Bridge to the subconscious. And in people who have near death experiences, what often happens is they say, come through this near death experience, and I met my deceased mother, or I met God or I met this other thing. And often they found in people who have attempted suicide, and then near death experience, their anxiety and depression goes away after they have this mystical experience. So these breathwork, or psychedelic or near death, experience enabled mystical experiences, they lead to better outcomes. It's not just oh, cool. I met my sister who died many years ago. It's like, I met my sister who died many years ago, and my anxiety is gone, my depression is gone, my addictions gone. So it's such an exciting thing that we can lead people to these missile experiences, and then their outcomes are significantly changed.
Harry Turner 28:27
Man, Man, Man, how long have you been studying? Yes.
Richard Blake 28:30
We're doing the PhD for about four years. Yep. Before that, I was doing psychotherapy,
Harry Turner 28:36
psychotherapy. So did psychotherapy not work out for you? I
Richard Blake 28:41
took a hiatus from it. So yeah, I was studying integral integrative psychotherapy in London. And I think it's great, but I just felt like breathwork needed someone to go and do the research because like, I was teaching breathwork I wanted to be a psychotherapist, who also taught breathwork because I was working for a charity for the NHS, the National Health Service during COVID. The charity was set up to help all the doctors and nurses get mental health treatment to deal with all the stresses they were going through. And these doctors and nurses who were quite evidence base would come to me and be like, what research is there on breathwork? And I'd be like, there's none. Sorry, do you want a breathwork session? They'd be like, No, thanks. It's free. Still, no, thanks. And so it's like, right, I'm gonna go and do some research. And yeah, because I, you know, I think psychotherapy is amazing, but it doesn't work for everyone, you know, the outcomes are not 100% Guaranteed. CBT only has like a 40% response rate for anxiety. So the 60% of people who are not getting outcomes from CBT I know there are a lot of other amazing psychotherapies but I feel like breathwork deserves a seat at the table as well.
Harry Turner 29:44
And you put foot in a damn good case, sir. Thank you. You know, of course, life and death, and the breath. You can tell when someone is in purpose, you know, and so I know that you're in purpose. And so we called you Oh, my modality, you know, I don't know if you know much about me, but I'm a psychotherapist, but I'm trans transitioning more into the broader sphere, you know, influence and spending more time influence and whatnot. So I'm actually effectively transitioning away from that as of July. Very very, very soon. But what I find is exactly what you said, it's, it's finding that right? That right method that right technique, Bruce Lee, he said, I'm not afraid to demand that knows 10,000 kicks in practice, once I'm afraid of demand and those one kick in practice the 10,000 times, it's like, when you find that one thing, you know, or maybe a few things that really speak to you, and you go deep into it, you'll find that that breakthrough happens. And so for you, it's breathwork. And I honestly, I believe that I don't think anybody could not not benefit from breathwork because that's sort of kind of vital to life, you know, like, on so many different levels, like we're talking about life yet, you know, and so the ability to dis regulate, because in polyvagal theory to talk about how state you know, Steven Porges, he says, you know, state dictates story. Oh, like I click the wrong look at the backup on out one state dictate story, you know, so if you're in a fight or flight state, the story that you're telling yourself about the world is different than when you're in a ventral vagal regulated state, you know, the story of connection, where you're feeling safe. That's a whole different story. And of course, it's a different story from the collapse, you know, dorsal vagal, collapse, you know, disconnection, you know, there's all of these different states, internal states, tell us different stories. So it better be it's really important that we pay attention to the internal state and know how to regulate to a regulated state, you know, or become regulated. Tell me more man, like, like I have questionable. Not, you know what? The man asked this question. It sounds like this up here. And then we just got a free flow for the rest of this. But breathwork can be deeply personal. How do you adapt techniques to meet individual needs, especially for those dealing with specific mental health challenges? Yeah,
Richard Blake 32:07
so there's a lot of different techniques out there. The one I have done my PhD in is obviously about it is the deepest one. And it is not necessarily for everyone, there have been studies showing that it can increase paranoid ideation in some people. So some people who are prone to to paranoia and schizophrenia, it can make those people who are similar to psychedelic assisted therapies, you know, they can bring out work problems in certain people. But yeah, I would tend to work with people, firstly, by looking at their breath, looking at the function of their breathing, giving them a little bit of education about breathing through the nose, and not over breathing. So over breathing is a big problem in that it, particularly for people who breathe in and out through their mouth, because there's no resistance that comes through the mouth, they over breathe, and then they get oversensitive to carbon dioxide. So the oxygen advantage and this guy, Patrick McEwen, he gives people these exercises on his app, he's got a free app called the oxygen advantage for people who want to learn about this type of thing. And it's just about breathing light, slow and deep. So you're not taking big deep breaths in he would say that the optimal breathing ratio is 5.5 breaths per minute. So about about a five and a half second inhale and a five and a half second, exhale. So that's really slow. So we want to be breathing slow.
Harry Turner 33:26
Can you model that? Can you monitor that real quick? Yeah. Okay, so
Richard Blake 33:29
we just go in through the nose 2345, out through the nose to 345 in 2345, out 2345. And an exercise like that is great. And what I would say, if people want to try something like that, I would say, go big, you'd like start with five, go up to six, go up to seven, go up to eight. And the more you can tolerate carbon dioxide, the more you can get comfortable with a little bit of air hunger, the longer you'll live. So here's an interesting piece. So there's animal called the naked mole rats, they live underground, but they breathe at an incredibly slow rate, like almost like one breath per minute. And they like can't get cancer, they've taken these naked mole rats in labs and sort of injected them with cancer. But because they breathe so low, they don't they just, they just kick it away. They're not bothered by cancer. So there is this kind of idea that the slower you breathe, the fewer breaths you take, the longer you'll leave. And that's a big part of like Tai Chi. If you see people doing tai chi, you'll notice their breath is completely silent. There's no ruffling of their nose, nasal hairs, you can't see or hear them breathe. And that's that's a real goal to strive for. It's really quiet, really slow, really gentle breaths
Harry Turner 34:59
of all All the different art forms, you said Tai Chi, let me tell you, Tai Chi has been calling to me for years now I legit, every now and again, I google up someplace where I can, you know, go in and get taught Tai Chi. But for some reason, there's there's yoga, there's so many different things you can choose out there, but Tai Chi is calling to me. So if you don't mind for a moment, can you can you make that connection? Why would Tai Chi be calling to me it is in regards to becoming more disciplined with the breath work, even though I don't call it that, you know, having me calling I'm gonna start calling in because you know, so that's what people don't understand. But yeah, something Tai Chi has been constant talk to me about tai chi and breathwork. And that connection.
Richard Blake 35:40
Yeah, I'm really not an expert in Tai Chi. I just know that in Tai Chi, there is a breathwork element. I know a little bit more about Chi Gong. I did a course on that during my PhD. But I suspect there's a big part of like the movement, you know, the movement and mental health, mindful movement, because sitting cross legged and meditating and focusing your breath is great for many people. But some people, they can't do that. Some people don't want to do that. And making that into a movement, practice a skill and art that also can help with your mental and physical health. Maybe that's why it's appealing to
Harry Turner 36:15
Yes. And as a psychotherapist, I sit you know, on my backside for hours, and I really don't, you know, my wife will watch me whenever I'm done, she'll watch me in the house, and I'll eat standing up, I'll walk around the island aimlessly, you know, because I like to move, you know, sitting down, you know, why this is where we differ, she can lay down, right? And she can come home, she can lay down and she's good. If she's off for a week, she can lay down, you know, she can pretty much not leave that bit. Which you know, for me, it's like, okay, depression, but whatever. No, she's actually, like, quite happy doing that. Like she really is inside person. Oh, my goodness, man, I have to move. I have to move. And so when I'm thinking about incorporating more of the healing techniques, the techniques to regulate oneself, I'm thinking about what movement meditation I want to incorporate into my daily practice, the mind stuff, I have to just say, as a psychotherapist, I'm constantly practicing the mind stuff. So from the top down, I don't want sound arrogant. But that's that's all knock. You know, I truly wholeheartedly believe in psychotherapy, it depends on the client clinician match. And of course, it depends on what you bring into it because I bring a lot of non traditional beliefs into my practice, because I believe that there's ego strengthening, and that's what therapy from a scientific standpoint was designed to do. Strengthen the ego. But I also believe that it's important, all of us are seeking to transcend the ego as well. So when it comes down to self actualization, I believe that psychotherapy has its limits. And so I have to bring in these other components, which are deeply spiritual, but breathwork, the way that you describe it, just the act of breathing itself, like, it is a deeply spiritual practice. And so I'm very intrigued by the things that you're saying, I have a friend who also she's a coach in breathwork. And she was telling me about it too. And I actually did a session with her. Tell us more. I don't even know what to ask now.
Richard Blake 38:08
Well, yeah, I really do think there are sort of many different forms of therapy that are different for or effective for other people. And I get it I bristle a little bit when So a friend of mine said to me, or a new person I met the other day, and she was like, No, I really want my husband to go to therapy. You know, I've said to him, this is a non negotiable, you have to go talk therapy, you have to go see that. And he's doing it. But he's saying to me, he doesn't really like it, he doesn't think it's going to be for him. And I was like, No, I don't think he's wrong. I think that different people are going to heal in different ways. And if you look at the origins of psychotherapy, it's like Freud, and Jung, they are European, they only dealt with class white women, that the culture it was so specific, Victorian repressed women, and that is just we're so far away from that now. So you know, so many different portions of the world, so many different types of people, then those Victorian upper class women, maybe for men, talking about the problems is not as effective as it is for women. John Gray talks about how when women talk about their problems, their cortisol reduces. Whereas when men talk about something stressful, their cortisol increases and their testosterone goes down. So John Gray and this other men's work coach I know called Ryan Park, he says the first thing I do to people is not to get them to talk about their problems, is to get them feeling good in their body. So I'll tell them to go drive a fast car, I'll tell them to go chop some word, I'll tell them to go lift some weights or you know, watch a football match or do something that gets their testosterone up, and then they can talk about their problems. And this is another reason I think breathwork is so effective because you don't need to talk about your proper sort of undercoat talks about trauma survivors and how Broca's area in their brain gets shrunk in people with severe PTSD and that's a part of the brain that is responsible for talking and our verbal fluency and hence why people do who have severe PTSD? They don't get resolution of their symptoms just from talking. So doing other things like tai chi or breath work or, or whatever, so they can get EMDR. Yes, Heidi? Exactly. Yeah. EMDR is another great one. The point is, there are many different forms of therapy, and people shouldn't just be like, You must do talk based psychotherapy. Yes.
Harry Turner 40:21
And let me just for those who don't know the difference, this therapy, this talk therapy, in this psychotherapy, talk therapy is more or less the way you describe it. And that's dealing with current function, mainly, psychotherapy is looking at the totality of a person's life. And if the person is really deep, like maybe Freudian, and really operating from that Carl Jung mode, they're making connections of life patterns. So you know, of course, that leads you to do further studies. And so another credential I have is a heart centered hypnotherapist to really get past those ego protectors very quickly in a trance like state, but they are different. There are many different training modalities, all of them pretty much it's about finding that fit for you, that's gonna allow you to get to that point to where you can begin to unlock, you know, let those if I'm gonna use ifs terminology, internal family system terminology for a second for you to release those exiles. Welcome, everybody back at the table. Everybody's feeling love and compassion is extended to all parts of you, you know. So whatever modality really calls to you, and you got to try it out, you got to begin to explore to see which one really speaks to you and which one really fits. And then you just do that, again, Bruce Lee said, I'm not afraid of demand and those 10,000 cakes and practice, just go deeper and deeper and deeper into that if you feel that it's a match for you. But please, Brother, tell me talk more to us. I'm throwing out the questions. I'm not even going to question this anymore. I just want to flow with you just want to talk to you. I want you to talk to us because you have so much there. So what else would you like to offer up to the outlier? Audience?
Richard Blake 41:53
Yeah, well, I guess, looking at biohacking and things like that for mental health. I think hot and cold exposure is so underrated. It is getting more and more popular thanks to people like Andrew Huberman. But I think that getting talking about dopamine I mentioned earlier, we are in this dopamine society, we're all just addicted to dopamine, we've got dopamine on tap. And dopamine is this neurotransmitter that's responsible for like our drive. So when we were scrolling Instagram or reading the news, or swiping on Tik Tok, that is all activating our dopamine seeking dopamine seeking behavior. And there's a Stanford professor called Carol Dweck, who wrote this book called dopamine nation, that is really helped me understand some of my behaviors, especially around addiction. And she has this kind of seesaw analogy. So on one side, you have you have pain. And on the other side, you have dopamine. And if you first if you get dopamine, without the pain, you'll get the pain later. So if you get dopamine from Instagram, social media, the news, whatever it is for you, you will then your body will see. So we'll balance things out by giving you pain, that pain will probably be a sense of anxiety, a sense of lacking a sense of unease. Whereas if you get pain first, so you want to say something? Yes. So if you get pain first, if you do something uncomfortable, your body rewards you with dopamine. So if you go in an ice bath, you do something you don't want to do, if you go do a really difficult workout. Even if you do something like let's say you've got a picture, I've got a pic a couple of pictures that I bought, that I need to hang up on my wall, and it's been on my to do list for ages and ages and ages, I really don't want to do it. If I do that, I will get rewarded with dopamine. Because I've done something hard, I've done something that I'm resistant to, my body will then release dopamine, and I'll feel good about it. That's why when you do something that's difficult for you, you feel good about it afterwards. So if we go and do hard things to get dopamine, we get a much longer and more balanced state of mood. So the that's why these things make us feel so good and feel good in a sustainable way.
Harry Turner 44:02
So one of the things that I say often is lean into your discomfort. Planes fly against the wind with it freedom exists on the other side of your fields. Sailboats are safe at the harbor, but they will never build remain dark. Like I'm very much intuitive base. I used to be very logical, like mine, I realized. But once I understood the logic, that's when I was able to move into the more deep nonlinear understanding of the logical linear reality. And so that's when the the codes the law started to come to me and one of those laws was lean into your discomfort. And so as you're talking about this, I did not know that man, like me. I don't even remember. Like, I don't remember ever coming across information that told me what you just told me. But intuitively, I was given certain level of confidence that this is how it happens to me. I get these insights and it comes with this different energy is confidence. It doesn't matter whether the science is there. not this is true. You know, it's like Harry except this, this is true. And so what you're doing right now is explaining the science to something I had long held as true is based off of the fact that it was given to me from that place, you know, but I love this man. What is what is like you named ice bath? Can you name some other practical things that one can do? That is painful that will lead to a night and we talked about healthy pain, but like what are some practical activities that one can do to experience that you know, what type of pain like what what painful activities or uncomfortable activities do you have in mind offhand?
Richard Blake 45:41
Yeah, so what comes to mind is hormetic stressors. So there is this someone just written a question that dopamine nation was the name of the book, dopamine nation is the answer to conscious raise these questions. So yeah, homeostasis. So homeostasis is this principle of what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. So it's a sort of use stress, good stress. So when we go to the gym, you know, we lift weights, so we're doing our bicep curl, we tear our muscle fibers, these we have these little micro traumas in our muscles, and then the body rebuilds them in a stronger and bigger way. That is the principle of homeostasis. This the same reason why astronauts they get the atrophy, their muscles start wasting, and their bones start becoming more brittle, because they don't have the stress of gravity. We are anti fragile, we need stress to keep us going. So you know someone who's who's never doing any physical stress they become they become weak because we need this stress on our body. Any kind of hormetic stressor can be good, ice is good. Fasting is another form of hormesis. Because a little bit of anger is good. Our body reacts with things like autophagy, and norepinephrine, release and all sorts of other positive things like reduce inflammation in the body too much fasting is death and starvation, obviously. And the same with heat, you know, a little bit of heat in a sauna, our body sweats, our body releases dopamine, our body releases heat shock proteins that boosts our immune system, we detox too much stress, you know, a month in the Sahara desert in the middle of summer is death. Same with cold hypothermia, because it's too cold. If he was in there for two minutes and gone out, he would have been feeling amazing because you'd have that short amount of hormetic stress that his body could tolerate and then react stronger to the last one relevant to me is hypoxia. So hypoxia is breath holds effectively. So I mentioned that Wim Hof Method earlier. That's another really good one that I'm training called Soma breathwork. You can find some of my videos on YouTube. But Richard, I think it's just the breath geek. And then so my breath work and there's some free guided breathwork sessions there. In that you will do some sort of coherent breathing for a few minutes, and then you'll do a big long breath hold. When you hold your breath for a certain amount of time, your body starts to react in positive ways it releases something called P 53. Which is a kind of anti cancer fighting thing. If you get your blood oxygen saturation low enough, you can also release your own stem cells from just holding your breath. You also get other things like BDNF brain derived neurotrophic factor, which is kind of like a rocket fuel for your brain. So it's making you smarter from just doing breath holds,
Harry Turner 48:24
holding one's breath that hit us correctly. Breath holds leads to higher intelligence.
Richard Blake 48:33
In a way, yeah, effectively.
Harry Turner 48:36
Is that so? Man, man, man? Oh, my goodness. Okay, I'm gonna have to invite you back for more of his height. He said, amazing. Info. This is great and conscious it thank you for the information. Yes, I agree, man, I don't want to end it like this, this hour went by real fast brother. But I will have to invite you back to do some more stuff with the community, as a senator transitioning into something else. And that's something else is to bring, you know, brings information that I know and bring it to a larger audience, you know, teaching groups and whatnot, really facilitating that movement, adding to the movement of self help and self healing, you know, doing those exercises that are in alignment, to get us back to that regulated state. And what you're talking about, though, even though you listed so many facts, it sounded so deeply spiritual. To me. This is the way my body was hearing what you were saying like, intuitively, it felt deeply, deeply spiritual. And so that has me way more intrigued. All of a sudden, we got some more comments. Raising that BD n f. There are some good supplements out there that help with yet conscious he knows a lot about the supplements that you want to reach out to him. Eventually you can put a store out there. He calls for a pod to win contest say yes, part two, whoop, whoop. I say quote unquote, and Heidi says yes, the three exclamation points, not one, not two, but three. So you must come back or you must come back. All right. Very happy to in real quick, just let the audience know where they can find you where they can locate you and stay in contact with you. Until we meet again, I definitely got your information. So I'm definitely gonna stay in contact and again, invite you back to talk to a lot of communities more. So
Richard Blake 50:19
my website is the breath geek.com I'm most active on Instagram at the breath geek it's in my handle there at the bottom. I also have a podcast called laughing through the pain navigating wellness where we talk about breath work and biohacking and wellness and CrossFit. We try and have a bit of a laugh about it as well. They can find that on my website.
Harry Turner 50:39
My bad man, my thing you hit the spacebar and and put me in before so well, one final question. Why Why? Why have I not been on your podcast yet, sir?
Richard Blake 50:51
Well, I was just about to invite you. Actually, if you if you did, if you'd like to come on, we'd love to have you
Harry Turner 50:56
know, I will push that over your bed. I try to push that. Oh, yeah, just message. No, I
Richard Blake 51:00
was gonna ask you and we've only done 13 episodes. So that's why otherwise you would have been in so we're quite new. But we'd love to have you.
Harry Turner 51:08
Yeah, man, I love to be on that brother in any way I can promote you because I know that you're the real deal, man. I love this. And actually, well, I could talk more to you about that. But we definitely got to stay in contact and I want to do some collaboration. I don't know what that looked like. But we definitely got to do it. Like it's it's it's we don't have to do anything. But you get what I'm saying? Like it's it definitely does feel in alignment. So I appreciate you so much, brother. Do you mind sitting backstage for just a minute or two? Sure. Okay. Yeah. All right. Thank you. Thank you. Y'all heard it. I don't have anything to say I don't have any clever to say I'm finished, um, can put you know, conscious reason he didn't put up words you know, I'm saying like he put up emojis at this point, you know, and Heidi said laughter is medicine for the soul. Yes, I will sit lap as medicine. I finish off the rest of that for you know, I understood where she was going with it. And yes, laughter is medicine for the soul. But y'all heard it, I can't I can't drop any more jewels like I'm full, you know, like, my plate is full. I need to sit down and chew what he handed out today, because I did not expect him to come out there with him haymakers like that, you know, but it was haymaker after haymaker after haymaker. So definitely check out Richard Blake's Instagram, wherever you can connect with him. And definitely, you know, I'm encouraged you to go out and try that out and you can't hurt anything. And like literally, even breathwork is different than simply breathing. Like think about it, you always have to breathe. So you know, if you always have to breathe when I learn how to become skillful at breathing. It just makes sense for me, you know? So again, I appreciate y'all. And I thank everyone who attended this livestream and everyone who supports us and has been listening through the podcast as well. So thank you all so much. As we continue another chapter of "Is that SOO?" I hope our journey today has left you with more than just thoughts but a call to live intentionally, live intentionally deeply, authentically and truthfully. The path of self discovery of Self knowledge is infinite a labyrinth where each turn reveals more of who we are and can be let this conversation be a lantern in the dark guiding you back to yourself time and again until we meet next outlier. Continue to seek question and live in the profound truth that defines your existence. Agape and stay L.I.T. Live In Truth.
