If you're listening to this in real time, we're dang near halfway through 2024. And from what I can see out there in the world, social media channels, people I'm talking to, organizations that I'm fortunate to work with and consult with, everybody is grinding really, really hard. Every once in a while when you've got that grind going and that grind is not necessarily a bad thing, sometimes it can be a bad thing. Sometimes you just got to take a little bit of time for yourself.
Relax, chill out so the grind can be even more effective. Welcome to the firefighter craftsmanship podcast where we coach you to deal with the stressors of the job as a first responder, as well as how to thrive off duty. My name is Kevin Housley, the human performance coach and a firefighter since 2005. I've been able to coach over a thousand emergency responders on the ways to be more resilient, better prepared for the job and how to be happier and healthier at home. So let's get to it.
And today's topic is going to be about breath and using breath for relaxation. So today it's all about relaxation and how to use a very free and very effective tool that all of us use many, many times a day anyways, and it's our breath. And the cool thing about our breath is it is tied directly to a lot of different parts and pieces of our brain as well as our autonomic nervous system.
And the autonomic nervous system really a lot of the times is driving the bus as far as are we stressed and how do we react to that stress? Or are we resilient and how do we react to those stress inputs that come into our lives when we're a little bit more resilient? Or are we apathetic or even depressed? And the cool thing about breath is we can have an impact in a positive fashion.
You can have an impact in a negative fashion using your breath as well, but you can have an impact with your breath in a positive fashion to change the narrative a little bit or for one of the concepts that we're going to talk about today to relax and fall asleep or fall back asleep after a 911 call. And so this is a pretty common thing here is, you know, a lot of us in emergency services, especially if you've been in the game for more than just a couple years.
At some point there might be a switch and I've talked to five or six people in the last month that all have the exact same story about, hey, if I run a call around three o'clock in the morning, I have a really, really hard time falling back asleep. And some of that is obviously tied into circadian rhythm and that stuff and that's outside of today's podcast.
But some of it also is just that hypervigilance and us not getting rid of those acute stressors that those little short bursts and dose of stressors like the tones going off in the middle of the night and you waking up if you're at a 24 hour sort of job in emergency services or fire and having to down regulate from those. And one of the biggest impacts is if we get woken up, especially in the fire service, maybe we get woken up for an assist or some sort of a call.
And then before we even leave the apparatus bay, we get canceled. So you have this big adrenal response for the tones going off, you're up, you get your gear on, you're starting to head out the door and then boom, you get canceled. And that was all for not. And now you got to go back and try to go back to sleep.
And some people are very, very good about going back to sleep in those circumstances and other people have a really, really hard time and that might really snowball them into an environment or an event that they have a hard time recovering from. So let's dive into three different ways that we can use our breath specifically for relaxation.
So before we dive into that, we're going to talk about CO2 and CO2 tolerance and why CO2 is very, very important for us in the respiration and the breath world specifically. So CO2 is really what's kind of driving the bus. It's a primary metabolic waste of the body. So when cells do their thing, they create waste and the primary waste that comes out of that is carbon dioxide, which then is expelled from the body during the exhalation phase.
So if you hold your breath, those alarms bells that start going off in your brain that say, hey, you need to take a breath, that's actually tied to an increase in CO2. And it's creating an acidotic relationship within the body, very, very minute levels of pH change, but it does go more acidotic. And you have receptors in your brain that are tied to CO2 specifically. And that is what is saying, hey, you need to take an inhalation to help me have an exhalation to get rid of this CO2.
So when we hold our breath, it's not that I have a lack of oxygen. It's that I have an increase in carbon dioxide. And that's going to be very, very important just to understand that very basic part and piece of breath and breath training and respiration overall. When we talk about probably the most popular technique of breath, which is called the box breath. And the box breath is called a box because every respiration cycle has four sides to it.
So if you think of just drawing a square on a piece of paper, the horizontal line at the top could be an inhalation. And then after that, we would have some sort of either a breath hold or a transition. And then we would have an exhalation. So the exhalation would be the horizontal line across the bottom of that square on your piece of paper. And then you would have another transition or an intentional hold of that exhalation. So an empty chamber breath. And so there's the four sides.
We have an inhalation, a transition or a hold, an exhalation, and a transition or a hold. And the very, very popular thing that you're going to see taught with box breathing specifically is what is called a four by four box. Meaning all sides of the box have a four second count associated with them. And you perform one box breath cycle four times before the breath practice is complete. And what this really does, it does a bunch of different things.
So what this really does is it helps us focus on something else other than whatever the stressor is that we're trying to deal with. And it slows our respiration cycle down. And so we're allowing CO2 to build up, which can be good, can also be negative. And then we are also by allowing that CO2 to build up, we're processing more oxygen at the cellular level due to a thing called the Bohr cycle.
Not going to get into the Bohr cycle today, but if you go and you visit the most recent Yoga for First Responders podcast, some good friends of firefighter craftsmanship, Yoga for First Responders is doing some absolutely amazing stuff. And they hosted me last week on their podcast. And we talk quite a bit about the Bohr cycle.
So if you're joneson for a explanation of what the Bohr cycle is and why it matters in the respiratory cycle, go check out your for First Responders podcast and listen to yours truly. Try to do some explanation on that with Eric and Olivia over there. So the box breath has been talked about recently as being a tactical breath. And you probably could use it for a tactical breath.
But one of the problems with the box breath is you have a hold where you have all of the air in your chamber in your lungs completely exhaled. And then you're holding your breath on that full exhalation.
So if I'm trying to work really, really hard, whether it's I'm doing a tactical fitness workout, or we're actually running a call emergency response, maybe on a fire, I for one do not want to be holding my breath in those situations when I'm meeting that oxygen to process through my body for survival. So a box breath, in my opinion, is a much better relaxation breath than it is a tactical breath.
One of the concerns with the box breath, as I mentioned, is on that final part of the box, the final fourth side of the box is after you have a four second exhalation, then you hold that empty chamber for four seconds. Now this is where CO2 tolerance ties back into this. And that can really set off a lot of alarm bells in our brain.
And if we are already maybe really, really stressed out, or maybe we have PTSD, or maybe we have PTSD, or some other form of anxiety, that full exhalation breath hold might actually trip us into a state that we don't necessarily want to be in. And it could really trigger some of those alarm bells. And the wheels can kind of come off of the bus relatively quickly. So if you're somebody that struggles with PTSD, severe anxiety, a final exhalation breath hold may not be the greatest thing for you.
So kind of walk into this sparingly. And as a reminder, I'm not a physician. And so I encourage you to talk to your physicians about breath practices and things like that. And that a lot of physicians don't actually have any training in relation to breath practices at all. And it might be a good opportunity for you to kind of become one of the experts and teach your physician how some of this stuff works so they can train their other patients.
Or you can train the people that you deal with on the street in emergency services, how to use these for things like panic attack control before panic attack set in, anxiety control, as well as other members of your departments to be more resilient and more prepared overall. So the box breath four seconds in four seconds hold four seconds, exhale, and you're trying to get rid of all of that air and then a four second hold. And you would do that four times.
And at the end of this podcast, we will run through a box breath protocol so you can use that along the way if it's kind of confusing to you. Now realize on the box breath specifically, you can choose what number you want. So four seconds inhale is too hard to get as much air in there as you want. You could easily make that a six second inhalation.
And so the thing with the box breath is you really want it to be rhythmic and you want the four sides to be the same every time for that protocol of four rounds. So I could do a six second inhalation. I could still do a four second hold that would be fine. So six seconds in four seconds hold six seconds out. And then another four second hold. Just realize that that's slowing your respiration rate down even more than a four by four by four.
So just play with that figure out what's working for you and figure out maybe you could do a six seconds in a four seconds hold a six seconds out and then maybe a two second hold just every time through that entire protocol do a six four six two six four six two. That would be three rounds of that in that scenario. So do that four times. If there's ever any question on any of this stuff, please reach out to us at firefightercrasmship.com.
We'd be happy to nerd out with you on breath protocol specifically. So the second protocol we're going to talk about is just what I like to call the two to one protocol. And this is a really, really good protocol for us to use when we're trying to fall back asleep or trying to fall asleep after any sort of a day, but especially a day where we've kind of been up for the entire duration or maybe we've ran some calls or we're having a hard time down regulating.
So the very first step would be put your phone down at least 60 minutes before bed. Don't watch the news. Try to have lights dim, cold, dark environment that you're sleeping in. Set the stage for success on sleep and a lot more content coming in relation to sleep here on the firefighter craftsmanship podcast specifically. But if you're having a hard time falling asleep, you got to remember what you put in is what you're going to get out.
So if you're only putting in negative content and things that are grabbing your attention for short bursts of time, even if they're hilarious, that's not the best thing to be watching or consuming within an hour of your bedtime. It's a harder for us to down regulate after that sort of stimulus. So a two to one protocol is really, really good. And all the two to one means is I'm going to double my exhalation compared to my inhalation.
And so when I double my exhalation, it is tied to our parasympathetic nervous system. There's a lot of studies that show this just by that two to one protocol. And I want to make sure that I'm doing my two to one protocol and really my box protocol as well through my nose only if I can tolerate that.
But for sure our two to one protocol, I want to breathe in through my nose because that's going to activate my phrenic nerve and my vagus nerve and the vagus nerve controls respiration and it controls our heart rate. And if we can lower that thing down by just simply breathing through our nose, we're going to be ahead of the game in comparison overall and create more of a parasympathetic state.
So a two to one protocol could be I take a nice slow inhalation for six seconds through my nose and then I exhale for 12 seconds through my nose if you can tolerate that. If you can't tolerate that exhalation through your nose initially, exhale through your mouth with the goal of trying to be able to do this all through the nose if possible. And there's a lot of reasons for that.
The biggest one is the tiredly vagus nerve triggers a parasympathetic response, which is our rest and digest part of our autonomic nervous system. It calms us down and it gives me something to focus on other than the fact that I'm trying really, really hard to go to sleep. So that's a really, really easy one for us to give a shot and just figure out what feels good for you. You shouldn't really be uncomfortable in a two to one protocol.
So if six seconds in and 12 seconds out is too long, that's fine. Do a four and an eight or a five and a 10 or figure out what works for you. And the crazy thing about this is you will notice, especially those of you that work a 48 hour shift, that if you have a really busy day during the day on day one, you have a really busy night on night one. And then you have a busy day on day two.
On night two, the number that's going to feel the most comfortable for you is probably going to be different than the number that was on night one. And that's tied to just all the stress that were subjected to an emergency services. You could also see this on day one of your day off or maybe even day two of your day off. A lot of people are talking about that on day two is actually the hardest day on their day off where they're really, really dragging.
They have a hard time kind of reengaging with the real world on day two of their day off. So give the two to one protocol a call, a shot, especially if you're having a hard time falling asleep or falling back asleep and try really, really hard to focus on nasal breathing only. Great, great protocol for down regulation and to go to sleep.
The third protocol that we're going to talk about has become relatively famous from Dr. Kuberman as of late and that's called the phrenic sci or the parasympathetic sci. And the way that this works is you take a nice inhalation in through your nose, a nice deep inhalation until you feel like you're completely full of air. You stop that inhalation and then you try to sip in just a little bit more air on the top of that. So that would be a nice inhalation. A little bit of sip, right?
And so I was doing that through my mouth just for the sound effect, but try to do that through your nose. So an inhalation through your nose until you're pretty full and then a little bit of an extra sip at the top and then nice long exhalation through the mouth or through your nose specifically. Once again, we're triggering the vagus nerve when we breathe through our nose.
And so that's kind of where skip breathing came from initially for those of you that are in the fire service and that were taught skip breathing in your SCBA mask. It's a really, really good way for us to quickly down regulate. You can do just a couple rounds of that inhalation through the nose and then a little sip and then a nice long exhalation.
And that's a really, really good one for a quick relaxation or if you're responding to a call specifically and it sounds like it might be a high energy call or a charge scene or something that might be somewhat traumatic that you're walking into. Really, really good one to do right before you get out of the police car, the ambulance or the fire engine before you go engage.
Another great one if you have some anxiety tied to training or testing scenarios or things like that, use the phrenic side to your advantage there. A nice inhalation in. Sip a little bit more at the top. Nice long exhalation out. Nobody will even know that you're doing it and it will help you calm down.
One of the reasons that this works so well and why you do that extra little sip of air at the top is because at the bottom of our lungs are the alveoli and the alveoli is where that oxygen transfer takes place from the inhalation and the lungs into the bloodstream from the hemoglobin. And so we have trillions of these alveoli in our lungs and as the hemoglobin passes by, it snags those oxygen molecules from them, it releases CO2 molecules into them and then you exhale those back out.
And so the alveoli are like kind of like these little sticky bouncy balls sort of thing. So think about like those little sticky hands you had as a kid or your kids come home with. They're kind of little sticky like that. And if you roll them up, they stick together and they're kind of hard to release.
And so we have these little teeny sticky alveoli at the bottom of our lungs and if we don't breathe full deep respirations every single time, those little sticky alveoli can actually collapse and so that initial inhalation, it has to overcome that surface pressure of the alveoli themselves to get them to expand.
And so they have a harder time to have really, really full amounts of that gas exchange within them if they have that surface tension because they haven't really been activated or used in a while. So I take that nice big inhalation, that alveoli starts to expand a little bit. It's having a hard time overcoming surface pressure. And then I take that extra little sip and it pops that thing all the way open.
And now I have better oxygen transfer, which means I'm a more efficient machine essentially. And it also has a good calming effect because I have better oxygen transfer and it's tied in since I'm doing it through the nose once again to the vagus nerve or the phrenic nerve. Calms us down. So there's some great breath stuff, three protocols that you can use specifically to help relax, calm down, take a chill pill that doesn't take very much time at all.
So take some time for yourself and try to start to use some of these relaxation breath techniques every day if you can. If you wake up in the morning and you're pretty amped, use a breath protocol to help start your day outright. Certainly use a breath protocol to help you take a safety nap or to go to sleep. And you're going to be steps ahead of the game the more that you practice.
And like anything else, breath protocols and breathing techniques, they do take practice even though we do respiration cycles around 20,000 times a day or so. All right, so as promised, we're going to finish this podcast today with an actionable item which is going to be a four-sided box breath. And I'm going to just count this out for you. So again, the box breath has four sides to it, an inhalation, a hold, an exhalation, and a hold.
And we're going to try to do all this through our nose if we can. We're going to do a four-by-box and we're going to do four rounds of this. All right, so sit in a nice comfortable breathing position and here we go. So inhale for one, two, three, four. Hold it, three, four, exhale, two, three, four and hold it, two, three, four. Inhale, two, three, four, hold, two, three, four. Exhale, two, three, four, and hold, two, three, four.
Inhale, two, three, four, and hold, two, three, four, and exhale, two, three, four, and hold it, two, three, four. And inhale, two, three, four, and hold, two, three, four, and exhale, two, three, four, and hold, two, three, four. And that's a four by four for four rounds of a box breath right there. And when we actually put that on kind of a timer, it might seem a little bit quick, especially when we're trying to dump all of our air out in that four seconds.
And that's where you can start to play with those numbers a little bit and figure out what works very, very well for you based on the situation, based on the level of stress that you've incurred and based on what your goals are, especially when you're trying to use it for sleep. So thank you for the support for the Firefighter Craftsmanship podcast. We really appreciate all of you out there that are willing to listen and share this content and help us grow this show organically.
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And just remember that on the Firefighter Craftsmanship, none of this is considered medical advice and all the opinions and statements made on this podcast represent the speakers themselves and not the organizations that they work for. So go out there, keep grinding, work relaxation into your world, work good quality sleep back into your world and stay smart.
Thank you for listening to the Firefighter Craftsmanship podcast where we give you real tools to train ultimate human performance both on and off the emergency scene. You can find more information on our web page at firefightercraftsmanship.com, including all the classes that we offer and there's plenty of free resources and training on the site as well. Reach out to us on social media, including Instagram and Facebook.
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