Well, hello ladies and gents, Robert Sykes, Keto savage.com and today I've got special guest Niraj Naik on the line and we dive deep into breath work, how to manipulate it, how to do some breath work practices to make the most of oxygenating yourselves, leveraging CO2, switching from sympathetic to parasympathetic at will based off of how you are breathing a different breath work practices. So very interesting conversation, thoroughly enjoyed it.
I've got no doubt that you'll have some takeaways from this one. Without further delay, sit back, relax and enjoy the conversation. And we are live. Niraj, How are you, Sir? Fantastic, my friend. I'm excited to be chatting with you. I've had several people on the guest and we've all kind of known that the importance of like oxygen and breathing is obviously very vital to our livelihood in existence. But you are a master with all things proper optimized breath work.
So this is something that I definitely need to work on because I am guilty, as I'm sure most of us are, of just living a very hurried life and not taking time to just simply breathe. So I'm excited to to peel the curtain back on that man and just learn from you. Yeah, or not breathe. So actually the paradigm shift that I'm going to share with you is that actually breathing less is better than breathing more.
And there's a whole science that I can explain the mechanism of to support that very kind of counter intuitive claim that I've just made. I, I like counter intuitive, controversial things man. So I definitely want to put the curtain back on the science there. What, what guy's seen the breath work in the 1st place? What was the catalyst for you going down that rabbit hole? Yeah, so it's actually something that happened by accident. It's not like it was something I was searching for.
It happened because I actually had quite barrel within the system as in the corporate world as a pharmacist trying to get my kind of renegade ideas out to the masses. And I'd actually got very successful getting people off medication using very similar kind of diet plan to what you're talking about, but more like focus on first step as just stop eating processed foods that come in boxes, go on a non factory diet. That's what I'd call it.
And just teaching people how to actually make their own food again. Right. So, so I, I felt like as a pharmacist, I had a very important place, you know, because people would trust everything I said. And often they wouldn't have time for the doctor and the doctor doesn't have much knowledge when it comes to lifestyle changes and interventions like food and diet, believe it or not.
So I got really good at that, but it actually got me promoted to the head office of one of the biggest supermarket chains to do a very like, could have been a high impact, very powerful project with them, which is a healthy shopping list service, which would get customized meals directly sent to people's homes, you know, through their home shopping platform. And then six months into it, they decided to shelve the idea. And I, I had a real crush to my soul and my purpose.
And I was just confused. I was like, why? And I was facing having to go back to my cubicle job as a pharmacist and the stress and everything, the impacts and the tension and all that just exploded. Well, I kind of had a, you know, a serious existential crisis ended up boom getting hit with a autoimmune disease was ulcerative colitis. You may be familiar with that. And I was now housebound basically shedding blood for
almost a year. And this was where I learnt like the true, you know, mechanisms of getting healthy. And because none of the medications worked, the, I was facing 2 choices, either be Guinea pig for a drug hasn't been tested or I have my colon removed. So I was only like 32 at the time. So, you know, wearing a nappy and having a colostomy bag wasn't what I really wanted. And I had actually surrendered to the whole medical system. I thought, you know, I basically
given up hope for myself. I'd lost my purpose in life, my faith in God. Especially when you're suffering like I was, I've you're spending like 40-50 times a day on the toilet, you know, that's, it's really horrible symptoms. So, you know, it's kind of like you're shitting yourself, you know, it's like fear manifest, you know. So luckily someone came to the rescue, a yoga teacher in the UK called Swami Amakananda. She said to me, look, actually
you've got a gift here. If you can turn this around with your tenacity and passion to help people, you could become an amazing role model, an example for others by reversing the situation. And it gave me like a hope back. So I had to let go of my disbelief because I'm very scientifically programmed and to suddenly take up this woo woo type stuff, which is actually for my own culture.
But we're so educated out of it, as, you know, as first second generation Indian immigrants to the UK, we, we don't think that things that come from India are considered cool back then, you know, now we all know the benefits of this stuff. So anyway, she told me some simple breathing techniques and the the the results were so profound just to just to stress release and the pain relief that I got from just simple rhythmic breathing, extending exhalation, holding your breath in various
ways was mind blowing. I couldn't believe it. So I was like, you know, my curious mind throwing down the rabbit hole to learn as much as I could about this amazing wealth of knowledge and wisdom we have from India. So I went really deep into the brilliant techniques Pranayama and really studied that. I discovered an amazing medical doctor in the UK in so in India called Prakash Mahesh, who actually then ended up becoming one of my teachers.
And then we Co created the curriculum for Soma Breath. And what I also went and fell back in love with was the music because I used to hear music was I used to run raves in the UK. I became a pharmacist when I was at university. I had a massive rave actually for two 2000 people every month for three years. It was epic. And that's what I thought I was going to do. Actually, I thought that's what I was going to do. But something inside me also. Well Mike, I've learnt now.
You know your soul will choose a different path if you're not aligned with the path you're on, right? It will do something. It will give you a disease or it will self sabotage or something until you you get in line right with what you really want to do. And I realised that music back then I was making and all that, it was great. We're bringing people together, celebrating life, but it was
very hedonistic. It was creating a crazy culture of a lot of people getting off their heads every weekend. And, you know, I love the music, but the lifestyle that came with it, not so much. And you know, I couldn't handle it. You know, growing up, getting into my 20s and beyond, like hardcore raving was what my escape. But that also took its toll on
me, right? So what I realised that music actually has a spiritual purpose and it's been around for thousands of years, you know, hidden away in, in these like Vedic texts as a method of transformation. And there's entire books dedicated to music and it's called some of yoga, a whole system of using music
therapeutically. So I started to really experiment with that and decided to combine the breathing techniques because a lot of breathing techniques involve rhythms, rhythm of breathing that invokes certain effects on the body. So I, I went deep into that and started to make my own therapy for myself for reprogramming the unconscious mind. Because I also learnt that mantra is a form of self hypnosis, reprogramming the operating system, the mind that gets corrupted with Thor
viruses. And there's those Thor viruses that cause negative beliefs, limiting beliefs and you know, bad habits that cause disease in the 1st place. So boom, I found a way to reprogram myself that worked super good. And and then I started sharing it. And so I was uploaded onto YouTube, got really cool results. People were like asking me for more. And then I went really deep into figuring out how, how can I get this out there to the to the mainstream to get it to people.
And I started to build a in my own like online platform that took off. And along the way I met Wim Hof, became his right hand man for a bit and he was like, this is the front man. This is the guy and I actually end up producing the soundtrack to the Wim Hof method that you can hear on his YouTube channel and courses. And then I I wanted to go deeper into the whole pharmacy of techniques that Pranayama has and put music and and science to
those things. So me and Prakash Marsh joined forces, created a curriculum to some of breath, started off in this amazing island that I was living on now in Copenhagen in Thailand, where with a bunch of mates, we got together and built the Soma Breath school, which then over the last like six years or so has really scaled into an amazing transformational school where music is a core part of it with over 3 1/2 thousand instructors growing fast.
And now I'm like attracting amazing people like yourself and working with other kind of known, you know, like influencers in the space, people like Asim Malhotra that you've heard of who's big proponent of also, you know, the keto diet and, and breath work and and so on. So yeah, amazing stuff is happening now because I've chosen the right path rather than the wrong path. But what I realized was I was in the wrong system. You know, the corporate system is not where I belonged.
I'm a bit more renegade than that. And, and that's why we're talking to each other right now. I love. It and I love it.
So going back from the beginning when you started to have all these issues flaring up and it was manifesting in the ulcer, colitis, colitis, you think that was predominantly because of the stress and anxiety and depression that you were experiencing with all the mishap from a career standpoint, Like there wasn't any type of, you probably didn't have your diet dialed in perfectly prior to that, but that probably wasn't the main catalyst. It was more so the stress
induced. I think, yeah, I think what that does is it leads you to to create bad habits and make bad decisions. So it wasn't just the career, it was relationships. They're all linked, right? It's like a domino effect. One thing stresses you out like severely, and then that knocks on to everything else in your life. So, you know, my like actual lifestyle choices have got better.
Like I because I was now going to be the face of health of this big corporation, but I also had years of abuse right from being a raver. So when you get a stress impact, it becomes like a ticking time bomb and boom, it can manifest as disease if you're weak in certain areas of the body.
Like for me it's the colon. And also according the Ayurvedic system, it shows that my energy type, which is known as Vata Pitta, it's combination, we're more prone to colon issues, especially ulcers in the colon under severe stressful situations. That's where the disease will more likely manifest. So I figured all this stuff out and, and a lot of it's down to your environment, like who you're surrounding yourself with.
If you're in the wrong environment, your body will kind of do something to shift you out of that environment. Whether you make a conscious decision to change your soul, if you don't listen to that, we will make that change and it will give you a disease. It will make you self sabotage or do something that makes you change your course of direction. And if you keep ignoring that, it gets worse and worse and
worse. And a lot of people do that because they mask the symptoms with substances, with alcohol, with drugs, with prescription medications, with comfort food and comfort eating, right? So I was indirectly doing all that. And it was, you know, that one hit, that one big kick in the gut, literally from this big corporation that set me off, right? And so it's like a chain reaction.
But a lot of this will affect right stress, how you breathe, bringing it back to breathing and how you breathe is very much linked to your how you think, right? Your thinking and breathing is linked. Your breath is the mirror of the mind. So if you're like a stressed out person, if you're like frantic, if you even if you're overly excited, your fight or flight mode is switched on, right? It's on adrenaline's pumping,
going through your system. Even if you're extremely enthusiastic and high on life, if you don't know how to control your breath consciously, you sometimes develop bad breathing habits like mouth breathing, and you'll over breathe and hyperventilate. And a lot of people suffer from what I call probably the biggest disease in the world, chronic mild hyperventilation, which is something that's totally overloads and people don't fully understand it. But I've gone really deep into this.
And what that means is you get less oxygen to your body tissue cells, not more, when you hyperventilate, even if there's a mild form of hyperventilation where you may be talking like I am for long periods of time throughout the day, which I was for many years as a pharmacist, rushing, rushing, rushing, you know, talking, talking, talking. And also you're not conscious anymore. You're, you're an autopilot in a
stress mode. And there you start to breathe in a faster rate than you normally should or would. And if you don't have time to recalibrate the breath, you'll start to get low oxygenation of your body tissue cells and you get vasoconstriction. You know, there's a lot of people suffer from hypertension because of this. And if you learn how to slow your breathing down, you will actually get more oxygen going to your body tissue cells, not
more. There's a mechanism I can explain to you why that is and why the entire system of yoga, meditation even, and pranayama is all geared up and design actually for one core result, right? Which is a beginning of enlightenment. And that is becoming super efficient using oxygen. We hardly need to breathe because oxygen, my friend, is something we have a toxic codependent relationship with. It's something that we can't live with and we can't live
without, right? Because it causes oxidative stress. Every time you produce energy in the body, you're crying a little bit of stress, you're aging a little bit. So everyone listen to this right now. You're aging a little bit as you breathe, unfortunately. So the yogis developed systems that train you to be so efficient and using oxygen, you hardly need to breathe while your breath rate slows right down. And they use meditation techniques as well to slow your breathing right down.
This actually then makes you more adapted to low oxygen, which then means your body becomes more efficient using oxygen and you get less oxygen stress and you get better body tissue oxidation. And this prevents you from getting these sorts of diseases I'm talking about in the long term If you, if you train like this. So this is what we teach in summer breath.
We, we actually teach the system of becoming super oxygen efficient by giving you techniques that trains you to become really efficient using oxygen in the body through your mitochondria. And then what it does is it overall, you'll find a slowering, a lowering of your breathing rate and a long and ability to hold your breath for longer periods of time. That's one of the signs that you're becoming oxygen efficient. If you can hold your breath for a certain length of time and
beyond. And what it also does is it raises one of the most important gas in the body, CO2, which we've been told is this toxic gas that must be let go of at all costs, right? Or it's causing, you know, the climate change and we're all going to die because the tumors seem to, right? I mean, that's a whole other story we can go into later and some other time. But I have to tell you that carbon dioxide is your friend.
It really is. It is the way you get oxygen from your red blood cells into your body tissue cells through a process called the bore effect. And if this, if this mechanism is disrupted by hyperventilation, because that means you let go of the CO2, you get rid of too much CO2 because every time you breathe out, you breathe out CO2, you will get less oxygen into your cells. And this leads to all the
problems I'm talking about. I. Definitely want to dive into the science for, for you as having gone through, you know, the academic rigors involved in becoming a pharmacist. Like you said yourself, you're much more science driven. It's kind of you get you get the analytical background. I, I do as well, like my, my
family all are scientists. So like this sounds Boo, as you said in the beginning, at what point you, you kind of like we're at rock bottom with the physical manifestation of the colitis, But at what point or at what instance did you realize that the breath work was the the limiting factor like the game changing component? So, so that was through the techniques that my swami told me.
So she told me these reduced breathing techniques and also breath holding techniques and these reduced breathing techniques and also rhythmic breathing. I mean, there's one thing I need to add is the way we can change our physiological state. So from sympathetic or parasympathetic, just with breathing with a rhythm where you're extending your exhalation, like doubling your excel time, breathing in for four beats out for 8 beats, for
example, over and over. What that will do is it switches on the parasympathetic puts you into rest and digest. Well, digest is incorrect to say that, but it puts you into a rest rejuvenation mode, OK. And that allows you to to switch off stress for a moment, OK, and helps you get into a trance like state as well where you can use guided meditation techniques to start reprogramming the autonomy nervous system.
Because remember, autoimmune is your healthy cells, your immune cells attacking the healthy cells thinking that they're foreign invaders. Now, here's the thing, if you go back from back in the, you know, evolutionary times back to when we were single cell organisms in the in the sea, those cells decided one day instead of fighting with each other, to collaborate with each other and to create a colony of cells, which then became the first multicellular life forms.
They came together based on trust, love, connection, collaboration, right. Then those cells multiplied and became eventually through, you know, evolution us, OK, or maybe there was some interfering through aliens or whatever, who knows. But we eventually evolved into who we are. So our cells are actually
connected based on love. That's the real connection that's based on now autoimmune disease is a malfunction in this intelligence that we have where your immune system thinks healthy cells are, are evil cells that must be killed, right? This is what causes the disease
symptoms. So what we're doing with with this is we're with these guided meditation techniques and the breath, the breath is using helping you to rewire and get into a a more like kind of theatre brain wave state where you can now communicate the unconscious mind and tell it tell it that everything's OK because your environment is what
you become. So if you're in a hostile environment like a corporate head office, I don't know if you've ever worked in one, but they're like the most hostile environments. Everyone's out to get each other. You know, there's so much competition and so much cut throat behaviour in there. Me very sensitive person don't belong in that environment,
right? So, you know, all of this added together with the distrust of the pharmaceutical system and the medical system and the loss of hope for humanity and seeing what was going on in the world, that really disturbed me through the eyes of the lens of the corporate head office. I was not in the right place, the right environment. So part of the healing is to kind of reframe past events.
So guilt, shame, anger, fear needs to be kind of rewired and transformed, transmuted into the opposite. And that is where healing comes from. But these slow rhythmic breathing techniques also gets oxygen back into the body tissue cells. And because stress will cause contraction and tension and it's going to reduce blood flow as well.
When you start to breathe in these general rhythms, you start to harmonise the biorhythms in the body because every function in your body is rhythmic in nature, right? And they're subservient to the rhythm of your breath. Your breathing patterns really affects your physiological functions, so this rhythmic breathing is really good for
your body anyway. But then when you combine it with a certain pattern that switches off stress, that helps you to really relax and get into these trance states where you can reprogram yourself. And so the music also helps with that because the music has a groove to it. So when you breathe in a rhythm, breathe in in beats is what I call it, you can really get into these amazing flow states just with the breath. It's like a amazing guided
meditation. And then the guided meditation I record over the top, I call it neurasomatic programming. Now is a way of it's like an NLP, but you're bringing the body into it and the breath is the bridge between the mind and the body. And it allows you to start to reprogram yourself. Like imagine you're an operating system and it gets thought viruses over time, you can, you can reformat this. So this is what I kind of delve
into. And what I'm explaining now is thousands of years of wisdom from ancient India. It's it's the it's from Buddhism, it's from Tantra, it's from Pranayama yoga. All of these schools, these ancient schools, these actually they're science based, in my opinion, are all reprogramming tools. They're all about discovering who you are. How do you end up where you are now?
And to change, you can go in there and change the the very apps that are installed in your mind, your mind Ware to in alignment with what you truly want. And this is the process of I would say waking up. Enlightenment, you know, is another word for that. But it's everyone has the ability to do this. And you know, you've seen the power of hypnotherapy.
It works really well. The reason why is because it's the same process, but with a breath, you can actually speed up this process of reprogramming and it can happen very fast. We've even done studies with Cambridge University now with my protocols I've developed which showed like how powerful this breath techniques are in comparison to psychedelics. They used to treat severe depression, like I, I had severe
depression at the time. So psychedelics has a great use of this because it gets you into these auto states of consciousness that allows you to reprogram, right. And you know, I've also had another scientist called Jeff Taran who did one that showed how we quiet the default mode network, which is the brain's version of the ego through these breath retention techniques, holding the breath.
Also Cambridge showed that the breath holds is where a lot of the magic happens with this breath therapy form of therapy. And and so a lot of what we teach is all about increasing your breath hole capacity because this is what is the measure of you become efficiently using oxygen. And and that method is the you mentioned a few times, I may be misprinted the the par pariana or is that what it's called? Pranayama. Pranayama.
And what is that like? If someone you know googles that, what's what's the Webster's definition of that? So pranayama simply means prana means energy, yama means control. And it's the first branch of yoga. It's like it's the one of the most important things you do first in yoga, right? It's kind of been forgotten a bit in mainstream yoga, but it's the very important part. And it's actually a pharmacy of different techniques you master. It gives you the ability to
manipulate energy in the body. And remember, energy is produced by oxygen coming into your body, combining with glucose and burning like a combustion engine in your mitochondria to produce ATP, life force energy which drives all the functional life. So breathing has something to do with every function of your
life. So with Pranayama, you have the ability to consciously control things you thought you had no control over, like your heart rate, your blood pressure, digestive system, your immune system even and your way you produce energy and you can become very efficient using oxygen with pranayama techniques. So pranayama is a little bit mystified in the whole yogic
literature and stuff. So we've demystified it like my, the, the Doctor Who works with me in, in India, he is an incredible like Yogi, but also knows how to translate Sanskrit. So he an amazing translation of the ancient original texts. And through that, we reverse engineered the whole system of pranayama, which is incredible. There's so many techniques for different things. You think of all the things you go to a pharmacy for, there's a pranayama technique for that as
well, right? So this is what I wanted to bring to the world because I believe prevention's better than cure, right? And the more we could do to prevent having to go on the pills, the better. Because there's a pill for every eel, right? But there's also an eel following every pill. That's the problem. The side effects. I saw it everyday, people getting on one medication a few weeks later or another one, another one.
So that's why I'm on such a mission right now to get people to not get on to that cycle, that vicious cycle. Because medical bills are insane, right? They can bankrupt someone and there's so much we can do. Like, you know, changing the diet. Not everyone has to go full on kheyo, but it does help for certain diet, certain issues, certain conditions, for sure. There's all the evidence out there.
And yeah. And so I'm very committed to bring Pranayama to the world in a way that's accessible, fun, but also scientific that you can trust to get the result you're looking for. Yeah, and I definitely dive into the the tactics here. So like I am a big proponent for, you know, returning to the parasympathetic states whenever
possible. Like when I train, like I try and wake up and before I look at my phone, before I look at distraction to try and just do some, you know, mindfulness practices, prayer, breathing outside, ideally after I get done weight training in the morning, I allow myself to kind of, you know, stretch out, return to normal breathing before I, you know, consume a meal or anything like that.
But I am the worst when it comes to consistently, you know, journaling or meditating or using like a mindfulness app. Like I've, I've downloaded them all, I've played around with them, but then I, I never stick with it. I never adhere to it, but I feel like if I was able to commit something and then tangibly experience the benefits in short order, I would be compelled to, you know, obviously adhere to it
long term. So for somebody that's going through life and they are what they would benefit from this as most people would, how does that look like? What are some very tangible takeaways? Somebody listen to this could start implementing and actually experience the benefit from on the short term. OK, so so we teach I, I have a section on our app, the summer breath app called Breath Farmer. And on there there's a lot of
useful breathing techniques. So I'll give you one example very quick one easy one you can do if you've got a blocked nose or if you've got stuffy congestion. I have a little baby door and she's always giving us stuff these days because she's out there playing with all the kids. So sometimes I get a little bit congestion. So what I do in that situation, you can try this right now if
you want. It'll it'll give you a little kind of wake up too, as if you breathe in through your nose, breathe out through your nose, hold your nose right and hold your breath and just nod your head up and down, right. And you do that until you can't hold your breath any longer. I really do. It's your maximum effort. And then repeat that two or three times right in a row or your congestion will go away all clear and you're suddenly as a breathe again. So breathe through my.
Nose out to my nose once. In through your nose, out through your nose. Hold your nose like pinch it with your fingers. Hold your breath until you go to your maximum breath hold capacity. And then do it again and again, at least two or three times, and then you'll see everything clears up. You want to try it now? Sure. Sure, maybe a little silence on the the the court recording here, but yeah, I'll give it a shot. OK, makes. Me realize I need to be able to
hold my breath for longer. What? How long? How long do you think people should realistically be able to do that? As they're pinched, their nose will hold their breath like a minute's hold between each session. No. When? Maybe some people will do a minute, but people just starting out might be more like 30 seconds. Yeah, but 30 to 40 seconds. But how did you get on? No, that's good as in about 30-40 seconds. Yeah, I wasn't congested to begin with.
But I feel like if if I get congested, especially as the seasons are changing here, being able to do that, that would that would certainly help. Yeah. So did that, did that, did it clear a little bit. Did you feel anything? Yeah, I feel like it just, it brings me to the present state efficiently, you know, like I, yeah, just like mindfully controlling your breath and actually thinking about as opposed to just going about it. I do try and not ever allow myself to mouth breathe.
Like when I'm sleeping, I take my mouth so I can only breathe nasally. So I'm, I'm, I'm try to, to, you know, implement that whenever possible. But I think I should probably do something like that throughout the day for sure. Yeah, yeah. So we have lots of other. So this is just the basic one. Then there's like techniques for going to sleep, for example, which is a big common problem a lot of people have.
So if you breathe an extended exhalation in a rhythm, so in for two beats, A4 beats, so seconds, that would do in for 2A4 and just do that. If you just do that in a cycle right, over and over for a few minutes, you'll start to turn on the parasympathetic pretty quickly and you'll feel much more relaxed. And if you add a little affirmation to it, I command my subconscious mind to put me into a deep, restful sleep so I can wake up the following morning.
And you set a time, right? Watch what happens. You'll fall asleep and then that will happen, right. And we actually make a track just with that, that breathing pattern that you breathe along with that, that guides you into that state as well. A very relaxing track with beautiful music. And yes, sometimes I, if I'm in a situation where I really want to sleep, maybe I'm like in a different time zone and I want to reset, I'll use this track and it will put me into sleep. It's amazing.
So you know, that's another example. Turning on the parasympathetic. You can also do 4 beats, 8 beats out. There's certain techniques you can do like in for four, hold for eights, out for eights, for example. So this is a really good one for actually kind of turning off anxiety, right? And stress, which is another useful one. If you breathe in for about four beats where you breathe in fully, you breathe into your lower lungs.
So imagine your nostrils are in your back and you're breathing out, expanding your belly, your back, then into your chest, upper back, upper chest, and then so you've got full lung full of air. So do that'll take about four seconds to breathe in fully. Then you hold for 8 beats, right? You hold that for 8 beats and then you breathe out for 8 beats, right? Slowly, like you're breathing out for a small straw.
If you just repeat that pattern OK over and over, boom, you'll feel very relaxed and actually helps if you've eaten loads of food and you're a bit stuffed. If you just do that, it will actually help you digest the food better too. It will give you space in the bowels to get the bowels moving. It's really cool. So the main thing is definitely be holding or exhaling for at least double the amount of time that you are inhaling so that you have more carbon dioxide
than oxygen. It's all about the CO2CO2CO2 is what you want to use to turn on parasympathetic nervous system, OK and to calm you. CO2 is a calmer, O2 is an exciter, right? O2 is also a vasoconstrictor. CO2 is a vasodilator. OK, big difference. So when you know that you can manipulate the gases in your body for whatever situation you want.
OK, so with when you actually breathe out a lot of CO2, you, you actually, you don't get more oxygen really you don't, you can't really fully saturate more than what you do with just a little sniff of air coming in, inhaling a little sniff of air. It's that's not the thing. But what, what happens is if you breathe out lots of CO2, right? And if you, especially if you're doing a fast freight, you generate heat in the body as
well. If you hyperventilate, short bursts, you, you reduce heat, but you also produce adrenaline and it can create a bit of a stress on the body, which can be used in certain situations for certain things, like as a natural kind of stimulant in the short term if it's just for a short period. But also it can act as a bit of an anti-inflammatory. But there's another way to use that because when you do that, when you breathe out CO2 temporarily for a short period, right?
So I'd say 30 breaths in and out, in through your nose, out through your nose fast. If you do that for 30 breaths and then you take a deep breath in and then breathe all the air up and hold your breath, you're now going to be able to hold your breath significantly longer than you thought you could. Like your normal breath whole time. Just if you breathe in and breathe out and hold maybe about 30 seconds, the average is about 20 to 40 seconds.
Some people are much higher, but if you breathe all the CO2 out, because CO2 is what tells your brain you need to breathe OK, if you have less CO2 in your bloodstream, it allows you to now hack your breath all times temporarily. And what that does is it basically triggers a positive stress on the body because you start to lower oxygen briefly and you create a state called insomin hypoxia.
This is a very, very useful physiological state because when you take anything away from the body, it tricks the body into becoming more efficient using that thing that is being deprived of. That's why fasting helps with food. It basically when you fast, you actually trick the body and thinking you're running out of sugar and glucose and fuel. And what it does then is it becomes more efficient. It clears out old cells that you know are using up energy that you don't need.
It kind of cleans the body up a bit so you can become more efficient to survive on less calories. OK, now same thing with diet. So with breathing, if you take away the oxygen for a brief period because it can't be too long otherwise you die, you, your body adapts to a low oxygen environment. And what this does is your body will start to do what makes sense as well physiologically to
become more efficient in oxygen. So you'll produce more mitochondria in your cells, your red blood cells count increases and you get more capillaries growing in certain areas of your body, right? And you can actually get coronary collaterals, which are like natural heart bypasses that form that increases the cardiovascular strength of your heart, but also your brain health improves. You actually increase more blood vessels and neurogenesis in the
brain as a result of this. So just doing this like a few rounds of this a day, OK, can be a really good cardiovascular workout for your system. And it's also why high, high altitude training works. High altitude training has been shown to be one of the most effective exercises where you go up to high altitudes, train and then come back down and then go
back up again. You do this like protocol of training at high altitude, coming back down to sea level and so on. And this is shown to be a secret weapon of a lot of athletes. But now they use machines called IHT machines where they give you through machines a different concentrations of oxygen, high and low. You know you are normal and low actually. And sometimes they use actually a higher concentration oxygen and a low, very low concentration oxygen.
And this fluctuation oxygen tricks the body and thinking you're running out of oxygen too. And this wakes up as well. Stem cells are the system because stem cells and that's why you get more capillaries forming stem cells have the power to turn into any other stem cells. Very small embryonic like stem cells are the the magic weapon of of reversing ageing and creating health within the body repair of old cells that have died due to low oxygenation or inflammation or so on.
So this can help lower inflammation in the body and it also stimulated rapid healing as well. And so you know, these techniques have been preserved in the yogic traditions of tantric yogic tradition for 1000 years. Now the science is starting to back them up. You know, people are Wim off he that's what he's doing. He's showing you high altitude training techniques, simulation of how to training with what he does. And you know, he's all about climbing up mountains in his shorts.
And he's doing the kind of techniques that these Tibetan yogis would do to become efficient using oxygen so they can go and stay up in high altitudes. You know where the oxygen supply is much lower, right? So, you know, Pranayama has these techniques, you know, we do our own version of this. Free divers are doing this as well that's allow them to swim underwater and hold their breath for long periods of time, you know, and so on and so forth.
So yeah, a lot of incredible things can be done just with your breath that we don't even realise. I mean, there's more, there's, there's ways you can turn on focus creativity, also sleep, digestive fire and that has to do with how you manipulate your nostril activity, your nostril dominance. I can share about that as well
if you want. Yeah, yeah, definitely that As far as the the momentary acute increase in oxygen, like I've, I've noticed that like I used to scuba dive and prior to using the the oxygen tanks, we were trying to increase breath hold times and we would intentionally hyperventilate for a period and I would notice that my breath hold times, you know, almost doubled. It was kind of crazy.
But I'll do something similar, you know, when I'm training, like if I'm about to do a, you know, heavy deadlift or something and I am bracing against the belt, in which case I'm not really breathing, I'm just keeping that core tight. I'll hyperventilate a little bit before, you know, committing to that pull. And I feel like that's pretty much the the same thing is happening there.
Yeah, actually deep sea diving is a great way to see how efficiently using oxygen because how long, how fast your oxygen sound runs out is that measure. Because when I went, I did a whole advance diving and all this in Thailand, and I outlasted every single advance instructor there in terms of the oxygen supply, like significantly longer than most people because my oxygen efficiency is so high compared to everybody else I've trained for it. And so I could stay on the water for ages.
People were blown away. They couldn't understand how I could stay on the water for so long compared to everyone else. But yeah, because you don't need to breathe much when you're efficient. And actually that makes the whole underwater experience so much better when you you just go into these meditative States and, you know, some people panic down there and the oxygen tank runs out really fast or they're just all the way because that's how they naturally breathe.
And I used to breathe like that till I learned that actually, that's the wrong way. So I had to reprogram a lot of bad habits from the past. And it's so easy to do. And once you do it, everything shifts and changes. But yeah, the, the the things that really fascinated me is how we can tap into the autonomic nervous system as well. Like literally turning on creativity, turning on focus alertness, like in the moment, you know, literally in minutes.
You know, you hear about pills and medication for this, but I'm sorry, there's nothing that compares to what you can do with your breath. I mean, I can teach you one of those techniques as well if you want. Yeah, yeah, I'm always down to learn more about how to be creative. Yeah, yeah, so, so basically we have two sides, the brain, left hemisphere, right hemisphere. OK, so the right hemisphere is your feminine brain and it's the part that's going to emotional world.
And it's also the more dreamy creative side, OK. It deals with kind of imagery, symbols and, and dreams and, and it's the creative part. It's where you have the divine downloads coming in. The left brain is your more cognitive kind of reason and logic side of the brain. And, but here's the thing. So throughout the day, you're actually three people with three different personalities. Your left brain, your right brain and both hemispheres
operate at the same time. OK, this is super interesting because when your left brain's switched on, you're more in your masculine, OK? You're more in that focus mode, you're more linear in your thinking, right? And it's actually your sympathetic nervous system. When you're more in your right brain, you're more in your feminine side, your nurture side, your creative side. You're more dreamy. And actually your mind may have a lot of thoughts. You're more introspective as
well. You're more in your mind, right? So throughout the day your nostrils will stretch dominance between left and right by itself. It's actually linked to the the lunar calendar believe it or not. And you can notice as you can see which nostrils more dominant right now by closing 1 nostril and just breathing in out of one. You'll find one is much easier to breathe out from the other. Have a go. Yeah, my right side is definitely winning right now. Your right side, yeah.
Is this breathe from? Yeah. So you're actually in your left brain because your left brain controls the right side of your body, your right brain controls the left side of the body. So when your right nostril is more dominant, it means your left brain is more active, right? So you're actually more in your
masculine. So while you're paying attention to every word I'm saying right now, OK, but if you're in your right brain, you may be drifting off right now thinking about what I said before and going off on tangents yourself. And, and it's interesting, you'll notice that you probably do that certain parts of the day now also, you know, the afternoon slump people get, right? It's usually when the left nostril switches on because it's also the more relaxed part of the brain.
And so you can monitor this throughout the day and you can see which personality are you in at the moment. Now here's the thing, we can on command switch nostril activity, right? You can turn on creativity right now if you want to be more creative, you need your left nostril switched on your left nostrils, also known as soma. It's the symbol is the moon. OK, because usually the left nostrils more active when the moon comes out. So and your sun is Surya is your right nostril.
And that's more active when the the sun's out makes sense because during the day you want to be more active, sympathetic, getting stuff done. And during the when the moon starts to come out and the sun goes down, you want to be more now into nurture, relaxing and being more in your creative. That's why artists tend to be more creative in the evenings, right? And especially during the full moon, right? They're more creative suddenly, right? Especially me, I'm a musician.
I feel it straight away. So I can show you how to switch on your right nostril now, right. So you're left. So let's do that. So you, you know that I'm not completely insane. So take your left hand, put your right, so all your fingers wrapped around your left thumb. So put your basically put your left thumb into your palm and then wrap your your fingers around it. OK, so you make like a fist but with your fingers over your thumb.
Then you put your left armpit. So your left, this fist under your right armpit and you push up, you put loads of pressure up, OK? And you close your right nostril with your so your right hand now closes your right nostril, OK? And you're going to push up and you're going to breathe in and out through your left nostril only for about 21 times and put the pressure up. You need to re put pressure up. That's what switches on now in a few minutes your right nostril.
So try that, OK. So I got my fist around my left thumb and I'm pushing into my right armpit and I'm holding my right nostril closed. Yes, for 21 breaths. Yes, yeah. In a few minutes, maybe even before the 21, your left nostril should switch on. Yeah definitely can breathe through my left nostril easier now for sure. Yeah. So switching on. That's interesting, man. It's trippy. I think I'm doing yoga right now here as we're talking. Yeah. And then in a minute you will
feel more relaxed. Actually, you might start to drift off now actually a little bit in your attention. So your your left brain is attention. Your right brain is, I don't want to say distraction, but it's can't think of what rhymes with attention. But you know, it's going to be more in your creative side. You're more nurture female side now. So do you actually go through the day and you kind of like just self check and analyse to to switch as?
Yeah, I yeah, I try not to mess with the whole biorhythms too much unless I really need to. So like, let's say I've got to do this interview with you. I want to be really sharp and, you know, I want to not go off on tangents. I want to kind of stick to some kind of linear thing. Now, you see, I was in a bit of a rush. I had a busy day. And so usually what I do is actually prepare a bit and get my right nostratus so I'm in my
flow. So I actually, I started this call just checking that my left nostril is more active than my right. So I may be going off on a bit of a tangent, but I definitely feel more in the creative mode right now. Actually, I'm having a few divine downloads as we're talking. Yeah, so, but usually I'd switch it as to and also here's the other useful time is digestive fire. So you need your right nostrilative to digest food
properly. All right, so you want to sleep on your if you eat a lot of food and your left nostrils active, you basically want to avoiding food when your left nostril active, you want to switch it to your right. Or if you if it's too late, what you do is you do a Soma power nap is you sleep on your left brain. OK, for a bit, because whatever side you sleep on is the hemisphere that will turn on. All right.
So you sleep on your left brain, your left hemisphere switches on. And this is your, you know, the, the mask inside the digestive fire. Surya, it's the fire. And after a few minutes, when it switches on and you wake up out of it, you're not really going to sleep. But it's like a little power nap. You'll feel so relieved if you're stuffed full of food. Suddenly you'll start digesting food so much better. It's amazing and you have more energy you feel or. Right side.
You sleep on your left, so whatever brain hemisphere you want to switch on, you sleep on that side. So if you want to sleep, sleep on your right brain. Interesting. This is cool man. This is very cool. So do you. It's like I need to have like a bunch of diagrams or charts taped on the wall or something where I could see all this and adjust on the fly as needed based off of the goal. Yeah, so cool, right? And actually, you can also say
no to things as well. Like if you really play with your biorhythm, let's say there's something you need to do that requires attention, but your left nostrils are active. You can wait till it switches and then do that thing because that thing will be way more successful if you do it in the right nostril. So if you're going to be creative, your creativity will be more turned on when you're less nostrils are active and therefore you'll have a better
outcome, better result. So whatever result you're looking for, check in with it and if you have to, switch it. So what if you're sleeping on on your back, for instance? Is it kind of like just a blended hemisphere? So the back is an interesting one, right? Because first you don't want to sleep on your back because it will make your mouth open using your snore and your hyperventilate in your sleep, which is one of the most deadly things you can do, OK, for your health.
So avoid mouth breathing in your sleep at all costs. OK? But it's also known as corpse pose. OK, He basically dies a reason why it's called corpse pose. It's how dead bodies lie and both nostrils may switch on as well. And here's the thing, you will throughout the day, only a few moments will both nostrils be out at the same time. This is a time not to do anything other than meditate.
This is the Shushumna nadi. It's when you're connected to the divine right, and it's the moment you, all you should do is meditation. If you do anything else in that state, it's going to fail, right? It's not going to work. You're not going to have the best outcome because you're actually connected source at that point, and that's the best time to meditate and have the divine downloads. So if you wait for that moment,
you can. But you can also switch them both on by basically using both fists of both armpits and putting pressure on both armpits at the same time and that will eventually switch on both nostrils. Interesting. Again, don't mess with that too much. Yeah. So what what does a day-to-day look like for you? Like when you wake up? Like how do you kind of construct your day to optimize where? You're well, I live states, yeah, I live what is called what
I call a breath based lifestyle. So everything revolves around the breath. I wake up, I do breath based yogic practices, asanas as well as stretching and physical body weight exercises. Holding the breath is Indian martial arts system called Kalari which is all using the breath with body weight exercises like push ups, sit ups, squats and so on, lunges and different types of variations of squats. So I do that.
So you get anaerobic exercise benefits which is in my opinion way more efficient than aerobic exercise. You get a lot of benefits at quicker time. I use my breath. I have an app, the same breath app, so they have these amazing tracks on there. And I do one dose of that usually of the intermittent hypoxia techniques, which is an amazing, you know, way to start your day. Then I go on with my day, right?
And I'll check in with the nostrils and if I need to switch them because I've got something urgent to do, I'll do that.
I usually I'll play with the nostril like I'll, I'll kind of work in, in tandem with the biorhythms that my nostrils tells me. It's my, you know, signal of what to do and what not to do. And I do also spend times where I, I'm in silence, where I don't talk and I keep my mouth shut and just breathe in and out through my nose because it helps recalibrate the, the nervous system and get the oxygen back to where it needs to go. It's very important that we have
these no breathing breaks, you know, where you don't breathe much. Well, reduce breathing breaks, you know, especially if you're a talker, if you're doing a lot of interviews and talking for long periods of time, you need to have at least a minute every 20 minutes just to recalibrate. Like I'm talking a lot right now because I'm in my flow, but I know it's now I'm getting a bit light headed because I've talked to talk, talk, talk non-stop and I'm breathing out a lot of CO2.
So that is meaning I'm getting less oxygen to my brain, not more. This is why it's so important that people stop and just focus on the breath. It's called Vipassana, where you just focus on your breath and just breathe in and out in silence.
This is one of the easiest ways to meditate and it gives you all the benefits of reduced breathing, which is the cornerstone of good yoga practice, but also a breath based lifestyle that's going to dramatically improve your health, well-being, energy levels, your moods, everything. Just let you do a few, a one minute break every 20 minutes of slow reduced breathing in a rhythm in for four beats after 4 beats or infrared alpha rates. There's other patterns.
There's all you can do and just see what happens to your life. Man totally, man, totally. I had a podcast of a couple days ago talking about like CPAP machine, you know, sleep apnea. And obviously, as you had said earlier, you know, if you've got sleep apnea in your mouth breathing like the worst thing you you can do, is there any downside to the C PAP machine as far as like having a regulated amount of oxygen coming in? Is that kind of like better than the sleep apnea?
I'm sure, but probably not optimal. So therefore, like severe situations, right, they shouldn't be first line treatments, right? So I, I'm, I go with the mantra first. Do no farm, you know, as my friend has seen my daughter's mantra, because pharmaceutical invention is just putting the Band-Aid over the of the of the actual 'cause you know of the situation. So you need to identify the cause 1st and then you can reverse engineer what's going on. Why am I on the CPAP machine?
It's probably lifestyle factors, probably being overweight. It's probably stress levels, anxieties, maybe sleeping positions. There's so many things you can do before you go on a CPAP machine to fix to prevent you getting on there because once you're on that, you become dependent on it and it means you're not actually fixing the port, the cause of the problem. So I'm always like medical intervention, last resort, emergencies, do everything you
can before take it all off. If none of that works, then do CPAP machine. But you also need to give a chance. People don't give changing in lifestyle enough of a chance. People like, we'll go on a diet for a day and say, oh, the diet can work, you know what I mean? Yeah. So that's not good either. Totally agree man. Well tell me about the the app real quick to kind of round to here. I want to learn more about that. Yeah.
So the app I'm really proud of, it's got a whole library of different breath pharma techniques and also a whole library of different breath tracks with newer somatic programming, which is all about reprogramming you at a core level with amazing guided breath meditations and using this breath retention techniques to create intermittent hypoxia. The dose I'm talking about and dose stands for DOSC, dopamine,
oxygen, serotonin, endorphins. When you hold your breath for a long enough period and also rhythmic breathing as well enhances this, you release a dose and that positive stress on the body, right, is what it creates all the magical effects I was talking about with intimate hypoxia. Also, that dose makes you feel naturally high, makes you feel it gives you a natural high feeling.
So in the net result, everything we do, if you follow our app and uses your daily practice, you're going to get naturally high. You feel like you're glowing every single day, right? But also you will become naturally healthier and happier because these are feel good neurotransmitters, right? And if you feel good and happy and a high vibe, everything we do is a result of feeling. So if you're feeling good, you're going to start doing good stuff to other people as well.
You're going to start making better choices for your life. It's the miserable people who go and do and make people miserable around them and cause suffer in the world. It's the high happy, healthy people who go on and do good things. So that's my mission is to make people naturally high. Right without needing loads of drugs and also healthy and happy. And then we can make the world a better place.
That's the real mission behind the Summer Breath app and everything we do I. Love it man your your raves now look quite a bit different than your than your initial raves I'm assuming. Yeah, we call them breath raves. Awesome man, where do I point people to to learn more? The the summer breath app? Is it.com or? Itssoberbreath.com. OK. The app there and we also have various courses like instructor training courses and and so on. Awesome, man.
Well, I'll definitely put some of this into practice. It's getting colder now, so I'm going to start doing more of my cold plunging and doing the breath work, breath work as I'm doing that. So yeah, man, this is this will be cool to play around with for sure. Amazing mate. Well, I certainly appreciate the time, brother. Keep fighting to keep good fight. Keep making people help healthier and happier and doing the good things man. So what the world needs more of right now, for sure.
And if you go to my Instagram, Neeraj Naik official, all right, and you send me the keyword breath, I'll send you a lot of good stuff. Awesome man, I will check it out. Really appreciate it brother. Epic mate.