Day 28 — Yoked to Breath — Part 2

Blogtober — Day 28… “At the stroke of midnight..”

OK it’s 11:46pm and I’ve got 14 minutes to punch out 750 words to keep the streak alive!!!

OK, so today I had a meeting with an epic strength and conditioning coach, Elias Wright from Iron Power Strength & Performance about my Beep Breath Protocol.

I shared with him this box breathwork protocol which operates like the beep test… you know that running and fitness test which gets progressively harder and grades your fitness by how hard you can push yourself… whereas the beep breath though does that same thing, but with your breathing. Longer inhales, longer holds, and longer exhales… until you cannot continue.

You burst… having to breath!!

Breathwork has been an inspiration of mine for several years, and of late the initiative of Benny Wallington to digitise my “box breathing puff test”, which he revamped into, the “Beep Breath Test”. In addition the book by James Nestor and Anders Olsson, Breath, has rekindled that spark of using a progressively more difficult box breathing practice to gauge a person’s stress thresholds.

The test participant is given a score… it’s their “CO2max”…

This score relates to their tolerance for carbon dioxide build up in the blood. As the beep test is a decent measure of a person’s VO2max, it came to me that the beep breath test does that for carbon dioxide (CO2). Interesting synergy considering these two tests share the same progressive ramping up of difficulty until threshold is reached and also have a VO2/CO2 max component. Synchrony, harmony and isomorphy.

Anyways, I discussed with Elias how anxiety and panic attacks in particular have been shown to occur as a person begins to over breathe and as that happens, their CO2 levels drop. The researchers found by teaching people to breath slower and also hold their breath, they would increase their CO2 levels, and thus panic attacks would subside. Imagine having a wearable device which could tell you when your CO2 levels were getting in the zone where a panic attack was extremely likely?

I know many clients and many people out there who would pay anything for that kind of technology as they suffer from panic attacks and chronic anxiety.

The other side of CO2 is the elite performers populations such as professional athletes, elite special forces and free divers. Especially the free divers who spend up to 10 minutes underwater, holding their breath, and they are able to keep their calm, even perhaps when their brain and body is shouting at them to BREATH DAMMIT!!

The CO2 max of these individuals, free divers, is extremely high, as these people train to develop their CO2 tolerance.

That’s because the desire to breath ISN’T from a lack of oxygen… NO… !?

It’s from a buildup of CO2.

If you’ve heard of Wim Hof and how his breathwork practice enables people to hold their breath for 2–5 minutes… if you haven’t heard, that’s legit.. (I once held my breath for 3 1/2 minutes after a Wim Hof session while in an ice bath!!). The reason they can feel so chill, calm, and at peace without breathing is because they’ve hyperventilated all their CO2 from their bodies from his breathing practice. Then when they go to hold their breath, there’s such little CO2 in their blood that the brain thinks, “oh, well, no CO2, no need to breath!”

Eventually CO2 does build back up, but it happens far later than most people ever imagined.

One time in fact, and this is a bit off topic, but I’ve got 3 minutes to punch out 200 words, I was doing holotropic breathwork at my home office.. I was breathing in for 1sec, and breathing out for 1sec… for about 10 minutes… then I cut that time in half and was breathing in and out half a second each way… then I went even faster and was breathing super duper fast 0.3sec in, 0.3sec out, then…. and at one point I think I pushed it to 0.2s in and out… I did that to some rocking Goa Psy Trance music for about 45 minutes…

I even found myself spontaneously rocking into circular breathing… where I was breathing in as I was breathing out… and breathing out when I was breathing in… like playing a didgeridoo…

And then…. once the music ended… as I ended my breathwork session… I stopped breathing on the exhale… and held… and waited… I put on the stopwatch on my mobile phone… 1 minute went past.. 2 minutes… 3 minutes.

Then I found myself going to 8 and 9 and then 10 minutes… WITHOUT BREATHING!!

There simply was no impulse, urge, or hunger to breathe for such a staggeringly long period of time… I’d blown out so much CO2 that my brain was like, “it’s cool guys…” Of course eventually my urge to breathe resumed as CO2 built back up in my system.

We are definitely Yoked to Breath, in particular CO2 as it really is the reason for our urge to breath… lack of oxygen we just pass out… but that panic, urge, hunger, desperation, panic… that’s all about CO2… and a higher CO2 max…

The less likely you are to experience panic attacks, and the cooler, calmer, and more composed you’ll be as a human being.