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  2. Life At The Midpoint with Gabby Logan
  3. Rebecca Dennis
Life At The Midpoint with Gabby Logan

25 Mar 2026 · 37m · 17 chapters

In short

Breathwork coaching and how changing breathing patterns can shift the nervous system (calm vs fight-or-flight), reduce stress effects, and help address depression/anxiety and other conditions.

Key claims

Rebecca says conscious, connected breath can access blocked memories and help people come off antidepressants; her approach is gentler because connected breath can potentially retraumatize. She links diaphragmatic breathing to vagus-nerve activation and parasympathetic balance, and claims that one minute of conscious breathing can help clear cortisol/adrenaline.

Notable examples

She describes her own case—diagnosed with depression at 19, suicidal thoughts, then stopping antidepressants within six months after breathwork. She also cites clients: people with autoimmune disease/rheumatoid arthritis, asthma reducing inhaler use, trauma/addiction, and an athlete/boxer using breath for fight readiness.

Guests

Rebecca Dennis, a breathing coach (trained in body work/physio/anatomy; works with NHS, psychiatrists/psychotherapists, Met Police; runs a training school, books, retreats, workshops).

Written by AI. May contain mistakes.

Chapters

0:45

Rebecca Dennis's Journey to Breathwork

Rebecca shares her personal story of overcoming depression through breathwork.

“I know the most natural thing a human being ever does from the moment they're born is to breathe.”
4:50

The Impact of Breath on Mental Health

Discussion on how breathwork can serve as a therapeutic tool for mental health.

“So I imagine at first you're thinking, this is great.”
6:20

Understanding Breath and our Body

Exploration of how breath affects our physical and emotional states.

“without not going into too much detail but yeah I managed to get to the roots of it and yeah.”
8:00

Practical Breathing Techniques

Rebecca shares practical tips on how to improve your breathing.

“And what I help people to do is really helping them with their breath to help them to remember how they used to breathe when they're babies and toddlers.”
11:00

The Power of Breath for Overall Wellbeing

The benefits of breathwork for stress management and overall health.

“They might be having another conversation in their mind about something else and then trying to tick off all of their lists and when you're at sleep and so on.”
14:01

Understanding the Nervous System's Role

Explore how the nervous system influences our emotional states and breathing.

“So that you can come into a more calm and relaxed state.”
15:02

The Power of Conscious Breathing

Learn how conscious breathing can help regulate emotions and reduce anxiety.

“So just while I'm sitting here talking to you, I've been doing like deep breaths down in the belly breath.”
17:20

Breath Patterns and Emotional Responses

Investigate how our breathing patterns affect our emotional well-being and reactions.

“And that makes them feel even more tense.”
19:50

Breath Work and Personal Growth

Discover the transformative power of breath work in personal development.

“You can feel if there's tension in the room.”
23:25

Cultural Perspectives on Breath

Examine how different cultures view and utilize breath in their practices.

“You don't need to go and you know take any that was his kind of mantra you know that you've got it all there.”
Show all 17 chapters
26:10

Finding Balance Through Breath Techniques

Learn about various breathing techniques and their benefits for balance and health.

“looking at their breathing patterns, where they're breathing into, where they're not breathing into.”
28:00

Finding Calm in Chaos

Learn techniques for recharging and finding clarity amidst chaos.

28:37

Mainstream Adoption of Breath Work

Discover how breath work is becoming more recognized in health care.

“And what about in terms of education and children?”
29:22

Breath Work in Education

Explore the potential of breath work for children and teachers.

30:22

Healing through Breath Work

Learn how breath work can aid in healing various medical conditions.

“So if you can help to reduce inflammation in the body, you can do that with breath work.”
31:16

Breath Work in Sports Performance

Understand the role of breath work in enhancing athletic performance.

32:42

Guided Breathing Exercise

Experience a guided breath work session for relaxation.

“So breathing in through the nose and just for as long as is comfortable and then exhaling, letting go through the mouth for as long as is comfortable.”
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Transcript

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0:36Hello and welcome to The Midpoint. My guest today couldn't have arrived at a better time for me, so I'm hoping you might also be ready to learn a thing or two from her. Rebecca Dennis is a breathing coach. I know the most natural thing a human being ever does from the moment they're born is to breathe. So why do we need to be coached? But how many times do you stop and realise you've been working away, holding your breath, subconsciously not breathing or stop and really get in touch with your breathing. I know I'm guilty of pausing my breath way too much and on the flip side, I don't think about breathing better enough.

1:10So let's go breathe with Rebecca.

1:15Rebecca, welcome to The Midpoint. Thank you very much for having me. So I want to know how you got into all of this in the first place. How does one become a breathwork coach? Well I came across breathwork nearly 20 years ago so I was working in media at the time and I had already trained in body work and as a physio and anatomy so I was always fascinated in that in that world in the healing world holistic world but I also had been struggling with depression and anxiety for many many years and I'd been diagnosed with depression when I was 19 and I was put on antidepressants and I thought that I would probably have to take them for the rest of my life because every time I tried to come off them it was a little bit of a car crash and I found it really hard to function.

2:08And when you were on them, sorry to interrupt you, when you were on them, was the reason you wanted to come off because you didn't feel like you or did you not like the idea of just taking medication? I think taking it for however long It was like 15 years I ended up taking the medication. And, yeah, I didn't want to be reliant on taking medication. And I also wanted to get to the roots of depression and anxiety. And so I tried many different therapies, psychotherapies, meditation, yoga, holistic and cognitive therapies. But everything just seemed to be more of a temporary fix and was more surface level.

2:46so I could talk about stuff, but it wasn't really getting to the roots. And then I stumbled into a breathwork class, and that was 18, 20 years ago. And at the time, I was working at a place called Special Yoga Centre that works with special needs children, helping them. That was in Kensal Rise. And, yeah, just as soon as I started that session, it was very strong. It was very powerful. It was very visceral. And you'd never done anything? I tried meditation and I tried yoga and pranayama, but not this type of breathwork. It was a conscious connected breathwork. And I just knew that I'd found something really, really powerful.

3:27And two months actually before this, I tried to take my life. So I would have quite a lot of, I would have suicidal thoughts, even though I was on the medication. And so I knew that I'd found something really, really powerful. And so I just kept going back to do more sessions, one-on-ones. and group sessions and also practicing on my own and within six months I managed to come off the medication and I've not taken it since and I did it with a guidance I had an amazing doctor at the time and I also had a therapist it wasn't a walk in the park I'm not saying to everybody you can just come off antidepressants everyone has a different story um but for me I was really I just kept I went then I went into training and then I went and trained in various other discipline so how many hours a day were you doing the breath work when you were when i was for my own benefit i was i was um practicing it every single day every day and yoga and swimming and you know all of the things that moving my body running that that could support me um so yeah so and it also really helped me with anxiety as well but just getting to the roots of depression So that's why I'm so passionate about it, because I probably go as far to say that it saved my life.

4:46And yeah, and then ever since then, it's just it's just shown me so much more. So I imagine at first you're thinking, this is great. This is working somehow. At what point did you start thinking, why is this working and how? Because you can kind of be passive almost, even though you're being proactive in terms of, well, this is working, so I'm just going to do it. You obviously wanted to go a bit deeper and understand what was going on chemically in your body. Yeah. When you were breathing. Yeah. I think with conscious connected breath, when I was, you know, the method that I learned, but I've adapted it quite a lot since then because it was, let's just say, it can potentially re-traumatize people.

5:26Conscious connected breath. Yes. And so I have a much more gentle approach now, how I work with people and work with clients, because it takes people into an altered state of consciousness. So when you're going into an altered state of consciousness, a bit like when people take psychedelics, for example, psilocybin for depression, there's been a lot of research around that. You can actually do it with your breath. And so rather than thinking your way through it, you're feeling your way into your body, into your nervous system, into your subconscious. and it helped me to access some memories that I had blocked from very early years from childhood and it managed to help me piece together why I had some very negative thoughts really about myself and I would say that was probably the diagnosis as I went along the diagnosis was complex PDSD without not going into too much detail but yeah I managed to get to the roots of it and yeah.

6:26So that sounds like therapy almost as well. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, so it is like therapy without having to do the talking. And because I think I did so much therapy and I felt like I was going over and over stories, but there were my perceptions of the stories. And like I say, you can't remember everything as well. So it's, you know, our body and our nervous system, how it responds and how we store trauma and how we store unprocessed emotions in our body, what the breath helps you to do is to release them. So in the introduction to this episode today, I talked a little bit about just breathing and how often in a day I'll do this, I'll be on my computer and I'll realise I haven't actually had a breath.

7:14Somewhere in my body I'm being kept alive somehow. But I haven't actually just felt a breath leave my body. So there's that part of breathing which I want to talk about. and how we can operate on a very kind of shallow breath all day long. And then also just what you're talking about is so much deeper and how far and how we can connect with breath. But in terms of day-to-day life, I do think it's probably something that we could all do a bit better, even though we do it so subconsciously. Yeah, I mean, I think it's something that we take for granted every day, our inhale and our exhale, because we don't really have to think about it.

7:50It's the first thing we ever do when we were born, right? And it's the last thing that we do when we leave the world as well. So it's there with us for our whole lives, literally. And how we breathe and the way we breathe is really indicative to how we feel and think. And what I help people to do is really helping them with their breath to help them to remember how they used to breathe when they're babies and toddlers. So they're not carrying tension. Their breathing patterns are very much in a flow. They have a very open, expansive breath. and so it's really, like you say, it's like, I mean, there's a lot more awareness about breath work now and it can be a bit confusing because there's so many different breath works out there but really, back in the day when I was first teaching it, people didn't really understand why I was teaching people to breathe, like you say, because we all breathe anyway but there's much more of an awareness now that, like you say, for example, you might be really busy and you hold your breath and you don't realise that you've just been holding your breath for a very long time.

8:48or we shallow breathe and we're just shallow breathing more in the chest and not so much in the belly some people are breathing more in the belly some people more in the chest so we accumulate these patterns over time and and just the rhythms and the depths and the the rate of your breathing can really help to change your state change your state of how you're feeling so if you're feeling anxious you can use your breath to feel calm if you're feeling tired you can use your breath in another way to feel more energized um or you can go into these altered states or you know if you forget what you're going to say because you've got you know you've got brain freeze because maybe you're feeling nervous and something's happening you know with the prefrontal cortex part of the brain has gone into shutdown you can use your breath to help the nervous system to start to stimulate your parasympathetic nervous system so it's you know it's it's this incredible tool that we have under our nose that's free um and that we yeah like i say we do take for granted until even if someone's thinking well i'm perfectly good at breathing thank you very much i don't need any guidance on breathing i think my experience you asked me before we started recording my experience of being lucky enough to work with wim hoff and have his guided breathing taught me so much about the power you know you talked about kind of going into an altered state and how how that you know i I had that experience and how incredible that is.

10:11I had no idea that was achievable just through lying on my back and being told to breathe in a certain way and following that. So it has so many possibilities and the energy as well, which Wim always says, you know, if you feel like you need a kind of a quick 10-minute nap, just do two rounds of breathing and barrel breathing, basically. And the energy levels that you will achieve afterwards are incredible. So I think anybody who thinks that this doesn't apply to me, I'm not depressed, I don't need to come off antidepressant, it's actually there are so many great things that you can add to your kind of health routine, if you like, through learning to breathe.

10:48So let's start from kind of somebody who isn't thinking that they need particularly to know much. What tips would you give them in terms of the benefits of learning about their breath work? Well, so many people experience stress. so we live in quite an urgency culture don't we where people just on the go all the time and i would say that anxiety can be quite high um focus attention spans all of those you know are all connected how we sleep also inflammation in the body uh is also created by stress um chronic pain uh so really it's not just about you know our mental health but it's about our physical health as well and breathwork has so many benefits for so many challenges but also you know I work with athletes with boxers I work with singers with actresses so for performance for voice but also for confidence for increasing your lung capacity and and and just being present I think is is quite it feels like it's quite a luxury for people these days because people have just normally got about 9 million other tabs open in their brain whilst they're having a conversation.

12:08They might be having another conversation in their mind about something else and then trying to tick off all of their lists and when you're at sleep and so on. And so I think it's quite hard for people to manage to feel present, you know, either thinking about things maybe in the past or thinking about things that we've got to do in the future. And then the world is going by. So I think particularly in these times, it's really important to come back to our breath because it's about coming back to the wisdom of your body, the wisdom of your nervous system. How do you do that then, practically? Practically.

12:43So, I mean, just really, really simply when I talk to people about breathing and how they're breathing and the way that they're breathing, just understanding the physiology. So your diaphragm is a dome sheet muscle that sits underneath your rib cage. It's a really strong tonic muscle. And over time, a lot of people tend to breathe a lot more up into the upper chest. So they're underusing the diaphragm. And you also have a little diaphragm like muscles in the pelvis as well as in behind the jaw. So they're all correlating. These are actually seven diaphragms in the body. Seven diaphragms? Yes. and so being more aware of how you're breathing am i using my diaphragm am i using a deep diaphragmatic breath by just very simply when i say simply because it's not simple for everybody but breathing into your belly and breathing low into your belly and expanding your belly on the inhale then you are actually um working with the the vagus nerve do you know about the vagus nerve So vagus nerve is the longest nerve in our system and it stimulates the sympathetic and the parasympathetic nervous system.

13:52So when you're breathing and you're using a deep diaphragmatic breath, then you can start to stimulate your parasympathetic nervous system much more efficiently. And why would we want to do that? So that you can come into a more calm and relaxed state. You know, yes, you know, sympathetic, which is flight or fight, also helps you to get the job done. And it's not all bad and it sort of helps us when we're on the go. But we don't really want to be in that state when we're trying to get to sleep and when we're feeling really wired. So it's about being able to oscillate between those states with much more ease.

14:25So what I find is like a lot of people are sometimes will be more sympathetic dominant. So they're just like go, go, go all the time and then they crash. and then so they get really tired and then they're back up again. But there's not that little sweet spot in between where they're energised but present and can engage and their mind isn't all over the place. And you can achieve that by when you understand the language of your nervous system and how breathing can really help to nourish our nervous system but also bring it back into balance. So just while I'm sitting here talking to you, I've been doing like deep breaths down in the belly breath.

15:08How long do you think it takes for somebody, if they want to kind of access that ability to move between different systems, how many breaths should they be aiming to take? Yeah, if you just breathe for a minute, then you can clear cortisol from your system. Yeah, so just using conscious breath for one minute will really immediately help to, you know, the hormones, adrenaline and cortisol. It's on a very primal level. The nervous system obviously is a very ancient system. It's letting the body know that we're safe, so that we don't need to be pumping around those hormones. So we would have done this much more naturally when we were hunter-gatherers.

15:49Absolutely. We wouldn't have thought about it. No, and now people are being activated because of emails or because of what they see on the news, whereas before the flight or fight sympathetic nervous system was used for that, for when there was, you know, real direct danger. and our nervous system only perceives danger as you know for example say if someone is feeling really anxious say if they're presenting or coming on a podcast it they might all of a sudden be feeling butterflies or feeling nervous but they know what they're going to say but it might be because there's a trigger from the past and then that they had an experience say for example where they were in school and they were laughed at and then they just remember that so we carry all of these stories in our nervous system and what the breath helps us to do is also just helps us to to not be so triggered by past experiences right so it could be a job interview or something where you're you're a good communicator you know you can say what you want to say when you you know you're in your own space but going into a heightened uh stressful environment or a stressful environment that's that's unfamiliar yes is where people can get into that anxious state which is where the breath almost disappears yes exactly or it starts to like i just said um but think at the beginning about how a lot of people tend to breathe much more into the upper chest and so when you tell people to take a deep breath and a deep diaphragmatic breath um and then you'll feel calm for some people actually that will make them feel even more anxious simply because the diaphragm is very tight and the intercostal muscles, which is the muscles in between the ribcage, are also quite tight and they're breathing more up into the upper chest and they can't get the breath down into the belly because they haven't got it down there for quite some time.

17:41And that makes them feel even more tense. So you get that feeling of air hunger. You can't get the breath in or when people have a tight throat or a tight chest, you know anxiety various different sensations and feelings that you have with anxiety so you can change that by changing your breathing pattern and by changing your breathing pattern you know you can do something like lying on the floor with your belly on the floor and it's just you know it's very basic but if you did that for 10 minutes every single day and then just breathing into the ground and breathing into the floor so that your belly is pushing against the ground or giving your muscles a support, then over time you start to change that breathing pattern.

18:19It's how we used to breathe when we're babies. When you watch a little baby when they're sleeping, they're breathing in their belly and they're breathing in the midsection, they're breathing in the chest and the breath is coming in and out like a wave. They're really present. They're not worrying about what people think about them. They're not thinking about... They're shopping later or what's on the list to do. Yeah, and they just express how they feel. They'll express joy if they want to, but they're also expressive, they're hungry, tired and so on. So it's over time that we start to learn really how to control emotion, control pain, to hold back feelings, emotions and so on.

18:56So we start to accumulate these breathing patterns where we start to maybe, we're not using our breath to its full capacity. The expression, and you kind of jumped into it slightly there when you said take a breath, it's such a powerful tool, isn't it? You know, I found myself saying it to people recently, a bit of family stress and there was, you know, a bit of heightened kind of anxiety and emotion. And just just take a breath before you act on this, you know, and actually it's something we say flippantly, but actually is practically so worthwhile doing. Because the way you behave after you've taken some breaths could be very, very different to that emotion that you want to kind of let out at the time.

19:39so it's I know it's been kind of almost over just take a breath you know when people say that to you and they usually say it sometimes in a kind of almost accusatory way just take a breath on that one but actually we could all do with just taking a breath on the way we respond to things yeah I think if everybody started the morning with some breath work we might live in a slightly different world and um and it's true I think like you say like in family situations or if it's with colleagues and all of these nervous systems around us, you can sometimes, you know, it's like when you walk into a room, you can feel what the energy is like in the room.

20:15You can feel if there's tension in the room. And, you know, it's a bit like Christmas is quite a good test for your spirituality. And, you know, people think that they've done all the meditation that they can, but then you can go back into some family dynamics and it can trigger your nervous system and you go back into being a child again. But if you do take a few deep, a few breaths where you start to stimulate your parasympathetic nervous system, you're not as reactive. So you're being responsive. You're not firing off. You know, you're not sort of speaking before you take a step back. And the breath is just really helpful to bring you back, to bring you back to yourself and to just that feeling of connection.

20:56I think a lot of people feel quite disconnected and so we can be living a little bit more from the shoulders up rather than maybe listening to our gut feelings. So you had a, obviously going back to the beginning of your story, something of a career pivot really through this and decided that it was something you wanted to help other people with. Yeah, absolutely. It's almost like it found me. And then from there, I went and trained in Mexico and the US with various other teachers along the way. And since then, I've just gone from strength to strength. And I've written three books and I've now got a training school.

21:37And I still do one-on-ones and retreats and workshops. But I love it. And what I love about it is, is it's very intimate and you the breath doesn't really lie. So, you know, you meet people in these places where sometimes they can be vulnerable or they can, you know, it's like the masks are off. So it's really important to hold a safe container as well for people and to make sure that they're really grounded when they leave. But yeah, it's just, you know, I meet people from all around the world working with the breath. And because everyone has their own story, everyone has their own breathing pattern.

22:17So it's, yeah, I'm always learning. Culturally, you mentioned working in America and Mexico. Are there other cultures that...

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23:28already embrace the idea of understanding breath and and treating it slightly more seriously or is it yeah i mean i think you know yoga has been and and has been around for thousands and thousands of years and you know in china and various you know disciplines of martial arts um and a lot of shamanic practices as well actually it's really interesting when you meet these different people from around the world breath has always been a central point for many cultures um and and it's something that really it's it's a bit like it was a it's a forgotten it's you know it's a very powerful healing medicine that we have and and i that's the wim hof uh always used to say um your you know your medicine best medicine cabinet is inside your body yeah and those you know the chemicals that you can access through breath are the most powerful ones.

24:25You don't need to go and you know take any that was his kind of mantra you know that you've got it all there. Yes. You've got to be able to access it and what the kind of breathing that he did I would describe as almost like a circular breath so you're taking in the breath and you're never really stopping at any point you know you're not holding it anywhere it's moving constantly and that's the one that after maybe three or four rounds of which you feel almost in a kind of slightly altered state and you start to see inside your body almost. What's that called? So, yeah, there are, I guess it's...

25:00Yes, exactly. There are many different breathing techniques. Connected breath is, so Wim Hof's method is, it's very dynamic and... It's quite exhausting. It's quite alpha as well. Right. Because you do hold at the end for a bit. Yes. But for some people, they can get quite a lot of anxiety from it. And they can get some, there's something called technique where they can, if they're pushing the exhale out too much, it can get a little bit painful. Right. So it is, some people really love it and lots of people really love it and really enjoy it. But I like to sort of teach people the foundations of breathing first, just looking at where their breathing pattern is.

25:44because I would say that Wim Hof's method is a more advanced method. So if you understand your breathing patterns first, then you, because if you're breathing in that way or breathing into the upper chest, you could potentially have a panic attack or you could feel really dizzy. So it's something to work towards. It's something to work towards, absolutely. So how do you help people understand their breathing? Well, like I say, normally by really starting with looking at their breathing patterns, where they're breathing into, where they're not breathing into. I work a lot with body work as well and acupressure too.

26:19So helping to release tension in the fascia, which is the connective tissue that envelopes the muscles and the bones and all around the body and is really a communication system to all of the nervous system. So really getting a breath where you are breathing with a full open breath, breathing in your belly and breathing in the midsection and up into your chest and not getting that feeling of air hunger. And then you can go into these more deeper, more advanced patterns. And how I teach it is sometimes it's through the mouth and out through the mouth, sometimes through the nose and out through the nose.

26:56And sometimes, you know, I always tweak it and adapt it. It's not necessarily one size fits all. Sometimes I'll just be working with people with functional breathing or working with just getting them to just be with their breath. Some people just that's that's that can be quite overwhelming sometimes just to sit and be with your breath for for 10 minutes or 15 minutes. But the dynamic aspect aspect and the connected breath, it really helps us to come out of our minds and come in to our bodies so that we're not thinking our way through it. We have to feel our way through it, which can be uncomfortable sometimes, as you might have experienced that for some people.

27:38Yeah. Yeah. Very emotional. very emotional yeah or just deeply relaxing yes you never quite know and I think as somebody who's done a bit of yoga as well I think there is a certain amount of intention isn't there and you can once you start doing it you can almost decide beforehand what you want to get out of that experience yeah so sometimes I've used breathing as a recharge almost you know if I've had a busy day and I know I've got a really busy evening ahead to take 10 minutes to try and recharge your batteries yeah it's quite powerful absolutely and just to find calm in the chaos sometimes when you just when there just feels like there's a or there's many decisions that you need to make and you just got you know you you can't quite ground that decision just taking a time away to breathe for 10 minutes and not think about it normally there can be quite a lot of clarity that can come after that because we have quite a few voices sometimes and you know you know telling us it's that yes or is that no is that my intuition telling me this is that you know um and so the breath work really helps us to to filter some of the chatter in the mind it's so powerful and it's it's so easily accessible are we giving people instruction through the nhs do gps talk about breath work yeah how mainstream has it got well i mean i i work a lot with the nhs and with psychiatrists and psychotherapists and I've worked with met police and also and and but I would say that it's it's definitely becoming more widely used and prescribed let's say in the NHS but but there could definitely still be more.

29:21And what about in terms of education and children? well again i mean there there are there are schools that do teach breath work um for children but again it's funding isn't it and um and you've got somebody who's interested yeah but it's you know there are some amazing people that are you know that are are doing that and are helping you know getting it into schools and getting yoga and getting breath work into schools because it's not only great for children but it's also good for teachers as well having to you know they have to manage all of those nervous systems as well but if a teacher can go in and also feel calm and and then you're trying to manage the nervous systems of you know say 30 children um bringing getting them to you know start breath work from a very early stage is uh i think you can you can see a notable notable difference so in terms of uh going more mainstream you've obviously noticed that through what you do and the kind of people you teach what kinds of you've talked about your own journey but what kinds of things have you seen improve conditions have you seen improve and heal i've worked with people with autoimmune disease um so often so some people will uh with me or with rheumatoid arthritis just so many different it's a lot of different autoimmune illnesses and um when i'm working with people often you know with chronic pain or chronic illness is inflammation.

30:43So if you can help to reduce inflammation in the body, you can do that with breath work. And there've been some really profound results with that. Working with people with asthma, I've worked with many people with asthma who don't use their inhalers anymore, just by helping them to change their breathing patterns, but also helping people deal with trauma and abuse and addiction and focus and you know it's it's so it's so so varied and yeah just you know just working with just a recent recent um client I've been working with working with this boxer that I've been working with just helping him to get ready for his fight but also helping him to manage his emotions as well so it's yeah noticed um I went to watch my son play against Bath a few weeks ago at the rec ground and um the bath team after a try or a kick when when they're regrouping for the game to start again i noticed the players all going together and doing some breathing and my husband and i both like oh my gosh this is you know this is interesting what are they doing you know and it made sense right that you know they to get that kind of uh energy back very quickly because if you've just had an explosive period of play and you've had to defend or attack then you you know you've used up a lot of your um kind of different energy systems yeah absolutely and uh you know you can get quite tired and your muscles can get tired as well so when you're working with with breath work and you're you know breathing through the nose versus breathing through the mouth for example and if you're breathing through the nose and it's going to be um it will help your capacity and it will help your lung capacity so things like that you can train yourself you can train yourself and then that will help with stamina and performance so yeah there's tennis players and lots of sports players that now do work with breath work a lot as well and I think that's the beauty of it that it's just it's just having that understanding that the psychology and physiology are very interconnected yeah and uh yeah so it's it's for performance um on many levels many many levels so before we let you go today um could you do uh can we do a little bit of breathing yeah okay absolutely how long would you like to do it for a couple of minutes couple of minutes okay and what would you what would you do something guided so anybody's listening that they can um they kind of go along with okay is that okay yeah i've sprung this on you no it's fine i'm very happy to do breathing on the spot whenever um okay so why don't we just do a little grounding breath exercise okay should i close my eyes yeah close your eyes and if you can just feel your feet on the ground beneath you so imagine there's little roots going from your feet all the way down into the earth and just noticing the temperature in your body noticing the temperature in the room just noticing how it feels in your body and just being aware of the mind and any thoughts in the mind and then giving your mind a job to do so just allowing it to become aware of the breath and just noticing your inhale and noticing the exhale.

33:55So breathing in through the nose and just for as long as is comfortable and then exhaling, letting go through the mouth for as long as is comfortable.

34:08So not manipulating the breath or trying to push it anywhere, just noticing the breath first of all, just noticing how it feels as it moves through your body. Inhaling in through the nose for as long as is comfortable. A little pause at the top and then exhaling for as long as is comfortable. And now just see if you can just bring the breath all the way down into the lower lungs. So when you're bringing the breath into the lower lungs and you start to use more of a deep diaphragmatic breath and you might want to place your hand on your belly so you can feel your belly expanding on the inhale and then contracting on the exhale so you're just letting your body know and your nervous system know that you're coming to a place of calm and you're just breathing in to your belly so it's expanding and then exhaling and just see if you can visualize the diaphragm in your body as it's moving and like a parachute going up and down as you're inhaling and exhaling and 60 % of your lymph nodes is situated underneath your diaphragm so you're giving your body a really good cleanse by breathing in this way just helping the lymphatic system to flow with more ease.

35:26And now just inhaling in all the way down to the belly just see if now you can bring the breath a little bit lower so you might even be able to get the movement of the breath to come down into your lower belly. Inhaling in for as long as is comfortable, so not pushing it or forcing it, you're just being there and the mind has got a job to do and it's just staying with the breath. So the mind is following the breath, the mind follows the inhale and it follows the exhale. Inhaling in through the nose, exhaling, letting go through the mouth, inhaling in through the nose, exhaling through the mouth.

36:11So now hopefully the breath feels like it's in the belly we're just going to inhale in for one, two, three and hold, two, three, exhale let go, two, three and hold, two, three and then inhale in two three hold the breath relax into that hold and then exhale let go two three and then hold the breath at the bottom and just relax at that hold relaxing your body relaxing the mind, staying with it and then inhale in, hold two, three, exhale let go, two, three and then just now allow the breath to go where it wants to go, just noticing the breath, keeping it in the belly, staying really present with your breath, just allowing your mind to just follow the breath in the belly,

37:15Good. And then when you're ready, coming back, just wiggling your toes, fingers. Notice how you feel. Oh, very relaxed. That's all I can come up with. That was the best I could do. Very relaxed, euphoric. Good. Thank you. That was absolutely lovely. And I'm sure anybody who's going along, I put a little warning at the beginning of this episode, if you're driving. Yes. Not to close your eyes when you're breathing. You might want to do this in a nice, quiet space. That was absolutely lovely. Thank you. Thank you very much for having me. Thank you.

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From the publisher

This week on The Midpoint, we’re joined by breathwork expert and wellness coach Rebecca Dennis to explore the transformative power of the breath — and why something we do every day might be the key to feeling calmer, clearer and more in control.


Rebecca shares her personal journey from burnout and anxiety to discovering breathwork as a life-changing practice, and explains how conscious breathing can help regulate the nervous system, reduce stress and reconnect us with our bodies — especially during the often overwhelming midlife years.


In this episode, we talk about why so many of us are stuck in “survival mode,” how poor breathing habits can impact both our mental and physical health, and the simple techniques we can use to reset in moments of stress. Rebecca also demystifies breathwork, making it accessible for beginners while offering deeper insight for those looking to build a consistent practice.


This is a grounding, practical and deeply empowering conversation — a reminder that sometimes the most powerful tools for change are already within us.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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