Use Your Breathing to Control Stress, Reduce Pain, & Much More - With Jill Miller

32:25So movements might be like pelvic tuck-on-tucks or tiny rotation movements, either the pelvis moving or the upper body moving, just to get the ball to start to nuzzle into the guts on the anterior side and then nuzzle around towards the backside. And then eventually, once that side feels good, it feels compliant, then you go to the other side. You kind of repeat the same steps. and then with permission with your body's permission maybe just maybe you can go across the center and then if the center is always uncomfortable because your organs you know i mean like organs typically don't want to be restricted and also as soon as a ball goes into your belly button you think of that as a pressure blockade for your diaphragm so the diaphragm can't really move down well when you have all this central pressure going in and so that can also set people off or create pain that's not really there it's just this interference and so we train our students to work with that and then you can work around that also by creating a little bit of tension and preventing it from going deeper but this is some of the basic steps of how to work into an abdominal massage that can be quite total i mean with our students who've done this a lot and especially you know myself you know we'll be twisting our body all over the ball and so the ball will be ringing into the tissues and this is how to create the most dramatic levels of glide just like a really skilled massage therapist or a rolfer would do on your tissue to create a tremendous amount of intra-tissue stretch so not just pressure but trying to create traction between layers and there's so many benefits to this on a fascial tissue level because what you and I haven't even talked about is the insane amount of neural net within all the fascial layers that are being deformed and informed by the pressure of the ball.

34:28And that's a whole other language that's being spoken to different areas of your brain that helps to really rearrange one's perception of their body and pain. Wow. It's all connected. All connected. Wow. Can you share, by the way, where can people get a gorgeous ball from? Oh, my company is Tune Up Fitness. So you can find it on our website. And of course, you know, we have an Amazon shop, but yeah, tuneupfitness.com. Tune Up Fitness. Beware of the imposters, right? Get the original gorgeous ball. Thank you. Yes. Of course. And, you know, we're talking about accessing our ability to modulate stress in our bodies, help to kind of be able to release and let go and to get more into that parasympathetic.

35:18On the other side, though, a big part of stress management, which even I use that word loosely, but thriving amidst stress, which we all are going to be exposed to, is having more stress resilience or capacity. And so is there a way that we can actually utilize our breathing to help to make us more resilient in the face of stress? Well, we can train our breathing in slow breathing. We can train our breathing in fast breathing, like kind of in a Petri dish, right? So if you're sitting in a room or sitting in a nice quiet space, you can be the sample. You can be you in a Petri dish, trying out different experiments and seeing what effects that has on you personally.

36:14And, you know, there are a lot of, there's so many different breathing strategies out there that combine, you know, all slow breathing or resonant breathing or fast breathing, hyperventilation breathing, combinations of all of these things. My friend Tanya Bentley and the HHP Foundation, that's the Health and Human Performance Foundation, they did an index or systematic review of all of the breath literature that shared breath practices geared towards an anxiety reduction and so this paper came out in 2023 i believe late 2023 and they had they were over 300 papers that they looked at and then they had to rule out a lot of exclusion criteria and they came down to think like 74 or 76 papers but the summary of what was included in breathing practices that definitely reduced anxiety over the long term are the breathing practices need to be need to include slow paced breathing and they need to be at least five minutes so continuous breath practice that includes some slow pace breathing or you can have a fast slow mix but it needs to be at least five minutes and you need to do this at least five days a week to get long-term benefits so when i look at that i can say oh sure it looks like you can do both slow and fast breathing as long as you have the slow breathing in there because i think some people They just want to do fast breathing and think that that's all they need to do.

37:58And that's going to like pump you up. It's going to get you really excited, but it's not going to give you the type of focus, like clarity that the slow pace breathing will do, which ultimately has a connection with improving your heart rate variability, just helping you to be more organized as an organism with your, the synchrony of your heart rate, the way your brain patterns work with breathing and this other complicated systems of the body that if I start talking about it, we'll go into the weeds. Can you talk about specifically when you say fast breathing, because somebody might be like, well, why would I want to do that if I'm trying to, you know, I found that in those different names for it, chaotic breathing, breath of fire, but having a fast paced breathing intentionally, and then going to slow breathing, I relax so much faster than anything else that I've ever done.

38:57That's amazing, yeah. And so can you specifically like tell people what that is and describe what do you mean by fast-paced breathing? Yeah, so it would be just taking as fast an inhale and as fast an exhale as you can muster. The most voluminous, both on the in and on the out. And so that might look like an inhale that go less than a second in and less than a second out. and it's going to be very metabolically taxing. And I actually think that the exhaustion of, it's like a hit class, but for your breath, like super hit for your breath in a short timeframe and then contrasting it with the slow paced breathing that really slams on the vagal break.

39:38So you get to really feel this contrast of all on, all off, all on, all off, just like the contract relax does for your musculature. So I think these is in a way, like it's a contrast therapy for breathing, like contrast therapy for contractions. We really get to feel the ends of our resilience when we do things like that. I, for one, I'm not a huge fan of doing fast paced breathing as a practice. I've certainly done it. I like to get my fast pace in other ways. Yeah. Wait, are you talking about sex? I mean, like just efforting at the airdyne bike. The way you look though, this is like in other ways.

40:19you know, and with you had the side eye, right? So like exercise. I keep the sex slow and then the breathing fast in other realms. Okay. Okay. Got it. Got it. It was the side eye for me. Okay. But again, many different acts. There's a relationship there, obviously. We just, we just made a turn. Who knew he was going to turn into this little pathway, but can, is there any insight you could share on the relationship with breathing and our sexual health? Oh my goodness. Well, now I'm, I'm flushed. Um, so orgasm is a parasympathetic event. So if we can do breathing exercise and especially breathing exercise that builds awareness all the way to the basement of our body, right?

41:09So when I'm talking about zone one breathing, the pelvis isn't not included. The pelvic floor is a reciprocal elastic region that is going to receive pressures from the diaphragm. So this can help our body to feel really like totally included in the physical event, the physical effects of breathing that can help us get towards orgasm. I mean, I'm not, look, I'm not an orgasm expert, so I'm sure you have a lot of other people in your space, but it is a parasympathetic event. And so if you can build more tolerance capacity for being in a parasympathetic state. And we do that with the types of things that I've been describing, the breathing, the massage, we can do pelvic floor massage with the gorgeous balls, with the yoga tuna balls.

42:01This is in the book. It's in Body by Breath. Really smart stuff to do so that there's less muscular tension in those areas. This all helps with blood flow. And I think it all helps with the coordination, the neural control of orgasm. Thank you. Thank you for that insight. One of the most important nutrients for human health, this should be of no surprise. It should be written in the sky. It's vitamin C. It has so many benefits from supporting our immune system function to supporting our sleep quality and even supporting our mental health. Vitamin C is believed to be a bona fide stress buster and reduce stress by supporting the adrenal glands and allows a person to bounce back more quickly when under stress.

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44:21plus it has a 60-day 100 % money-back guarantee. So if you aren't absolutely thrilled with it, you'll get your money back, no questions asked. So again, you've got nothing to lose, but better health to gain by utilizing Paleo Volley's Essential C Complex. Head over to paleovalley.com forward slash model right now for 15 % off. That's P-A-L-E-O-V-A-L-L-E-Y.com forward slash model. for 15 off store wide and now back to the show you know again i think it's very it's very superficial the way that we view breathing in relationship to sex and orgasm you know very like uh cinematic you know perspective but it's deeply related our breathing orgasm you know even the the act of all of it itself can be more, dare I say, controlled if we're tuning in to our breath and breathing a certain way.

45:25I mean, it's hard to get off if you're just trying, right? So that efforting, that tension-based, that's not really helpful for letting go. So, hey, you just wrote it out for us. Hopefully. So let's get back to the main road again. And I want to ask you now about, obviously, when we think about breath in the context of relaxation, a lot of it is tied to meditation, right? Especially in our culture today, which is great. Now, with this being said, body by breath, and our bodies are just so dynamic, and we have all this movement capacity. Can it be possible for us to access a lot of those meditative qualities through movement?

46:23Basically, like movement-based meditations, I'm asking about. I love this question. I think stillness meditation can be very intimidating for many bodies, especially many bodies that are like highly charged, like more sympathetically aroused. And one of the things I came across when I was researching the book is this thing called relaxation induced anxiety. So relaxation induced anxiety is that for some bodies, when they are still, they end up getting neural rushes or feeling very fidgety. They have an inability to stay still or they feel like they must. They get very nervous. Right. So it's this anxiety of being still.

47:15And I saw this when I was teaching. So I'm my background is yoga teaching. and then massage. And I would see this in a very small segment of the, my students, like some of them just, they just, they would fidget the whole time. You know, they'd move their fingers or eyeball here or there, or just, you know, squirm. And when I came across this relaxation induced anxiety term, I realized that's probably what's happening for a lot of these people. And then I started, I came across the work of Stephen Porges and polyvagal theory and his work on polyvagal theory really helped to explain people especially who have had a trauma history can find stillness extremely threatening because still they were forced to be still in some of the traumatic events that happened to them and if you think about in a yoga space you're laying with your genitals your mouth facing the sky you're completely vulnerable in a dark room, right?

48:21Everybody's eyes are closed. And so that made a lot of sense to me in terms of, I mean, I don't know what's going on inside of people's minds and bodies, but stillness can be a threat to certain bodies. So how do you help those people to gain the benefits of relaxation? For those folks, their bodies should be assisted to move. They should be allowed to do slow, gentle movement. And we can do slow, gentle movements that induce deeper relaxation or deeper concentration or calm or going approaching meditative states. Meditation doesn't always have to be this complete static stillness. So some of the things I teach in the body by breath work are these slow motion dynamic movements, such as like rolling over in bed.

49:18I know that sounds crazy, but there's an exercise I teach where you're just laying on the ground in an, like an X-like shape and in super slow motion. And I mean, super slow motion so that it's like you can feel one filament move at a time and I'll do it fast now, but basically you, you let your hand cross over to your chest and then it reaches over to the opposite hand and your whole body ends up rolling over and then you unwind that and you roll back and it if you allowing yourself to really let go enough it feels like an external force is moving you and that whole event becomes the focus of your meditation the slow movement becomes the focus so your mind and your attention and your body really glom together and so that becomes a very meditative experience um there's another meditation i teach it's called the hand dance meditation that i learned from my studies in buto so buto is a form of japanese dance that came out out of japan after the second world war after the second world war after um the devastation of the atomic bombs there and it's a very elemental primal form of dance but sometimes the dances would and i've studied this and i've attended buto concerts you know you'll see somebody go from standing down to the ground and that will take 60 minutes so it'll be one gesture and you'll see them progressively melt all the way down to the ground over it's incredibly powerful like with cool lighting and stuff, or I've just seen it done in, in a dance space.

51:02But this hand dance meditation is a, an homage to that. And what that is, is you can sit anywhere or you can lay down and you set a timer. Five minutes is probably a good amount of time. And over that time frame, the hand that's in a fist ends up opening and the hand that's open goes into a fist. and so you do this and it's only one rep so you've got one hand and a fist one hand open close your eyes or have them partially open and make sure your hands are rested and then over that five minute time period no just once yeah and when i do this for my students and i set the timer a lot of times they're nowhere near finished one hand is barely open one hand is barely closed And so this is also this experience of interoception because time is an interoceptive experience in our body.

52:05So interoception, I just jumped like four pages of your questions there. Interoception is our body's experience of its physiology. It's our ability to sense our physiology, like our heart rate, our breath pace, our sexual urges, hunger, satiety. But time is also an interoceptive concept. And so it's really interesting to see folks have this dissociation of their body and time and space. But it doesn't like, that's just like a little factoid on the side. But all this is designed to help those students with relaxation-induced anxiety find ways of focusing that don't spin them out or send them into a higher stress or threat response.

52:50So yes, slow motion movement, extra slow motion can be so helpful for so many different bodies and temperaments. This is wonderful. I wanted to cover at least one more thing with you, which this awareness of interoception and our body's awareness of itself, this is also our awareness of pain. Yes. And obviously, you know, just part of being human and going through life, you're going to experience pain, whether this is injuries or just hurts. And my question is, can we utilize our breath? Can breathing help us to recover, to heal faster? Is this something that is well-established? You know, whether again, somebody is working to recover from an injury, would the state that our breathing can put our bodies in help us create an environment to where healing can happen more gracefully and swiftly?

53:59I just saw a paper last week that was by Josef Tashel out of Germany and some other folks. And it was about chronic pain and PTSD and biofeedback resonance breathing, which is basically, you know, resonance breathing. You need some tools to be able to see that you're in a synchronous frequency with your heart rate, the baroreceptors, and your breath pace. and typically this is in the five to seven breaths per minute zone but these people had had tech so they had the biofeedback about this breath pace for their own bodies and i don't remember all the details but the group that used resonance breathing who had chronic pain along with ptsd had a remarkable, had a significant ability to not have the catastrophizing around their pain to the degree that they had prior to the study.

55:12So the controls still had the same relationship to their pain, but the people who had done the breathing practice, their relationship to their pain had transformed, which is incredible. And the PTSD. So these are like compounding variables. um and then i would if it were my study what i would have done is i would have wanted to also see can we give these people some self-myofascial release intervention that actually deliberately addresses some of the the pain points that they might have um that's a lot of variables but i'm so encouraged by by this study and i wish i could remember the name of but if you just look up Joseph Tashel and those other keywords, you'll find it.

55:58Amazing. So obviously no two people are the same, you know, any injury or any type of condition that somebody is dealing with, they're working to recover from, it's always just going to be an estimation on how long it's supposed to take to heal. Right. And so it's something that's difficult to track to see, like, is somebody healing faster with this protocol, including breathing versus not, because it's situation dependent. However, it's such a huge component of the catastrophizing, as you just mentioned, how we make it mentally like, this is so bad, this is going to take so long. Whatever negative thing we could add to the mix, I'll never be the same, I'll never recover.

56:44The quicker we can shift out of that, the more available we are to feeling better and to healing. And so just that change alone is probably the biggest change possible. Yeah. I think with pain, because there's so many different things that are impacting the pain, right? It could be the tissues. It could be your brain. It could be your brain's memory of the pain. It could be the salsa that you ate that was unfortunate, right? It could be how your kid yelled at you. There's so many things that impact pain that the beauty of that something so simple as breathing can be a window that gives you a reprieve into how your mind has arranged itself around its belief about your pain.

57:33It's huge. And I think that those of us or people who live in chronic pain, you really, you want to stay positive and optimistic that there can be other things that can help with your perspective because when the perspective changes it can change the physical engagement that you have with the pain and we need those windows in order to to feel hopeful about living in this body obviously there are so many different paths to the goal so many different modalities of accessing our breathing but are there any kind of tried and true breathing exercises or strategies that you can give people if they're dealing with pain to help them to relax to reduce the pain or just to even feel a little bit better i think the simple answer is slow down your breathing whatever you're doing now make it slower than it is normal and try to make your exhale last longer than your inhale so that's like the simplest strategy because slow deep breathing is really what's shown to help with symptoms of anxiety but pain specifically i'm not so sure because sometimes what happens is when we relax deeply, we actually start to really feel our pain, right?

59:04The more in touch we get with ourselves. So when we're sympathetically aroused, our muscles are bracing for us and our mind is spinning and that can inoculate us to some of the screams that are coming from our interoception, from some of the, the ale of pain. In fact, movement blunts pain. So as soon as I'm still and I'm breathing slowly, what might happen is I might start to have more emotional processing. And that can lead me to more catastrophizing. So it's one of the reasons why. Okay. So also the way you're breathing could compound the pain because you might have a paradoxical breathing pattern or you might already be a chronic zone two, zone three breather.

59:52You might naturally breathe like that when someone tells you to breathe deep because you don't know there's another alternative. You have trained your body away from a baby's breath, right? Life has not been kind to you and you've tried to look skinny or not feel the feelings in your gut or whatever it is. And we're offloading our breathing into areas that compound our pain over time. So this is one of the reasons why I include body awareness in the context of breathing because also sometimes you just tell somebody to breathe and they have breath-induced anxiety. Forget about relaxation induced anxiety.

1:00:34When I'm working with beginners and I ask them to breathe, that first breath is an assessment. Some people have such a difficult time decoupling the need to control their breathing from letting it be an effortless, full, deep experience. And so that's one of the reasons why, like, especially in body by breath, I introduced self-myofascial release into the body in gentle ways because it can actually trick people into a more appropriate, healthy breathing pattern and get out of this chronic over-breathing using the neck, the shoulders, the ribs as the primary drivers of breathing. So I think it's a lot more complicated.

1:01:17I'm telling you the simple answer, which is take a longer breath than you normally would and make your exhale last longer than your inhale. But that can have other consequences. One of the things like I'll tell some people is let's blow out candles on the birthday cake. And the next blowout is going to be one more candle, right? So you breathe in and then blow out four candles. Good. Take another slow breath in, now blow out five candles and so on, right? So you can increase the duration of their exhale by giving them an external target because sometimes the internal target really creates that anxiety.

1:01:57So it's not, it's not simple. I'm sorry, Sean. No, I wasn't expecting it to be because you're telling the truth, you know, and there are, there's an overarching principle which is again, accessing our breathing, according to what you just shared, making that exhale longer. But you know, for some people, it's just finding the tools that work for you right now. And one of those things you're really providing and has been now a staple in my life is putting pressure on parts and just interacting with those parts that might be holding tension, right? So whether this is like that knot in your shoulder, whatever the case might be, but utilizing these different tools that you have, you give people access to.

1:02:45And we were just doing some of that before the show started, but that knot in your shoulder and putting the right amount of pressure into it and breathing, breathing into it, pressure on parts. And I can literally feel like that tension melting away when I do those kinds of things. And also like putting that pressure and then, you know, changing my body, rotating different ways, turning my head, right? Just being able to get in there and to move around and to, again, it's creating more physical literacy even around that tension. And so pressure on parts combined with breathing can really help to relieve a lot of the symptoms and manifestation of pain.

1:03:27But that's just one access point. That's one strategy. This is incredibly complex. And this is why you have such a phenomenal stacked book. It is a hefty book, but it's beautiful. So visually pleasing as well. Tons of photos. Can I flash it? Can I flash it to the show? Take out my stacks of notes too. Body by breath. Yes. And this is a book that, and I haven't shared this with you. I see your book every day. Aw. because it's just kind of right there prominent on my bookshelf.

1:04:01It's 480 pages and more than seven years of writing. Plus, you know, the 30, 40 years of life prior to the writing. Yeah, this is like a manual for so many different practitioners. You know, sometimes I might randomly visit, you know, a colleague who's doing, you know, whether they're a massage therapist, physical therapist, and I've seen your book out there in the wild. Oh, that's so great. Oh my God. That makes me so happy. So can you tell people where they can pick up a copy of the book and also share where they can pick up those tools? Yes. Oh my gosh. I'm so honored. Yes. So body by breath, I don't carry it because it's too heavy.

1:04:41So get it on Amazon or Barnes and Noble or wherever you buy, wherever you buy books. And And it is available electronically like Kindle. I'm a hard cop. I'm a paper person, so I love that. And then there's another book called The Role Model. That's my first book. And that's all about self-myofascial release, basic self-myofascial release strategies. And that's available on Tune Up Fitness, my website, as well as Amazon. So the therapy balls, there are different sizes like we discussed earlier. And they work great on all different parts of your body to help you live better in your body. and transform your pain.

1:05:18And they're available on Tune Up Fitness as well as Amazon. And there's a lot of independent clinics that also sell them. So you can find them and you can find teachers who work in person with you on my website. You can do that by zip code. And then I teach, of course, all over the world. And I also have a platform on Tune Up Fitness where I teach weekly classes in a library called Move, Breathe, Roll. But all the exercises in Body by Breath, they, you know, they're written in the book, but they're also filmed on video because a lot of people are not necessarily wanting to learn an exercise from a book.

1:05:54So I recorded every single exercise that's in this book. And that's also on my platform in the Move, Breathe, Roll platform. Amazing. Thank you so much for putting so much energy and effort into creating this. It's truly special. And thank you again for making the trip to come hang out with me today. I appreciate it. It's easy. You're down the street. We're really close to each other. I love it. Well, thank you again so much for everything that you do. It really does mean a lot. Thank you. The one and only Jill Miller, everybody. The one and only Shawn Stevenson. Come on. Thank you so much for tuning into this episode today.

1:06:27I hope that you got a lot of value out of this. The real value comes in utilizing it. All right. Again, this has been transformative for so many people, putting pressure on parts. P.O.P. Pop that, pop that, all right? Pressure on parts. And couple that with being intentional about our breathing. Incredibly powerful for relaxation. Before this episode even started today, I was in there minding taking a nap. I'm not a nappy type guy, but just doing a couple of these exercises with Jill here at our studio in the lobby. like it's just so relaxing for my body. And I found little parts of pressure like, oh, I didn't know that was, that's a little junky.

1:07:14You know, and just being able to work on those parts and also just to feel that tension to leave the body. And it's an incredibly valuable practice, but most of us don't realize that we have access to treating and supporting our own bodies and having more physical literacy. That's the key. And so just the awareness that we can do things like this is so powerful. But our ancestors have known this for thousands of years. We're just beginning to remember. So I appreciate you remembering for checking out this episode today. And please share this out with somebody that you care about. You can send this directly from the podcast app that you're listening on or share it on social media with your friends and followers.

1:07:59Make sure to tag me. I'm at Sean Model on Instagram. And I appreciate you so much. We've got epic masterclasses and world-class guests coming your way very, very soon. So make sure to stay tuned. Take care. Have an amazing day. And I'll talk with you soon.