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In this episode of "A Changed Mind," our host, David Bayer, explores the transformative power of breathwork, blending ancient wisdom with modern neuroscience. Discover how your nervous system creates your reality, why thought-based strategies often fail when your body is locked in stress, and how intentional breathing can quickly shift your state of being.

David breaks down two daily breath practices: an energizing method inspired by Tummo and Wim Hof, and a calming heart coherence technique for deep regulation and resilience. Learn the science behind how breathing patterns influence your stress response, focus, creativity, and emotional wellbeing.

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What We Explored This Episode

00:07:00 Ancient Wisdom Meets Modern Science on Breathwork

00:13:00 Physiological Mechanisms of Breath and Nervous System

00:19:00 Demonstration and Steps of Energizing Breath Practice

Memorable Quotes

Memorable Quotes from the Host

"Your nervous system is not just responding to your reality, it's creating it, because the state that you live in determines what you notice, how you behave, the decisions that you make, and ultimately the life that gets reflected back to you."

"Breath is unique because it happens automatically while also remaining consciously controllable, which means breath becomes a doorway into the autonomic nervous system itself."

"The state from which you live becomes the state from which you create."

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Most people are trying to change their life without ever changing the state from which their life is being created. They're trying to manifest abundance while living in stress, trying to build success while their nervous system is stuck in survival mode. But your nervous system is not just responding to your reality, it's creating it because the state that you live in determines what you notice, how you behave, the decisions that you make, and ultimately the life that gets reflected back to you. Now, here's what's fascinating. The ancients understood thousands of years ago that one of the fastest ways to change your state of being was through the breath. Long before neuroscience, long before modern psychology, ancient traditions taught that breath was the life force itself. They called it prana chi, spirit energy. And they believed that mastering the breath meant mastering the mind, the emotions, the body, and ultimately your experience of reality. Because every thought that you have has a corresponding pattern of breath. And now modern science is beginning to catch up to what these traditions discovered thousands of years ago. Your breath is one of the most powerful levers for regulating your nervous system. It can energize you. It can calm you. It can change your brain state. It can shift your chemistry and completely alter the way that you experience life. So in this episode, I'm going to show you why breath is so powerful, why it may be one of the most overlooked tools for transformation. And I'm going to teach you the two breath practices that I personally use almost every single day. One to rapidly energize my body and clear my mind, and one to deeply regulate my nervous system and create a profound state of calm and coherence. So let's get into it.

Welcome to A Changed Mind, a journey into the topics that matter to you most. From the neuroscience and spirituality of mindset and personal growth, to groundbreaking strategies for health, wealth, and relationships, to open and honest conversations about pressing global issues such as the environment, censorship, corporate capture, and democracy. Each and every episode reminds us of the certainty of the goodness of the future and provides the teachings, tools, and timeless wisdom, inspiring you to create real, lasting change in your life and in the world. If you've been desiring a sanctuary for your spirit, a place to go to tune out the distraction, negativity, and doom and gloom so that you can tap into the deep power, the vibrancy, and the potential you have inside, you're in the right place. Welcome to a changed mind.

All right, guys, what we're going to talk about today is something that I think is simultaneously ancient and incredibly relevant to the modern world. And it's something that has become a really important part of my own nervous system regulation practice over the last several years. And that is the breath. Not just breathing in the ordinary sense, because obviously we're breathing all day long, whether we think about it or not. But consciously using the breath as a mechanism for changing your state. Because one of the things that we talk about a lot on the show is the relationship between your state of being and the reality that you experience. And we talk a lot about mindset, about beliefs, about emotional patterns, about consciousness, about how your inner world shapes your outer world. And I really believe that. I believe the state that you live in profoundly influences the life that you experience. Because if you live in a chronic state of fear or stress or emotional contraction, that state affects the way that you think, the way that you perceive reality, the decisions that you make, the energy that you bring into relationships, and the opportunities you recognize or fail to recognize. In other words, your nervous system is not just reacting to your life, it's participating in the creation of your experience. At the same time, when your nervous system becomes more regulated, when your body begins feeling safe and coherent and grounded, something shifts. Your thinking becomes clearer, your emotional reactions soften. You become less reactive to circumstances and more connected to possibility. And from that state, you create a very different reality. Now, again, here we talk about changing your thinking because your thoughts influence your emotional state and your emotional state influences your nervous system. But there's something important that I think many people struggle with. In practical, everyday life, changing your thoughts can be difficult when. When your nervous system is already dysregulated. Are you with me? Like it sounds simple in theory, focus on abundance. Choose a better perspective, reframe the story, interrupt the limiting belief. But in the middle of a stressful day, when your body is already overstimulated and your nervous system is already moving quickly, it can be incredibly hard to catch your thoughts in real time. And part of the reason for that is because modern life itself is deeply stress inducing. Most people today are living in environments filled with noise and with speed, with stimulation, continuous attention, fragmentation. So the body's constantly processing information. Notifications, headlines, social media, caffeine, financial pressure, artificial light. And over time, many people unknowingly condition themselves into a low grade survival response that simply locks in the nervous system and that becomes normal living. So you wake up anxious, you move through the day overstimulated, you feel mentally foggy or emotionally reactive. And we assume that that's just how life is. But often what's happening is that the nervous system has lost rhythm the body is no. No longer knowing how to function efficiently because there's too much activation going on. And this is one of the reasons, I think, so many people struggle with manifestation work or personal transformation or high performance when they. They intellectually understand the principles. Because you can understand what success conceptually feels like, but you don't actually integrate it into the emotional experience of your body. So this is why I think nervous system regulation matters so much. Not just emotionally, not just psychologically, but spiritually, creatively, relationally, financially. Because the state from which you live becomes the state from which you create. Now, this is where breath becomes really fascinating, because unlike your thoughts, which can move very quickly and sometimes feel difficult to interrupt in the moment, the breath gives you a direct physiological lever into your state. It's physical, it's immediate, and it sits at this very interesting intersection between the conscious and unconscious mind. So most functions in the body happen automatically. Your heart beats automatically, digestion happens automatically. Hormonal responses happen automatically. But breath is unique because it happens automatically while also remaining consciously controllable, which means breath becomes a doorway into the autonomic nervous system itself. And when you begin consciously regulating your breathing patterns, you begin influencing your emotional state, your stress response, your energy levels, and even the quality of your thinking. Now, what's fascinating is that the ancients understood this thousands of years ago, long before neuroscience, long before people were talking about HRV and vagal tone or biofeedback. Ancient traditions across the world viewed breath as something sacred and deeply connected to consciousness itself. So in yogic traditions, breath was associated with prana, or life force energy. In Chinese traditions, it's called chi. In Greek traditions, it's known as pneuma. Different cultures, different language, different places in the world, but a surprisingly similar understanding that breath was not merely biological, it was transformational. And entire systems were developed around breath mastery. Some breathing practices were designed to energize the body and sharpen awareness. Others were designed to calm the nervous system and induce profound states of peace and stillness. And there are stories of monks using breathing techniques to generate heat and freezing temperatures, literally melting the snow around them. There are traditions that believe breath could purify emotional states or expand consciousness and increase connection to the divine. Now, whether you interpret all of those ancient stories literally or symbolically, what's undeniable is that cultures separated by geography and time independently arrived at a very similar conclusion. Breath changes consciousness. And what's interesting is that modern science is now beginning to explain why. And I want you to get how important this is. Most of Your systems you don't have access to because they function automatically and autonomically. But breath is the thing that sits on the barrier. It's automatic, but you can control it. And it is the key that starts to reharmonize all of your other systems. So we're understanding that breathing patterns now directly influence the autonomic nervous system. We understand that the breath can amplify stress, chemistry, or signal safety to the body. We're understanding through science that breathing affects heart rate variability, vagal tone, cognitive performance, emotional regulation, and even inflammatory responses in the body. In other words, the breath is constantly shaping your physiological state, whether you're conscious of it or not. And because your physiology influences your perception, your emotions, the way that you think, the way that you behave, your breathing patterns are influencing far more than most people realize. One of the things I find most interesting about this is that many people are unknowingly breathing in ways that reinforce the very states they're trying to escape. That's shallow breathing, rapid breathing, tight breathing, chest breathing. Like, take a check. Check in with yourself for a quick second. How are you breathing right now? And this is a thing we don't normally pay attention to. And what happens is, over time, these patterns subtly communicate stress and urgency to the nervous system. So the body begins adapting to those patterns as though danger's continuously present. And then people wonder why they feel anxious, why they can't relax, why they feel mentally scattered even when nothing is technically wrong. It's because the body is responding to these breath signals. And the beautiful thing about breathwork is that it gives you the ability to consciously begin changing those signals. Okay. This is why breath work has become such an important part of my own daily practice. Because there are moments where I need energy and clarity. There are moments where I need to become more focused and alert and mentally sharp. And then there are other moments where I need the exact opposite. I need to downregulate. I need to calm my nervous system. I need to shift out of mental acceleration and back into coherence and calm. So over time, I've developed two specific breathing practices that I use consistently for those two very different purposes. One is a modified version of what many people know through Wim HOF breathing as Tummo Style Activation breathing. And I've adapted it in a way that feels less aggressive because I really felt like Wim Hof was. HOF was, like, overly intense for me. And so this is a more sustainable practice for my nervous system. But it still produces a tremendous amount of clarity, energy and Activation. And the second is a heart coherence breathing practice that I use to deeply regulate my nervous system and increase heart rate variability. So that's to calm me down. And honestly, when I do it for about 20 minutes, the effect is so profound that it almost feels pharmaceutical. It feels like taking a muscle relaxant. Except instead of introducing a chemical into my body, I'm learning how to access my body's own internal pharmacy through breath and nervous system regulation. So before I teach these two practices to you, I want to spend just a moment talking about the science behind why these methods are so powerful. Because once you understand what's actually happening physiologically, you start realizing that breath work is far more than some spiritual ritual. It's one of the most direct tools we have for influencing our state of being. And again, since your state of being influences your reality, breath becomes much more than a health practice. It becomes transformational. So one of the things modern science has made very clear is that the way you breathe directly affects your nervous system, your neurochemistry, your brain function, even the way that your body allocates energy, meaning your breathing patterns are not neutral. They're continuously sending information into the body about the kind of state that you're in. And this becomes really, really important because most people are breathing in ways that are sending dangerous signals. So when that happens chronically, the body begins adapting around stress chemistry. So your cortisol patterns shift, your adrenaline increases, your inflammatory pathways become more active, the nervous system becomes more reactive and less resilient. Now what's fascinating is that this doesn't just affect the body emotionally, it affects the way that you think. Because when the nervous system enters a chronic stress response, the brain starts prioritizing survival oriented processing. And so when that happens, when you've created a fight or flight response, your perception starts to narrow, your thinking becomes more reactive, you become less creative and less intuitive, because the brain is allocating resources towards threat detection. That could be comparing yourself to other people on social media that could be feeling like you don't have enough time in the day. And I think this is one of the hidden reasons why so many people feel disconnected from themselves today. Their nervous system is consuming enormous amounts of energy trying to manage overstimulation. Now, on the other side of that, when your breathing patterns become slower and deeper and more rhythmic and more coherent, something very different begins happening inside the body. The nervous system begins shifting towards regulation. So your stress chemistry decreases, your vagal tone improves, your heart rate variability increases. And heart rate variability is particularly interesting because HRV is essentially a measure of how adaptable and resilient the nervous system is. So a higher HRV is generally associated with greater emotional regulation and better recovery and improved resilience and a more optimized autonomic nervous system. So in simple terms, a healthy nervous system is flexible, and breathing practices can dramatically influence that flexibility. Now, this is where things get interesting for me personally, because once the nervous system becomes more coherent, the quality of consciousness itself begins changing. People often describe this in spiritual language, but there's a very real physiological component to it. Because when your nervous system becomes regulated, the mental noise decreases, your body stops consuming so much energy on internal stress signaling, your thinking becomes clearer, your intuition becomes stronger, you become more present and less mentally fragmented. And I think this is one of the reasons people often report feeling more connected, more creative, or even more spiritually aligned after deep breath work practices. Now, obviously, words like frequency and vibration can sometimes sound abstract or mystically too. Woo woo for people. But at a practical level, your body's constantly generating electrical and energetic activity. Your heart generates electromagnetic fields, your brain operates electrically, your nervous system communicates through electrochemical signaling. In different emotional states correspond to very different physiological states within the body. So those aren't just philosophical distinctions, they're measurable physiological states. And because those states influence the way you perceive the world, this has a major impact on what you create. And this is why I often say that manifestation is not just about visualizing what you want, it's about becoming coherent enough internally to sustain the emotional and physiological states that are associated with, with the life that you want to create. Right? So breath becomes one of the fastest ways to start shifting into those states by changing your physiology. So some practices are deeply calming and regulating, others are highly activating and energizing. And the two that I personally use most consistently serve almost opposite purposes, depending on what my nervous system needs. In that moment I mentioned before, the first practice is something I use when I want energy, clarity, focus, activation, especially if I'm feeling mentally foggy or sluggish or emotionally flat. Now, one of the people who really helped bring breathwork into mainstream awareness is a guy by the name of Wim Hof, right, Or known as the Iceman. And so what Whim did, which was interesting to researchers, was that he appeared capable of consciously influencing the processes in the body that were automatic. And so scientists observed really measurable changes in his immune response, his inflammatory response, his stress chemistry, and his autonomic nervous system through his combination of breath work, cold exposure, and nervous system training. And the Breath that he popularized is heavily influenced by an ancient Tibetan practice known as tummo breathing. Sometimes it's translated as inner fire. And so traditionally, tummo practitioners believed that the breath could be used to generate internal heat, which increased vitality and altered your consciousness. And there are accounts of monks literally meditating in freezing temperatures and melting the snow around them. And from a modern scientific perspective, these activating breath practices, they create a very distinct physiological response because you're intentionally increasing oxygen intake while temporarily altering carbon dioxide balance in your body. And so this tends to increase alertness, stimulate adrenaline release, heighten focus, and create a rapid shift in energy and mental clarity. And so a lot of people, when they do this type of practice, they feel intensely energized and emotionally released because the body enters a heightened state of activation. Now, personally, I found Wim Hof breathing incredibly powerful. But over time, I also felt that some versions of the practice were a little too aggressive for me. They were very forceful, almost overly intense in the way the breath practice was taking place. And so what I became interested in was finding a way to create a similar level of clarity and focus and internal activation, but in a way that felt more sustainable and more regulating to my body. And that's when I got introduced to a similar style of breath that Sadhguru teaches. If you're not familiar with Sadhguru, he's an Indian mystic that teaches various yogic techniques and philosophies. So I, I modified it according to Sadhguru's practice. And then over time, as I practice this breath, I developed it even further. And I personally use it almost every single day, particularly in the middle of the day when I need a pick me up. So I want to walk you through how this breath practice works. This is a more aggressive breath practice, and you're inhaling through the nose and you're exhaling through the mouth, and what you're trying to do is completely fill your body with air through the inhale and completely exhale through, through all the air out of your body through the exhale. And so again, if you're listening, you're not going to see me. If you're following along on YouTube, you will. The breath looks something like this. And while I'm breathing, I imagine energy running on the inhale from my root, like down at the core through my tailbone up to the top of my head. In the inhale, I'm pulling the energy up, and then on the exhale, I'm moving this energy back down from the top of my head to My root. And so you'll notice there's a small pause in between. My eyes are closed, and I'm visualizing in the inhale pulling the energy from up through the earth, through my root chakra, up to my head and out into the universe. And on the exhale, I'm doing just exactly the opposite. I'm pulling the energy from the universe back down through my nervous system and my spine back down into the earth. I'll do around 35 of those breaths without stopping. And then on the last inhale, instead of a forceful exhale, I will just allow the breath to release and I'll let about 80% of it out of my body and I will hold on the exhale. Holds are something that are commonly introduced to a lot of breath practices. This is where you sit relaxed, noticing the energization in your body, almost in a meditative state. And I like to time my holds just for fun, because what you'll notice as you've inhaled and exhaled for 35 deep breaths. And then you do your final inhale and you let out the exhale in a calm way to 80%. And then you hold it at the bottom is that you'll be able to hold your breath for a minute, two minutes, three minutes, because you've hyperoxygenated your body. So I like to time the hold on the exhale. So it might be, let's say two minutes. And then I inhale again and I pay attention to my body. And when I'm ready to release again, I release. Okay, so again, the hold is on the last breath, you exhale and you let it out. And many times after that exhale and I do the final inhale again. I'll hold it for about 15 seconds and then relax. So that's very similar to the WIM HOF practice. Again, if you have any questions about this and you're following along on YouTube, leave them in the comments. I'm happy to clarify. I can pin the post with the instructions. Now. The second practice that I use is almost the opposite of the first. The first practice is designed to activate your energy, to sharpen your focus and increase alertness. The second practice is designed to regulate calm and downshift the nervous system into a deeply coherent state. Honestly, this has probably become one of the most important practices in my life because of how overstimulating my life can be. And this is what's called a heart coherence, or hrv focused breathing practice. And the rhythm is very simple. It's about a five and a half second inhale directly into about a five and a second exhale directly back into a five and a half second inhade. No aggressive holding, no force, no hyperventilation, just smooth, rhythmic, coherent breathing. And what's fascinating is that this type of breathing appears to synchronize multiple systems in the body simultaneously. So your heart rhythm begins stabilizing, the nervous system begins shifting towards parasympathetic regulation, your stress chemistry decreases, and over time, the body begins receiving a very different signal than the one most people live in throughout the day. And so instead of urgency, you feel safety. Instead of acceleration, you feel coherence. And one of the things I find most interesting about heart coherence, breathing is that it affects not only emotional state, but cognitive state as well. Because when the nervous system down regulates, the brain begins functioning differently. So again, all the mental noise starts to decrease. Your thinking becomes less reactive. People often report feeling more intuitive, more present, more connected. And I think this is important because many people are trying to solve stress exclusively at the level of thought, while their body remains chemically locked in activation. But the body profoundly influences your consciousness. And so the way this practice practice works is again, a five and a half second inhale, right into a five and a half second exhale, all through the nose, you'll find your own rhythm again. There's no break in between. So it's a 5 1/2 second inhale, right into a 522 2/2 second exhale, right into a 5 1/2 second exhale. You're not trying to like fill your lungs with as much air as you can. The point is the rhythm, because this is a retraining of your breath pattern that retrains your heart and your nervous system pattern. So this is not unlike the first breath practice about massive inhales and massive exhales. This is about just being able to hit that rhythm of five and a half second inhale, five and a half second exhale. It may take you a moment to hit that rhythm and figure out how deep do you need to inhale? How deep do you need to exhale? But what's really interesting is when researchers study people with higher heart rate variability, they consistently find associations with greater emotional resilience, better stress adaptation, improved recovery capacity. And so flexibility is really the key word here. A healthy nervous system is not one that's permanently calm. A healthy nervous system is one that can activate when necessary, for example, through the first breath practice, and then regulate and recover efficiently, as I mentioned, with the second breath practice. And personally, when I Do this second practice for around 20 minutes. The effect can feel remarkably profound. There are times where my entire body softens to such a degree that literally, I tell you, it feels pharmaceutical. Like I took some kind of muscle relaxant or anti anxiety medication, except nothing external was introduced into the body. So the body itself generates the shift. And I think that's one of the most empowering things about breath work. You begin realizing that the body already possesses extraordinary mechanisms for regulation and healing and calm and focus. Just most people have simply never learned how to access them consciously. Now the other thing I love about this practice, the second practice, is that it doesn't require perfect conditions. So it's a little hard to do the wim hof breath while you're driving on the highway. I guess you could if you wanted to. But with this second HRV practice, you can do it sitting in your car. You can do it before a meeting. I do it on zoom calls. Sometimes nobody even notices that I'm regulating my nervous system. You could do it lying in bed at night or waking up in the morning. You can do it after an emotionally intense conversation. And literally within about 8 to 10 minutes. I like a 20 minute practice, but within about 8 to 10 minutes, you begin shifting the entire quality of your internal state. Not because the external world changed, but because your relationship to the experience changed physiologically first. And for me, that's where breath work becomes deeply transformational. Because eventually you realize that peace is not merely something that you hope life gives you someday. It becomes a state that you learn how to train intentionally. So as we start to bring today's episode to a close, what I want to encourage you to remember is that one of the most powerful things about the breath is its simplicity. This is not some complicated technology that only a small group of experts have access to. You've literally had this tool your entire life. The question is simply whether you're using it consciously or unconsciously. Because whether you realize it or not, your breathing patterns are already influencing your state every single day. They're influencing your nervous system, your emotional baseline, your clarity, your energy, and ultimately the way that you experience and create your life. And the beautiful thing is that it doesn't take years to begin noticing a shift. You can feel changes literally within minutes. This is sort of the Amazon prime version of translation transformation can feel. The body becomes more energized, more coherent, more calm, more present almost instantaneously. And as you engage in the practice, over time, you start realizing that you're not nearly as trapped by your emotions. Or your stress or your conditions as you once believed, and you start reclaiming influence over your internal environment. When your internal environment changes, your external life changes too. So here's what I encourage you to do over the next 24 hours. Try one of these two practices. If you've been feeling mentally foggy or physiologically sluggish or emotionally flat, try the Activating Breath Practice. If you've been feeling overstimulated or anxious or emotionally reactive or unable to slow your mind down, try the Heart Coherence Practice. And don't just intellectually listen to this episode, experience it. Because breath work is experiential by nature, the understanding comes through the practice itself. And honestly, I'd encourage you to come back to this episode again and practice along with me. Like re listen to the instructions, slow down enough to actually let your body experience what regulation feels like. And if you do try one of these practices, leave me a comment. Let me know what you experienced if you have any questions. Because I genuinely love hearing how these tools affect you in real life. Did you feel calmer? Did you feel clearer? Did you feel more energized? Did you sleep differently? I'd really love to hear your experience. And if this episode resonated with you, make sure you subscribe to the channel because we spend a lot of time here exploring the relationship between consciousness and nervous system regulation, emotional mastery, and creating your life intentionally. And if you want more tools and support, I've got a ton of things links in the show Notes, resources, trainings, tools to help you regulate your nervous system, transform your limiting belief patterns, and create your life more powerfully. You can also head on over to davidbear.com, join our newsletter, get a bunch of free stuff or check out the links in the show Notes so I appreciate you being here. I appreciate you doing the work. I appreciate being on the journey with you. I love you so much and I will see you in the next episode. Hey, it's David.

One more thing. If you want to go even deeper on everything we've talked about on today's episode, don't forget to jump over to www.DavidBear.com. you can find the link in the show notes and subscribe to our newsletter. A couple of times a week. I'm going to be sending you the latest episodes that we've released along with additional free trainings. You'll get immediate access to my free Mind Hack ebook and go even deeper into to all the tools, the technologies, the frameworks that have helped tens of thousands of people establish a changed mind. Don't forget to jump on over to the site and I will see you in the next episode.