Reset your Breath for More Energy & Focus

Participant #1:

Have you thought about starting your own podcast? It's not as difficult as a lot of people think. And I'm telling you, if you have that, itch it is worth exploring. My friends. It's completely changed my life. It's so much fun. And the cool thing with Anchor is you can start one for free. They have all the creation tools to allow you to record and edit your podcast right from your phone or computer. You ain't going to be fancy y'all now you can even add any song from Spotify directly to your episodes. That's kind of cool. Yeah. Anchor will distribute their podcast for you, so it can be heard on Spotify, Apple podcasts, and many more. And the cool thing is, you can start making some moolah from your podcast with no minimum listenership. It's everything you need to make a podcast right in one place. So make sure you download the free Anchor app or go to Anchor dot FM to get started. Today we are speaking with a Navy Seal veteran who served in three combat tours in Iraq, participated in over 250 highly classified combat and advanced special operations missions. And guess what? He says that the breath is where it's at. And sometimes, well, sometimes we need to reset it to calm down and regain focus and energy in doing so. Well, it just might make your brain happy. Welcome to another episode of Happy Brain. My name is Heather Parody and thank you for joining us as we explore the fun side to mental health by digging into the simple hacks and fun tips to make your mental health journey more enjoyable and your brain a little happier. Diego Ugaldi is the CEO of the Trident Approach, which was forged in these Seal teams with the mindset of inspiring groups of passionate people to synergize their strengths, talents and efforts in order to achieve collaborative success. Today he's going to share with us about how this technique of resetting your breath and how that just might make your brain happy. Now, before we get started, he does advise that if you have any issues with breathing, cardiac health, not just in general, it's good to consult with your doctor before practicing this. But Diego, what is resetting your breath? I call it reset breathing. I'm sure it's called something else for other people, but whenever I notice that I'm not doing much, but still somehow I'm kind of out of breath maybe, or feel like I'm not really getting a full set of lungs. I'm just having like these really shallow breaths. I noticed when I very first started doing it, that's kind of how I was breathing every day was just like this. There wasn't a real pool exchange kind of going on in my lungs or if I was getting up to do, especially in the beginning, like these keynote speaks, and I was just kind of out of breath just by standing there talking. The way that worked for me to reset my mind, reset my breathing. Reset. My focus was to really just empty out every cubic centimeter of air in my lungs possible. When I started this, I had been doing it as part of my meditation practice, so I was always sitting down. But it was funny because I had an event in San Francisco. We were on the beach, and I had this whole group of people for the first time, I did it standing up, and I actually had a DMT release and I passed out in front of everybody. I was like, Whoa, okay, note to self, like, do this sitting down from now on. So we had kind of gone around the circle of like, how are you breathing right now? Just notice. Just pay attention. People said, yeah, I don't feel like I really am breathing. So. Okay, so let's reset this. I don't know if we're on video, but on sound, really, it can be really quiet. Essentially what it is is that you really take everything you can to get every single cubic centimeter of air out of your lungs. The important thing is just really noticing how you're doing and where you are before the breath and then after the breath. There's no doubt about it. I mean, there really is just a massive difference. And all of a sudden it just feels like you're breathing. What I ask people do is what I do myself is I take in a deep breath and I let it out kind of deep, and then I take a normal breath in and then I exhale hard

Participant #1:

and then breathe normally. And there's a difference. That was the longest XL I've ever seen in my life. That was one Xcel. Yeah. So do you, like, build up to that or what? I'm sure over time. For sure.

Participant #1:

Yeah. Keep going. That's it. That's all I have. Really? Wow. And it really does. It. It inspires real exchange and loans, and even now, I'm still light headed and in a couple of seconds, I'm going to not feel light hitting anymore. But for sure, what I'm also feeling right now is energy. Like, a lot of energy. And I just happen to notice this is just me. If I just do that once a day, it could be four in the afternoon. Like, yeah, I'm breathing well, really once a day just for me. I don't know if that's true for everyone, but you could pass out, couldn't you? Like, you passed out that one time. As long as I'm sitting down. The reason why I passed out, it's like what we call medicine vagal maneuver. So if you're a cardiac patient and all of a sudden you recognize that your heartbeat is like 180 or something like that, and you have your width about you. There are certain things that you can do. These bagel maneuvers that we do to slow your heart rate down, to put it in a safe place but if my heart rate is already like at 55 and I'm doing this and my heart rate could be and I haven't looked at it to see actually how slow my heart rate goes, that would actually be an interesting thing to do. It goes pretty low. And like I said, when you get into this breeding practice, you start to unlock certain things. And like I said, that day on the beach, for sure, added the Mt release, which is like being on psychedelics just for a second. So all those things combined. So I think for sure I was lucky I was doing it on the sand. I just fell back on the sand. I was curious to know when in his life this became a thing where he was like, Yo, breathing. That's where it's at for sure. Meditation I very first started really meditating with intention back in like 2017, and somebody told me about this app Mindspace, and I bought like a package of it. And literally, no matter what you wanted to meditate over, whether it was like losing weight or anxiety or depression or whatever, the guy kept on talking about going back to the breathing. And over time, I lost interest in that. And I was like, well, everything can't be about breathing. So I left the breathing and I started kind of going on my own mental journeys during my meditation. My mind was always wondering because I was just beginning and so I was like, well, maybe there is something to this breathing thing. So I went back to breathing on my own or meditating on my own just with the breathing thing. And this was something that was truly just organic to me. I didn't know anything about it. Nobody told me about it. I was just breathing with intention during the meditation and it was just like, keep going, just keep going, just keep going. And I was like, and when I came out of it or out of that exhale and finally into my first inhale, I was like, it shifted my whole day. Yeah, I would say that I've been breathing in this way since about early 2018. And I mean, honestly, through psychedelics also for sure, there is no doubt that healing for me happens in the breath. I can breathe in good and I can breathe out bad or injury or sickness or whatever, like generational baggage, things that hasn't even really occurred in my lifetime. But through epigenetics and all that stuff have accumulated over all the lifetimes that have come to contribute to me being who I am today, releasing that kind of stuff. Yeah. It's just like a key component for my life. I talk about it almost every keynote talk I ever have because I just feel like it's just so important for people to take time and breathe in this way because I just feel like it's overlooked. But at the same time, one of the most important things we can do. Also ask Diego to just let us know a little bit more about the Trident approach. I retired out of the Seal teams back in 2018, but when I was on active duty, the most common question I got from corporate executives is how is it that you guys work and communicate so well together? Well, I had answers for that, but I also found myself lying in my responses. I would tell them, like, the best of what we did. And then I would add in all the stuff that we didn't do that I happen to think was important, like things like connection to the self and connection to humanity, which aren't necessarily tremendously important in the Seal teams. And so when I did retire and I had the opportunity to kind of do whatever I wanted to do in the whole world, I was like, man, that would be awesome to have an organization that teaches that collective, full spectrum response on how to lead in your best, how to be, how to just be, and how to work in elite teams and be part of an elite team. And so that's what the trial approaches. Basically, the best of what the teams have to offer, combined with consciousness and leadership and connection to the sales. Make sure you connect with Diego@thetridanteproach.com. That is linked in the show notes. And as you probably noticed in this episode, he mentioned psychedelics. A lot of people use that as a type of therapy. And I was listening to another podcast the other day, the Aubrey Marcus podcast. And he had on a guest, to be honest, I can't remember his name. He was talking about how breathing exercises is a really great alternative to psychedelics because not everybody feels comfortable doing that. Do you? I don't know. I had to ask Diego, since he has experience with both. Has he seen that? Do people have the same experiences, the same benefits with his breathing exercises? 100%. So look up holotropic breathing. Okay, there are many different ways to do holotropic breathing, but again, it's shifting, like your intention and what you're actually trying to accomplish with this breathing that makes all the difference. Sometimes it can be really powerful and quick installations and isolations and sometimes even up to like 30 or 40 minutes at a time. When you do that, yes, there is a release. Like I said, I had a DMT release just doing that one exclamation while standing up. Imagine breathing very powerfully for 30 or 40 seconds. You can get into these places where you are in this experience. I don't believe that psychedelics are the answer for fact. I say that because I've seen it. I'm a psychedelic green integration coach, so I've sat with hundreds of people. It's just not the right answer for some people. So if you don't want to go down that route, no problem. There is holotropic breathing at your disposal. There's also float tanks that can absolutely. Joe Rogan says that his deepest experience in a float tank has been deeper than any of his deepest experiences on psychedelic medicine as well. And that's 1000%. Like what you said, psychedelics are natural, but this is completely organic or people don't know what flow tanks are. You get in this pod, it's completely dark, there's no sound, and there's this water with so much sand in there that you don't salt in there that you don't have to work to stay afloat. You just end up floating on the water. And because the water or the temperature is the same as your body, over time, you kind of lose connectivity with where your body begins and the water and sort of thing and so you start to lose sense of self. The amazing thing about the flow tanks is I believe that it's the ultimate training ground for learning how to let go, letting go of letting go. Just dropping this whole idea of awareness or anchoring point for where you are so that you feel safe, which is what I feel like most of us are doing on a daily basis. All right, cool. I know this is here. I know the walls there. I know the sky is up there, so I know where I'm at. But genuinely letting go, like 10th level deep of letting go is where all this organic knowledge comes from. How to breathe, how to heal yourself through breath, how to heal generational baggage, all of these pockets of stress that we pack in all those things. I love how he said healing for me happens in the breath. Listen, my friends, whether it is talking to your Angels in order to tap into your intuition, Doing a slow carb diet for your mental health or resetting your breath to gain clarity and focus, we just hope you take a moment for it yourself today, my friend, and keep that brain of yours happy. Thank you for listening to another episode of happy brain. If you enjoyed this, make sure you hit that subscribe button wherever you listen to podcasts. And if you haven't an extra second, Leave us an honest review over on itunes or your Apple podcasting app. And until next time, my friends, keep that brain of yours happy.