Recently, I interviewed Dr. Sachin Patel, and we talked about breathwork and its many benefits for your overall health. If you would prefer to listen to the interview you can access it by Clicking Here. [1]
Dr. Eric Osansky:
I’m super excited to chat with today’s guest, Dr. Sachin Patel, as we are going to be talking about breathwork. Before we dive into that topic, let’s go ahead and discuss Dr. Sachin’s impressive bio here.
Dr. Sachin Patel is a father, husband, philanthropist, functional medicine practice success coach, speaker, author, breathwork facilitator, and plant medicine advocate. Sachin is convinced that the doctor of the future is the patient and has committed himself to helping others raise their consciousness, activate their inner doctor, and initiate their deepest healing through lifestyle and breathwork. Sachin founded the Living Proof Institute, pioneering a revolutionary approach to patient-centered healthcare. Sachin coaches hundreds of practitioners around the world, so they are empowered to deliver affordable, inspired care to their communities through his Perfect Practice mentorship program. He is an advocate of transforming the healthcare paradigm, and he has devoted his life to the betterment of healthcare for both patients and practitioners. Thank you so much for joining us, Dr. Sachin.
Dr. Sachin Patel:
Thank you. Please call me Sachin. It’s great to be here, Eric. I am so excited and honored that we get to spend this time together and talk about what I hope people realize is one of the most important things we do, which is breathe.
Dr. Eric:
Without question. If you could dive into your background a little bit, Sachin. How did you get so involved with breathwork? I have listened to some of your other podcasts, and this wasn’t always the case. If we go back 10 years, you didn’t do what you’re doing now. Is that correct?
Dr. Sachin:
Absolutely. I want to remind everyone who is listening that we are all on a journey. We all have permission to evolve and grow and learn and share new things. That’s been the story of my life.
I started off as a chiropractor. I still am. I still believe in the innate forces that guide all living and nonliving things, and there is a universal embodiment of intelligence in every cell that we have. That is pervasive throughout the entire cosmos. That belief, you can’t take that out of me. Call me whatever you want. You can call me Dr. Sachin, or you can call me Sachin, but that philosophy will always exist. It’s baked into my DNA now, as I’m sure it is for you as well, Eric.
I then started learning about functional medicine, which was essentially similar to chiropractic philosophy, which is to get to the root cause. Now we have tools to go a little bit deeper into people’s cellular biochemistry, into toxins that we can measure in their blood or imbalances that we can measure in their stool in their microbiome. Just going a little bit deeper and getting more granular into the causes of illness is what functional medicine was for me.
But that gets complicated really fast. As I’m sure everyone here listening is aware, there are thousands of tests out there and tens of thousands of different supplements out there. They can get really confusing and overwhelming for practitioners, but also for patients.
Then I began a search, and I asked a different question: What if I could get people better without testing them and without supplements but show them without a shadow of a doubt that they’re getting healthier and moving in the right direction? What would that process look like?
We went back to the drawing board and asked that question. If I didn’t have supplements at my disposal, and if I didn’t have any lab testing at my disposal, because at one point we didn’t have these things, how would I get somebody healthy?
We realized we would go back to first principles. This might happen to you, as I know it happens to me often. When someone comes to you, and they have tried everything—every diet, different macros, different micronutrient profiles, all kinds of supplements—and their digestion still sucks, the question I will ask them is, “Are you even chewing your food?” Most of the time, the answer is no.
We realized when we were applying all this advanced testing and supplementation and knowledge that we acquire when we take all these trainings, my clients were so far down the mountain that these advanced strategies didn’t really apply to them. We went right back to the basics.
My mantra is that of Leonardo da Vinci’s, which is the greatest science of sophistication is simplicity. The greatest science of sophistication that I’m aware of is the human body. Shouldn’t it be simple to take care of? It shouldn’t be complicated because that would mean it’s not sophisticated. What makes the software easy to use, our computer easy to use, is what makes it sophisticated. Otherwise, we’d be banging our head against the wall if we had to learn every nuance of how a car or computer works in order to be able to use it.
That became my mantra: How do I solve people’s most persistent, most chronic, most challenging health issues? How do I apply simplicity to that instead of trying to match the body’s complexity?
If you look at research, one thing you’ll notice is every year, there is more research being done. It actually means that every year, we know less. If we knew it all, there would be less research happening, but we actually know nothing, so the joke’s actually on us.
We went back to first principles, back to the basics. Then I had to search for what is the zenith of simplicity? Then the question became: What do I do the most? Here is a fun fact: The thing I do consciously the most is breathe every day. The average person breathes more than the steps they take. The average person breathes almost as much as they think. That’s one thing.
The second thing is I consume more air than anything else. The average person consumes 30 pounds of air every single day. I actually eat more with my lungs than I do with my mouth. Interesting fun fact, which is kind of fascinating, that we consume 30 pounds of air every day.
The next thing is most people can’t go more than 4-5 minutes without breathing, so that should tell us how important it is. You can go weeks without eating. You can go days without drinking water. You can go a few days without sleeping, but you can’t go more than five minutes without breathing.
As I started studying breathing from an anatomical standpoint, from a dental standpoint, from a nervous system standpoint, from an environmental standpoint, from a biochemistry standpoint, I realized it’s actually the most important thing that we do that nobody has trained us how to do.
Dr. Eric:
Makes sense. Visit the basics, the foundations, and you can’t get any more basic than breathing. I would hope a lot of people, because they hear me talk about stress management and blocking out time, whether it’s doing deep breathing or meditation or yoga. Would breathwork fall under the category of mind/body medicine? Is it something completely different? For those who are taking time to meditate or do yoga or simply deep breathing, how does breathwork differ from those?
Dr. Sachin:
There is a spectrum of breathing. There are different ways that we can breathe, cadences that we can breathe. Breathing through our nose, breathing through our mouth, left nostril or right nostril, holding our breath on full, holding our breath on empty, the pace at which we breathe. We can do so many different things with our breath to alter how we feel.
I like to think of breathwork as perhaps almost on what end of the spectrum. How we breathe throughout the day, 24/7, 99% of the time of the day, that’s on the other end of the spectrum. If somebody were to ask what is my breathing practice, my breathing practice is being conscious about how I breathe throughout the day. The last thing we want is to take time out of their day, that 10 minutes, do the Wim Hof breathing or holotropic breathing, and then they breathe unconsciously the rest of the day. The most profound shifts take place based on how we breathe the 99% of the day, not just the 1% that we take out. That 1% of your day is about 14 minutes.
I want people to focus on how they breathe while they’re sleeping, while they’re on their computer, while they’re exercising, while they’re out for a walk, while they’re sitting next to their child, while they’re trying to go to bed. Those are the things I like to focus on.
To me, that’s also breathwork because the hardest work is raising our awareness and consciousness. Bringing our awareness constantly to our breath, that’s the work.
Once we’ve done that, the hard part, then the next decision that we make is how am I going to breathe based on how I want to feel? Just like we grab our steering wheel if we want to change the direction of our car, most of the time when we’re driving, the majority of the time you’re driving unconsciously. You’re talking to your spouse, listening to the radio, in your head having your own thoughts. A minute later, you go, how did I even get here? I wasn’t even paying attention, but somehow, I got here. For most people, that’s how they breathe. They breathe unconsciously.
Imagine if you want to change directions, or there is a turn coming up in the road, you have to grab that steering wheel, then you decide what direction the car is going to go in. Our breath is the same way. If we want to bring awareness to our breath, we ask ourselves, “Is my breath matching the state that I want my nervous system to be in?” For example, if I am eating a meal, I want my nervous system to be calm and relaxed, not all excited. My breath should then match a calm, relaxed breathing cadence.
If I am going to go for a jog, or if I am going to go for a run, or if I am going to lift a heavy set, I come back to my breath, grab that steering wheel, and realize how I want to breathe to accomplish this activity. We use our breath to inform our nervous system on where to send blood to. We use our breath to move lymph throughout our body because the diaphragm acts as a pump and pumps the lymph. Some of our biggest lymph nodes in our body are underneath our diaphragm.
We use our breath to inform our nervous system based on emotions. For example, if you and I went to a laughing yoga class, and we just started laughing for no reason whatsoever, if we did it long enough, just for a couple minutes or so, our breath would inform our nervous system that we’re happy, and we’d start making happy chemicals. In fact, I can do things like exaggerate sighing, something called a physiologic sigh, and create the feeling of relaxation in my body in less than two minutes.
Our nervous system informs our breath, and our breath informs our nervous system. It’s actually a really interesting two-way street. For example, if you think about something like sobbing, sobbing is a breathing signature that babies use when they’re crying almost uncontrollably. That’s actually how they calm themselves down. It’s the nervous system’s way of releasing all that adrenaline, that breathing cadence of sobbing. What do most parents do? They tell their children to stop crying. Now, the child can’t use their nervous system and breath to calm themselves down. They bury those emotions.
Breathing plays such an important role in so many areas and aspects of our life. It’s one of those things that is so critically essential and does so much more than we think. It’s not just delivering oxygen to our mitochondria, which is one of its functions; it’s promoting healthy circulation, healthy lymphatic flow, a healthy nervous system. It’s doing so many other things.
When we breathe correctly, we also create the right environment, particularly in our nose, to purify and cleanse the air, and also create certain molecules, one of those being nitric oxide. The correct breathing, which is breathing through our nose, and we can talk about that, has such a profound effect on our physiology because it allows us to make a molecule called nitric oxide. Nitric oxide helps with increasing microcirculation, healing and repair, killing viruses and bacteria on contact, and lowering blood pressure. Breathing also plays a role in our blood pressure.
Another fun fact about breathing is the greatest predictor of lifespan is lung capacity. If you want to live long and healthy and vital and have lots of energy, guess what? You need to learn to increase and maintain your lung capacity so as you get older, you still stay vital. In Eastern medicine, they believe we are born with a certain number of breaths. What the yogis do when they want to slow down the aging process is slow down their breath. When we slow down our breath, we slow down our heart rate as well. We can control our breath. We can’t control our heart rate directly, but we can directly control our respiratory rate.
Dr. Eric:
I have a couple of questions. When it comes to lung capacity, what are some things we can do to increase it? Also, when you say that we should breathe through our nose, should we both inhale and exhale through our nose, or just inhale through our nose and exhale through our mouth?
Dr. Sachin:
Sure. There are three gears to breathing. The majority of the time, we invite people to breathe in and out through their nose. Unless they have some sort of obstructive issue, of course, there will be people listening to this who for whatever reason can’t breathe through their nose. If you don’t use your nose, you lose it. If you are a habitual or persistent mouth breather, and you decide to start breathing through your nose today, it will feel restricted because you haven’t been using your nose appropriately. The more you breathe through hour nose, the more it will actually open up. That’s something to keep in mind.
When they did studies on people who had trachs put in, breathing tubes into their throat, what they realized is their nose essentially closed up. Over time, it will close up if you don’t use it. If you’re a persistent mouth breather, expect your nose to feel a little congested. You can use a Naväge to clean it out. You can use a salt rinse to clean up your sinuses as well. There are other things you can do to improve that, but those are good places to start.
The first gear is breathing in and out through our nose. That is how we should be breathing the majority of the time.
Next, with mild exertion or when we’re talking, we might find ourselves breathing in through the nose and out through the mouth.
The third gear is if we are in extreme exertion, fight or flight, then we would be breathing in and out through our mouth. There are going to be times, like if you are running up and down the basketball court, and you need to breathe in and out quickly, you might breathe with your mouth open. You will then try to calm your nervous system down by breathing in and out through your nose, and then go back to breathing out through your mouth. Those are the three gears of appropriate breathing.
One of the best and cheapest ways that I found to increase lung capacity is to use diaphragmatic exercises, where you are working the trigger points out of your diaphragm. It expands and contracts appropriately.
I like encouraging people to use an incentive spirometer. An incentive spirometer is something that they typically give people when they have pneumonia in the hospital. It’s a way for you to measure and work on improving your lung capacity. That’s a very easy and inexpensive way that people can increase their lung capacity.
Blowing up balloons can also be helpful. Taking deep breaths in and deep breaths out.
One other thing to help improve lung capacity and breathing is to strengthen your diaphragm. There is an easy exercise people can do called crocodile pose, where you lay flat on your stomach with your hands on top of your head, breathing into your belly. The resistance of your body weight is going to create resistance in the diaphragm to contract, which is going to then strengthen it as well. If you can’t lay on your stomach for whatever reason, you can put your old radiology textbooks on your stomach, breathe into your belly, and lift the books up and down. Those are some ways to increase lung capacity and strengthen the diaphragm as well.
Dr. Eric:
You mentioned that if someone was used to breathing in and out through their mouth, it might take some time, like they might feel like they’re congested. Reasonably, how long on average would it take to inhale and exhale through the nose? If they are practicing on a daily basis, is it two or three weeks, or a few months from now, to where they really feel comfortable, and it’s almost like conscious yet unconscious? Kind of like you said, like driving, you want to be conscious about it, but not necessarily constantly thinking about it.
Dr. Sachin:
Right. Great question. The truth is it absolutely depends on the person. If somebody is a habitual mouth breather, chances are they have a narrow upper palate. Or in some cases, if somebody sucked their thumb when they were a child, they have pushed their hard palate into their airway, which means they have a smaller airway to work with. It’s going to depend on the anatomy of somebody’s face. It’s also going to depend on their diet, nutrition, how functional that tissue is, and how well their biochemistry is functioning. The correct answer is I don’t know because it will vary from person to person.
What I have found is the body always responds very quickly. It doesn’t have to take long for people to start noticing an improvement. There are other things people can do. There is a nasal oil we can put in our nose to lubricate the nasal passages. We can also wear breathing strips to open up the nasal passages. There are other ways we can enhance or support the anatomy, so it becomes easier for us to breathe through our nose.
Some people also have challenges with stuffiness. There is actually nose clearing exercises that you can do. Simply by taking a deep breath in, followed by a relaxed exhale, and then plugging your nose, letting the CO2 build up. Within about a minute or so, your nose will start to unclog automatically. It’s almost like magic. Depending on what’s causing that stuffiness. Sometimes, there is instantaneous solutions.
Sometimes, the solutions may be longer-term as well. Some people actually need to have facial airway reconstruction interventions because their airway might be very narrow. It just depends on what’s going on with the person.
Dr. Eric:
Do you find once someone is breathing consistently, inhaling and exhaling through their nose throughout the day, does that automatically happen at night, too? Or do you find that most people need to incorporate mouth tape? Also, that is a process itself, trying not to breathe at night through the mouth, assuming they don’t have sleep apnea. I don’t know if you want to touch upon that. Assuming the absence of any physical obstructions.
Dr. Sachin:
About 66% of people breathe through their mouth at night. Breathing through our mouth is the #1 cause of cavities. Breathing through our mouth dries out our mouth, which makes our teeth and our gums more prone to disease and dysfunction. It dries out the microbiome in the mouth and kills healthy bacteria, which help us make nitric oxide, which naturally helps lower blood pressure.
It also is important to note that our mouth is the dirtiest part of our body. Sleep should be the most rejuvenating thing that we do. If we are going to consume about 10 pounds of air while we’re sleeping, we don’t want that air to be going through our mouth. We want that air going through our nose because our nose is going to filter the particulate, temperature regulate the air, pressure regulate the air, recapture the moisture we would normally lose, and act as an antidiuretic, meaning people who breathe through their mouth at night are more likely to wake up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom. We want to ensure people are breathing through their nose at night for a variety of reasons.
The other thing to note is the most parasympathetic healing thing we do is sleep. We want our breathing cadence and our nervous system to be informed that we are in a safe and relaxed state. A safe and relaxed state is us breathing through our nose. We would be normally breathing through our mouth in a fight or flight situation.
Many times, people don’t get restorative sleep because while they were laying there, their body was trying to repair, but their nervous system never got into the deepest stages of healing by being more parasympathetic. This is why people wake up and are more tired in the morning than when they went to sleep. Let’s say somebody had apnea, and their breathing stopped in the middle of the night. Imagine somebody is snoring all night, and then breathing like that during the day. Of course, they would feel tired. They would feel more tired than when they went to bed because they were breathing like that for the past eight hours.
Some people wake up with high blood sugar, no matter how perfect their diet is. It’s because they were producing so much cortisol while they were sleeping because of the way they were breathing. The mouth tape acts as an insurance policy.
I have been mouth taping for about three or four years now. One of the things I noticed, besides keeping my mouth closed and essentially eliminating my snoring, is I realized that I’m not waking up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom. My wife is a much happier camper.
The other thing I notice is I don’t clench my teeth anymore. What the tape does is keep my jaw naturally closed. My jaw muscles don’t have to do any work to keep my mouth closed at night. Some people are prone to grinding their teeth. A lot of times, that has to do with stress or magnesium deficiency and other things. I noticed I used to do that. I used to have a bite guard. I hated the thing. I never wore it. It was a big waste of money. What cured my grinding was the mouth taping because I didn’t have to clench my jaw to keep my mouth closed.
Dr. Eric:
Do you still use mouth tape consistently every night?
Dr. Sachin:
Yep. I think I have missed fewer than five days that entire time. I forgot my mouth tape at home when I was traveling. Other than that, it’s been a big staple for me. My whole family does it. My wife, my son, we all mouth tape. It’s profoundly changed our lives and the lives of so many of our clients we recommend it to.
Dr. Eric:
Are there any specific brands? Should people just do a search for mouth tape?
Dr. Sachin:
I use the 3M Micropore tape. It’s not probably marketed as mouth tape specifically. It’s a surgical tape. There are versions for sensitive skin. It works well even with my beard.
You are applying a vertical strip. You are not sealing your mouth. There is something called hostage tape. That seals the person’s mouth. That’s not the purpose of the tape. The purpose of the tape is to keep your mouth closed and relaxed. You can still talk if you need to. You can still breathe through your mouth if you need to. You are not trying to hermetically seal the mouth. You are telling the jaw to stay in that closed position while you sleep.
The 3M Micropore tape is super cheap. It’s a couple bucks for a roll. A 10-yard roll will last you many months. It’s literally pennies a day to do the most important thing that you do better. The most important thing that we do for our healing is we sleep. How we breathe while we sleep, if that’s the other most important thing that we do, then it makes a huge difference. People notice within a couple days a significant improvement in their quality of sleep and how they feel when they wake up in the morning.
Dr. Eric:
Sticking to the topic of sleep, do you believe we all need a certain amount of sleep? On average, do we need 7-8 hours that you hear that most other practitioners or people in general recommend? Do you think everybody is different, and some people can get away with six hours without a problem consistently?
Dr. Sachin:
We’re all wired a little bit differently. I know Michael Bruce, one of the leading sleep experts, will tell you there is different chronotypes. Some people need a little bit more. My wife needs more sleep than I do, which is not a bad thing. It’s just what her body needs. We need to be intuitive with our sleep.
Certainly, you can wear an Oura ring or a sleep tracking device to see if you are getting the quality of sleep. I would say the best indicator is how you feel when you wake up in the morning. If you have got everything dialed in—your breathing is right, your room is set up right, you have your sleep hygiene dialed in—and six hours isn’t cutting it for you, listen to your body.
I also believe there is seasonality to sleep. Us living here in the Northern hemisphere, now it’s winter. I believe in the winter, we should be sleeping a little bit more. It’s a season of hibernation. Animals do it as well. Humans keep the same hours and keep plugging away even though everything else around us has changed dramatically. I believe in the winter, people need more sleep than they would in the summer. That’s another theory. I don’t have any evidence or science to back it up. Paying attention to all the animals and what they’re doing, they’re sleeping a lot more than they do in the summer.
Dr. Eric:
For a couple minutes, I wanted to talk about Circadian rhythm. What are some quick tips you would recommend to reset someone’s Circadian rhythm? Sticking to the topic of sleep, if someone has problems falling and staying asleep, besides breathwork and mouth taping, do you recommend getting regular sun exposure, like sun exposure first thing in the morning? Making sure the room is completely dark? What are your thoughts on staying off of electronics before going to bed?
Dr. Sachin:
I hate to be the bad guy, but I think there is some really important things that people can take away from what I’m about to say that can be really helpful for them. When you tell people not to be on their electronics, it almost shellshocks them. “Oh my god, what do I do?”
There are definitely filters you can get. On my iPhone, I have an accessibility feature. When I press my Power button a few times, my screen actually turns red. On your Android, there is an app called Twilight, which will do that as well. It takes away the blue light from your devices. On your computer, there is a product called f.lux. It’s a free software that automatically adjusts your lighting from your computer monitor to reflect the time of day. There are some workarounds. There are blue blocking glasses, which block frequencies of blue and green light out. Normally, in the evening, there is less of that.
Another thing that is often not discussed is the directionality of light. You want to try to avoid overhead lighting after the sun goes down. The direction of lighting shines in the bottom of your retina when it’s coming from above, telling us it’s still daytime outside. What we encourage people to do is use red lights in the evening, coming from the ground up. We actually give all of our clients a special bulb that is a 640nm bulb. It’s a red bulb. It’s a flicker free LED. What that bulb does is lower our cortisol and help increase our melatonin. As many of you probably know, melatonin isn’t just for sleep. It plays a huge role in our immune system health. It’s probably one of the most important signaling hormones for our immune system. Avoiding overhead lighting in the evening.
Avoiding daytime spectrum bulbs. Some people have these fluorescent bulbs. If you look at junk lighting through the same lens like you would junk food, you would see that it’s crazy that people use LEDs without knowing the potential harm they are causing to their health. A Tungsten bulb, which is the original bulb that was invented by Edison, that bulb is very similar. The spectrum of light that it gives off is very similar to a sunset. It will be a much more relaxing light.
Even though it looks similar, the actual information that your eye and your nervous system is receiving is very different than receiving it from an LED bulb. There is lots of graphs you can look up. You can look up sunlight vs LED light spectrum. You will see the radical difference in how much information is missing from an LED bulb coming to your brain versus a Tungsten bulb versus sunlight. That matters.
Of course, getting daytime sunlight is a huge thing, especially first hour in the morning. I always say try to get green and sun before you take your caffeine. Usually, people want to wait about an hour before they have caffeine.
You can also use certain breathing techniques in the morning to increase your energy. Cortisol should be highest when we wake up in the morning because that helps energize us. It also helps us raise our blood sugar. That’s cortisol’s main job.
We can also raise cortisol using our breath. There is a special type of breath called Bellows breath. It’s really simple. We forcefully inhale, throwing our hands up in the air. We forcefully exhale, in and out through the nose, 30 times like this. You will get your heart pumping. Every time you breathe in sharply, your lungs expand, compressing your heart. As your diaphragm moves up and down, it will also compress your heart. It will get your heart pumping and your adrenaline up. It’s lovingly also known as yogic coffee. That could be a great way to energize you in the morning if you need something and don’t want to drink caffeine, or even in the afternoon as well.
Dr. Eric:
My final question before telling people where they can find out more about you, and it might tie into this question: What other resources do you recommend, especially getting back to breathwork? I have heard you on other podcasts talk about the book Breath by James Nestor. I wanted to ask you about that, too, because I don’t have that book. Do you recommend physically reading it, or is listening to it okay?
Dr. Sachin:
Breath by James Nestor is a book I gave to every one of my clients in 2020 when it first came out. It’s one of the most important books I have personally ever read. I recommend getting the audio version and the written version.
James has become a friend over the years. I’ve had a chance to go to his retreats. If you ever have a chance to do that, it’s in beautiful locations with beautiful people. I would look into that a well.
We only literally scratched the surface today. I gave everyone a bucket out of the ocean of the knowledge that’s out there on breathing. I hope I sparked some people’s interest in going down this rabbit hole a little bit longer.
I’ll share a link I created for a bundle called The Ultimate Breathwork Bundle. It’s got my keynotes I’ve done on breathing, breathing exercises, a breathing experience that people can go through for themselves. I know you have gone through it. I have recorded that and am happy to share that. It’s all absolutely free. They say the best things in life are free. There is nothing better for you than learning how to breathe, so I want to bring this information, knowledge, and awareness to as many people as I can.
I created this free bundle, which has five of my most requested resources. I have a stop snoring guide in there, my notes from James’ retreat, the breathing experience, my breathing signatures guide, and my breathing keynote. People can request the slides if they want as well. A great set of resources for both practitioners and those of you who are learning to improve and optimize your health.
Dr. Eric:
What is the website?
Dr. Sachin:
BreathWorkWithSachin.com.
Dr. Eric:
Thank you so much, Sachin. Like you said, there is so much more you could cover, but definitely visit Sachin’s website, and take advantage of those resources. Appreciate everything that you shared with the audience.
Dr. Sachin:
My pleasure. It’s an absolute honor. I’m so grateful that we had this time together.