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From Stress to Serenity: How Simple Breathing Techniques Transform Mental Wellbeing
Meditation expert Jaleel Mackey shares accessible techniques to calm your nervous system in minutes
Brady Dowling
May 21, 2025
In this episode of The Adaptive Mind, I talk with Jaleel Mackey, a sales leader turned meditation and business coach who discovered meditation at age 17 while struggling with depression. Jaleel explains how breathwork helped him release "30 years of trauma in one hour" and shares techniques anyone can use to find calm amid life's chaos.
After listening to this episode you'll learn:
Why emotions only last about 90 seconds if you allow yourself to fully feel them
How breathwork "defrags your nervous system" by shifting from sympathetic (fight/flight) to parasympathetic (rest/digest) mode
Simple techniques like the 5-5-5 breathing method (5 seconds in, 5 seconds out, for 5 minutes) that create physical coherence
Why meditation is not about "emptying your mind" but rather noticing thoughts without judgment
How to incorporate mindfulness into everyday activities like washing dishes, walking, or during the 60 seconds between work meetings
Join us as we explore practical approaches to meditation and breathwork that don't require special postures, religious beliefs, or hours of practice to experience profound mental health benefits.
Episode Transcript
Brady Dowling: Welcome to this episode of the adaptive mind. Today I have Jaleel Mackey, who is a sales leader and now a very successful and super helpful meditation and business coach. And we're going to be talking a lot about breath work and meditation. Jaleel, thanks for being on.
Jaleel Mackey: I'm grateful to be here brother. Thank you for the invitation. I'm excited to drop in and riff with you
Brady: Yes, for sure. So to jump in, can you talk a little bit about how you got into breathwork and meditation and just kind of how you got started with that?
Jaleel: Yeah, happy to. So my meditation journey started when I was about 17. You know, I was a freshman in college experiencing a lot of challenging emotions. I was overwhelmed.
Um, I later found out that I was navigating depression. Um, but in that discomfort, was seeking some kind of relief and I actually experienced at least the qualities of meditation in a yoga class unintentionally. had no idea. I was, I was invited to a yoga class. I was dealing with some football injuries and, I wasn't a big fan of the yoga practice, at least at the time now I love yoga, but at the time I was like, yeah, this isn't for me.
But the end of the practice when I was lying in Shavasana, you know, lying on my back and corpse pose as it's called, I felt this incredible peace and this like serenity and this calm that I'd never felt before. And that was just a taste, right? It was like, my gosh, what is that? I want more of that. So I started digging into various books. I was reading things that was informing my, my understanding of meditation. And then I came across the book that probably opened me up the most, which is called the Untethered Soul by Michael A. Singer.
And in the book, Michael A. Singer talks about the idea that, you know, when it was novel for me at the time, that I am not my thoughts, that the thoughts that I have are actually something I can observe from a third person perspective or fourth person's perspective, if you will. And I can actually build a relationship with those thoughts that's actually healthy and can create that opportunity for ease and comfort more often. And so that just set me on this long journey. I'm 34 years old now, 17 years of meditation, and I've done
variety of trainings. I've trained under Jack Kornfield and Tara Brock by way of Sounds True and was a two-year program. Thomas Davis the fourth is one of my mentors. He's also this incredible mindfulness teacher who lives in the LA area and it's just become a core part of my life. As far as breathwork goes, I was introduced to that, gosh, that might have been six years ago, just about. And so I was 28 at the time.
And I was actually a resident at a trauma treatment facility. And I mentioned that I was navigating depression at 17. I realized over time that I also had undiagnosed post-traumatic stress disorder. And the combination of, you know, variety of factors led me to take a leave of absence from work. Um, when I was 28 years old and check myself into this facility and it was in this facility that I was introduced to breath work. And the first time I experienced breath work, it was just revolutionary. I was just like,
experiencing things of my childhood, rewriting the narratives that I had been holding on to so tightly for almost 30 years at this point. And I felt like I had released and cleared 30 years of trauma. Honestly, I joke and say like, just did, you know, 30 years of therapy and a one hour breathwork session. And that was the beginning of my journey of exploring what is breathwork.
What does it actually mean? What does it look like? What are the various types of breath work? Can I use breath work in a less of a cathartic sense, but more in a performance sense? And so I got certified in breath work. I started doing P-Performance certification trainings. I started exploring all the various ways in which I can incorporate breath work into the modern world. And now again, it's one of those core pillars of my life, mindfulness and breath work. They're very key to me and my everyday living.
Brady: Awesome, so I find a lot of things that you just said interesting. But you know, you've done like a lot of exercise and athletics and of course there's kind of a therapeutic aspect to those things, I think for most people. But it seems like for you breath work is, meditation as well, but those are like really different. And what do you think makes
Maybe this is going be different for each, what do you think makes breath work so valuable for our mental health?
Jaleel: Yeah, that's a great question. Yeah, the control or the modulation of breath is definitely key from an athletics perspective. And I didn't know it at the time, but yeah, coaches would teach me different types of breathing practices to like calm my body down if I'm tired or to find more energy, et cetera. But I think the reason why breath work is so impactful for my mental health is that
it gets out of, for me, gets out of the mental body, right? I'm not thinking about the thing that I'm trying to solve. I'm not thinking about the experience I had in childhood. I'm not thinking about that challenging relationship I had with my wife. I'm not thinking about the stress and overwhelm I'm experiencing in my business. I'm just breathing. And in doing so, I move from my mental body and I move into my physical body. And that's that mind body connection that we all have. And in that process, what I'm doing is I am effectively, ⁓
I like to think of it as like defragging the nervous system. I'm hitting like a hard reset on my, on my nervous system to shake out all of the things that I may be holding onto because the truth is Brady, and you know, there's like every moment of every day we're inputting information, we're taking in information and that information is stored in ourselves. The issues are in the tissues quite literally. And so breath work is something that helps me with releasing those issues that I'm carrying in my tissues without having to know what it is or know why it is, but it just
is and I can let it go through the breath.
Brady: Yeah, so you started to touch on kind of the effect it has on our nervous system. Maybe you can go into that just a little bit more
Jaleel: Yeah, yeah, happy to. So there are a whole host of theories as it relates to the nervous system. It's evolved a lot over time, our understanding of our nervous system. But what I like to play with when I'm thinking about breath work and what I've been taught and what I've come to understand for myself and with my clients is that it's the parasympathetic and sympathetic response that we have, right? And so our nervous system, it usually operates in one of two types of expressions, if you will.
where the parasympathetic, parasympathetic response is rest and digest. I'm relaxed. feeling good. I'm not feeling under threat, right? Rest and digest, meaning that I'm eating, I'm drinking, my digestive system is working properly. I'm able to move things through my body. And then there's a sympathetic response, which is actually I'm under threat, right? And a sympathetic response is usually associated with the fight, flight, or freeze response. There's another fourth one that I like to also bring in, which is fawn, right? And fawning is when
⁓ you know, in, in, the natural world, a fawn, like a deer will literally call out for its mother or, you know, it's a group of other deer that it's, that it's with to get attention, right? So that's what fawn is. So flight, I run away, fight, I stand and I fight and I, you know, protect myself, freeze as I can't do anything and I'm paralyzed in the moment. And fawn is I'm yelling for help. I'm asking for somebody to help me. And so.
As we go through our day, our nervous system is fluctuating depending on the type of stimuli that it's taking in. So if I am focused on something that's in front of me, it's actually helpful to have somewhat of a sympathetic response, right? It's called eustress, it's good stress. It's the kind of stress that helps me actually execute on my goals. That's that motivation that I feel when I have a deadline. Those things are actually healthy for us. But too much of that stress, chronic stress, actually leads to getting stuck in that sympathetic response, right?
And so what breath work does is it actually modulates the nervous system and typically moves us from that sympathetic response into that parasympathetic response. And the way we do that is by actually exciting the sympathetic response to release whatever emotional charge we're carrying as a result of whatever the stimuli is that we have in our body. So if it's anger, if it's sadness, if it's fear, if it's guilt, if it's shame, whatever it is, we release that through typically some kind of emotional expression of, you know, laughter or yelling.
crying, right? That's usually what I find myself doing. And then once I have come to completion, because once we come to completion in our emotions, right, they last usually about 90 seconds if we let ourselves feel them fully, they come to completion. And then our nervous system gradually shifts into that parasympathetic parasympathetic state again, where I can be in that rest and digest where I can receive stimuli without feeling under threat where I can be present with Brady on this call and not feel like I'm trying to figure a bunch of things out, right? I'm just present.
engaged and I'm appreciating the opportunity in front of me.
Brady: Yeah, amazing. So you said something just at the end there that I think we should emphasize because I don't think we emphasize it enough, but you talked about the fact that an emotion lasts just 90 seconds. And I think that's something that we kind of gloss over, at least in conversations that I often have, I kind of gloss over it a lot. But you also said another point after that, which is like,
if you allow yourself to feel it. And I think a lot of kind of like a lot of the mental health challenges that we have in general are a byproduct of us not allowing ourselves to feel emotions, whether it's, you know, pain or disgust or whatever it is. So I'm glad you mentioned that point. yeah, so these emotions do kind of have
generally a shelf life of 90 seconds and you mentioned those ways to kind of get them out.
Jaleel: Absolutely. Yeah, there's an analogy that I like to use with breath work. So, you if we don't allow ourselves to feel the emotion, what is happening is we store that emotional charge in our nervous system, right?
And that's what things like post-traumatic stress disorder, you know, that's how PTSD becomes something. So for me, I experienced traumatic moments in my, in my childhood. I didn't understand how to process them properly. I bottled them up. I tried to navigate it. I adapted accordingly in order to survive that moment. But what ended up happening is that I had stored within me, right? And sometimes it shows up as like physical expressions. think it's, ⁓ Peter Levine actually has this really wonderful video where he's working with a.
a military veteran who experienced the detonation of a bomb and he was in that bomb and people, everything, everyone around him lost their lives and he survived, but he had this really profound tick where he would do this over and over again and he didn't have it prior to that experience. And so what Peter Levine came to understand is that the expression of his PTSD was actually rooted in the fact that his body kept reacting.
to that bomb exploding over and over and over again. And so his neurons and the muscle fibers were firing in such a way to protect him any moment that he felt like he was under threat, because that's what we store. That's what he stored in his body as an example of a moment where if I'm under threat, this is what's going to help me, right? And so when we don't express our emotions, they become stored energy, which then shows up like physical expressions, mental patterns, behavioral patterns, et cetera, et cetera.
And what breath work has done for me and what I've seen for other people is that it helps the natural flow of those emotions, right? 90 seconds of an emotion, if we feel it fully, we release it. That natural flow of emotions is how we're born. Babies cry and then they're done. All of a sudden they're happy again, right? But over time we learn these behaviors that tell us that we shouldn't cry for whatever reason. We experience trauma or something happens that keeps us from being able to express ourselves fully and authentically. And as we do that, that natural flowing river of emotion starts to get debris.
There's maybe some leaves that fall into that river. Maybe there's a rock that falls into that river. Maybe there's a log. Maybe you experience some intense trauma. There's a boulder that falls into that river. And so those emotions will flow around, right? They'll flow around those various debris that are in the river. But it definitely, like we've seen it, right? Like the moss that grows around those logs or those rocks that are in a river, right? The water becomes toxic over time. And if we get enough of that debris,
enough of those boulders, enough of those logs in the water, the flowing of our emotions, what happens is that emotional river stops flowing entirely. And what I have seen is that if people don't allow themselves to feel or express their anger, they're also struggling with feeling joy. They struggle with expressing that because their whole emotional river is no longer flowing. I think it's Khalil Gibran that says something like, allow sorrow to carve deep into your being because it makes more room for joy.
It's just that captures, that idea of any emotion that we feel, it allows for us to feel the full gamut, the full capacity of our emotional reality. So what breathwork does is it brings a small tsunami, if you will, down that river to clear out that debris. And then the expression of the emotion, whether it's laughter, whether it's crying, whether it's anger, whatever it might be in that breathwork practice, is really the physicality or physicalization of the releasing of those boulders, of that debris, of those logs.
if I will. And so that's the analogy that I like to think about when it comes to breathwork.
Brady: Yeah.
Nice. Yeah, I really like that. I also like just going off of you saying how, ⁓ basically like allowing yourself to feel this in influx and flow of emotions. and kind of being able to feel the negative emotions with the positive emotions kind of increases your capacity to go both ways. ⁓ and it actually kind of on the same topic, speaking about meditation, makes me think of
⁓ some things that Andrew Huberman has said about kind of the effectiveness of meditation, ⁓ with specifically with regards to focus and that doing a meditation kind of puts you in this state where you're, for lack of a better word, so bored that you're like going down into this trough. He uses the word trough. and you have this trough of stimulation where like you're not stimulated at all.
And so then when you come out of it after that meditation, you are basically more capable and easily excited or easily entertained by the things you're doing. And so maybe you can be more interested in doing that, doing something that previously seemed boring. So let's talk a little bit more about meditation on that note. So what are some of the different variations or different types of meditations?
that someone can do.
Jaleel: That's
a great question, Brady. Because it is a very vast field of exploration, there are countless types of meditations. And the reality is that you can ask any, you know, two different people like, what is this type of meditation, and those one person will say one thing, and then another person will say something different. So
The way that I was trained, was trained in insight meditation specifically, which is a Westernized version, secularized version of Vipassana meditation. And really what it is, it's a practice of noticing whatever is happening for you, the stimuli that's coming up for you, noticing without judgment, on purpose, the very stimuli and not getting pulled away or distracted by it and forgetting your center, right? I believe it's...
John Cabot's in his quote of what is meditation, he says exactly that meditation is paying attention on purpose, without judgment. And so that's very similar to what, what I was taught, right, which is that, if I'm seated in meditation, what I am doing is I am creating or expanding my field of awareness to notice the very stimuli that I'm experiencing. And I start with a breath, right. So there's in Vipassana meditation and insight meditation.
there are four foundations of mindfulness, right? The first one being mindfulness of the breath, right? Which is also related to mindfulness of the body because I feel the breath in my body. So that's where I start. I start with noticing, right? What does it feel like to breathe? And then I move outward from there to my emotions, right? And the feelings and the sensations in my body, because that's what emotions are, they're actually sensations in the body that we then pass through our consciousness and then interpret according to our cultural and historical background.
And then we move from there into mindfulness of the thoughts, right? What's going on in my mind? What's the top 10 greatest hits of the repeats that I keep playing back over and over again. And the fine one is actually mindfulness of mindfulness, right? It's the damas. It's how can I be aware of everything all at once? And so in each one of those foundations, there are different types of mindfulness practices or meditation practices that one could incorporate. And so just a few that I'll share with folks is, and one that I found to be really impactful for me that actually has
shown to improve one's capacity for compassion is meta or loving kindness meditation. So there's a, it's much more of an active form of meditation. There are some that are more passive and you're observing this one's much more active. You're definitely repeating phrases over and over again. And these phrases, they are some version of this, right? May you be well, maybe free from suffering, right? And you move into different people.
starting with typically yourself, then you move into someone that you love, and then you move into someone maybe you have a challenging relationship with, right? And then finally, you move into the world at large, if you will. And that practice has actually been shown to improve or actually increase the size of the brain, I think it's part of the amygdala that actually has the capacity for compassion. So that's one really effective way just to be more aware of compassionate and empathetic to the world.
Another one that's really effective and one that I practice on a daily basis is just the practice of noting. So as I'm seated in meditation, I'm noticing the various stimuli. And I think of it like clouds passing in the sky. I notice the cloud, ⁓ that looks like a bunny rabbit. And then I let it float away. I notice the cloud, my gosh, that's a turtle. And then I let it flow away. And then as it goes away, what I'm doing is I'm coming back into present awareness, typically of my breath or some kind of physical sensation.
There's also transcendental meditation. That's something that I don't necessarily practice, but it's a repeat of a mantra over and over again.
Brady: So going off of those, I mean, I think first of all, the loving kindness meditation, I can think about, ⁓ the first time that I did that, actually we were working together at the time and, ⁓ it was a company meeting and someone had been leading.
the guided meditation for the company, oddly enough. Maybe for some people that's odd, but for us it was, yeah, it was the reality. So anyway, I remember, you know, engaging in this meditation and I was working from home and it was the first time doing this. And I started to get really emotional and I started just to silently cry and my wife came home in the middle of it.
And she was like, what's going on in your work meeting? So it was a very effective, affective meditation for me that I hadn't done before. I just kind of went into it being willing to do something new. And I could basically instantly see the effect that it had on me.
And then the other one is kind of becoming the observer of your own thoughts. And before I had tried that, it didn't really seem real to me or like, just didn't really make sense. And so, um, once I, again, just kind of went for it and, you know, followed along, played along, whatever words you want to use for it. Like I started to get that. And when you said like, yeah, I noticed a cloud that it's shaped like a bunny or whatever.
Like it sounds silly if you haven't done it before, but like being able to get into that state where you can notice your own thoughts. the first time I, for me, it feels like magic is like, this is kind of cool. I can, I can notice these thoughts and I don't have to attach to them. And, ⁓ you know, it's harder for more emotionally charged thoughts or, you know, more.
emotive thoughts, I guess, at times, but being able to get in that state, at least as like a proof of concept and trying that out for the first time where you like notice something, but then you come back and you're ready to notice the next thing. think, yeah, I can't describe it any other way besides just kind of the first time it feels like magic.
Jaleel: Yeah, man, I agree 100%. I think the, when I started meditating in my dorm, my freshman year of college, and I struggled a lot. And I remember just being like, why do people do this? This is, I just say, this feels really uncomfortable. I have no idea what I'm doing. I'm actually getting frustrated. Like this doesn't feel calming at all. Someone told me this was going to make me calm. Like this is not working for me. And I think that,
for folks who are beginning mindfulness or meditation for the first time.
to know that that's actually part of the journey, right? Part of the journey is the struggle. It is the, I'm not sure how this is working, whether it's working, what am I doing? But it's the noticing of the struggle. When you feel frustrated, notice when you feel frustrated, right? When you're questioning whether or not this is working, notice that. When you're saying this is not working, notice that, right? And it becomes this like interesting kind of meta, it is in a lot of ways, it's metacognition. Like you're like watching yourself react
various things while you're in the meditation practice. And then what happens is you realize, wait, I'm noticing that I'm noticing my thoughts. And then you notice that you just noticed your thoughts because that becomes another thought, right? And so it's just, it is a, it becomes a game in a lot of ways. And at some point, folks typically find themselves, I know I found myself there and folks that I've teaches that I teach have also come there where they're like, I don't have any thoughts anymore.
And I'm like, well, that's a thought. The fact that you're thinking you don't have thoughts anymore is actually a thought. And they're like, ⁓ you're right. Yeah. And so that it just becomes a game, right? Because ultimately thoughts are the most natural thing. It's like saliva for the brain, right? It's saliva for our mind. We're just excreting them all the time. They're not good. They're not bad. It's just a matter of how do we relate to them? And that's the whole point of meditation. How do we change our relationship with our internal world?
Brady: You
Jaleel: so that it doesn't feel like something that is driving our behavior unconsciously. But we can actually use our thinking mind as a tool, right, to help us make decisions. And you brought up something, Brady, and I'm going back a ways, you said something about focus, right, about how Andrew Huberman talks about focus being a byproduct of meditation.
And the way I think about it is it's like training, it's training your brain, it's training your mind to be able to notice when it gets distracted and then to come back to something. And it's the same thing when we go to the gym or we go for a run or whatever it is, like with more practice, we get stronger, we get better at it. And that process of noticing, oh, I got distracted, let me come back to that, that, that breath or whatever the single mantra is, whatever it is that's keeping me in the present moment.
It's building that focus muscle so that when I'm not meditating, I notice, I got distracted. I picked up my cell phone or, I need to be working on this thing that's in front of me, not worrying about what's for dinner or whatever it might be. Right. We build that muscle of coming back to the present moment over and over again.
Brady: Yeah, and I think that we've started to touch on some misconceptions of meditation and breath work both. But I think that's one of the big ones is like, some people are like, you know, I just can't sit there and not think about anything. Like you touched on going to the gym and the way that you get stronger is by like literally tearing your muscles. So like actually
you have to fail in order to get stronger. And that kind of concept goes to just almost everything, but meditation is just an extension of that. And you mentioned coming back to your breath or coming back to whatever it is that the meditation is on, that is the practice. so going off of that as one of probably the biggest misconceptions, at least that comes to my mind.
Can you think of other kind of misconceptions or myths or things that people just kind of get wrong about meditation?
Jaleel: Yeah, yeah, that's a big one for sure. I think some of the ones that are most prominent are I have to be seated in some kind of, you know, lotus or half lotus, full lotus with your feet folded and, on top of your legs. That you have to be some kind of monk or, you know, spiritual person or religious person to practice meditation or mindfulness.
that it is a religion and that people are indoctrinating you into a religion of some kind if you practice meditation. That it's actually a waste of time. Sitting and doing nothing is a waste of time. I hear that a lot. A lot of people who are especially high performing, high achieving, the idea of sitting and doing nothing for a period of time feels like it's actually wasting time. But the reality is that it's actually giving you the ability to be more productive, more effective.
when you give back to whatever it was that you're doing before. But those are probably some of the biggest ones that I hear. I've had my mother actually ask me, like, are you like, is that like new religion for you now? Like, are you, that like, no, mom, that's not necessarily it. So it's definitely natural and normal to question those things, to wonder, right? But honestly, the way that I've come to appreciate it is that it's a practice of building a relationship with yourself.
That's really what it is to become aware of yourself in a way that allows for you to be in tune with, appreciative of, and no longer unconsciously moved by, right, things that happen underneath the surface of what we see in the mirror every day.
Brady: Yeah. Yeah. And you touched on basically like people kind of putting meditation in this box and, vice versa saying, like, if I'm going to meditate, then I have to be in this kind of box. ⁓ and you know, you don't have to be anything you can, you can meditate and you can still be who you are, or you can change who you are. You can change what meditation is, you know, you can come up with your own meditations. can kind of just.
make it your own. So yeah, I really like those thoughts about misconceptions. to close out, guess, before we get to my last question, is there anything that we've talked about that you want to come back to or you think would be important for people to know or understand?
Jaleel: Yeah, I think I think broadening the idea of meditation is really important. Because I know we've talked about like loving kindness and watching your thoughts and like these are types of meditations that are traditionally done like sitting down. But you can meditate while washing the dishes, right? Just notice what it feels like in your hands to have water running over your hands what it's like to feel the suds of the soap, what it feels like as you're scrubbing the dish like that is a meditative practice.
going for a walk without your cell phone and just paying attention to the sounds that you hear as you're walking around your neighborhood.
is a form of meditation, right? There are meditations that are actually walking meditations where you walk exceptionally slow, and you notice the contact of your foot hitting the floor beneath you, the rolling of your foot from the heel to the ball, the tips of the toes coming off the ground, shifting your weight over to the other foot, having the other foot hit the ground, right? That's a meditative practice, you know, you don't have to get to that degree, right? That's just a form of meditation. But if you just walk outside without some distractions and pay attention to what you're hearing,
what you're seeing, you are practicing meditation. You're practicing the act of being mindful of your surroundings, free of judgment, right? Just taking it all in. So my encouragement for folks is just think about it differently, right? Consider how you can just pay attention more intentionally with your family, with your friends, with your work when you're outside. And the thing that's typically the most distracting from the present moment is this thing, right? Can we put it down long enough?
Brady: Nice.
Jaleel: right, just to be present with whatever's in front of us. And the benefit of that is less stress. Truly, we feel less wound up, less in that sympathetic response, more presence with our family, with our friends, more effective in our roles. And the most important thing, at least in my opinion, is deeper connections and relationships with the people that matter most to us.
Brady: Nice, cool. So for someone that's listening and they're like, this is it, I'm gonna start, I'm gonna meditate now for the first time, or maybe even someone that wants to kind of just practice, deepen their practice, do you have some small tips for how to get started into meditation and potentially breath work as well?
Jaleel: Yeah, the biggest thing that I can share, I'll share for both of them. The biggest thing I can share about mindfulness or any new practice is start small. If it's brand new to you, you've never done it before, set a timer, do it for 60 seconds. We have 60 seconds for sure. And once we start with those 60 seconds, we just become curious. There's no good or bad, whether it worked or not, become curious about that experience for you. Right? Notice what it felt like. Notice how you felt compared to the moment before you did the practice.
and just explore it, right? And so one small way you can get started is literally sit down, you know, if you're in the middle of a work week and you've, you're in middle of a meeting and you're looking at your clock and you're saying, okay, this meeting is going to end in 10 minutes. My next meeting starts five minutes after that. I'm going to move away from my screen. I'm going to set a timer. I'm going to sit on my couch. I've got a couch over here. I'm going to sit on my couch for 60 seconds. I don't do nothing other than just notice what's happening. The sounds that I hear, right? The smells that I smell in the room.
the feeling of my breathing, right? The belly expanding and contracting, just noticing that for 60 seconds. And if you practice that a few times a week, you may start to be more curious about, what if I take this a little further? What if I do it for two minutes instead of one minute? And just keep playing with it until it feels like something that you actually enjoy exploring, because that's the point. The point is to enjoy the exploration even when it's uncomfortable, right?
Brady: Yeah, I'm going to cut you off there because I've, I've in one of our previous episodes with Hassan, we talked about basically like how going out of a meeting at work. ⁓ and this is for people who are working from home or kind of in desk jobs, but coming out of a meeting, we feel stressed sometimes. And both of this conversation and that one kind of opened my eyes because I don't think of myself as a stressed person.
Jaleel: Yes, please.
Brady: But when I finish a meeting, I check ESPN.com. It's like, that's like my ritual. And I don't want to, but I've like come to this awareness that this is because of the stress of being on a call, seeing my face and knowing that other people are seeing my face, you know, being judged about what I'm saying, stuff like that. And so this transition time is something that
Jaleel: Mmm.
Brady: I've started to pay attention to a bit more and you giving this 60 second practice and the idea to kind of use this as an opportunity to observe. think that's going to be really helpful for me. Hopefully other people will find it helpful as well, but like just using 60 seconds right then that's a moment when for me, I'm in like a heightened state and often don't notice it. So I'm really going to really going to try to do that and I'll let you.
If you're gonna go into breath work or something else, then I'll let you jump in there.
Jaleel: Yeah, definitely. Let me know how it goes, Brady. I'm excited. There's a whole other conversation around the flywheel of flow. It's actually like you got to build the stress and then you got to release the stress intentionally and then you experience flow and you just do that cycle over and over again, maybe for a future conversation.
Brady: Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
Jaleel: But the breath work, the thing that I have come to appreciate about breath work, and it's similar to mindfulness is you can habit stack, right? So one thing that I've started doing is in the morning, I brush my teeth every day without fail, right? One thing I can do while I'm brushing my teeth is I can just put my hand on my belly and just breathe deeply as I'm brushing my teeth, right? And that's a form of breath work.
Breath work is simply paying attention to my breath, right? Paying attention to my breath, noticing what it feels like and breathing deeply. Wonderful way to just become familiar with that practice of intentional breathing. A second thing that I started doing years ago that I share with people is that anytime I walk through a doorframe, I check in with my breath, right? So my office door here, my front door for my house, walking through the doorframe at the grocery store, I just check in with my breath. Okay, how am I breathing? Is it shallow?
my chest, am I breathing fast? Or is it deep and resonant? Am I breathing slowly in my belly? And just noticing that begins to build that relationship with our breath, which allows for us to start thinking about, what happens if I breathe more deeply and I hold my breath for a period of time and then I release it, right? Like then we begin to play with it. So that's one thing just to get started with the idea. One practice you can do that I think anyone and everyone should do.
is the 555. It's called a heart coherence breath. And it's actually popularized by an organization here in Santa Cruz County called HeartMath. And they actually have biometrics devices that you can measure how your body responds to this. There's HRV measurement, whole host of different things that come with that. But you can do it without the actual devices. And it's five seconds in through the nose, five seconds out through the nose. And you do that for five minutes.
What happens is you'll your your your various systems in your body will cohere your endocrine system, your vascular system, your cardiovascular system, excuse me, your respiratory system, your nervous system all starts to cohere because you're breathing in this equal in breath out breath. And so your body starts to regulate itself with that balance. And there's a book by James Nestor called, ⁓ breath, the new science of a lost art, where he discovers that across various traditions,
various practices, there's a sweet spot for the amount of in-breath and out-breath. It's like five seconds, five point something seconds. And if you can get that resonance of five point something seconds in, five point something seconds out, your body naturally experiences euphoria. And euphoria is a way good way to live your life. That's a good feeling.
Brady: Yeah, yeah, awesome. ⁓ that's so cool. I have to try that. So
now actually, can we take like, one minute? Can you guide me and everyone listening in like a one minute meditation just so we can jump in? Okay.
Jaleel: Absolutely, yep, happy
to. So just taking a second to get comfortable. If you're seated, finding a posture that feels upright, dignified, yet relaxed. If you're walking, just pay attention to what it feels like to be walking. If you're driving, please keep your eyes open and just pay attention to your posture and the driver's seat.
We're gonna begin with three deep breaths, taking a big deep inhale through the nose.
Sighing it out through the mouth. Really using that diaphragm to get all the air out. Good. Two more of those in through the nose.
Signing it
Last one, into the nose.
Sign it out.
Just noticing how you feel as you breathe in and out through the nose, naturally finding a natural rhythm of breath again.
to encourage you to do is actually become curious about the sounds that you're hearing.
If you have headphones on, maybe you're noticing the whirring of technology. Maybe you're hearing the timber of my voice and the way that my voice cracks as I speak.
Maybe you're outside and you can hear birds chirping or cars driving by. Maybe the wind rustling through the trees.
notice what sounds you hear.
it's helpful you might even begin to apply a label to those sounds. that's a truck.
through that, what you are doing is you're actually like the jokingly call it triangulating the present moment, you're noticing what's happening around you in the present moment, moving yourself, removing your focus and attention outside of your head, and into what's actually happening right here and right now. And at any moment of the day, you can do this with or without the three breaths. And if your eyes are closed, go ahead and open them. Come back to
whatever is in front of you.
Brady: Nice, awesome. Well, thank you. For me, that was a different experience doing it on camera, but it was very interesting to notice even the feelings and the emotions I had and trying to get into it and just kind of let those things go. And again, trying to observe those things. So yeah, that was really cool for me.
Jaleel: Thanks for sharing your experience, Brady. Appreciate that.
Brady: Yeah, so, um, I mean, we talked about a lot of interesting things today, breath work, meditation, kind of the effects those can have on us. Um, and then just some practical tips on getting into them and really just like the benefits of noticing and not judging and kind of making this practice your own. Um, I learned a ton from you and Jaleel and, uh, yeah, I'm really looking forward to putting these things into practice. So I appreciate you coming on and taking the time.
Jaleel: brother. Appreciate you too. Thanks for having me on and yeah I'm looking forward to hearing about these practices and how they impact your life and everyone who's listening enjoy.