Transcription
I'm Dr Anthony cave and this is my EKG and I'm almost a little nervous here to start the video from my heart rate. Far too many of my patients feel that I'm gaslighting them when I encourage them to use their breathing to reduce their anxiety. I'm not anti-medication or anti-therapy. I'm a big advocate for ketamine therapy and other modalities, but I always want to emphasize your inner healing capacity to help naturally reduce anxiety without the need for external medications or their side effects.
So I connected myself to the life support monitors here in the operating room so I can show you on my body how my heart responds to these breathing techniques, to focusing and giving attention to this most basic human necessity, to be able to harness its power to help reduce our anxiety, help improve our mood, and hopefully show changes in my heart in live real time with you watching. Please don't. Wow, that, that heart rate, that heart rate really did shoot up. So this is the best time for me to do these breathing techniques. I'm going to cover cyclic breathing and 478 breathing, two of the most common techniques I recommend to my patients and do with them before surgery or during their ketamine treatments with me. Let's get started.
The first step is to connect myself to to the EKG monitor. And unfortunately, I do have a little bit of hair on my chest. White right is the lead that I start with, and then smoke over fire, meaning black over red, waiting for my EKG to show up. Now you can slowly see my EKG start to pop up on the monitor with the. Oh, there it went. Oh, I flatlined. Whoops, I'm back. I'm back. We're good. And then I'm going to put the pulse oximeter on my finger so you can see my oxygen status and my heart activity at the same time. You can hear the tone and you can see my oxygen saturation 96%, a heart rate in the 60s now.
So let's get started with cyclic breathing. Remember that you can hear my heartbeat. With every beat, I want you to specifically hear the change in my heart rate as the distance between beats increases and decreases with the breathing. How I'm going to do the cyclic breathing is inhaling through my nose, taking an extra sniff of air at the end, and then slowly exhaling for about 10 seconds through my mouth. And I'll explain how I hold my tongue position while I exhale at the end. Let's get started on three. One, two, three. I'm going to do it one more time. Listen closely to how the heart rate increases then slows down with that inhale and that 10-second exhale. One, two, three. So that was about a 1-second inhalation, then another second to sniff in more air, then a 10-second exhalation. What we call cyclic breathing.
Before we do the 478 breathing, just a reminder that if you're learning something new, please share with your loved ones and remember to hit that like button and subscribe to keep up with all of my videos. And thank you to our members who support this channel and have exclusive access to behind the scenes content and get to ask me more questions on our live streams. Now let's try the four 78 breathing technique, where I inhale for 4 seconds, hold it for seven, and exhale for eight. Starting on three. One, two, three. Let's try that one more time so you can appreciate just how much that heart rate changes on three. One, two, three.
So you've already noticed that I am breathing in through my nose and exhaling through my mouth. And a teacher of mine, Dr. Andrew W, always emphasized bringing your tongue to the top of your mouth, just behind your front teeth, to close a circuit to help slow your exhalation down as you try to breathe against your tongue pressing up against your upper palate or the hard part of the roof of your mouth. There you have it. Cyclic breathing and 478 breathing, and you can immediately hear the change in my heart rate variability. Now, I'll repeat these breaths multiple times. It's not just a one breath and you're feeling good for the rest of the day. I might do this multiple, multiple times at once and then repeat it throughout the day. And I'll combine this with a guided imagery like the videos that I'm posting online soon. You should absolutely listen to those before surgery or to help you fall asleep. And you can integrate this breathing with those guided imageries. You can integrate this breathing with vagal nerve stimulation and other mindfulness-based activities to help synergize and give you the care that you ultimately deserve because you have more power over your health than you've probably ever been told. Until next time.