Mastering Business Stress with Breathwork

Kathy (host):
Well, hello there, and welcome back to another episode of Help! My Business is Growing, a podcast where we explore how to grow and build a business that is healthy and sustainable. I’m your host, Kathy Svetina, a fractional CFO and a founder of NewCastle Finance, a company where we believe that everything that you do in your business will eventually end up in your finances. And to get to healthy finances is to have a healthy business. Well, the question is, how in the world do you get there? Well, this is where this podcast comes in to help. Owning a business is no doubt really stressful, and it can sometimes be really, really stressful. So when stress hits, it can hijack your body and mind and sabotage how well you work. And if you don’t manage your stress, the stress may even manage you by making you lose your focus. You can miss opportunities, and worst case, you can burn out, which will ultimately block your business from growing. It’s just not a good situation, but the good news is that there’s a simple yet powerful way to manage stress, and it’s called breath work. I know we all breathe all the time, but if you breathe in the right way, and especially if you use the techniques that we’re going to be talking about on this podcast, they will help you regain control and find calm even in the most stressful situations. So we’re going to be talking about, what is breath work exactly? How is it different from regular breathing? How does it help to manage stress, and how do you know if you’re doing it properly? You can find all the links and the detailed topics in this episode’s show notes. My guest today is John Hall, a breathwork coach who works with executives and entrepreneurs globally. A 30-year Fortune tech leader, John left corporate life to cultivate the relationships and purpose that drive fulfillment. Now he coaches executives and entrepreneurs via science-backed methodology, blending neuroscience, breathwork, and somatic practices to manage stress, boost self-confidence, and unlock potential, integrating practical breathing techniques used by Navy Seals and top athletes with a trauma-informed approach. John has created somatic practices to reduce anxiety, manage stress, and improve self-trust, empowering individuals to live a life filled with purpose, peace, and passion. Join us.

Kathy (host):
John, welcome to Help! My Business is Growing.

John (guest):
Kathy, so good to be here.

Kathy (host):
I’m so great you’re here because we’re going to be talking about stress, and unfortunately, you know, stress when you’re running a business, it’s a part of life, and hopefully you realize it sooner, rather than later, that you need to learn how to deal with it, because one, your health becomes a mess if you don’t, and two, you’re very, very reactive in your business. And when you’re reactive in your business, you can make some terrible decisions, you know, so on and so on on this topic. So we know that a little bit of stress usually helps with performance, so you can perform better, but too much stress, and especially when it’s chronic, it becomes an issue. So let’s talk a little bit about the stress response, if we can.

John (guest):
Absolutely, and Kathy, I loved your opening on this, because one of the things that I share all the time with clients is that successful people don’t have less stress; they have better stress management techniques, right? Better stress management tools. So this is such an incredible chance to share some of this and talk about what’s going on, because you’re spot on with what happens when we stay in this, when we get this, and when we stay with this, and the need for it. That was something that was really interesting when I started the research, is that there’s actually three different types of stress. So there’s something called new stress, which is neutral, like I’m reading about bad news somewhere else in the world, or some part of the United States, and that impacts me, can cause me stress, but it’s not normally. It’s not really direct. Then there’s something called you stress, which is the healthy stress that you mentioned, right? This is I’m going to kick the winning field goal for my team, and I train for this. I have a team to support me. It is stressful because I know what’s on the line, and yet at the same time, I know I’ve got the support I need. It’s temporary. It actually motivates me to grow, to become better, to step up and perform. But we’re really going to focus today on the third part, which is called distress. Distress is the type of stress that is unhealthy, especially as you say, when we are staying in it chronically, and we feel like a big part of what makes it distress is we feel like we don’t have control over the situation. And so it’s causing that reaction in our body. It’s causing that impact.

Kathy (host):
Yeah, it’s sometimes it can feel like, essentially a bear is chasing you, but there’s no bear. You’re sitting in your office, or you’re having a conversation with someone, and it just feels like this visceral response of, I am so under stress. And one of the things that I’ve noticed too, especially for me, is you constantly feel tired like you can, you can get as much sleep as you can, and it just feels like you cannot catch up. So let’s talk about how does chronic stress reflect in the body?

John (guest):
Yeah, so you touched on something that’s really important here, which is the impact in the body of stress, right? So it is a full somatic response. It is a mind and body connected response. So let’s talk about what happens. And you used a perfect segue for me, which is we feel like we’re getting chased by a bear in the woods. So the first thing to start with is understanding our body has a very natural stress response, which is there for a reason. So if I was out in the woods and all of a sudden I did come across a bear, and it’s not a black bear, it’s a grizzly, it’s a Kodiak, it’s something mean. So now all of a sudden I need my body and mind to be focused on survival. So what does that mean? Right? Anything in my body that isn’t needed at the moment is going to get shut down. That’s typically digestion. That could be sexual function. In my mind, that’s going to be creativity, right? I don’t need to think about the spiritual meaning of the bear chasing me, right? I need to think about, how do I run? So what happens is, in our brain, we have the amygdala, which sits basically at the top of our spine, right at the lower part of our skull, the amygdala. Amygdala is our primal center of the brain. This is really the thing that the fight or flight response originates from and the amygdala will hijack control of the brain. And research was actually done, research for relationships, but it’s a great researcher by the name of Dr. John Gottman. He found when our heart rate goes over 100 beats per minute, this prefrontal cortex part of our brain, which is our wise CEO, it’s our logic center, it’s our higher reasoning, it shuts down. So now in the woods, perfect response. I don’t need the higher reasoning. I need to run very quickly. And so my body’s priming for that, right? That’s, that’s and that actually is the fight or flight. That’s what we call hyperarousal. And there’s another one you touched on this as well, because sometimes you said, right? It feels like getting chased by a bear in the woods. But you also mentioned, it feels like I can’t get enough rest. It doesn’t matter what I do, I can’t get enough rest. So let’s talk about this other end of a stress response, right? So the other end of a stress response, again, a very healthy thing. Let’s say the bear catches me now. I’m injured. I’m wounded. My best hope of survival is someone finding me and helping me right at this moment. So what’s my body going to do in that stress response is going to shut down, it’s going to withdraw so I’m not feeling all the pain. It’s going to go inward. It’s going to slow down my heart rate, it’s going to slow down my energy level. So this is what we call hypoarousal, which is where I’m on the other extreme, and I’m basically in a freeze response. I’m withdrawn, I’m waiting for someone to come help me. So those are when we talk about those stress responses you described, right? I’ve got the one which is priming me for survival by fighting or running. I’ve got the other that’s prepping me for survival by just shutting down and withdrawal, right? But both of them are very healthy stress responses in given situations. The challenge is like you say, it’s just an overdue deadline, it’s a relationship that’s gone south. It’s some stressful situation that’s triggering these same responses without really being a life or death situation. And

Kathy (host):
This is such a great example that you provided with the bear chasing because one of the things that I have noticed with myself, I’ve been managing my stress, and I’ve noticed that there’s been situations when there was high stakes, high stress situations, and I just wanted to take a nap.

John (guest):
Yeah, yeah. And this is all, I want to be really clear about this, because I think one of the things that can happen is we can get caught up in a should loop. I shouldn’t be this way. I should be calm. I should be more energized. I shouldn’t, right? We get, we the joke is we should all over ourselves, is what we say. And so what happens is we aren’t understanding what’s going on in our body, the natural response. And when I work with executives, entrepreneurs, what I work with other individuals on is, how do we redirect that into something that’s actually productive. So we’re not going to fight it. We’re going to roll with it. We’re going to redirect it. We’re going to understand what’s going on in our physiology and use our body to actually redirect that back to a spot of calm and safety.

Kathy (host):
So let’s talk about this. So let’s say that you have a high stress situation, you have to present in front of, you know, 150-200 people, and the stakes are high. Let’s say that you are in a very, very real situation for a lot of people, that you have to present in front of investors, and you need to get the money because, you know, you just need to do that. That’s right, it’s the height of stress. How do you manage the stress? What are some of the things that you can do in the moment to calm yourself down so that you can still have that little bit of stress that helps you perform, but it doesn’t hijack all your thoughts?

John (guest):
It’s a great question. I love that. So the acronym I teach clients is BPM, just like beats per minute. My heart rate goes up, you think beats per minute, and it stands for Breath, Physiology, Mindset. So let’s break that down. The first thing, let’s keep in mind that the stress reaction is a mind-body response. It is a somatic response, and so it’s not just our mind that’s stressed. It’s our whole body that’s reacting that way. So attempting to use our mind alone and say, “Calm down, calm down, you’ve got this, calm down,” right? We are basically like the little toddler trying to tell the 800-pound gorilla what to do, yeah, and it’s ineffective. So when we think about what’s going on with our mind-body connection, and there’s all sorts of really cool science behind this that talks about why, you know, how the mind-body connection works, how what we think in our mind impacts our body, how what we’re holding, how we’re holding ourselves impacts our mind and our thoughts. Amy Cuddy has some fantastic work around this. She’s done a couple of TED Talks. She did a study, for example, just doing the Wonder Woman pose, your hands on your hips, or the Superman pose for 10 minutes, actually changes your brain’s ability to take appropriate risk. So you’re willing to take more, better risk, a worthwhile risk, not a risky risk, but a worthwhile risk for your business. So we’ve got our body in the stress response, and our body’s saying we’re in danger. And the way that this signal goes back and forth is there’s something in our body called the vagus nerve. Vagus is from the Latin “wander”, if you think like vagabond, right? That’s coming from the same term. And the vagus nerve wanders through our body, and it connects these different organs and different input systems with our brain. So what we want to be able to do is use our breath, first and foremost, to tell our body to calm down. There’s a very specific way to do that. I’ll share it in just a second. But when we do that breath, what we’re doing is, we’re consciously using our mind to tell our body to do something, which then signals the rest of our body that we’re calm and we’re safe, and begins to release this hijack in the back of our brain, the amygdala hijack.

Kathy (host):
Interesting. And so that is the B, on the breath.

John (guest):
Yes, it is, yes.

Kathy (host):
So let’s talk about the P before we get to the whole breathing section, but I want to dissect the BPM first. Let’s go into the P.

John (guest):
So let’s talk about physiology. So I touched a little bit on this with Amy Cuddy’s study. And essentially what happens is our body is constantly sending signals to our brain as to our emotion, our mode, our focus, etc.

John (guest):
So the first thing we do, the B for the breath. We get that breath, we start to signal to the body to relax. Now what we want to do is bring our conscious awareness to how our body is, right? Are we holding tension? Are we collapsed in? Are we knotted up with tension in our body? Are we able to relax our chest? Right? This is, this is a safe response. Me opening up my chest is a safe response, right? That’s a confident response. I’m not going to do this unless I feel safe with you.

John (guest):
So again, what we’re starting to do is the subtle physical, physiological markers that we’re going to start relaxing our body, opening our body, bringing our body now to again, signaling a sense of safety and confidence, which again is signaling our mind that we’re safe. So we’ve got our breath signaling body to mind that we’re safe. We’ve got our physiology, right, opening up our chest, relaxing our shoulders, again, signaling to our brain that we’re safe.

Kathy (host):
So essentially, what it sounds like is your mind thinks you’re in danger. And for you to overwrite the mind, you have to use these body cues that the mind is reading, and you have to force it into, force it with, you know, gently move it into that state that signals the brain that you are in a safe spot.

John (guest):
I’m going to tweak that a little bit. So our mind and our body think we’re unsafe, and that’s the key to recognize, is that when we get into a stressful situation, it’s our body that is reacting. And this is where we really get into limiting belief work. We get into deeper work to find out what’s causing that trigger. But that trigger, that stress trigger, is a body-mind response. And so that’s why we have to work with the mind and the body to release that. And it doesn’t have to be a full-on, you know, this is not like, “Oh, I’m in a stress response and I’m freaking out.” This can be very subtle, right? This could just be we’re starting to get this feeling of an energy drop. We’re starting to get this feeling of a tightness. We’re starting to get subtle clues that are actually, if we don’t address them, it’s going to impact our ability to make effective decisions, efficient decisions, to make them rapidly, to not defer them, to be able to go into a situation and be at peak performance.

Kathy (host):
Yeah, that makes sense. So we’ve talked about B, breath, we talked about P, the physiology. Let’s talk about the M now.

John (guest):
So mindset is the third part, and mindset, I’ll share this. So I’m a 30-year tech exec, and you know, my background is technology, it is not personal development, although I fixed a lot of departments. That was what I did in corporate, I’d parachute in, turn the team around, turn the technology around, and work with the people. And people were coming up to me telling me, 5, 10, 15 years later, “You shared something that changed my life, that changed my career, that changed so much.” So when I had the opportunity to move into the personal development space, still this mental part of me was like, “Hey, I want to know the logic behind it. I don’t want to just hear the phrase and go, ‘Well, that’s gospel because someone said it on stage.’ I want to actually know the science behind it.” So one of the things you’ll hear all the time is “Where focus goes, energy flows.” You’ve probably heard that phrase before, many times. Okay, so here’s the science behind it. I’m going to share an experiment that was done. So there were two sets of college students. They were given exams. They had sets of, I think it was like five words, just five sets of words, and they had to create a sentence with four more words out of those five words. Unknown to them, there were two sets of tests. One had words related to aging, the second had just neutral words. The real part of the study came when the students completed the test and walked down the hallway to drop the exam off. The students who worked with the phrases related to aging walked 20% more slowly than the students who didn’t. They didn’t know it. They claimed it had no impact, even when they were told about it, it was completely unconscious to them. And yet, the researchers found that just priming their mind with age-related words caused them to walk 20% more slowly. So the reality is that what we set our mind on impacts our body. It impacts our response. It impacts how we respond. And if we’re focusing our mind on “I’m stressed. I’m stressed. I’m stressed,” we’re just reinforcing that loop of body going, “Hey, I’m stressed. This is what I do when I’m stressed.” So the mindset is, we’ve got the breath first, so we’re starting to send a signal to the body. It’s the most immediate signal to the body we can send to start to release this hijack. Second part is physiology. I’m following up on that. I’m doubling down on my body’s response to send the signal to the mind to relax. Now what I’m going to do is, hopefully, I’ve started to release this hijack of the amygdala. I’m starting to get blood flow back up to the prefrontal cortex and this full brain, this logic, and now I can start to set my focus on what’s positive, right? What’s positive? What can come out of this, right? Sometimes it might just be, “What are the things I’m grateful for? Where am I blessed?” Right? What are those basic things that I can start to set my mind on and start to release this hijack and get focus back? So now my body’s not only am I sending the direct conscious signals to my body, I’m sending unconscious signals through my positive thoughts to my body. And there’s science behind all of this that backs it up.

Kathy (host):
Yeah, that’s really interesting, especially with the whole student experience because, and I’ve noticed this with myself too. If there are certain thoughts that you have had because you have read something, or maybe you’ve been around people that were negative, you start to absorb some of that energy, and especially if you’re an empath type of person, I mean, it can really, really affect your whole energy. It affects your and on top of that, it will affect your health as well.

John (guest):
Absolutely. It sounds like a trope, but you know, if you take a Friday night by yourself and you listen to all the sad songs and watch all the sad movies, right? And cry on the sofa, not talking about, what are you going to wind up at the end of the night? Right? You’re likely, unlikely, going to be thinking, “This is amazing, and I’ve got creative ideas coming out of this.” So we know this in the extreme, but it’s really subtle, and it does show up in the day-to-day work, and we can find our thoughts just looping and that’s sending signals that’s just reinforcing the stress as well. So

Kathy (host):
What are some of the day-to-day things that you can do in terms of mindset, that you should be aware of, that they might be taking you down the direction that you don’t want to go to?

John (guest):
Yeah. So the very first, the most powerful thing you can do is simply being aware of it. Right? Even if you don’t have a solution, you don’t know why, you don’t even have to know the why. If you can bring awareness to going, “Wow. I just realized, for the last 10 minutes, I’ve been focusing on where this project can go wrong. Wow. I just realized that I’ve really been focused on what’s wrong with my relationship with this business partner,” or even with a romantic relationship, right? So if you can become aware and just all you’re doing is going, “Wow, I can see that I’m doing this,” you don’t have to have a solution. You don’t have to know the why. But that simple act of awareness and pulling it up out of the unconscious into the conscious starts to dissolve it and break it down. And so just that alone, if there’s one thing I’d say, being aware of when your thoughts start to go south is the biggest single thing you can do to start to shift your thoughts from negativity to positivity.

Kathy (host):
And once you have, let’s say that you have figured out, “Oh, I’ve been thinking about this negatively for the last 10-15 minutes,” and you’re seeing yourself spiraling. What is the next thing that you should do? Should you, you know, in meditation, we are using this as a place to observe. It’s like, “Is this really true? Is it not true? Do I have evidence against it? Do I have evidence for it?” So, like, really think of it rationally. What would be the thing that you say that helps the most when you find yourself having those thoughts and you’re like, “Okay, I figured out that I’m doing this. Like, how do I stop and how do I change it?”

John (guest):
Yeah, yeah, no, I love this question, Kathy. So I always go back to BPM. I love the tool, just to kind of reset there. So again, taking that breath, checking your physiology. Because now what you want to do is, you want to think of this somatically. So again, I’m in my negative thinking, all right, deep breath, let’s reset. Becomes automatic over time, right? You open up, you sit up, you change your physiology. Now I’m starting to change my mind. My body’s in a different state, which opens up my mind to be in a different state. I’m aware of it. BPM. Now I’m going to think about, okay. Now that I am aware of it, what can I set my mind on positively? That’s the M part. Now I can start to examine it and go, “Okay, is this really true? Is this really a true belief that I have? Might there be a way that is right?” Then you start getting into the biases, the fallacies, right, all these things that we know about, but we don’t always apply. But we can apply any of these different tools to start opening it up. But the ones you shared are absolutely brilliant, which are, “Is it really true? Can I find evidence to the contrary, right? What would happen if I didn’t believe this belief?” There’s all sorts of tools that we can use at that point to start digging in and dissolving that. And

Kathy (host):
We’ve talked about breath. Let’s do that exercise with breath, if you’re willing to walk us through it.

John (guest):
Yeah, absolutely. So there’s different breaths, and I use breath three different ways. So I use breath tactically, which we’re going to learn in the moment here on how do we calm down? How do we reset? How do we regain control in a moment? I use breath strategically, which is where we’re using breath outside of a stressful situation, to really pattern our body, program our body in a way that makes it more receptive in stress, but also expands our window of tolerance, expands the ability of chaos, uncertainty, of stress, that we’re able to adapt to without going into an extreme response, or even starting to lead to an extreme response. And then finally, I use breath to dissolve limiting beliefs. So one of the things that’s wonderful with the guided breathwork sessions that I do, is I can really take people to a place of safety, and then we can start to bring up these limiting beliefs, like “I don’t deserve to succeed. My investors don’t want me to succeed. I can’t be honest with my venture capitalists, because they’re going to tell me the ABCs if I tell them what’s really going on,” right? So we start busting those things apart in a breathwork. But we’ll teach, we’ll work on the breath right now. So if you find yourself in a stressful situation, a couple of things we want to do. The first one is we have two styles of breathing. One is chest breathing. It’s up in our lungs. We kind of move towards this over time as adults, but the natural way that we were born breathing, and it’s a much more effective breath, is a deep belly breath. So if you just put your hand on your chest and your belly…

Kathy (host):
And I’m doing this too, so I invite you to do it with us.

John (guest):
So if you just, without thinking about it, just take a breath in and see what moved more. Top hand or bottom hand?

Kathy (host):
My bottom.

John (guest):
Bottom. Excellent. So that’s great. So that’s your natural default. If you found your top hand moved, you want to just bring that awareness to make your bottom, make your bottom hand, the belly hand move. So that’s the first thing. We want to do a belly breath when we’re stressed. Do it again and then exhale. So when you do that conscious breath, a deep belly breath, that is a breath of safety for your body. So you could probably feel you feel a little more settled, a little more grounded, right? A little more relaxed just from doing that. So that’s number one. We want to breathe deep. We want to breathe into our belly. Now next, what we want to do is you want to inhale through your nose and exhale through your mouth, and let that exhale be 30% longer than the inhale. So let’s just do this together. We’ll do five seconds in. So if we all exhale out…

John (guest):
Five-second inhale through the nose… and then just opening up your mouth and letting the breath spill out.

Kathy (host):
And how’d that feel? It’s harder. It’s definitely harder. The way how I think about it is as if I’m gently and slowly blowing into a balloon.

John (guest):
Beautiful. I like that. So go ahead and do one of those again, just nice deep breath in through the nose to the belly, then through the mouth to exhale.

John (guest):
And how’s that feel when you do that?

Kathy (host):
Feels very relaxing, very calming, very peaceful. You definitely wouldn’t be doing this if you were really, really under stress. It just it’s physically impossible.

John (guest):
That’s right. That’s right. So when you’re using your mind to consciously do this, what you’re doing is you’re actually telling your body, I’m not stressed, I’m not stressed. Because, like you say it’s not a breath you would do when you’re stressed. So the key on that there are two key parts. First off is the belly breathing. The deep belly breathing is really key to signaling to our body to relax, right? That is a breath of safety. The second part of it is that by making the exhale longer than the inhale, that is also specifically signaling the vagus nerve to calm down. Remember, that’s the nerve that wanders through our body, that’s wandering through our body, up to our brain, so that belly breath, with the exhale, longer than the inhale, again, is signaling to our body to relax.

Kathy (host):
So John, if you are, let’s say that you are in the middle of, you know, a really stressful response, like you having an argument with someone. How would you remind yourself to do this? Is it a certain reminder you that you can put, like on your wrist, or maybe something that will because right now, you know we we are obviously, if you’re listening to this podcast, you’re probably not in a crazy, stressful response. I hope at least you’re not. But how do you remind yourself when you are really there, especially if this hasn’t been an established habit for you?

John (guest):
Well, I have a little story I’ll share with you, right? So this is all very simple, and there’s a game, I don’t know if there’s a game, I don’t know if you ever heard of it, called Othello. Have you ever heard of that game?

Kathy (host):
No, I haven’t.

John (guest):
So you have white chips and black chips, and you have a little square, it’s like a checkerboard, and you put one player’s white, one player’s black, and you put the chips down, and if there’s white chip and three black chips, and you put a white chip down, they all convert to white. Very straightforward, simple, learn game. So my girlfriend taught me this. I got cocky, and I’m like, “Okay, bring it on. Bring it on. I know how to do this. Bring it on. Let’s go.” Within two minutes, she had destroyed me. Just converted everything on the board to her color. I couldn’t put a chip down with her without her flipping it her color. I was just absolutely destroyed and couldn’t do a thing right. And it was a very humbling lesson. But I also learned that simple doesn’t mean mastery. Doesn’t mean easy mastery. So this is the part of practicing breath. This is where I really work with clients to make breath a part of their just normal routine, because the more that you can train your body to relax with the breath, that it’s used to the breath, and there’s different breath patterns we use, the more that we’re then in a stressful situation, able to get what we need out of the breath. We’re first off, our mind is going to “I know what to do here. Let me do the BPM,” which is why I try to make the acronym so simple, so BPM, it’s easy to remember, it’s easy to go to, but the more we practice offline, so to speak, the easier it is. And then our body’s trained too, because our body knows, right? It’s kind of like my dogs. They know when I go scoop the food and I walk to a certain area of the room, they sit down, they start salivating. They know what’s happening. Our body’s the same way when we do this on a regular basis, right? And this is part of what I work with clients on, along with mindset and everything else. But we do this on a regular basis, our body starts knowing, “Oh, I know what’s coming next. I’m going to calm down. I know this,” right? So it reinforces the whole thing. And that, again, is the key. It is a little difficult to learn it first, but that’s why doing it offline makes it easier to do in a stressful situation.

Kathy (host):
Yeah, it’s one of those things where practice makes perfect. Not that you want to get perfect at it, but it’s it really is the repetition, and the repetition of it makes it so much easier. And I’ve noticed that too, like I’ve been using breath work for quite a while, and there’s times when I sort of speak, like, forget about it a little bit. And then, you know, it comes in, bites me at the end, like, “Okay, I need to get back to this practice. I need to get back to meditation. I need to get back” and another, the tool that I use, also that I’ve started using in the last year, it’s tapping that’s very helpful. So I don’t I know we have not talked about tapping officially when we were talking about this podcast, but since it looks like that you are familiar with, can we talk a little bit about that too?

John (guest):
So tapping is something that I’ve done a little bit for myself. I don’t know enough about it to say, here’s all the parts of it. It’s not something I incorporate on my train. I’ve got a great partner who does that, I can connect with, but it’s going back and underscoring the same things, right again. It’s using our body, in a way, to signal to our mind to relax. And that’s where I really think it’s so key, is remembering, right, that two year old toddler with the 800 pound gorilla, which way is that? What? Where’s, what’s that power dynamic right there. So the more that we can use our mind, the conscious part of our mind, to signal to our body, whether it’s through tapping, through breath, through some other physiology, yoga, mindful, whatever it is, right again, we’re signaling to our body to calm down, which allows us to start releasing that hijack. And just even a little bit, we start getting a little blood back to our brain. It’s amazing how differently things look when we do that. And it also is a big factor in decision fatigue. It’s a big factor in decision fatigue when we aren’t able to recognize it, when we’re just burning ourselves out all day long.

Kathy (host):
Yeah, that’s true. And I think of these, all of these things, as tools, and the better the toolbox you have, the bigger your toolbox gets. You are able to pick the things that are most beneficial to you at that particular moment. So it really is, the more you do these things, the better your quality of life is, the better you can make decisions. I mean, it really does change a lot of things in your life, and they’re simple, and they’re free, they’re 100% free, these tools.

John (guest):
Right, right? Yeah, that’s what I love, is I really love. How do we distill something down to the most base concept that’s true, and how do we incorporate that in a way that is just easy to adapt into our life? And the more we can do this, and the more we practice this. And you touched on something so beautiful, which is that we do, we do? We burn ourselves out. We stay in stress. We burn our mental capacity. This was something fascinating. I learned Daniel Kahneman’s book “Thinking Fast and Slow” is the title, and he talks about these two different decision systems in our in our mind, right? We have what he calls system one, which is the more gut response, the more intuitive response, is the ability where a skilled chess master can walk down a street and see a chessboard, someone playing chess on the sidewalk, and say, “white mates in three,” like just looks at the board. And secondly, go, “white mates in three,” because they’re so tuned, they become so skilled in this that it’s just innate to them. It’s very natural. This is the system we live most of our life in without thinking. It’s how we drive to work. We’re so skilled, right? You ever have one of those moments that you’re driving or commuting, you go, “Wait a second, how do I get two thirds of the way on my commute? I don’t remember what happened before there,” right? That’s all this system one, just doing things very low energy cost, very natural. The problem is that this system one has biases and fallacies. It will make mistakes, because we’re kind of going with what feels right, not really running the analytics on it, but it’s what feels right, right. It feels right to go this way. It’s art of us being kind of emotional creatures, going this feels right. So I’m going to go with it. System two sits on top, and it’s the one that’s watching, going, “Ooh, you’re about to make a mistake. It feels like that. But that’s not really the case, right? That’s not you need to do some more research on this. There’s a little bit more you know, this is a tougher decision. You need to do the analytics on it.” We don’t want to pick a stock based on whether we feel good about the stock. We want to pick a stock based on the analytics behind it. We’ve done the research. So system two is really that one that watches, that monitors, that helps us say “You’re about to make a mistake. Let’s step in. Let’s do something differently.” But when we are under stress, when we are constantly feeling like our energy is drained, that’s when it can be subtle. We don’t even have to see that we’re in a stress response like, “Oh my gosh, my heart is racing and everything else.” It can be very subtle that we start to degrade that system too. We’re just running in system one, and we start introducing biases and fallacies, or maybe better yet, we’re aware that we’re in that we can’t make a decision, but we’re deferring decisions that need to be made today because we feel burnt out. So this is how this stuff burns up and it shows up in day to day life.

Kathy (host):
Yeah, that’s a great explanation. And you know, if you feeling this way, it’s, does breath work really, really helps? So John, we have, we have gone through the physiology. We have gone through the BPM. And if someone is saying, “Okay, I understand all of this. I don’t even know where to begin right now.” What would be the simplest thing that they can do? I usually say in the next week or two, but here I’m gonna say in the next five minutes, more relaxed.

John (guest):
Yeah. So I’ll say two great things. One is just being aware of your breath. Awareness is such a powerful thing. If you’re aware of it, you’re aware of how you’re breathing, you’re practicing belly breathing, right? That’s going to be great. You’re going to start to feel the difference in your body. You may not even realize how stressed you are at this moment until you just take a moment and sit and do some deep breaths and go, “Oh, wow. I didn’t realize I was this worried. I was this wired up,” whatnot. The second thing is, I’ve got an amazing course that’s on my website, and I walk through this. I walk through this course on what the stress response is, how to redirect it. I get into practices that you can use. It’s really and even though I work with executives and entrepreneurs, primarily, I want to just democratize this and be able to say, you know, how do I expand this out to more people? It could be, you know, a college student that’s starting to get stressed with an exam schedule coming up, or it could be a mom, a busy single mom who’s got a lot going on our life. Or anybody who says, “I want to learn more about this. I want to do something right now.” It’s on my site at John Hall coaching. You’ll see it there. It’s, course, called “Breathe Easier,” and we get into a lot of the details, two simple, weeks short lessons, but you’re going to walk away with so much more understanding about what’s going on, why your body reacts that way, and what you can do about it.

Kathy (host):
That’s great. Thank you so much, John and I know that people can find you on your website. Is there anywhere else that people can find you that you are on the interwebs?

John (guest):
Yeah, so the website, obviously, at John Hall Coaching is the best way to find me. Also on Instagram and Facebook are two others. It’s John Hall Coaching there as well.

Kathy (host):
Awesome. So we will put all of the links in the show notes. Also, John has talked about a lot of other resources or a lot of other books, so we’re going to put that in there as well. So if you want to take a look at it, feel free to do it. And thank you so much, John, this has been a very de-stressful type of conversation, and it was very enlightening. Thank you so much.

John (guest):
Kathy, thank you so much for having me here. This has been so much fun.