Dr. Joel Rosen: And welcome back to another edition of your adrenal fix where we teach exhausted and burnt-out adults the truth about their health so that they can get their energy back quickly. And today, what a real pleasure. I’m joined by Andres Olson, he’s a trainer. He’s an author, he’s an innovator is the founder of conscious breathing. He’s been on an incredible journey since he decided to be the world’s foremost expert in breathing. His mind was racing his whole life.

And he was fortunate to come across different tools to help him with his inner calm. And he’s really settled in on the conscious breathing retraining program. And I’ll let him explain his entire story today and how this will help you with your stress response and being exhausted and burnt out. So with more with no further ado, Andres, thank you so much for being here today. I appreciate your time.

Anders Olsson: Thank you, Dr. Joel, for having me.

Dr. Joel Rosen: Yeah. So I always like to get a little bit of your background, and I know you were in the import of computers and gadgets, and so forth. And what was it that made you finally realize that you’ve got to, you’ve got to change the trajectory that you’re on?

Anders Olsson: Well, you know, I was just chasing money and having these long to-do lists and a lot of inner stress and didn’t feel fulfilled, felt empty inside. And although the money I chased, they started to come in. And that’s what you think may be the key to success to happiness, but I found out it wasn’t. So that’s when I started to look at health and become interested in health.

And it coincided with my when my son when he was six years old, and he was diagnosed with Lyme disease. And he didn’t feel well at all. And at the time, my view of the hospital and the doctor, and the healthcare system was very, like I lived in the computer world. So it was very binary, either you take a test, and either you’re healthy, or you’re sick. And that was not the case, I realized when I came there with my son that there was a lot of guesswork and a lot of ways of interpreting the results. It was not black or white, which of course makes a lot of sense because our bodies are hugely complex. But for me when my son didn’t feel well, it was a way for me to try to help him and dig into how the body works. And ever since I’ve been stuck in that because it’s so so so fascinating.

Dr. Joel Rosen: Yeah, for sure. Thank you for sharing, I do a lot of Nutri genomic interpretations, which in English means we look at your genome. And we look at the overlapping environmental talk triggers, if you will, that ended up causing the loaded genetic gun to go off and creating this perfect storm of genetic susceptibilities and environmental triggers that create exhaustion, fatigue, burnout, and under.

One of the areas in that studies that we look at is the entire we call the Fenton reaction side of the pyramid, which is, of course when oxygen mixes with iron. And it’s another way that our respiratory cellular ability to use oxygen breaks down. But the whole point of what I’m trying to get at is the gentleman that formulated that software, he won a lot of studies in Islands, which is in the conferences of Lyme disease, and he found that majority of people that get hit harder, everything else being equal in terms of health challenges, are these ones that have these genetic susceptibilities of not moving iron out a tissue, so they can’t open the doorway for iron to get out. They can’t convert vitamin beta carotene into vitamin A, they have difficulty with transporting copper, very difficult time recycling their iron.

And it has to do with pretty much what you’ve discovered, which is that if you’re not breathing at that cellular level, effectively, any other environmental triggers are gonna make you that much worse. So I guess the question would be in that process with your son and with your own health, where did oxygen or how did oxygen come into the equation?

Anders Olsson:  Yeah, it was a few years later when I read a book actually how to swap asthma for life by changing your breathing, and it had a profound effect on me on my ability to calm down. I had this racing mind for the majority of my life and looking back I realized that what I wanted more than anything was a way simple, yet effective way to calm down.

And I tried many different things changing my eating habits, training habits, drinking habits, working habits. But it was when I found out about changing your breathing habits, that was the key for me, it has such a huge impact. So almost immediately I noticed the effect, just by turning my breath and changing it, I could notice the effect on being able to calm down. And I thought this is way too good to keep to myself, I really want to spread it to the world.

Dr. Joel Rosen: Right. Okay, so reading that book, you realize that breathing plays a significant role in your racing mind, I guess, take us through the evolution from there, I guess in terms of what you’ve learned since then, or what you’ve developed?

I know that’s a very broad question. But I guess start us out at the beginning where you’re like, Okay, this is too good, to not share with the rest of the world. But take us through as your knowledge base got bigger, and what you decided to do with your own business.

Anders Olsson: Yeah, so I started to focus all my attention on breathing. And I trained to become a yoga instructor, I trained in the Matejko method, and the Russian professor, late professor Constantine, taiko, and many many other modalities and read tons of research reports and books and tried everything with my own body. And one of the main things I discovered when was the benefits of carbon dioxide. And how it helps you, to regain that balance between activity and recovery and the realization that with every breath, actually, we regulate our nervous system with the inhale, we go in a direction towards activation and fight-flight, while the exhale is the opposite. Ah, if I’m exaggerating, we don’t normally breathe like that, of course, but inhale activation. exhalation is relaxation and recovery and parasympathetic.

And in my view, there is a huge misunderstanding, we have an obsession with oxygen, we think it’s only about oxygen. Of course, we know that we’re super dependent on oxygen because if we stop breathing for just a couple of minutes, we will die. So of course, oxygen is crucial in order to produce energy efficiently.

And then we may think that carbon dioxide is just a simple waste product. And I tried to tell the story that it’s about balance, which almost anything in life is about right, our car doesn’t go better, just because we give it more fuel, it will be just as bad to have too much as to have too little the same with water or with anything, it should be a balance. So our breathing should mimic our body’s needs at any given time. This means that it is different when I’m sitting on the sofa watching TV or if I’m out running.

And this obsession with oxygen and the web we have a tendency to forget that the only possible explanation why we store so little oxygen in our bodies is so that we can only survive for a few minutes. There has to be a reason for that if we compare to the amount of fat and sugar and water and other things we have stored in our body, there are huge reserves, but oxygen is good enough to go by a couple of minutes and the only reason that I can think of is that oxygen is toxic. So that’s the reason why our body stores as little supply as possible.

Because we know that for example, if I take a bite of an apple and put it down, the Apple will turn brown in just a short period of time. So in general, we want to protect our food from oxygen, right because oxygen is extremely reactive. That’s why it’s so important when we want to produce energy in our mitochondria, which we also call the powerhouses the furnaces, there are fires burning in our body in the mitochondria and when you add oxygen to a fire, it will burn better but of course, if you add too much oxygen, it will explode basically because oxygen is so extremely reactive.

So that means it is not good to oh, I took a big breath now I’m oxygenating my body better no actually you don’t you may create more oxygen-free radicals which we also called oxidative stress and inflammations. So that is the one aspect of how many of us are breathing we have a tendency to breathe fast and shallowly or we may breathe through our mouth or hold our breath in, we breathe in a more chaotic way. And all of these can be seen as over-breathing, which means we take in more oxygen than our body needs.

So we increase the oxidative stress. Because when we are at rest with a normal breathing rate, which most people don’t seem to have a normal breathing rate, according to medical textbooks is about six liters per minute, many studies show that we may breathe eight or 10 or 15 liters per minute. So in this normal breathing rate, breathing volume of six liters per minute, we only use up a quarter of the oxygen we inhale, and the rest 75% is exhaled. So already at a Low Breathing volume, very low and slow and rhythmic breathing that most of us don’t engage in, we only use up very little of the oxygen we take into taking a big breath is a complete misunderstanding, we do not oxygenate our body better. So that is the one aspect.

The other aspect is carbon dioxide. And it turns out that carbon dioxide is as far away from just a simple waste product as we can ever come it has many many different important properties in our body, including helping the smooth muscles relax, we have the heart muscles, and we have the skeletal muscles that we can control by well. And then we have the smooth muscles and they surround the airways, the blood vessels, the stomach, the intestines, and so forth.

And when carbon dioxide goes down, which it does, when we over breathe, we breathe slightly faster than we take in more oxygen and exhale more carbon dioxide. So we lower the levels of carbon dioxide in our bodies. And when it does, we will then make these smooth muscles constrict. And because carbon dioxide works closely with nitric oxide, so basically we can say, when carbon dioxide levels go down, nitric oxide production goes down. And nitric oxide is what is actually stimulating the smooth muscles to relax and widen. So, in essence, what I’m trying to say is that when you hyperventilate, the airways will constrict, and they will get more narrow airways and lungs, as well as the blood vessels. So there will be more friction, it will be harder for the air to flow and harder for the blood to flow. So your body had to work harder to oxygenate the muscles deliver the brain etc.

Dr. Joel Rosen: Go it’s amazing, I appreciate the nuances that you’ve picked up in your study. Really, because you can see how Apple evolutionarily, our body has adapted based on the cues of life, right? And you think about and you will probably agree with this. Over the millennia. The program stress response, whenever there’s an increase of sort of unlikelihood for survival being eaten for food or prey, it’s going to create a sympathetic response, which is going to shuttle important nutrients away from the parasympathetic and more for the fleeing. And then ideally that that trigger goes away.

And we get back on with our life. However, as you’ve noticed, as well, not just the rising co2 levels in the environment, but chemicals and toxins and waste products and EMFs and social media and pesticides and sprays and heavy metals and viruses and 5g and dope, you know, cell-cell text messages and stuff. I think it keeps us in a constant hypoxic state, if you will, in terms of we’re not getting enough oxygen and we’re not getting enough buildup of co2. So I guess the question would be was that was missing Enders in terms of when you did all your own research that no one was really emphasizing the importance of co2 or they were over-exaggerating the importance of oh two, was that where you found your little niche in terms of your area of I can bring this information to the masses?

Anders Olsson: Yeah, I think that’s a good way to put it. Yeah. And my main discovery, so I worked with this since 2009. And it was in 2010. When I was already in the beginning started with nasal breathing restrictions Seeing my breathing, breathing lower and slower lower using my diaphragm, slowing down my breathing.

And I realized that that type of breathing also breathing through my nose, helps you to restore the balance between oxygen and carbon dioxide you take in a little less oxygen, and you maintain a little more carbon dioxide. So when I started applying those simple principles when doing physical activity, I noticed that when I increased that, so for example, when I went out for a jog, I took a one-hour jog and I decided to do what I call carbon dioxide training or oxygen restriction training.

And if you look at different training concepts today, they they are actually doing that when you go to high altitude. A lot of elite athletes do they go to high altitudes to increase their blood oxygen-carrying capacity. And at higher altitudes, the oxygen levels are lower. So the body needs to respond to that. So more red blood cells are released into the blood and more are manufactured.

And also more carbon dioxide is retained in the body. And also, when you do high-intensity interval training is the same, you are not able to deliver enough oxygen to your muscles and you’re not able to get rid of all the carbon dioxide is similar to doing high-altitude training. It’s oxygen restriction and carbon dioxide loading if you do, katsu if you know that the Japanese method where you basically put a strap over the muscle that you want to exercise, again, you restrict oxygen and you eat more carbon dioxide in the area and the muscle will get stronger and bigger, faster.

So what I discovered when I went out for this carbon dioxide, training a jog, which meant that I was only breathing through my nose and trying to breathe as few breaths per minute as possible. Taking, for example, two, or three steps on the inhale, and six to eight steps on the exhale. And it was tough, every single step was really tough. I felt oh, I want to take a big breath. But I feel myself while next three next lampposts. And then I can take a big breath. But then again, I set a new small target.

So eventually, I made it home for about one hour. And then the reward came, I was extremely harmonious and calm, I sat down at the kitchen table and felt extremely harmonious a level I haven’t experienced yet, maybe when I got my two kids, but it was on that level. And three, three hours later, I was still sitting there, just super relaxed, wondering what the heck was going on. So I think that was my real starting point to realize the importance of carbon dioxide. If we want to be smarter, kinder, and happier. It’s key to finding a balance between the two. Yeah, no, that’s great.

Dr. Joel Rosen: Observation. Thank you for sharing. I know that. David St. Clair talks about aging is really the breakdown of communication inside the body. And I think if you think about what oxygen is, especially if it’s toxic, it’s a chemical messenger. Same thing with carbon dioxide if it’s not low, or if it needs it starting to build up. It’s a chemical messenger.

And it puts our body in, what we call a danger response. And I use the analogy of thinking of it as the danger response at the macro level where let’s say you have a very low income, and you have a lot of expenses, your body’s not going to be able to keep up with the demand.

And it’s going to prioritize what expenses do get met in order to survive. And then as you build up a surplus, now you’re not just paying interest payments only, but you’re paying into the principal. So I guess paying into the principal, would be the added effects that you’ve listed beyond the blissfulness. So maybe we can talk some about that, that once you’ve been doing this for a long period of time and you retrain your body in terms of having it is more natural with the conscious breathing program.

What can we expect with additional improvements? I guess it’s a two-part question. What is the conscious breathing program? And what additional effects can we anticipate beyond just paying back interest payments, if you will, but you know, cutting into the deficit?

Anders Olsson: Yeah, so we’ll start with the second question. Ultimately, I think it’s longevity. Because if you start studying this,, you realize that animals that have figured this out that are able to live on lower levels of oxygen and tolerate higher levels of carbon dioxide, they live longer. One of the most studied animals is the naked mole rat, it’s just a small rat, but it lives up to 30 years, which is 10 to 15 times longer than its cast in a normal rat, and when it does not suffer from oxidative stress, doesn’t suffer from osteoporosis, it has a low breeding frequency.

And even when you inject cancer cells into the naked mole rat, it does not develop cancer. So in other animals as well, if you look at it, termite queens can live up to 50 years and Queen up to 30 years they live an in the nest below the ground, where there are high levels of carbon dioxide, because all mammals are carbon dioxide factories, right producing carbon dioxide. So it’s similar to asking people if we come together in a room.

And some will complain after a while Oh, I don’t like the air quality, that person has low tolerance for carbon dioxide, most likely, because that is what happened, you shift you lower the oxygen slightly in you increase the carbon dioxide slightly. So that will be the ultimate, I think evidence of learning to tolerate this and finding the right balance. And honestly, this is very important.

That is something that we are not aware of. You mentioned earlier the increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. But it’s not like if we compare it to when it’s very cold, we just realize that it’s cold and then we act accordingly we put on more clothes, or if it’s very warm, we adapt to that. But the increase of carbon dioxide exposure to the human body is going very slow.

So when we talk about global warming, it’s all about the increase of carbon dioxide and how horrible that is for the environment. But we don’t realize that this increase which is about 35% in the atmosphere in the last 65 years, that affects our metabolism as well because it is not lack of oxygen that makes us take the next breath it is the buildup of carbon dioxide in our bodies. So carbon dioxide stimulates breathing. And if you then are exposed to more carbon dioxide, and that is not only from the increase in the atmosphere, we spend about 90% of our time indoors.

And we get more and more people on this planet. So we and we live in bigger and bigger cities. So we come together more and more people. So typical indoor air could contain two to three times as much carbon dioxide as atmospheric air. If you sleep with the person in the bedroom with the window and doors closed, typically, in the morning hours after a few nights asleep, the levels in the bedroom will be maybe seven 810 times as high as the atmospheric air and if you go in a car, the levels could also reach very high levels within a short period of time, if you wear a facemask mask, which was very popular during COVID Also your increase to carbon dioxide exposure is increased and the oxygen reduction.

So I think a very important message that I tried to get across is that we have to understand that our exposure to carbon dioxide increases. And if you don’t deal with it, if you don’t learn to tolerate it, you will end up in a permanent state of stress because it drives breathing. And at some point, you will just continue breathing very fast and very shallowly and you will have a huge problem because there are numerous studies linking breathing fast shallow breathing to a number of health issues.

And yeah, and of course, so in my view, carbon dioxide is something good and if you learn to tolerate it, then the benefit is that you will increase your consciousness that was what I felt when I went out for this young good 13 years ago and felt, you know, it aligned with everything In the universe, sort of that, that la la land, that happiness, harmonious feeling that being in the zone, and that is the benefit of learning to tolerate. So it’s basically a divide or a crossroad. Either you learn to tolerate it and you will grow as a person, or you do not learn to tolerate the increased levels of co2, and you end up under more stress. So, that is the answer to question number two. And now I have forgotten questions.

Dr. Joel Rosen: Well, I remember number one was a little bit more about the conscious breathing program. But we’ll get there in a second because I want to make a comment on that. So it seems like the buildup of carbon dioxide is the most fundamental hormetic stressor that we need to be able, to adapt to. And when I say hormesis, hormesis is the exposure to stressors, toxins, and environmental triggers, that make us stronger over time by adapting to them.

And when I say someone has a very little surplus, or their demand and supply has been so unequal for so long, that even their autonomic nervous system is not able to regulate itself, because you’re so far behind on the bills, if you will, that you’re not even paying for power and you know, food on the table. That’s where your body is not able to regulate its temperature. When it’s cold, it’s hard to warm up when it’s hot, it’s hard to cool down. When you stand up, you get a drop in blood pressure, you might feel lightheaded when you go up a flight of stairs, and your heart rate seems to be rhythmic.

And it seems to be very fluttery. So I think it’s really important with what you’re saying the next leap is you can’t separate the emotional component to that either. Right? Whereas, let’s say that’s happening to me emotionally a higher order. Human beings and creatures, we now have that thought, you know, the upper part of the brain where we attach meaning and purpose to it, and then we start to get freaked out, Oh, my God, this isn’t good. I’m awful, I’m going to die. I feel that’s where I think the emotional component comes in, where if you can regulate that breathing, so that you’re tolerating the co2, and you’re creating that increased blood flow to the areas of the brain that is enriching it, but it’s not dominated by that limbic center of fight or flight and fear. I think, would you agree, I guess the question is, would you agree that as you be able to tolerate this carbon dioxide tolerance, that naturally, it stands to reason that the only way you’re going to do that is by shutting off the emotional, negative sympathetic contacts that are being placed on it? Does that make sense? The question that I’m asking you is.

Anders Olsson: I mean, studies show that there is emotional breathing. So if I am angry, my breath signature has a specific angry signatory, if I’m stressed out, I have a different stress, a different breathing in which studies have shown so by there was a very interesting study where they took a group of people and have them try to go into specific emotions, and then afterward describing their breathing, and there were specific patterns for specific emotional states.

And then I took another group and asked them to breathe in that specific way. And they were able to get into that emotion just by breathing in that specific way. So it goes both ways, right? Your breathing is a reflection of your state physically, mentally, and emotionally. And by changing the way you breathe, you can change these states.

Dr. Joel Rosen: Right? Right. It’s you know, it’s almost like the reverse Pavlovian dog experiments where you have the bell that rings and then you give the dog some powder to make it salivate. And then you no longer need to give it the powder because the bell has been paired with the stimuli. But in this case, you’re asking the natural reflexive response of fear to be changed in terms of everything’s okay slowing down your breathing, conscientiously feeling the release or, you know, really training your brain. I guess that would be a good segue into conscious breathing in the program that you’ve developed.

How important is the thought process besides the mechanical extra breaths out last breaths in or timing how Orton is the actual conscientiousness or the emotional state, when faced with those stressors, honors in your program?

Anders Olsson: Yeah, so firstly, if we just address what is conscious breathing, so firstly, it’s a way to understand my nervous system being able to read it and realize that, as I mentioned earlier, with every breath, we shift, with every breathing cycle, we shift between activation and relaxation, and many of us seem to be stuck in a state of stress and activation and fight-flight, which is not bad per se, of course, we need it. But the problem is if we are there too often for too long. So that is the first pillar.

The second pillar is breath knowledge and breath awareness, the understanding of what happens in our body, when we breathe, that gives us a y, which makes it easy to engage in different breathing exercises, not just because someone tells you to do something, but you also understand that the nose is there to protect your lungs, it helps you to to clean the bacteria and viruses that we inherited helps you to warm and humidify the air, etc.

And the other part of that is breath awareness, the awareness of your daily breathing habits, how are you breathing when you talk, when you eat when you do physical activity? Is there a connection between when you’re stressed out, and as you’re breathing, then shallow and fast? Or do you hold your breath when concentrating? So starting to pay attention to that and get an awareness that is usually the first step towards change, understanding, oh my god, there is a connection, I don’t know where it comes from, I’m that scared. And then when I look at my breathing, my breathing pattern is also that scary.

And then we can do something about it. So the third pillar of conscious breathing is to help you calm your nervous system, you can, of course, go in both directions, you can easily activate your nervous system just by starting to read faster and shallow or hold your breath. But what we found is that most people like to have tools to calm their nervous system. And it’s very simple. The principles are very simple.

The typical hallmarks of activation, and breathing, are mouth breathing, fast breathing, shallow breathing, holding the breath, noisy breathing, and labored breathing. And if you want to change from a state of fight-flight into a state of safe and security and rest and digest, you just do the opposite, close your mouth. Breathe low, using your diaphragm slowly and rhythmically, and quietly. And the best way to do that is usually just to close your mouth and prolong your exhale slightly.

Dr. Joel Rosen: Right, and I guess is there a step four, step five, where you start to pair it with a positive emotion or a celebration or gratitude or a different form of energy that shows up beside the sympathetic thoughts that are automatically paired with the with all those bore ways of breathing?

Anders Olsson: Yeah, so we didn’t have conscious breathing, we have the exhale exercises, which are both physical exercises to help you open up your airway soon because even though our diaphragm is our most important breathing muscle, it’s supposed to do 70 to 80% of the muscular work, moving the air in and out of the lungs at rest. But there are many different muscles in our neck and throat and back, and chest that are involved in breathing, and many of them if they are stiff and tense, will inhibit the flow of air, it will make it harder to breathe. So these exercises help to open up the airways and make it easy for the air to flow in and out of the lungs. And the other part of the Excel exercises is one that helps you to find your inner calm, like guided relaxation exercises. Right.

Dr. Joel Rosen: Excellent. So that’s great. So then, as far as I know, you’ve also developed a couple of tools besides your course. One is the body stream dry co2 bath. So I’m very interested to discuss that how that came about and, giving our listeners exactly what that does in terms of harnessing co2, so maybe you can elaborate on how you came up with that.

Anders Olsson: Yeah, so the carbon dioxide did A suit we call body stream, it was if you imagine an astronaut sawed it suit that you put on, and then you vacuum pump out all the air, and then you fill it up with carbon dioxide, and then the carbon dioxide is absorbed through the skin. And it turns out that hot springs, which has been popular for centuries, that the main effect people get from them, they notice an effect on the heart and the circulation on the skin. And the mental capacity, the ability to calm down, the major effects from these hot springs is actually carbon dioxide.

And since not all of us can have a hot spring in our backyard. There have been ways of developing alternatives and the dry carbon dioxide bath is one of those. So it’s not our product is not unique in that sense. But yeah, as I mentioned earlier, I’ve started carbon dioxide a lot and see so many benefits when you read the studies. I read a few studies today.

One was about the increase of muscular mitochondria when exposed to carbon dioxide. Another one was where they broke the legs of 140 rats and exposed them to carbon dioxide. And it was a huge improvement in healing when exposed to carbon dioxide compared to the control group. Right? Yeah, so there are many, many effects and where we describe it is as parasympathetic Deluxe, because it really helps people to wind down. And that’s where our popular term is to boost your immune system. And I think the optimum way of doing that, or one of the best ways of doing that is just to calm down because then there will be a lot of energy for the immune system.

Dr. Joel Rosen: Right. Excellent. And as far as the relax it or tell us a little bit about that I’m interested to know about how that works and how that helps for carbon dioxide tolerance.

Anders Olsson: Yes, the whole principle of conscious breathing is actually to help restore the balance between oxygen and carbon dioxide. So whether it’s the body stream or relaxing Sater and the other products we have, it’s about restricting the oxygen intake slightly and increasing the carbon dioxide tolerance by simply slowing down our breathing. So the relaxation gives you a resistance on the out-breath, you put it in your mouth, you inhale through the nose, and out through relaxation and you set a resistance very easily of your choice.

And then you prolong the exhale slightly. So this little device then helps you to slow down your breathing, getting a low and slow and rhythmic breathing that more than anything, I would say, gives the brain a steady supply of oxygen. So if I’m in if I have a tight deadline, or if I just need to concentrate and want to be focused. So for example, right now I’m updating my book. It’s a fantastic tool because the brain doesn’t need any pauses. I’m not saying that I’m not taking any pauses.

But I have come to realize that the reason why oh, I need to go to the bathroom, I need to have a cup of coffee, I need to call my best friend, I need to clean the toilet, or whatever. When we’re engaging in these tasks that demand a lot of us the brain figures out ways to take us away from that. And I think a major reason for that is that we either shift between either breathing too fast or holding our breath, which disturbs the oxygen supply to the brain. And that means the brain gets stressed out more than anything. It wants to predict what’s coming and it wants to predict the oxygen supply. So if you can have this rhythmic, low, and slow breathing, the brain will calm down and it’s easy for you to stay focused for a long time.

Dr. Joel Rosen: So okay, so that is that would you suggest that with a bunch of different tasks that we normally get fidgety with or just at any time or with walking meditation? What’s the best way to use that device? Oh, yeah.

Anders Olsson: So I mainly use it in front of my computer when working but many people love Using it in the car before going to sleep, maybe in bed or before getting up in the morning, when watching TV when cooking all kinds of situations, since it’s so little and lightweight, you can have it in your mouth for a long time without a problem. And any situation where you find, okay, I have some it’s possible for me to also do breathing retraining. For example, if I’m in the car for half an hour or an hour every day, it’s a perfect way of retraining my breathing helping me to achieve this rhythmic, low slow breathing more and more often.

Dr. Joel Rosen: Right, excellent. Okay. And as far as I have a couple of other questions, I know that one of the big things that you talk about is sleep. So maybe we could explain why balancing your co2 and your oh two in conscious breathing will have an impact on your sleep.

Anders Olsson: Yeah, so we recommend everyone to take their mouth shot at night. So we have developed a product for this called Sleep tape. And I participated a few years ago in a study at Stanford together with James Nesta who wrote the book Breath where he talks about the study quite a bit. And what we did was for 10 days and 10 Nights, we blocked our nose, so we could only breathe through our mouth. And our sleep was the thing that got most negatively affected.

And we went from no snoring, for example, to three hours of snoring per night, I woke every morning with dry as a desert in my mouth. And during the night I was fidgeting and bouncing back and forth and waking up many times. And then after these 10 days, we did so and we did a number of tests every day, I think we tested things around three hours per day, from blood to HRV, to standing on one leg to doing push-ups, a lot of things.

And then we did 10 days of conscious breathing, which included taping our mouth shut at night. And again, I was down to no snoring at all, it was a huge difference comparing the two. So we all know the effect that a bad night’s sleep has on our performance and our mood the next day. But we have a tendency I would say in today’s society to not prioritize our sleep, we wake up to the alarm, which basically means that we drag our body out of bed when it’s not fully rested, the body wants to stay in bed, but our map mind forces it to go up.

So sleep is crucial for everything from learning. If if, if you read a book and I question you about the content of the book, and I do that the same day, your results will not be as good as if I question you the next day because during the night the brain will be able to all the stimuli that you are being exposed to during the day will be sorted and categorized and put in different boxes and so that you can understand and get the bigger picture.

And also the brain is cleaned. At night. It’s like when you go to bed you push the button to the dishwasher and washing machine. Because that is quite recently discovered, right we have our body’s lymphatic system, which is our sewage system to get rid of waste products. The brain’s cleaning system is called the glymphatic system. And that is not active in the daytime. It’s only when we sleep and it’s not only about the hours, it’s also about the quality of our sleep. So I think that is crucial. Sleep is so underrated, I would say.

Dr. Joel Rosen: Yeah, I think you’re just it’s interesting to see you and hear your evolution of the balancing of the fine, the fine act between too little and too much. And I’m glad and thank you for really shedding light on the importance of the oxygen-carbon dioxide balance. Because ultimately, if you’re I’ve said this a lot with the people we work with that are exhausted, tired burnt out you either have oxygen work for you or you have oxygen work against you. It’s not really in between if you will.

And if you are able to harness oxygen effectively so that you’re making ATP and energy and carbon dioxide and that’s in a good balance and that’s right out of biochemistry 101 Then there’s gonna be less stress or dry go. And that’s what the definition of mechanical stress is right? Whenever there’s an unclean formula, and vice versa, if you’re not able to do that, then you’re going to have oxygen use work against you. And so many challenges, I guess one more area I’d get into is, if someone’s listening to this, and you have a lot of great information and blog posts and articles on your website, which we’ll post a link to, and, and be able to hopefully offer our listener a discount on your products. Why is it that it would help and facilitate weight loss or fat loss?

Anders Olsson: Well, in order to, I mean, we usually burn fat or sugar right in our body to produce entity and sugar can be fermented outside of the mitochondria, but fat cannot, that needs oxygen to be burned. So if we start to engage in this, over breathing, if we start to have an imbalance between oxygen and carbon dioxide, there will be areas of our body that will receive less oxygen than it needs. And then we basically shut the door slightly to our fat reserves.

So we have seen over and over how people that start to slow down their breathing, open up the doors to the fat reserves, they are able to burn more fat, which makes a lot of sense. And if you study people that are overweight, there are very, very few to be honest when they are walking. And even if sometimes when they are sitting, they have their mouth open, which is the hallmark of stress breathing poor oxygenation.

Dr. Joel Rosen: Right? Yeah, no, I’m glad you shared that insight. Because it is again out of the biochemistry of one on one aerobic respiration using oxygen. So I always say you’re either using oxygen for you or you’re not. So I always like to ask my guests when we’re coming to the end here on there’s knowing what you know, now versus what you didn’t know, then what would you have told the younger version of yourself?

That you know, now a lot sooner than you’d had to figure out to help your quality of life or your purpose or, or just overcome stressors? What would that youthful sort of sage-like information, you would have told your younger self? What would that have been?

Anders Olsson: I would have told my younger self to shut his mouth and prolong his exhale.

Dr. Joel Rosen: Where is everything we just said, right? Because that will help you balance carbon dioxide be able to increase blood flow, be able to turn off your sympathetic system, be able to produce more energy effectively with fewer free radicals and be able to ultimately get where you want. But then you might not have discovered all these other you may not have gotten down these other pathways. Curious, how is your son doing now?

Anders Olsson: Oh, I mean, that was when he was six. He’s now 25. So So Cory is there? He’s doing fine. But he got help with traditional medical treatment with strong doses of antibiotics.

Dr. Joel Rosen: Okay, and hope he’s a conscious breather as well now.

Anders Olsson: Yeah, I would say so.

Dr. Joel Rosen: Yeah. Okay. All right. Well, listen, I appreciate your time. Andres Olson, as we said, is the founder of conscious breathing. He’s got amazing products and is able to support your stress response so that you’re not living in that sympathetic fight or flight. And that’s what I really liked about what you do is, is that a lot of people will get on the magic diet or the, like, 1001 different supplements.

And really breathing is like you mentioned, it’s not just that we’re supposed to breathe, but how are we supposed to breathe is really key. And thank you for your time. And we’ll post links to all of your, your information at the end of this podcast and wherever we’re uploading it to social media. And I wish you nothing but continued success in your endeavors. And thank you for everything that you do.

Anders Olsson: Thank you and thank you, Dr. John, for having me. It’s been a pleasure.

If you’re interested in trying any of Anders’s products go here, and be sure to use discount code drjoel10 

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