The Sweet Slumber Podcast: Baby-Centered Sleep

Episode 65- "Discover the Powerful Connection Between Breathing Habits & Sleep Quality" with Julia Yarovoy

• Season 4 • Episode 65

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In this enlightening episode of "Sweet Slumber," host Meredith Brough welcomes Julia Yarovoy, a registered dental hygienist, myofunctional therapist, and Buteyko breathing educator, to delve into the transformative power of proper breathing techniques on sleep and overall health. Meredith opens up about her personal journey, sharing how she overcame persistent asthma symptoms by incorporating Julia's breathing methods into her daily routine.

Meredith and Julia emphasize the powerful impact that mindful breathing can have on one's life. They encourage listeners to start paying attention to their breathing patterns and try out the techniques discussed in the episode for better sleep and overall health. Julia offers simple, actionable steps to start improving your breathing habits today.

Topics:

  • Julia's background as a dental hygienist & her transition into breathing education
  • The science behind breathing techniques & their impact on health
  • Meredith's struggle with asthma and how it affected her sleep & daily life
  • Discovering Julia's breathing techniques & the subsequent improvement in her asthma symptoms
  • Why nasal breathing is crucial 
  • The benefits of breathing through the nose versus the mouth
  • Detailed explanation of slow exhales & their calming effect on the nervous system
  • New breathing practices to incorporate into daily life for improved respiratory function
  • How proper breathing can help manage & reduce stress levels
  • New exercises to practice mindful breathing during stressful situations
  • The role of breathing in managing sleep apnea & snoring
  • Tips for improving sleep quality through better breathing habits
  • How breathing habits influence sleep quality & overall well-being
  • The ripple effect of improved breathing on mental & physical health

Enjoy Julia's resources for further learning and practice. Visit this website to learn more about her services and set up a consultation. You may receive life-changing guidance and support! Direct email: HappyMyoNYC@gmail.com.

Mentioned:
Julia's articles on mouth taping and snoring: 


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Disclaimer:
The content of this podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be considered medical advice. Always consult with a healthcare professional.

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Meredith Brough (00:52)
Today, I am happy to share one of my close friends and associates with you. Julia Yarovoy from Happy Myo in New York City. Hi, Julia. Hi. So nice to see you and be on your podcast. I'm so excited.

just so you all know, this is number two talking about breathing because it's that important. That it is Julia.

has been on my show before. So if you didn't see the episode, you need to go back and check that out because it's kind of like the precursor. And she's going to be back because she is amazing. And as I'm about to explain, has so much training and expertise to share. And I really wanted to come back and talk to us about myofunctional therapy and a little bit different side of sleep disorders that we don't talk about. But today we're going to talk about

sleep disorders just a little bit or maybe a lot. Focusing on breathing again, because there's just so much more to know. Julia has been my breathing therapist for several months. She graduated me. I graduated a couple of weeks ago and she's going to be excited when I say this. She has helped me.

eliminate my asthma symptoms, which used to affect me daily. And, you know, when you deal with asthma, it's a lot like having panic attacks all the time, because you're like, my gosh, I can't breathe. And then you make yourself worse and you can't breathe worse. So it's a big deal. and honestly, I noticed it in my, in the videos that I make, I used to get breathless.

I've had people say, what was wrong? Why'd you do that? And I was, it's just my asthma. And now I notice it just a little bit in one video I made recently, but I don't think anyone else did. All right. Very good. And you remember how you learn how to speak on the exhale, speak like a queen. We practiced that also. And here you are speaking like a queen. Everything has changed quite a bit. It's pretty cool.

She's helped me with my sleep too, because she has that side of the expertise as well. And my favorite is helping me feel regulated, calm, relaxed, more present with my family, focused on my work, but being able to handle my stress and it's been extreme lately.

Super grateful to her. You know that her breathing technique even helped me when my back went out a couple of days ago. No chest breathing. If you don't breathe your chest, you won't hurt your back. It was like the most casual introduction I've ever done. You are one of the best students for sure. You were so diligent with every exercise. Every week you were doing exercises. It's perfect. And...

I'm very, very happy and proud of you. Good job. Thank you. From the best instructor guys. All right. Julia is a registered dental hygienist, which I didn't realize she was actively doing until just recently. A certified Buteyko breathing educator, a myofunctional therapist and a sleep coach. She lives and works in New York City, which when I'm in a big city, I always think about her because I'm like, how can you live this way?

She provides care for children, four and up and adults. And she has a special interest in breathing practices related to hormonal changes in women. So that's a whole nother

then her in her sleep coaching practice, she helps her clients with regaining control of their sleep through lifestyle changes and various exercises. As a myofunctional therapist, she helps clients with their orofacial health.

As a Buteyko breathing educator, she teaches proper breathing techniques to help with a variety of conditions. All of her clients receive personalized care, which often consists of a mixture of all three specializations that are tailored for their needs, which makes her one of my heroes. Actually just talked about this in my Instagram in the last week, how people like you are my heroes because you can't get enough learning.

You feel like you never help people enough. You're just like so interested in learning all the things to help people fully and a full picture, a full circle. And and that's why I'm telling people they need to take my sleep consultant course, because, you know, if you're like that, you got to help moms in another way. Right. Yes. You constantly learn. Absolutely. And you're always searching for this, the grain of.

something even better, you know, to add to your knowledge and that you should never stop learning. You know, you have to be out of your comfort zone because if you're like stuck in this swamp, you don't really grow. Not you, you're not growing. Your clients don't grow. And but the life evolves like around so many things. And it's like constantly changing and it goes in different directions also.

Yeah, so this knowledge and we can kind of find something that we can utilize in our practices. It's sometimes it's unrelated to your to your practice, but you can utilize that. Yeah, so personal life or it'll come up. It'll come up. That you shared or somebody shared with you and something that you felt like you said that in your practice you you're going with your gut feeling.

And that's so important, you know, like, so you see what works and you know, it's practical. if

pursue education for the wrong reasons, The wrong reason would be something like not feeling confident enough, not believing in yourself, thinking I need more certification. I'm not, you know, I can't help people without more.

So that can be a roadblock or we are, you know, kind of getting in our own way, but it's also a mental game where we're just not feeling adequate. But don't you agree that it's just important to just start using those things that you've learned, start sharing and teaching, and then you gain confidence, right? That's absolutely right. You know, like I remember once I was offered the position in college to be an instructor for hygienists and I was just out of the school.

And I remember I was talking to my mom and she said something that the best way of learning is teaching. And that stuck with me. So the more you teach, the more you learn. And that's because everybody is different. You have to adapt your knowledge, what you know. And if you don't know, search for it. Find the answer. Find the answer and then look for more.

So that's my motto. That's exactly how my baby's sleep, my baby centered sleep solutions and my certification program came because I was constantly needing to learn more and I was constantly needing to solve new problems. And I love what you said. That was so perfect. My mom said that she's a wise woman. Tell your mom I said so. I will. Thank you.

I also love having an open channel between teacher and student because like you and me, right? You're always teaching me. And here we are having this conversation because the information is so important to

all started with me calling and seeing if you could help one of my clients. So look at how things have changed from our open communication and our collaboration, right?

And I'm so grateful for that email that you sent me, you know, like out of the blue. And I'm like, that's an interesting email. So I was very intrigued when you emailed me. So I'm glad that we actually connected then. And look, our friendship is going

It's amazing. Yeah.

I often find blessings from just being genuine, like just being myself, you know? I outreach, send a question to someone and I find a new friend and I find a new collaboration. And like, I think that's another key here is just being confident enough to connect with people and be yourself, right? Yeah, absolutely. So I've got Julia here.

she's very self -conscious and worried about communicating well, because how many languages do you speak? I speak a few, but when I'm in a good mood, I can speak English pretty well. That's so funny. That's great. a fourth language. gosh, fourth language.

All right. I think y 'all is a little bit too much in there, girl. I was about to say, if it's not your original language, you are going to have more self doubt. And you know, if you get nervous, it's harder to remember what you want to say. And so I think Julia does an awesome job and she's a great teacher with so much knowledge. So we're just going to brush away those little fears. She's putting herself out there. All right. So Julia.

Yes. I just shared your background. Is there anything you want to add about your background? Anything? I can tell a little bit about myself, absolutely. I was born in Azerbaijan.

That's the country, former Soviet Union. It's on the border with Turkey and Iran, so it's very, very far away. Then I moved to Israel. I lived in Israel for a long time, and then I lived in Canada. I lived upstate, and now I live in New York. So this is in a nutshell. I have one son who I absolutely adore. He is...

everything for me. So he's my sunshine. He's my star. He's everything that any mother would hope to have in a child. So I'm very blessed with him. He teaches me a lot. He actually more of a parent for me than I'm a parent for him. That's how I see it. If I have any difficult situation, he finds the way to resolve it. And I think it comes maybe from a...

him being an Aquarius. And I think that's also he sees things completely different than I see them. I'm more emotional and he I think he has like a very good equilibrium between the emotions and practicality. And so I'm very, very blessed with him. Yeah, I have a husband. I'm married. And

My husband is a physical therapist and that also helps with my myo functional therapy quite a bit and and we have a very good and solid family

supportive unit. My son just recently got married and I absolutely adore his wife. She is beautiful girl inside and out. She's

extremely creative, very sweet girl. So we're very lucky. So, yeah, your family is complete for a little bit because I know that grandchildren are somewhere in the back of your mind, but you didn't hear that from me. I won't say anything else. We might have talked about this before That's all I got to say.

All right.

you for sharing all of that.

you start telling us a little bit about why your work is important? Sure. Absolutely. How often do you think about your breathing? Never, right? The panic attack, right?

Only when you cannot breathe right then you realize it's important. So there's so many things in life that we take for granted and But how many things are so important, but we never think about them Okay, so and the breathing is one of the acts and we don't think about right and but how we breathe

be drastically improving or worsening our lives?

So that's why I chose the breathing for education. And that will tell you something that's very interesting. Then I was thinking about that. When I was young girl, my father was into a bodybuilding and he was using a Buteyko breathing for gymnastics, that's what he called it, to help him with the athletic performance. So when I started like learning the Buteyko method,

I spoke to him about that and he's like, well, I know all about it. I was using that. And I remember, I had tons of different pages and pages with the exercises. So it's kind of funny how people were using that more for a physical performance, for athletic performance, and then me using it for completely different things. And that tells you then how important the breathing is. We know without breathing, you cannot really.

Last long.

So that's why I chose that, Buteyko breathing. That's awesome. There's something else that you said. How we breathe can drastically improve our lives. Yes. I don't think people realize that either. And you know what? That comes to the point how Buteyko started his techniques.

Buteyko breathing comes from the name of Konstantin Buteyko. He was a Ukrainian born doctor. In 1950s, he was very ill himself. He was working in the units with the asthmatic, you know, people suffering from asthma. And he was diagnosed with malignant hypertension.

He wasn't expected to live for too, too long. So he noticed that hyperventilation actually was worsening the conditions of his patients. So the legend goes that he started practicing a controlled mindful breathing on himself first. And then he noticed improvements of his condition.

then it became a very, very big wave in medicine in Soviet Union at this time. Okay. I probably shouldn't ask this because I know the answer, but tell everyone else how breathing incorrectly affects us. so what is incorrect breathing? Most of the time incorrect breathing is breathing through the mouth instead of the nose.

When we breathe through the mouth, we actually breathe through our chest. When we're breathing through our chest, we are hyperventilating. So we're breathing too much air. We're breathing too much oxygen. People think that oxygen is good. Oxygen is good, but if you have too much oxygen, you don't get enough exchange from the blood cells your lungs, okay? And vice versa.

So you don't have the exchange of the gases. So the hyperventilation is excessive breathing and that causes a poor oxygenation of the tissues. So unconscious erratic breathing leads to worsening of the outcomes in many parts of the body, especially when you exercise for example, any kind of physical activities, you need to have more oxygen to come to the areas of the muscles. And if you breathe through your mouth,

you kind of losing the benefits of exercising, like a proper physical exercising. can you tell us what you do as a breathing coach? Sure. Sure. So what I do as a breathing coach, I as the name suggests,

I re -educate how to be more mindful. But it's also very direct, so to speak, breathing gymnastics. So I customize exercise for each person. It depends on their abilities, time, that's very important, the lifestyle. And what I'm doing, I'm building a habit of

being more mindful about your breathing and more like have more of an intentional breathing. inhale through the nose, nice and soft and elongated exhale, and we have to observe a natural pause at the end of the exhale before we take another inhale. So I call it the triangle breathing. In for a shorter period of time, exhale a little bit longer.

and then hold your breath for a couple of seconds

goals with my patients is to establish the nasal breathing.

day and night, and during rest and physical activities. Tongue is on the roof of the mouth, jaw is nice and relaxed, lips are closed. And to minimize the chemo sensitivity to carbon dioxide, and this is the gas we talked about last time, the first time we met, So to minimize the chemo sensitivity to carbon dioxide to improve the

our organs,

And also the most important thing, what I'm doing, I'm reteaching my clients to breathe with diaphragm, to engage the diaphragm in breathing. That's important thing. Those are my goals. I remember, I hope this isn't too much. I'm not giving away too much, but I remember when you had me start breathing with the balloon. And I was like,

I don't use this very much. Well, first of all, I'm not, you know, doing situps and working my abs very much. So the whole area is like completely ignored probably since I had my last child. He's 16. So anyways, it was like a wake up, you know, I'm waking up my muscles and they're pretty strong now.

very good. Very good. Now you can blow up so many balloons for any birthday party. Honestly, yeah, last time I had to blow up balloons for a birthday, I was like, I used to get so lightheaded when I did this, but I can do this all night. Very nice. Very nice. And that's what I do. You know, I do like my exercises. I kind of build them in a small increments. We start small.

And then we slowly increasing the challenges, we increasing the time of exercises and the difficulties. So nothing is like you don't jump into the cold water right away. I have to laugh that I just yawned because when I met with Julia, we actually wanted yawning because it meant that

We were doing the right exercises. It was a sign that my breathing is out of whack and we're trying to fix it. So I just yawned and I was like, man, whenever I'm around her. Well, that's also, it also gives you that you're actually getting into the rest and digest mode. So your body is so relaxed and you're like, I'm ready to sleep. So you're not in the stress mode. So your parasympathetic response is like working.

Yay. People always think that, man, I'm boring. No, I'm just relaxed. Yeah, that's right. Okay. Well, you know, this is kind of more of like a girl talk this time. hope everybody else listening doesn't mind. We're just more relaxed. And last time we had technical problems and we're not going there this time. So tell us about conscious breathing.

that's a good question and we touched a little bit on that at our last conversation. So we want our respiratory rate, so how many breaths per minute would take to be as low as possible, I talk about 6 .5, 4 .5 to 6 .5 because...

Now it's normalized to have like 11 breaths per minute. It considered to be normal, which is not. It's still a sign of hyperventilation. So we wanna slow down the rate of like our breathing per minute to 6 .5. We always want to have our exhale to be 1 .5 times longer than our exhale. And that will help us.

to be more in control of our breathing. That's what conscious breathing is all about. And again, as I was mentioning just a couple of seconds ago, so

inhale very nice and slow, exhale nice and long, and we have a pause, one or two pauses in between the inhale and exhale. And if you're listening to this and you're thinking, how in the world is that possible? You need to hire Julia.

It's doable, it's possible and you're a perfect example for that because you managed it. Well, I'm still working on it and it's kind of nice because we worked over a period of months and she's checking in with me over the next period of months. And so it is a process, right? And it takes a lot of work. And you know, like this is the only way to do it, like to build the sustainable habit.

You have to do everything in a small increments. Well, that's how I believe it, because you know, it's like a brick by brick. That's how you build a house. You don't build a house right, right away. Yep. So, and the reason I get excited when she talks like that is that's my approach to sleep too. Yes. We don't change everything overnight on a poor baby. That's just sad. Why would we do that? All right. So how does daytime breathing affect our sleep?

Wonderful question. So during the daytime, so we can control our breathing, right? So, but if we are hyperventilating and we're breathing through our chest, most likely we're gonna do the same thing at night when we sleep without even being able to control our breathing. So we will breathe through our chest, we breathe through our mouth. So the body is staying in a constant stress mode.

So when you're stressed, how well can you sleep? You can't really sleep very well, right? And that - I think about children too. I think that's - yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Kids, adults, we're all, kids will grow into adults. If the child breathing through the mouth all his life as a child, do you think he, when

grows up into an adult, will he be able to breathe through the nose just because he's an adult? No. So it's all about building the habit, teaching the parents, teaching the child how to develop the habit of breathing through the nose. Often enough, people cannot breathe through the nose for the reason of physical obstructions. Sometimes it's a habit, sometimes it's a physical obstruction. So...

I think the visit to ENT is very helpful. So if you see your child is breathing through the mouth, so go check the nose first, see if he has any polyps, anything like that

nasal passages. So allergies or? Allergies, polyps, adenoids. Yeah, absolutely. Sometimes some people have like a...

maybe a little bit older kids have deviated septum due to whatever sport injury they had. That's also a possibility. Yeah. Does that ever happen just naturally or does it only happen from injury? Deviated septum. Well, you know what? They have some other conditions with the breathing than some people are born with. So, but it's a completely

ENT visit is highly recommended. Yes. And one thing I like about, love about myo functional therapist is you believe in the team effort. Like you can solve everything on your own and you're happy to send people off. And that's exactly right. It's very collaborative field, you know, like, so you always need the support of either orthodontist, ENTs,

sleep doctors, dentists, orthodontists, whoever is involved. Bodywork. Yeah, bodywork, physical therapists, and there are like many, many other specialties in medicine that we use to make a person whole. So that's good. It's not only one person can do. I cannot do everything. I look at everything from very, very small prism of a mouth, nose, face, some of that.

Yeah. Yeah. And that's so humble of you to say, because there's so many doctors out there who are like, I know it all and I, I, I'm not going to send you anywhere else. I'm gonna try and treat this myself, but we pretty much everybody knows about specialties. You know, you can only know so much about everything, but I am pretty impressed with how much you know. But it depends on the training. It depends on what you invest into learning. Right.

Sure, sure, absolutely. Okay. You know how much I like sleep. So let's talk.

about what's going on with sleep and breathing Sure. All right. So that's, that's basically our topic today, right? Nighttime sleep, nighttime breathing and sleep apnea.

This is what we wanna talk about. So the progression of sleep disorder breathing is happening very

And it starts with the mild snoring first. and sometimes it's cute. he's just puffing through the mouth, you know, like so. And then it becomes moderate snoring. And then it's turned into a severe snoring.

when we have an increased resistance to breathing, you know, our throats and soft palate. And then we come to sleep apnea. Sleep apnea is when we have total collapse of airways and we stop breathing. So that's how they slowly start. So it has many different reasons, but that's in a simple way to explain how it

have...

two different types of snoring. I just recently wrote an article about snoring if it's just a noise. It is not. We'll include that in our show notes. All right. Snoring is noisy breathing during sleep. We have a mouth snoring and we have a nose snoring. So the mouth snoring

result of a very large amount of volume getting into your mouth.

while you sleep and you open your mouth, just air just gushing in. And this large volume of air passing through your airways and that collapses the airways because it's causing the soft palate to vibrate. So, and when soft palate vibrates, it becomes very flabby and it can kind of cover the airways, when the air coming through the nose or a mouth. Okay. Sounds really bad.

But interestingly enough, it stops when mouth is closed. So when you start breathing through the nose, if you don't have a collapsibility of the soft palate, you're breathing, your snoring stops. Then we have a nose snoring. And this caused by turbulent airflow through the nasal airway as well.

where the nose meets the throat. So we have a nasal pharynx there. So that's where the air flows through that area. And the obstruction of nose can be caused by nasal stuffiness, as we talked about that deviated septum. And another one is anatomically small nose airways. So sometimes people have very, very small nostrils or like,

If you have, I don't know if you ever saw that or not. So the nose has just the slits instead of the round nostrils. So they definitely will have a difficulty breathing through the nose because of the physical anatomy of it, Okay.

another thing also cause snoring is speed of air that we're taking in. So if it's fast and a lot, so that definitely will cause you to have nose snoring for

can be helped with that.

slowing down the air and coming in through the nose and out through the nose. And I think we can attach to the topic that we discussed about the daytime breathing. So if your breathing is nice and slow during the day,

breathing through the, a small straw. So your breathing at night will be exactly the same and that will prevent you from

the nose. So nice and soft.

I understand what you're talking about from experience. So, well, and I think it's interesting because it's not that I've gotten my regular breathing down to six breaths a minute or four or whatever, which I could do when I, from practice and focusing, but I do notice with my watch when it tracks my breathing that sometimes I'm breathing six breaths a minute.

eight times per minute so I wonder if the work that we've done has helped me do that in the night. Absolutely, absolutely. Because again, you're slowing down the breathing per minute that helps you to bring your

parasympathetic response and sympathetic response into equilibrium. And that's what you want. You want to make sure that it's not like you want to have like a sympathetic here, parasympathetic here. So you want to have them on the somewhat level. Sometimes we need to be in a sympathetic response, right? So when we in danger, we have to use the sympathetic response. You don't, you see a tiger behind you, you don't want to say, I'm going to breathe

Six times per minute and I'm fine, you know, who cares about the tiger you need to speed up You need to run away from the tiger and that's what the sympathetic response can be very helpful Well in my line of work I talk to people about sleep disorders a lot and you know

looking for red flags and getting the help that we need. So I definitely want to talk more about sleep disorders and sleep medicine. So can you shed some more light on that, especially when it comes to breathing? Sure, absolutely. So the sleep medicine is fairly new.

segment of medicine. So a lot of people became more interested right now in even some dentists and ENTs. So it's not only the sleep doctors now. So they have like different specialties than specializes in sleep. So my practice, for example, is an airway focus practice. So I am always introducing the breathing exercises and breathing techniques to every area of my therapy. So I

don't do only sleep coaching without breathing. I don't do myo functional therapy without, without breathing. Okay. That's very important. So the sleep medicine often enough concentrated on the anatomical structures of airway. So the good airway is the size of the thumb.

the thing is when we breathe through the mouth, we actually are increasing the resistance of the airway.

dry mouth in the morning will be the first sign of mouth breathing at night. So if anybody wakes up in the morning with a dry mouth or pillow is actually wet. Those are the signs that you're losing air and you're breathing through your mouth at night. So

golden standard of sleep apnea treatment is the CPAP.

problem with...

device, then it's only 50 % of users using it. Some people cannot tolerate that. It's the tolerance to CPAP a little bit higher with people who breathe through the nose and the compliance increases to 70 % It's only 30 % of mouth breathers that can use the CPAP machine. Very interesting. And it's very...

It's very sad because the CPAP machine can save so many lives. Some people can suffocate at night just without using the machine

So even though we have one machine that treats all kind of varieties of sleep apnea, Now they started talking more about four subtypes, endotypes, phenotypes of sleep apnea. So the first one is, it's a classification is called POM. So the first one is a P -crit.

So it's an anatomical compromise which tells us how much suction pressure does it take to collapse the airway.

and how we can influence this condition. So we close the mouth, we nose breathe, our tongue is on the roof of the mouth, we'll breathe through diaphragm. And when we breathe through the mouth, we breathe through the upper chest. When we breathe through our upper chest, we're reducing the diaphragm recruitment. When we don't use diaphragm, our lungs, the size of the lungs kind of decreases also. And when we

reduce the lung capacity that can lead to collapsibility of airway and throat in particular. So diaphragm mechanically links to a throat.

The second type of, subtype of sleep apnea is a low arousal threshold. What it means is like how light do you sleep? If any, small disturbances in your breathing wake you up. Sometimes they diagnose the mild sleep apnea and that happens because people who are

tested for in the sleep studies, they wake up too quickly. They are very light breathers. So a mild snoring or anything will wake them up. The problem with that particular subtype of sleep apnea, then person constantly get kicked off from the deep sleep. So you're sleeping and you wake up constantly. The micro arousals wake you up all the time and then you

don't get restorative sleep. The third type is going to be a high loop gain. High loop gain tells us about how unstable

breathing during sleep. Those people are very, very sensitive to carbon dioxide. So what happens with that? So when a person snores and then stops breathing,

the accumulation of carbon dioxide increases in the blood. And then the carbon dioxide send this signal to your brain that you need to breathe, then your breathing becomes exaggerated. You take too much oxygen now. So for us to have a proper oxygenation, we need the carbon dioxide. And we talked about in the previous conversation, we need the carbon dioxide and we need the oxygen for a proper exchange or gas exchange.

And the fourth one is going to be a pharyngeal muscles recruitment, all the muscles in our throat and how weak they are. If they are weak and losing tonus, so we most likely will also have a collapsibility of the airways during sleep. So that's where myo functional therapy actually comes very handy because it's exercises the muscle there. I have different exercises for that. Amazing. I never.

before I worked with a myofunctional therapist, I had no idea that we could actually strengthen those muscles. It's amazing.

It can happen in men and women. Yes, that's I know you talked about a little bit in our last interview Yes. Yes. You're right. Very good memory. Excellent. Yes, it could happen in men and women. And especially in the postmenopausal premenopausal women when we actually have the progesterone levels are diminishing. So

that also because the progesterone is responsible for the tonus of the throat.

Alright, so big question, which you've touched on. How does nasal breathing affect apnea?

Well, all those four phenotypes that I actually discussed now, like the P-cre, the low arousal threshold, high loop gain and the muscles recruitment. So all of them can be helped with the nasal breathing.

That's very, very,

fascinating to me because it's such a

condition that people deal with, you know, like going through the sleep studies. And yes, it seems like it's very easy fix. Not that I'm saying that I'm treating sleep apnea, absolutely not, but I can influence any kind of sleep apnea by just teaching you how to breathe properly, how to slow down the breathing.

how to breathe through the nose, day and night, during sleep, during physical activities, breathe

your diaphragm, And that will help you with the gas exchange, how to minimize the sensitivity to carbon dioxide. And that also will improve

simpato -vegal balance.

keynotes of what I do. So I'm influencing sleep apnea. I'm not treating it.

So how does sleep apnea affect the rest of our health, our bodies? Okay. So besides not being able to sleep and get the restorative sleep, sleep apnea also can play on our hormones. For example, it may increase the production of ghrelin. Ghrelin, is a hunger hormone. like...

grr grr when your stomach makes funny noises. All right. That's a

to remember it. it stimulates the appetite. So poor sleep leads to overeating and it makes very difficult to lose weight. But the obesity and the fat distribution feeds into sleep apnea.

person with sleep apnea cannot really lose weight and it becomes a vicious cycle. Sleep apnea, insomnia and depression, they have like a crossover symptoms such as irritability, fatigue, difficulty concentrating. The people who cannot breathe through the nose very often have difficulty concentrating.

So if we can make our clients breathe through or teach them how to breathe through the nose, the concentration level also will increase, especially it's very important for kids in school. Plus we'll prevent them from getting sick all the time because it's going to help them to prevent any bacteria to be unfiltered because nose filters all the bacteria that we breathe.

Yeah, I really like that topic too. I like learning how everything's connected. Yes. Okay, so you already shared

ways

apnea Yes, yes, I don't treat it. I just influence. I help them to be better, to increase even compliance. Because if I teach person who breathes through the mouth, through the nose, then they can use the...

CPAP with the better results. Absolutely. Yes. Okay. So I love this explanation that you have about taking less air in. Can you explain that part of your work and what that does for us? Absolutely. So taking a little bit less air in, so instead of taking...

100 % of air,

80%. And

you breathe in and out, you want to bring a feeling of total relaxation. So when you're breathing in and

want to see any movement of the chest. And I want to have like a 30 % less movement of any breathing muscle. So I always say, like a bunny,

that is hiding, so it doesn't wanna be found. So this is what my exercise is, If you remember, we had those bunny breathing exercises. So try to hide your breathing, but not by holding your breath, by just slowing down the breathing. So it's a very nice and slow breath in, very nice and slow and long breath out.

And while you're practicing, you will feel like the sensation that you need to have a little bit more air, that you don't have enough air. What it means, it means that you're actually increasing the carbon dioxide in your blood. By exposing your body to the carbon dioxide, you help to reset respiratory center. That improves your brain tolerance to carbon dioxide.

And as you reduce the chemo sensitivity to carbon dioxide, your breathing becomes lighter and slower. So you can tolerate it better so you don't hyperventilate, you don't take too much air and you're

sympathetic response. Okay, so.

The carbon dioxide is a stimulus to

sensitive you are to carbon dioxide, the less breathing you need to do, less breath per minute you have to do. I want to mention something that is the theory of carbon dioxide is not accepted by any medical community. Even

a doctor himself.

and he was a medical doctor. But till today, the theory of carbon dioxide and the tolerance to carbon dioxide is not accepted, not approved because...

Not a lot of research was done there. And why is that? Because they cannot sell anything.

So you cannot really sell carbon dioxide, right? In the pill form. Yeah, no research was done about that. Nobody wants to spend money on researching why the breathing slow helps us to feel better and sleep better and control our anxieties better. Panic attacks, anxieties. Look at me, guys.

My asthma. I have an inhaler ⁓ in  my bedroom on the floor and I haven't touched it in months. And I used to need it at least a couple of times a week when I met Julia. And sometimes, you know, with my allergies flaring up, it would get worse. But the other thing I was laughing at when you're talking, this is so funny, is that you're just talking about slowing down breathing. You know how to.

just extend your breathing and only taking in a little, I'm listening to her like we're in a session and my breathing is like, as light as

can't see me move. And I'm just into this mode because it's your voice talking about it. But what I want to point out here is that when you started working with me on that, it was hard. It was labored. Like, I couldn't get

a smooth breath out for very long. Maybe I do two or three breaths and I feel like, my gosh, I'm gasping for air. Or, you know, we might do that for five minutes at the end. I'm like, I'm like holding back this urge to breathe fast, you know? And it's really kind of fun for me now to do that and just feel completely relaxed. And because you know, you can do it, you know, I worked and you taught me and it's an accomplishment. It's super cool. Absolutely.

Absolutely. You did an amazing job practicing, as I was saying before, really good student. Excellent. Bravo

Can you explain what happens when we slow down our breathing? Sure. And extend our exhale. What happens?

Yes, when we slow down our breathing and extend our exhale, our respiratory signal center send the signal to the diaphragm. And the diaphragm moving a little bit down by two to three centimeters, and our intercostal muscles move outwards. That increases the volume of thorax, the chest area, and create negative pressure in the chest.

And that's like a vacuum, it causes the air to move into the lungs. So with diaphragm breathing, we increase the lung volume. And I was telling about that before, that's why it's so important to breathe with diaphragm. And when lung volume increases, the throat, our throat stiffens and becomes very, very strong and tight. And that prevents collapsibility of airways. Miracle.

The only way to increase the lung volume is to breathe with diaphragm recruitment. You can actually practice that. If you're going to put your hands on your two lower ribs and you're going to be breathing in and out through your nose, with the tongue on the roof of your mouth and lips are closed, you will feel like it's opening it's going outwards.

and inwards. If you see that. And you have to breathe slow because you know, like to get all the air into the lungs and kind of fill them like a balloon. Yeah.

I'm just so grateful for your help because I don't know what I would have been doing to my body for the rest of my life.

really good. That's good. And you like, like to see it's to see somebody like yourself, you know, like being in health with asthma symptoms. That's, that's really a cherry on top of the whole, the therapy being your therapist, you know, working with you have

in my life, the happy smile. So it's really to see results and it's really, really priceless. So I appreciate you being such a hard working student. You're so kind. If you remember once we were doing the exercises, I was actually pushing you to go outside to go for a walk. Remember that? All right. So the reason for that,

because we want to increase the lung volume and how we can increase it by being physically active. So if you want to fill your lungs with air, go for a run, but make sure you breathe through the nose. Okay. So our, our metabolic rate, should match how much air we take and how much air we take should match our metabolic rate. So like any animals that you see on the farm,

dogs are a little bit out of the range of being good nose breathers. They like to breathe through the mouth. But the other animals like horses, for example, they don't breathe more air than they need. They run, they take more air. You can see the nostrils are going, really opening up.

I have some exercises that actually I teach my patients horse exercise. So when they're opening the nostrils, like physically working their nostrils like a horse. That's a gift that we have in my family. So I didn't need that. You know how to do that very well, right? I have one daughter who can wiggle her ears and we like to flare our nostrils at each other. And then my girls, my son, they're always...

playing with their eyebrows and I'm like, okay, I can't do that stuff, Information that you didn't want today, you just got it. But I use it, you know, I use those exercises. Your kids are practicing with that. All right. Well, I love what you said. You said, our air volume should also be on an as needed.

basis. And I don't think that's natural. You're very good at teaching this ability. You're right. Because we can teach ourselves to be more mindful about our breathing and to have a normal ventilation without over breathing. So we predisposed to overdoing things nowadays, overwork, overeat, overbreathe. And the

If we look at the newborn babies, how they breathe, we can learn from them. The naturally born nose breathers, the breathing is very nice and soft and slow. You barely hear them. How many mothers you have in your practice, they have to go and listen if the baby is breathing because babies are breathing very softly, lightly. And that's why, you know, those are the signs of health, basically, right?

The ones who have the raspy breathers, the ones with congestion or snoring, they are actually grateful. And I'm like, OK, but that's not good. That's exactly right. And I often say, you always have to breathe through the nose because you have to breathe through the mouth as often as you eat through the nose. So that will make, like, put things in the perspective.

Right? And as I was saying before about the snoring, I also want to say that the speed of breathing matters as well. Slow and gentle breathing through the nose will tell your brain that you are safe. And again, we're coming back to the sympathetic parasympathetic response. If you are safe, you're not going to be over breathing. If you're not over breathing, the functions in your body working properly. So we're fighting dysfunctional breathing.

by slowing it down and breathing through the nose. That's pretty awesome. It's amazing.

I really love what you said, about telling your brain that you're safe. There's just so many things that we don't understand about breathing and our nervous system. So I find all of this very fascinating. I know a little bit about a subject from my myofunctional therapy that I think that all of us

maybe don't know about or haven't even heard of yet. So tell us about lip and mouth taping. All right. This is a new trend the lip and mouth taping. And I actually wrote a few articles in favor of it, but I want to emphasize that just the mouth taping at night is not enough. We need to establish a new breathing patterns first. And if breathing is dysfunctional during the day,

And during the nighttime, as we said, it's a precursor of the nighttime breathing. Mouth -taping is just superficial fix for it. And the problem is very serious. So in order for you, like people say, I'm going to tape my mouth at night, so it should help me with my snoring. Yes, it might help you with your snoring. But again, you have to know how to tape your mouth properly first. So.

Because if you don't feel safe, your body doesn't feel safe when you tape your mouth shut, you're not gonna be getting a good night's sleep. You will be removing that at night because you don't wanna be in a panic, okay, I'm suffocating. You don't wanna suffocate. So the breathing patterns are very important. So you have to teach your body how to breathe during the day, how to breathe during the nighttime. If you wanna tape your mouth at night for a better quality of sleep,

great. I usually recommend it to start taping your mouth with one strip only so you will have like little spaces for mouth puffing a little bit. Some people when they sleep they don't realize they make like this kind of kind of noise again coming back to horses. So when they do that do that if the mouth is going to be shut

with the tape, that will definitely interfere with their sleep and they will have to remove the tape at night. So I recommend to use the tape at least like to just to keep the lips together. And then you have two small holes here for the air to escape if needed. And plus it's a very safe practice. And you've talked a lot about other aspects of, you know,

seeing other doctors, figuring out what's going on and getting your answers. So this is a complicated thing. This mouth breathing Yes. Not nose. You cannot fix such a difficult problem as a sleep apnea with just a, you know, mouth taping. It's not going to work. You do have to have like a ENT involved. You have to have like a sleep studies done. You may need a myofunctional therapist.

you might need a myofunctional therapist, especially if you have like a collapsibility of the throat due to lack of the toneness of the throat. Just a little side note for y 'all. If you want to get your sleep disorder signs assessed, reach out to Julia. If you reach out to me, I'll just send you to Julia. So reach out to Julia and.

If there's other things too, and we don't need to get into that here, but there's other reasons you could be having trouble with mouth breathing, nose breathing. And she's trained to be able to look for those reasons. And like I said earlier, send you to the right people, give you the right treatments. And I think, I think that maybe have you written any articles on sleep disorder signs that I could link? I gave her a homework assignment guys. I, I.

do have a couple of articles that I wrote about snoring and two articles about mouth taping. So I do have that. So read about, read your snoring articles, but also, you know, if any of the things that we've mentioned today are concerns, you are mouth breathing, struggling to breathe through your nose.

If there's things that have come up for sure, reach out for sure. Get some sleep disorder signs checked, assessed, but you know, see if you have more, see if there's, you know, any, anything that she can do to help you. She now she's a busy woman, but she'll do her best to keep up. Also, you know, I have other resources, so reach out to her first and then we'll send you somewhere else if you need it. Does that help that make

important.

I run into so many people in my work where a child has tongue tie. They have no idea that this can affect sleep. And then once we start talking about the child's symptoms of that, or maybe they already know the child has it, find out that a cousin had it and mom and dad had it. And like, OK, wait, wait, this is not a question anymore. We need we need to go see someone. We need to get the help. So I'm just bringing it up because.

You just don't know if you have some of these signs. You want to know why you want to know what the causes are. You want to get the help and you want to be on your way to having good sleep. So look up a myofunctional thereapist. You're right. Because you know that the tongue is considered to be a breathing muscle. Also, it's not only the muscle to help us talk, eat, swallow. And so it's it's basically the main point of the tongue to be on the roof of the mouth.

And if it's, it cannot reach it because that because of the tongue tie. So the child will always will be breathing through the mouth because it's gonna it's pulling the jaw up just in a simple terms. Yeah. And sometimes it's just the back of the tongue. So yeah, you need, you need some, you need help. So go see one, go see a myofunctional therapist and just rule out your concerns and figure out what. Okay. I'm going to get back on track now.

What should people expect when they start breathing through their nose? All right, very good. So I have a lot of patients who are very active, physically active, very healthy. But every time when they were going for a run, they would breathe through the mouth. They think that's how it should be and that they were doing. So when they started the therapy, when they started the breathing exercises, they started breathing through the nose. First of all,

they noticed that at the beginning the speed of their running decreased.

So they were kind of upset about that. In addition to that, they noticed the nose started running a little bit. But some people get a little bit of a headache. Everything is very temporary. Continue using your nose for breathing, not for eating. For breathing only. Mouth is for eating, nose is for breathing. All right.

OK, so those are the symptoms when you're doing the exercises. So this is expected. But stick with that. Stick with the nose breathing and your athletic performance will increase with time. OK, and the nose would not be running anymore. And as I was saying before, with the increased nose breathing,

with a clear passages in your nose, your concentration will also improve. So the mental capacity increases, physical capacity increases, lung capacity increases. So all the benefits from this little thing that we have on our face in the middle. You said concentration, attention and memory in my notes here. It's not just focus. I'm like, what? exactly right. The memory. Not just intriguing to me, but like inviting. I want that.

Absolutely. Absolutely. It's the nose breathing is a key. Now I know you've taught this a little bit already, but just maybe go just a little further in detail on what we should focus on when we're breathing and what's some bad advice that we hear on breathing. that's a good one. The bad advice is to take a big breath. any yoga instructor will tell you, take a big breath. Somebody's stressed.

Take a big breath. Big breath is never beneficial because our brain needs like 20 % of oxygen. We can help it by training to breathe less and slowly, not by taking big breath. When we take a big breath, we minimize the amount of carbon dioxide in our blood. And that causes the blood vessels to constrict. Too much oxygen?

constrict vessels and that reduces the oxygen delivery. So this is really bad advice. The carbon dioxide, and I talked about that all the time before and always and today also, the carbon dioxide is a natural vasodilator. So it helps to lower blood pressure and...

the act of breathing can be very, very powerful. So if you breathe too much of oxygen, you are not getting oxygen supply the areas in your

oxygen needs to be delivered. It gets delivered, but it doesn't get unloaded. So the carbon dioxide is the one that helps a good oxygenation in the tissues.

low blood pressure. we should also start working on breathing from the diaphragm, but just be not so focused on a big breath, right? Yes. Don't take a big breath. Take a slow and low breath. That's better. And elongate your exhale. So make your exhale a little bit longer.

and a natural pause at the end. If you can hold for two pauses that's great. Okay, so, and that basically will help you to have a more functional breathing. Because the most important thing that breathing can do is to bring a quietness of your mind. It controls racing thoughts, anxiety, panic attacks, and it brings serenity. And as I always finish my,

mindful breathing session with my patients to open their eyes and don't forget to bring peace and tranquility with you from the meditation. Look at you. That was so perfect. What a perfect wrap up. Cut. We're done. That was perfect. Honestly, I really appreciate the time that you took to prepare, which I know you spent some serious time preparing and preparing me and

you know, everything, your generous heart brought us to this moment. Thank you. Thank you for having me. I had such a wonderful time and that you definitely put everything at ease and I don't really feel like I'm on camera and that was wonderful. So thank you so very much for being such a wonderful host.

absolute pleasure to be on

and I'm wishing all the best.

to you and to your listeners and to your viewers. Thank you. So kind. All right, Julia, will you tell us really quick before you hop off how listeners can find you and if there's any information you want to share about working with you? Sure. So my information is on my website -it's happymyo.com. So (www.happymyo.com)

HappyMyo, Myo is spelled M -Y -O, dot com. And all the information there, the contact information is there. I also have a link to Medium. That's where I publish my small articles for general public so everybody can read

you share that with me so it could be in the notes or do you want them to find that on your website? Yeah, I can send it to you.

Yeah, absolutely. It's best to get in contact with you through the website or can I share your email in the notes? You can share my email. Absolutely.

my email address is happymyo, happy, and M -Y -O -N -Y -C, New York City. And that's so HappyMyoNYC@gmail.com. Okay. We got it. So to my listeners, I want you to feel free to share this conversation. If you found it insightful, please pass it on, share it with your friends and family.

help others learn about the importance of breathing properly. This isn't a topic that people are searching. You know, they're not like, hmm, how can my breathing help my health? Right? And so we really need you to share this topic. I'm going to make sure that the title is more about the sleep and the health and everything, but we just need your help. So pass it on. And, you know, we hope for the best for you and your health, right, Julia? Yes, absolutely. Happy and healthy. That's what we're aiming for.

Well, thank you, Julia. We've already covered this, but I just wanted to give you an opportunity to say goodbye to the viewers and give you all the accolades that you deserve for being so generous and being a delight to listen to you. thank you, thank you, thank you. Thank you, everybody, for being patient with me. And thank you for our great, great host who made it happen. And I appreciate every minute of your time.

So thank you again. And if you have any questions, please reach out to me. I'll be more than happy to help anybody with any kind of

any guidance that I can provide. I will be more than happy to do so. Thank you. Great. All right, everybody. Thanks for being here. I hope you learned some really good stuff today. Until next time, we'll see you soon. Ciao.

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