Who are we? So Tanja and I have a business called The Alchemic Way. We are a personal development and wellness business devoted to empowering real estate leaders and teams around the world to fulfil their potential in the least amount of time. You can check out our webpage just scrolling through here on screen is just a screen grab of our landing page for some free resources and also more information about what we do for real estate professionals just like you. And I can see that Kylie’s just popped here the employee assistance program for domain in the real care app. She’s put the link up there if you’d like to access that at your disposal. Awesome.
A little bit about me, so I have a background in five star hotels, initially working in front of house management throughout Australasia. I studied hotel management coming out of high school. I have had a successful small business for just under 20 years, owning a busy natural health clinic, and I’ve had just over 20 years as a doctor of traditional chinese medicine, meaning that I have skill sets in acupuncture, massage, cupping, chinese exercise therapy. So things like tai chi and qigong, diet and wellness therapy, nutrition and herbal medicine. And I also am what’s called a total body modification practitioner. Now, this isn’t a tattoo and piercing business. It’s technically a combination of principles of chiropractic philosophy, Chinese medicine, energetics, nutrition and electromagnetic harmonisation in a principle called radionics. So TBM was formulated by a north american chiropractor in the early seventies, a gentleman called Doctor Victor Frank. And he blended some of these concepts together to get some pretty interesting ways into running around inside the software that runs us behind the background. While I was transitioning out of my own practice that I’d had for the 20 year mark, I also spent a year, as Kylie mentioned, working in real estate. It was 2020, it was lockdown. It was a pretty interesting time to be in real estate, but I did work briefly as a leasing agent, property manager, a BDO, and I also did property marketing photography as well. With my interest in landscape photography, I was sort of segued into that as well. So I had a chance to look at the marketing side of that. So here’s me firsthand with a pretty good skill set to deal with the stressors of working in real estate. And I found it a pretty challenging year, to be honest. And I saw a lot of my colleagues really struggling as well. And that’s what’s led me to be here today to work with a skill set in complementary healthcare to see if we can get a better result for people just like you who work in real estate and have a pretty stressful, pretty long winded hours and pretty interesting time of dealing with problems that we don’t always make, but often have to fix. So that’s a little bit about me.
So thank you very much for joining me and being here today. Moving into my next slide, we’ve got a little bit about a curiosity for me. I’d like you to see if you’re willing to be vulnerable and share in the chat room. Who here, on occasion, has trouble falling asleep? You finish your work at the end of the day, ready for bed, and you go to hit the sack and you just can’t turn off. Anybody here struggle with that on occasion? Just type yes or no in the chat box. Yeah, we’ve got a couple here. Sandra. Yep, yep. Hayley Stuart. Awesome. Thank you for your vulnerability, guys. I really appreciate your participation here. Yep. Snooze for a couple of hours and wake again. Yes. Kylie, who here has trouble staying asleep or you wake up overnight frequently. Often around the same time every night. Anybody struggling with that here? Yep. Hayley, what about on occasion, having difficulty regulating your emotions, feeling overwhelmed, anxious, flat, depressed, angry?
Can’t shift that. Consider here, guys, that emotion, they’re like clouds. They should come and go. It’s normal for the human experience to feel emotion, but it’s not so great when they run us a little bit behind the scenes and we have trouble shifting through an emotional state. And what about some nice, tight, ropey muscles in the shoulders, stiff lower back? You have trouble turning your head to head. Check in the rearview mirror for your car if you’re out on the road. Anybody struggle with that? Yeah, Dee has yet. I’m getting a few yeses. Lauren? Yep. Hayley. Poor Hayley. You’ve said yes to everything so far, Kylie. God, yes. And what about, finally, things like digestive or elimination concerns, hormonal concerns, women’s or men’s health concerns? Sort of struggle in that realm at all? Yeah. Kaya and Hayley, I tell you what, Hayley, you and I need a one one. I tell you what, we’ve got some work to do here, guys.
Thank you so much for your participation in all of that. What I’m trying to get a bearing on is how this is relevant to you is what I’m about to share with you. Got any use? And just judging by the responses I’ve had so far, it looks like we’ve got some traction. So bear with me. Over the next 50 odd minutes or so, I’d like to share with you some strategies that can get you back on track here and, of course, are free. Firstly, I must put this in here as a disclaimer. I have to be upfront here. I am not a western medical doctor, what we would call a medical practitioner. My doctor is within a traditional Chinese medicine field. What I’ll present today is “A truth” not the truth. These are some techniques that I’ve successfully used with my patients in clinical practice over the years to get lasting health results. And I certainly recognize that there’s many paths to good health and I’m definitely no expert. Lots of different ways to skin cats. I’d like to just mention here what I’m about to present. Nothing in this material is aimed to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease and should not be used to replace your own health professional’s advice. If you experience any undue signs or symptoms while utilising anything that I’m about to run through, please cease the activity immediately and consult your preferred medical healthcare provider as soon as possible. Or you’re also welcome to reach out to me via our socials. You can see on the bottom of every slide in the left hand bottom corner @the.alchemic.way is our insta handle. We’re most active on that, but you’re also welcome to reach out through our website and contact me directly there. All my contact details are there. And as the saying goes, if your symptoms persist, please consult your doctor or preferred healthcare provider. All clear. Excellent.
So my intention for today is for you to gain access to some simple and effective healthy habits so that you can fulfil your potential in the least amount of time and achieve sustainable success. Not just as a real estate agent, real estate professional, but just in your life in general. Just have a better life experience walking on the earth plane and getting through life feeling great, hitting your full potential and having a great time along the way. Sounds good? Okay.
Healthy habit number one. It begins with water. Now, I’d like you to consider there’s a lovely old wives tale how we are 70% water, which is roughly true, on average, almost every cell in the body, inside the bag of each cell and in the giant bag that we walk around in is a big, squishy, walking sack of fluid. We’re about 70% water, but I’d like you to consider that certain tissues of the body are far higher than that, and one of them being muscle tissue. And I have a little demonstration here that I’d like to bring to your awareness that if this dried out kitchen sponge that I’ve had sitting out in the sun is. Sorry, I’m just going to unshare my screen. That if this sponge represents your muscles, not just your skeletal muscles. So not just those tight, ropey shoulders, not just your lower back stiffness, but consider the tubing that runs from your mouth to the opposite end of your elimination tract is also all lined with muscle. If you’re female and you have a uterus, it’s all smooth muscle. That this muscle tissue is over 70% water. Now, if we’re dehydrated chronically, this sponge, and I don’t know if you can hear me flicking this, but this stiff, uncomfortable, kind of hard to move sponge, dried out, desiccated tissue represents your muscles. I have a little bowl of water here and I’m going to dip the sponge into that. And when you see that hydrate, you can see how soft and malleable this becomes, how easy it is for me to bend, that I could tie it in knots, really soft and squishy. When I first started studying TBM, one of their main principles was to get patients hydrated. And I’m not exaggerating. If I could get half my patients to drink adequate amounts of water and the other half to breathe properly, I’d be out of a job. I’m not exaggerating, but water is this fundamental agent that everything in the body floats around in.
So I’m just going to pop back to screen sharing here. Anybody get anything out of that, personally, about the representation of that analogy of seeing the sponge? Does that make sense to you guys about this tissue? And I ask you to consider, when I first started studying this, I was drinking about half the amounts of water that I should do as far as TBM is concerned. And yeah, when I was working through that, I have this lovely little spot in my left shoulder that fizzes, feels a little bit like pre pins and needles, tingly sort of feeling. Then it could get right up to an ice pick jabbing into my back. And I noticed that when I started to hydrate, I. This discomfort just went away, literally just went away. And it’s now become my barometer that if I’m on the road, travelling a lot or a little bit out of my usual routine and my water intake drops a little bit, I feel a hint of this tingly fizziness come back, and it’s a bit of a gentle reminder for me to up my water intake and get hydrated again. So water is this critical component that lets everything in the body work.
Moving into the first thing, the thing that Victor Frank mentioned here about water washing, he was absolutely adamant that only plain water counts as water intake. And I’ll explain why he felt that everything that touches your lips, mouth or tongue, kinesiologically speaking, your brain perceives it either as food, medicine, poison, or solvent. So what does that mean? Meaning that if you put lemon juice in water, not for a moment am I saying, is that bad or detrimental? But consider that when you add a lemon juice to water, you’re actually adding in sugars. So sucrose and fructose. Energy or food? In a sense, you’re adding minerals, you’re adding citric acid, and you’re adding fibre, trace elements as well. And your body has to pull that apart, metabolically speaking, and digest it, sending it chemically to different parts of the body to break down. To do that, it requires internal water reserves. So everything you eat or drink, if it’s not plain water, actually uses water to digest it to metabolise it.
Consider with medicine, if you drink things like chamomile tea, there’s a concept in TBM called the medicinal selectivity of the body. And your brain very intelligently understands when you’re using something with a medicinal benefit to it. So chamomile tea to help you relax, switch off, get to sleep, that type of thing. Not bad. But no longer water poison. Consider that alcohol is a good example here, that the reason we become drunk or the reason that we become tipsy, inebriated is we’re actually poisoning ourselves with alcohol. And our bodies make a chemical called alcohol dehydrogenase that breaks alcohol down, and over time, as it passes, we’re no longer drunk, and we become back to sober again. So poison has an effect here. And solvent, this is literally the fluid sac that we’re born from and into the amniotic fluid is this neutral fluid environment that we’re birthed out of and come from.
So doctor Frank was most adamant about the fact that only plain water counts. Plain water is the only thing that doesn’t require internal water reserves to metabolise and absorb it. Chinese medicine would also counsel to avoid cold. Orlando. Very chilled water. What this does is when you drink it constricts the blood vessels lining your stomach and can affect and slow down digestion. If you think about the concept, if you roll an ankle and it’s big and swollen, you pop an ice pack on it. The reason that works to stop the swelling and take the bruising away is you’re constricting blood flow into the area. It’s very good initially for acute wounding, but you want to get blood flow back in there and clean up chemicals again after a day or two. So we would counsel to drink room temperature or slightly warmer. Just filtered tap water doesn’t have to be himalayan, glacial melt, blessed by the Dalai lama, or anything freaky or funky like that. We’re blessed in Australia, generally right across the nation with good quality water, particularly in Victoria and in Melbourne, excellent quality drinking water. So where possible, filter it to remove any heavy metals or chlorine, that type of thing, and just drink filtered tap water.
Does that all make sense for everybody? Any questions on that so far? Am I losing you or are you with me? Just let me know in the chat box if you have any strife or making sense. Kylie’s got all good, on average. Just if you could share with me, how much water, plain water would you drink a day? Ballpark, how much would you drink a day? How many glasses a day? Or if you know, the millilitres amount or litres? Amount. How much would you drink on average? Anyone willing to share there? Just type it into the chat for me. Not enough for Hayley. Six glasses, Kai. Pretty good. Nowhere near enough. Pretty good. Okay, eight glasses a day. A litre. Two litres for Chris. Yep, eight glasses, so, doing pretty good, guys. Two glasses. Okay, so bear in mind this is plain water. Nothing else in it. Nothing else counts, not for a moment. Am I saying medically that water isn’t contained in food or isn’t even contained in coffee, but it’s plain water that I’m interested in.
For what we’ve just discussed here, consider that water is required to filter three types of waste from your body. The first of these is metabolic waste in a very simplified way. Metabolic waste is the byproduct left over from turning the food we eat into energy. This is done inside the cells in the mitochondria in something called the citric acid cycle, which I will not get into. It is one of the most painful parts of biochemistry I ever studied. But consider metabolic waste, Victor Frank felt it was one of the most toxic things in the universe. If you’re not aware, if you cannot urinate for yourself over about 24 hours, medically, a catheter is inserted to remove that fluid from you. They have to get it out of your body. If that’s not done over about 24 to 36 hours, you’ll go into kidney failure and then into liver failure and then eventually into organ failure, and you can die from that. So it’s critically important to get this metabolic waste out of the body. And water plays a huge part of that. You’ll notice this in a very simplified way of just noticing the colour of your urine. If it’s a very dark yellow to orangey colour, compared to a very light straw or clear colour, is indicative of how much water in general, in a simplified way, that you’re shifting through your body.
Second type of waste we want to get out of the body is what we call healing waste. This is cellular repair. Now, consider that every moment of every day for our entire lives, our bodies are repairing and breaking down, repairing and breaking down cells all over the body. And a good little example of this, red blood cells. I’m not sure if you’re aware, but a red blood cell has a lifespan of about 120 days before it’s completely discarded and taken out of circulation. The reason this happens is they’re a cool little shape if you’ve ever seen one in a microscopic view, they look like a concave disc on both sides, like a doughnut on both sides and flattened out. And the reason they’re their shape is that where they can fold to get down a blood vessel pathway that’s so thin, only one cell at a time can squeeze down it. But in doing this, when they fold up and squeeze down this capillary network, they abrase along the sides and it damages the cell and the spleen. An amazingly awesome organ has a special matrix or a mesh filter that pops a blood cell through it and it examines its shape, it examines its integrity, and if it’s found to be lacking, it’ll take it out of circulation to be broken down. And as I said, your body’s really efficient. It’ll recycle as much as it can to make new cells from that, but there’s always a little bit left over at the end and that also has to be eliminated as waste.
Third type of waste here is environmental. Every moment of the day, particularly in a modern world, we’re exposed to toxins and pollutants all over the place. These can be things like exhaust fumes if you live in a city, or certainly near a main road. A lot of research has been done about people who live on main roads compared to people who live away from that, impacted more with environmental pollutants, things like fertilisers, petrochemicals. And no doubt you’re hearing a lot of chatter at the moment about microplastics in our food chain having to also be broken down, primarily in the liver and excreted from the body. And water plays a huge part of this. So we need to get rid of this stuff out of our system, or it builds up over time and causes concerns. So metabolic healing and environmental waste is removed.
The million dollar question: how much do I need? TBM counsels this as a calculation of 43.5 ML. 43.5ml per body kilograms. So the example here is 65 kg times 43.5 equals 2827 ML. What I’d like you all to do for me, if you can, is grab your phones, if they’re handy, don’t go on apps, don’t check emails, just stay with me here, but open your calculator. And if you know your weight in kilos, even roughly around in kilos, I’d like you to multiply your kilo amount by 43.5. If you’re willing to share, just pop in the four digit amount that comes up there in your calculator. And if someone would be brave and just share with me what that number is, it would be great. Just in the chat dialogue, if you don’t have a phone, even, just put your kilo amount and I can do that. So Kylie’s got 3654, 2436 for Hayley. Awesome, guys. So you see what’s coming up here. We’ve got about two and a half to three and a half litres per day. Now, bear in mind TBM would say this number that you’re coming up with to the millilitre is your bare minimum amount required of plain water. You can have whatever else you like. On top of that, coffee, orange juice, cups of tea, alcohol, no problem. But this is your plain water minimum amount.
If you do consider working towards this after what I present today, go no higher than one litre above this amount. So for me, I’m at about 3900 and millilitres. I want to go no higher than 4900 ML. Unless you are an ultra marathoner, someone who’s doing massive amounts of perspiration in sweat lodge work or sauna or that sort of thing, where you might need a little more, it’s critically important you go no higher than one litre and I’ll talk. Why in a moment. Does this make sense so far for you guys? Just give me a yay or nay in the chat box. Of course you’ll get a copy of this presentation so you can keep this calculation ready to go. I know it seems like an astronomical amount and as I said, when I first started with TBM, I was drinking about two litres a day and found out that I needed to be on four litres a day. If you are nowhere near this amount, do not attempt to drink this. Tomorrow. You will feel like you’ve had a small swimming pool and you will be up half the night getting rid of it. Take some time to work towards it. In a perfect world as a kinesiologist, I would work with you in a one on one construct to reset some of the fuses in the body that help us process water. But failing that, you will do it naturally over time. So take a month or two to work towards this amount. Don’t try and jump there tomorrow. If you’re one litre or one glass a day and you need to be on three litres a day, don’t smash three litres. You will feel like you’re drowning from the inside out of moving into this to drink more water.
If you struggle to drink water, and a lot of people do, and I will counsel, it’s also an acquired taste. The more you drink it, the more natural it becomes. And the more tasty it becomes, the more normal it becomes. But to drink more water, start early in the day. My suggestion would be to keep a bottle next to your bed, ideally not a disposable plastic water bottle. These break down over about six to eight weeks, quicker if you leave them in sunlight in a car. And they bleed BPA plastics into your water. Microplastic components. So a metal lined bottle or a BPA free bottle, glass bottle. Keep it next to your bed and as you wake up, smash your first amount of water. In a perfect world, I’d like to try and get through about a litre before I’m into my day for more than about half an hour. So if you start early, you can finish early. So, again, there’s certainly an amount of what comes in, has to come out again. If you’re trying to get through your last litre or two in a day and this is sort of hitting you, towards the end of the afternoon, evening, you will be up trying to get rid of it.
Kylie’s just put a question here. What if you have to take medication first? Absolutely no problem. Take your medication first. Get that out of the way. But generally, unless the medication specifies it is safe to drink water with your medication, consider. I always thought that with water intake, everything I’ve been trained to nutrition, traditionally, before TBM, was to avoid drinking large amounts of water at meal times. Whereas Doc Victor Frank had a concept that he likened it to a washing machine. If you just put detergent in with your clothes and no water to circulate it around, you don’t wash very well. It actually takes water to circulate and shift that through and around your clothing. He likened this very similarly to the digestive tract. Not for a moment am I saying have like a litre or so with your meals, but have a little bit of water as you actually eat. And it can make it easier on your digestion. See how you go with that. But start early in the day for my first tip.
Second thing, if you’re struggling to drink water from a narrow necked opening, and I’m just going to, again, open my bottle here, you can see the thinner opening in the top of this. When you have a narrow aperture opening, there’s a tendency to take air in with your water that can lead to bloating, and again, that can be detrimental for some people struggling to get through a water amount. So my suggestion would be, pop it into a glass with a wider opening. It avoids you taking in so much air and can make it easier to get through.
The third tip here is a little strange. Look at the water as you drink. Now, even in a drinking vessel like this, even if I can’t see the water as I’m consuming it, visualise the water in the container. Look at it as if you can see it. I have a great story of an older lady that I worked with some years back who was drinking almost no water at all, and she was really struggling with some health concerns. And I invited her to get up around the two and a half litre mark, and she said, this is just not possible. She felt that when she drank, she sort of felt like she was choking on her water. And I invited her to look at it as she drank it, no matter what vessel she was drinking out of. She came back to me a couple of weeks later and was blown away with how easy it was to drink the water. I know it seems odd, but there’s something that we call a neurologic connection to this, in kinesiologic terms, that allows it to be more easily taken in, and I invite you to give it a go. If you’re skeptical, bear with me, but look at the water as you drink it.
Lastly, really important for this, it is critically important that you do not avoid salt if you start to drink this much water. It’s certainly true that we demineralize or wash out of the body certain minerals with larger amounts of water intake that have to be replenished. But the number one is sodium. Salt is critically important when we consume water. If you think about mentioning before, you have water inside a cell and you have water outside a cell, how do we separate water from water in the body? And we do this because each cell’s membrane is made from a fatty layer. It’s called a double lipid bilayer. It’s made from cholesterol. And being fat, it doesn’t allow water to cross this membrane. In order to cross the membrane, we have a gate. It’s called the sodium potassium pump, and it allows water to be selectively moved in and out of a cell. When you don’t have enough salt in your diet and drink larger amounts of water, there is a risk of something called hypernatremia. Water intoxication can actually be deadly in large amounts of water, which is also why we would say avoid drinking more than about a litre above the amount I’ve mentioned, bear in mind, unless you’ve been medically advised to avoid salt.
So by someone like a cardiologist, a heart doctor or a renal physician, a kidney doctor, there are certain medical conditions where salt must be avoided, and that would be given to you by a medical professional. But if you haven’t been given that advice and you do choose to drink this amount of water, add salt to taste on your food. You don’t need to lick salt sticks or have mountains of it in your kitchen or anything freaky like that. Just add it to taste on food and don’t actively avoid salt. Or use a low salt diet. We’d recommend using things like pink himalayan rock salt, black Cypriot salt, or the mould and sea salts, the unrefined, unwashed salts, because you also do get trace minerals like selenium, chromium, manganese, which are also beneficial to health. Straight table salt, literally, sodium chloride has been washed and you lose all that extra component out of it. Good thing nowadays is himalayan rock salt is readily available at the supermarket and pretty easy to come by.
But that would be my suggestion. Does that make sense for everybody? And is everybody clear about the requirement of salt? Yes. So a. Carol’s just asked, so don’t add salt to the water, but just to food. Correct. Don’t add it to your salt. Remember, you change its constituency there. I’m not saying electrolytes are bad to any degree, but the most hydrating thing you can take, according to this kinesiology method I used, is plain water. Add the salt to your food as it’s a food component, not necessarily a water component. So that’s good. Any other questions there? Does that make sense for a carol? Just give me a thumbs up or a. Yeah. Your name. Remember the equation? I’ll just flip back a slide. 43 and a half millilitres per body kilo. Where am I? Yep. 43 and a half millilitres per kilogram gives your amount. If you’ve got any questions on this, reach out on socials, let me know. But it’s. It’s reasonably simple. No higher than one litre. Don’t avoid salt. Perfect.
Okay, the next one. Healthy habit number two, regulating emotions. In this, I’d like you to consider that emotions are normal. They are normal. We should experience them. It’s part of the human experience, part of, literally, a mammal. Every mammal that’s thought has what we call a limbic brain or an emotional brain. Your cat, your dog, a seal. They all have the same emotional regulatory mechanisms. But emotions shouldn’t run us. They should pass. We should experience them. If you’re angry, be angry. If you are flat and depressed about something. It’s normal to be flat and depressed with something that’s flat and depressing, but it should shift. So regulating emotions is part of the human experience. What I’d like to share with you is a very brief understanding of the human nervous system. This diagram that you can see on your screen here of the human system. On one side, at the bottom of that chart, you see green, somatic nerves. And on the right hand side, autonomic nerves.
The somatic nervous system is subdivided into two parts, what we call sensory and motor. Sensory means we can detect pain, pressure, temperature at the skin surface, feedback from our environment, and motor nervous system, voluntary skeletal muscle movement. I can choose to move my hand or not move my hand, and my brain gives that impulse to a muscle. Provided I’ve got an intact nerve and an intact muscle, I can voluntarily choose to move. That or nothing. The other half of that, though, the autonomic nervous system is the software that I get to run around in as a kinesiologist, and this is the background software that runs what we call the human biocomputer. This is also subdivided into two halves. Autonomic nervous system has one half, called the sympathetic nervous system, fight, flight, freeze, or survival mode. And the parasympathetic nervous system, rest, digest, and heal, or recovery mode. Liken this to a car, you can’t drive a car with your foot on the accelerator or the sympathetic system all the time, and you can’t drive your car on the brake all the time.
The parasympathetic shutdown system, you have to be able to regulate in and out of both. This is a survival mechanism, and it was set up from an evolutionary perspective to keep us alive. If I’m running away from a pterodactyl that’s trying to eat me, my brain’s not going to give me the impetus to slow down, rest, digest, heal, defecate, lie down, and have a nap. It’s going to send all blood to my brain and muscles and send hormones that allow me to crank out and get out of danger. But once I get back to the cave, that should turn off and I should be able to rest, recover, and slow down again. What this looks like in the modern world is we hit, snooze five times, wake up late, stuff a piece of toast in our mouth while we’re trying to run out the door or sit in peak hour traffic with people screaming and yelling at us, have a stressy day, at work, come home, and we’re in survival mode all the time. Even at sleep, we never shut down and turn off. So we stay stuck in this state of fight, flight, freeze. Not processing very well, so regulating autonomic nervous system function is critical.
Hayley said, that’s me. Hang in there, Hayley. I’ve got some good stuff coming up here. So does this make sense about this regulation between on mode and off mode? Just give me a yay or name. Should all be pretty self explanatory. Yep. Beautiful. Yep, yep. Fantastic. So what I’d like to share with you is an awesome little kinesiologic technique that TBM calls basic emotion. Bear in mind, this will not fix why you’re in an emotionally triggered state. If you have a fight with your partner, it’s not going to repair why you had a fight with your partner. That’s a conversation, a counselling or therapy session, or some ongoing work. But this takes the emotional charge off something. There’s a concept that, again, Tanj loves to share in some of her work. When emotional intelligence is high, when your emotions are running high, your intelligence is low, you’re not thinking clearly. And sometimes when your intelligence is really high, you’re not really connected emotionally. We want to have a little bit of give and take here, but to take the charge off this emotional situation that may be hitting you and allowing your rational brain to kick in and find a way through, there’s a great little technique here. Bear in mind, what I’m about to share does require you to curl your spine. And the reason why is, in a postural sense, this is a concept known as the triune brain, or three layered brain. We have a central reptilian brain that over time, evolution had a mammalian brain or animal brain, the limbic emotional brain. And then unique to humans, we have a third layer called the neocortex, or the rational thinking brain. It gives us the concepts of language, of rational thought, memorization, and the concept of time.
What we’re interested in is the animal brain here, the emotional brain. To access that, you’re in a fetal position, or curled position. So it is important to curl the spine here. So what you do is you curl your back and neck, leaning forwards. You must cross your arms using your fingers. There’s a spot just in the middle of the forehead here, in line with the pupils. Just above your eyebrows, you have a little hollow. You curl, bending forwards, and you inhale in through the nose, out through the mouth. You can close your eyes and you do a minimum of three repetitions. Here, you can do more if you choose, but this is really effective at taking the charge off something.
And even if you’re sitting there now, give it a try. Close your eyes, cross your arms, touch the points on your forehead, in through the nose and out through the mouth, and at least three or more breaths. And it’s quite a calming reset here. Now, you can do this before heading into a charged meeting or something where you’re coming out of a connection with someone that’s left you a little bit shaken. You can certainly use this as a basic reset. As I said, it won’t fix the issue, but it definitely helps take the charge off it. I’ve had good mileage with this, with patients that have struggled with things like public speaking and public performance.
Again, Tanj mentions a great story about, you know, the most feared thing on the planet is public speaking, meaning that people would rather be dead than speak publicly. You’d rather be in the coffin than deliver the eulogy. And I’ve used this technique for people before. They’ve gone out on stage as a performer or as a public speaker, where it just settles the dust a little bit, lets them clear their mind, get their brain in gear again, and out they go. And they’re not held hostage by the emotional charge. Great for parents with kids when they’re feeling a little worked up as well. Really simple, effective little technique.
All makes sense on that one. Great for property managers. When you’re out on the go and you’re dealing with people with pretty challenging phone calls they’re unloading at you, it’s your problem. Even though you haven’t done anything to warrant that. This one’s worth the price of admission.
The second one is probably one of my most favourite things I’ve ever come across. It actually came initially to me. The first person that made me aware of this was my mother. I’d like to share with you a technique called 478 breathing. Has anybody here in the group heard of 478 breathing before? Just give me a yes. Or if you use it with regularity or have ever heard about it before. Has anybody heard of 478 breathing?
We did that at rides. Miss Davis? Yes. Ok. From me. Oh, my goodness. I’m repeating myself now. This is good. Not bad to revisit this one. As I said, this technique is amazing. Dee says yes. Do you use this regularly, Dee, or is this just something you’ve heard of prior?
Okay, so the gentleman that first postulated this is a gentleman called Doctor Andrew Wheal. Now, Doctor Weil is an integrative medical doctor. He’s a western medical doctor who is deeply interested in integrative medicine. So nutrition, wellness therapies. And he studied why different breathing patterns have persisted throughout the human experience. Why do we have chanting? Why do we have religious breathing methodologies? Why do we do yogic breathing, nostril breathing, all these different things. And he started to look at how the brain actually functioned during different breathing cycles.
And we know that when you exhale longer than when you inhale, we’re actually bringing up this parasympathetic nervous system, what we would call upregulating the parasympathetic nervous system. So if your sympathetic is really high and your parasympathetic is low, 478 again helps counter that and bring the parasympathetic up. You feel calmer, you feel like you can switch off, you feel like you can exhale, and the pterodactyl is not threatening to eat you immediately.
I’ve popped a link to Doctor Weil’s website there. It’s just drwheel.com. But he has again, some great resources on his website that are free around lifestyle changes, nutrition changes, this type of thing. Really, really useful resource, but I’d like to share with you 478 breathing. Now this is so named because you inhale for a four count, you hold for a seven count, and then exhale for an eight count. Another component to this is you pop your tongue right to the roof of your mouth. You take the tip of your tongue, put it right at the top of your palate, you should feel a little ridge line on the roof of the mouth.
And what you’re doing here is actually connecting two energetic pathways. This is, in Chinese medicine known as the microcosmic orbit, two pathways that loop up and down the front of the body. I won’t get too much into that, it’s another seminar or webinar that I’m more than happy to run through, but at this point, just tongue to the roof of the mouth.
What I’ll do is just flick through these next little components so you can see them, and then we’ll work through the method. So firstly, you’ve got to exhale, get all the air out of your lungs first, so you can breathe in for the fore count, tongue to the roof of your mouth, inhale through your nose, down into the abdomen for a fore count. Does everybody understand what I mean by abdominal breathing, where you take it right down into the abdomen? You should feel your tummy expand a little bit when you inhale. Hold it for a seven count. And then with the tongue still touching the roof of the mouth, you exhale for an eight count and then you repeat this four times, no more than four times.
And Doctor Weil is adamant about this. When I first came across this, I thought, oh, four times is great, I’ll do this for an hour. There I am sitting for an hour, doing four, seven, eight breathing and actually not feeling so crash hot because you are exhaling more than you’re inhaling. It can lead to, over a long period of time, a lower oxygenation in your blood, something called hypoxia, and you don’t feel super great about that. So definitely stick to Doctor Weil’s recommendation of only four cycles at once. You can use it multiple times in a day, but only do four cycles at once.
Doctor Weil reckons the best results from this method are gained by doing it twice daily every day as a preventer. It helps the brain pattern in how to switch on and off. Remember brake and accelerator, how to switch on, switch off, switch on, switch off. He recommends doing it on waking up. And then when you go to bed and you want to switch off at the end of the day, it prepares the brain for sleep. And I’ll talk a little more on that when I get into the third healthy hack about sleep.
So two times a day, four, seven, eight, breathing for four cycles. I’ll walk you through it for a couple of rounds with me now. So I’d like you just to sit for a moment and follow my direction here. Pop your tongue to the roof of your mouth and just breathe out. And then inhale through your nose for a four count. Go. Hold 234567. Exhale. Inhale again through the nose. Two, three, four, hold 234567. Exhale. And just rest now. Just resume normal breathing.
You’ll notice on the eight count, it can be difficult to sustain the exhalation for eight. And it takes a bit of practice. Like any new skill, you have to work at this a little bit. But my invitation here is if you’re struggling with the exhale and it seems to be going too quickly, purse your lips like you’re whistling. So I’ll demonstrate here. Tongue is still to the roof of my mouth here. So you make a whooshing sound as you exhale. When you make a smaller opening, you can lengthen the amount of time it takes to exhale. You can regulate this a little better, play with it and practise it and see how you go.
But this one is probably one of the most effective techniques I’ve ever used with my patient, outside of sticking sharp pieces of metal in them or doing specific kinesiologic resets. This breathing method has revolutionised some of my patients’ lives, and I can’t speak highly enough of it.
Any questions on 478? Does that all make sense? Just give me an indication of your biggest takeout so far? What’s the biggest thing you’ve had to connect to so far that I’ve shared? Anyone got anything in particular that’s starting to really resonate for them? Drink more water intake, the amount of water needed. Thank you, Ann. Yes. Bear with me. I promise it gets going here. And as I said at the start, guys, bear in mind this is a truth, not the truth, but I can only share with you what I’ve got clinical traction with, and it’s pretty good. Awesome. Sympathetic, parasympathetic, says Kaya. Yeah, water quantity intake and breathing.
Awesome. Okay, moving on. Healthy habit number three, I’d like to share with you tbm caffeine and sleep regulation. So how to set yourself up for sleep success. What this is called is sleep hygiene. And by hygiene, how to get the best healthy aspect out of what you get.
So first one, go to bed and wake up at the same time each day. As animals, as mammals, we operate within something called a circadian rhythm. This is our natural biorhythm day to day that the body works through hormonally. An example here is during sleep, when it’s dark, we release melatonin and it keeps us asleep. When it’s bright and daylight, we release serotonin and cortisol and it wakes us up.
So this circadian rhythm, your brain doesn’t understand the difference between a Tuesday and a Sunday. My invitation here is to try to go to bed around the same time every night, maybe with about an hour variation either side, and try to wake up around the same time each day. Even if you don’t get out of bed, wake around the same time each day and do this as the time that you’d usually have to be up to for work. The reason why is it starts to train your brain in when to switch off at night and when to wake up during the day. So if you’re all over the shop with that, if you work shift work or you have a really hard time where you’re getting to bed at four in the morning some days and 09:00 p.m. Other days, your brain doesn’t understand what it’s doing.
The first thing my invitation here is to get good sleep regulation. Regulate your circadian rhythm. They go to bed, wake around the same time each day.
Second thing, make your bedroom a little cooler rather than a little warmer. Optimum temperatures are around 15 to 18 degrees centigrade here. If you’re not aware, what the body does is actually decrease its core temperature overnight. When we sleep, it shunts blood away from the core into the extremities, which is why sometimes your hands and feet can feel a little warmer in bed than other times. Your body’s actually regulating temperature away from the core into the extremities so it can cool down a little bit. If you sleep in a very hot bedroom or use an electric blanket on like level 50, you’re actually warming yourself up and it makes it much harder for your body to settle into this regulated cooler state to prepare for sleep. So cooler rather than warmer.
Third thing, remember mentioning the circadian rhythm, working off light exposure, make your room as dark as possible. My TBM instructor who now owns and runs TBM, a gentleman called Kevin Malay, talks about how even a flashing smoke detector for some patients is too much. Led lights on things like Internet routers in your bedroom, red lights on devices like television screens and stuff are still, for some people, too disrupting. So consider using a sleeping mask, particularly if you do sleep in an urban area where you can’t block light effectively with blackout curtains. But make your room as dark as possible, you want to make sure your brain’s aware it’s nighttime.
Fourth, avoid stimulating activities with flat screen technology around 90 minutes or more before you go to bed. Flat screen devices, as I’m sure you’ve heard or are aware, and if you’re not, they emit a blue wavelength light. Blue screen light. What this is, it mimics early morning sunrise light. Blue lights associated with sunrise, red light with sunset as far as a wavelength is concerned for sun exposure. And remember, we tweak on a biorhythm of sunlight. So when you look at a flat screen at 02:00 in the morning, when you wake up in bed, you’re telling your brain it’s morning, it stops making melatonin and it starts producing cortisol and serotonin, and we wake up. So make sure to try and avoid flat screens, tvs, iPads, flat screen devices about 90 minutes before bed. Even if you use blue light blocking glasses and things, it still tweaks the brain definitely fine to read a book like an actual book or a Kindle that has a non blue wavelength screen but no mobile phone, use electromagnetic, use stimulating activities.
I’d also count things, obviously, like caffeine, nicotine, sugar. If you’re sitting on the couch smashing chocolate at 09:00 p.m. At night, you’re giving all this energy into the body that it wants to utilise and it wakes up going, cool, I’ve got all this extra fuel. I want to go run around the block and we sit on the couch and then go to bed wondering why we don’t sleep. Even things like emotional stimulation. So heavy exercise late at night, even for some people, tweaky movies like really intense scary horror films or very involved dramas and that sort of thing can be enough that it stimulates the brain. So you want to start to slow down and wind down towards the end of the night. Certainly avoiding stressy emails. From a property manager’s perspective, I know the temptation is to clear the inbox that never empties. But if you’re doing that at midnight and then you want to fall into bed and you’re carrying all this emotional swirl around it, you’re not going to have a great night’s sleep.
Fifth one, obviously minimise sounds. I used to live on a main road in metropolitan Melbourne and I’d have to wear earplugs to try and get some sound blocking. So that’s quite important to minimise sounds. There, there. And finally, your brain might be tired from a pretty hefty day at work, but your body may be not. We sit all day if we’re a PM, maybe sit in a car, then sit at a computer and then maybe up for a little bit. But generally we sit down for a fair chunk of our day. We’re not using the body physically. TBM would counsel using at least up to an hour of brisk physical activity every day where possible. Again, it’s part of the circadian rhythm. We want to use the energy that the body has to deplete it like a battery, prepare the body to sleep and replenish and go again the next day. So where I say brisk physical activity, even a walk around the block, just enough to get a bit of a glow on. You want to feel a hint of perspiration, a little bit of raised heart rate and feel like you’re getting a bit more moving through the body there. So aiming for up to an hour a day where we can. Again, I appreciate real estate with long hours and long days, that’s not always possible, but just food for thought here, all making sense. There, there.
And lastly here. TBM, caffeine. TBM, caffeine. TBM uses an energy circuit called energy circuit two. It comes from Chinese medicine at your desired wake up time. So this is where you want to wake up at 06:00 a.m. Instead of 04:00 a.m. Or you want to wake up at 06:00 a.m. Instead of being half asleep until 10:00 a.m. Or when you need an energy boost at any time during the day, you can perform this technique.
First thing you do is on your left rib cage, halfway between your armpit and the base of your rib cage here on the sideline, the side seam shirt line of the body called the axillary line, you brush. For women, this is about where your bra strap crosses your torso. For men, it’s about where the pectoral muscle ends. You brush here for about 30 seconds, just lightly brushing on the side of the rib cage here. This one is amazing.
For children that are out of whack with their sleep cycles, brush your left rib cage for a good 30 seconds and then on the outside edge of both ears. I don’t know if you can see here, but this outer cartilage line of the ear is called the helix. You take both ears and you roll this open. Gently stretch this cartilage crease along the outside edge of the ears, working from the top down to the bottom or bottom to the top. But you unfurl this so the left rib cage is immediately followed by both ears.
What you’re doing here is an energy circuit that helps regulate the circadian rhythm. When I first worked with TBM, I said, if I do this at 06:00 a.m. To wake up, and then I do it at 02:00 p.m. In the afternoon to have a cup of coffee, haven’t I just reset my body to now think of my 02:00 p.m. Is my wake up time? And they said, good question, but not so. Your brain innately understands your intention. So at your desired wake up time, do this while you’re lying flat in bed before your feet touch down for the day, lie in bed, brush left rib cage up both ears at your desired wake up time.
This one is amazing for things like what’s coming up over the weekend with daylight saving time changes where we get out of sync with our meal patterns, our bowel patterns, our sleep wake cycles, and also jet lag. Very, very effective when travelling at your desired wake up time. Left rib cage, both ears, or when you need a bit of an energy boost, it avoids you reaching for the sugar drawer, three drawers down in your desk or living on caffeine.
All clear there. We’re almost there, guys. You’re doing great. Any questions so far? Doing really well. Bear with me, we’re almost there.
How to fall asleep and get back to sleep quickly. Two little tips here. The first, 1478, breathing. I cannot stress this one enough. As I said, my mum introduced me to this. She’s a nurse of 30 years. My dad was a surgeon for about 30 years. Is she came across this about 15 years ago and said this to me about getting back to sleep again. And I thought it was a bunch of crap. It’s yet to fail me personally and I’ve had one patient who didn’t get good results with their sleep. They had some other health problems that were impacting their insomnia and this didn’t work for them.
But 478, breathing, amazing for getting back to sleep. If you wake up overnight, give it a try. No more than four cycles, you should knock out again. If that doesn’t work. The second one here is behind your ears. If you feel behind your ear lobes here, there’s a little peak of bone just on the inside around the base of the ear lobes here. It’s called the mastoid process. You want to find the very base of that. And you gently rub this with a finger pad, not the tip, because it’ll be a little pokey, but using the pads of two fingers, you rub these points at the same time, firm enough to feel a little bit of pressure. Not just a skin polish, but nor do you want to cause any discomfort. And you rub this for about two minutes.
What you’re stimulating here is an acupoint. In chinese medicine, it’s called an mian. It means peaceful sleep. So we use this one as a combination of points to help with insomnia. So you can give this a rub again if you wake overnight or to prepare you for sleep. It helps again bring down the brain activity. Upregulate, parasympathetic. Get us set to stay asleep.
There’s my tips for the three healthy habits. Have a look. If you’d like to stay connected with us on Insta, that QR code links through to the alchemic Way Instagram site. As I said, we’re really connected on that. And I can’t thank you enough for spending an hour with me. I know it’s gone very quickly, but if you have questions, let me know and I cannot thank you enough. There’s Tanj and I at the alchemic way with our socials. Go be awesome. If you have questions, let me know. But thank you so much. And just let me know what your biggest takeout here was today.