E9 | You Can't Breathwork Your Way Out of Burnout

Mike Schwartz: You've done the meditation app, you've done the breath work, the vacation, the just rest more, you've probably even gone to the jungle, sipped cacao, laid under the stars, and wondered why things weren't working out. Cause you came back still tired, still irritable, still getting hurt, still getting sick, still snapping at people that you love. Listen, that's not a discipline problem, and it's not a try harder problem. That's a battery problem. See in a perfect world, you'd be fully charged. Except this is where you're actually at. You know what happens to a car when a battery goes fully dead, not just low, but like gone. And then you put the jumpers on it? You try to jump it. Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Sometimes you even fry the system trying. You see, a dead battery doesn't need a jump. It needs to go all the way down to zero, get taken off the car, and get fully recharged. From the ground up, your nervous system works the exact same way. So when you're chronically burnt out, the tools that work for a low battery, they stop working because you're not low anymore, you're completely dead. And nobody told you the difference. Here's what most people get backward. See, you've got what we know as an internal doctor. It's running 24-7. It's repairing tissues over here, it's ⁓ fighting off the cold over here, it's managing inflammation down here. It's regulating your hormones. It's it's essentially keeping the whole system upright without you even having to think about it. See, when that doctor is on the job, you don't get sick. You don't get hurt. You're not snapping at people who don't deserve it, like your kids over lunchtime or something. But when the load gets too high for too long, that doctor doesn't quit. They get pulled off your case entirely. They get reassigned to just keeping you alive. It's like straight up triage mode. The doctor is on vacation in Uruguay and nobody is covering your shift. And that's when the wrist pain shows up. That's when you get sick for the third time in as many months. And that's when you're irritable over absolutely nothing. You see, those aren't separate problems. They're actually the same problem, just wearing a different hat. Here is the equation that nobody has taught you. It's important to remember it's not the stress that kills you. It's your ability to handle the load. See, stress isn't the enemy. Everybody thinks it is. It's not. Load is normal. That's what these are. These are the boxes of load. These are the things that we're going to do. Things like training, deadlines, relationships, life. The problem isn't that that load exists. The problem is when the load exceeds capacity for long enough that your system, remember that doctor, that your system stops recovering between hits. And that gap, that load over capacity sustained, is called allostatic overload. And it's cumulative. It doesn't just reset because you slept eight hours one night. This is why the same person keeps getting hurt in training, keeps catching every single cold going around the office, and keeps being real short with people who just genuinely don't deserve it. It's not bad luck. It's a capacity account running in the red. These are all of the areas of your life, many of which we don't even know exist, that contribute to that load versus capacity burnout equation. We've got physical, like the thumb, that's your grip on life. We've got our emotional stress, we've got our nutritional type of stress, we've got our chemical, just like the ring that we wear on our ring finger, and then the tiny but all too mighty electromagnetic style stress. And if we open up that palm, that's our thermal. So that's when you're too hot, too cold. These six zones of stress all contribute, they all go to the same pile. So when you're dealing with load versus capacity, if we are stressed out in one or as many of us are, more of these areas, they all go onto that same pile. And over time it keeps on building up, up, up, up, up so that our load exceeds our capacity. See when we've got A bigger gap in here, and we've actually taken into account some of the things that we can do, like recovery systems. ⁓ we have more room for error. If we don't have recovery systems in place and we can't reset our nervous system, these things take control of our life. So if we're looking to not be ill, getting sick, irritable, being annoying to people, or getting injured, we've got to focus. On where we are with regards to the batteries. See, meditation and breath work. Now, here's the part that nobody likes to hear. Breath work, guided meditation, 10-minute app sessions. These are all what we know as active down regulation. They require your system to have enough capacity left to do the work of calming itself down. Here's the problem though, you can't actively Downregulate a system that has nothing to give. That's why the breathing exercises that you used to do and they used to help feels like another thing to do. Add it to the list now. The technique itself isn't bad. It's that you're asking a dead battery to charge itself. Just doesn't work. So now what actually happens at zero is what we call passive downregulation, where the nervous system is guided down without needing you to consciously do anything right. This is what brainwave entrainment does. Two tones, one in each ear, a few hertz apart, and your brain just follows the gap. It does the math for you. And that doesn't require your permission ⁓ or any sort of effort at all. You don't have to breathe right. You don't have to sit still and focus on one thing. All you gotta do is listen. Now that's the whole difference. It doesn't ask your depleted system to perform recovery. It removes the performance requirement entirely. The system just goes down naturally. This is the whole method. Prescriptive music paired with prescriptive movement, rebuilding the mindset underneath both so the internal doctor can come back from Uruguay and get right back on the clock. That's the music side of the music fit method. It's not a playlist, it's more of a protocol. Brainwave and trainment for actualization and transformation. DOS is the movement side of things, the prescribed physical practice that rebuilds capacity, while beat rebuilds the nervous system's ability to actually recover. One without the other is half the equation. Together, that's the music fit method. This is how I see it. Like a sailboat. We're unable to do much growth and performance without these things. Flexibility, mobility, strength, and balance and skill. However, we don't even get into the ocean, as this is a sailboat, without things like recovery, our sleep diet, and our stress, or our CNS regulation, which is music. Okay? That's the safety and security. If you get into the ocean, With safety and security, then your growth and performance can set sail. Now, if you're a coach, this is a tool that you learn once and use twice. On yourself, one, so you're not running your own sessions on a dead battery, and in your client work. So you've got both beat and dose as something concrete to hand somebody who's already tried the meditation, they've already tried the breath work, they they stopped doing it. Because they stopped believing it worked. Then on the other hand, if you're an artist or you're just the person reading this going, ⁓ man, that sounds a lot like me. This is your daily practice back to game shape. Not another thing to white knuckle through. A track that you press play on and a movement practice that helps put the sweat equity back into the account. Now, here are some of the things that are being said about this practice. From folks like Dr. Sean Postoch, who loved it because it was prescriptive, it was a dosage, it was a lot less than he had thought. ⁓ another one, Leanne Knox, with the Wit Sundays weightlifting team, found that not only did it help her, but also her athletes perform better both on the platform and then in recovery. If you're an athlete, this could be great too, such as Ruby right here. Ruby was ⁓ another athlete down in Australia. Who use some of the practices combined with the music to have her best performances. And then we've got, of course, other coaches and practitioners like Megan here, who's leading the empowerment charge with athletic therapy, who has found great success in helping with her limiting beliefs and also helping her with her client's limiting beliefs, where she can dose in with music or mindset work that helps flip the script for an individual who has a ⁓ upregulated nervous systems. That's it. That's all. You know where to find me if this is something that you want to explore. Hit that link below. Peace.