How You Breathe Impacts Dating…

Hello, good morning cadre. Welcome to Friday. Thank you for joining in. Glad to be here. I'm just going to take one last sip of my coffee. Hopefully that's not the freeze frame that shows up on my feed when this is posted. So just a little introduction to me. My name is Michelle O'Connell. I am a dating coach. I started a business called Unstuck by Michelle, which is dating coaching, and I absolutely love it. So my content on here is about dating. And I've said this before, this content can also be applied to people who are in relationships.

If you're not dating, if you're married, a lot of this stuff can cross over into different categories. And as we know, dating, if you've ever dated, if you're dating, you know that dating can impact your mental health. And that is why we're here. This is why we're on CADRE to talk about it, right? To talk about how dating can impact your mental health and I'm here to give you tips and tools and things that can help you date with more ease. So let's dive into it. Today we are talking about breath, breath and dating.

And you may have seen the title for this and wondered, how are those things related? And the reality is most people focus on what they're going to say during a date or with texting with somebody and not so much on how they're breathing. And your nervous system affects your energy, your confidence, your connection. Breathing is the most efficient way to calm your nervous system. And I know that there's a lot of folks on Cadre that talk about breathing, breath work. They have like breath segments and this is going to be really different.

This is really different than typical kind of like sit with breath work, breathe. This is about how you're breathing throughout the day. So in my spare time, in my spare time, outside of dating coaching, I am also in training right now to be a functional breath coach. And I've learned so much about breathing and how that impacts your nervous system, your cognition, your sleep, your energy and motivation. And so in learning about this, you know, my brain is always connecting dots and I'm like, of course this impacts people's dating.

Of course it impacts people's mental health if you're not breathing in a way that is efficient to sending oxygen from your brain, your toes to your fingertips. You're going to be tired, exhausted. You're going to live in that anxious state. And so thinking about how you breathe and not just how you breathe again during isolated breath work, how you breathe throughout the day, how you breathe when you're sleeping, how you breathe when you're watching TV, flipping around on your phone. impacts your nervous system, right?

And your nervous system impacts how you show up. So thinking about breath, right? Take a second and just notice how you're breathing right now. Don't overthink it. Are you breathing into your chest? Is your chest moving a lot? Are you breathing out of your mouth? Is your belly expanding? Are you taking a big breath? Is it loud? Can you hear it? I ask those questions because all of those things matter. If you are breathing shallow into your chest, right, if your chest is moving quite a bit when you're breathing throughout the day, that is a recipe for stress, tension, and overthinking.

And I'll explain the why, right? If you're breathing faster, right? If you have, I would say I'm being generous, over 12 breaths per minute, like you're breathing too fast, right? And that can cause and have some anxiety, residual anxiety, it can cause urgency in your body and nervous energy. If you're breathing through your nose and if you're breathing slow, that is a calm presence, that is grounded energy. And that, my friend, is sexy, right? Calm presence, you can be your authentic self. And that's so important when you're dating, right?

If you show up dating and you're shaking your legs, sweating, right? That really gives off nervous energy. And for me, that kind of energy kind of pushes me back a little bit. As human beings, are you ready for this? We are meant to breathe through our nose. There's 30 functions of our nose and I'm not going to get into all of them. There's like a few functions of our mouth, right? It is to talk, to chew, to eat, few other small things, but we are meant to breathe through our nose. Right, there's science behind this.

Well, a lot of my studies come from the Budaiko method. That's from the 1950s. This has been backed by science. It is well supported that as human beings, we are meant to breathe through our nose. There's more to it. It's not just as simple as breathing through our nose. We are meant to breathe. I won't get too geeky into this, but there's like biomechanics, biochemistry, and the physiological sides of breath. So to break that down even basic, it is slow, light, deep breathing. Diaphragmatic breathing, we hear that term all the time.

So the why behind that and how, again, I'll keep bringing this back to dating. When we have diaphragmatic breathing, so deep into our diaphragm, what happens is that we have more carbon dioxide in our body. Carbon dioxide is not just a waste gas. Carbon dioxide is a fuel for our body. It connects with our red blood cells and it sends oxygen throughout your body to your brain, toes, fingertips. Nasal breathing through your diaphragm is the most efficient way to send oxygen throughout your body, right?

I don't think I need to go into why we need oxygen throughout our body, but imagine when you don't. So if you're an anxious breather, chest breathing, if you're breathing too fast, if you're breathing out your mouth, those folks tend to have less oxygen dispersed throughout body. They wake up feeling mouth breathers at night, wake up feeling more tired, more brain fog, more likely to fall into an anxious state. And that impacts dating. When I first started learning about this stuff, I took a walk.

I was like, I'm just going to breathe through my nose, pierce your lips closed, chest is still into my diaphragm, and I was walking. was out of breath within a block and I was like, I don't normally breathe like this. Like I am talking to my dog. I'm like, hey, I'm talking to myself. I often run through things in my head and kind of just mumble. Yeah. And I was like, I don't breathe through my mouth or my nose as much as I should. And I don't do it correctly, right? Because you can breathe through your nose and look at my chest.

We want our chest to be still. And I can do a whole nother talk on just nasal breathing. So I'm not going to get too much into the science, but I encourage you to look it up. So some signs that you don't have efficient breath is overthinking, like with dating specifically, overthinking text, talking too fast, feeling really anxious before meeting somebody. struggling to stay present and feeling disconnected from your body. So all signs that maybe the way you're breathing is not helping you. When we're stressed, the body goes into a fight flight state, right, that is called your sympathetic nervous system is activated.

And that often leads to heavier breathing, faster breathing, chest breathing, the heavy, Right, that is a sign that we need to change the way we breathe. Because if you're showing up and you're in a stressed state, it's gonna be harder to be your most authentic self on a date. And to think about like the way that I'm talking about breathing now, I want you to think about it, not just as like, okay, again, like a breath work or before a date. I want you to think about how you're breathing throughout the day, when you're driving, when you're listening to somebody, when you're watching TV, right?

Because diaphragmatic breathing, we've lost it along the way, right? With everything going on, TikTok's doot, doot, of the stress of the world, it's changing the way humans breathe, keeping people in a stressed state longer. So if you can slow your breath down and you have to train your diaphragm, a lot of people have weak diaphragms because we're used to breathing through our chest, through our mouth. And so diaphragmatic breathing, it can feel uncomfortable at first. It can feel like you're not getting enough breath.

And so what it looks like, I'm gonna shift my body a little bit. You just see the whole fit, bright pink shorts. Diaphragmatic breathing, right, your hands can go at the base of your diaphragm. And when you breathe in, your chest is still. When you breathe out, your chest is still. Now this is when you're sitting and practicing. You breathe in so light that the hairs in your nose barely move. You exhale so slow that you barely feel it on your lips. If you watch me, my hands are going to expand out, not forward.

It will a little forward, but it's more out out. I'm going to be a little dramatic. I love drama. So it looks like this. You can rewind. You'll notice my chest was still. It's taken a lot of practice. I don't move through the day like that, right? I'm not like, but I have trained myself to diaphragmatic breathe and not just by doing this once or twice, by being mindful of it more days than not. And the rule of thumb is once you train diaphragmatic breathing, you want to think 80/20. So even throughout the day when you're doing stuff, 80, 20, breathing is an autonomic, it comes from our autonomic nervous system.

It just happens automatically. And so I'm asking you to think about how you breathe because I want you to be your authentic self when you date. Calmer energy is safer. It's more attractive to people. These breath practices change how you live. Breathing through your mouth takes years off your life. Google it. I know some people have issue with breathing through nose allergies, deviated septum, that stuff. I really encourage doing what you need to do to take care of those things the best that you can to breathe through your nose.

Because how you breathe is how you feel. How you feel is how you date. You guys know I'm an aura ringer. When I started my nasal breath practice and two weeks ago, I was doing it every day, being very intentional. Nasal breathing, there's certain exercises, again, it's a whole different thing. My ring literally told me, you've been more restored lately. I felt better. I fought less, like I don't fight all the time, but I was less irritable. I was less reactive, right? I could see in my, I'm a therapist as well.

In my sessions, if I'm not breathing slow, if I've lost connection with my breath, my body is more stressed. But I can see the difference on my ring when I'm engaging my diaphragm and breathing through my nose. We're not meant to breathe through our mouth. We are not. And I know in yoga, sometimes it's like in through your nose, out through your mouth. There's certain practices for this. It's short lived, right? It's a 45 minute class and then You live your life. And when you're living your life, I want you to nasal breathe, right?

We've learned a lot more about breathing and the science of breathing throughout the years. And it's just so essential. So you guys drop me a DM, follow me, TikTok, unstuckbymichelle, Instagram, unstuckbymichelle. Unrelated to breathing, but related to breathing, I have a workshop coming up, it's called Dating with Confidence. I've done this before and it was so fun and I love doing it. So it's going to be in the North Loop in Minneapolis at Bound Nolo. It's a permanent jewelry store. And we're going to be talking about showing up as your authentic self, like getting out of your head and feeling good about who you are and working on your self-esteem and how self-esteem originates.

And you better believe there's going to be stuff on breath in there because If we're over breathing, breathing too heavy, breathing through your chest, breathing through your mouth, we're going to feel our body's going to be in an anxious state. We're not going to be our authentic self. It's going to steal from your confidence. So with all those things said, I hope you have a lovely, lovely Friday. Really start thinking about nasal breathing. Really start thinking about your chest being still and let me know how it goes.

Bye guys. Oh, not bye guys. com under workshops. Bye you guys.