Ziv: Hey, I’m Ziv and this is “On the Journey”. Every week “On the Journey” expose the intersections of wellness, spiritual inquiry, mental health, personal growth, and purposeful living through the eyes of the people we interview.

And today, I’m happy to host Cheryl. Cheryl is a toxin expert. She wrote four books, and today she’s going to tell us how can we manage our stress and anxiety.

Welcome Cheryl.

Cheryl: Thank you. I’m really excited to be here. My name is Cheryl Meyer. I live in Los Angeles, California, and I had so much stress as a solopreneur, I depleted my cortisol almost all of the way to Addison’s disease, which was a huge component in me getting autoimmune disease, which gave me horrific pain. So it really was self-defense. I had to figure stress out.

And before we start, I want everybody to understand

When it becomes a problem is when it goes over the top into chronic or toxic stress. And I was living perpetually in toxic stress, so much so that my friends had started pulling me aside and saying, hey, stress accumulates. You are so stressed out, you need to deal with it now. And I thought it’s making me get more done. It’s making me more productive. So what’s to do? I’m going to live on stress because it’s helping me be more successful in my business. Ends up nothing could be further from the truth.

Ziv: So that’s really interesting and important because I agree. I think that stress can help us perform better. On the other hand, like you said, it can be just horrible for our health and for us.

How do we know when we are at the good point of stress, this sweet spot where it’s the thing that pushes us forward or where it becomes too toxic for us and it’s we really need to take care of it.

Cheryl: If you’re really feeling it in your body, if your moods start to shift, if the way you’re dealing with your loved ones or your employees starts to shift because you’re strict with them, your emotions are raw, then you are dealing with chronic stress. And what I’ve learned, I’ve come up with a whole series of three-minute exercise that I learned from a down group of meditation that if you do them, they bring blood up to your brain and actually improve your productivity.

It’s really important that you break up your day by doing these little exercises, which then releases it from being chronic or toxic, improves your flow to your brain, improves your productivity, makes you happy because it impacts your gut and your gut is where the majority of your serotonin is. So it releases all that serotonin, which is the feel-good hormone. You’re better to be around. You’re much more effective as a manager and you’re a much better manager of your own body and what’s going on with your body and your own health. So there are all kinds of benefits of taking care of stress.

Ziv: Cheryl, I’m sold, teach me. I want to see this three minutes of exercise. I really want to. But how does it work?

Cheryl: The one that I do the most you can look at right up on Google. And it’s by the first integrative doctor whose name is Dr. Andrew Weil, and it’s called the four seven eight breathing exercise. You can do it anywhere. It takes three minutes or less. I do it in L.A. traffic when I’m on the way to my functional doctor because my blood pressure was always super high when I got to her.

And now I have the best pulse and the best blood pressure of any of her patients because I’m just doing this breathing exercise and it’s as simple as breathing in four, holding it for seven, and then wishing it out of your mouth with your tongue up against your teeth for the count of eight. You do four rounds of it. It resets your parasympathetic nervous system at the back of your neck, which means it dramatically lowers stress from chronic back to a normal dealable level. And you’ll feel much better. Your pulse will lower, your heart is happier. Everything about your body is happier. So it’s that simple.

Ziv: It sounds like magic. Let’s do it. Let’s do it with you.

Cheryl: Breath in for four. You hold it for seven.

Two, three, four, five, six, seven.

And then you wish it. Out of your mouth, with your tongue up against your teeth, your mouth is open for a count of eight. And you do that four times.

Ziv: I already feel different. Four times.

Cheryl: You’ll be surprised and you’ll be much easier to be around if you do this and it’s so good for your body.

Ziv: That’s amazing. So I do it four times for three minutes or?

Cheryl: You do it four times and it doesn’t matter really how fast or slow you do it. But by doing it four times in a relative cadence, it will reset your parasympathetic nervous system.

Ziv: Cheryl , that’s like magic. Thank you so much.

Cheryl: There’s a second breathing exercise called The Perfect Breath, which is five point five seconds in and five-point five seconds out. You can also go to Zoom and you can find a little thing that goes up and down for five points five seconds that you can breathe with.

And when I do that is when I’m really frustrated and anxious. And what I do is I visualize breathing in light and breathing out dark. And you do that for three minutes and you’ll be surprised at how that also dramatically improves your mood and you feel light and happy again where you were feeling anxious and frustrated.

Ziv: That’s wonderful, Cheryl. Just to breathe in the light, take out the darkness, and it’s like a physiological reset.

Cheryl: Right and it reset your brain so that you’re focused on the good again.

Ziv: Cheryl, thank you so much so much for your experience, for your knowledge, for sharing us these two magnificent exercises, which I’m definitely going to try them on my own.

Cheryl: It can be as simple as, you know, you’re frustrated. You stand up next to your desk and you just bounce for three minutes. You let every muscle in your body bounce and you’ll feel the energy going all the way up to your brain and all the way down to your fingertips and all the way down to your toes. It’s that simple.

Now, you might be embarrassed doing that in an office cluttered with people. The other two exercises you can do and nobody knows about it. But it will make you feel really good to move that little and send blood to your brain. And if you have that thing where after lunch you go down, which a lot of us do when we’re eating food and we come back to work, just getting up and bouncing for three minutes will really energize us to attack our day again.

Ziv:  So we have three minutes breathing to support simple methods, five point five minutes out or then breathing for four, holding it seven and then breathing out four eight. And bouncing, which I love breathing and I love bouncing.

Cheryl: I thought I had it close but there’s also something I want everybody to look up, call the belly button want. It’s a T yellow piece of plastic that you literally put in your belly button. The theory is your belly button was the beginning of all life. And by putting the belly button wand in your belly button and jiggling it, you can exercise every organ in your body and again, send energy to your entire body, to your brain, to your toes, to your fingers. It feels really good. My husband and I do it on each other at the end of a stressful day.

And we went to UCLA, to the head of neurology, do a lecture where he was pooh poohing the belly button wand, but he had his brainwave machine set up and he was bringing people out of the audience to sit in. Their brainwaves were all over the place. And then they used the belly button wand and they completely evened out and he was blown away.

We ran into him at a health conference two weeks later and he came up and said, was that unbelievable or what? And I said, we do it. We know it works. It’s an odd looking tool. And that one’s probably one you’re going to want to do at home, because even when I brought it out to other health coaches, they went, hey what? what is that thing?

But it’s not big. It easily travels. And it is a miracle producing little gizmo that you can use on your body to feel fantastic. And my books are all called Feel Good. That’s what we want to do. It’s so good for our health. So that’s what you want to concentrate on is how are you going to take your body back to feeling good

Ziv: Cheryl, I want to tell you that talking with you with this amazing energy of yours, I already feel good. So thank you so much for this interview. It was a pleasure. And I learned so many new things.

Thank you Cheryl

Cheryl: Thank you. Thank you.