Welcome to episode 343 of Live Happy Now.

No matter where you are right now, we're all doing the same thing.

Breathing.

And this week, we're going to teach you how to do it better.

I'm your host, Paula Phelps, and this week I'm joined by Josh Trent, the founder of Wellness

Force Media, host of the Wellness Force podcast, and creator of the Breathe Breath and Wellness Program.

Josh has spent the past 19 years as a trainer, researcher, and facilitator, discovering the physical and emotional intelligence we need to thrive in today's modern world.

He's here with me to talk about how our breath affects our physical and mental well-being

and offer timely tips for using your breath to get through a hectic holiday season.

Josh, welcome to Live Happy Now.

Thank you for having me, Paula.

We are talking about something that we think we all know about, which is breathing. But, you know, even though it's something we do from the time that we're born, I was surprised as an adult to find out how little I actually knew about breathing. So before we dive in and get our master class from you and breathwork, Can you explain what it is? So, you know,

breathing is a lot like meditation, but the difference between breathing and meditation is breath

work and breathing. It's this skill that you cultivate over time. But unlike meditation,

really what breathwork is, is it's an active form of clearing your mind and centering your body

that is going to produce immediate feedback and this is the key differentiator.

So this is what let's go of stress and to calm the monkey mind is really important to literally

change the way that your body responds or reacts to stress coming in.

I like to say that breathwork is the only autonomic or

automatic lever that we can pull that actually can modulate our stress.

And it's such an incredible tool because we're using it whether we realize it or not. When we

start rapid breathing, we get in an anxious situation. So we're kind of doing it in the dark side of the

...