How To Heal Consciously By Decoding Gut Health Secrets

Sachin Patel

Thank you, Sinclair. It’s an absolute honor. As you’re introducing me, I’m like, I need a little version of Sinclair on my shoulder cheering me on every single day. I still love that. I appreciate you and I’m so excited for our conversation.

Sinclair Kennally, CNHP, CNC

Let’s go then. I really think that your personal journey is really interesting. I want to dive into myth busting today and the ways that we actually create chronic illness and how to unpack it, especially for gut conditions. I know that you’re so wise in so many tools that we have access to today to do that, especially things that have been overlooked. But I really want to start with your personal story and how you arrived on this path. So what got you started in this field of helping people to take back control over their own health?

Sachin Patel

Yeah, well, I’ll go all the way back to the fact that I was born, because I believe that this is my life’s work. So that’s where the story actually starts. Sometimes we don’t realize that this is our life’s work until we’re 45. So for me, the journey starts there. In hindsight I struggle with my health. It wasn’t until I felt better and closer to optimal that I realized how unwell I actually was because supposedly we have this one life depending on what you believe, but supposedly at least this is the only life I know in this body. It’s my only conscious experience that I have of what life should be like, how I should feel when I wake up in the morning, and what my energy level should feel like. If you’ve always been suboptimal, for which I look back and realize that I was, then that’s just how you think life is. It’s like if you ever have an old car and then you get a rental and you get a brand new car, and then you realize, wow, cars are so much faster, the brakes are sharper, like the acceleration is crisper. Then you go back into your old car and you have that contrast. Well we can’t really do that with our bodies. We can’t jump into somebody else’s body and see how they feel and what they’re experiencing. So, I’m trained originally as a chiropractor and as a chiropractor. 

Our focus and our belief is that nothing can heal the body better than it can heal itself, and that our focus and our belief also is that we are born with trillions and trillions of cells which contain the intelligence of the entire cosmos. So as far as we know, we are the most intelligent life that exists in the universe. Our cells are basically a fractal representation of our whole body. So it’s just a little mini version of who we are. We’ve as philosophically as chiropractors have always believed this, but it wasn’t until I learned about functional medicine that I feel like I truly adopted that philosophy and I truly started believing that you can feel amazing because I didn’t realize the foods that I was eating were actually causing me joint pain or causing me persistent acne. So as a teenager, I never took my shirt off because I had acne all over my back and I was just so embarrassed. Unfortunately, I’m sure that I had psychological scars and so on and so forth. When I was younger, I had a really hard time gaining weight, so I used to get teased for being skinny. Now it’s because I realized I was eating gluten and my body does not agree with gluten. Growing up, I used to use the bathroom every four days. I don’t think I’ve ever told anyone this, but every four days. I just thought that was normal. It wasn’t until it became more regular and obviously normal that I realized, oh, my God, you’re supposed to go at least once today, not once or twice a week. To me that was normal growing up. When I learned about functional medicine, I gave up gluten, I gave up dairy. I stopped eating all this fake meat, I’m still vegetarian, but I grew up being an unconscious vegetarian. If you’re an unconscious vegetarian, I think that’s one of the worst diets on the entire planet.

Sinclair Kennally, CNHP, CNC

I totally agree. I’m almost like a lifelong vegetarian myself. Yes. Thank you for saying..

Sachin Patel

Yes. So eating tons of soy, tons of fake meat, tons of processed stuff. At the time I didn’t know any better. So when I got on the functional train, I started realizing instantly how much better I could feel. My digestion improved, my acne went away, my skin dramatically improved like all the areas in my life that I had taken for granted and just assumed that they were the way they were improved. Like I didn’t have joint pain when I woke up every morning. I wasn’t tired when I woke up every morning. Since then, I’ve just been on this never ending path of mastering myself and mastering this body. Then if I learned some cool things, I love sharing that and paying it forward with my clients, but also my community online as well.

Sinclair Kennally, CNHP, CNC

That’s so beautiful. I think it’s really a testament to our commitment to service and for everybody listening. I hope that you, as you recognize yourself in sessions or my story today, that you give yourself grace to take each chapter like you can. You get to be in service. You get to give back as soon as you take care of yourself. I wasn’t any good to anybody until I took care of myself and that was the truth. If you have a big heart and you want to be there for other people, make sure that you’re taking care of this first. 

So, let’s dive into myth busting because you’re so good at that. I really want to unpack today when we think about reversing chronic gut conditions. There’s so much noise out there about digestive issues and so much of it isn’t working. We look at like six out of ten Americans have chronic digestive symptoms. That is completely unacceptable and unprecedented. So many of us do this train of like, oh, I’m not quite sick enough to be assigned a diagnosis yet. I guess I’ll wait it out and just try to survive it. Oh, now I have this set of words and they’re even the wrong set of words, and that sends you down a different path. There’s so many layers to this that don’t need to be there. What has gone wrong? What are the myths that still persist, that have gotten us to this place of this epidemic of chronic symptoms?

Sachin Patel

Well, I think the first myth that comes to mind is that it’s only 60%, and so I would argue that it’s probably closer to 90 to 95% than if we were to go to the mall and run a gut test on every single person. Then out of a thousand people, I would bet the barn that over 950 of them would have some identifiable GI issue. The issue with the gut is, and maybe this is a myth that symptoms are the first thing to show up. It’s usually the last thing to show up. Your gut is designed to be like this industrial system. Like it’s got to take literally take food that you eat and turn it into raw materials so that your body can turn it into human parts. Like how insane is that to think that your digestive system has to do that and it does that just kind of silently for the most part. It does it with this intricate release of chemicals and there’s a lot of intelligence involved in making that happen. It’s a pretty cool process when you actually consider what’s happening, something that we take for granted. Because it’s such a resilient system, it’s got to deal with a lot of stuff going on before it’s going to raise its hand and say, hey, listen, there’s something going on down here. We need to fix it. Like you think about stage four cancer in the gut. I mean, it’s usually somebody has blood in their stool one day and then three weeks later they’re dead. That they had no symptoms leading up to that. So we can’t rely on symptoms. We have to and we can’t just rely on function. Because if you were like me and your guts were dysfunctional your whole life or for as long as you could remember, how do you ever know when it’s functioning properly? You’ve normalized dysfunction like I did. Going to the bathroom every four days. That was normal to me, but that was dysfunctional from a health perspective. So don’t rely on symptoms. If you have any inclination that your GI issue, your gut is a problem by the time you have symptoms, it’s not too late, but it’s probably further in the progression than most people are willing to admit.

Sinclair Kennally, CNHP, CNC

That’s really well said, and it totally doesn’t tell us with that statistic that 93.8% of us are metabolically unfit in the US. So that makes total sense. There’s the gap. That 30% silent right in the middle there. Okay. So what other myths are still persisting that are making us sick?

Sachin Patel

One big myth is basically our delegation of our power. So we are far more capable than we think we are. Our body has these amazing systems that we’re probably not even fully leveraging. So I know we talked about this a little bit and prior to conversations that we’ve had. But it’s worth mentioning that we never want to ignore the tools that we already have, the anatomy, the physiology that we already have that’s in place. So many people come to me and I’m sure to come to you and any other practitioners that are listening to this. They’ve tried every diet under the sun, they’ve tried every supplement protocol under the sun, and their GI issues go away. The people that come to us are eating healthy. They’re actually eating healthier than 99% of the population and they tend to have GI issues. You’re just kind of scratching your head because of course the first layer of thinking is, what am I putting down there? But the next order and layer of thinking would be, are you actually turning that system on? So I like to think of digestion like a car wash. You would never go through a car wash backwards. Because that would be absolutely ridiculous. You’d never use a car wash even if it was free, you would never go through a car wash where one of the components was not working. So you wouldn’t think if I owned the car wash, I wouldn’t say, hey Sinclair, you can go take it through as many times as you want. 

The soap doesn’t work, but everything else seems to be working fine. It doesn’t work that way. So your digestive system is like a car wash. So first things first is we have to choose the foods that are going to go down there. Most people I find are doing a pretty good job about that. There’s always tweaks, there’s always like little things that we could identify. But I find an educated person is probably avoiding gluten. They’re probably minimizing, cutting out dairy or eating certain forms of dairy. They’re not eating hyper processed foods with toxic oils. So we’re just going to assume that you’re already doing that and the next thing is chewing that food. This is where a lot of people struggle. So something as basic as chewing our food breaks open the cell walls of plants. Without that chewing process, your stomach can’t digest through plant matter. So you’re missing all that nutrition and all those antioxidants and all the minerals because you literally don’t make the enzyme to break open plant cell walls. So you have to chew them. 

Especially if you’re a vegetarian, one of the reasons most vegetarians are nutrient deficient is not because of the vegetables, it’s because they don’t actually chew their food. If you swallow a salad, you will poop a salad the next day or whenever you go to the bathroom. So we don’t have the ability to digest it, so we have to physically break it open. When we chew our food, we actually taste our food. By tasting our food, it tells our brain what blend of proteins and fats and carbohydrates are coming so that our pancreas and our stomach and our liver and our gallbladder can make the enzymes that we need in order to assimilate those foods and absorb those foods. By chewing, we also increase stomach acid because by chewing we do two things: We increase oxygenation to the brain and we induce a parasympathetic response. By inducing that parasympathetic response, we start sending blood flow to our digestive system. Making stomach acid is a million times more acidic than your blood, so it takes a ton of energy to do that. You can’t be sympathetic, dominant, stressed out and make stomach acid because the energy requirements are insufficient to be able to do that. 

Your stomach acid is important because it kills viruses, bacteria, mold, pathogens on contact. If you’re not chewing your food, you don’t make enough stomach acid. By not making enough stomach acid, you don’t properly digest your proteins, which is what your immune system ends up responding to. If you have a leaky gut. You also don’t trigger the bottom of the stomach to open up to then move on to the next phase of digestion. So food literally rots in your stomach for 3 hours until your stomach says, Listen, I don’t know what to do with this. You got to keep going. Then that food doesn’t get digested properly because the sequencing of the digestive enzyme release is based on ph, it’s not based on the fact that food is going through there. It’s not triggered by attention, it’s triggered by chemistry. The chemistry has to be right in order for that process to take place adequately. If it doesn’t, then now we set the stage up for undigested food entering the small intestine where it’s meant to be absorbed, not digested. So that our bacteria is going to be adapted to what foods we eat if we don’t properly assimilate our fats, then those fats can get transported across the gut barrier as a lipopolysaccharide promoting leaky gut and inflammation so it can be really downwards viral if we just don’t do our food. Like one step, which is the conscious step that we’re responsible for, creates a whole cascade. Again, the car wash, each step requires a previous step being done.

Sinclair Kennally, CNHP, CNC

Yeah, I think that’s a wonderful metaphor because it gives you such a beautiful visual. Thank you for taking the time to unpack like the stomach acid piece for people because I know that’s really work for some, so that’s really helpful. So is there anything else that you want to admit best before we dove into other pieces and other aspects of reversing chronic conditions? Any myths that still persist, especially in the functional medicine world, because I think that’s most of our audience.

Sachin Patel

Yeah, I think the other myth or just kind of misconception that people might have is they just want to if they do get diagnosed with a GI issue, they just want to hit it with a hammer. Sometimes you could do too much too fast. So I always suggest working with a professional who can make sure your drainage pathways are open, who can make sure that you’re not doing too much, too soon to create further disruption, because that can create a bad experience for people. What I want people to also know, even if you’ve seen multiple practitioners, don’t throw in the towel because not all practitioners are the same, the experience is going to be different. The way they approach your case is going to be different. You want to find someone who’s going to meet you where you’re at, not just your labs, but you and combine the two and come up with a plan that’s going to make the most sense.

Sinclair Kennally, CNHP, CNC

Yeah, I think it’s really beautifully said. It’s so over a lot. So one of the things that I love about your work is your emphasis on the mental, emotional and spiritual aspects of this bringing your own or assessing and supporting your own level of consciousness around your physical health. How it can be an expression physically of our more subtle layers of consciousness. So I would love for you to unpack that perspective for folks who have had a gut condition for quite some time. What does that mean to them? Where would you direct their focus if they’re like, yeah, I know. I’m a spiritual being in a physical body. How do I think about that in a way that helps me heal from this? 

Sachin Patel

Yeah, absolutely. So energetically that gut is often associated with fear and anxiety. So there’s a lot of times where and here’s why. So when we undergo a flight or fight response, and when we have low grade anxiety or have a sympathetic, dominant tone, what that does is it decreases blood flow to our digestive system. Where we send flow is where we send function under times of stress or duress, which for some people is all day, depending on the environment they work in. Like if you’re a barista at Starbucks at a busy location, you’re in fight or flight all day. You might have a smile on your face, but you’re sympathetic, dominant the whole time. There’s no denying that because it would be the same for me. It would be the same for you if you worked in that environment. You’re always on edge. You’re always on alert, you’re always having to pay attention. There’s a lot going on. So your nervous system is in fight or flight. Now, some people have that persistent fight or flight because of some trauma that they’ve experienced. 

Maybe they are in an environment that’s stressful. Maybe they have a sympathetic, dominant breathing pattern. They’re shallow, unconscious breathers or they’re mouth breathers that keep them in a sympathetic, dominant state. So if we can get them to shift into a parasympathetic state that makes all the difference in the world. One of the keys to healing, repair, regeneration is getting into that more parasympathetic state, working on your vagus nerve, properly simulating it, using breathing to drive the parasympathetic response appropriately. If you’re burnt out, that’s a different story. But for most people, when we are under stress there is a decrease in blood flow to the gut and then the gut can’t do its job properly. Now, the other thing that happens is it’s not just the gut that gets restricted blood flow when we’re under stress. It’s all the organs. Because the liver is not going to do its job like detox is not important if you’re in fight or flight. Your gallbladder is not functioning optimally. Your kidneys are not functioning optimally because guess what? Under fight or flight, there’s a 90% decrease of blood flow to the liver and kidneys. So our body sends blood to the arms or legs. Think of the barista. She’s using her arm. She’s on her legs all day. We don’t like it. We should be sending blood to the arms and legs. That’s a smart thing to do. That’s why when we ask people to sit down, slow down and eat, take a few deep breaths, they’re getting that blood flow, redirecting to the gut so they can actually send more function to that part of their body. Now, not only does their gut health improve, but their detox improves, their kidney function improves, their blood pressure improves, their lymphatic system function improves. Their reproductive health improves every cell tissue, organ and system in your body heals when you’re in that state. Digestion is one of the most parasympathetic things that we do. It’s important that we shift gears for people.

Sinclair Kennally, CNHP, CNC

Yeah, that’s beautifully said. So what we’re really talking about is unpacking what our culture has normalized. It’s long term effects on the body. And then.

Sachin Patel

Some people are traumatized around eating fast. So if they were slow eaters growing up or normal paced eaters and their parents were fast eaters because their parents were traumatized from eating fast, then guess what? Their parents are always rushing their kids, telling them to eat fast. What’s taking you so long? When the right thing to do then is to eat as fast as you can and then you win the praise of your parents. Which child doesn’t want that? Guess what? You’ve now created a habitual trait of poor digestion, because you’re just always rushing through your meals.

Sinclair Kennally, CNHP, CNC

Yeah. I’m thinking about how people eat as adults now standing at the sink or in your car or on the couch with the laptop on their stomach or the tablet phone or whatever. It’s just like you’re getting zapped and overloaded. It’s the opposite of the healing state. We have to be parasympathetic to digest.

Sachin Patel

Yeah. I 100% agree.

Sinclair Kennally, CNHP, CNC

I was down to three foods at one point and I was like, I just got the short end of the stick with this body. I know you’re just doing it all wrong and you’ve been through a lot, so. Yeah. Okay. So let’s unpack this a little bit more from the solutions perspective. So you have your own methodology for helping folks who have created and I use that term, deliberately created chronic gut conditions. Because these are developed over time with our lifestyle habits, our food choices, our  stressors. our traumas that are created. That’s not an accident. Then from there, you have your own system for helping folks to heal at a really deep level. Can you help us unpack that?

Sachin Patel

Yeah, maybe I could add just a little bit to what you just shared there. There’s certainly choices that we have when it comes to our gut health and our chronic health conditions. It’s always a choice to continue feeling the way you do. So I believe that’s where ultimately our choices lie. Am I going to do something about this or not? But I can say that I’ve experienced this and maybe Sinclair, you’ve experienced this where I’ve traveled somewhere like Costa Rica and I picked something up there and was it a choice? I, of course, I chose to go to Costa Rica. I chose to eat the food that I did, even though it was all prepared at home. So, yes, smart choices. But sometimes we pick things up and that’s a big problem that often gets overlooked, especially and maybe that’s one of the myths that are out there is I don’t have a parasite or I don’t have a pathogen because chances are you do. That may not be something that you consciously chose. You could where I call it, keeping it real goes wrong. So if you’re eating like we were eating from a cloud garden and I think we were trying to maximize the microbiome. So we weren’t really aggressively washing the food. In hindsight, we probably should have done that. So we probably picked something up trying to keep it real, but it went really wrong. Fortunately we had the foresight and made a decision that I don’t want to keep feeling like this, so I did something about it. So we all have that power to choose. If we want to continue feeling the way we do, we may not have chosen what’s happened to us. Even though we might feel like we’re doing all the right things, there could be something that just slips under the radar that we don’t catch. Then working with somebody can help you catch that.

Sinclair Kennally, CNHP, CNC

Oh, I think that’s so beautiful. The way you just slow us down right there, because by positing that we create our health conditions, especially our chronic gut conditions. I am by no means blaming us, ourselves, our listeners and not saying who we’re consciously choosing to feel unwell. What I’m saying is we have so much more control than we think we do. As they could respond to this circumstance. That’s so Western to like a victim we’re blameless, were victims of our genes, were victims of whatever, and instead of like where all the juices is in the self responsibility. 

Sachin Patel

Yes. That’s the big difference between Eastern and Western philosophies. Is that in Western medicine, all the power is outside of us. So we have to go find it and acquire it. In Eastern Medicine, it comes from within. That’s you might need some Western solutions, but always start here. I always start from the within because you’re way more likely to even be able to intuit what Western solutions are going to be able to help you if you can work on this. Work on ourselves.

Sinclair Kennally, CNHP, CNC

Yeah. That’s beautifully said. Yeah. If you use your Western toolbox, it’s your decision to do it.

Sachin Patel

Yeah, absolutely. So I didn’t answer your question.

Sinclair Kennally, CNHP, CNC

Yeah please do. We got sidetracked. Go ahead.

Sachin Patel

So one of the things that we realized over the years is that it’s easy for things to get complicated really fast. As practitioners, I think you and I both know this and I’m not going to speak for you, but I can certainly say that my experience is that every six months there’s a new test, every few days there’s a new miracle supplement that comes out. Then every year or so there is like some crazy new diet and each one just seems to get more extreme because that’s what it takes to get people’s attention these days. There’s always that noise and that chatter and things can get really complicated, really fast. What I found is that people with chronic either digestive or even health challenges, we look at them like a diamond and with a diamond, you don’t just polish one side. We don’t just polish the gut. Or we don’t just polish the diet facet of the diamond. We look at the whole picture. When we do that, that’s when we can get maximum brilliance out of a diamond. So when we cut all these different faces of the diamond, the more accurately we can shape them, the more light the diamond will reflect. 

So our clients are just like that. When we work with somebody, we’re looking at their gut. Of course, we’re looking at the way they breathe. We’re looking at their vocation. We’re looking at the lighting situation in their space. We’re looking at their connection with nature and source and sleeping and all the mechanics that go around that. What we found is that when we polished as many sides of the diamond that we could, we started getting really rapid results and it ended up feeling like rolling a boulder down a hill to get healthy. Instead of rolling the boulder up the hill and because you’re addressing multiple inputs, the body’s like not resisting at all. It’s like, give me more. Let’s do this. Then as people start feeling better, their food choices automatically become better. As they start breathing better, their stress automatically starts stabilizing and normalizing as they become conscious of how to use their nervous system as a tool instead of something that’s weaponized against them from all the stress in the world that’s out there these days. They now claim power over their body and they start seeing rapid transformations in their health. It’s amazing what can happen in just a few days. I have a client who’s 75, and before we got a stool test back, I told him to go grain free. In a week. 

He lost 10 pounds and he’s continued to lose weight when he got his stool results back, his celiac markers were through the roof. Yeah, I’m sorry, but his gliadin markers were through the roof, and his immune system was also suppressed, which means that the response that he was having to gluten was much stronger than the test even reflected. Something as simple as that can make all the difference in the world for somebody. It can happen really, really fast because we also worked on his breathing mechanics and so he stopped snoring in less than a week. He’s losing weight. He’s feeling so much better. His energy’s working with me because he wants to climb a mountain. We’re working on his breathing mechanics, metabolism and all that stuff. But we’re focusing on all the different areas to get him to optimize. So we call that a metabolic and lifestyle reset because it just really is like hitting the reset button for people.

Sinclair Kennally, CNHP, CNC

Yeah, that’s beautiful. Okay. So I think that that handles like a lot of low hanging fruit that people overlook. How about for the folks listening? They’re like, “Yeah, I’ve cut out the gluten Sachin and I still don’t feel well. I’m chewing 42 times.” And where would you direct their focus? What gets overlooked by our wonderful advanced students that we can help them to uncover today?

Sachin Patel

Yeah. Another big thing when it comes to chronic health issues is what I would refer to as your unfair advantage. That’s typically your spouse or your loved one, somebody who’s going to be supportive on your journey. Somebody who’s going to eat the same meals as you do? Somebody who is going to hold you accountable to slowing down a little bit. So somebody who’s your partner in health and healing. I think having that support system is absolutely crucial. I also feel like if you can become part of a community where you’re surrounding yourself with other people who are on a healing journey, that also has a lot of evidence around it. In fact, Cleveland Clinic did a study and found that people who belong to groups of people who have similar challenges as they do, get faster and more affordable outcomes. 

So work with a practitioner who’s going to look at you individually, who’s going to pair you up potentially with people or a community of people who have a similar challenge. So you don’t feel that sense of aloneness when you’re going through a chronic health issue. You feel so alone, your closest relatives usually don’t know about what’s going on. Your coworkers don’t know about what’s going on. If you try to explain it to someone, what do they really understand? So that sense of aloneness is something that is extremely detrimental to our health because we feel hopeless. When you’re with a community of people who are on different legs of their journey. If somebody in your community and there’s somebody who’s six months out who’s feeling amazing now there’s hope in knowing that I’m in the right place and with the right people and I will get better. When we’re alone we don’t always get that feeling. 

Sinclair Kennally, CNHP, CNC

Beautifully said. Yeah, I totally agree that the community element is so overlooked in our individualist society. I know though in our groups people feel like they’re meeting people that get them for the first time. That’s fair because it’s like sometimes your loved ones don’t understand. It’s not really their responsibility even to understand what you’ve been through. But there’s somebody out there and there’s a group of folks out there that really get you and are ready to cheer you on. So call them in. Absolutely. Okay. So we’d love it if you would. I know we only have time for a couple more questions. I really want to cover the gut brain axis with you and your thoughts there in regards to reversing chronic gut conditions. Then just a few tips on mind body wellness that you’re so great at sharing with folks.

Sachin Patel

Yeah, absolutely. There is a nerve that I’m sure most of you have heard of called the vagus nerve. The vagus nerve is like a two way superhighway from the gut. Between the gut and the brain. Most of the signals actually go from the gut to the brain. So it’s this communication system that we have that is extremely important. One of the important things to note about the vagus nerve is that most people’s vagus nerves are under-stimulated. So let me explain to you what stimulates the vagus nerve. Then we can decide people can do kind of an internal checklist if they’re getting enough stimulation. So things that stimulate the vagus nerve, number one, gagging yourself. So I gagged myself two to three times a day. Every time I brush my teeth, I use a tongue scraper to gag myself because that’s one of the strongest stimuluses to the vagus nerve. Number two, gargling. So we see this in cartoons and stuff like that. But how many people actually gargle? Very few people actually gargle that stimulates the vagus nerve. Chanting, humming, singing, that stimulates the vagus nerve. Laughing stimulates the vagus nerve, crying stimulates the vagus nerve. 

Other things that stimulate the vagus nerve are also diaphragmatic breathing or diaphragm is one of the most innervated muscles by the vagus nerve. So when we intentionally breathe, we stimulate our vagus nerve. So if you’re not doing those things intentionally, you’re probably not getting enough stimulation. Now, my theory is that people don’t get enough stimulation of the vagus nerve because we don’t talk as much as we used to. Everything is texting, everything is emailing. We don’t gather in community and chant and hum and sing. So these are things that are not happening on a consistent and regular basis and many people don’t actually gag themselves. So I know a ton of people that don’t use tongue scrapers. If you don’t use a tongue scraper, I highly suggest it. I also know that we emotionally suppress our tears many times and we’re not laughing as much as we used to. Laughing is one of the best exercises for the vagus nerve. One way to know that your vagus nerve is being strongly stimulated is if you start tearing up. So when you laugh really hard, I’m sure you’ve experienced this. 

When you laugh really hard, you start tearing up. That’s because the part of our brain stem where the vagus nerve inserts is right next to the part of our brainstem that controls your production. This is why when you gag yourself, you also start tearing up because you’re getting that strong stimulation of the vagus nerve. If you gargle, usually for about twice the output, you gargle the alphabet twice is what we recommend. If you do it strongly and aggressively enough, you’ll start tearing up. So that’s one way to know that you’re getting adequate stimulation. So when’s the last time you laughed until you cried? When’s the last time you gagged until you cried? When’s the last thing you gargled until you cried? So push yourself a little bit to do that. That’s going to create a great stimulation of that nerve for you.

Sinclair Kennally, CNHP, CNC

That’s so beautiful, because it really dovetails with what you were just talking about community. I think about anthropologically, all the different cultures that we have all trickled down from through the centuries. We would all get together in every corner of the planet and we would hum or sing or chant. Part of being in communion. That was something we could count on. And it’s really beautiful. Thank you for sharing.

Sachin Patel

Thank you. My pleasure.

Sinclair Kennally, CNHP, CNC

Yeah. I hope you’re listening, guys. Our audience tuning in. There’s so many gems about how to wake up vagus nerve function in the body and Sachin is one of the best in helping you hear something in a way you haven’t heard it before. So definitely follow him for those tips. Okay. So any last gems for our folks who know more than their practitioners are super advanced students and listeners write about their chronic gut conditions, what might help them today, and to bring them some hope and give them something new to focus on and take their next step on their journey.

Sachin Patel

All right. So there’s something that I’ve become intensely passionate about these last few years, and that’s been proper breathing. So one of the most important things that we do metabolically is not actually what we eat, it’s how we breathe. So if you think about it, if you want to feel better, usually in about a week to 30 days. you change your diet. If you want to feel better in a week, you drink more water and you start feeling better. If you want to feel better tomorrow, get a good night’s rest. But if you want to feel better in the next few minutes, the only way that I can think of to do that is by optimizing breathing mechanics. Our breath is the master control switch of our nervous system. We talked a little bit earlier about why the nervous system is important in healing your gut and all chronic conditions and our breath is also one of the main control mechanisms for our vagus nerve, so we can stimulate the vagus nerve by breathing properly. 

Our breath also is responsible for proper lymphatic function, so the diaphragm is actually our main lymphatic pump. When people have chronic illnesses and diseases, a lot of times they show up in the lymph first because the body can’t drain things properly or there’s cellular waste that’s accumulating faster than the body can remove it. Now, in our arms and legs, we have our lymphatic vessels are wrapped around our muscles. So when we move, we get that lymphatic flow. But our abdomen requires proper breathing mechanics in order for those organs to get their gentle hug each day. So a really good exercise that you can do, if it’s okay I’ll share this. It’s really simple and we’re just going to give those organs a squeeze. So what you’re going to do is you’re going to take a deep breath in and through the nose and breathe in all the way and at the very top, take another sharp breath. So really packing those lungs full of air and that sharp breath at the top fills the bottom alveoli. Now, what you’re gonna do is you’re going to squeeze your pelvic floor. So holding that breath, squeezing the pelvic floor, the pelvic floor muscles are like the diaphragm of the lower body. The next thing you’re going to do is you’re going to squeeze your abdomen. So what we’re essentially doing is we’re creating some pressure in the abdomen. We’re bringing the diaphragm down, we’re bringing the pelvic floor up, and then we’re wrapping and squeezing the abdomen so that we’re kind of squeezing those organs. We’re giving them a hug. 

What that will do is it will allow them to properly move that lymph and if you do that a few times throughout the day, you breathe more consciously throughout the day. The coherent pattern for breathing is usually six seconds in, six seconds out. That proper breathing mechanics and cadence of breathing and the mechanical function of breathing is really going to help people with chronic illnesses. It’s something so simple. We already do it. We only eat a couple of pounds of food a day, but we breathe 30 pounds of air a day. So it’s the thing our body consumes more than anything else. It’s something that I overlooked, I’ll admit, overlooked for many, many years. But now that I’m going down this rabbit hole and realizing that it’s actually one of the most important things we do. The other big part when it comes to chronic disease, whether it’s GI related or systemic, is how we breathe at night. So millions upon millions upon millions of people can’t just lay on their back and breathe without almost dying. We call that apnea. This is a huge, huge problem. It’s an epidemic. It affects so many things. It affects our stress levels. It affects our food choices, it affects our hormones, it affects our mental health. 

So many things are impacted by improper breathing, especially at night. So I suggest people get an app. It’s called SnoreLab, and you can actually record yourself while you’re sleeping and see if you actually snore at night. If your partner hasn’t told you, you do or you’re not aware that you do. This is a great thing for people to start working on. In fact, I’m going to be doing a whole training and summit on this topic because I’m so passionate about helping people because it leads to so many other chronic health issues and they don’t even know they’re doing it. A lot of times, most people are in denial about how poor their breathing is at night, and it’s something that you can easily fix. Simple exercises that we share with our clients can reverse snoring in seven days, and people can start breathing again without any issues.

Sinclair Kennally, CNHP, CNC

So beautiful. Then I can’t wait to share. Thank you. So, Sachin, this is so joyful to do with you. I know we gave so many tidbits to folks who are just getting started on their health journey and understanding their chronic gut condition. There were a lot of nuggets for practitioners and also I think we took really good care of our advanced students who just needed a reason to keep going. This is a reminder, guys. This is totally doable. You’re in the right place at the right time. Take in all the information from our beautifully curated experts. Listen to their missions. These are hard won insights for so many of us. It’s all good. It’s all happening at the right time. So thank you so much, Sachin. From my heart to yours, I really appreciate your taking the time to inspire our audience this way today.

Sachin Patel

Thank you, Sinclair. It’s been an absolute honor.