Once You Learn This About Breathwork, Everything Clicks

Most people who quit breathwork or don't experience this transformative experience through a deliberate breathing practice, they don't quit because it doesn't work. They quit because they were using one practice while expecting the result of a different one. Almost every deliberate breathing technique you've ever heard of falls into one of two buckets. If you mix them up, the practice stops making sense. If you sort them out, everything you've been doing starts working better right away, and it helps you to be calm and focused when you need to be. Hi, my name is Ketero and I'm a breathwork and mindfulness teacher with a 20 year background as a traditional martial arts and movement teacher. Here's the pattern. I see all the Someone tries hypoxic breathing like the WIM HOF method or my hormesis breathing in the morning for feels great and decides this is the answer. And then they do it again and again and do it again before bed to calm down. And then they can't sleep. So they conclude breathwork isn't a reliable tool. Someone else does slow coherence breathing every morning for two weeks, doesn't feel a dramatic shift and decides it isn't really doing anything. So they quit, just like they did with meditation. They think it's some esoteric tool that doesn't really change anything. Or another example is that someone tries a guided 4, 7, 8 session, feels calmer in five minutes, then tries to use the same technique while in a stressful moment and gets overwhelmed and it doesn't work because it's too complicated. In that specific moment, all three of these people are running into the same problem. They they are treating one bucket of breathwork as if it were the other one. And once you can tell the two buckets apart, you can pick the right tool for the right job. You stop being disappointed when a state change practice doesn't build a skill. And you stop being disappointed when a skill building practice doesn't change your state. So here's the framework I'm referring to. So imagine two buckets. One bucket is breathwork as a state change. You're using your breath to deliver a specific shift right now when you need it. Calmer, more alert, more focused, ready for sleep, ready for a meeting or getting out of a panic spike. The job of the breath is to move you from a state A to a state B inside the next five to 15 minutes. The second bucket is breathwork as a skill cultivation. You're using your breath to train something underneath the breath, a stronger Diaphragm, better CO2 tolerance, a finer ability to sense your own body and mind, A longer exhale than you had six weeks ago, or just simply increasing your health through managing your inflammation. The job here isn't how you feel at the end of today's session. The job is who you are at the end of six weeks. So these two practice buckets don't run at the same clock, and that's very important to understand. State changes run on a single session clock. You measure success by the difference between when you started and when you finished. The technique either delivered or it didn't. Skill cultivation runs on a multi week clock. A single session shows you almost nothing. But the same technique done daily for a month or so shows you a lot. So there's a cumulative effect you can't see in any one session only across many. The strongest effects don't show up on day one. They show up much later, around four to six weeks after starting a practice. The mistake most people make is judging a skill cultivation practice on a state change clock or judging a state change practice on a skill cultivation clock. So the question now is, how do you actually use this in your week? So step one is sorting your existing practice into the two buckets. Anything you reach for to feel different in the next 10 minutes is bucket one. A long exhale before a difficult conversation. A few rounds of physiological sighing when your kids melt down and throwing a tantrum. A 4, 7, 8 sequence to fall asleep. Faster box breathing before a presentation or two short rounds of wim HOF or hormesis breathing to get in a focused and energized state before a demanding task. That's all bucket one. And anything you do regularly without expecting an immediate dramatic shift is bucket 2. Daily coherence breathing to control inflammation. Slow nasal breathing during a walk to slow down CO2 tolerance drills. Diaphragm strength work for a stronger respiratory health. Hormesis breathing as a morning training to increase resilience. That's all Bucket two. The two buckets are not exclusive to each other. The same technique can sometimes show up in both buckets, depending on how you use it. Coherence breathing for two minutes when you're anxious is bucket one. Coherence breathing for 10 minutes every morning for two months is bucket two. So the expectation is different when you practice these techniques together. Step two of this framework is apply the right expectation to each bucket. So for bucket one, the test is simple. Did you feel different at the end than at the start? If yes, the practice worked. If no, you used the wrong technique or your Nervous system was in a state that technique couldn't reach yet. Bucket 2 There's a different approach or a different expectation. Stop checking session by session. Check at the four week mark instead or the six week mark. Check how your resting breath feels after six weeks. Check how long your exhale naturally is. Check whether a situation that used to stress you out now feels less stressful. The data lives across sessions on a long enough time horizon, not inside one session. That's very important to understand and apply it to your expectation of your practice. Otherwise you fall off the wagon and think it doesn't work. Step three of the two Bucket framework is to pick the right time of the day for each Bucket one is reactive. That means it happens when life asks for it, so you don't need to shadow it. You just need a few techniques ready so you can reach for the right one when something happens. Bucket two is proactive. It needs a slot in your day morning routine for most people because nothing else is interrupting you yet. Evening works if you're choosing calming techniques or for a wind down routine. For example, activating practice like the WIM HOF method or Hormesis, breathing belong in the first half of the day because they spike adrenaline in your body. So that's why they shouldn't be done close to sleep. This is the most common mistake I see. People take a strongly activating practice, put it right before bed because they have some time there and then wonder why they can't sleep. Step four of the two Buckets framework is noticing when you need to slow down. There's a third hidden skill inside Bucket two that almost nobody talks about, and that's sensing. Feeling the breath, feeling the body, feeling the shift. It's the art of noticing. Speed is the enemy of feeling. The faster you run a practice and rush through your routine, the harder it is to notice what's actually happening. If you only ever run techniques at full speed, you never really develop the perception that makes the techniques work in the first place. So inside your bucket 2 practice, leave room for slow, almost boring sessions where you do less and feel more. Leave room to settle down and leave room at the end to consolidate your experience and reflect upon it. That's where the skill of sensing your own physiology gets built and it transfers to any or every other practice you do. If you're overwhelmed or a bit confused by the different breathing techniques I mention, don't worry about it. I have a free 15 day breathwork transformation course that teaches you all the techniques I mentioned here and it's also split around this exact framework that teaches you Bucket one breathing techniques, but also longer Bucket two breathing routines. The link is in the description. If you want to learn more about it. Now, let me explain how I use this framework for myself. For a long time, I treated all my breathwork the same way. If I felt good after recession, the practice was working. If I didn't feel anything dramatic, I assumed that I was doing something wrong, that the practice wasn't doing much for me and made the technique maybe useless. Then I started teaching and I noticed something different. I lead a class on slow breathing techniques, something quiet and patterned like coherence breathing or box breathing. And by the end of the class, my voice was different, my pace was different, I sounded calmer to my own ears. More grounded. Students would notice it too. So inside a single class, I could see the state change bucket working clearly. The before and after was very obvious. So as a teacher teaching a big class, I always was starting out nervous because of the performance pressure. And I was always finishing calm and confident. And that's clearly the effect of a state change Breathing bucket. But the deeper change was somewhere else. Over a year of teaching multiple times a week, my baseline shifted. My resting breath was lower than it used to be. My voice was deeper and more resonant. I could hold a comfortable breath hold for almost twice as long as the year before. Not because I was practicing breath holds harder, but because the underlying capacity had grown from steady use. That was the Bucket two effect. Invisible inside any single session and undeniable across the year. The reframe that mattered most was this. I stopped asking, did the session work? Or my Bucket two practices? I started asking, is this becoming who I am? That question only makes sense over weeks or months, and the answer is usually yes. It also helps to develop a stronger habit and identify with the practice rather than just chasing superficial results. I have a student in the BRASS work lab cohort group who came in convinced his daily practice wasn't doing anything anymore because he didn't feel transformed at the end of each 10 minute session. So we did apply the two bucket framework. He'd realized that he'd been judging bucket two on a bucket one clock. So he kept going through the five week practices and courses. Four weeks later, he sent me a message. He noticed he wasn't reaching for his own coping habits the way he used to. He hadn't changed anything in the practice. He'd just finally let it work on a longer time scale. So the next time you sit down for a deliberate breathing practice before you start ask which bucket this is, then judge it by the right yardstick, the right time scale. State change practices should feel different at the end. Skill cultivation practices should be felt at the forefront week mark or the six week mark, not at the end of today's session. If your practice has felt like it isn't working lately, this is probably what's happening. You haven't been doing the wrong technique, you've been measuring it against the wrong clock. Watch this video next if you want the specific breathing principles to change one's state. See you in the next one. Bye.