I Love Being Sober

You breathe somewhere between 20,000 and 30,000 times a day. Ryan McBurney says most of us are doing it wrong, and it's affecting our anxiety, our sleep, our cravings, and the way we think. Ryan found breathwork through a Wim Hof interview while he was in what he calls an existential depression, searching for meaning and leaning on substances. The first few sessions gave him something he had been reaching for his whole life. In his words, breathwork was "in large part" a gateway to sobriety. He has since trained in seven breathwork programs, studied with breathwork pioneer Dan Brulé, and with his fiancée and business partner Shelby Von Oepen, RN, founded Liquid Breathwork in Phoenix, where they have certified more than 60 facilitators. Recorded live in front of clients and staff at Camelback Recovery's outpatient treatment center in Phoenix, Arizona. What we get into: how Ryan found breathwork why most people overbreathe and mouth breathe the slow, nasal breath Ryan calls optimal the difference between breathing practices and breathwork what makes Liquid Breathwork different the theatrical sigh of relief breathing to wake up versus breathing to wind down humming before bed box breathing "the same sun that melts wax hardens clay" breathwork as a gateway to sobriety what to do with your breath during a craving, using David Hawkins' Letting Go why breathwork can feel like a psychedelic experience without a substance whether anyone can guide breathwork, and how to do it safely what treatment centers should look for in a facilitator audience questions on feeling safe enough to let go, rebirthing breathwork, and how to do circular breathing.

Most of us have heard that cortisol is the stress hormone and the goal is to lower it. Dr. Erin Kinney says that is backwards. Cortisol is your body’s energy currency. It gets you out of bed, handles stress, and helps your body heal. The real problem is running out. At 22, Erin was a marathon runner who gained thirty pounds almost overnight, couldn’t get out of bed, and cried all the time. Labs showed her cortisol was nearly nonexistent. That sent her to naturopathic medicine and, years later, to her Cortisol Bank Account framework: everything you do is a withdrawal, rest is a deposit, and healing only happens when you earn more than you spend. Recorded live in front of clients and staff at Camelback Recovery’s outpatient treatment center in Phoenix, Arizona. What we get into: why cortisol is not the enemy the stress muscle and the relax muscle why Tim wakes up at 2 AM what alcohol and drugs do to your cortisol bank account why anxiety and depression often rise in early sobriety swapping drugs and alcohol for exercise, social media, or gambling caffeine as a credit card the earliest signs of burnout cortisol, hormones, and women in recovery why people feel exhausted even when they’re doing everything right the ten minute “toes up” what a day that supports cortisol looks like when to get labs audience questions on nicotine, chronic pain, thyroid and autoimmunity, and whether remembering hard times stresses the body a live exercise with an imaginary lemon; and Erin’s own story of burning out again in 2021 and how she got better.

Getting sober is an amazing step. But as Dr. Gary Sanchez told a room full of our clients, not being shackled doesn’t mean you’re free. It just means you’re sober. The next question is the hard one: now what? Gary practiced cosmetic and sedation dentistry in Albuquerque for 32 years. He picked dentistry at 18 because his dad was a dentist and he didn’t know what else to pick. About 28 years in, sitting in an audience of top dentists at a meeting in Scottsdale, Arizona, watching a surgeon rebuild a jaw, he realized he didn’t want to learn any of it. He had been good at a life he never chose. What he found next became the WHY Institute and the WHY.os, a short discovery tool built around nine WHYs: Contribute, Trust, Make Sense, Better Way, Right Way, Challenge, Mastery, Clarify, and Simplify. Everyone in the room took it before we started recording. Recorded live in front of clients and staff at Camelback Recovery’s outpatient treatment center in Phoenix. What we get into: why “What do you want to be when you grow up?” is the wrong question at 18, and at 40, and in early recovery WHO first, then WHAT why “just being sober is not freedom” the Halloween costume we wear when we don’t know who we are why the WHY of Challenge is the one Gary sees medicate the most the nine WHYs, one by one whether your WHY changes after addiction or trauma Tim’s own WHY.os read live (Better Way, Simplify, Challenge) a live read with a construction foreman in recovery “Drinking’s hard. Not drinking’s hard. Pick your hard.” and why “change” might be the wrong word for what recovery asks of you. FREE FOR OUR LISTENERS: Dr. Sanchez is offering the WHY Discovery free to I Love Being Sober listeners at go.whyinstitute.com/ILoveBeingSober. It is a third party tool and asks for your email address. It is a motivation framework, not a clinical or diagnostic assessment.

She was thirteen. She decided the world would be better without her, and she picked anorexia as the way she was going to leave it. She told her parents she would be dead by sixteen. She went into a treatment center three hours from home with four adolescent beds and a building full of adults detoxing. The program treated her by the number on a scale. Reach this number, you can call your parents. Reach this number, you can go outside. Nobody asked her why she was doing it, and she already knew. Paige Kelly, BSN, RN spent eight years in that illness. She got out at twenty-one on what she calls decision day, on a bathroom floor, with her body failing. She went on to become an emergency room nurse, because chaos was the environment her nervous system already knew how to live in. Then she got on a bike, then she got off it in a crash that showed her what eight years had done to her bones, and a doctor told her to start running to rebuild them. That is how she ended up finishing an Ironman in 10:07. This conversation is not about any of that. It is about what nobody taught her: how to notice the thoughts running her life, how to tell the difference between her own voice and everyone else’s, and how to come back into a body she had spent a decade at war with. Recorded live in front of our clients and staff at Camelback Recovery in Phoenix. What we get into: why an eating disorder is a decision about the world and not about food the difference between an eating disorder and disordered eating why so many people eat before bed and what the nervous system is actually asking for the “I should” inventory she did with a piece of paper and a pen what to do when someone asks what you love about yourself and you come up empty the day she said hello to her own body and her body told her where to go why she keeps her promises to herself microscopically small, and the one thing she thinks treatment centers should be doing more of.

He was a Versace model living at the Clevelander on Ocean Drive, drinking fifty drinks a day for free because his friends tended bar, and getting handed cocaine because the dealers knew he knew everybody. He worked five times a year. The rest of the time was idle. Then the hangovers started lasting five days. Troy Casey — The Certified Health Nut — grew up a ward of the state, started drinking and smoking weed at thirteen, and spent four and a half years cycling in and out of sobriety before it finally held in 1999. What made it hold was not a program. It was an hour on a cushion the morning after a fight, and then, two weeks later, ten days of silence at a Vipassana retreat. Thirty-five years into holistic health, his position in the wellness industry is not what you would expect from someone who looks like he does: the things that actually move the needle are mostly free. Sleep. Sunlight. Walking. Water. Breathing through your nose. He is blunt about the rest of it — peptides, Ozempic, TRT, the twenty-supplement stack — and blunt about why a person in recovery in particular should be careful with all of it. Recorded live in front of our clients and staff at Camelback Recovery in Phoenix. The room does a breathing exercise together at 42:30 that is worth doing along with them. What we get into: the fashion industry’s open bar and what it did to a young man with no supervision why he calls the friends who told him he was wasting his potential “love incarnate” the four and a half years of relapse before it stuck what ten days of silence actually does the nine pillars, and how to shrink them to three when you are thirty days sober why he thinks biohacking can become the same disease in a lab coat the seven factors of stress how to breathe like your nervous system depends on it, because it does.