SPEAKER_01 0:00

We're over breathing, right? We're like straining ourselves. We're in between meetings or again stuck in traffic and we're breathing shallowly. We hold our breaths every once in a while. We're like, oh my God. And then we gasp and then we start to catch up. And so we also want to take fewer breaths per minute. So that could be anywhere down to like 10 breaths per minute, ideally. The kind of monk gold standard is somewhere around five to six breaths per minute. So imagine how slow you have to be breathing to really slow your pace down to that level. But there's so many benefits, like any amount that we can lower how many breaths per minute we take.

SPEAKER_02 0:40

Hi, Huntresses.

SPEAKER_03 0:44

This is Talk Rich to Me.

SPEAKER_02 0:46

Where we get more comfortable talking about money and dealing with money.

SPEAKER_03 0:50

Brought to you by Huntress Wealth. 71% of women are investing, but only one in six feels confident about where she's headed. Huntress is the all-in-one financial app built to help you make a plan, get actionable steps, and build your wealth. Join the wait list at HuntressWealth.com and get good with money. I'm joined by Marina Kay today. Thank you so much for being here, Marina. And why don't you tell everyone a little bit about yourself?

SPEAKER_01 1:26

Yeah, it's great to be here. I'm Marina Kay. For anyone who's not familiar with me and my work, I'm an executive coach and I facilitate breathwork for my clients, for companies, and I host breathwork events. I work in the space of mind-body health, so the intersection of mental health and physical health with a lot of my clients. I work with leaders and entrepreneurs, mostly women, although I've worked with many men in the past too. And I am mostly interested in how ambitious and successful people build their businesses and uh work and achieve everything that they want to without burning out. So that is what I'm really passionate about helping people through.

SPEAKER_03 2:05

You have a personal journey of how you came from your past career to where you're at now, being an executive coach, um centering that on somatic breath work. So, what brought you from A to B?

SPEAKER_01 2:21

It was a journey that really started with the corporate world and my corporate career. I was a consultant first. Um, I had my master's in HR. Out of college, I did consulting for large companies. And over time, I found my way at WeWork headquarters. So that's where kind of the majority of my learnings and lessons in success and burnout and achievement really came from. Um, that was a really exciting time in my career. It was also a really challenging time for my body and for my nervous system. So I always think back to that experience. And I learned so much, both like handling so many different projects and opportunities and so much on my plate. And at the same time, also noticing like while I was doing all of these amazing things and achieving so much and being well recognized for it, at the same time, my body was just going through it with hormonal chaos and um just feeling disconnected from myself, bad sleep, anxiety, all of these different things that kind of pile up over time. That by the time that the pandemic came around, I was just kind of really present with all of these things that I've been living with for so long. I think the pandemic had so many of us slow down for a period of time and just notice what's going on below the surface. And I was already coaching part-time for a couple of years, so I had started my health coaching practice along with working my full-time nine to five in New York at WeWork headquarters. And that's when I decided to fully switch over. It took me a few months to just kind of unwind and um put that corporate kind of stress and burnout behind me. And I've been coaching ever since. So, borrowing both from my background in consulting and just everything that I knew right from the corporate world. Um, at WeWork, it wasn't just HR. I ended up doing a lot of MA work, which is pretty high stakes and high pressure. Um, so borrowing from that background and understanding of what a lot of corporate leaders and people who, you know, are starting their own companies deal with and what they live with, and then also merging it with my experience in mind body health. So breath work and mindfulness and just holistic health coaching. Um, at this point, I blend all of that depending on where someone is where when they come to me. Um, I look at, you know, their hormonal balance and their blood work, things like that, to really kind of support them in all of these different areas. Um, so that it's kind of a holistic picture. Um, and really also think about how they can then translate that back into their leadership because I think that there's a huge difference in someone who is well resourced and how they lead a team or a company and the vision that they set versus someone who's been running on empty for a really long time. So that is always what it comes back to for me is okay, how can we be healthy and well-resourced so that they could achieve more and ultimately create the life that they are working towards just without that personal depletion and health issues?

SPEAKER_03 5:22

I'm so curious. When you made the transition out of corporate America, did you think, okay, yes, I'm gonna do be a breath work leader, or did you think I'm gonna be an executive coach? Was that always the vision, or did one kind of lead into the other?

SPEAKER_01 5:37

I mean, I still can't believe that I teach people how to breathe. This is, I mean, I think also for like my parents and a lot of my past colleagues, you know, it takes people a little while to catch up and be like, okay, you teach people how to breathe. Don't we all know how to do that? Um, so no, that was definitely not the plan. Um, for me, everything started with my yoga training and then my mindfulness training and then my health coaching training, which are all pretty, you know, pretty standard. I think they're pretty well accepted at this point. A lot of people have heard of them or tried them. Um, but breath work is still this very new, I think, really misunderstood part of health. Um, but I love teaching it. I love being an educator in this space because there's so much that's available. I'm sure we'll get into all the things that people could do when they learn how to breathe optimally and when they learn how to control their breathing and work with different breath patterns throughout the day. There's so much that opens up, um, especially for people in leadership when they work with it. But no, I've kind of found my way into really fully landing in breath work as by me modality around 2022. So it was a couple of years after. I cycled my way through so many different modalities until I really figured out that breath work is it's so accessible, right? Anyone anywhere in the world can learn how to do it because we're already breathing. It doesn't cost anything. Yes, of course, you can study and learn and you know get coaching with someone, but after a while, my goal is to always leave someone better off than I found them and so that they could learn tools that they could use forever without any additional cost. I guide sessions on Zoom now, so I talk to companies and people all over the world. I think that's the beauty of it. You don't have to go into an office, you don't need a prescription. So many people are looking for something to help with anxiety, for example. And of course, there's value in medication and you know, so many additional modes of finding calmness in the body, but this is just like such low-hanging fruit to me. Yeah, that's why I love teaching it. And no, I had no idea that this would be where I would end up. A lot of times when I mention my work and I ask people if they've tried breath work, they'll mention yoga and something that you do at the end of a yoga class or at the beginning of a yoga class. And what I do is so much more broad than just that, because the world of breath work is as vast as saying, you know, I don't know, I cook, right? It's like, well, what do you cook? Okay, you could cook Italian, you could cook, I don't know, Chinese food, right? They're completely different things. So in the world of breath work, there's so much that's available. The way I divide my work is there's functional breathing and there's somatic breathing. So everything we've talked about so far, breathing between meetings, airway health, breathing for relaxation, that's in the world of functional breathing. This is where I teach people how to breathe throughout the day, how to lower how many breaths per minute that you take. There's different exercises for that, how to calm yourself down after something stressful happens. That's all functional breathing. These are brief practices, maybe up to 20 minutes at a time, as like the max length, and you spread them out throughout the day and you just notice how you're breathing, right? At different points throughout the day. There's different exercises that we do to kind of expand your breathing, your posture. Posture is a huge part of it too. The other side is the world of somatic breathing, which is what we hosted, what you and Stephanie got a chance to try out. This is an extended practice that is meant for rapid stress and emotional release. And it's also possible through modifying how you're breathing. So that practice is laying down and being guided through different ways of breathing over the course of an hour or longer. So, that point in time practice, I think of it as like this once-a-week space that you can come back to to just process like what's going on in life. A lot of us have so many emotions that go unprocessed because we're moms or leaders, or we just have so much on our plate. You're not gonna be able to at 3 p.m. on a random Tuesday to work through something that just came up, or a phone call, or a bill, or an email. But all of us hold on to that and store it without an actual outlet that ever happens, right? So we have this opportunity to once in a while connect with yourself in the deepest way that I know of, connect with your body, really notice your emotional state, notice what emotions are maybe stored in different parts of the body. So, a lot for a lot of leaders, I see different stress patterns come up. Some of us have jaw pain and tightness. A lot of women struggle with this. Um, actually, statistically, more women than men have jaw pain and clenching and tightness and TMJ. For some people, it's their neck and shoulders, and they notice chronic pain in their neck. Um, they might look for like chiropractic care, right? And regular massages, and those are great. But if that pattern exists, we just create that same pattern over and over when we're under stress, right? So we really want to be mindful of those patterns. For a lot of women, it's pelvic floor, um, clenching, tightening, um, so many different, you know, pelvic floor issues, especially for moms. Like if you add in being a mom and being postpartum with a layer of stress, our pelvic floor is such a place in the body where we hold on to stress. Um, and quite literally, I mean like our muscles are really tight and chronically engaged in this part of the body. And so that's another space where stress gets held. So somatic breath work becomes this place where we can notice what are those stress patterns, what's going on right now in the body. And then, I mean, really breath by breath, let it go. It doesn't come from like just one practice, it might come for people over time, because so many of us maybe haven't had the opportunity to really look at stress and how it affects us for a really long time. Um, but it's a really, really lovely way to let some of that go and clear out some of that stuff that gets stored in the body.

SPEAKER_03 11:35

Okay, well, I don't know about our listeners, but I know for sure that I have chronic neck pain and pelvic floor pain. And I'm just like, as we're talking about it, I feel it. And I'm just like, ah, so fidgety now. And I do remember from having the session, it's just like a total relaxation of like melting into the ground that I hadn't felt before. And I do yoga a lot. I like, you know, that that breath, yes, there is some breath work involved in yoga, but this is a complete, yeah, a completely different thing than I'd ever experienced before, even in like a meditation class.

SPEAKER_01 12:08

And I want to touch on that too, because again, like the pelvic floor, I've seen this over the course of the past five years as this space in the body where especially for women, again, tension gets stored there. But what so few people know and talk about is that there's a connection between the pelvic floor and our jaw. And so, again, with a lot of women postpartum, when there's pelvic floor tension and pain and healing that's going on, they'll develop TMJ. And vice versa, sometimes the TMJ gets developed. This is the disorder of clenching and tightening and um pain in the jaw muscles, for anyone who's not familiar with the words TMJ. But sometimes that happens and then pelvic floor pain or discomfort is developed. And so these are connected in the body. No one for some reason talks about this, but this entire area, the neck, the throat, the jaw, and the way it functions is really similar to how our root muscles function. In utero, a baby, the two first kind of like things that form are the pelvic floor and the jaw, the two openings, and they're connected forever through fascial lines. So fascia is the connective tissue that runs all throughout the body. It's what kind of is the layer on top of our muscles, and it's also the layer through which a lot of our nerves fire. So the stress signals are sent and our fascia is impacted. And so from the jaw, when you're under stress, you might be sending that through the clenching and tightening up here, that same signal of tightness down all the way to the pelvic floor. And so there's ways that we can right work with that fascial line and let go of again this stress pattern that gets formed in women. Um, you mentioned yoga, that could be really healing, especially if you couple yoga for pelvic floor with deep breathing. So, even things like, you know, we hear in yoga a lot that our hips store a lot of pain and tension. Also, if you sit a lot, this is a space that doesn't move often, right? So we just kind of solidify some of that stress and tension there. Any sort of hip opening postures, anything that you can try at home, you don't have to go to a yoga class, but happy baby, um, uh child's pose, legs up the wall, any ways that you're connecting and releasing pelvic floor tension. And as you do that, if you also breathe into the pelvic floor, do deep nasal breathing, work with deep exhales, that's even better than just doing those postures alone.

SPEAKER_03 14:42

I remember you said the statistic when we did the co-event with Huntress and Women Who Breathe. It was astounding how many breaths we take in a day.

SPEAKER_01 14:50

Anywhere from 20 to 40,000. Ideally, it's closer to 20, but people with chronic conditions like asthma will take as many as 40,000 breaths a day. And, you know, maybe this is the first point that we should touch on because you just said, you know, you're noticing you hold your breath. We all do that. And a lot of times people will ask me, like, oh, how often do you practice breath work? And I say, all the time, like all day, every day, ideally, right? I'm coming back to deeper breaths, I'm noticing how I'm breathing. I was just in an Uber to get to this interview, and I'm in the Uber and we're in traffic, and it's just an opportunity for me to connect with how my breathing, right? Maybe that's the first point in the day where I can just kind of slow down and reset because we're in traffic anyway. So we're not going anywhere, we're not moving. So there's so many points in the day where you can check in with yourself and notice like what's going on in the body. The breath just becomes this amazing opportunity to do that work of checking in. Like anytime you notice that you're holding your breath, that just becomes an opportunity to take a deep breath and calm yourself down with a long exhale. But ideally, we want to take slower, fewer breaths. And this is actually, since I'm sure you're gonna appreciate more statistics, but all the animals who take fewer breaths per day in their life live the longest, all the way down to like a specific type of turtles. Um, they live up to a hundred years and they take four breaths per minute. So humans take about that 20 to 40,000 breaths a day. Most of us are somewhere around like 25,000 breaths per day. And what we also want to be mindful of is how many breaths per minute do we take. So I see this in a lot of people where we're over breathing, right? We're like straining ourselves, we're in between meetings or again, stuck in traffic, and we're breathing shallowly. We hold our breaths every once in a while. We're like, oh my God. And then we gasp and then we start to catch up. And so we also want to take fewer breaths per minute. So that could be anywhere down to like 10 breaths per minute, ideally. But the kind of monk gold standard is somewhere around five to six breaths per minute. So imagine how slow you have to be breathing to really slow your pace down to that level. Uh, but there's so many benefits, like any amount that we can lower how many breaths per minute we take, if let's say anybody can time themselves right now, right? You just time yourself, uh, set a timer on your phone for a minute and just breathe normally and just count the breaths, feel what's normal for you right now. A lot of people will land at like maybe 20 breaths, something like that. So any amount that you can start to over time do different practices that are gonna lower that count so that your new baseline maybe becomes now 15 breaths a minute or 12 breaths a minute, that's a huge improvement. And also a lot of people's sleep trackers or their Apple Watch, their Oring, their Whoop, will show you your breathing rate at night. So that's also a nice way. Like if you don't want to count, if you just want to like an organic checkpoint. Yeah, that's a nice way to check. It's not 100% accurate, so right. Um, but yeah, that's a nice way to check too.

SPEAKER_03 17:56

Amazing. Yeah, that's incredible. Very fun fact. Now I need goal, breathe less. And I was gonna ask, like, does holding your breath, is that a bad thing?

SPEAKER_01 18:05

And it sounds like yes. So when you do it unconsciously, like when we're just doing it throughout the day, yes. Um, a more advanced practice that I offer people, and if you remember, I do it at all my events at least twice. We do a breath hold that's an extended breath hold. That's an intentional hold that has a really specific purpose. But throughout the day, we definitely don't want to just be holding your breath. And especially at night, right? That's technically sleep apnea where people pause breathing, uh, stop breathing for like seconds at a time, right? Snoring disrupts how we breathe as well. That impacts our brain in not getting enough oxygen, right? So if we're doing that throughout the day and at night, first of all, if we're doing it during the day, then it just becomes habitual at night. Um, but it's really important that we're taking spacious breaths continuously, that our brain is getting enough oxygen, that we are letting go through exhales of CO2 normally, that that exchange is happening, because it's literally the most vital thing for our body. This is maybe another fun fact, but we can live without food for weeks, without water for days, but without breath for minutes. We can't absolutely hold our breath longer than a certain amount, and it's really, really short. And so that knowing alone just tells me about how important breathing is for the body, right? There's nothing else that is as important, as impactful for the body. So yeah, it's really important to pay attention to. And especially with sleep. Like if anybody does know that they maybe sleep throughout the night or they get like six, seven, eight hours of sleep, but they don't wake up well rested, that might be telling us that something's going on at night, either like the beginnings of sleep apnea. I don't want to like worry anyone unnecessarily. You would need a sleep study to determine that. But maybe you snore or maybe you mouthbreathe at night. This is where things like mouth tape are becoming popular. Um, there's different schools of thought on that, but it's definitely a sign that we want to look at.

SPEAKER_03 20:07

You've mentioned the differences um in in men and women and and stress, where it holds, all that. But how is it costing women in ways it doesn't cost men?

SPEAKER_01 20:18

Yeah. So I think what feels relevant is to touch on fertility and just reproductive health. And I always touch on fertility from the lens of whether someone wants to be a mom or not, fertility is a marker for overall health in both men and women. And there's finally like tons of information and consensus consensus coming out on this, whether that's ovarian health, ovarian reserve and function, our uterine health, all of these things. Like if there's imbalances there, if there's like severe PMS or chronic pain or um, you know, just any sort of female fertility issues, it might be a sign that there's just larger issues going on in the body. So I always want to approach the conversation from that standpoint, because I know a lot of women, especially in my community, want to be moms, but not all. Women choose to freeze their eggs, to extend that window of that choice and that opportunity as we're still building businesses, companies, and so on. And so I think this link is also not often talked about for women because when we're under a lot of chronic stress, again, finally there's research coming out around this that the nervous system it runs all throughout the body, right? So when we feel stressed, we pretty much feel it in every single part and system of the body. Like our skin reflects when we're stressed, right? You can tell when someone's been chronically stressed for years, it shows up in their appearance, their hair, their digestion. There's so many downstream effects from chronic stress, which of course breath work helps with. But one recent area is there's a really small research study that came out at the end of 2025 that showed that the nervous system also, of course, can. To our ovaries. And so the more stress someone experiences, the more they age their ovaries, essentially. Like the functioning of the ovaries gets impacted as well. And so I always think about many, many female clients that I've had over the years who will find me after they've been tested and find out that they have low ovarian reserve, which maybe they hadn't been tested for before and they're healthy otherwise, and they're maybe in their like their late 20s to early 30s, and they find out that, you know, it's like really a not good result. And that of course only creates more stress and more pressure to figure out this part of life. And so I think if we talked about stress and all the education around it more and wider, and also gave women these opportunities of education and understanding like what options there are and how to manage stress better, we would also take this whole big stressful event off of their plate that I see also in so many women, like late 30s and early 40s, when we find out that, right, though very unreserve maybe isn't where we'd like it to be, and then we have to make some really tough choices. And of course, I should touch on how those choices carry tons of costs because even round one round of egg freezing will run, depending on where you are, from anywhere from like $10,000 to $15,000. And some women choose to opt in to have multiple. So I think it's really, really important to touch on that stress and fertility connection. Um, because there's a lot of like more immediate, obvious impacts from stress that we notice. Sleep is one, digestion is another. Those are short-term things that we are, I think, all pretty aware of. Then those long-term consequences, I think we still don't talk about enough.

SPEAKER_03 23:47

I appreciate you bringing that up. I did not realize, well, I mean, it makes sense. You know, when you hear things and you're like, oh, duh, like life, like that makes sense. Um, but I didn't know that.

SPEAKER_01 24:00

Um, no one did because women's health has gotten so little research. And now finally, finally, it's getting so much more research that it and attention that it deserves. Yeah, because we're too complicated.

SPEAKER_03 24:11

Yeah. Quote until I'm not. Do you know that? Yeah, that's why nothing was put up like women's health has been not studied, or we weren't even used in like any lab testing until the early 90s because we are too complicated.

SPEAKER_01 24:25

Um, I started my own podcast recently and I've had some of the top female women's health and fertility experts on it already, which is so exciting that we're talking about perimenopause and menopause. I'm posting about these things on LinkedIn. I never thought I would do that, but I'm posting widely about fertility, freezing your eggs, or understanding your male partner's fertility and their sperm health, like all of these things. I think we're finally like, I don't know, it's still edgy for me. I again to your earlier question, I'm like, no, did I ever think I would be posting about fertility on LinkedIn for my whole entire professional network to see? No, I didn't. But I also think it's so important and I'm just willing to go there.

SPEAKER_03 25:07

Agreed. I'm so, yeah, I'm glad you are. I don't think it should be something we're not talking about or thinking about or like any it should not be offensive. We are 50% of the population and we all have a period. Uh, or hopefully we do or did at some point in our life. Because if you didn't ever have a period, that's also unhealthy, even though that somehow sounds magical. And I think for most women that are in our demographic, in our age group, are really interested in this because we're getting affected with it, whether it's, you know, perimenopause or fertility concerns or whatever the case may be. Um, and so yeah, I I find it fascinating.

SPEAKER_01 25:44

I'll never forget, you know, one of the um experts who came on my podcast. One of the things, like the quotes that she's known for is when a woman goes in to get something checked, or she's in the ER, or she's seeing a doctor, that's the last place she wants to be. And it's the absolute last and final resort after she's been dealing with something for a really long time. Because we are naturally really resilient. We know this. I think this is shown many times that women have a really high pain tolerance. I think biologically that's because of labor, right? And child rearing. So it makes sense why that would be the case. But because our pain tolerance is so high, that also means that we let endometriosis and PMS symptoms go for a really long time. We push our way through heart attacks. Women don't spot in themselves because we don't know what symptoms of female heart attacks look like. We spoke about that on the show as well. They look very different from male heart attacks. Our symptoms of a heart attack, a true heart attack, is much more similar to nausea and anxiety. So we're much more likely to be misdiagnosed when we go in to seek treatment for something that we feel is going wrong. And maybe this is something to just kind of like remind the women who are listening. Like, if you felt for a really long time that something was off, whether it's your fertility, your productive health, or any other part of the body, like do take it seriously because we have this tendency to be like, you know, I'm here at the doctor's office, but by the way, you know, I just want you to know I have a really high pain tolerance and I'm sure this is like nothing, and I've been dealing with it for months anyway. And then we find out that like some major health event happened. So that's such a common thing, especially for ambitious high-performing women.

SPEAKER_03 27:36

You've gone over women's health and why it's important that we make that connection between stress and fertility and how that is an indicator of our lifespan, specifically in your experience as an executive leadership coach. Like how should women work through this stress and the cycles that we go through and navigate our careers?

SPEAKER_01 27:59

So, one of the things I'm most passionate about speaking on is cycle syncing. So, especially for women, I know this isn't, you know, actually it's relevant for everybody, and I'll touch on why. What I was about to say is it's not relevant for women who don't have a cycle, but it is. That's one of my biggest caveats with it. So cycle syncing means that you know at what stage in the monthly cycle you are, again, if you are still cycling, and that you as much as possible adjust what you're doing during that week or those few days to accommodate your body because our bodies are different from men's bodies, of course. Our biology is very, very different. Our hormonal cycles and fluctuations are super different from the male 24-hour clock. Women run on a 28-day clock. So our hormones fluctuate over the course of 28 days, whereas our male counterparts can wake up and feel more refreshed and reset as far as their testosterone and their cortisol goes. So, in that regard, what I always remind people is that the nine to five work schedule is very much created around the male biology. Men can do that, they could have a brand new, fresh start every single day. Whereas for us, how we feel at the start of our follicular phase is probably completely different than like day 27 and 28 of our cycle when we're either in late luteal or have already started our menstrual cycle. Adjusting for your body and for your biology is so important. I've been working on this huge massive resource as people will be able to find it via my social media and my website, but it's the cycle reset button bundle. Um, it's all the ways that you can modify your leadership style, what's on your calendar, as much as possible, your nutrition, your fitness, and your self-care, and even your skin care for each one of the four phases. So that's follicular, the start of the cycle, ovulation right in the middle, luteal, and then menstrual. Each phase deserves its own different ways that you care for yourself. And for those that have some room in their calendar to adjust what meetings, what types of meetings, right, whether or not you have a full day of meetings, or whether or not you block off deep work, right? Ideally, the follicular phase and ovulation is great for meetings, presentations, like sociability, uh convincing people of things, sales calls, and then the luteal phase is great for deep work, reflection, budgeting, anything like that that's a little bit more inward. So that's just like a really high-level overview of everything that's, you know, can be found through the cycle syncing method. And what I also wanted to touch on is for those who no longer have a cycle, or even men, I have men come to my cycle syncing workshops because first I want them to understand how women's bodies work. But also to me, cycle syncing means that you're doing things in phases, right? So anyone, any leader, man or woman, can start to look at their calendar and batch things together depending on their energy level, and also take plenty of time for rest as well. Because that's the main thing that I see in why burnout happens, again, for both genders, is because we're constantly on. We're doing the same thing every single day, especially every single workday. And then we're trying to catch up on weekends. So we're never fully resting when we're meant to be resting and we're constantly pushing ourselves, no matter the month, the week, whether it's summer or winter, like we're always trying to squeeze as much productivity out of ourselves as possible, which is the easiest way that you're gonna burn out. So if you can adjust that and adjust your calendar, batch things together more, have more. Um, maybe you create like every Wednesday, right in the middle of the week, is actually just like a call-free deep work day, just to give yourself those breaks as you go. Um, I think that's really important.

SPEAKER_03 31:39

So insightful. I love it. Dang it. How can men just wake up the next day and feel better? How did you figure out you were in a burnt out stage? And how is that different from like normal stress?

SPEAKER_01 31:53

So I think for me, it was just this desire to fit in and do what is expected or what's standard and not like push the boundaries. And I was very much during those days also uh high, high amounts of people pleasing. So, like asking for some of those, you know, days off or whatever I needed was just very uncomfortable. And then as far as like burnout versus chronic stress or just stress in general, I think the time frame is what matters. I think the check-in that everybody can do is, you know, if you're going through a stressful period right now, it could be situational and could be a couple days to a couple weeks, right? Maybe there's just like an event that's going on and there's an end date to that event, like you know something's gonna improve after like the end of July, right? You can see the light at the end of the tunnel versus that chronic stress. You can ask yourself, like, if you're feeling stressed right now, how long have you been feeling this? If it's been years of feeling the same way, okay, there's probably some imbalances in the body that we can for sure say have already developed. For a lot of people, it could be their mineral balance or their vitamins, their bone health, their sleep. Some of those things are probably getting compromised if stress has been going on for a really long time. And then the other way you can identify if it's chronic stress if there's no end in sight. So for a lot of people, stressors again vary in severity and like the context. So a situational stressor could be, again, a bill you weren't expecting, right? And you're gonna plan for it and pay it off, and that stress will be done. But something like a boss that you hate, right? There's no end in sight to that, right? So I would also check in and see how many of the things on your plate are between those two, like the situational things versus like these long-term things that are going on. And then I mean, we really just have to start to take action. Like nothing's gonna change if nothing is changed by you.

SPEAKER_03 33:49

As we near the end of our conversation, what's a breathwork exercise that that we can do? Can you like guide a huntress through a short minute or so?

SPEAKER_01 34:00

Yeah, yeah, I can do uh two things that I'll mention. So the first one is gonna be more complex, the second one's gonna be even easier. So the first thing is if someone's like looking to understand functional breathing and try it out and really understand what it's all about, I'm sure a lot of people have heard about box breathing. I think that's been really popular. Box breathing is essentially inhaling for a count of four, holding for four, exhaling for four, and holding for four at the bottom. And you do that over and over again. It's been pop made popular by Navy SEALs, so they actually practice this when they're about to go, you know, on a mission. Um, so it really works. However, I find that it's really challenging to even hold for that long at the top and the bottom for a lot of people. So, what I've really been loving recently is rectangle breath. I would love to be known for this one. You inhale for four, you hold for two, you exhale for four, and you hold for two. So it's just a little bit easier and more manageable because breath holding becomes really challenging for people who are under stress, like especially in this like short term, let's sprinkle it throughout the day. So I'm just about like how can we make it even easier for people? This breath is gonna help people, one, slow down. So especially if something stressful just happened, this is great to just come back to center. It's a lot easier than meditation because meditation asks you to sit quietly, not think, and just, you know, kind of calm your mind or clear your mind.

SPEAKER_03 35:23

The not thinking part.

SPEAKER_01 35:24

Whereas breath work gives you something really tangible to follow and to notice. So yeah, we can try it out for a few rounds if you're up for it. Anyone can do this. Maybe if you're driving, just be mindful and careful, even though as long as your eyes aren't closed, please don't close your eyes if you're driving. Um, you can try it out too. And yeah, so I always love to just have everyone connect with their breath first. That means that you just start to notice, like as you're listening to this, how are you breathing? What are you noticing? Like, where in the body are you noticing that the breath is moving the body? So a lot of times it's just like the belly rising, the chest rising, anything like that, noticing that. That's how we just first locate the fact that you're breathing at all, right? That's like a simple check-in. Like, where's my breath right now? And then from there, we can just take a deep breath in through the nose, exhale, regular exhale out through the nose or the mouth, and just let it go nice and easy. And then we'll try this out.

SPEAKER_00 36:23

We'll inhale two three four, hold, two, exhale, two, three, four, hold, two, deep breath in, two, three, four, hold, two, exhale, two, three, four, hold, two, let's do one more. Inhale. Hold on. Exhale and hold. And then a regular inhale in through the nose. And a regular exhale out.

SPEAKER_01 37:12

And then you can just notice maybe that was 30, maybe 45 seconds. Just see how that felt for you. It's okay if it felt challenging, but for a lot of us, it's just a really worthwhile way to come back to yourself. Sometimes it feels soothing right away. Um, you can stay with just this breath pattern for a couple minutes throughout the day, in the morning, in the evening. It's just a nice one that I think is going to be really accessible for the most amount of people. Something that's even simpler is just throughout the day, if you have a moment in between meetings where you have some of that like wait time throughout the day where you're like waiting in line or you're in traffic, just connecting with belly breathing. What that means is like, are you breathing just in your chest, or can you start to breathe down below the chest? So that ideally the stomach starts to move. And why this is so helpful, and again, whoever is listening, I'll invite you to notice that right now. Like, can you inhale in? And as you breathe in, can you notice is the breath going all the way down below the rib cage? Because that's one of the most healing practices, especially for women, for everyone, but especially for women, because we pull our stomach in so much, we pull on the pelvic floor. This is like a space in the body where a lot of stress gets stored. When in reality, when you can just take a deep exhale out and let your stomach soften, this is where deepest breaths happen. Because when your stomach can move out of the way, it creates more room for your lungs. So it's really simple, like nothing about this is like woo or spiritual. Sometimes people associate this with yoga, but it's just like anatomical. Like when you can take your deepest breaths, the lowest part of your lungs is also expanding. That part is usually in a contracted state because we're pulling up. But when you let the abdomen soften, then we can create space for our deepest breaths. So we actually can take fewer breaths per minute to circle back to that. Because usually when we're in a chronically stressed state and our lungs aren't filling up all the way, we've lost that capacity for deep breathing. We're taking fewer, more shallow breaths. So belly breathing, so healing before bedtime or at any point in the day. Um, you can physically feel it, like you can put your palms around your belly button and like feel that movement moving in and out. But finding that, like there's nothing that you need to count, you don't need to pay attention to anything. And it still feels tangible, right? Much more the meditation. We're paying attention to a part of the body, we're paying attention to the breath. So it's a really nice opportunity for people to just like catch ourselves. Like, oh, I've been feeling some stress here. I just had a stressful meeting happen. Let me come back to just a few deep belly breaths to like regulate back to feeling calm. I love that.

SPEAKER_03 40:05

Marina, what does rich mean to you?

SPEAKER_01 40:10

I saw this question and immediately my thoughts went to time. There's nothing to me that's more important than time, being in charge of time. That is the one true resource that is completely right. It's not coming back. It's it's finite. Money can be made, right? We can compound so many other things. There's no such thing as like compounding time. I think just being present and being mindful of how we spend our time is like the best options that we have. So for me, it's, you know, feeling rich and feeling abundant. It has to first and foremost happen with am I in control of my schedule? Do I feel in ownership of the time that I have? Um, and can I be fully present? I think that's where stress management comes into it because a lot of times we might have a lot of time, we might take PTO, we might go on a vacation. That entire time we're thinking about something else. We're thinking about what we have to do, our mind is elsewhere. And so we come back from that time away and we don't even know where the time went. So I think being present, being really mindful, being connected with yourself, and being able to be where you are, being in those moments. Um, that's what I think of.

SPEAKER_03 41:21

And then the last thing is what advice do you have for all the huntresses out there?

SPEAKER_01 41:27

Connect with your breath. If it's through me, if it's through someone else. Uh, you know, there's so much on YouTube. My practices are on YouTube, Women Who Breathe, Insight Timer. I'm also there. You can find me at Marina K. But any ways that you can to maybe this conversation just like allows you to notice your breath more, connect with your breath throughout the day, take some big exhales. The reason I called the podcast the exhale is because I think so many women hold our breath and we're not able to just like take an exhale and let some stuff go. Whereas I think the exhale is a perfect opportunity. It's happening multiple times every single minute of our life when we're awake. Like every single exhale that you take could be an opportunity to let some stuff go. Let some tension go from the body, let some things go from your mind. So I would just say this is an invitation for women to start to notice and work with their breath more, connect with their breath, use the exhale. Maybe even right now, you could just like sigh it out and let some stuff go.

SPEAKER_03 42:30

I can't wait to listen to the exhale. Uh so um, thank you for us always being such a calming presence. And I always enjoy being with you. I'm sure we could talk for two more hours. Thank you.

SPEAKER_02 42:42

Thank you for having me. Of course. If you enjoyed this episode of Talk Rich to Me, you'll love the Huntress Wealth app, where you can get more comfortable with money, make a financial plan, and make your money move. Sign up now at HuntressWealth.com.