The Breath Geek

The Breath Geek Breathwork, bio-hacking and life coaching Dr. Richard L. Blake

06/13/2026

Not everything that feels true is true.
Especially when questioning it makes people accuse you of being “blocked” or “in denial.”
Unfalsifiable memories and theories aren’t healing—they’re just dogma with better branding.

06/11/2026

A 2025 study by Patihis et al. found something wild:
The more therapy sessions people attended, the more negatively they viewed their childhood—even if nothing about their life had changed.
📎 Read the study
The researchers are now calling for clear warnings to be shared with clients before starting therapy.
🧠 But this isn’t about bashing therapy.
✅ Therapy can be life-saving.
✅ Some people really do have trauma that needs to be named and healed.
✅ If you’ve been through something real, blaming others might be necessary.

But we also need to talk about the people therapy is hurting.
Because not all suffering comes from trauma.
Some comes from:
• Mold
• Methylation issues
• Nutrient deficiencies
• Blood sugar imbalances
• Gut-brain disruption
• Chronic inflammation
• Somatic dysregulation
• Sleep debt

Most therapists aren’t trained to look for those.
So instead of real healing, clients are handed a narrative:
“Something bad must’ve happened to you.”
And if you hear that enough, you’ll start to believe it—
even if it’s not true.

👇 Should therapy come with a warning label? Let’s talk about it.
You can listen to our podcast with the author of this study by going to RUNGA.co/podcast and looking for Lawrence Patihis.

And if you're worried that you have mold in your home you can now test using GOT MOLD? and use code RUNGA10 for a discount.
https://fas.st/t/DZrDSFT2

06/07/2026

🆕 New 2025 study: Moderate cycling right after recalling a traumatic memory reduced its emotional intensity in the days after (University of Tsukuba).
🔄 This mirrors Ishikawa, Fukushima & Frankland (2016): Mice forgot a conditioned fear only when a brief reminder was followed by exercise or a neurogenesis-boosting drug.
❌ No reminder = no change
❌ No movement = no forgetting
Why it matters:
Current treatments that focus solely on talking about the past can have unintended consequences:
Family estrangements

False memories

Victim mindsets

Years trapped in the same narrative

If we want to solve the mental health crisis, we need to lean into treatments that heal without these side effects and exercise is now proven to be one of them.

06/06/2026

Puberty is arriving earlier than ever—and girls are paying the price.
In the 1960s, most girls started their periods around 12.5.
Today it’s often 11.9—or earlier.
During the pandemic, hospitals reported a 2.6x surge in early puberty cases.
This isn’t about genetics.
It’s about daily exposure to things that disrupt the body’s hormonal timing:
— Endocrine disruptors in personal care products
— Processed food, seed oils, and sugar
— Plastics and food packaging
— Blue light and poor sleep
— Metabolic dysfunction
Cited studies and clinical cases:
• JAMA Pediatrics (age trends)
• Frontiers in Pediatrics (2.6x rise in CPP)
• JESEE (paraben exposure in infants)
• NEJM (lavender & tea tree gynecomastia)
• Lustig clinician report (genistein in bath gel)
• Frontiers (childhood obesity & early puberty)
• PubMed (sugar and menstruation timing)
• NIH & ScienceDirect (BPA, phthalates)
• PubMed (blue light and puberty onset in rats)
Start where you can.
One swap, one meal, one better night’s sleep at a time.

06/05/2026

Interoceptive sensitivity — heightened awareness of internal bodily sensations — is associated with anxiety and panic vulnerability (Paulus & Stein, 2006, Biological Psychiatry; Domschke et al., 2010, Neuropsychopharmacology).

Greater inward monitoring can increase salience attribution to benign physiological signals, particularly in individuals high in neuroticism.
At the same time, this is not a blanket critique of mindfulness or interoception.

Some people are genuinely disconnected from bodily awareness, and structured interoceptive training can improve regulation.

But for highly neurotic or anxiety-prone individuals, excessive internal monitoring may amplify threat perception while feeling morally virtuous — as if being “more in touch” automatically equals healthier.

We also need perspective. Violence, war deaths, and extreme poverty have declined dramatically over the past centuries (Pinker, 2011, The Better Angels of Our Nature; Pinker, 2018, Enlightenment Now). Yet perceived fragility has increased.

Safety externally does not guarantee calm internally.

Attention shapes experience.





06/04/2026

Here’s the hard truth:
Some people are addicted to the news.
To the outrage.
To being emotionally wrecked every day.
🧠 Study: After the Boston Marathon bombing,
people who watched hours of media coverage
had more PTSD symptoms than the people who were actually there.
(Silver et al., PNAS, 2013)
📊 Study: “Extremely liberal” individuals had 150% higher rates of mental illness than moderates.
(Carl, Mental Illness and Ideology, 2023)
And I bet people on the far right are suffering in other ways.
So no, not all mental illness is random.
Sometimes it’s chosen—
through what people watch, believe, and refuse to let go of.
It’s time to take back your attention.
👇 Comment “TURN IT OFF” if you’re done letting the news live in your head rent-free.

06/03/2026

What if therapy is targeting the wrong mechanism in anxiety?
A 2026 family study found that while social anxiety and intolerance of uncertainty both cluster in families, shared family-level intolerance did not explain why social anxiety transmits (Moreau et al., 2026, Journal of Anxiety Disorders). Individual-level factors mattered more.
Large twin meta-analyses consistently estimate anxiety disorders to be 30–50% heritable (Hettema et al., 2001, American Journal of Psychiatry; Isomura et al., 2015, Psychological Medicine).
This doesn’t mean upbringing is irrelevant. It doesn’t deny trauma. It doesn’t invalidate therapy.
But it does suggest that repeatedly excavating family dynamics may not be interrupting the primary transmission pathway for many people.
If anxiety is partly temperamental and biological, then exposure, behavioural skill-building, and nervous-system capacity may deserve more emphasis than narrative reconstruction alone.
Curious to hear thoughtful disagreement.









06/01/2026

I am not trying to minimize anyone’s abuse. I am trying to calibrate its effects. Why do people want to inflate the consequences of abuse beyond what they really are? This only makes people suffer more.
""The body keeps the score"" is one of the most powerful ideas in modern trauma culture — and one of the least tested against prospective evidence.
Two studies used court-documented childhood abuse records — verified official evidence collected decades before anyone asked about pain — and followed participants into adulthood.
Raphael, Widom & Lange (2001, Pain, 92(3)) followed individuals with verified abuse records approximately 30 years into adulthood. Once relevant covariates were controlled for, there was no significant direct association between documented childhood maltreatment and chronic pain.
Brown, Berenson & Cohen (2005, Clinical Journal of Pain, 21(5)) used the same court-documented design and followed participants to a mean age of 22. Elevations in pain attributable to documented maltreatment fell below the threshold of statistical significance.
Both research teams then switched from court records to adult self-report — asking participants whether they remembered childhood abuse. In both cases, the association with pain reappeared.
This is the methodological problem at the heart of most trauma-pain research. Retrospective studies take adults who are currently in pain and ask them to recall their childhoods. People in pain are more likely to reinterpret past experiences as harmful — not because they are lying, but because that is how memory works under conditions of current distress. A methodology that does this almost guarantees it will find what it is looking for.
None of this means childhood abuse has no consequences — it clearly does. And none of it means chronic pain isn't real — it is. It means the specific causal claim — that unresolved trauma stores itself in the body and surfaces as physical pain decades later — is not supported when you use documented evidence rather than retrospective recall.

📚 References: Raphael, K.G., Widom, C.S. & Lange, G. (2001). Childhood victimization and pain in adulthood. Pain, 92(3), pp. 283–289. Brown, G.K., Berenson, K. & Cohen, P. (2005). Documented childhood maltreatment and pain in young adults. Clinical Journal of Pain, 21(5), pp. 448–453.

05/31/2026

Gratitude isn’t woo. It’s neuroscience.
🧠 Hebb’s Law says: neurons that fire together, wire together.
So when you complain constantly, your brain learns to expect and search for negativity.
When you practice gratitude—even in small moments—you reprogram your brain to look for the good.
One study published in NeuroImage showed long-term gratitude practice reshaped neural pathways associated with emotion regulation and reward.
Other research found it reduced cortisol and increased gray matter volume in key regions of the brain.
Your mental habits are wiring you—whether you like it or not.
What are you rehearsing?
🧠 Source: Fox, G. R. et al. (2015). “Neural correlates of gratitude.” NeuroImage, 105, 298-305.

05/30/2026

In 1995, Elizabeth Loftus ran a now-famous experiment:
Loftus, E. F., & Pickrell, J. E. (1995). The Formation of False Memories. Psychiatric Annals, 25(12), 720–725.
Participants were told four childhood stories — three real, one fake.
The fake?
That they’d been lost in a shopping mall at age five, cried, and were rescued by a stranger.
💥 25% remembered it — vividly.
This wasn’t acting. Their nervous systems responded as if it were real.
The lesson: memory is shockingly easy to distort.
Now apply that to therapy — where tools like:
✨ Guided imagery
🌀 Hypnosis
👶 Inner child regressions
🔮 Past life recall
… encourage people to trust whatever “comes up.”
If we’re not careful, we’re healing from traumas that might not be ours, or might never have happened at all.
The body doesn’t need a story to heal — it needs a release.
👇 Comment CLEAR if you’re ready for trauma healing that’s grounded in reality.

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