When we think about improving our health, we typically think about diet, trying to exercise more, and taking vitamins and supplements. But James Nestor argues that none of that stuff really matters if we haven t improved something even more foundational: our breathing. His latest book, Breath, The New Science of a Lost Art, explains why simply switching the passageway of your breathing from oral to nasal can have such significant health benefits.
00:08:34.920Our noses get plugged from pollutants or allergies or whatever we have to breathe through our mouth.
00:08:40.480But it wasn't until I dug deeper into the story and found it's actually caused by evolution of the human skull.
00:08:48.760That seems nuts, but all you need to do is look at skulls from 400 years ago and look at skulls now.
00:08:54.800And they've massively changed, especially in the mouth.
00:08:59.360Our mouths have grown so small, our teeth no longer fit, which is why they grow in crooked.
00:09:05.640And the other problem with having a too small mouth is you have a smaller airway, which is one of the main reasons so many of us have sleep apnea, snoring, other respiratory issues.
00:09:15.000Well, and you actually, you go to like a crypt beneath Paris to look at, to find skulls from 400 years ago.
00:09:22.000Like, why have our mouths gotten smaller over the years?
00:09:25.840Yeah, so that was one of the first expeditions I really did because I wasn't able to get into labs.
00:09:32.140It's hard to get into labs and look at ancient skulls.
00:09:34.940I had not met the biological anthropologist that I later ended up working with.
00:09:40.000So I wanted to see what happened to our skulls up close and personal.
00:09:44.460And I managed to contact a friend of a friend who took me down to the quarries in Paris, which are about 60 feet below the streets of Paris.
00:09:52.680170 miles, and there's 6 million human skulls down there.
00:09:56.760So I was able to root around and look at skulls down there without anyone looking over my shoulder, you know, without any plaques or cautionary ropes.
00:10:08.420So what I learned later after that was that so much of the damage that's been caused to our mouths, to our sinuses, to our ability to breathe is because humans have stopped chewing.
00:10:20.720If you look at industrialized food, processed flour, processed rice, canned stuff, it's all soft.
00:10:29.140And without that masticatory stress, especially early in life, mouths don't grow properly.
00:10:35.360They don't grow wide enough, which is the main reason.
00:10:38.460There's other things that contribute to this, but that's the main reason so many of us have crooked teeth.
00:10:43.220And that is also correlated to breathing problems.
00:10:46.360All right, to kind of add some context here, people have smaller mouths today because they have less exercise chewing on harder food.
00:10:55.740And that began even before the industrial revolution with industrialized food.
00:11:23.760When kids get inflamed adenoids or tonsils, they have to breathe through their mouth.
00:11:29.080And if you do this for so many years, it can actually change the skelicature of your face.
00:11:34.700And it changes how you're going to look, which is later on in life, these people who study this stuff, the scientists, can tell if someone has been breathing through their mouth through their youth because of the way in which their face has grown.
00:11:49.440And what that means is it's a longer face.
00:11:56.080So you don't have this big, powerful chin.
00:11:58.460Of course, genes and genetics determine a lot of how you're going to look.
00:12:02.660But epigenetics, these environmental inputs, also have a huge influence of how you're going to grow in your health, including your breathing.
00:12:14.860What it was like to be a chronic mouth breather.
00:12:16.860What happened when you removed the nasal plugs and could breathe through your nose again?
00:12:21.080Yeah, so the experiment was never intended to be like some jackass stunt.
00:12:26.600We were lulling our bodies into a position they already knew and that so much of the population already knew.
00:12:33.220The difference was we were calculating everything that was happening.
00:12:36.680So the good part of the experiment was that the next phase was only nasal breathing.
00:12:42.340I mean, I'm sure we snuck in some mouth breaths here and there, but the vast majority of the breaths we were taking per day, including all of those at night, were through the nose.
00:12:52.540We also practiced some breathing techniques along the way.
00:12:55.280And within the first night, my snoring almost completely disappeared, went down to about 30 minutes.
00:13:03.000Three nights later, two nights later, it was gone.
00:13:52.560First of all, you're pressurizing air and you're slowing it down, which allows more time for oxygen to soak in for gas exchange in your lungs.
00:14:02.980If you take a breath through your nose, you get that negative pressure going in that vacuum.
00:14:08.020Then as you exhale through the nose, you get that positive pressure.
00:14:11.760So beyond just that, you get 20% more oxygen equivalent breaths through the nose than through the mouth.
00:14:18.000That is enormous, especially throughout the day.
00:14:22.980With that pressure, you're able to push those soft tissues at the back of the airway further back and to help tone them a little more, which opens the airway.
00:14:33.440If you open your mouth right now, I just learned this trick from Dr. Stephen Park at Albert Einstein Medical Center.
00:14:39.960If you open your mouth right now, you're going to feel your tongue softly going back into your airway.
00:14:45.440And as you close your mouth, that tongue is going to gently move up towards the upper palate.
00:14:51.320When it moves up towards the upper palate, you're opening your airway, which is also one of the reasons why nasal breathing is so effective for people with mild or even moderate snoring and sometimes even sleep apnea.
00:15:02.680So beyond that, I mean, it's, you know, the nose is the first line of defense.
00:15:07.460It filters stuff out, produces nitric oxide, which interacts directly with viruses.
00:15:14.120There's innumerable benefits to nasal breathing.
00:15:17.040And none of that is controversial, right?
00:15:19.100You ask anyone, any rhinologist, and they know about this stuff.
00:15:24.940So, I mean, it sounds like, I mean, I think people typically breathe through their mouth.
00:15:27.800They're thinking, well, I got sinus infections, so I can't breathe through my nose.
00:15:30.340But it sounds like the mouth breathing could be contributing to, like, the sinus infection and your inability to breathe through your nose.
00:15:41.960The doctor of speech-language pathology down at Stanford studied people who had had laryngectomies, little holes drilled in their throat because they had mouth cancer or some other problem.
00:15:51.940And from two months to two years, their noses were 100% blocked.
00:15:58.960And she found that the more we use your nose, the more those tissues are going to become acclimated and open up and allow us to use our noses.
00:16:07.920So with something like chronic sinusitis, which, you know, 25% of the population suffers from this, like, that is a huge number.
00:16:16.440You've got to find a way of clearing your nose.
00:16:18.340As NIAC down at Stanford said, if your toilet's plugged, you're going to find a way of clearing it.
00:16:23.140And the nose has to be considered the same thing.
00:16:25.640So I think during the day, someone can practice, intentionally practice nose breathing.
00:16:32.320And that's the other thing with mouth breathing at night.
00:16:34.600That's one of the things that leads to bad breath, periodontal disease as well.
00:16:38.140So what can you do to make sure your mouth's shut at night?
00:16:40.500So, so many other issues as well, because when you're breathing through the mouth, you don't have all those structures in the nose that help to humidify and filter and condition air.
00:16:52.460So breathing through the mouth will release 40% more moisture than breathing through the nose.
00:16:57.840So I had been a mouth breather at night for as long as I can remember, which is why I would go to bed with a huge glass of water by the bedside every single night.
00:17:07.840It didn't matter if I was in a hotel, and I just thought this was normal to be waking up with a dry mouth, hitting on water, going back to sleep, waking up, hitting on water, going back to sleep.
00:17:19.520You know, sleeping with your mouth open is not a normal thing.
00:17:22.400You look at animals in the wild, they're not doing it.
00:17:24.500So what I had learned at Stanford from Dr. Ann Kearney and also from Dr. Mark Burhenney is that we can use a teeny piece of tape.
00:17:34.380Now, I'm not talking about a fat strip of industrial tape or duct tape or anything.
00:17:40.300A teeny piece about the size of a postage stamp, you place that at the center of your lips.
00:17:45.980And the point of this isn't to block air from the mouth.
00:17:49.220It's just to train the mouth to be closed at night.
00:17:53.520And I started doing this and recording what happened with my sleep.
00:17:57.280And an extraordinary benefit, more oxygenation, better sleep, longer sleep.
00:18:04.200I mean, less resistance in the airway because your mouth is closed.
00:18:08.720And since this book has come out, which has been a couple months, I've received literally dozens and dozens and dozens of emails from people saying,
00:18:16.320Oh, my God, why didn't I know about this before?
00:18:19.300Or they're no longer snoring, you know, even people with milder sleep apnea no longer have sleep apnea just by shutting their mouths.
00:18:27.900I did the mouth tape thing and I liked it.
00:19:06.160And nasal breathing is the first thing.
00:19:09.120Another thing about breathing, I think when most people think about breathing, they're always thinking about the breathe in part because that feels nice.
00:19:51.700And what Carl Stau found, and he was this choral conductor in the 50s who found that few of his singers were really exhaling properly.
00:20:02.160They weren't moving their diaphragms up high enough.
00:20:05.300And by just allowing them to engage more diaphragmatic movement, he completely changed the resonance and the volume of their voices and went on to teach opera singers or the Met Opera this.
00:20:17.680But he then went on to, for 10 years, helped emphysemics by just increasing diaphragmatic movement.
00:20:26.120By just using breathing, he was able to effectively heal these people and have them walk out of the hospital, which is extraordinary, but it also makes perfect sense.
00:20:35.900These people had lost the ability to breathe properly.
00:20:39.060Every single breath they took was a struggle, and they were stressing themselves out every moment of every day.
00:20:46.280Okay, we're going to take a quick break for you, words from our sponsors.
00:20:52.680And how do you, what do you do with the diaphragm to make sure all that air, like how do you tell your diaphragm, squeeze that air out more?
00:21:00.300Sure, so breathing is this wonderful thing because we do it unconsciously.
00:21:04.060We don't have to be thinking about it, but we can also do it consciously.
00:21:07.580So if everyone just takes a big breath in now, through the nose, please.
00:21:12.440As you breathe in, your diaphragm, which is this muscle underneath the lungs, because the lungs don't do anything on themselves.
00:21:21.260They need something to expand them and contract them.
00:22:20.600I'm going to add that to my list of activities here.
00:22:23.640I do know that Carl Stau, the researcher who had done this and proven this, what he had patients do, and this included Olympians.
00:22:33.020He was the guy who trained the 1968 track team, U.S. track team, to go down to Mexico City.
00:22:39.980They were the only team that did not use oxygen because they didn't need to because they were breathing properly, and they destroyed everybody.
00:22:46.360It was like the greatest Olympic performance and track ever.
00:22:50.880And so he would have them start with that inhale, and as they exhaled, he'd have them go, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 9, 10, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 9.
00:22:58.760And count from 1 to 10, and even when they were out of breath, to start whispering it, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 9, 10, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6.
00:23:05.860And by doing that and vocalizing while you're doing it, you're able to engage more diaphragmatic movement.
00:23:11.400And what that also does, it lengthened your breath.
00:23:15.260And this kind of segues to my next question because this is one of the most counterintuitive things I got from your book.
00:23:21.300Like I said earlier, when we typically think of breathing, we think about the oxygen part.
00:24:21.560But what few people consider, and this blew my mind when I came across it, is that we need a balance of CO2 and oxygen in the body for oxygen to disassociate from hemoglobin to feed our hungry cells.
00:24:41.600And if we don't have enough of it, our bodies have to compensate.
00:24:46.000And that compensation can start wearing us down.
00:24:49.260So when you see people, again, out jogging, doing CrossFit or whatever, or even sitting at an office in front of a computer and they're breathing, thinking they're getting more oxygen into their tissues and muscles and organs, the opposite is happening, which is why their fingers are cold, which is why they get dizzy in their head.
00:25:11.600And that feeling is caused by constriction.
00:25:15.040Because when you offload too much CO2, you cause vasoconstriction throughout your body.
00:25:21.580And so I guess what do you do to increase levels of CO2?
00:26:18.640And that's the key to so much of health and fitness as well.
00:26:23.260But then you also can do these training things where you actually elevate CO2.
00:26:27.580And you did this run that sounded hellish where you would inhale for three seconds, exhale for four, inhale for three, and then make your exhale five.
00:26:38.940So basically you were taking in less oxygen compared to – I tried that just sitting still and I was like, I felt I was never getting a full breath.
00:26:48.700What were you hoping to accomplish by doing that?
00:26:51.540So this was the more extreme part of this.
00:26:54.560I would suggest people start with the mellower part and breathe normally, breathe in line with your metabolic needs, which is slower and less.
00:27:02.160But what they found is there are significant benefits to be had by controlling your breathing to a point – they call it hypoventilation training.
00:27:12.660So it's when you try to acclimate yourself to higher levels of CO2.
00:27:19.500And when you do this, when you're out running – and again, I do not suggest anyone do this.
00:27:39.800I mean, it gets almost psychedelic because what that is is you are increasing circulation and oxygenation throughout your body when you're doing this.
00:27:49.100You can get to a point where you're breathing so little that your O2 is going to go down.
00:28:27.780And so many of those benefits, I was seeing this research sort of dovetail together.
00:28:32.940It was blowing my mind to see the benefits of people who have trained with this hypoventilation training increasing their threshold of CO2.
00:28:42.820And they found that the benefits of this are similar in many ways to altitude training.
00:28:51.200You can pull more energy from lactic acid on and on.
00:28:55.240This guy, Xavier Warrens in Paris, Paris 13 University, is now researching this stuff big time.
00:29:01.780And they're actually using it for people with heart conditions.
00:29:04.180They're using it because it helps people lose weight quicker because it actually allows you to offload more oxygen and you burn fat with oxygen.
00:29:14.120So I included about 20 references to scientific studies looking at this stuff.
00:29:21.700Just through breathing, you have access to all these different systems in the body.
00:29:25.520I think you talk about too, like people with asthma, if they do the hypoventilation, it can help with asthma as well.
00:29:31.160It makes a huge difference with so many people.
00:29:34.560And again, I included, I think, 50 studies showing how slower breathing by breathing less can really help people with asthma.
00:29:44.460Asthmatics as a population tend to breathe way more than the rest of us and they tend to breathe from their mouth.
00:29:50.600So they're exposing themselves to everything, all the pollutants, allergens, whatever else in the environment all the time,
00:29:57.340which can exacerbate their allergic reaction to asthma.
00:30:01.120If you think about someone with asthma, the last thing they want to do is suffer another asthma attack.
00:30:06.520So they become so sensitized to CO2 that whenever they think they're having an attack, what do they do?
00:30:15.740They breathe more and more and more, which causes more constriction, which, guess what, brings on an attack.
00:30:21.640So by teaching them to breathe normally, I call it breathing less, but it's actually teaching them to just breathe normally in line with their metabolic needs.
00:30:31.380They've shown huge benefits for people with asthma.
00:30:35.240And so just to recap here, the reason why elevated CO2 is necessary or you need CO2 is that it's what allows your body or your blood to,
00:30:43.340or your body to take the oxygen off the blood cell and use it.
00:34:39.400And where did he get this idea of this sort of breathing where you can basically take over involuntary aspects of your body?
00:34:46.900So, I wanted to start with, you know, in the book, start with the problem real quick and start with a foundation that anyone can benefit from.
00:34:55.520It doesn't matter if you're an elite athlete or an asthmatic or whatever.
00:34:59.340Just as you mentioned, nasal breathing, exhaling, breathing slower, breathing less.
00:35:04.400Huge foundation of science supporting that.
00:35:06.760Not a lot of people are going to disagree with it.
00:35:08.500But also, you know, you hear stories about Wim Hof, you hear about things like holotropic breath work, these breathing practices that require more effort, right?
00:35:18.160This isn't just, oh, I'm going to breathe through my nose.
00:35:20.300Like, they require some concerted effort to do this stuff.
00:35:23.300But I was curious to see how far breathing could take us.
00:35:27.260What it could do to really heal ongoing chronic maladies.
00:35:32.060What it could do to move us up that next level of human potential.
00:35:35.920And what Wim, you know, everyone calls it Wim Hof Method, but he's been very clear that he didn't invent any of this stuff.
00:35:44.800His breathing method has been around for thousands of years.
00:35:48.260People have been superheating their bodies with this.
00:35:51.240The Bon Buddhist monks have been doing this for so long.
00:35:54.840And what they all have, so you can call it different things, Tumo, Wim Hof Method, Pranayama.
00:36:00.480But they're all doing the same things.
00:36:02.100They're allowing you to control your breath.
00:36:05.260And when you control your breath, you can then take control of certain elements of your autonomic nervous system, which was supposed to have been, according to Western medicine, beyond our control.
00:36:34.420And once they started using these methods to breathe, they were able to either blunt these symptoms or some of them claimed to have outright cured them.
00:36:43.580And they've measured their progress with real measurements, real science.
00:36:47.940And I just thought that this was fantastic and amazing.
00:36:51.240It seems too good to be true, but look what Wim's done.
00:36:54.660He's been studying in labs all over the world right now.
00:36:58.180We're just starting to crack this thing open, which is really exciting.
00:41:33.400And I so completely freaked out, the people doing this study, because I was able to make my blood so alkaline to about 7.68, which if they saw someone with blood like this, they would immediately put them into an ER and say, this person's about to die.
00:41:52.160But something amazing happens when you consciously will yourself into these states.
00:42:31.740Dr. Justin Feinstein is out there doing some incredible NIH-funded research looking into the role of CO2 therapy for people with chronic anxiety, chronic fear-based problems.
00:42:44.880You see, like, the amount of people with panic, I think, is about 10%.
00:42:49.260Chronic anxiety, I think, is about a quarter of the population.
00:42:52.580That includes people with anorexia and other serious issues.
00:42:58.260We know that SSRIs, Prozac, and all of that is not really that much more effective than placebos, even though people have been using them for 30 years, which is absolutely wild.
00:43:07.840So he is introducing CO2 into their bodies and helping them to become more flexible and tolerant of it so that they will be able to breathe more comfortably at a slower rate and let their bodies heal themselves.
00:43:23.320And, again, he's one of the top researchers in this field.
00:43:52.760But what happens is when you're introduced to this much CO2, and he gave me a double dose, just to be clear, far above what the other people, the other patients in this study were giving.
00:44:06.920So what he was essentially doing was eliciting a panic attack in my body.
00:44:11.700So I was hooked up to all these instruments, and I was able to see on a computer monitor, my oxygen didn't change at all.
00:44:18.340It was steady the whole time, but he introduced this huge amount of CO2, and I felt, I experienced what a panic attack felt like, and I feel so sorry for these people now because it lasts for a long time, sweating, everything becomes, your vision becomes narrowed.
00:44:36.820It was awful, but the more acclimated to more CO2 you become, the easier that gets.
00:44:42.700So if I would have gone back and done that over and over again, as he does with his patients, that experience would have become lessened and lessened and lessened the longer I did it.
00:45:29.160He's the author of the book, Breath, the New Science of a Lost Art.
00:45:31.920It's available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere.
00:45:33.840You can find out more information about his work at his website, mrjamesnester.com.
00:45:37.860Also, check out our show notes at aom.is slash breath, where you can find links to resources when we delve deeper into this topic.
00:45:49.880Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM Podcast.
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