The Art of Manliness - #638： How Changing Your Breathing Can Change Your Life

00:00:00.000 Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.

00:00:10.900 And when we think about improving our health, we typically think about diet, trying to exercise

00:00:14.900 more, taking vitamins and supplements.

00:00:17.200 My guest today argues that none of that stuff really matters if we haven't improved something

00:00:20.340 even more foundational, our breathing.

00:00:22.840 His name is James Nestor, and his latest book is Breath, The New Science of a Lost Art.

00:00:26.680 At the beginning of our conversation, James explains why he paid thousands of dollars to

00:00:30.460 have his nose plugged up, and what happened to his body when he could only breathe out

00:00:33.720 of his mouth.

00:00:34.420 We impact the dangers of the common problem of being a habitual mouth breather, including

00:00:38.160 the fact that he even changed the shape of our faces, and why modern humans started breathing

00:00:42.080 through their mouth rather than their nose in the first place.

00:00:44.520 James then reveals what happened when he switched his experiment around and breathed only through

00:00:47.920 his nose, and explains why simply switching the passageway of your breathing from oral

00:00:51.620 to nasal can have such significant health benefits.

00:00:53.820 He also shares his weird trick to switch from mouth to nose breathing at night, which

00:00:57.180 I've tried myself and I've found effective.

00:00:59.500 We then discuss the importance of getting better at exhaling, and why you counterintuitively

00:01:03.120 probably need to be thinking more about getting more carbon dioxide in your body rather than

00:01:07.040 oxygen.

00:01:07.620 In the latter part of our conversation, we discuss more advanced breathing techniques, including

00:01:11.060 hypoventilation training, where you double your exhale to inhale so you acclimate yourself

00:01:15.280 to higher levels of CO2, as well as other experimental breathing techniques that may allow people

00:01:19.500 to take conscious control of the supposedly involuntary autonomic nervous system in order to

00:01:23.800 boost immunity and heal diseases.

00:01:25.660 After the show's over, check out our show notes at aom.is slash breath.

00:01:37.340 All right, James Nestor, welcome back to the show.

00:01:41.000 Thanks so much for having me.

00:01:42.160 So we had you on a couple years ago to talk about your book, Deep, which is about free

00:01:47.120 divers.

00:01:47.480 These are people who train themselves to, without any aid of oxygen, to just go down as far as

00:01:54.160 they can in the ocean, and they're down there for minutes at a time.

00:01:57.340 You were talking about the science of this.

00:01:58.380 While you're researching this book and doing this, you or yourself were dealing with some

00:02:01.840 breathing problems.

00:02:03.400 What were the type of problems you were struggling with, and what made you think, well, maybe

00:02:07.360 if these free divers could train themselves to breathe better, maybe I can do that too?

00:02:11.140 I had been surfing a lot at Ocean Beach and exercising a bunch and thought that just chronic

00:02:18.520 bronchitis was just part of the game because everyone I knew was having some sort of respiratory

00:02:23.840 problem or another, be it allergies, asthma, bronchitis on occasion.

00:02:29.660 I was getting mild pneumonia year after year.

00:02:32.640 It wasn't any big deal.

00:02:33.820 I'd just take antibiotics and be on with it.

00:02:35.780 And again, I didn't expect that anything was wrong.

00:02:38.120 Until I saw my doctor, and she's like, hey, I think you're not breathing properly, and

00:02:42.660 it could be exacerbating or maybe even causing these problems.

00:02:46.480 So she suggested I go to a breathing class, and I did that, had this very weird experience

00:02:55.000 just sitting in the corner of this cold room here in San Francisco, breathing in this rhythmic

00:02:59.660 pattern, and I sweated through my t-shirt.

00:03:02.980 My hair was sopping wet.

00:03:04.500 There were sweat stains on my jeans.

00:03:06.880 I mean, it was completely wild, unlike anything I'd experienced.

00:03:10.800 And I thought, wow, something's going on here.

00:03:13.500 I wonder what the science has to say about this.

00:03:16.060 And so that was really beyond freediving, where I saw the potential of breathing for

00:03:19.980 underwater research.

00:03:21.580 I also started wondering what breathing could do for the rest of us on land.

00:03:26.640 And that's what really set me off.

00:03:28.660 And it set you off in a new book.

00:03:30.020 I mean, it went on all these crazy scientific adventures.

00:03:32.900 And the first one is the craziest, because you basically paid $5,000 to have a doctor

00:03:39.360 plug up your nose.

00:03:41.800 What were you hoping to learn by doing that?

00:03:45.320 Yeah, this was never intended.

00:03:47.380 So this was never, ever part of my plan.

00:03:49.960 It's funny.

00:03:50.340 People read the book, and they think that I had placed myself in these situations on purpose.

00:03:56.640 But it was through total happenstance.

00:03:59.400 The doctor, he's the chief of rhinology research at Stanford, so knows everything about the nose.

00:04:05.960 And I had had several interviews with him, long, hours-long interviews.

00:04:10.660 And he kept telling me about all the wondrous things the nose can do, how it can help fight

00:04:16.340 off viruses, how it conditions air, how it allows us to absorb more oxygen.

00:04:20.600 And he kept also telling me about how bad it was that so many of us are breathing through our

00:04:25.300 mouths, like something like 25% to 50% of us are chronic mouth breathers.

00:04:29.900 And I think I was breathing through my mouth a lot, too, because I didn't know the difference.

00:04:35.040 And so I asked him, I said, well, how soon does this damage from mouth breathing come on?

00:04:39.820 That includes neurological problems.

00:04:43.000 It includes respiratory problems, poorer athletic performance, all of that.

00:04:47.720 That's been known for a while, but nobody really knew how quickly it came on.

00:04:51.960 And he didn't know.

00:04:52.940 No one had conducted an experiment with it.

00:04:55.440 So I volunteered for an experiment.

00:04:57.820 Of course, Stanford didn't have money for this kind of research.

00:05:01.900 So we had to pony up the cash ourselves.

00:05:04.500 And it was even more than five grand.

00:05:06.660 So I used a big chunk of my book advance to do this because I was curious to see what would

00:05:11.380 happen.

00:05:12.020 So basically, he stuck, plugs up your nose, and then tape, like you couldn't breathe through

00:05:16.680 your nose.

00:05:17.400 How soon did you start noticing changes in your breathing and how it influenced your

00:05:22.800 health?

00:05:23.800 Yeah.

00:05:24.100 So that was the plan, is for 10 days, silicone up the nose, tape over that to inhibit even

00:05:30.920 the slightest amount of air entering the nose.

00:05:34.140 So me and one other subject, a breathing therapist named Anders Olson, we were only mouth breathing

00:05:39.080 for 10 days.

00:05:39.900 And we were recording what was happening in our brains, physiological data, three times a day,

00:05:44.740 every single day.

00:05:46.500 And we found that mouth breathing, we knew it was bad.

00:05:49.560 We didn't know it was going to be this bad.

00:05:51.740 I mean, within a few hours, my, I mean, this is a few hours of switching our breathing.

00:05:57.100 My blood pressure shot up about 20 points.

00:05:59.820 That night, my snoring increased 1,300%.

00:06:03.820 Within three days, I was snoring through half the night.

00:06:07.140 I hadn't been snoring before doing this.

00:06:09.080 Anders, the other subject in the experiment, suffered the exact same damage.

00:06:14.340 We're stressed, fatigued.

00:06:16.520 I mean, you name it.

00:06:18.320 And to me, this explained, at least partly, why so many people are suffering from so many

00:06:24.400 of these chronic problems.

00:06:25.840 It's just switching the pathway of your breathing.

00:06:28.440 Just breathing through the mouth can really exacerbate so many issues.

00:06:32.420 All right.

00:06:32.580 So you did this scientific experiment to get data on how bad mouth breathing is for you.

00:06:37.240 But it was something that earlier cultures already knew intuitively.

00:06:41.560 For example, you talk about tribes where the parents would close their baby's lips with their

00:06:45.700 fingers to keep them from breathing with their mouths.

00:06:48.420 Yeah, you can trace this back several thousand years, actually, in many early Hindu texts.

00:06:55.760 They were talking about the wonders of nasal breathing.

00:06:57.680 The Chinese wrote seven books of the Tao dedicated to breathing, of all the bad things that can 1.00

00:07:05.580 happen when you do it improperly.

00:07:07.520 They specifically mentioned mouth breathing, how injurious it is to the body.

00:07:11.960 And they talk about the wonders of nasal breathing.

00:07:15.040 So this spread out through other cultures.

00:07:17.500 And what was interesting to me is you can find this in cultures, but these cultures didn't have

00:07:22.400 direct contact with one another.

00:07:23.960 So they all came to these same conclusions somewhat independently.

00:07:28.980 And the Native Americans, that's the story you're citing, were habitual nasal breathers. 0.93

00:07:34.540 And they were so into it that some of them, according to the sources, would hesitate when they laughed

00:07:41.540 because they didn't want to open their mouth for even a moment to get air in.

00:07:45.600 And when they had infants, after they were done breastfeeding, they would softly close their lips.

00:07:51.360 They'd stand over them at night to see if they opened their mouths while they were sleeping

00:07:56.020 and softly close their lips to make this a habit later on in life, to always breathe through the nose.

00:08:03.760 All right.

00:08:03.900 So if mouth breathing is so bad for you, why do modern people do it?

00:08:08.220 Well, I think it's become so normal that you look at people running, you look at people in a gym,

00:08:14.440 when we used to go to gyms, and almost everyone's breathing through their mouth.

00:08:18.120 They're thinking that more oxygen is going to get into their bodies the more they breathe through their mouth.

00:08:24.320 But the opposite is happening.

00:08:26.380 This is such a counterintuitive concept.

00:08:29.540 It took me months to get my head around.

00:08:31.060 But I had thought it was habitual.

00:08:33.300 I thought it was environmental.

00:08:34.920 Our noses get plugged from pollutants or allergies or whatever we have to breathe through our mouth.

00:08:40.480 But it wasn't until I dug deeper into the story and found it's actually caused by evolution of the human skull.

00:08:48.760 That seems nuts, but all you need to do is look at skulls from 400 years ago and look at skulls now.

00:08:54.800 And they've massively changed, especially in the mouth.

00:08:59.360 Our mouths have grown so small, our teeth no longer fit, which is why they grow in crooked.

00:09:05.640 And 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.

00:09:15.000 Well, and you actually, you go to like a crypt beneath Paris to look at, to find skulls from 400 years ago.

00:09:20.580 I mean, so what would happen?

00:09:22.000 Like, why have our mouths gotten smaller over the years?

00:09:25.840 Yeah, so that was one of the first expeditions I really did because I wasn't able to get into labs.

00:09:32.140 It's hard to get into labs and look at ancient skulls.

00:09:34.940 I had not met the biological anthropologist that I later ended up working with.

00:09:40.000 So I wanted to see what happened to our skulls up close and personal.

00:09:44.460 And 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.

00:09:52.680 170 miles, and there's 6 million human skulls down there.

00:09:56.760 So 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.

00:10:06.120 A completely wild experience.

00:10:08.420 So 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.

00:10:20.720 If you look at industrialized food, processed flour, processed rice, canned stuff, it's all soft.

00:10:29.140 And without that masticatory stress, especially early in life, mouths don't grow properly.

00:10:35.360 They don't grow wide enough, which is the main reason.

00:10:38.460 There's other things that contribute to this, but that's the main reason so many of us have crooked teeth.

00:10:43.220 And that is also correlated to breathing problems.

00:10:46.360 All right, to kind of add some context here, people have smaller mouths today because they have less exercise chewing on harder food.

00:10:55.740 And that began even before the industrial revolution with industrialized food.

00:10:59.500 It started with the dawn of cooking.

00:11:01.560 So mouths have gotten taller rather than wider.

00:11:04.400 And your nasal cavity, your sinuses, get smaller as a result, which leads to a preference for mouth breathing.

00:11:11.160 And it gets more interesting still because being a mouth breather can actually change the shape of your face too.

00:11:18.160 Yeah, it's so common that it has an official name.

00:11:22.080 It's called adenoid face.

00:11:23.760 When kids get inflamed adenoids or tonsils, they have to breathe through their mouth.

00:11:29.080 And if you do this for so many years, it can actually change the skelicature of your face.

00:11:34.700 And 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.

00:11:49.440 And what that means is it's a longer face.

00:11:51.980 It's a droopier face.

00:11:53.700 The chin is recessed.

00:11:56.080 So you don't have this big, powerful chin.

00:11:58.460 Of course, genes and genetics determine a lot of how you're going to look.

00:12:02.660 But epigenetics, these environmental inputs, also have a huge influence of how you're going to grow in your health, including your breathing.

00:12:12.380 So what happened?

00:12:13.240 You did this experiment 10 days.

00:12:14.860 What it was like to be a chronic mouth breather.

00:12:16.860 What happened when you removed the nasal plugs and could breathe through your nose again?

00:12:21.080 Yeah, so the experiment was never intended to be like some jackass stunt.

00:12:26.600 We were lulling our bodies into a position they already knew and that so much of the population already knew.

00:12:33.220 The difference was we were calculating everything that was happening.

00:12:36.680 So the good part of the experiment was that the next phase was only nasal breathing.

00:12:42.340 I 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.

00:12:52.540 We also practiced some breathing techniques along the way.

00:12:55.280 And within the first night, my snoring almost completely disappeared, went down to about 30 minutes.

00:13:03.000 Three nights later, two nights later, it was gone.

00:13:06.160 I had no sleep apnea, no snoring.

00:13:09.160 Blood pressure went down about 20 points, 30 points from its highest point the previous week.

00:13:15.200 I mean, just a complete transformation.

00:13:18.240 Our athletic endurance increased.

00:13:20.320 We were measuring that.

00:13:21.700 Heart rate variability went through the roof.

00:13:23.920 It was so dramatic, and yet this is such a simple thing to do, to breathe through the nose and not the mouth.

00:13:31.760 And it seems to be completely lost on modern society.

00:13:35.380 So what is it about nasal breathing?

00:13:37.220 Like you said, we actually get more oxygen from breathing through our nose than our mouth.

00:13:41.040 It doesn't make sense because you're like, well, if I'm breathing through my mouth, I'm getting more air in.

00:13:44.860 I mean, what's going on in our nose that allows our body to get more oxygen?

00:13:49.900 Sure.

00:13:50.380 So a number of things are happening.

00:13:52.560 First 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.

00:14:02.980 If you take a breath through your nose, you get that negative pressure going in that vacuum.

00:14:08.020 Then as you exhale through the nose, you get that positive pressure.

00:14:11.760 So beyond just that, you get 20% more oxygen equivalent breaths through the nose than through the mouth.

00:14:18.000 That is enormous, especially throughout the day.

00:14:21.100 So other things are happening.

00:14:22.980 With 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.

00:14:33.440 If you open your mouth right now, I just learned this trick from Dr. Stephen Park at Albert Einstein Medical Center.

00:14:39.960 If you open your mouth right now, you're going to feel your tongue softly going back into your airway.

00:14:45.440 And as you close your mouth, that tongue is going to gently move up towards the upper palate.

00:14:51.320 When 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.

00:15:02.680 So beyond that, I mean, it's, you know, the nose is the first line of defense.

00:15:07.460 It filters stuff out, produces nitric oxide, which interacts directly with viruses.

00:15:14.120 There's innumerable benefits to nasal breathing.

00:15:17.040 And none of that is controversial, right?

00:15:19.100 You ask anyone, any rhinologist, and they know about this stuff.

00:15:23.260 It's just seldom practiced.

00:15:24.940 So, I mean, it sounds like, I mean, I think people typically breathe through their mouth.

00:15:27.800 They're thinking, well, I got sinus infections, so I can't breathe through my nose.

00:15:30.340 But it sounds like the mouth breathing could be contributing to, like, the sinus infection and your inability to breathe through your nose.

00:15:37.320 Absolutely.

00:15:38.120 It's a use it or lose it thing.

00:15:40.220 And they've found this.

00:15:41.960 The 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.

00:15:51.940 And from two months to two years, their noses were 100% blocked.

00:15:57.380 So zero could get in there.

00:15:58.960 And 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.

00:16:07.920 So with something like chronic sinusitis, which, you know, 25% of the population suffers from this, like, that is a huge number.

00:16:16.440 You've got to find a way of clearing your nose.

00:16:18.340 As NIAC down at Stanford said, if your toilet's plugged, you're going to find a way of clearing it.

00:16:23.140 And the nose has to be considered the same thing.

00:16:25.640 So I think during the day, someone can practice, intentionally practice nose breathing.

00:16:30.700 But what about at night, right?

00:16:32.320 And that's the other thing with mouth breathing at night.

00:16:34.600 That's one of the things that leads to bad breath, periodontal disease as well.

00:16:38.140 So what can you do to make sure your mouth's shut at night?

00:16:40.500 So, 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.

00:16:52.460 So breathing through the mouth will release 40% more moisture than breathing through the nose.

00:16:57.840 So 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.

00:17:07.840 It 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.

00:17:17.300 It's not normal.

00:17:19.520 You know, sleeping with your mouth open is not a normal thing.

00:17:22.400 You look at animals in the wild, they're not doing it.

00:17:24.500 So 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.

00:17:34.380 Now, I'm not talking about a fat strip of industrial tape or duct tape or anything.

00:17:40.300 A teeny piece about the size of a postage stamp, you place that at the center of your lips.

00:17:45.980 And the point of this isn't to block air from the mouth.

00:17:49.220 It's just to train the mouth to be closed at night.

00:17:53.520 And I started doing this and recording what happened with my sleep.

00:17:57.280 And an extraordinary benefit, more oxygenation, better sleep, longer sleep.

00:18:04.200 I mean, less resistance in the airway because your mouth is closed.

00:18:08.720 And 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,

00:18:16.320 Oh, my God, why didn't I know about this before?

00:18:19.300 Or they're no longer snoring, you know, even people with milder sleep apnea no longer have sleep apnea just by shutting their mouths.

00:18:27.900 I did the mouth tape thing and I liked it.

00:18:31.620 It worked.

00:18:32.020 I slept pretty nicely.

00:18:33.820 And I mean, that's what I love about this book.

00:18:36.380 It's such a simple thing.

00:18:37.360 Just breathe through your nose and you can have all these benefits.

00:18:41.420 Sure.

00:18:41.880 That's one of the, you know, that's the foundation of healthy breathing that everyone needs to adhere to.

00:18:47.840 It starts off with first acknowledging that as a species, we're messed up.

00:18:54.200 Our faces are messed up.

00:18:55.640 We become the worst breathers in the animal kingdom.

00:18:58.240 The second is, and this is the most of the book, the foundation of the book, is like, okay, we're screwed up.

00:19:04.880 What can we do to fix it?

00:19:06.160 And nasal breathing is the first thing.

00:19:09.120 Another thing about breathing, I think when most people think about breathing, they're always thinking about the breathe in part because that feels nice.

00:19:14.460 Your lungs are filling up.

00:19:15.520 You feel like, oh, I'm getting oxygen.

00:19:17.000 But you highlight research that the exhale is just as important.

00:19:22.180 What happens in the exhale whenever we do exhale and what happens when we neglect that in our breathing?

00:19:28.880 So the only way to get a full nourishing breath in is to get that last breath out, get that stale air out.

00:19:36.320 A lot of us, when we first become aware of our breathing, we're just putting air on top of air on top of air.

00:19:44.680 But air should be, you know, your breath could be considered like a cycle.

00:19:48.960 It needs to cycle in.

00:19:50.340 It needs to cycle out.

00:19:51.700 And what Carl Stau found, and he was this choral conductor in the 50s who found that few of his singers were really exhaling properly.

00:20:02.160 They weren't moving their diaphragms up high enough.

00:20:05.300 And 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.

00:20:17.680 But he then went on to, for 10 years, helped emphysemics by just increasing diaphragmatic movement.

00:20:26.120 By 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.

00:20:35.900 These people had lost the ability to breathe properly.

00:20:39.060 Every single breath they took was a struggle, and they were stressing themselves out every moment of every day.

00:20:46.280 Okay, we're going to take a quick break for you, words from our sponsors.

00:20:50.980 And now back to the show.

00:20:52.680 And 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?

00:21:00.300 Sure, so breathing is this wonderful thing because we do it unconsciously.

00:21:04.060 We don't have to be thinking about it, but we can also do it consciously.

00:21:07.580 So if everyone just takes a big breath in now, through the nose, please.

00:21:12.440 As you breathe in, your diaphragm, which is this muscle underneath the lungs, because the lungs don't do anything on themselves.

00:21:21.260 They need something to expand them and contract them.

00:21:25.240 That's what the diaphragm does.

00:21:26.980 So when you take that breath in, the diaphragm sinks, okay?

00:21:30.300 And when you exhale, the diaphragm lifts up a little higher into your chest.

00:21:35.780 By increasing the movement of the diaphragm, there's so many benefits to it.

00:21:40.480 But especially considering breathing, it allows you access to more of your lungs.

00:21:46.100 And by having access to more of your lungs, you can get in more air with fewer breaths.

00:21:51.940 You can breathe more efficiently.

00:21:54.400 Breathing is something a lot of us do 25,000 times a day.

00:21:57.860 If you can do it more efficiently, you're going to have huge benefits from this, as has been clearly studied and seen.

00:22:04.940 One cue that I've used, I've heard to help you exhale, is like, just pretend like you're holding your pee.

00:22:10.140 And for some reason, that makes the diaphragm go up.

00:22:13.520 I don't know.

00:22:13.860 So that's what I typically think.

00:22:15.100 I'm holding my pee, and then for some reason, I'm able to get more air out.

00:22:18.560 I haven't tried that one.

00:22:20.600 I'm going to add that to my list of activities here.

00:22:23.640 I do know that Carl Stau, the researcher who had done this and proven this, what he had patients do, and this included Olympians.

00:22:33.020 He was the guy who trained the 1968 track team, U.S. track team, to go down to Mexico City.

00:22:39.980 They were the only team that did not use oxygen because they didn't need to because they were breathing properly, and they destroyed everybody.

00:22:46.360 It was like the greatest Olympic performance and track ever.

00:22:50.880 And 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.

00:22:58.760 And 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.

00:23:05.860 And by doing that and vocalizing while you're doing it, you're able to engage more diaphragmatic movement.

00:23:11.400 And what that also does, it lengthened your breath.

00:23:15.260 And this kind of segues to my next question because this is one of the most counterintuitive things I got from your book.

00:23:21.300 Like I said earlier, when we typically think of breathing, we think about the oxygen part.

00:23:24.500 Oxygen is good.

00:23:25.280 It nourishes our bodies.

00:23:26.500 It gives us energy we need to do what we need to do.

00:23:29.320 And then CO2, we want to get rid of that because it's waste, right?

00:23:32.940 But you have this interesting research that actually CO2 is an important part of our health.

00:23:38.500 And oxygen, getting oxygen from breathing, it's typically not a problem.

00:23:42.360 It's like we actually don't have enough CO2 in our system.

00:23:44.680 Can you walk us through this counterintuitive claim?

00:23:47.320 Sure.

00:23:47.920 So a lot of people with chronic pathologies, people with emphysema or people with other issues can have not enough oxygen.

00:23:56.420 You look at people with coronavirus, they don't have enough O2.

00:23:59.800 So what I was talking about and focusing on was ordinary healthy people who don't have these underlying conditions.

00:24:07.480 And for healthy people, oxygen is seldom the problem.

00:24:11.840 And you can see this by using a pulse oximeter and seeing that you have 95, 94, even 97% oxygen in your bloodstream.

00:24:20.560 That's great.

00:24:21.560 But 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.

00:24:37.360 So CO2 is essential in this exchange.

00:24:41.600 And if we don't have enough of it, our bodies have to compensate.

00:24:46.000 And that compensation can start wearing us down.

00:24:49.260 So 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.

00:25:11.600 And that feeling is caused by constriction.

00:25:15.040 Because when you offload too much CO2, you cause vasoconstriction throughout your body.

00:25:21.580 And so I guess what do you do to increase levels of CO2?

00:25:24.360 I mean, it's breathe less, right?

00:25:26.160 Or breathe in less?

00:25:27.660 Yeah.

00:25:28.060 Breathe normally is the key.

00:25:30.420 And what that means for the vast majority of us, I've found, is to be breathing less and to be breathing slowly.

00:25:38.360 Because in every breath, you're offloading CO2, right?

00:25:42.380 And that's good.

00:25:43.520 We need to offload that CO2 and whatever toxins our bodies are purging through our lungs.

00:25:48.320 Of course we need to do that.

00:25:49.680 But what you want to do is you don't want to offload too much of it.

00:25:53.740 And so if we were to breathe 10 heavy breaths here, our CO2 levels are going to go down.

00:26:01.040 And when they go down, again, our bodies are forced to compensate for that.

00:26:05.920 So by breathing slowly and breathing as closely in line with your metabolic needs, you're able to use the most breath most efficiently.

00:26:15.400 You're able to do more with less.

00:26:18.640 And that's the key to so much of health and fitness as well.

00:26:23.260 But then you also can do these training things where you actually elevate CO2.

00:26:27.580 And 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.

00:26:38.940 So 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.

00:26:48.700 What were you hoping to accomplish by doing that?

00:26:51.540 So this was the more extreme part of this.

00:26:54.560 I would suggest people start with the mellower part and breathe normally, breathe in line with your metabolic needs, which is slower and less.

00:27:02.160 But what they found is there are significant benefits to be had by controlling your breathing to a point – they call it hypoventilation training.

00:27:12.660 So it's when you try to acclimate yourself to higher levels of CO2.

00:27:19.500 And when you do this, when you're out running – and again, I do not suggest anyone do this.

00:27:25.340 Don't do this in your car.

00:27:27.340 Do it with a breathing therapist.

00:27:28.820 But when you're out running, you try to double the exhales to the inhales.

00:27:34.120 And immediately you feel all of this circulation throughout your body.

00:27:38.240 You start heating up.

00:27:39.800 I mean, it gets almost psychedelic because what that is is you are increasing circulation and oxygenation throughout your body when you're doing this.

00:27:49.100 You can get to a point where you're breathing so little that your O2 is going to go down.

00:27:53.380 That's for sure.

00:27:54.160 But at the level we were doing it, our O2 wasn't going down.

00:27:58.240 Our CO2 was going way up.

00:28:00.520 And what triggers the need to breathe isn't lack of oxygen.

00:28:06.280 It's an increase in CO2.

00:28:08.800 So if you exhale right now and just hold your breath for 30 seconds or whatever and you feel that need to breathe, that's CO2.

00:28:16.340 It's not oxygen.

00:28:17.200 Well, that's what we talked about that in deep, right?

00:28:19.900 One of the training that freedivers do is they have to get their bodies comfortable with elevated CO2 levels.

00:28:26.640 Exactly.

00:28:27.780 And so many of those benefits, I was seeing this research sort of dovetail together.

00:28:32.940 It was blowing my mind to see the benefits of people who have trained with this hypoventilation training increasing their threshold of CO2.

00:28:42.820 And they found that the benefits of this are similar in many ways to altitude training.

00:28:49.160 You can help build blood.

00:28:51.200 You can pull more energy from lactic acid on and on.

00:28:55.240 This guy, Xavier Warrens in Paris, Paris 13 University, is now researching this stuff big time.

00:29:01.780 And they're actually using it for people with heart conditions.

00:29:04.180 They'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.

00:29:14.120 So I included about 20 references to scientific studies looking at this stuff.

00:29:20.320 And to me, it's fascinating.

00:29:21.700 Just through breathing, you have access to all these different systems in the body.

00:29:25.520 I think you talk about too, like people with asthma, if they do the hypoventilation, it can help with asthma as well.

00:29:31.160 It makes a huge difference with so many people.

00:29:34.560 And again, I included, I think, 50 studies showing how slower breathing by breathing less can really help people with asthma.

00:29:44.460 Asthmatics as a population tend to breathe way more than the rest of us and they tend to breathe from their mouth. 1.00

00:29:50.600 So they're exposing themselves to everything, all the pollutants, allergens, whatever else in the environment all the time,

00:29:57.340 which can exacerbate their allergic reaction to asthma.

00:30:01.120 If you think about someone with asthma, the last thing they want to do is suffer another asthma attack.

00:30:06.520 So they become so sensitized to CO2 that whenever they think they're having an attack, what do they do?

00:30:15.740 They breathe more and more and more, which causes more constriction, which, guess what, brings on an attack.

00:30:21.640 So 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.

00:30:31.380 They've shown huge benefits for people with asthma.

00:30:35.240 And 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,

00:30:43.340 or your body to take the oxygen off the blood cell and use it.

00:30:46.820 That's part of it.

00:30:47.500 That's right.

00:30:48.060 More efficiently.

00:30:49.320 It allows your body to do this more efficiently, yes.

00:30:52.000 Okay.

00:30:52.580 So you mentioned earlier our mouths are jacked up because of modern life.

00:30:57.880 We eat soft foods, so our teeth are all crammed.

00:31:00.460 This affects breathing because it constricts the nasal passages as well.

00:31:04.600 It makes our teeth growing crooked.

00:31:06.520 And so, I mean, this happens to kids, and that's why they go to the orthodontist.

00:31:10.820 They get palate expanders, braces, straighten that out.

00:31:13.560 Is it possible to reverse this in adulthood?

00:31:17.600 Like, can we make our mouths more like our ancestors, or is it too late for us?

00:31:23.620 Well, the key, as with anything, is preventative maintenance, right?

00:31:26.540 When you're young, it's so important to have proper habits, to be closing your mouth, to not be mouth breathing at night.

00:31:34.520 They've shown that breastfeeding versus bottle feeding is so beneficial to airway health.

00:31:40.160 Eating harder foods, that masticatory stress can benefit mouth growth.

00:31:45.940 But, you know, for me, youth was many decades ago.

00:31:50.580 So I'm kind of hosed.

00:31:52.300 And my mouth is, we took CAT scans of my sinuses, and I'm as messed up as anyone.

00:31:57.220 Deviated septum, clogging here and there.

00:32:00.160 Small mouth. 0.98

00:32:00.920 I had braces, extractions, headgear, all that crap. 0.91

00:32:04.660 So it turns out that we can change a lot of what we have in adulthood. 0.74

00:32:10.380 First of all, we can tone the airway.

00:32:12.380 We can do this through oral pharyngeal exercises, these tongue exercises.

00:32:18.100 This sounds a little crazy, but it makes perfect sense.

00:32:20.840 The tongue's a muscle, very powerful muscle.

00:32:23.080 When we don't use it, when we're eating soft foods and we're not using it properly, it can grow out of shape, just like anything else.

00:32:31.200 So by toning that tongue, you can increase your airway health.

00:32:35.960 And that's been widely shown.

00:32:38.320 But you can also help expand your too small mouth, even in adulthood.

00:32:43.440 If people are listening there and you have a clean thumb, don't do this if, you know, you've been touching doorknobs or whatever.

00:32:50.320 You can put your thumb on the top of your upper palate.

00:32:54.300 And right in the middle of that upper palate, there is a suture.

00:32:58.540 And these are the same sutures that are in the skull.

00:33:01.040 Now you can feel your skull and feel all these little ridges and cracks.

00:33:05.720 So that suture can open at virtually any age, I think up until your 70s, which means the upper palate can be expanded at any age.

00:33:14.640 When you expand that upper palate, you expand your airways.

00:33:18.440 So I use this device called a homeoblock just to see if these claims were true.

00:33:24.180 And I wore this thing at night for a year.

00:33:26.400 We took a CAT scan before and after.

00:33:29.080 And I had huge benefits from this.

00:33:32.160 My airway opened up, I think, about 15, almost 20%, which is enormous.

00:33:38.780 And I even built bone in my face, which we've been told is impossible.

00:33:44.000 Bone mass only goes down once we're in our 30s.

00:33:47.100 We can model it in one bone right in the middle of our faces.

00:33:50.780 So the CAT scans proved it.

00:33:52.780 So, yeah, that helped you.

00:33:53.940 They expanded the airways.

00:33:55.580 It helped you breathe better.

00:33:56.920 That first section is amazing because it's just about basic things you can do to improve your breathing significantly.

00:34:02.980 It's breathe through your nose, breathe more slowly than you think you need to breathe, than you probably are breathing right now.

00:34:08.640 And then the second half of the book, it's called Breathing Plus.

00:34:13.020 And you wanted to explore the fringes.

00:34:15.360 This is like you're going back to your deep territory, right?

00:34:17.720 The fringes of breathing.

00:34:19.400 And you talk about some of these people who are doing some crazy stuff with breathing.

00:34:22.880 One of these guys we've talked about on our podcast is Wim Hof.

00:34:26.620 And he does a type of breathing that has allowed him to, you know, he can warm up his body.

00:34:31.220 It can cause his immune system to kill bacteria on demand.

00:34:37.460 What kind of breathing is he doing?

00:34:39.400 And where did he get this idea of this sort of breathing where you can basically take over involuntary aspects of your body?

00:34:46.900 So, 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.

00:34:55.520 It doesn't matter if you're an elite athlete or an asthmatic or whatever.

00:34:59.340 Just as you mentioned, nasal breathing, exhaling, breathing slower, breathing less.

00:35:04.400 Huge foundation of science supporting that.

00:35:06.760 Not a lot of people are going to disagree with it.

00:35:08.500 But 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?

00:35:18.160 This isn't just, oh, I'm going to breathe through my nose.

00:35:20.300 Like, they require some concerted effort to do this stuff.

00:35:23.300 But I was curious to see how far breathing could take us.

00:35:27.260 What it could do to really heal ongoing chronic maladies.

00:35:32.060 What it could do to move us up that next level of human potential.

00:35:35.920 And 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.

00:35:44.800 His breathing method has been around for thousands of years.

00:35:48.260 People have been superheating their bodies with this.

00:35:51.240 The Bon Buddhist monks have been doing this for so long. 0.94

00:35:54.840 And what they all have, so you can call it different things, Tumo, Wim Hof Method, Pranayama.

00:36:00.480 But they're all doing the same things.

00:36:02.100 They're allowing you to control your breath.

00:36:05.260 And 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.

00:36:16.960 That's BS.

00:36:17.760 We can absolutely control it.

00:36:19.620 When you start controlling that, you can start controlling immune function.

00:36:23.380 Which is why these people, I talked to dozens of these people, had autoimmune diseases, arthritis, psoriasis, diabetes.

00:36:32.440 I mean, on and on and on.

00:36:34.420 And 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.

00:36:43.580 And they've measured their progress with real measurements, real science.

00:36:47.940 And I just thought that this was fantastic and amazing.

00:36:51.240 It seems too good to be true, but look what Wim's done.

00:36:54.660 He's been studying in labs all over the world right now.

00:36:58.180 We're just starting to crack this thing open, which is really exciting.

00:37:02.220 Yes.

00:37:02.500 You talked about this one guy.

00:37:04.060 He was, I think, a Hindu monk.

00:37:06.320 He came to the United States and he kind of went on this whirlwind tour.

00:37:08.940 But he was doing crazy stuff.

00:37:10.120 He was, with breathing, he was able to control his heartbeat so he'll only beat once every 300 seconds.

00:37:16.240 So, like, people thought he was dead.

00:37:17.660 Like, the doctors thought he was dead, but he was actually still alive.

00:37:20.400 Yeah, this was on the outer fringes of breathing.

00:37:25.080 I tried to find the best breather in history.

00:37:28.640 And there's stories of these people, you know, who can superheat their bodies for hours at a time, melt snow, melt wet sheets.

00:37:35.780 And we know this is true.

00:37:37.080 Herbert Benson at Harvard has studied these guys extensively.

00:37:41.000 And anyone can look that up online and find those studies.

00:37:44.140 Published in Nature, the most prestigious scientific journal in the world.

00:37:47.240 So, I think the best breather that I could find that there was some scientific foundation to was this guy, Swami Rama.

00:37:55.460 Grew up in the Himalayas in the 70s.

00:37:58.500 He came to the States to kind of show what he could do.

00:38:01.260 And they studied him at the Menager Clinic.

00:38:04.320 A Navy physicist studied him with all the latest instruments at that time.

00:38:09.600 So, this wasn't, you know, some new age dude in India.

00:38:14.700 This was a real scientist.

00:38:17.140 And they found that he could flutter his heartbeat at a rate of 300 beats per minute for 30 seconds at a time.

00:38:26.800 Apparently, he could do it for much longer than that.

00:38:28.920 Which would, it's called atrial fibrillation, which would kill most of us.

00:38:33.500 But he was able to do this on command.

00:38:35.580 Even more amazingly, he was able to shift the blood flow in his hand about 11 degrees from his thumb to his finger.

00:38:44.260 So, one side was all gray and the other side was all red with circulation.

00:38:50.020 I mean, it goes on and on and on.

00:38:52.220 And these measurements, these reports were published in the New York Times.

00:38:58.180 They were measured very carefully by experts in the field.

00:39:02.120 And still, people find it pretty hard to believe anyone could have this control over their systems.

00:39:07.760 But I think Wim is kind of the new reincarnation of Swami Rama.

00:39:12.520 And he's busting down what we thought was possible time and time again.

00:39:17.940 So, we know it happens because there's data.

00:39:19.960 But do scientists know why breathing is the key to unlocking or controlling these automatic functions in our body?

00:39:28.180 Because breathing helps you control your nervous system function.

00:39:32.500 If you were to inhale right now to a count of about 3 and then exhale to a count of about 12,

00:39:38.860 you're going to feel your heart rate go down slower and slower and slower.

00:39:43.480 That's because you're stimulating your parasympathetic response when you're exhaling.

00:39:47.800 And we know that when you're in this rest and relaxation, parasympathetic response,

00:39:53.660 you are increasing circulations to different organs in your body.

00:39:58.400 You are decreasing inflammation.

00:40:01.360 So, if you're talking about how breathing is healing people, this is not some crazy placebo effect.

00:40:06.860 This is physiological.

00:40:09.080 This is the most basic medicine of how the body works and how it can retain balance.

00:40:15.820 What's so great about it is it's measurable.

00:40:19.180 So, to directly answer your question,

00:40:21.280 so, how can Wim sit in an ice bath for two hours and not have his core temperature go down?

00:40:26.400 How can he not suffer from any damage to his limbs or hypothermia or frostbite or anything?

00:40:34.540 We still don't know.

00:40:35.840 And we still don't know how the Bon Buddhists are able to do this either. 1.00

00:40:39.960 And this is what I get into at the end of the book.

00:40:43.120 There are still mysteries to breath as far as heating yourself up and keeping it sustained at that level.

00:40:50.060 And I hope science is going to be checking that out and discovering exactly how to do it and how it works.

00:40:56.700 But I think it's thrilling that we think we have everything figured out.

00:41:00.040 We're just on the cusp of understanding the true potential of breathing right now.

00:41:04.580 Did you try any of these advanced breathing techniques?

00:41:06.900 And what was your experience with it?

00:41:08.120 I tried them all.

00:41:09.360 Yeah.

00:41:09.680 As a journalist, I want to be able to write from the inside of these things.

00:41:14.320 There were several studies that didn't make it into the book.

00:41:16.960 We just didn't have room.

00:41:18.440 So, I tried this one, Sudarshan Kriya, which is very similar to Wim Hof method.

00:41:22.720 I went to the University of California, San Francisco hypoxia lab.

00:41:26.880 And they hooked me up to all of these different measurements, the catheters in my veins, on a gurney. 0.98

00:41:32.360 I mean, all this crap.

00:41:33.400 And 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. 0.86

00:41:52.160 But something amazing happens when you consciously will yourself into these states.

00:41:56.600 They can be incredibly healing.

00:41:58.820 They make you more flexible.

00:42:00.180 They make you more resilient.

00:42:02.360 So, you know, holotropic, I did that.

00:42:04.940 I do Wim Hof breathing.

00:42:06.720 I keep calling it that.

00:42:08.080 But it's really tumo, been around forever.

00:42:10.000 I do that about three or four times a week.

00:42:12.020 You know, this has just become a part of my life.

00:42:14.840 I've seen the science.

00:42:16.060 I've seen the benefits of my own body.

00:42:17.700 And it seems this stuff is free.

00:42:20.200 It's available to everyone.

00:42:21.440 And I want to take advantage of that.

00:42:23.760 Well, you also, you came to my hometown, Tulsa, to breathe in CO2.

00:42:28.800 I didn't know you lived in Tulsa.

00:42:30.720 Yeah.

00:42:31.740 Dr. 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.

00:42:44.880 You see, like, the amount of people with panic, I think, is about 10%.

00:42:49.260 Chronic anxiety, I think, is about a quarter of the population.

00:42:52.580 That includes people with anorexia and other serious issues.

00:42:56.720 They aren't really being helped.

00:42:58.260 We 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.

00:43:07.840 So 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.

00:43:23.320 And, again, he's one of the top researchers in this field.

00:43:26.260 This is NIH-funded research.

00:43:28.620 I was able to go out there and go through his study, inhale CO2, and I think the results are going to be published in a couple years.

00:43:36.900 It's a very long research study.

00:43:38.780 It sounds frightening.

00:43:39.420 It feels like you're suffocating, basically, but you're not.

00:43:42.240 He's like, no, you're fine.

00:43:43.040 You've got plenty of oxygen.

00:43:44.740 You're going to be okay.

00:43:45.340 It's going to feel like you're drowning, but you're okay. 0.91

00:43:48.240 Yeah, it sucked.

00:43:49.420 I'm not going to gloss over it.

00:43:52.760 But 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.

00:44:04.120 I said, go for it.

00:44:05.040 I've never had a panic attack.

00:44:06.920 So what he was essentially doing was eliciting a panic attack in my body.

00:44:11.700 So 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.

00:44:18.340 It 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.

00:44:36.820 It was awful, but the more acclimated to more CO2 you become, the easier that gets.

00:44:42.700 So 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.

00:44:52.060 That's super weird, but also hopeful.

00:44:54.920 Well, James, this has been a great conversation.

00:44:56.640 Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?

00:44:59.460 My website, mrjamesnester.com.

00:45:02.460 You can put a backslash breath in there.

00:45:04.820 I put all scientific references there.

00:45:06.740 There are free breathing videos from the experts in the field, FAQ, all that.

00:45:12.800 I'm also trying to get better at this social media thing, bit of a dinosaur.

00:45:16.580 So on my Instagram page, I'm posting little videos and other pictures along this journey and new breathing research.

00:45:23.780 Fantastic.

00:45:24.060 Well, James Nestor, thanks for your time.

00:45:25.160 It's been a pleasure.

00:45:26.200 Thank you very much for having me.

00:45:27.920 My guest there is James Nestor.

00:45:29.160 He's the author of the book, Breath, the New Science of a Lost Art.

00:45:31.920 It's available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere.

00:45:33.840 You can find out more information about his work at his website, mrjamesnester.com.

00:45:37.860 Also, check out our show notes at aom.is slash breath, where you can find links to resources when we delve deeper into this topic.

00:45:49.880 Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM Podcast.

00:45:52.400 Check out our website at artofmanliness.com, where you can find our podcast archives, as well as thousands of articles.

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00:46:20.740 Until next time, this is Brett McKay.

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The Art of Manliness - August 24, 2020

#638： How Changing Your Breathing Can Change Your Life

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