The Mikhaila Peterson Podcast - 116. Why You Need To Relearn How To Breathe ｜ James Nestor

00:00:00.000 So first of all, you have to figure out where that's occurring and then you have to consider

00:00:05.200 that we have a muscle tube, it's cartilage and muscle and tissues right here in our throats,

00:00:10.880 right? We need to be working this out as well. And by working out that tube, you can expand it

00:00:16.680 and you can actually reduce and sometimes reverse your sleep apnea.

00:00:22.120 Okay, so how do you work out that tube?

00:00:24.560 welcome to the Michaela Peterson podcast episode 116 with James Nestor the breathing expert do

00:00:35.420 people really need to learn how to breathe apparently when I was really ill I felt like

00:00:40.040 I couldn't inhale fully all the time but my diet fixed that there is more you can do though if you

00:00:46.100 have trouble sleeping or sleep apnea this episode is for you we got majorly sidetracked down topics

00:00:51.140 like free diving, which was fun. James is awesome. I am most definitely trying free diving. We spoke

00:00:57.540 about the healthcare system, sleep, free diving, some hippie stuff, the usual. I'm a huge fan of

00:01:04.360 this guy. This was a fun episode. If you enjoy it, please remember to hit subscribe. Also side note,

00:01:09.920 if you want to sponsor this show, hit me up. If you have awesome products that I like, that is

00:01:15.880 no vegan shakes. I like meat and honey and air fryers and grills and salt and things I can sleep

00:01:21.080 on or sit on, or maybe free diving equipment. Just kidding. You don't need anything to free

00:01:26.840 dive except your breath. Hit up sponsorships at michaelapeterson.com, link below. I hope

00:01:33.920 you enjoy this episode. James Nestor, welcome to my podcast.

00:01:45.900 Thanks a lot for having me.

00:01:46.840 before we get started would you mind giving my audience a brief background if they don't know

00:01:52.220 who you are of who you are and what it is you do sure i'm a science journalist and an author

00:01:57.780 and i write about health or i have been for the last few years and i'm interested in the potential

00:02:05.680 of the human body that's what seems to be a through line through a lot of my work

00:02:10.800 okay so i specifically wanted to speak with you because my dad's been diagnosed with sleep apnea

00:02:19.160 rather severely he was waking up like maybe 30 times like a ridiculous amount he had no deep

00:02:25.820 sleep and it was ruining his life one of the things that was so i thought let's get sleep

00:02:33.160 apnea out of the way and then let's talk about other aspects of breathing but a lot of people

00:02:36.660 suffer from sleep apnea and i know one of the ways to reduce the suffering is to lose weight

00:02:40.800 but are there other ways to go about reducing sleep apnea and is cpap the right way to go so

00:02:47.640 what are your thoughts on that so sleep apnea is this huge problem and it just seems to be getting

00:02:53.580 worse and worse every year so about 20 percent of the population suffers from some level of sleep

00:02:59.320 apnea which is crazy and a lot of people think that sleep apnea only afflicts obese people because

00:03:06.080 what happens is too much fat accumulates around their necks and their airways get clogged and they

00:03:12.020 start choking on themselves throughout the night. But that's not true. So many people who are

00:03:17.160 average weight or even underweight, ultra marathoners, top fitness people can suffer

00:03:24.020 from sleep apnea as well. So sleep apnea is a problem in the airway and that problem can occur

00:03:29.760 in various areas of the airway so for a lot of people it's the tongue falling back into the mouth

00:03:37.300 sometimes there's a problem with the oral pharynx nasal pharynx the the deal is there is an obstruction

00:03:43.060 there that has to be cleared and for so long people who had sleep apnea were often misdiagnosed

00:03:51.000 and so they were giving given a whole you know battery of different pharmaceuticals which was

00:03:56.700 actually making their sleeping worse. And if you don't do anything with your sleep apnea after

00:04:02.280 several months or several years, it can lead to so many chronic, very serious problems. Diabetes

00:04:08.860 has been linked directly with sleep apnea. Yeah. Who knew? ADHD, Alzheimer's, all the rest. So

00:04:16.700 I'm not a doctor. I can't prescribe a blanket fix for everyone with sleep apnea. The most

00:04:23.080 important thing is is to get it diagnosed figure out exactly where the problem is then you can fix

00:04:30.460 it so okay that's that's interesting so i didn't realize that there were different that sleep apnea

00:04:38.260 could be caused by different problems so yeah can you delve a bit more into that sure so you know

00:04:45.660 people who are obese suffer from uh sleep apnea again because they have too much too much fat

00:04:52.460 around their necks but the same thing happens with weightlifters you figure these people who

00:04:58.580 are weightlifters are the fittest people on the planet but they die of heart issues all the time

00:05:04.700 in their 40s and 50s because they have so many muscles around their necks and it inhibits their

00:05:11.020 ability to breathe which is why so many people who are very fit have a lot of musculature around

00:05:17.220 their necks have sleep apnea so first of all you have to figure out where that that's occurring

00:05:23.260 and then you have to consider that we have a muscle tube it's cartilage and muscle and tissues

00:05:28.560 right here in our throats right we need to be working this out as well and by working out that

00:05:34.780 tube you can expand it and you can actually reduce and sometimes reverse your sleep apnea 1.00

00:05:40.800 okay so how do you work out that tube mouth workouts well yeah as as idiotic as that sounds 0.99

00:05:48.960 i'm not going to demonstrate because it's it's gross but there's something called oral pharyngeal 0.96

00:05:54.760 exercises that have been found in a few studies to be very effective in reducing sleep apnea

00:06:00.860 surgery can be very beneficial as well and c-pap is great as a band-aid right and it

00:06:09.920 absolutely works it's been a lifesaver for so many people it's doing nothing for the core issue

00:06:16.560 of sleep apnea to be pushing air into your body for a third of your life is not a good in my

00:06:23.680 opinion a good long-term solution so there's there's so many different ways of treating this

00:06:30.620 again i'm not going to be the one to tell people how to treat this but i will give you a few little

00:06:36.580 hints from what i've heard from experts in the field from harvard from stanford and more is they

00:06:42.180 prefer to start softly and see what your natural body can do for yourself and then you can lead up

00:06:49.380 to a full diagnosis and and go into surgery or other methods to help fix that okay interesting

00:06:57.540 so people potentially not that this is medical advice but potentially suffering from sleep apnea

00:07:02.580 if they're using a cpap or something like that they could look into some of these mouth exercises

00:07:07.060 and just see what it does for them if that ends up changing any of their symptoms they can do

00:07:11.060 a few things they can do these oral pharyngeal exercises there is one instructor uh instructor

00:07:17.620 that helps people uh improve their sleep apnea outcomes by singing and which is basically a

00:07:23.860 workout for your mouth that's cool and you get to sing if you're toned up that that might be a

00:07:28.580 problem for people around you but uh and there are also different things you can do with breathing

00:07:34.540 in the daytime and this is a burgeoning area of research what they're finding is if you can

00:07:40.700 control your breathing and breathe better in the day you can influence how you're breathing at night

00:07:46.400 and this sounded sketchy when i first heard it a couple years ago till i've more more recently

00:07:52.320 heard from some top level researchers who are exploring this in some studies right now

00:07:56.880 that makes sense that if you practice something during the day you strengthen those muscles and

00:08:02.500 then slowly you teach your body to breathe a certain way at night makes sense yeah yeah and

00:08:07.320 that's that's the thing with all these little hacks is there's not too much of a leap of logic

00:08:13.500 to get there you're like okay my mouth is flabby uh just like other areas of my body are flabby

00:08:19.300 what happens when i don't exercise them they get out of shape what happens when i exercise them

00:08:23.960 they can get toned up what happens when i breathe in a slower lighter way in the day i'm going to

00:08:30.240 carry that habit into the night and and so to me it seems pretty simple and yet who's talking about

00:08:36.840 this stuff i just don't see too many people except for for some leading researchers you know

00:08:42.760 in in academic institutions okay so a flabby mouth how does one know whether or not they

00:08:50.280 either have a flabby mouth or their breathing is is improper what are the signs yeah well that's

00:08:57.000 that's tough uh if you're snoring then there is room for improvement and oftentimes not always

00:09:04.180 but snoring and sleep apnea go hand in hand and a lot of us continue uh to believe that snoring is

00:09:11.340 like this cute thing uh we think oh my you know my husband my wife snores i have to sleep in another

00:09:17.300 the room, haha. But snoring is so injurious to the body. If you're struggling to do anything

00:09:23.920 for a third of your life, struggling to get air, right? It can cause so many downstream problems.

00:09:32.900 And we've known this for decades and decades. And still you go on YouTube and see pictures of like

00:09:39.400 infant snoring and people think it's cute. And it's, you know, talk to people in sleep medicine

00:09:43.960 about how cute that is later on in their life

00:09:46.300 when they have developmental problems.

00:09:47.760 So it's very serious stuff.

00:09:51.900 Okay, so back to weightlifters then.

00:09:55.380 You said that what they need to do

00:09:57.360 is start focusing on also working out those muscles.

00:10:01.320 Is it also reducing the amount of muscle

00:10:03.120 they have around their neck though?

00:10:05.080 No, I think it's less a concern about that

00:10:08.980 and more concern about your airway health.

00:10:12.420 and the things that i'm suggesting now i want to be perfectly clear i'm not saying this is going

00:10:18.280 to work for everyone all the time it's going to cure all your problems but this stuff is free

00:10:22.940 you will only be celebrating in benefits of having better breathing right and having better airway

00:10:29.080 health you can only benefit from this so so why not look into it so those exercises they're having

00:10:35.100 weightlifters do and and skinny people and ultra marathoners do are you're using this very powerful

00:10:41.260 muscle which is your tongue and you're learning how to use the tongue the way our ancestors use

00:10:47.080 their tongue and in the fact that they used to push their tongues to the roof of your of the

00:10:53.220 mouth when you're swallowing right and we know this because our ancestors all had these pronathic

00:10:58.720 faces right they all had straight teeth because they had these wide mouths they got those wide

00:11:03.380 mouths by having this correct oral posture so so it starts with that oral posture don't walk around

00:11:10.020 with your mouth open when you swallow move the tongue to the roof of the mouth to push it don't

00:11:16.640 push against your teeth right and if you want you can do some of these oral pharyngeal exercises

00:11:23.160 which are a whole bunch of crazy stuff opening your mouth lifting the tongue to the top of the

00:11:28.340 mouth sticking the tongue out so on and so forth what does any of this have anything to do with

00:11:35.640 mewing we heard of mewing so mewing is just uh that's just a version of an oral pharyngeal

00:11:41.920 exercise there's really no difference between it and what what john and mike have done is they've

00:11:46.840 tried to bring awareness to the fact that our oral posture is so poor and if you have poor

00:11:53.020 oral posture when you're young it can affect the growth of your face it can actually affect how

00:11:59.160 you're breathing later on in life because as the face develops right it needs the right inputs about

00:12:05.280 40 to 50 percent of how you look of how your airways are going to form are epigenetic which

00:12:10.760 means they are going to be formed by whatever inputs you put into them it's it's not just

00:12:15.360 encoded in your genes right it's it's the environment that is influencing how you're

00:12:20.260 going to look and how you're going to be able to breathe and so what they were trying to bring

00:12:24.480 awareness to was to shut your mouth for one don't walk around like this if you see a kid walk around

00:12:31.800 like this that's bad news right shut your mouth the teeth should almost be touching and the tongue

00:12:38.560 should be on the roof of the mouth with the very tip just grazing the back of your front teeth

00:12:44.640 so a lot of us even when we're shutting our mouths our tongues are still down low right

00:12:50.660 the tongue should be raised up and you're going to notice when you open your mouth the tongue tends

00:12:57.700 to rock back into the throat right it helps to to close the airway when you close your mouth that

00:13:04.020 tongue will rock up and will help open the airway this is especially important at night when you've

00:13:10.740 got gravity working against you just shut your mouth and become a nasal breather

00:13:17.940 okay i'm very aware of my tongue at the moment doesn't make for very good radio does it to just

00:13:22.500 be sitting there with your with your mouth closed working on these exercises but listeners you can

00:13:27.060 try this at home and see how it works for you yeah i've got i've got a bit of a horror story

00:13:33.220 i'm still horrified by this i have a four-year-old and they put warnings on soothers right it's like

00:13:39.300 don't use this past six months and i was young and she liked her soother so i was like

00:13:46.820 she likes the soother anyway she's about a year she's passed a year and she still had this soother

00:13:52.420 And my mom was like, you're screwing up her teeth.

00:13:56.500 I was like, I'm not screwing up her teeth.

00:13:58.060 And, but then I started looking into it and I was Googling and it was just hundreds of

00:14:01.820 pictures of these toddlers with teeth that have grown like around a soother.

00:14:05.840 And then they end up with their lower jaw that's too far back.

00:14:09.660 And it's, and it destroys how attractive they are, which is a huge problem when you grow up.

00:14:15.000 They end up with a whole bunch of teeth problems, like jaw surgery, if it's really bad.

00:14:19.180 so obviously we stopped the soother and but it took her teeth maybe almost two years to go back

00:14:26.860 to normal it was horrifying i was very unhappy that they don't have these huge warnings on

00:14:32.260 soothers like we'll disfigure for life if you use these too long but does soother use or sucking

00:14:38.280 your thumb when you're little does that screw up breathing as well of course it does yeah for for

00:14:43.980 sure. And, you know, there's a lot of research. I'm not an expert in this field about baby led

00:14:49.240 weaning, about not using this non-nutritive suckers or pacifiers. You know, a lot of people

00:14:58.320 were saying, I was just hanging out with Dr. Kevin Boyd last week, who is the expert in this field.

00:15:03.600 And he's saying like anything over six months for with a pacifier is bad news. He even says

00:15:09.780 any pacifiers are bad news. Because what happens is when an infant is breastfeeding and breastfeeding

00:15:18.320 every two hours or however often, it helps to literally pull the face outward, okay? When

00:15:25.140 you're pulling the face outward, the palate will be able to sink down and open up. And so you not

00:15:32.560 only have this more attractive pronathic profile, but you have more room in the mouth for teeth to

00:15:39.400 growing straight. So you're setting up the foundation for straight teeth and also a wider

00:15:46.240 airway. What happens when you have a wider, larger mouth? You have a wider airway. There's more room

00:15:52.400 in there. And so one of the reasons why so many of us suffer from snoring and sleep apnea is our

00:15:58.880 mouths have grown too small. And because they're too small, there's not enough room for our tongues.

00:16:05.120 And so we're literally choking on ourselves every night because of this.

00:16:10.740 And this sounds crazy, but all you have to do is look back at ancient skulls.

00:16:16.300 This is something I did for a couple of years, worked with some top researchers.

00:16:21.740 They all had stray teeth.

00:16:23.600 They all had pronathic profiles, right?

00:16:26.940 They had these wide nasal apertures.

00:16:29.020 They breathe totally different than we do today.

00:16:31.540 it's amazing how many ways you can screw up just being alive like oops pacifier

00:16:38.660 it's like under a year and a half and your face is screwed up now well you know the good thing is

00:16:46.500 that's reversible you're aware of it now and there's so many procedures you can do expansion

00:16:52.200 procedures correct oral posture all of these things can make an incredible uh difference

00:16:58.820 to the profile to the breathing health of your kid it's about establishing positive habits now

00:17:05.660 as you know when we're in early development it's much easier to change these screw-ups when you

00:17:11.480 get to middle age right it's a lot harder because things are more set that doesn't mean we can't

00:17:16.580 make a lot of improvements and i showed that in in my book you know to your airway health to your

00:17:22.500 breathing to your health um obviously we can but it's a lot easier when you're younger

00:17:27.480 okay but when you're middle-aged you can still do you think doing those these facial exercises

00:17:34.000 not for everybody but for some people or losing weight doing the facial exercise and strengthening

00:17:38.940 can reverse sleep apnea for some people for some people uh yes it can and and i know this because

00:17:48.180 i've seen it because i've this is the one thing i've heard more from from anybody else um or

00:17:55.020 people with snoring and sleep apnea who have written, have adopted these quick little fixes

00:18:01.020 who use a little bit of sleep tape at night and no longer snore, no longer have sleep apnea.

00:18:07.260 Doesn't work for everybody, but it's worked for, according to these people, thousands and thousands

00:18:12.240 of people. And now there's a study booting up at Stanford with 200 people looking at nasal

00:18:18.620 breathing and sleep apnea on how just nasal breathing, changing the pathway through which

00:18:23.820 we breathe at night can significantly improve our sleep and reduce sleep apnea

00:18:29.220 interesting i always had a i had a number of health problems and i always had trouble i used

00:18:37.160 to snore i don't anymore but i used to snore but it's because i couldn't breathe through my nose

00:18:41.000 at night it felt like i couldn't breathe through my nose and then i fixed my diet now i can breathe

00:18:45.320 through my nose and so now i don't snore anymore but sleep tape always horrified me a little bit

00:18:52.040 when my nose was stuffy because I was like I remember thinking if I ever get kidnapped

00:18:56.060 and they duct tape my mouth I'm gonna die because I can't breathe through my nose very well so

00:19:02.980 do do people who have trouble breathing through their nose are they able to do the sleep tape

00:19:07.900 does that improve do you think it does improve it but it again it depends what's what's your

00:19:14.260 problem what is causing this nasal congestion right is it a structural issue have you broken

00:19:20.180 your nose four times your septum so so deviated you can't breathe through your nose or is it an

00:19:26.420 allergic reaction to food to something in the environment to something in the air um you know

00:19:33.240 so each of these things has to be looked at and you need to find the core issue that's that's

00:19:38.900 causing the problem in order to really fix it so as you found and as so many other people have found

00:19:45.340 changing your diet can significantly impact your ability to breathe through your nose,

00:19:50.600 especially removing dairy, especially U.S. dairy, A1 protein dairy can make a huge difference.

00:19:58.320 For other people, it's about finding what else is causing that allergic reaction, right? Is it

00:20:04.540 pollen? So you have to look into that. But the key is here that if you are a mouth breather,

00:20:11.120 I'm more convinced of this now than than ever and I'd heard this from researchers years ago

00:20:15.700 if you're a mouth breather you are never ever really going to be healthy no matter what you do

00:20:21.620 no matter what exercise you do no matter what foods you eat you have to become a habitual

00:20:26.840 nasal breather this is the route through which the body wants to receive air because when we

00:20:32.880 breathe air through the nose it's filtered it's pressure pressurized it's humidified it's

00:20:38.480 conditioned. When we breathe air through the mouth, you can think about the lungs as an external

00:20:44.600 organ. They're exposed to everything in the environment. And if you're breathing 20, 25,000

00:20:50.580 times a day, you're going to really cause a lot of problems and you're going to overwork your body

00:20:56.460 unnecessarily. Okay. That makes sense. Yeah. Especially air filtering. That makes sense.

00:21:02.580 You don't want to have to fight off infections without that kind of

00:21:05.760 mucous membrane protection yeah that makes sense okay what's a proper breath look like like if

00:21:13.860 you're describing to the audience exactly how you should be breathing you talked a little bit about

00:21:17.960 where your tongue should be but is there a length of time you're supposed to breathe in versus out

00:21:22.240 like what does a normal breath assuming you're not exercising look like it depends who you are

00:21:27.640 and it depends on what you're doing so the perfect breath is the breath that is most efficient to

00:21:33.760 your metabolic needs you don't want to be over breathing for your metabolic needs you don't want

00:21:38.340 to be under breathing so kids need to breathe more than adults when you're jogging or running

00:21:44.040 you're gonna be breathing more than you're breathing on a sofa right it's easier said than

00:21:48.900 done to say just breathe within your metabolic needs but one thing the nose is so good at is it

00:21:54.900 helps control the flow of air into our bodies and it does this for us in many capacities what's

00:22:03.240 really hard to hyperventilate through the nose. It's really easy to hyperventilate through the

00:22:09.200 mouth, which is why you see people with anxiety, fear-based disorders, panic, asthma, they tend

00:22:16.180 to breathe like this. Try to do that through your nose. It's a lot harder. So when you breathe

00:22:23.780 through the nose, you're forcing your body to breathe more slowly, to breathe more deeply and

00:22:29.560 breathe more lightly. And those slower fluid breaths allow us to get more oxygen with fewer

00:22:37.520 breaths. And so that's what efficiency is all about. If you're into athletic performance,

00:22:42.640 it's all about efficiency, right? So many of us don't think about this, that we think it's okay

00:22:49.320 just to be breathing up to our, into our upper chest, just all day. But that's just like revving

00:22:56.120 a car and idling just over and over and over you're working your body you're working all

00:23:03.320 these different functions but you're getting a minimal amount of breath so one good thing that

00:23:08.640 one good breath that i learned for people at rest okay this isn't going to work if you're boxing

00:23:14.420 is to take in a breath of about five to six seconds in and five to six seconds out so when

00:23:21.760 you breathe this way that you shouldn't push it okay a lot of westerners tend to just that seems

00:23:27.820 like such a long time well this is an exercise uh you're not going to be able to do this throughout

00:23:33.780 the day if you can uh my understanding is you're only going to have benefits from it but this is

00:23:38.720 an exercise to condition yourself to slow it down and it turns out that when you breathe this way

00:23:46.980 so many different systems of the body

00:23:49.460 enter into a state called coherence.

00:23:52.500 Your brain waves enter the state of coherence.

00:23:55.260 Your cardiorespiratory system

00:23:56.860 enters the state of coherence.

00:23:58.780 Heart rate goes down.

00:24:00.180 Blood pressure goes down.

00:24:01.760 More oxygen is delivered to the brain.

00:24:04.200 More areas of the brain come online

00:24:06.600 or are able to communicate more fluidly

00:24:09.220 just by breathing this way.

00:24:11.020 If you have a wearable

00:24:12.620 that can look at heart rate variability,

00:24:14.820 everyone's into that stuff nowadays.

00:24:16.980 Check out what happens to your heart rate variability

00:24:19.740 when you breathe in this pattern of about

00:24:23.480 five to six seconds in, five to six seconds out,

00:24:28.320 five to six seconds in, and five to six seconds out.

00:24:32.160 So this is not a placebo effect,

00:24:34.500 and you can see it with very clear objective measurements

00:24:38.500 from instruments.

00:24:40.100 And so this is a great place to start.

00:24:42.540 There's only benefits from breathing this way.

00:24:44.640 If some people get panicked when they're breathing this way and can't do it, just slow it down.

00:24:50.000 You know, do four seconds in and four seconds out.

00:24:53.380 And you should think of this breathing like a circle.

00:24:56.400 Don't think of it like a...

00:24:58.640 That's good for pranayama, martial arts stuff.

00:25:03.800 But this calm breathing should be very relaxing to you.

00:25:08.120 And you can use this anytime you want to calm yourself.

00:25:10.820 And the science is very clear that it has pretty profound benefits.

00:25:14.640 oh that's that seems fairly simple five to six seconds in five to six second notes

00:25:19.960 how do you feel about something like wim hoff breathing i love wim hoff breathing i think wim

00:25:25.960 is an amazing dude i think he has brought awareness to the potential of breathing what

00:25:31.620 it can do for autoimmune issues what it can do for anxiety what it can do for fitness freaks and

00:25:37.480 bros and women and whomever else more than anyone. And I'm lucky enough to have spoken with him

00:25:45.620 several times and I'm a huge fan of what he's doing. It seems so counterintuitive that he's

00:25:52.040 up on a stage, right? Saying, breathe everybody, let's go. And I just told you that the most

00:25:57.280 benefits are going to be from this very slow breathing, but it depends on what you want your

00:26:03.080 breath to do for you. Wim Hof's method, which is an ancient method, and he's the first to admit that,

00:26:09.560 is like going to the gym. You're not going to spend 24 hours in the gym, right? You go in for a very

00:26:15.840 closed amount of time, you work your body out, get jacked up, and then you feel better for the rest

00:26:20.820 of the day. So his method teaches you how to turn on stress. That's what it's doing. You're stressing

00:26:28.840 yourself out. You probably think, why do I want to stress myself out? You want to do that so that

00:26:33.940 you can learn how to turn it off. You compound all your day's stress in 20 minutes, and then the rest

00:26:39.900 of the day you can chill out. And that's why his method is so effective. What people don't see about

00:26:46.080 Wim is when he's not up on stage, you know, shirtless, yelling at people to breathe more,

00:26:51.900 he's chilling out, breathing through his nose, breathing very lightly and softly. But that's not

00:26:58.700 you know it's not as sexy as seeing a dude on stage in front of an audience doing that

00:27:03.940 so what I'm saying is breathing you can do it in all of these different ways and there

00:27:08.400 there are benefits to be had from so many of them interesting I found with Wim Hof I used to do a

00:27:16.000 lot of you know headspace or meditation just trying to calm my brain down and I found that

00:27:20.460 that I never experienced anything as effective as his breathing if you do like three rounds of 30

00:27:27.280 of those really intense breaths it's very unpleasant i find but the after effect is just

00:27:33.040 insane like i had no idea that breath could make that much of a difference to mental health or

00:27:39.740 just your sense of calm it makes sense but still that that method of breathing very heavy and then

00:27:46.740 holding your breath and then breathing very heavy again this has been around for thousands of years

00:27:52.460 There's so many pranayamas that do this.

00:27:54.860 Sudarshan Kriya does the exact same thing.

00:27:57.820 Kundalini breath work does the exact same thing.

00:28:01.320 And it's no coincidence that all of these different techniques affect us in the same way.

00:28:06.560 They're so effective for anxiety and panic.

00:28:09.760 There's a hundred independent studies looking at Sudarshan Kriya and how effective it is,

00:28:13.660 even for autoimmune diseases.

00:28:15.660 When people are constantly stressed out, you know, there's this IV drip of adrenaline and

00:28:20.440 cortisol.

00:28:20.840 all you have to stop that and by breathing this way as as you know and as i know it allows you

00:28:28.300 to sort of get it all out and then just be so relaxed through the rest of the day what i love

00:28:34.220 about this stuff too is it's free you know and there are no negative side effects to to breathing

00:28:40.340 so it's accessible to everybody and and i think that that's that makes it so uh it makes it so

00:28:46.940 universal, which is why the Hindus were into this and the ancient Chinese were into it and we're

00:28:51.500 into it today. Good. So your book took off, right? Like you, I've seen you on a ton of different

00:28:59.260 podcasts. People seem to be really interested in this. Do you have any idea why your book's been

00:29:06.900 so successful? That's a good question. I have no idea. When you, when you write books, you know,

00:29:12.180 you put them out into the world and you think maybe your mom and friends are going to read them

00:29:16.720 And that might be it.

00:29:18.240 It's a scary thing because you have no idea what's going to happen.

00:29:23.680 I certainly had no idea what was going to happen with this book.

00:29:26.760 You know, when I first mentioned the idea to my agent and editor, they thought it was 0.98

00:29:30.920 the stupidest book idea they'd ever heard. 0.98

00:29:33.280 So I had to work on it more. 1.00

00:29:34.800 I said, I think there's something in here.

00:29:36.880 They didn't believe these stories that you could help fix scoliosis with breathing, that

00:29:41.300 you could help fix asthma with breathing, that you could fix panic with breathing.

00:29:46.020 that diabetes could be, symptoms of diabetes could be reduced with breathing.

00:29:52.320 They didn't believe this.

00:29:53.640 And I didn't believe it either until I really spent a long time, years talking with researchers

00:29:59.760 and putting together the stories.

00:30:01.360 So I was unfortunate enough to have spent so many years working on this book and it

00:30:07.080 was all printed and ready to come out in May of 2020.

00:30:11.740 And as you know, books are printed like five months ahead of time.

00:30:16.020 Right. So it's in the warehouse ready to go. It was already released in catalogs. I was ready to tour. March comes around of 2020. I was like, oh my God. So I had to record the audio book in a shed in my backyard because everything was shut down here in San Francisco.

00:30:32.400 We weren't going to release the book.

00:30:34.180 We were going to wait a year, a year and a half.

00:30:37.180 And then an editor said, you know what?

00:30:39.360 People might need this right now.

00:30:41.580 We have a respiratory pandemic.

00:30:43.820 And I said, what the hell?

00:30:45.660 I'll just, I'll do promo the next year.

00:30:48.160 We'll just get it out.

00:30:49.440 And yeah, it's been a complete trip.

00:30:52.300 You know, the last year and a couple of months have been pretty nutty.

00:30:56.280 I didn't know that so many people were as interested in this seemingly simple

00:31:00.780 and odd thing as breathing as I've seen.

00:31:05.020 But obviously, it's awesome.

00:31:06.660 I'm so grateful.

00:31:08.820 I guess that makes sense given the pandemic.

00:31:10.880 Have you done any research on how breathing can affect COVID or viral issues?

00:31:18.640 It can have a huge impact on it.

00:31:20.900 And this isn't from my experience.

00:31:23.140 This is coming from doctors in the field.

00:31:25.720 There's a whole group of doctors called Stasis right now.

00:31:30.300 they put together breathing protocols for covid so one of the first things they started doing

00:31:35.800 with covid patients is instead of having them on their backs right in hospitals most of the

00:31:44.060 expansion in your lungs happens in your back it doesn't happen in your chest everyone thinks it's

00:31:49.640 here oh wow when you breathe it's happening in your back so if you're on your back it's much

00:31:55.980 harder to even take a breath in, right? And we've known this for hundreds and hundreds of years.

00:32:02.780 And yet in hospitals, they're laying out these COVID patients on their back. So the first thing

00:32:07.380 they did is started to prone them. They would lay them on their stomachs or their sides,

00:32:12.620 and it made a huge difference. Then they started noticing that so many people suffering from severe

00:32:20.520 COVID had breathing problems. They were mouth breathing. They were breathing too much. They

00:32:25.420 were constantly hyperventilating. So they started fixing that. Then they started engaging the rest

00:32:31.400 of their lungs, right? This is a viral problem in the lungs and it seeps into all of the different

00:32:38.000 lung tissues and clogs them up, right? What you want to do is to be engaging the other parts of

00:32:44.200 the lungs that aren't clogged up with fluid and to be breathing more fluidly, to be breathing very

00:32:51.580 softly and lightly into the lungs. So this can make a huge difference. And I was pretty amazed

00:32:58.820 that I was finding this and researchers were writing me right when the book came out and said,

00:33:03.740 try to get this information out there. And yet I just don't see the CDC or anyone else talking

00:33:09.540 about nutrition, vitamin D levels, breathing health, you know, when it comes to COVID treatment.

00:33:15.840 And I think they should. And at least from what I've heard from several doctors,

00:33:19.860 that should have been a part of the program right from the get-go.

00:33:24.760 Yeah, it most certainly should have, but I don't know why.

00:33:30.520 Maybe it's harder.

00:33:32.120 I think the medical community is so used to looking into pharmaceutical interventions

00:33:36.400 that it's just a little bit outside of their forte.

00:33:40.600 Maybe, I don't know.

00:33:43.420 Yeah, it should have obviously been covered.

00:33:46.000 It is outside of their forte because they're dealing with acute, severe problems.

00:33:51.440 You know, in my family, there are doctors.

00:33:53.540 My father-in-law is a pulmonologist, so the specialist of the lungs.

00:33:57.840 And so much of what I was finding, he had never heard of in his life.

00:34:01.360 And, you know, he was curious as to why that was.

00:34:05.060 But he's dealing with people who come in with lung disease, who come in, get in a car accident, who have COPD, right?

00:34:11.020 He's not dealing with people who have chronic, low-grade problems.

00:34:14.640 a lot of doctors say we only deal with the walking dead you have to get so bad just like with sleep

00:34:20.140 apnea you can have five apnea events six apnea events per hour and you still won't get any

00:34:27.260 treatment from sleep apnea it has to get so bad before you get treatment for it and i just think

00:34:33.340 that that is a twisted way of looking at human health like maybe we should be looking into

00:34:38.320 prevention and what we can do to avoid these long-term problems yeah i entirely agree but

00:34:45.540 the problem there is there's so many aspects nowadays that are wrong aspects of our lives

00:34:50.120 that are just wrong like you have to you have to attack it in such a multifaceted way that it's

00:34:57.280 hard to say you know fix this one part when when for for people to be healthy they need to fix you

00:35:03.460 know nutrition and sleep and exercise and breathing and how your mouth is developed

00:35:10.840 and breastfeeding is a lot to handle just to keep somebody healthy it it is but as we've been

00:35:17.500 discussing here these fixes are so like well of course oh it's so simple right that they're not

00:35:25.480 very convoluted and the way i look at this stuff because diet is more confusing now than it's ever

00:35:32.240 been. It doesn't need to be that confusing. It's the further we move away from nature, the sicker

00:35:38.080 we get. If you look at any culture, and if you look at Westerners 300 years ago, the advent of

00:35:45.400 the Industrial Revolution, right? This is when all of these chronic diseases first started taking

00:35:51.680 root. So when we start moving away from nature, and it's no coincidence that if you look at

00:35:57.580 the hunter-gatherer tribes that are still around they don't have hypertension they don't have

00:36:03.360 diabetes they don't have uh asthma they don't have allergies they don't have any of these the

00:36:10.120 vast majority of these problems that we have and yet their diets are some of them eat the majority

00:36:15.840 of of carbs that's what their diet is 90 carbs others eat almost entirely fat and meat and

00:36:23.480 cow's blood, but they still don't have any of these problems. So to me, I start seeing these

00:36:29.180 patterns. The further we move away from that, the sicker we get. What happens when we start moving

00:36:34.400 back towards nature and doing things our bodies were evolved to do? Oh, that's weird. Our bodies

00:36:39.800 start getting well again. And this is how I view a lot of medicine is moving in this direction

00:36:46.700 because it's been so effective for people who haven't been helped in any other way.

00:36:51.880 i hope so i think that from my experience from being chronically ill to healing was like i didn't

00:36:59.720 stop i mean i still haven't stopped talking about it and i didn't stop talking about it for a number

00:37:03.580 of years to everyone i met because i was so mind blown that i had control over some of my health

00:37:08.080 problems so i think everybody who clues into one of these kind of alternative health practices

00:37:14.900 isn't even the right way of of talking about it because it's more like traditional right but i

00:37:20.460 think the more people that clue into it the more it'll spread and with social media and podcasting

00:37:24.680 and everything it seems to be going in a positive direction i hope and hopefully that'll influence

00:37:29.220 mainstream medicine at some point yeah i hope but but it's also it's so strange to me that

00:37:35.280 you've got all these dudes in a gym now talking about the electron transport chain and atp and

00:37:41.540 they become default biochemists you had to do your own research right you're like nothing's working

00:37:47.820 for me. I need to do my own research here. I had the same exact experience with breathing. I said,

00:37:53.420 why do I have all these respiratory problems? My doctor and other people are like, oh, you're old,

00:37:57.940 dude, get used to it. And I was like, yeah, but you can see these older people who don't have any

00:38:02.500 of these respiratory problems. So something's wrong. It's just all of us have been forced to

00:38:08.360 become these hackers in such a way where we have to research our own core problem because no one

00:38:14.640 else is doing it. But in some ways that's, it's enlightening that so many of us now have access

00:38:21.160 to information to take control of our health, you know, and I don't think that this information was

00:38:26.880 disseminated before, you know, it was much harder to get this 10 years ago, 20 years ago. Now we

00:38:32.660 have podcasts and other routes of finding information and you can try this stuff out

00:38:36.800 and see what works for you. Yeah. That's the nice thing about it. Just listen to people,

00:38:41.800 try it out, see, see what works. So you said, I wanted to ask you, and I forgot to ask you

00:38:46.380 closer to the beginning of the episode, why did you get into this in the first place?

00:38:51.200 I had some breathing issues, but I'm a science journalist, so I didn't want to write a memoir

00:38:56.100 about that. That's, that's not my jam. And so I just sort of stuck with those and I was curious

00:39:02.460 as to why I was having them. I surf a lot here in San Francisco. I was also doing a lot of martial

00:39:07.620 arts at the time. And I kept getting bronchitis and I kept getting mild pneumonia. Like every

00:39:12.720 single year I would get pneumonia. And I noticed I was starting to weasel it a little bit when I

00:39:18.020 was working out. You know, at my doctor's office, they gave me a bronchodilator and said, just use

00:39:24.040 this when you're wheezing. I was like, well, what's the core problem? They're like, I don't

00:39:28.080 know. You know, just, and I said, well, that's weird. I want to research this a bit. So I'd stuck

00:39:34.320 with that. And I tried to figure it out for a couple of years. I went to a breathing class,

00:39:39.580 which I was told could help improve my lung function. And instead I had just this absolutely

00:39:46.120 crazy reaction from doing this very vigorous breathing. It's just like Wim Hof breathing,

00:39:52.020 but it's like 50 minutes long of really going for it. Yeah. And I just started sweating,

00:39:59.140 just pouring, sweating profusely. My, my hair was like sopping wet. I sweat through my t-shirt

00:40:05.480 and I went back to my friends who are in medicine. I said, what, what happened? They said, oh, you

00:40:11.680 had a fever. Uh, oh, the room was too hot. Oh, you were wearing too many clothes. I said, no,

00:40:16.600 none of those things were true, but still I didn't know what to do with that story. Um, so I, I put

00:40:23.480 that in a back file and kept researching breathing and then was put on an assignment to write about

00:40:29.700 free divers for outside magazine. This was years and years ago. And I saw them and they just opened

00:40:36.400 everything up. They were doing something that's supposed to be medically, scientifically impossible

00:40:41.760 and they're doing it every day. So if they can do that, what else can we doing? Could we be doing?

00:40:47.720 And what else can I learn about where breathing can take us? Okay. That totally makes sense.

00:40:53.140 so sidestepping into free diving do they do some do they prepare similar to wim hof i know that

00:41:00.980 if i do wim hof breathing for about 10 minutes like the the cycles of 30 breaths i can hold my

00:41:06.980 breath no problem for like three and a half or four minutes which you shouldn't be able to do

00:41:12.100 and i can most definitely do and it didn't take a lot of practice to be able to get there so do

00:41:16.060 they do something like that in order to be able to free drive how does that work it's very

00:41:20.920 controversial stuff here. So some people do, but the reason you're able to hold your breaths

00:41:26.420 for so long after you hyperventilate like that is you're offloading a ton of CO2 from your body,

00:41:33.240 right? And by offloading that CO2, you are allowing your chemo receptors to reset and

00:41:41.920 have more time before they trigger the need to breathe. This gets a little complicated. I'll

00:41:46.240 simplify it so the need to breathe is not triggered by oxygen it's triggered by an increase of co2

00:41:55.620 so if you exhale and hold your breath and then you're like i need to breathe that's triggered

00:42:02.120 by an increase of co2 if you're breathing very slowly and hold your breath you're going to have

00:42:07.940 a healthy balance of co2 which means that limit right that difference between that need to breathe

00:42:15.200 is going to be smaller. If you offload more CO2, you have more space there before those alerts go

00:42:24.500 off. So this can get dangerous because CO2 and oxygen are very closely tied together. That need

00:42:32.200 to breathe when that CO2 gets to a certain level is usually the time when your body needs oxygen.

00:42:38.500 so if you're hyperventilating before you're diving you can pass out because you can run

00:42:45.440 out of oxygen before that trigger of co2 hits those chemo receptors oh that's not what i wanted

00:42:53.060 to hear at all i'm sorry yeah so don't ever do wim hof in a bathtub don't ever do it before you

00:42:59.600 go into a pool people have died doing this that is do it on your sofa you know do it on land so

00:43:06.820 with freediving what you really want to train yourself to do is to naturally be able to accept

00:43:13.000 that increase of co2 and that you can breathe slowly most all of the freedivers i met they

00:43:21.080 breathe very slow before they dive they'll breathe a big breath but it will be a slow and calm breath

00:43:27.800 to calm themselves down it's a lot harder to hold your breath that way at the beginning

00:43:32.540 but this is the better way of free diving. Wow. I had no idea. I'm also glad you told me about

00:43:39.760 the bathtub because I can see that's a way I could have gone, gone out like, well, I can hold

00:43:44.220 my breath forever. Don't, don't do it. If you're, if you're, even if you're hyperventilating and

00:43:50.700 holding your breath for four minutes, you'd be a good free diver because you've, Matt, you've

00:43:55.160 enabled your body to become comfortable with that long breath hold. And I can tell you like free

00:44:01.000 Freediving is the most transcendent meditative thing you can do.

00:44:05.500 Have you done that?

00:44:06.300 On this planet all the time.

00:44:08.340 Yeah, that's my favorite thing.

00:44:09.900 How?

00:44:11.500 So a lot of people view freediving, you go on YouTube and you see

00:44:15.500 Guilherme Neri diving down to 300 feet, right, or with sperm whales.

00:44:20.200 And so he's an elite diver.

00:44:22.800 This is, it's kind of sad.

00:44:25.400 My first book, Deep, there was some freediving in it that looked at the human

00:44:29.300 uh body and our connection to the ocean from the very surface of the of the ocean to the very

00:44:34.880 bottom of the deepest sea right so there's free diving up in the more shallow levels but

00:44:39.960 a lot of people know free diving through its competitions where these people are challenging

00:44:45.680 one one another to see how deep they can dive and come back to the surface conscious yeah what could

00:44:51.080 go wrong well i i saw what could go wrong that's that's in the outside magazine article but free

00:44:57.960 Diving, that's not what it was originally intended to be.

00:45:01.440 And that's not what the vast majority of the people on the planet use it for.

00:45:06.080 They use it as this connection with the ocean, with yourself.

00:45:10.040 It's totally silent down there.

00:45:12.420 You're in zero Gs.

00:45:13.860 You're floating around.

00:45:15.140 Animals come up to you because you're silent.

00:45:17.780 They accept you as part of their, you know, the ocean environment.

00:45:21.140 So it's just such a trippy and amazing thing.

00:45:24.940 And it's been hard being locked here in San Francisco, but I'm traveling very soon and

00:45:31.100 I hope to be doing a lot of diving in the future.

00:45:34.400 That sounds amazing.

00:45:35.820 I haven't done very much looking into, that gave me goosebumps, that story.

00:45:39.400 That sounds amazing.

00:45:41.760 Where are you planning on going?

00:45:43.160 Are you going to go somewhere and do the free diving?

00:45:45.260 I'm going to Europe for a couple of months.

00:45:47.140 So they have free diving pools in Italy and in France.

00:45:50.520 I've been to the one in Paris where instead of the pools being like wide and shallow, they're

00:45:56.320 very narrow and deep. So you can practice there. They go down to about 60. I think the one in

00:46:02.320 Italy goes down to a hundred feet. So you can practice your free diving in this controlled

00:46:07.220 environment because free diving is a huge deal in Europe, not just the competitive side, but

00:46:12.480 people do this because they're, you know, it's, it's the easiest way to really connect with

00:46:18.900 yourself and to force yourself into a meditative state. You can't do it if you're anxious or

00:46:24.420 panicky or hyperventilating. You have to chill the hell down and to focus and just sort of let

00:46:31.480 your body go. And, uh, you will never feel better than you have after four or five hours of free

00:46:38.260 diving in the ocean, because not only are you experiencing that you're breathing in this very

00:46:43.440 fluid, controlled way. Okay, I'm sold. How long can you, I'm definitely going to do that. How

00:46:51.060 long can you go for? How long do you hold your breath for? You're asking me these very clear

00:46:56.460 questions. I realize I'm giving you the most convoluted answers, but there's a reason I'm

00:47:01.140 doing that. So freedivers told me, don't pay attention to your watch. The reason is your

00:47:06.640 body changes from day to day. So you could be feeling really good and stay down to three to

00:47:12.540 four minutes or some days you're a little stressed out you ate the wrong foods and your body is

00:47:17.660 telling you to go up to the surface after two minutes so we are so inherently competitive

00:47:23.620 westerners westerners are that that we just want to be looking at oh i made it you know three 0.96

00:47:28.860 minutes yesterday i'm going to try to go for listen to your body like leave that crap behind and 0.97

00:47:34.380 when you feel the need to breathe here's an idea go up to the surface and get a breath this is not 0.73

00:47:40.100 a competition. This is about enjoying yourself and connecting with your body. So having said that

00:47:46.080 other people have, have timed me and I've done very shallow, um, you know, dives for about three

00:47:53.140 minutes, three or four minutes. That's not moving a lot, right? That's just sort of sitting, sitting

00:47:58.900 down. And the more you move, the more oxygen you're using. So, but even a minute underwater

00:48:04.600 and even diving down to 60 or 70 feet at around 30 feet buoyancy shifts and you no longer get

00:48:12.380 pulled to the surface you get gently tugged to the deep ocean that's creepy and you it's not

00:48:19.440 it's it's when you first do it you're like whoa because you're you're just like a feather

00:48:24.500 floating down but you can just sit there unmoving and float down and just glide down

00:48:32.380 so just staying down for a minute is a transformational experience and feeling that

00:48:40.120 negative buoyancy that gravity list state it's just incredible so uh i hope i'm i'm really 0.98

00:48:48.020 selling this big time to people to do this in a responsible way don't practice this crap in 0.80

00:48:54.380 in your bathtub get a proper teacher and do it the right way and uh i think it's a really

00:48:59.500 beautiful hobby to do cool okay well i'm i'm definitely interested in that uh i guess to

00:49:08.040 practice then you'd want to stay more shallow so you could get used to the breathing slowly

00:49:12.520 sounds scary if you're floating down and then you also fight like suddenly realize you need a breath

00:49:18.160 and then it's harder to get back up because the buoyancy's you have to think of it like climbing

00:49:23.100 a mountain right you don't climb a mountain and think as you're going up i'm going to use 100

00:49:28.780 percent of my energy. You have to use about 40 percent of your energy, you know, 50 percent and

00:49:34.880 say, I always need to have something in the tank. So with a proper freediving instructor, you're

00:49:41.220 going to go down to seven feet. OK, you're going to get comfortable with seven feet. Then you're

00:49:46.520 going to go back up. Then after a while, you're going to go down to 10 feet and then 15 feet and

00:49:52.240 then 20 feet. So you will know your halfway limit. That's what freediving is all about, just like so

00:49:58.120 many other things you you will feel that your body tells you all of these messages because

00:50:04.020 we are meant to be in the water deep diving humans have something called a mammalian dive reflex it's

00:50:12.080 the same reflexes that dolphins and whales and seals have we have them too and the deeper you go

00:50:18.680 the less of a terrestrial animal you become because more of these reflexes kick in your

00:50:24.940 spleen releases oxygenated blood into your bloodstream and and blood comes into your core

00:50:31.360 and your mind enters this meditative state some free divers have recorded their heart rates at

00:50:37.000 seven beats per minute during deep dives and this is the body learning that you're relearning

00:50:45.380 becoming reacquainted with these ancient skills that we're all born with and when they start

00:50:51.740 turning on it's gonna freak you out but it also feels incredible because you feel like you're

00:50:57.920 really connecting with with our our true nature again that is so cool seven beats per minute

00:51:05.120 what isn't it versus like 90 something what do we normally add well it depends at rest a lot of

00:51:13.280 people can be in their 60s some athletes can get into their 50s and 40s right now we're talking

00:51:19.860 we're active we're probably in our in our 70s or 80s so so this is not supposed to be humanly

00:51:27.720 possible and they've read they've looked at their blood oxygen levels and found that they were at

00:51:32.740 50 50 what is considered unhealthy is below 92 so uh this was a recent study too and they've been

00:51:42.760 studying this for decades but a study came out a couple months ago showing this again shouldn't be

00:51:48.360 possible. If you told someone this was possible and hadn't done the study, they would call you

00:51:54.580 insane. And yet this is the stuff that I love. It's like, if we don't know this about our bodies,

00:52:01.180 if we're just discovering this, what else is out there? What else can we do with them?

00:52:05.700 I completely agree. That's kind of how I feel. I've been on only eating meat since December 2017

00:52:11.400 for autoimmune issues again completely mind-blowing it's like how is that possible didn't think that

00:52:19.000 was possible i like this free diving thing so people are basically we still have those old

00:52:24.440 mammalian instincts but we just forgot about them yeah we're all born with them um and what we do

00:52:31.200 is just reawaken them when we enter the water and you can you don't have to free dive to do this the

00:52:36.500 reason why if you go into your kitchen or your bathroom right now and splash cool water on your

00:52:42.920 face, your heart rate can go down about 20% just by doing this, because that triggers these nerves

00:52:50.580 in your face to send messages to your body to calm down. So those messages increase the deeper

00:52:57.880 and deeper you go when your body senses pressure, when it senses your whole body is in water,

00:53:03.820 it calms us down. And this calming us down allows us to conserve more oxygen. This is why a whale

00:53:10.860 can stay underwater for 90 minutes, why a seal can stay underwater for two hours. They're accessing

00:53:18.100 these mammalian dive reflexes. They also have different hemoglobin profiles, but we have these

00:53:24.560 things too. We're mammals, you know, and we're just like seals and just like dolphins and just

00:53:30.880 like whales in this regard which is why when you free dive these animals if you're lucky enough to

00:53:36.760 have them around they accept you as as one of their own and they they come up to you and they

00:53:42.800 interact with you i've had these these interactions and it's just the most incredible experience you

00:53:48.840 could have because with scuba you're pretty loud right you look like and you look terrifying you

00:53:54.560 look terrifying and they associate dolphins at least associate bubbles with signs of aggression

00:54:01.240 that's what they do yeah when they're being aggressive but if you come up and they see you

00:54:07.300 go up to the surface grab a breath of air just like they do and then you come back down and then

00:54:12.080 they start mimicking you in what you're doing and it's a beautiful thing people i know this sounds

00:54:17.780 like some new age dream but but go and do it and you'll see for yourself this is exactly right down

00:54:24.340 my alley. That sounds perfect. Okay. That was awesome. Where can people find you online if

00:54:31.600 they want to learn more about breathing and breath work and apparently free diving?

00:54:37.280 So my website, my publisher allowed me to put all of the scientific references. There's

00:54:42.600 something like 400 scientific studies because I realized all of this sounds just like complete

00:54:48.400 sketchiness and uh but it's all real uh so you can see that at mr mr james nester.com

00:54:55.520 backslash breath to go right to that portal there are videos up there there are interviews with

00:55:01.940 professors at harvard and other leaders in the field talking about breathing there are also

00:55:07.360 exercises all of that is is free for people um the larger uh story is in the book of course i'm

00:55:14.700 trying to get better at this instagram thing pretty bad at it but i'm just posting stuff

00:55:19.560 associated with the stuff i'm working on uh breathing and other elements of human potential

00:55:25.460 cool that was amazing i'm gonna get my dad into these mouth exercises he's like he's he's already

00:55:32.420 on a diet he's like what more what more is there michaela like haha mouth exercises now dad is he

00:55:38.920 is he uh sleep taping by any chance he was i don't think he is anymore he had an autoimmune

00:55:47.160 flare-up and that is under control again now so he's back into all the things to make himself

00:55:54.260 feel better and i think focusing on the sleep apnea right now would be good which is part of

00:56:00.580 the reason i invited you on so thank you for all that incredibly valuable information more than

00:56:05.520 happy to help. Thanks a lot. Thanks a lot for having me.

The Mikhaila Peterson Podcast - September 24, 2021

116. Why You Need To Relearn How To Breathe ｜ James Nestor

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