James Nestor on The Science of Breathing

or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. Thanks for joining us.

Our guest on this episode is James Nestor, and author and journalist who has written for Outside Magazine, The Atlantic, National Public Radio, The New York Times, and many many more. Today, James and Eric discuss his New York Times best selling book, Breath, the New Science of a Lost Art. Hi James, Welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. It's a pleasure to have you on. Your new book is called Breath, the New Science of a Lost Art, and uh, I

was really excited to read it. I've been looking forward to it for quite some time, as I was telling you before the show, and it it really lives up to the height. It's a wonderful book, and we're gonna get into it, but we're gonna start like we always do, with the parable. And in the parable, there's a grandfather who's talking with his grandson. He says, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle.

One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandson stops and he thinks about it for a second, and he looks up at his grandfather and he says, well, grandfather, which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what

that parable means to you. In your life and in the work that you do well, I would have to associate it directly with breathing, and I would view that a bad wolf as mouth breathing, and I would view that good wolf as nasal breathing. And depending on which of those pathways you breathe is really going to dictate so much of your health and how you're able to think about things, and your mood and so much more.

I think that's a great intro. And mouth breathing is a big topic in the book, and we're going to get to that in a second. Before we go all away there, though, I want to talk just a little bit about a statement that you made a couple of different times in the book, and I think it's an important one. You basically say that the missing pillar in health is breath. Say a little more about that. Well. I think most of us have gotten the message on what to eat right, at least most of us compared

to how we were fifty years ago. We're aware that eating whole foods, that staying away from highly processed carbs, you know, that's the way to eat properly. We're also aware of that we need to move around, we need to exercise, we constantly need to be in motion otherwise some bad things can happen to our bodies. And that message has been pretty clear. But neither of those things

really matter that much unless you're breathing properly. Because you can go how long two weeks without food, You can go a lifetime without exercising, but you can only go a couple of minutes without reading. And how we get that breath, how we process it, it really determines so much of what we're able to do, where our potential is, and where our downfalls are as well. Yeah, I think

it's interesting because I agree with you. I think that when I look at the fundamentals of health, both physical, mental, and emotional, I look at very foundational things like you mentioned movement or exercise, eating, well, I think sleep. It's become incredibly apparent how important sleep is for me. Some sort of contemplative practice is a big part of that. But I think that a lot of us when we think of breathing, if we think of it at all, we think of it as something that maybe we call

on occasionally or in times of trouble. Oh, if I'm stressed, I need to take some deep breaths. But we don't think of it as as you said, I like that word as as one of those fundamental pillars too our overall well being. And I think the book really points out in a lot of detail how really important the way we breathe is, and it really influences the quality of our lives, and it really influences a lot of

different health conditions. Well, it's great that breathing is an unconscious act that we don't have to think about it. What a pain in the butt that would be to have to think about it twenty times a day, right, But that doesn't mean how we breathe is not affecting us in different ways. And the manner in which we breathe affects every single system of our body right down

to every single cell, you know. And a lot of us can get by with this dysfunctional breathing, with breathing through the mouth, breathing too much, breathing too little, hunched over, but that doesn't mean we're healthy, just like we can get by eating you know, twenty ding dong's a day and have enough calories, but that doesn't mean we're going

to be healthy. And and it's just this missing piece of this puzzle that I've found, so people are paying attention to even though there's a huge foundation of science showing that how we breathe has such an incredible effect on our physical body or mental body, even how we grow on our bones. Twenty ding Dong's a Day is about the equivalent of your Stanford experiment that you did. That would be the food version of that, which would be to you know, exist on twenty ding Dong's a

Day only for a month. But let's lead into that because one of the things that you started with when we talked about the Good Wolf and the Bad Wolf was mouth breathing and how bad it is for us. So why don't you first just briefly tell us about the experiment you did, and then briefly tell us about why mouth breathing is so bad and what it does to us, which you demonstrate very well in what you

did to yourself. So I'm in San Francisco and I'm pretty close to Stanford, and I use their medical library and their library all the time, their resources. I'm just poaching things from Stanford constantly, and I got to be pretty good friends with the chief of rhinology research down there.

His name is Dr Jayack or Nayak big nose guy, and uh, he was so depressed that so many of us are breathing through our mouth, something like of us are habitual mouth breathers, and when we go to sleep, that increases to about sixty close to seventy of us breathe through our mouths. And he explained to me that the nose serves innumerable functions in our body, helps to filter air and heats it, it moistens it, it conditions at all. That we get more oxygen breathing through the

nose than we do through the mouth. All of this isn't known. We've known this for a long time. But that damage of mouth breathing, exposing your lungs to everything, and the environments and everything else that comes with it, the poor posture as well. No one knew how quickly that came on. Did it come on after decades or years? One was sure. So after several meetings, several interviews, I said, well,

why don't you do a test with this. You're you're at Stanford, you have all these resources, and uh, he loved the idea, but he said that asking subjects to participate in test like this in his opinion would be unethical considering the potential damage it would do to them, even though the population is breathing this way. So it's a long way of saying I volunteered. I said, well, what if I willingly put myself in here as a subject,

and what if I get someone else? So it's an end to experiment and he said, okay, if you can do that, and I did, And the experiment was set up in two phases. For ten days, we're just breathing through our mouths, which a lot of people think is some like jackass stunt. That was not the intention. We were just lulling ourselves new position that so much of

the population already knows. For the other ten days, would be breathing through our noses as often as we possibly could, and we would be taking collecting data the whole way through and comparing those data sets at the end of that experiment. And what happened, Well, we knew the mouth breathing part was not going to be a picnic. I was pretty aware of that. But you know, an hour after we were leaving Stanford coming back, we're kind of laughing about it, like, yeah, this is gonna be terrible,

and uh, you know. Then I checked my blood pressure and was as high as I've ever seen it in my life. And over breathing causing your body to stress out by the constant flow of air very bad for your body, and it can jack your blood pressure. And that's exactly what happened to me. Then I went to sleep that night and I snored for the first time

that I've ever been aware of. When we recorded about two weeks of baseline before this zero snoring or a couple of minutes a night, max and I snored for an hour and a half and the other subject, andrews Olsen, who came from Sweden to be a part of this experiment, was snoring even more than that. And the longer the experiment went on, the worst we were snoring, we got sleep apnea, we were fatigued, athletic performance really sank. I mean, you name it. There's a whole laundry list of problems,

and it felt just awful beyond that. So basically, what you guys did was insert things in your nose so that you couldn't breathe through your nose, so you could only breathe through your mouth. And as you mentioned, all sorts of things that you could measure all got a lot worse, and as you said, you felt miserable. Yeah, and that's exactly what we did. We had silicon up our noses. And a lot of people think, oh my god,

I'm just getting so paranoid just thinking of that. But if you consider that of the population suffers from chronic sinusidis, you know, about fifty has inflamed terminates an allergy season, how many people are breathing through their noses? You know, it's we become a population of mouth breathers. So again, this sounds like some heinous thing that we did, but it really wasn't when you consider how so many people are breathing right now. And so you can answer this

one in two ways. Why is mouth breathing so bad for us? Or what are some of the impacts of breathing through our mouth more often than we should? Sure? So the first one is if you grow up as a mouth delicature of your face, because if you constantly hold your face in that position, your face will tend to be longer, your face will be more recessed, your chin will be more recessed. And this is so common

that researchers have a name for it. They call it annoid face for when kids have inflamed annoids or even tonsils and they have to open their mouths to breathe. So if you do that over a series of years, it will affect how you look, and according to a lot of people, you will you will look much less attractive than you would otherwise. It will also affect how your teeth will grow in so habitual mouth breathing can also affect your mouth size and how how you develop.

So later on in life, when we're adults, if we're mouth breathing, you can just consider every time you take a breath through your mouth, you might as well have your lungs as an external organ, because they're exposed to all the dust, all the mold, all the pollution, all the allergens, anything else in the air there directly exposed to it. And if you live in a city like me,

that means a whole bunch of crap every day. So our noses are our first line of defense for our body for pathogens, for viruses, for bacteria, for pollution, all of that, that's what the nose does. So it's just something to consider when you're going out and walking around. You see all these people breathing through their mouths. They're

just exposing themselves to everything around them. And so, what are some ways that we can cut down on mouth breathing, particularly given that it sounds like more of us do it while we sleep. Yeah, this is a tricky thing. It's one thing in the daytime because you're you're conscious, and you can develop this habit of closing your mouth. So some people have very serious problems and their noses and their sinuses, and they need surgical interventions. Okay, so

so for sure, but the majority of us don't. We just need better habits and we need to train ourselves to work this organ out to let it do what it's naturally designed to do. So in the daytime, for the second phase of the experiment, we wore a little piece of tape in our mouths in the day to teach ourselves remind ourselves to just be breathing through our noses. And at night we use that same little piece of tape. Now, this is not a hostage or pulp fiction kind of

vibe going on here. It's a teeny piece of tape with a very light adhesive that comes immediately off if you just open your mouth. It's just a reminder to keep your mouth shut. And just by wearing that piece of tape, my story went from four hours at its highest mouth breathing to zero, and my sleep apnea went to zero. Anders went from six hours of storing to night to zero zero sleep apnea. A h I so, um, you know, I'm not saying what worked for us is

going to work for everyone. But I have heard from literally hundreds of people who are so piste off that they weren't told this thirty years ago. It's worked amazingly well for them. And the best part is it's free and it's available to anyone. Well, I, after reading the book, am going to attempt this tape be in my mouth shut at night trick to see what happens. Yeah, let me know how it goes. I just want to be totally clear here to everyone. I'm not offering a blanket

prescription to all your woes. I'm not qualified to do that. I'm a journalist and some people just have major nasal obstruction issues that will need surgery. But but as I had said before, a lot of us don't. And I had heard this from Dr Anne Kearney at Stanford, who was slated for surgery. She's a breathing therapist at Stanford and she just worked out her nose. She just, over a series of weeks, taught herself to breathe through her nose and it completely opened up. And I had the

same experience. So what you're saying is, even if we feel some degree of congestion, if we try and really practice breathing through our nose more, we might restore functionality for many people. That's right. This is a use it

or lose it. Oregan so much so that I was just talking to Anne Kearney and she had looked at people who had laryngectomes, a little hole drilled in their throats, and she found that between two months and two years their noses where one obstructed, they completely close it off because they weren't being used. Those science passages aren't just bone right, They're covered in erectile tissue which can become flaccid or erect just like the tissue you know where,

so it opens and closes all the time. So it can be conditioned to be more open and allow more air in there so that you can become a nasal breather. Excellent, So let's move on to some of the other key points in the book. One of the most important parts of breathing is not what a lot of us focus on, which is the inhale, but actually on the exhale. Why is the exhale important to focus on? Why is it arguably more important than the inhale, or at least equally important.

So a lot of us, especially when we get stressed, will breathe in, we'll breathe the on top of that, we'll breathe in on top of that, we'll breathe the in on top of that, and we just keep packing air in. So there are diaphragms aren't really moving, they're just staying in this very low position. It's so much more efficient to get that stale air out before we

take a big breath in. For the same reason is if you're driving a cross country and you filled up your gas tank every time, it went down to about three quarters of a tank, and then you filled it up again, and you filled it up again, that would take a lot of time, a lot of wear and tear. You can think of your breathing in your lungs in the same way. You want to breathe as few breaths as you can that still sustains your metabolic needs. And so for a lot of us, we tend to breathe

way too much, breathing air on top of air. But by taking these fluid breaths easy breath in and then a full breath out, we can take fewer breaths and get more oxygen. And another cool thing about this is that diaphragm that sits below the lungs. Because the lungs don't do anything, they don't do anything on their own, they need this diet pramp to expand them and contract them. That diaphragm moves up and down like a piston in our body and helps with circulation and move limp fluid

as well. So it serves many functions taking these fluid deeper, slower breaths. And so you describe in the book what you call the perfect breath shown in a lot of different ways to be the right I don't want use the word the right way to breathe, an optimal way to breathe, And lots of our spiritual traditions also show the same thing. Say a little bit more about the perfect breath and how you do it, and and some

of the different places it shows up. I discovered this study that was put out about twenty years ago by some Italian researchers where they gathered a group of subjects and they had them recite the Abbe Maria in Latin, and then they had them recite Oh money, Pot Me Home, which is a famous Buddhist mantra, and they noticed that it took these subjects the same amount of time to recite each of these phrases, which works out to about five to six breasts per minute. That's about five to

six seconds in and five to six seconds out. Now, this respiration rate also occurred in Sata Nam, which is the famous Kunalini chant, and so many other prayers. And it turns out when we recite these prayers, when we breathe this way, we deliver more oxygen to the brain, We lower our blood pressure, we calm ourselves down, We let the systems in our body work at a state of peak efficiency, which they called coherence, which is why this is called coherent breathing. So all it is, you

don't have to pray to get these benefits. We pray. Go ahead and pray. That's cool if you want to do that. But all you really need to do is take a gentle breath into count of about five or six and a gentle breath out to that same amount of time, and you get these benefits from just by breathing that way. Would you say that's the optimal way to breathe most of the time. I think it certainly wouldn't hurt. There's no such thing as having too much

peak efficiency. Is it possible? Probably not. You know, this is a reminder throughout the day to slow down your breathing because the more you breathe this way, the more you acclimate your body to feel safe and comfortable breathing at this slow, soft, and deeper rate. And that's what you want to do. I mean, if you're like me, I don't want to walk around with an Apple watch be being all the time reminding me to breathe or note pad or whatever. I want this stuff to become

an unconscious habit. But that can take a long time to establish those habits. So this is a great one to use before a phone call, if you're nervous, if you want to slow down, if you really want to focus on something. Because at Northwestern University a few years ago, they found that this This breathing pattern when it was taken in and out of the nose, also increases the connections between different areas of the brain to allow us to remember and to think more clearly about things. So

it really affects so many systems in the body. Yeah, brain can activities a big deal, connecting to different aspects of the brain, of course, And if you look at what's happened to so many of us right now, we're losing contexts and losing connection with our prefrontal cortex, the area that is in control of logic and decision making, and we're letting emotions control what we're thinking, right, And so by breathing in this slow way, we can reconnect

those emotional centers the Hipple camp as a magdala, with that frontal cortex and allow ourselves to make more reasoned decisions instead of these rash, irate, angry, emotional outbursts. Let's talk about an aspect of word that you just used a sentence or two ago when you were describing this, and you describe breathing in a light way. You know, I think there's a tendency. I've certainly had it. I learned a lot in this book and I think one of the things for me is this tendency to breathe.

If I'm going to do like some sort of breathing, let's say, you know, breathing in a box or four seven eight breathing, and there's all these different ratios. Right, it's this very heavy, deep breathing, trying to suck in as much as I can. But I started to get a hint of this in a lot of the Zen training I do, where the teachers started talking about like you want to breathe in way less when you breathe in,

so talk about what light means, what is breathing lightly? Well, it depends on what you're doing, right, These are different tools in the toolbox to use in different situations. So a lot of Kundalini breathing, which I'm a big fan of. You're going for it, you know. That's a lot of the breathing in in Kundalini pranayamas. And it's the same thing with Sudarsan Creo, whim Hoff method whatever. So that is designed to elicit certain reactions in your body for

a short amount of time. Right, It's it's to hijack different autonomic functions. So this slower breathing, this very light breathing, this easy breathing. You can almost consider this as different kinds of music. You know, at the gym, if you want to get pumped up in the morning, maybe you want those those big, strong breaths, right. But at night, if you're cooking, if you're eating dinner, you want those slower breasts, just like you would want some slower, easier music.

You know, at the gym, maybe maybe you want some death metal or something. So you know, once you understand that these are different tools in the toolboxes, a lot of people seem confused. They're like, well, you know, should I breathe too much, I breathe less? Should I hold my breath? It just depends on on the context and what you're looking for at that moment. So the slower breathing can be used, you know, whenever you're chilling out. It's it's great for focus at the beginning of the day.

That's when I use it a lot. And the thing is, as as Westerners, we tend to overdo things all the time. Whenever I tell someone, you know, breathe in five to six out five to this, they say, I got it. Yeah, I really feel that man um You know, this is about calming the body down and regaining control of your nervous system function and putting that back online. And so in order to do that, it should be very light and imperceptible. So a lot of people tend to stick

out their stomachs every time they breathe. This should be an extremely light activity that is calming. You want to run efficiently. You don't want to wear out yourself, you know, and expend energy you don't need to expend. At some point in the book you reference that the common whiz dom is take really deep breaths if you're feeling anxious, and you talk about how that may not be the right approach. Terrible advice, and that that is coming from

Alicia Murrett, who is at the Southern Methodist University. Now, she was at Stamford before that and Harvard before that, so she really knows her stuff. And she did this study about ten years ago with panic sufferers and the only thing she did was she taught them to breathe less. She was able to see a panic attack coming on an hour before by looking at people's breathing. And a lot of people who suffer from panic or asthma. When they feel that attack coming on, what did they do?

They start breathing more and more and more because they feel like they're not going to be able to breathe. They feel like they're going to be denied a breath, which is about the worst thing you can do. When you overbreathe like that, you cause more vaso constriction and you exact serbate or trigger an attack. So instead of doing that, if you feel a panic attack coming on, you can train yourself to exhale longer and breathe slowly

and calm yourself down. Putting your hands in front of your face is a good reminder to yourself to calm yourself down. I won't get into the biochemistry, but many asthmatics and as populations, panic suffers and people with anxiety have much lower CEO two, which means they're breathing too much, and that's slower breathing is a way to get that

CEO two back on track and calm themselves down. Well, let's go into that for just a minute, the CEO two, because that's one thing that certainly I think is counterintuitive in the book, which is that we tend to think I need more oxygen. I need more oxygen. I need to get my oxygen up, whereas in reality, our problem is often too much oxygen not enough carbon dioxide. So say a little bit more about that and how we know that, because that is very counterintuitive to what almost

everybody believes. The vast majority of us are Oxygen levels are fine. There's there's no such thing as having too much oxygen in our blood stream, right, you know, we'll we'll pack perhaps, But what so many of us are deficient in is c O two. Because the only way that oxygen can disassociate from the hemoglobin which is in our red blood cells is in the presence of c

O two. So, for instance, if you are overbreathing right now, you're going to feel some numbness in your fingers after a while, some lightness in your head that is not caused by an increase of oxygenation in those areas, but but a decrease of circulation. So you need c O two for circulation to be a vaso dilator to your artery, veins, your blood stream, and without it, your body has a harder time of getting oxygen. So this is such confusing stuff,

but it's nothing revolutionary or strange. We've known this for over a hundred and twenty years. It's just so few people consider that if you're a healthy person, your oxygen levels are going to be fine, but what you may be suffering from is a lack of proper balance of c O two because you're breathing too much, which is another reason why the idea of a healthy person going into an oxygen bar. I mean, this is not doing

anything for your body. And uh, it's it's surprising that there are still oxygen bars out there because it just doesn't make any sense from a biochemical standpoint. What about it altitude? If you suddenly are in the rocky mountains and you're at an altitude you're not used to, are you having an oxygen deficiency in that case? Yes, and

and thank you for bringing that up. Um, So I'm talking about at sea level, a healthy person at sea level, where if if you put on a pulse ox and you're at pent huffing oxygen for half an hour is going to do nothing for you. And this is something my father in law, who's a pollon ologist, had been telling me for years and years and years, and I thought he was full of bs. Until you really look at the biochemistry, you're like, that's not going to do

anything at altitude. Of course, there are huge benefits to it because there's less oxygen, or that oxygen is further apart, right, There's less pressure, so oxygen molecules are further apart. So that's why people become hypoxic at high elevations. They're blood oh two's, their blood SATs can go down to you know, eighty percent, which is really bad news. So oxygen would have a huge benefit for you at those altitudes, but

I should mention there. Of course, has been studies looking into breathing more slowly and through the nose at altitudes, and in one study they found the people who were doing this instead of having their blood SATs at they were at eighty nine just by breathing more slowly and said of overbreathing like everyone else tends to do. While

we're talking about chemicals, let's talk about nitric oxide. I've seen some things that you've posted recently about nitric oxide, so tell us a little bit about the role of nitric oxide. A lot of people get nitric oxide confused with nitrous oxide, which is laughing if we're not talking about whippets. I don't I'm not interested. You know a lot of people that their their interest does go out the window there. So you were, like so many other

people I've talked to um this interviews over. Yeah, you know what, in that case, we're going to talk about nitrous oxide and all the wonderment. No, no, we won't do that. So nitric I see, oxide is this wondrous molecule. We produce a profusion of it in our sinuses about six times more than we do breathing through our mouths. And it so happens to be that the drug viagra uh sedenophil is its actual game. Guess what that does?

To do? What it does, It releases nitric oxide in the body, so it allows your body to produce more nitric oxide, so you get more circulation, you know where. So we produce our own nitric oxide. We produce it throughout the body, but we produce a huge amount in our noses, which is another reason you want to be breathing through your noses. You don't want to be breathing through your mouths, not just for the you know, perhaps

the sexual performance side of this. Nitric oxide is essential for circulation and oxygen delivery, which is why it's being studied in eleven clinical trials with COVID patients. The word on the street is it's working incredibly well because they tested this fifteen years ago and it worked incredibly well for the first round of stars giving people nitric oxide. Yes, because of having more nitric oxide allows you to get

more oxygen. To utilize more oxygen, It opens up those bronchials, It opens up all those little arteries and allows more circulation. It would be very interesting to see a study where they would have people mouth breathing versus nasal breathing people with COVID. This is never going to happen, by the way, for ethical reasons. And if you hum, you produce fifteen times more nitric oxide by humming, So it would be great to see a real study on the effects of

this with people who are chronically ill. But again I don't think that's going to happen because of ethical concerns, But I wish it would. I wish people would volunteer for this because I think we would learn so much. Fifteen times more nitric oxide than you do breathing through your mouth, or fifteen times more than you do breathing through your nose, then breathing through your mouth. Okay, yeah, well humming sounds good. You're gonna annoy everyone, but you

know you're gonna be happier. You're gonna have better circulation. So tell them that there was one thing that you referenced in the book that really A bunch of things perked my ears up, so I shouldn't a one. The next thing in your book that really perked my ears up was you talked about a study where they gathered two decades of data from subjects and discovered that the greatest indicator of lifespan wasn't genetics, diet, or the amount

of daily exercise. It was lung capacity. So say more about that, and then what are ways of developing lung capacity if that really is such an important part of longevity. Sure that study. I put it on my website and there's direct links to all of this. That's what they determined. They said, you know, lung size is very similar. It's a good marker of of lifespan. The healthier and larger

your lungs are, the longer you're going to live. That's that's how the data is stacked up, which to me makes a lot of sense because by having larger lungs, that means you can take fewer breaths to get that oxygen. By having these healthier lungs, that means you're getting this constant flow of energy to your body. Right, we get actually more energy from air than we do from food. And if we're doing that ineffectively, and if we're doing that in a dysfunctional way, it's going to wear us down.

So the good news here is the lungs aren't like the brain or the liver or the kidneys or anything like that. The lungs and your lung capacity can change, and you can change it by force of will. You can change it by adopting healthy breathing habits. So just by doing mild to moderate exercise can increase lung capacity by about if you really go for it. If you start doing yoga, I've known people who have doubled their

lung capacity. You can not only increase your lung capacity, but you can stave off that entropy that happens as we grow older and our lungs start shriveling up and go smaller and smaller and smaller. So exercise yoga is doing the type of breathing. We describe the perfect breath of five and a half in five and a half out? Does that increase the lung capacity? I believe that would help you maintain a healthy lung capacity. I've never seen

any studies, longitudinal studies on that. If you think about yoga, though, what is yoga stretching and breathing. Let's stretch this arm over this way, breathe into this long let's stretch it over here. You want to keep the rib cage very flexible. And as we grow older, are rib cages start growing inwards right, or bones get more brittle, You want to keep it very flexible because you don't want breathing to be an effort, especially if you're doing it times a day.

There was another fact in the book that blew my mind, which I had no idea about. What we were talking about carbon dioxide would have been the time to bring it up, which is that when you're losing weight, you correct me something like of the weight that you lose, you breathe out. That's right. Yeah, a lot of people think that when we lose weight, uh, it comes off in sweat or or whatever. But none of that makes

sense if you really look at the science. And that's what I was just so amazed when I was researching this book that there are such simple things that we have accepted in our culture as being correct, as being the conventional wisdom. If you're having a panic attack, you need to breathe away more. If you're having an asthmattack, we're breathing way more. None of this is based on anything.

There's no paper that ever proved this. And so this guy in Australia wanted he was a biophysicist, I believe, and he wanted to figure out what happened when we lose weight, because weight just doesn't disappear. It's it's an energy, right, it needs to go somewhere. And he found out that for every ten pounds that you lose, eight and a half pounds of that comes out through your lungs. When I read that, I was like, that is certainly not correct. All right, I trust James to some degree, but that

that sounds not like it's right. But I was. I went out and did the research. I was like, I'll be damned sure it's true. Yeah, yeah, I had to really double down on this because I didn't believe it either. And my editor the whole time was like, this can't be true, this can't You can't heat your body up with breathing. You can't heal yourself of autoimmune diseases with breathing.

So she worked at NASA before she became a book editor, so she was such a hardass, and I thank her for for really putting me through the ringer, because with these impossible claims, you really need to support it with science. And I put the entire bibliography up on my website that anyone can can go look at those five studies, and I put videos up there and the data sheets and all that, and you can you can peruse for yourself. So we've talked about this sort of standard quote unquote

perfect breath. You know, breathing lightly five to six times per minute is sort of an ideal calming breath, sort of an ideal day to day breath. But in the book you go into a lot of you call it breathing plus techniques. You referenced wim Hoff a little while ago. We had whim on the show, I don't know, a couple of months ago. So let's talk about some of the benefits or the things that can happen if we

breathe in more extreme ways. So let's just talk about, you know, whim Hoff for a minute and talk about his breathing method. And also, I think it'll be interesting to sort of I'm glad that you eventually got to it because it was a question that I was thinking all through the book. Was boy, all, this sounds very different than what whim Hoff advocates, right, say a little

bit more about this breathing. Plus, So it's interesting when you see wim Hoff on YouTube or if you see him live, you only see the whim Hoff that's like turned on and amped up to eleven. Right, breathe, everybody breathe to breathe. There you go, Okay, you're a convert as well. So a few people see him and the other twenty three and a half hours of the day and guess how he's breathing entirely through his nose, extremely slowly.

He hums a lot, and he is completely chill. So the breathing that he has become so attached to is equivalent to going to the gym. Right. This This is breathing where you just blow it out, You work yourself out so that the rest of the day you can relax. You've done your work for the day, and now your body is acclimated. It's at this nice spot. So all of this stuff was so confusing to me because some people like Boutaco, people are saying you have to breathe less.

Women saying you have to breathe more. Holotropic breathwork people are saying you have to breathe for three hours as hard as you possibly can, and this is the way you're gonna And I was like, who is right, And the answer is they're all right. It depends on the context.

So for the same reason you wouldn't go to a gym for twenty four hours a day is the same reason you would never do whim Hoff's breathing, for you know more than that thirty minutes at a time, and this kind of breathing, you are purposely stressing your body out, just like at the gym. You are purposely stressing your body out to build yourself up to become more fit so that the rest of the day you can take that time off and having done your work. It is

a pressure release valve. And so you could call it whim Hoff method, you could call it TUMO, you call it to dar Crea prea, are prey whatever, it's all doing the same general thing. I realize it gets confusing, But the middle of the book I tried to establish I was like, this foundation of healthy breathing. This is a benefit to everyone who's who's an asthmatic ultramarathon or or a cyclist or an office jockey. You will all benefit from breathing out the nose, breathing slowly, breathing lightly

and deeply. And then once you have that down, you can go off into some really weird areas into how to superheat your body or get rid of autoimmune diseases, you know, or get shot up with the coli and breathe in a pattern to battle the indotoxins. That's what I saved for that. I call it breathing plus because it's the next step up the ladder of where breathing can take us. And you mentioned there you sort of grouped a bunch of things together. You've you've grouped whim

half together, stars and crea prani yama. Often kundalini breathing falls into this category. Something you called that you said was tumo, which is an ancient Tibetan I believe style of breathing, So you sort of group those together, sort of say in what way they're common? What what are you doing in that style of breathing for people who may not be familiar. These are all variations on a theme.

And when I started really looking at these implotting them out, you know, it was like the usual Suspects moment where I was just like, every thing is lining up in a certain way. They're all doing the same general thing, but they're called different names, they're developed at different times, they're slight variations here and there, but they're all adhering

to the same practice. And the practices you purposely overbreathe for a certain amount of time, then you purposely underbreathe for a certain amount of time, and oftentimes as a whim hop method in tuma, you hold your breath, so you go from to holding your breath to excelling really long and do it all over again. So this is essentially interval training for your lungs, for your cardio respiratory system. That's what it is. I think that's a really useful

way to frame it. Right. As I've studied what do we want to do for cardio, and we think of like cardio exercise, right, and it appears that more and more what we're seeing is you want long periods reference film aftone in your book. So so this is basically what you say. They're right, Uh, we want these long periods of sustained effort at a pretty low amount of strain on our body, often referred to his zone to cardio. But you know you're on the lower end and you

want a lot of that. And then there is some belief some people disagree on this, but there certainly seems to be a fair amount of belief also that there's a time and a place for some really high intensity work. You know they called VO two max work in the cycling world, or interval training or tobada training right where we're going kind of all out. So I think the analogy you're making there of this gentle slow, you know, five to six breaths per minute is sort of an

ideal zone to cardio place to be right. You want to spend a lot more time there, and then there is a place for some people to do this much more intense whim off to mo praniama type breathing. That's exactly right, And it also depends on what you're looking for. So I know whim I've talked to him several times, and he's an amazing guy. I think he's brought breathing awareness to more people than than anyone else, you know, at least in the last twenty years or so. And

he is a huge proponent of his breathing technique. He calls it his breathing technique. But he's also very clear that he's like, I didn't invent any of this stuff. It's been around for thousands of years. It's just had these different names on it. You know, if you really want to wrung yourself up, if you really want to hop up to that next stage, if you're healthy and want to go into a next level of potential, you

can try these things out. What's interesting or maybe not interesting, shouldn't be surprising, is different breathing techniques that are all around the same variations on this theme. They so happened to affect people in the same way. If you look at how Sudarshan Crea affects people, it's so similar to the benefits behind whim Off breathing because these things are

doing the same thing. You know, my job is great in the respect that I'm able to talk to people who have had their lives transformed, like utterly transformed by just healthy, practical breathing habits. I know that seems like a real pie in the sky stuff, but but it's not, especially with asthma, even autoimmune diseases. And there's so much exciting research happening right now in this field. In the

next couple of years, we're going to know even more. Yeah, and I think you do a nice job of also painting a picture at different points in the book of Look and you've done a nice job of it in this interview is saying, well, you know, these things can help for certain things and certain people, And no, you're probably not going to cure cancer with the way you breathe. There a certain amount of science that backs this up, and there's a certain amount of things that we see

from a lot of people anecdotally. So there's real potential in this. And as you said, it's not a panacea. It's not you know, it's not like, well, just breathe a certain way every day and then go ahead and go on the ding dong a day diet and everything

will be fine. Yeah, it's for the same reason that that exercise is an a panacea, or nutrition is an a panacea, although we do know that eating certain foods will decrease your risk of getting certain cancers right and in other chronic problems in life, we know that in the same thing with exercise, well, breathing is right along with those those other two for sure. And it's always

been there. Uh. This was considered a very powerful medicine in ancient cultures, and that's all cool and peachy and great. But now we have the technologies to measure what actually happens in the body when we breathe in different ways. And that's what I think is so exciting. Like, if you don't believe me, all you need to do is get a pulse ox cimeter on your finger and watch

how breathing affects you. If you don't believe me, get a blood pressure monitor and take your blood pressure before and after doing some breathing exercises and tell me what your blood pressure is. So I've done this. I've watched my blood pressure go down ten to fifteen points after two minutes by breathing in certain ways. And and that's not some outrageous claim. This is basic physiology. This is

how our bodies work. It's just been so out in left field and in my opinion, pretty muddled over by a lot of sort of new age high claims that this stuff can do everything for everyone, which it can't, but it can do a whole bunch, and the fact that it's available to everyone without a subscription, without a prescription is to me even better. That's a great place to wrap up but I'm not quite going to wrap

us up there because i have one more question. It ties into what you just said there, and it's this idea of no subscription, no prescription. Like the stuff that you're describing is pretty straightforward, right, the way to breathe it. You just you basically laid out several of the key things doing things like learning to do Praniyama breathing or the whim Hoff method. Those things are freely available out

there and you can learn them. And there's a lot of people who want to charge a lot of money to learn to really do this stuff right. And I'm kind of curious, in your opinion, is there really that much more to learn? Is it really worth some of these expensive programs to really learn to do the perfect breath, to do coherent breathing or is it about as simple

as you're describing. Well, think about nutrition, right. You can give someone a sheet of paper that says, here is the best way for you to eat, cut out all processed foods, period. We know this to be true, just eat whole foods. How easy is that? You know, in one sentence you can give someone that. Will they adhere to it? Now? They won't. It's the same thing with with exercise in many ways. So you know what I'm getting at here is it depends on who you are.

If you're a big self starter who wants to take control of his or her breathing and who wants to go buy these gizmos, you can absolutely do that, you know, with no more technology than than our brains and our lips and our lungs. You can do that. But some people need a helping hand, just like some people need a fitness coach, and some people need a nutritionist, and some people need cookbooks, you know. And so there's absolutely a place for breathing therapists, especially for people who have

chronic issues anxiety, asthma, panic, and arexia. I mean, on and on and on. Breathing can have such a profound effect on on these people and they need a lot of assistance not only to keep with it, but but to understand what's happening in their bodies. Excellent. That is a great answer. Thank you James so much for your time.

You and I are going to talk briefly in the post show conversation about an area that we didn't even get to at all, which is really about chewing and why we have crooked teeth and why we might actually be dis evolving in certain ways. You and I'll talk about that in the post show conversation. Listeners you can get access to that and other things like a weekly

teaching song and a poem episode. I do add free episodes and lots of other great things at one you feed, dot net slash Join James, thank you so much for coming on. Like I said, I really enjoyed the book. We didn't even get into all the wonderful stories that are in the book and all the all the characters that you meet along the way and the things that you do. We kind of stayed very dry, but the book is not dry at all. So again, thanks so much.

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