Dhru Purohit Show - The Forgotten Power of Breath and How to Use it to Radically Transform Your Health with James Nestor

Episode Date: October 31, 2022

This episode is brought to you by InsideTracker and Colima Salt. There is nothing more essential to our health and well-being than breathing, yet as a species, humans have lost the ability to breathe correctly, a fact that comes with serious consequences. Modern research is showing us that making even slight adjustments to the way we inhale and exhale can jump-start athletic performance, rejuvenate internal organs, halt snoring, asthma, and autoimmune disease, and even straighten scoliotic spines. On today’s mini-episode, Dhru sits down with James Nestor to talk about the forgotten power of breathing and how we can tap into it to dramatically improve how we feel.  James Nestor is an author and journalist who has written for Scientific American, Outside, the New York Times, and more. He is the author of the New York Times bestseller Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art, which explores how the human species has lost the ability to breathe properly—and how to get it back. James has appeared on dozens of national television shows, including ABC’s Nightline and CBS’s Morning News and on NPR. He lives and breathes in San Francisco.   In this episode we dive into:   -How the way we breathe influences our health   -The Stanford University breathing experiment -How our modern industrial diet has impacted the way we breathe  -The connection between lung capacity and longevity  -How to establish better nasal breathing  -The importance of eliciting a parasympathetic response before you eat    Listen to the full episode here.   For more on James Nestor, follow him on Instagram @MrJamesNestor, Facebook @MrJamesNestor, Twitter @MrJamesNestor, and through his website, mrjamesnestor.com. Get his book, Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art, here. This episode is brought to you by InsideTracker and Colima Salt. InsideTracker provides detailed nutrition and lifestyle guidance based on your individual needs. Right now, they’re offering my podcast community 20% off. Just go to insidetracker.com/DHRU to get your discount and try it out for yourself. Right now, you can get a bag of Ava Jane’s Kitchen Colima Sea Salt for free, just pay for shipping and handling. Just head on over to dhrusalt.com and try Colima Sea Salt for free today! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hi everyone, Drew Prode here with another mini episode for you from best-selling New York Times author James Nestor. And James is on the podcast today to talk to you about the fundamentals of how we breathe and how our breath impacts every aspect of our health. Specifically in today's mini episode, James is going to be talking about how the way we breathe influences our health. The Stanford University Breathing Experiment, which is going to shock you in what they feel. found. He's going to be chatting about how our modern industrial diet has impacted the way that we breathe and narrowed our jaws. How is our diet changed our jaws which has impacted our breathing? He's going to be chatting about the connection between lung capacity and longevity. Fascinating research there. He's also going to be chatting about how to establish better nasal breathing

for anybody that wants to live longer. Nasal breathing is one of the keys. And lastly, he's going to be chatting about the importance of eliciting a parasympathetic response to, you know, and the last thing, before you eat, a little hack that James has for you. This episode is pulled from our full interview with James, but again, if you don't have a lot of time, that's why we do these mini episodes so that you can get those nuggets, and you don't have to worry about missing that full episode

if you didn't pass. All right, I hope you enjoy mini episode with James Nestor. Help our audience understand why paying attention to their breath, even though it's something they've done all along, is actually something that could potentially help them alleviate from so many of these things that we've gotten used to as a species. Well, a lot of people think that breathing is binary. I certainly did.

It was if we were breathing, that was a good thing because we were alive. And if we weren't, that was bad. We were dead. We were really sick or unconscious. But how we breathe depends. And it influences so much of our health. It's just like what we eat. You can't just say, as long as I'm eating food, I'm alive.

And if I'm not eating food, that's bad. You know, it depends what kinds of food you're eating. And with breathing, it's how you take in that air. We breathe about 20,000 to 25,000 times a day. And if you're struggling to do that, if you're doing that in a dysfunctional way, it's going to affect your health. So there's not a lot of controversy about this. So anyone who's researched this,

knows that this is so true and there's so much science behind it. But I was pretty shocked that it took me so long to figure this out and that everyone that I had talked to had no idea that they were breathing improperly and had no idea that so many of their chronic issues were attached to their poor breathing. And that's what I spent years and years trying to research, get my head around. And one of the ways that you researched that in the beginning was, as you started out the book, is you went to Stanford and you met a doctor there to participate in a program. Share a little bit more about that. This episode is brought to you by Inside Tracker.

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and even my daily big fat salad. It brings out all the delicious flavors and it adds a nice salty crunch. You know, when it comes to quality, Ava Jane's kitchen, Kalima Sea Salt is tough to beat. It's loaded with over 80 trace minerals, 100% free of ocean-borne microplastics, which are a bigger and bigger issue every single year. And its coarse texture tastes amazing sprinkled on top of whatever I'm cooking up in my kitchen. So treat your body right and treat your taste buds right to a super pure, high quality and mouth-watering sea salt. that you can feel good about. Right now, you can get a bag of Ava Jane's Kitchen Colima C-Salt for free.

Just pay for shipping and handling. Just head over to Drewsalt.com. That's D-H-R-U-S-A-L-T dot com, Drewsalt.com, to try out the world-famous Ava-Jane Kitchens, Colima C-Salt. For free today, just cover shipping. That's Drewsalt.com. So I'm lucky enough to live in San Francisco, where I'm really close to. is Stanford. So I use their medical library all the time. And I started interviewing experts there.

And I found the chief of rhinology research at Stanford. This guy named Dr. Jaiakar Nyak. So we had these very long lunches where we talked about all types of things. And he's a big nose guy. So he's very frustrated that many of us aren't breathing through our noses because we have this incredible organ in the front of our faces that serves so many different functions. And yet 25 to 15. 50% of the population is breathing through its mouth habitually, which is causing all kinds of damage, neurological problems, respiratory problems, high blood pressure, I mean, on and on and on. So we started talking more and more over a course of several months, and he knew the problems associated with mouth breathing.

Everyone in his field knew that, but nobody knew how quickly those problems came on. So I said, yeah, it's Stanford. why don't you test it? And he thought doing so would be, in his words, unethical because he knew how injurious it could be to the body. So I volunteered for an experiment. I said, hey, let me get one other person. So it's an N2 experiment.

And let's just see what happens. 10 days of mouth breathing versus 10 days of nasal breathing. And we'll collect a bunch of data before, during, and after, and just see if it affects us in any way. And you actually went through that. And in that period of time, when you purposely forced yourself through a device on your nose, just a little contraption, you forced yourself to breathe through your mouth. What did you notice and what was surprising about it? So a lot of people, at least my friends at the time, thought this was some sort of supersized me stunt, you know, and I didn't view it that way at all.

And either did NIAC or the researchers that were helping us out with. this little experiment. We were just lolling ourselves into position that so much of the population is already contending with. The difference was we were collecting data and seeing what happened. So I had silicon of my nose. Sounds awful because it was. And I was just forced to breathe through my mouth, which sounds awful because it certainly was. But again, so many people are doing this day in and day out and are used to it. So the first thing that happened within just a couple hours, my blood pressure was as high as I'd ever seen it in my entire life. And I thought, oh, I'm just stressed out. It's been a crazy day. We spent eight hours at Stanford getting four different blood draws,

pulmonary function tests, you know, not the most fun thing in the world. But then that night, I started snoring for the first time that I'm aware of, snoring for about an hour and a half. And that snoring got worse and worse as the study went on until I was snoring for four hours throughout the night. I got sleep apnea. So did the other subject in the study, Anders Olson. had the same exact thing. We were fatigued. We were miserable. We can concentrate.

I mean, it was so severe. We knew it wasn't going to be fun, but we had no idea this was going to be so brutal. And to think that so many people are walking around, breathing this way and not realizing that at least some of their chronic issues are tied to the ways in which they're breathing was just absolutely bizarre and kind of sad to me. Let's make sure we connect this back to the concept. of our dis-evolution or de-evolution, well, this evolution,

how is it that since the root of farming and us more processing foods and switching our diet to things that have changed the way that we were really evolved as human beings to eat, how has that had a direct impact on so many individuals that are out there that are mouth breathing and maybe not even realizing it? So the very first incidence of widespread crooked teeth occurred about 12,000 years ago with the very first farming cultures. So right when we started farming, right when we gave up hunting and gathering, we started getting crooked teeth.

But it wasn't bad at all at first. These were cultures that were living on a mono diet, you know, just eating one soft thing. For most farming cultures, their teeth were just fine because a lot of the food that they were farming was still rough. They were chewing a lot. But as food progressively got more soft and more processed, especially when the Industrial Revolution really started booting up in the late 1700s, early 1800s, that's when you just saw widespread crooked teeth covering most of Western Europe and anywhere else where people were eating for the first time in human history,

a diet entirely bottled stuff of canned stuff, processed stuff, high sugar stuff, you know, nothing pulled from the ground. And you look at our society today, what are we eating? And the same thing. Even what's considered healthy foods, green smoothies, avocados, oatmeal, yogurt, gogert, whatever. It's all soft. So it's no coincidence that our teeth are just growing more and more crooked. So what happens is when you have that, as we mentioned at the beginning of the program here,

when you have too small of the mouth, you have a smaller airway. And so the incidence of snoring and sleep apnea and respiratory problems also dramatically increased with this advent of the modern industrial diet. And you can trace this all around the world. As this diet went all around the world, mouths got smaller, teeth got crooked, respiratory problems shot through the roof. Yeah, there's this old saying that it's like, I don't know who discovered water, but I know it wasn't a fish, right? I'm sure you've heard that. our audiences heard that. And in a way, we are living that because human beings, we take breath so much for granted because it just feels like it's something that we're doing, that we don't

pay attention to it. And we are suffering with all these aspects, which you mentioned, crooked teeth, health issues. As you started to go through this research a little further, you found many examples in different societies, including native. Native American tribes and other cultures that were so focused on the importance of nose breathing and getting their children, especially not to breathe through the mouth, that it was baked into how kids were raised from a young age. Can you share some examples of that or a story that comes to mind? So if you look at ancient cultures all around the world, whether it's in India or in China or Native Americans, South America, they celebrated.

breathing as a medicine. This was a sacred thing. This was as important as other systems of health. And they wrote about it. They practice it. They had different technologies, different understanding and appreciation for it. So one very interesting story that I was reading about was with George Catlin. He was a painter. And in the 1830s, he decided to take off and go west and to start living with Native American tribes. And this was before these tribes. were given Western food. It was before they had any of the creature comforts of the West. So what we understood of these tribes came much later after these people were already given alcohol and already so much of the food and influence of Western culture. But he was there before all that.

And he said in every single tribe, they consider nasal breathing this font of health. And mouth breathing was the most disrespectful thing you could do so much so that mothers used to hold their infants and whenever they were done nursing, they would calmly shut their mouths and they would stand over them as the infant was sleeping and calmly shut the infant's mouth if they were opening their mouth at night. And again, there are so many health benefits to breathing through the nose. And they obviously saw this through observational studies, through empirical studies, whatever, but they were measuring it with instruments. but they saw it and was woven into their culture,

and it had probably been woven into their culture for thousands and thousands of years. And Catlin went to South America and found the exact same thing with every single indigenous culture that he studied. I grew up in the Hindu Brahmin Vedic tradition. That's my family ancestry, even though I don't identify by that now,

but I grew up in that tradition and that culture. And I can remember for young age, anytime my grandmother would catch, us breathing through our mouth if we were just sitting there, she would tell us that it was a sign of being kind of lazy. Like, hey, don't be lazy. Close your mouth, breathe through your nose. And in Arjuveda, it was a big thing that was talked about, especially because in the mornings, being part of this Brahman tradition in India, my dad would do something in the morning called Puja, where you would have to recite certain things and do meditation for about 30 minutes.

And when we would use prayer beads, rosary, you know, it has 108 beads that are around there, you would time the breath, which was breathing in through the nose. And when I would be lazy and I'd breathe through the mouth, my dad would say, you can't do it that way. You have to breathe in the nose. These are all remnants of things that were passed down for generations. When I was young, I just thought of them as, oh, this is all just superstitions. but now we're learning how true they were and essentially a major part of our health. I wish your mom was around Southern California in the 70s and 80s.

I could really use some of that instruction. And those things have been around for so long, likely for a reason, because they saw what happened with people who were mouth breathing all the time. They saw what happened with people who were nasal breathing all the time. And it's one thing to talk about these ancient scripts and these ancient traditions. is another thing to look at the actual science and to look at the data and to measure this stuff. And that's where it just becomes indisputable,

the benefits of nasal breathing versus mouth breathing. I want to share some of that data that you've come across and that you featured inside the book. One of them was you shared about how the Framingham data from the Framingham Heart Study and some of the things they pulled out of there, especially when it comes to breathing and lung capacity. Can you talk about that with our audience?

Sure. So a lot of people are looking at different metrics for lifespan. You know, they're looking at genetics, which can influence lifespan. They're looking at other environmental inputs of what you're eating, how much you're exercising. But the number one marker, the most accurate marker of lifespan is lung size and respiratory health. and this was discovered more than 30 years ago as part of the Framingham study, which is a 70-year longitudinal study into cardiac health. And so when they looked at all the data, all the people who were living the longest,

it had to do with their vital capacity. They said vital capacity, lung capacity is synonymous with life capacity, with longevity. And this went so far, this didn't make it in the book. This is in the end notes. my editor thought it was too weird. But some researchers even went so far to look at patients who had lung transplants. And they found that patients who had been transplanted with larger lungs lived way longer than those

who had normal size or smaller lungs. But you don't need to get a lung transplant to share in this larger lung size and longer lifespan. You just need to breathe properly. And what else is yoga, but stretching and breathing? You know, so much of the exercise is establishing proper respiratory health. It's engaging the diaphragm and keeping all the musculature and rib cage here flexible so that you can breathe easy later on in life.

You know, this podcast, we've had a lot of neuroscientists on here and individuals who talk about neuroplasticity. And that became a new term for a lot of individuals over the years because, you know, we all heard that story that you're born with a certain amount of brain cells and then it's all downhill from there. A big part of what your book talks about, just as you were talking about the diaphragm, is not just with the lungs, but so many aspects that relate to our breath are plastic. So you just gave that example of the lungs. Let's go back to the nose and the mouth and the jaw, which is how your book starts off. Where does plasticity come into play over?

there. So just to sort of go into the lungs a little bit more, the human lung, especially after the age of about 30, 30 to 50, you're going to lose about something like 15% lung capacity. And it goes down much quicker after that. So right when the time when we need to breathe the easiest, when we really need lung capacity, we start losing it as we grow old. But the great thing about this is you can have a direct impact on this entropy. You can not only stave it off. but you can actually improve your lung capacity at virtually any age. So it's an inspiring tale behind all this depressing data. The same thing is true with airway health.

The same thing is true with our mouths. So I think that's a great analogy between neuroplasticity and body plasticity and breathing plasticity. Because so many of these things, which even things that we've inherited, we can change by force of will. And that's really what I spent so much of this book getting into. It's establishing the problems. It's like here's a bunch of depressing information.

We're screwed right out of the gate. Our faces are messed up. There are environmental inputs. There's pollution. Blah, blah, blah. But that's cool. But what are we going to do with it? And how can we improve upon that?

How can we improve our health? In addition to our design of our face and our nasal and the, and the narrowing of our jaws and our canals for breathing, what are some of the other things that contribute to the fact that we are breathing too much instead of at these ideal ratios that you talk about inside of the book? So if you think about nasal breathing, you can just take a breath through your nose with me here. It takes a while, doesn't it?

It doesn't go in really easily. You can feel that negative pressure as it goes in. you can feel the positive pressure as it goes out. That's because when you breathe through your nose, you're forcing it through this gauntlet of different structures where this air is slowed down. It's pressurized. It's conditioned.

It's heated. It's moistened. So that by the time it gets to the lungs, the lungs can more easily extract that oxygen. It's the same thing with exhaling. It takes a while. So by forcing the air to slow down by pressurizing it, we can extract so much more oxygen.

We take in about 20% more oxygen breathing breath through our nose than we do equivalent breaths through our mouths. Now, if you were to take a breath through your mouth, that's all it takes, very quick. So it's much too fast for us to adequately use that breath to its full potential to extract that oxygen. So nasal breathing, this isn't some like new age, like hearsay. This is basic biology. I will show you a little model here for people listening. You're not going to be able to see this, but I'm showing an anatomical model of the side of a face.

And you just see this incredibly ornate structure of all the sinuses and the nose. That's there for a reason. We are supposed to be obligate nasal breathers. And when we don't breathe that way, our bodies really suffer. I want to read a quote that you shared on Twitter. This was April 24th. and I'm going to totally butcher this gentleman's name. He's a Nobel Prize winner, Albert Zensigri.

You know it probably correctly, so you can correct me after I show the quote. And the quote says, more than 60 years of research on living systems has convinced me that our body is much more nearly perfect than the endless list of ailments suggest. Its shortcomings are due less to its inborn imperfections than to our abusing it. how did you find out about this quote?

Where did you hear it? And what inspired you to share it? That's one of my favorite quotes. He won a Nobel Prize for his work in vitamin C in the 1930s. And he's one of my favorite researchers. I'm working on a project now to get more deeply into his research. So he had studied cancer for years and years and years and years and found that cancer, just like so many chronic problems, they aren't some false.

to our bodies, right? Our bodies are this perfect machine. They're the fault of being exposed to too many toxic environmental inputs, be that stress, be that pollution or whatever. So the human body, if it were placed in a more natural environment without these modern industrial inputs, can naturally live a very long time. We keep thinking, you know, the argument is nowadays, it's like, hey, we're living longer. like people used to live only 30 years.

That is not true. These studies were conducted during the Industrial Revolution where you would have 16 kids and 12 of them would die in childbirth. So there's a difference between longevity and lifespan. So, you know, longevity, the way that that is calculated is if I had two kids, one dialed in childbirth and the other lived to be 80, I would say the average lifespan, you know, longevity would be 40 years. But that doesn't mean we're all hosed and that we're all going to live to be 40 years long.

So, and we've known this for thousands of years. I found this somewhat recently when I was looking at all of these great philosophers and scientists from a thousand years ago, Roman philosophers, Greek philosophers. It's like, what? These guys were living to be 85 years old. They were 87 years old. And there's a graveyard near a cabin I used to rent. from graves from like the 1850s.

And these people were living into their 70s and 80s all the time. So the reason I'm mentioning this sidebar information is that our bodies, I think are programmed to live this long and healthy life. It just depends on how we treat them throughout our life, especially when we're younger and we set a good foundation. They're going to be much more apt to live longer. So true. And we just had a researcher on the podcast, Dr. Jason Fung, and his argument around cancer is that

cancer is less something that happens to us, but it's more of an evolutionary survival mechanism that the body taps into. And this isn't some fringe guy. You know, this guy has a couple of New York Times bestsellers in the category of insulin resistance and diabetes and talking about that whole trend. And so so many of these ailments, if we take that idea that many of the diseases that we suffer from in modern life, we think of them as things that are happening to us. But if we peel back the layer and go back into that quote that I was just sharing, one of your favorite quotes, we can actually see how so many of our diseases are just adaptations where our body is trying to do the best that it can under the crazy circumstances that it's been put under. And Stephen Park, Dr. Stephen Park at Albert Einstein Medical School has written about this a lot. So he's found that the organs that are usually cut off during times of chronic stress, when we enter in the states of sympathetic stress, our body prioritizes energy and blood flow to other areas

that are essential for us to fight or to run away. So skeletal muscles, the heart, the brain. but other organs, the stomach, the kidneys, the liver, pancreas, like all of that gets cut off during these states of stress. So if we stay stressed for too long, these other areas aren't going to get the energy they need. They're not going to get their blood flow. So cancer grows in environment of low circulation, of low oxygen. So he is hypothesized. This hasn't been proven, but he's hypothesized. He's that, hmm, look at all of the leading areas in the that are afflicted with cancer throughout a population.

Something like nine out of 10 of them are these areas that are cut off from circulation because of stress. So stress, yes, is a major contributor to cancer. So to help reduce your chances of getting cancer, you have to take control of your stress. And one of the quickest ways of doing that and to take control of inflammation is to take control of your breathing. I think in the category of books that would be very similar to your books, just saying in the category as a whole, you know, journalists going on a quest, you know, learning about, let's say, you know, similar to like, let's say a category of like Michael

Pollan going out there. One of the things that I really appreciate about your book is that you do go into the recommendations that are out there and not just generally like we have to pay more attention to this. We should give it more love. There are actually really amazing and emerging things that we can do to solve this at all sorts of levels. And I really appreciate that because I think the challenge that a lot of journalists felt in the past was they make two strong recommendations. Do they come across as an advocate rather than a storyteller for it? So thank you first and foremost for that. I'd like to go into some of those recommendations. And let's start first with the recommendations around our job. So through this dis-evolutionary process of us not

chewing us having smaller nasal cavities and breathing airways and many other mechanisms that end up preventing us from breathing as deeply and getting as much oxygen in and through the right mechanism, which is through our nose, we've ended up at a place where we have all these issues that we've talked about. But as we mentioned with the plasticity, there are things that are out there tools that people can tap into to reverse a little bit of that. process. What are some examples of those tools that you found through writing this book? Sure. I just want to dunk into the advocate evangelist thing just for a second. And I think you really nailed it. That is not my job as a journalist. I have no background in medicine. I'm not selling

anything. I'm not selling any product. My job is to go into a world. I don't understand and to try to figure it out and talk to the experts in the field. So I would like to be an advocate for data. an evangelist for facts. And that's really the position I want to stay in. So I'm not a breathing therapist. I do not offer prescriptions, blanket prescription for people. What I do is I filter out research from the leading experts. And I show what has worked for other people per the science.

So along those lines, so if you want to establish better nasal breathing, if that's the first thing you need to do is to figure out your airway, because no matter how many pranayamas you do, no matter how much Sudarshan Kria or Wim Hof method you do, if your airways are messed up, it doesn't matter how focused you want to be or how learned you are in all of these different breathing techniques. You have to fix your airway.

And that begins with breathing through your nose. A lot of people say, I would breathe through my nose, but I can't because I'm constantly congested. So I just breathe through my mouth. You have to find a way of clearing your nose. It's as simple as that. Some people need surgical.

interventions. A lot of people don't. Dr. Jack Araniak told me if a sink is plugged in your house, you're going to find a way of clearing it as soon as possible. The nose needs to be considered the same thing. So going back into that blanket prescription, everyone's different. So some people I've found got benefit from starting with those breathe right strips, which help to open up the nostrils a little more. Mute inserts can also be helpful using sleep tape at night. I've found to be incredible. I've gotten hundreds of letters from people who say they no longer are snoring right now because of sleep tape. You know, so that's interesting. This is something Mark Berheny has been researching for decades and decades.

So I would really start with those things. And if none of those work, if a netty pot doesn't work, then you can start exploring different procedures. But I would start with the things that are free that have no side effects that are available to all of us. Because what I've seen is the vast majority of us can really get a ton of benefit from those. And that's what Nyack has seen as well. And I know it's working because I've been into the world of mouth taping for a while. And I recently brought my fiancé into that world. And she's getting the best sleep that she's ever had in her life is what she feels.

But previously when you would look up mouth tape on Amazon, where a lot of people go, So there's a prominent company that's out there that a lot of people would use their product. But since your book has come out, I've seen one of the things that's come up in it is you say, look, there's a lot of really great solutions that's out there, and there's different people that are meeting different needs. But for people who want to start off with mout taping, they can even just start off with a little square patch of surgical tape. That is one very low-cost thing, and a lot of companies make surgical tape, and it's pretty easily

accessible and in this period of time since I've been into mouth breathing I saw somewhere right around when your book came out I knew that it was working because surgical tape came up to the top of mouth breathing when you typed it in inside of Amazon so people are using it and they're getting better from the process yeah I think 3M is extremely confused of what's going on with the with the rush for for mouth tape right now it was sold out for for weeks and weeks they're probably like what the hell a bunch of people doing home surgery now this is very strange. But whatever works for people works,

I would not go on YouTube and look at advice unless you're looking at Dr. Mark Berheny or you're looking at Patrick McEwen and his advice because people are using duct tape. They're using masking tape. You don't need any of the stuff. This is not a hostage situation. Okay.

This is just trying to train your jaw to be closed at night. Very softly. If you can breathe through the sides of your mouth, even if you can talk with this tape on, cool. The point of this is just to gently remind you to keep your mouth shut. And the great thing about so much of these hacks is we have technologies now that can measure how well they're working. So I've measured my sleep, not using mouth tape with a pulse oxymeter versus using mouth tape.

I've used an app called SnorLab, which records your snoring throughout the night. You can take other metrics before and after. You can look at your pH. And breathing is so easy to measure. So the benefits of it are so easy to see in this day and age. So this is not some placebo effect. This is your body operating in an efficient way. And the fact that it's helping so many people overcome snoring.

I mean, nine out of ten of my friends who have tried it are no longer snoring. I'm not going to say it's going to work for you. I'm not promising anything. But it's free. And it's worth giving it a go. And if you look online, you can see hundreds or thousands of people who are saying the same thing. That one product, that branded type of mouth tape called Somnifix, it works great and it works great for a lot of people. So go for that if you want to use it. So I'm not an evangelist.

I'm not an advocate for any specific product. What I'm trying to say is there are benefits to nasal breathing, especially during sleep. You should really train yourself to do that by any means. one of the interesting stats just on the topic of nasal breathing on during sleep and not breathing through your mouth is you shared inside the book something about water retention and basically holding on to moisture inside can you share a little bit of that with the audience sure so if you're breathing through your mouth you're exhaling inhaling through your mouth you are going to lose 42% more water so there's a reason if you're a mouth breather in night,

that you wake up with this extremely dry mouth. And I did this for decades. I thought it was totally normal. So I would go to sleep. Didn't matter if I was camping or I was in a hotel. If I was at home, I would have a big bottle next to me. And I'd be hitting off that bottle all night

because I would wake up, mouth dry, take another hit, go back to sleep. That's not normal. And if you look at people jogging right now, I mean, they now have all of these, these backpacks with water in it, with little straws. They have belts with water,

bottles and these people are cruising around you just shut your mouth you're not going to need this stuff for a five mile jog you know to think you need water every 300 yards is absurd so this is again the study was out years and years ago no one's arguing with it but still it seems like a lot of people aren't looking at the core issue of their constant dehydration and so much of that has to do with a pathway through which they breathe air. So as people go down the rabbit hole of your book, they naturally start to ask themselves, okay, great, what is the quote unquote ideal breath or how should we be breathing ideally? And you do a great job of basically explaining, well, okay, through things like working out

and maybe including in certain exercises, we may have periods of time where we are breathing more so that we can set up a better resting breath that's there. Once we are in that resting phase where we're just doing our normal activities, what does a quote unquote ideal breath look like? So an ideal breath is breathing in line with your metabolic needs. So your metabolic needs are going to be different sitting on a couch and watching Queen's Gambit as they are when you're out jogging around, right? And it's hard to gauge that.

How do you know you're breathing right in line with your metabolic? needs. So what you can do is first to train yourself to breathe a little less. And the benefits of breathing less, I just told you you actually get more oxygen. You're able to increase your CO2, which includes vasodilation, more release of nitric oxide, so many other benefits of that. I've found an exercise that works good for me is to breathe into a count of about five to six seconds and breathe out to that same count. And do this for five minutes, ten minutes a day. I have my phone. I put on this app and I put it on my desk and just allow myself to breathe at this rate. And then once you do that, once you get the rhythm of it, you start breathing that way unconsciously.

And that's the point of all this stuff. You don't want to have to be carrying around your phone or looking at an app or a notepad. You want to condition yourself so that you will breathe. healthfully when you're not thinking about it. And that starts by training yourself first into various methods of breathing less and breathing lightly and breathing deeper. So I should mention if you ever want to decrease stress, really relax a lot more, you would increase your exhalations. So right now, if you take your hand and put it on your heart and you inhale to account of about four and exhale to a count about six or eight, whatsoever comfortable to you.

You'll notice your heart rate lowers. It gets slower and slower when you're exhaling. So at any time in the day, you can breathe into a count of about six, exhale to about six or seven or eight, even shorten that inhale a little bit. And you will notice that your body is getting calmer. Your blood pressure goes down.

You'll feel some more warmth at your fingertips because you're entering that parisimps. pathetic state. And again, this is this is stuff. No one's arguing that this stuff works. You can see it for yourself with with simple wearables. It's the fact that a lot of people aren't accessing this. That's what I was trying to do with the book is really good this information out there. Yeah. I see them as tools in the toolbox, simple, no cost or even low costs that are out there, widely available. And those are the best interventions. They're often written off as soft interventions, but when we add them up and actually integrate them into our life,

they make such a difference. One of those areas that you chat about, that's something that we all do too much often, but we all do, which is eating. And there is something that we can do when it comes to how we eat that could also benefit this process. And it has to do with chewing. Can you chat a little bit about chewing

and how it's so central to what we're talking about here? Sure. There's a reason so many cultures did grace. before a meal that would stop for a moment and pray and take this very slow breath. They're eliciting a parasympathetic response. And so when you elicit a parasympathetic response, you're going to be able to digest your food so much better because the stomach and the intestines, those are some of the areas that are cut off when you're stressed out, which is why eating is so difficult after you've just had a big

fight with someone or if you're really amped up. So you can start by taking, and you can pray if you want. That's great before a meal. and you can start by taking a very slow and easy breath before you tuck in and start eating something. So beyond that, if you look at the way that the body gets rid of fat, it gets rid of fat with oxygen. You need oxygen to burn fat.

So you want to be able to be breathing efficiently and having that good circulation throughout your body to really burn more fat. So there's a bunch of different things tied to breathing and metabolism. Those are just a few of them to start off with. James, in conclusion, before you wrap up and tell our audience where they can keep in touch with you, your book and immersing yourself into this world of breath was so much about taking this, as you say, lost art, this thing that we once knew so intimately as core to our existence as human

being that we forgot about. In fact, when you wrote that, I thought of this quote by Eckhart Tolle, and I'm paraphrasing here, he said, it's in the nature of human beings to have something. and he's talking about levels of awareness around consciousness. It's in the nature of human beings to have something, lose it, find it again, and then understand it at a deeper level than they did when they first started off. Are there any other areas that you've been paying attention to that are similar or maybe have a lot of, yes,

have a lot of similarities to this world of breath? Things that we were so baked into our existence and maybe even evolution as human beings or core function of health, but we just forgot about it. And we don't even know maybe that we forgot about it. I think a really good analog is nutrition and is diet. So 120, 130 years ago, nutritionists were saying,

this process industrialized food is crappy for us. It's ruining our teeth. It's ruining our health. Who listen to them? Not a lot of people. So instead, we build this food pyramid that puts carbs at the very top of this pyramid that establishes all of these foods

that we knew weren't healthy for us. And this is a food pyramid we followed for a very long time. But yet, people were finding that when they weren't eating foods within this food pyramid, when they were actually eating more calories, more than the 2,000 calories we were supposed to eat a day, they were losing weight. In some cases, they could use diet to get rid of some.

forms of epilepsy or some forms of cancer. And so it was only until, like, decades and decades of all of these incongruities in the data, in the established data, that we realized that this whole paradigm that we had built around nutrition was completely wrong. Eating fat does not make you fat, right? And that's what we, that's what I had been told growing up. Everything I ate was, was low fat, high carb, high sugar. I was told that this. was the healthy stuff. So luckily, the cats out of the bag with a food thing, right? It's hard to find people who are now defending eating processed grains as a means to health. We know that whole foods, the original foods that we were eating for so many millions of years, those are the proper foods.

And I see that breathing is really this, it's so similar in so many ways. We keep discovering this stuff. It keeps going away. Discover it again. It's named something else. It's research somewhere else. It's considered a new discovery, but it's just a rehash on what we've already learned from so many centuries past. So I believe that we're right now at this new crest in breathing and in breathing awareness. And hopefully we have different ways of disseminating information. So I don't think it'll get buried again. The foundation of science is absolutely rock solid.

And the great thing is you can see for yourself just adjusting your breathing. in some very simple ways. You can just see how immediately that affects you.