Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee - #197 How To Transform Your Health Through Your Breath with James Nestor

Episode Date: July 6, 2021

CAUTION: This episode contains mild swearing. I’m delighted to welcome James Nestor, the brilliant science journalist and author of Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art back to the podcast. James and I first spoke last September on episode 124. It was such a popular episode – in fact the YouTube version is my most-watched show! And I knew there was so much more I wanted to talk about with this inspiring guest, who’s such a wealth of knowledge on the untapped potential of breathwork. Since its publication last spring, James’s book has become an international bestseller, translated into 30 languages. Much of its appeal, I believe, comes from the author’s easy-to-read yet rigorous, objective approach. James isn’t trying to convince us that any one technique is better than another, or to push his opinion. He writes as an enquiring journalist, looking for the science to support effects that have been celebrated for thousands of years. It doesn’t matter if you missed last year’s conversation or you’re new to the concept of breathwork, as this episode is a handy recap. We cover all the basics of nasal breathing, the science of carbon dioxide tolerance, and the benefits of harnessing our breath for conditions ranging from asthma to anxiety, emphysema to scoliosis. And if you did catch our previous chat? Rest assured we go way deeper in this one! We delve into some of the super-breathing techniques like Tummo breathing (as popularised by Wim Hof), Holotropic Breathwork and Sudarshan Kriya. James shares his own experience of each, as well as the evidence behind them. Not only has James spent years researching and collating his work, he’s been talking about his findings non-stop to a fascinated audience for the past year. And yet his enthusiasm shows no sign of waning. That, he says, is because he has first-hand knowledge of how life-changing breathwork can be. It’s free, it’s easy, it doesn’t require much of your time, and the results can be instantaneous. I think you’ll be motivated and inspired to try some of the tips that James shares as you listen. So why is it that we have come so far from what should come naturally to us? Answers to all this, and more, in today’s episode. I hope you enjoy listening.  Thanks to our sponsors: http://www.calm.com/livemore http://www.vivobarefoot.com/uk/livemore http://www.athleticgreens.com/livemore Show notes available at https://drchatterjee.com/197 Follow me on https://www.instagram.com/drchatterjee DISCLAIMER: The content in the podcast and on this webpage is not intended to constitute or be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your doctor or other qualified health care provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition. Never disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because of something you have heard on the podcast or on my website.

If you're able to improve your health and improve the efficiency of your body within a few minutes, just imagine what's going to happen after a few days or a few weeks or a few months and you start to understand how your breathing is such an integral part of your healing and your long-term health. Hi, my name is Rangan Chatterjee. Welcome to Feel Better, Live More. Hello, how are you doing? Thank you for joining me for another episode of my podcast. And this week's conversation is a good one. My guest is the brilliant science journalist and author of the international bestseller, Breath, The New Science of a Lost Art, Mr. James Nestor. Now, if you're a regular listener of my show,

you will know that I spoke to James about a year ago, on episode 124 and it was a really popular episode. In fact, the YouTube version of that conversation is my most watched show to date. We covered a whole variety of different topics last time, but breathwork is such a big topic and one that I find endlessly fascinating. So to celebrate the paperback release of James's book, I invited him back onto the show to talk more about the untapped potential of our breath, especially when it comes to improving the health of our bodies and our minds. Now, since his publication last spring, James's book has become a huge international bestseller, translated into 30 different languages. And I think much of its appeal comes from James's easy to read, yet rigorous and objective approach.

You see, James isn't trying to convince us that any one technique is better than another, or to push his opinion. He writes, as an inquiring journalist looking for the science to support effects that have been celebrated for thousands of years. It really doesn't matter if you missed last year's conversation with James or you're brand new to the concepts of breathwork as this episode is a handy recap. We cover all the basics of nasal breathing, the science of carbon dioxide tolerance and the benefits of harnessing our the science of carbon dioxide tolerance, and the benefits of harnessing our breath for a whole variety of different conditions, such as asthma, anxiety, emphysema, and scoliosis. And if you did catch our previous conversation,

rest assured we go way deeper in this one and cover a variety of brand new topics. We really go deep into what James calls super breathing techniques like tumour breathing, as popularised by Wim Hof, holotropic breathwork, and Sudarshan Kriya. And James shares his own experience of each, as well as the evidence behind them. I guess what I love most about talking to James is his passion. You know, he's been talking about his findings for well over a year to a global audience on podcasts, online. Yet, he's still just as passionate as the first time I spoke to him. And that's because he says he's got first-hand knowledge of how life-changing breathwork can be. It's free,

it's easy, and it doesn't require much of your time. I'm pretty sure that by the end of this conversation, you will be motivated and inspired to try some of the tips that James shares. I think this is an incredibly fascinating conversation. I really hope you enjoy listening. And now, on to my conversation with Mr. James Nestor. What percentage of Western populations are thought to breathe through their mouth? And why is that so problematic? Well, it's hard to pin down exactly how many people are habitual mouth breathers, but the percentages that I've seen in studies range from about 25% all the way up to 50%.

Kids tend to mouth breathe more than adults. Females tend to mouth breathe more than males. And we know that about 60% to 70% of the population sleeps with an open mouth. So it's the majority in some cases of us are sleeping or breathing with an open mouth throughout hours and hours of the day, which is bad news across the board. the board. If someone is sleeping with the mouth open, we say bad news, but what's actually going on in the body? What actually happens? So and why should people care about changing from mouth breathing to nose breathing? So I've been sleeping with an open mouth, as far as I've known. I'm sure it began in childhood, I was definitely sleeping with an open

mouth in adulthood, which is why I would go to sleep with this by my bed every single night. Didn't matter if I was in a hotel, if I was camping, I would always have water by my bed because I would wake up, my mouth would be parched dry. So not only does it dehydrate us we lose about 40 percent more moisture breathing through the mouth but it changes the ph in our mouths which makes us more susceptible to cavities and dentists have known this for more than a hundred years there's studies dating back over a hundred years that say that mouth breathing directly contributes to cavities dr mark berhena who's a dentist out here and a sleep researcher he believes that mouth breathing is the number one cause to cavities. Dr. Mark Burhana, who's a dentist out here and a sleep researcher, he believes that mouth breathing is the number one cause of cavities, even beyond sugar consumption. So not only does it mess up our mouths, but we're also exposing ourselves

to everything in the external environment. So when we mouth breathe, our lungs become an external organ. If you live in a city like I do, that means you're making yourself so much more susceptible to inhaling pollution, allergens, even viruses and other pathogens. So our nose is our first line of defense for the body. And it's really important to breathe through your nose at night as well, because it helps to push back those tissues at the back of the throat. And it can can in some cases make you less susceptible to snoring and sleep apnea i mean those potential downsides are you

know pretty serious but the potential upside is also pretty profound there and i've got to say a big thank you to you actually james because the first time you came on my podcast, you shared a tip, a very simple tip that has been transformative within my own family home. I have had other experts on before talking about the breath, nasal breathing, brilliant people like Brian McKenzie, Patrick McKeown. And my audience have always responded really well to those conversations. But you gave a tip about just a small bit of tape when you put on your mouth, nothing to make you feel claustrophobic or as if you can't breathe, just a small bit of tape, like a stamp, a postage stamp size, I think is what you said. a postage stamp size, I think is what you said. My wife implemented that tip immediately.

And I'll tell you what happened. Yeah, like you said, she wasn't drinking during the night. Normally she has a big glass of water and she drinks several times throughout the night. But the most striking thing was I've always been the early wiser in the house. And I love that time to myself. I'm downstairs, I make my coffee, I do some reading. And then a couple of days later, my wife, Fid, rocks up at 6am into the kitchen. I'm like, hey, babe, is everything okay? She goes, yeah, I feel great. I'm like, what are you doing? She goes, no, no, I just woke up. I feel great. I've come down. That was not a one-off. That has continued. So essentially, we have really experimented with this we have seen times when she doesn't wear the tape at times where she does and she

gets up earlier and she feels fresher so this has been completely game-changing and i just want to say a big thank you for that well i wish i could be responsible for that hack. And if so, I'm sure I would have made a billion dollars and would be calling in from my yacht in Monte Carlo. But I had learned about this from researchers in the field, and it sounded so sketchy to me. And then I went on YouTube and saw stuff that was even sketchier. So this idea of sleep taping to a lot of people, it reminds them of a hostage situation which is bad or some bondage thing which for some of us is bad i guess some people enjoy that and that's great but what the only thing it's really doing is that it's training your mouth to be shut this isn't

hermetically sealing your mouth up okay it's just a little piece of tape and if your mouth is shut at night that means you're nasal breathing and and if your nasal breathing you're better protecting your lungs. You're breathing more healthily You're breathing more efficiently your heart rate is gonna go down likely and you're gonna be able to celebrate in so many other benefits So there's nothing sketchy about that and nothing Controversial about the fact that when we nasal breathe we we can sleep better. And this has been completely transformative for me as well. And if there's one thing I've heard from people in the last year since the book has come out, I've received thousands of letters from people saying, I no longer snore. Some people say, I no longer have sleep apnea.

Here's my sleep data. People with kids who had ADHD and other developmental problems are saying their kids are sleeping so much better using this. So, you know, again, I would love to take credit, but it's really the researchers who have been spending decades and decades researching the difference between nasal breathing and mouth breathing, the importance of nasal breathing at night that should really take the credit for that. What was really striking in our first conversation just about a year ago now was the realization that you approached the whole of breathing and breath work through the mind of a skeptic. You weren't sure. You're like, well, what is all this? Is it really

true? And I find that fascinating that through that lens, you found the research, you found the science, and then you've arguably written one of the most impactful books on breathwork and breathing of all time. Given the impact your book has had, the reach it's had, the way it's really putting it on the map in a way that very few books have managed to do, what do you attribute that to? Well, it's interesting that we look at journalism now as being different from skepticism. But in my mind, journalism is you are paid to be a skeptic, you are paid to be truly objective. But there's so much BS from both sides of the argument now whether you're talking about

medicine or politics or the environment or whatever that you can't really make out what's really true throughout all of that noise everyone constantly yelling at you so I don't view myself so much as you know a dyed-in-wool skeptic, I do view myself as a science journalist. And so my job is to go out and listen to everybody and interview everybody. I probably did 200, 300 interviews for this book. You know, I spent so many years looking at the real science and talked to experts in the field, but I also talked to people who were breathing therapists, who weren't experts in the medical science of breathing, but I also talked to people who were breathing therapists, who weren't experts in the medical science of breathing, but who were clinicians, who worked with people for decades and

decades and helped teach thousands of people how to breathe better and saw how they improved. So in a lot of ways, I just viewed this book as me doing my job. I have no skin in the game on one side of the camp or the other camp to believe anything. But I do have an interest in looking at data and looking at what's been measured and looking at what has worked. And so that's how I want to continue approaching subjects is to call BS when I see it, but at the same time, be open-minded enough to really listen to everybody and look at what they've done and see where the truth lies. Yeah. Given that you've had so many emails and so much feedback, you've mentioned that mouth taping at night is something that comes up regularly what are some

of the other things that come up where people are fed back to you that you know i tried this james and actually this has now got better etc etc well a lot of people have written and said that they are so grateful for having this information but behind their thankfulness, there's an irritation and a frustration that it took them reading a book to learn about these things, to learn how asthma can be significantly reduced. It can even be reversed by taking control of your breathing. of your breathing. And if you don't believe me, all you have to do is look at the dozens and dozens and dozens of scientific studies that have proven this. Or talk to Patrick McEwen, whom I know was on your show. This guy's, for 20 years, he's been teaching people how to reverse their asthma. So I think that some of this is due to, again, all of the noise. It has to do with the internet. Everyone's got a voice now, which is great, but it's also problematic as we're seeing. And it took, I guess, you know, someone to go in

objectively and to really look at this stuff and to look at what had worked and to talk to the people on, again, both sides. So I think that this knowledge is obviously a great thing. And that's the only thing that we really have right now that the internet can provide is knowledge. People have access to information they would not have access to start to take control of their health in different ways. And to listen to experts who have years and years of experience actually helping people, not just conducting studies, but helping people day in and day out. And I think that that information and those perspectives are really the most valuable. and those perspectives are really the most valuable. It's interesting that there's an anger and a frustration coming through.

And I can see why there would be an anger, because if you can reduce how much you're taking your inhaler, let's say for asthma, if you can reduce your anxiety or even eliminate your anxiety by working on some breathing practices, you may well be thinking, well, why the hell have I not heard about this before when I've been to my doctor or my healthcare professional? So I understand that anger. I really do. Well, a lot of it comes to the capacity that healthcare professionals have with their patients. There's doctors in my family, we talk about this stuff all the time.

And they're dealing with acute, often serious problems. So if I get in a car accident, the last thing I want is breathing practices. I want surgery. I want the latest in Western technology to help sew me up. But the people who have been left out in the cold are the people with these milder chronic issues. It's only when these milder chronic issues becomes really serious that people get treatment. But oftentimes that's too late. And I heard this so many times through so many researchers and so many doctors over the years, and I'm still hearing it all the time. And there was a quote that actually Brian McKenzie told me, which I thought was great, is, Eastern medicine is great if you want to live. Western medicine is great if you don't want to die. So there's a big difference in those two things. And I think that they both have enormous benefits, but we shouldn't be thinking that you have to pick one or the other. And I think that's

where it gets really problematic. If you have a very serious disease and Western medicine can help you, why on earth wouldn't you help yourself through that? So it's about integrating these two things and knowing when to say when to each of them, which I think is really the key. And if you look at the top medical institutions in the world right now, this is the direction everything's going in from Harvard to Stanford to Yale to Oxford, you know, and that's inspiring. It's taking a while to get there, but these scientific revolutions can take decades. You know, I love that quote that Brian shared with you. It's really made me think, but it's spot on. You know, certainly in my 20 years experience of seeing patients,

I'd have to say that is completely spot on. I recognize maybe five years in that actually, you know what, we're really good at acutes. We're just not as good with this sort of chronic stuff a lot of the time. And, you know, I'm very proud to be a doctor, but I also, I think we should be honest and say, well, you know, these tools are great, but actually we're a bit limited. Can we get a bigger toolbox in certain areas? One of the sort of modern voices who has really helped to elevate breath work is Wim Hof. And, you know, I want to talk about Wim's methods and some of the pros and the potential cons that some people talk about with those sort of hyperventilation type breaths. I think that's going to be really important. But I wanted to

ask you, James, I talk about breathwork a lot. And what I hear is there's a lot of confusion. There's a lot of confusion that, oh, you know, I thought we need to breathe less. But now you're saying to breathe 30 times, then hold my breath with the Wim Hof methods. And I wonder if you could sort of unpick that for people. You know, what are the broad principles of these different breathing techniques? And when and how should people think about bringing them into their lives? So I was as confused as anyone when I was researching this book and learned this exact thing.

And when you start investigating different breathing methods, there are different breathing philosophies and different breathing camps. So the Buteyko people will say, you only breathe very slowly. You only breathe through your nose. You never want to over-breathe. And the Wim Hof people, including Wim himself, says, no, breathe, everybody, breathe, go, go, go. So who's right? And they're both right, is what I learned. It just depends on what you want to get out of your breath. So for the majority of the time, you do want to breathe slowly, rhythmically, lightly through the nose, okay? That is how you're going to get the most oxygen, the most energy for the least effort, and that's exactly what you want

throughout the day. But sometimes you want to push your breath and you want to use it to purposely stress your body out. A lot of you may be thinking, why do I ever want to stress my body out? Right? I'm stressed throughout the day. I'm answering emails, dealing with calls, dealing with the kids, exercising. But that's exactly why you should use breathing to stress your body out. Because what these practices do is they focus that stress into a controlled space in your day. So the Wim Hof method, you're not going to do that all day. Just like you wouldn't be going to the gym and lifting weights all day. It would destroy your body. Wim's method, you do it for about 20 minutes. And the point is

that you use this method to purposely stress your body out so that the other 23 and a half hours of the day, you can be in a state of calm and control. And, you know, Wim calls it the Wim Hof Method, but he's so clear that these practices have been around thousands and thousands of years. You can call it tummo, you can call it sudarshan kriya, you can call it pranayama, whatever. They're all doing the same thing. They're forcing you to over-breathe,

to stress yourself out, then control your breath, and then to stress yourself out then control your breath and then to stress yourself out again then control it again like interval training so that you can control your stress and the science is very clear that these methods can have an incredible impact on both mental health and physical health, including autoimmune diseases. One of the most memorable bits in your book for me was when you were talking about your own experience of trying tumour breathing. And you said something to the effect of, I was stressing my body out, but this stress felt very different to the stress that I feel when I'm running late for an important meeting. And I thought that was really fascinating, this idea of stress, which we typically associate as being a bad thing. Certainly, the societal narrative

around stress is stress is bad, we want to avoid it. But that was a beautiful way of describing sort of helpful stress and unhelpful stress. And I wonder if you could expand on that a little bit. I think the difference is when you are rushing to a meeting, when you are trying to answer emails and trying to answer calls and getting very frustrated with the amount of work you have to do every day there's no outlet for that stress that stress seems to build and build and build and it starts coming out in different ways you get angry you can't think straight your blood pressure goes up you start clenching your fists or your muscles tighten and that's such bad news but if you clench your fist and tighten your muscles and control your breath and learn

to do this consciously, you can learn what that stress feels like and you can then learn to turn it off. So a lot of these practices have you do that to, I mean, Wim has, you know, you're holding your breath and then you're breathing as hard as you can. And then you're holding your breath again and taking one breath and then exhaling it. So this is stressful to the body. But what the body doesn't want is to be in these states of low-grade stress throughout the day and throughout the night. Periodic stress is very good, okay? Hermetic stress is very good for the body. That's how we evolved, to go and run after a tiger or fight off someone and then to chill out for the

rest of the day and the rest of the night. What's happening now is so many of us are staying in this chronic state of stress. It's like this IV drip of stress throughout the day. And you can see that in what this has done to our health. So inflammation is behind the vast majority of modern chronic diseases, whether you're looking at diabetes or heart disease or hypertension or whatever. And so this inflammation is exacerbated by this constant low-grade stress, whether that stress is coming from the foods you're eating, whether it's coming from the environment. So it's no coincidence that hunter-gatherer populations don't have any of these modern diseases that we have.

It's no coincidence that our ancestors, as far as we can see, didn't have the vast majority of these diseases we have today either. So that's a long way of saying that controlling the stress and using breathing as your presser release valve can have enormous benefits to your day-to-day health. We're living in incredibly stressful times at the moment. The world has significantly changed the way people live over the last 12, 15, 16 months or so. And stress anxiety is ramped up in many ways for so many people. One thing I don't think people still quite fully understand is how intimately our stress levels are linked with the way that

we breathe. And therefore, without that understanding, it's hard sometimes to persuade people that, hey, you know what, if you literally can hack that system by working on your breath, not for hours a day, just a few simple things, you can actually start to change your biology. So can you speak a little bit to how stress and breath are linked? Well, this is what's so great about breathing is you can feel the effects and you can see the effects immediately. When you're changing your diet, usually that takes a little while, right, to really see the transformative effects it has to eat a healthy diet.

It'll take maybe a few days, but if you want to lose weight, it's going to take a few weeks or it's going to take a few months. And, you know, so many of us today, we have a very short attention span. So I think that's one reason people fall off their diets. They're just like, oh, I'm sick of doing this. But with breathing, one of my favorite things to do is to put a pulse oximeter on someone put a heart rate variability monitor on someone have them breathe in a very specific way and then watch what happens after a minute right even after a few seconds you can see this transformation taking place in your body. You can watch your blood pressure go down 10 or 15 points.

I've seen mine even go down 20 points if I went from a state of being stressed to controlling my breathing and de-stressing myself through those means. That's what's been so convincing with a lot of the readers of the book and also to myself, is if you're able to improve your health and improve the efficiency of your body within a few minutes, just imagine what's going to happen after a few days or a few weeks or a few months. And you start to understand how your breathing is such an integral part of your healing and your long-term health. So I could get into the biochemical processes of it,

but that's the umbrella, right? That's the overview of what these things are doing. And again, if there are skeptics out there, and I hope there are, question what I'm saying, but then go and grab some of these monitors and breathe in a certain way and tell me what happens to your body and what happens to your brain. Because what's happening in the body as well is happening in the brain. EEG patterns transform when we start breathing in a slow rhythmic way different areas of the brain start coming online you're able to think more clearly because you're allowing your brain

to function at peak efficiency and we feel free to expand on the biochemistry because you know in that section where you were talking about your own experience with tumo breathing you also had this gorgeous phrase that it was as if tumo opened up your own body's pharmacy. And that stuck with me. I thought we've got these chemicals inside us already, but it seems as though certain breath practices can sort of unlock like that full potential that we're sort of maybe keeping suppressed because of the way we're breathing and the way we're living our daily lives. Just taking a quick break to give a shout out to AG1, one of the sponsors of today's show. Now, if you're looking for something at this time of year to kickstart your health, I'd highly recommend that you consider AG1.

AG1 has been in my own life for over five years now. It's a science-driven daily health drink with over 70 essential nutrients to support your overall health. It contains vitamin C and zinc, which helps support a healthy immune system, something that is really important, especially at this time of year. It also contains prebiotics and digestive enzymes that help support your gut health. All of this goodness comes in one convenient daily serving that makes it really easy to fit into your life no matter how busy you feel. It's also really, really tasty. The scientific team behind AG1 includes experts from a broad range of fields including longevity, preventive medicine, genetics and biochemistry. I talk to

them regularly and I'm really impressed with their commitment to making a top quality product. Until the end of January, AG1 are giving a limited time offer. Usually, they offer my listeners a one-year supply of vitamin D and K2 and five free travel packs with their first order. But until the end of January, they are doubling the five free travel packs with their first order. But until the end of January, they are doubling the five free travel packs to 10. And these packs are perfect for keeping in your backpack, office or car. If you want to take advantage of this limited time offer,

all you have to do is go to drinkag1.com forward slash live more. That's drinkag1.com forward slash live more. Well, this is what's been so fascinating and great to see about what Wim has been doing. So he's had so many skeptics too over the last 20 years. He said, okay, be skeptical. Just take me into your lab and I'll do whatever. You can shoot me up with E. coli. Sure. Sounds great. You can take blood work at various levels while I breathe. We can bring in some other people. You can take their blood work and see what happens. And that's what he's shown. We've known this for a long time, that breathing in certain ways will create and trigger these responses in your body to release

hormones, to release stress hormones, to release relaxing hormones, to open up the blood vessels. We already know all that, but I think that, you know, such a superhuman breather as Wim is, he's able to show the true potential of where breathing can take us. So I think that what he has shown is this stressful breathing can help the body better defend itself. It can bolster the immune function, which is why Wim Hof breathing has been shown to be so effective for some people with autoimmune diseases. Their immune systems have gone rampant. They're attacking healthy tissues in the body. That helps to reverse that. But we can also use breathing to release different feel-good hormones. And when we do that, we can trigger those releases at any time. And this is one of the reasons that I think Wim Hof breathing has become so popular, because it's so hard not to feel amazing at the end of

that breathing session. If anyone out there has done it, it's hard to see someone who hasn't had a very profound reaction after 20 minutes says, i feel so good you feel that good because you're triggering the release of these hormones in your body and that's what's um to me is allows people to keep coming back to this and to keep using it because you're creating a positive feedback loop to allow yourself to heal and also to allow your monkey mind to be entertained by the constant good feelings right the constant sometimes hallucinations that some of these breath work practices bring on and it's great I love the Wim Hof method I do it as often as I can which is usually a couple times a week I also love

Kundalini I also love Sudarshan Kriya. But all of these things are essentially doing the same thing to your body and brain. Some people say that in a society full of stress, full of adrenaline already, that these hyperventilation practices like TUMO, like the Wim Hof method, are not necessarily the best choices. So I wonder what you would say to that. Could this potentially be the wrong method for some people? To me, it's just another option. It's just another tool you have in your back pocket. So people are going to want to come to breathing for different reasons, and there is no overarching prescription that you can use to cure everyone's woes. There is a foundation of healthy breathing that I tried to establish in the book. I said, okay, I don't care

if you're an ultramarathoner or an asthmatic or have long-haul COVID or are just anxious. long-haul COVID or are just anxious, here are some breathing practices that will help everybody. And there are zero side effects to this, right? You're only going to feel better. You're only going to be able to perform better. It's just like with food. We know that eating a healthy diet benefits everybody. But when you get into more specific chronic conditions, you're absolutely right. Some people with panic and anxiety would hate Wim Hof breathing. And they'd hate Sudarshan Kriya because these incorporate states of extreme hyperventilation. And that's going to give them a lot of trouble. So with people like that, I would say

start slow, right? Start with that five and a half seconds in, five and a half seconds out. That's even too much for a lot of people. So it's so important not to try to go and kick your breathing's butt, and this is what Westerners tend to do with everything, but to really dip into it slowly and become immersed into it at your body and your mind's own level of comfort. And so with people with anxiety and with people with asthma and panic, what I've tried to tell them is go very slowly. Start with three seconds in, three seconds out. And you would be amazed how few people have actually breathed in that way. Just three seconds in, three seconds out. Get comfortable with that and extend it. So if you're talking about someone who is already an extreme biohacker,

you know, they're in constant ketosis and they're eating all the right stuff and taking all the right pills and potions and they just want to totally push it. Go big then. Go do the Wim Hof method. Go try holotropic breathwork. That'll really, really send you on a whirl. And those people are already prepared, right? They're conditioned to do this. It's the same reason why you wouldn't say to somebody who's been sitting on a couch for the past year, go and run a marathon, because it's going to be really good for your body. You have to do what your body is telling you to do and to listen to your body and go into this stuff slowly. One of the things that I love personally with breathwork and that I've seen so impactful with

hundreds, if not thousands of my patients, is that tuning into your breath tunes you into your body, right? You start to gain an awareness that often people have never had, certainly for many, many years, just to stop, quieten the noise and actually listen to certain things. I'm interested as to what practices you do on a daily basis. If any, what I do, I usually take my mouth at night, but I also love doing breath holds when I'm walking. And I know you have written about this in your book, but when I'm out for a walk after about five or 10 minutes, I will do, you know, I will be breathing through my nose. I'll breathe out. I'll, you know, I'll sort of breathe out a normal exhale and then I'll see how far I can walk until I get that sort of medium air hunger. And then I'll do that five or 10 times. And what I love about that is, A, I can see myself getting better. So my body is better able to tolerate that carbon dioxide buildup

compared to, let's say, two years ago. So that's really great to see. But also, if I haven't slept well, or if I'm quite stressed and tense with work pressures and deadlines, I find I can't hold my breath as long. And it's almost like a early warning sign for me as to sort of what else is going on in my body. So that's one thing I love. And I would really encourage people to get into some form of breath work because I think it kind of teaches you about yourself and your state of stress. So breath holding has been a part of every breathing practice for thousands and thousands of years. Ancient Hindus were talking about breath holding has been a part of every breathing practice for thousands and thousands of years. Ancient Hindus were talking about breath holding, you know, 3,000, 4,000 years ago.

The Chinese, ancient Chinese were saying the exact same thing, same exact practice, different culture. Were they talking to one another then? I don't think so. And yet they came to the same conclusions. to me it's no coincidence that now modern science is really catching up to what our ancestors have been saying for so long and we know that co2 tolerance plays a huge role in panic in asthma in anxiety we know that because the studies have shown very clearly that people who can't hold their breath for a very long time are much more susceptible to suffer from these conditions. I thought that this was fascinating. I went out to the Laureate Institute of Brain Research and met with Dr. Justin Feinstein,

who is a neuropsychologist out there doing CO2 work. And he's one of the only researchers I found doing work into this thing called CO2 and CO2 tolerance. And he had a huge NIH study looking at CO2 tolerance and panic. And he's the one who told me that so many of his patients over the years, he would ask them just to sit down and before he hooked them up to any monitors, he asked them just to take a sip of air and hold their breath. And this is what they did. Then he'd ask them to do it again. Usually they'd last about two seconds, three seconds. And you see this all the time with asthmatics

and with people suffering from even anorexia and other fear-based disorders. So he kept wondering if you could allow them to tolerate more CO2, if it would allow them to better control their condition, because so much of their condition was caused by this perpetual hyperventilation. They were so scared of holding their breath because a breath hold to them reminded them of a panic attack or an asthma attack or an anxiety attack that they had conditioned themselves to breathe like this all the time. And this wasn't just a few people either. This is so common in communities of people who have those issues. So he has continued doing this research. And what I thought was even more fascinating is he's not the one who invented this stuff. You can look back more than a hundred years

and see researchers at Yale and Harvard and Boston University and University of Wisconsin doing work in CO2 and mental health conditions. And this stuff worked incredibly well, not just breathing retraining, but actually having these people inhale a bit of CO2. And what does that do? It replicates holding your breath. That's what it does. Because when you hold your breath, your CO2 increases. These people can hold their breath. So they allow them to celebrate in the benefits of breath holding by giving them a mouthful of CO2. So I just kept finding these stories over and over again, where we had learned this, it had been studied at the most prestigious medical institutions, learned this, it had been studied at the most prestigious medical institutions and proven to be incredibly effective. And then we had forgotten it. And now a few people are re-remembering it

right now. And that's what's been exciting since the book has come out is there seems to be a lot more interest in CO2 and CO2 tolerance, both in athletes and in people who are looking to overcome mental health issues. Yeah, I mean, just a recap for people, if they didn't hear our first conversation, if they're not familiar, that drive to breathe doesn't come from our oxygen levels dropping, it comes from our carbon dioxide levels building up. And if we can't tolerate that, we have to breathe, right? So, you know, this CO2, the carbon dioxide training that you're talking about can have, I could just see physiologically how many different conditions that could immediately have an impact on particularly anxiety. I can, you can really see how it would help people.

You mentioned athletics. And I know you've written and spoken about, I think it was at the 1968 men's track and field team. And, you know, tell us a little bit about that and how athletes and fitness enthusiasts can use sort of breath holding and nasal breathing and all kinds of methods to actually improve their performance. Well, again, these were methods that have been used for decades and decades but kind of became less popular for for some reason in the last few decades but one story in particular which I thought was so interesting was Carl Stow's work looking at a long exhale so he was a choral conductor, and he found that so many of his singers were breathing these very shallow breaths. And when you breathe very shallowly, you don't have the resonance, and you can't carry a note for as long. So he started training them to exhale longer.

And how our breath comes into our bodies, the lungs just don't inflate on their own, right? They need something to do this. They're just like two balloons. But we have something called a diaphragm underneath the lungs. And when we breathe in, that diaphragm lowers. And when we breathe out, that diaphragm lifts up. So Stow found that even within his singers, they had such limited range of their diaphragms. And by extending the range of their diaphragms, they allowed themselves more lung capacity and they could sing so much better. So he ended up going and retraining singers at the Met Opera who were already pretty good singers to begin with, but they were even better after he taught them these new tricks. And he got so popular that VA hospitals on the East Coast asked him to come in and help people with emphysema,

who were basically put on gurneys with an oxygen cannula up to their noses and fed a steady diet of antibiotics and left in the hospital to die. Nobody had any idea what to do with these people. Emphysemics lose the ability to engage their diaphragm. Parts of their lungs get inflamed and destroyed by emphysema. Those parts don't grow back, but if you engage more of your diaphragm, you can use the rest of the lung to compensate. So Stow was able to take these people who were literally left for dead, retrain them only in breathing, that's the only thing he did, and these people got up and left the hospital and went to live normal lives. And there's x-rays of this, there's data sheets of it. I have even heard from a few of these patients whom Staud treated, and they said he absolutely saved their lives. So that's a very long way of saying Staud then got even more popular

that he was asked by the Olympic Committee for the U.S. to come and retrain the runners for the Mexico City Olympics. And he used the exact same methods, engaging more diaphragmatic movement. And these runners went to Mexico City, which has an elevation of like 6,000 or 7,000 feet. And they were the only team not to use oxygen before and after, and they destroyed everybody. It's still the greatest performance of any track team in the history of the Olympics. And they were able to do this because they knew how to breathe properly. So a lot of trainers, Patrick McEwen being one, Brian McKenzie being the other, they have adopted these same tricks and they're using them to create these absolute monster of athletes right now. These people who are just really outperforming anything they were

able to do before. For me, I mean, fascinating to hear that, but this is not just about performance, because I'm currently training to do the London Marathon in October. Never done a marathon before. Two years ago, I probably wouldn't have considered myself a runner, certainly not a long distance runner. Long story as to how this came about. But I have got really clear in my goals for this. You know, and one of my goals is I am going to complete the London Marathon, nasal breathing the entire way around. Okay, that is my goal. Now, some people say, oh, you're not going to manage it. And I'm not saying everyone has to do this. I know there are times when you want to mouth

breathe and run faster and maybe move more oxygen. I get that. But what I'm noticing, and when I speak to other runners who've, recreational runners, who've moved from mouth breathing to nasal breathing, it's not, yes, performance can get better a lot of the time after a bit of crossover periods, But recovery tends to be quicker. Sleep is often better afterwards. People who wear trackers, heart rate comes down a lot quicker afterwards. These are super important metrics for overall health and well-being. So I really want to emphasize that point because it ain't just about getting faster. It is about doing a lot of these activities in a way that's just more physiologically sort of harmonious with our bodies and the way they're meant to work.

Do you know what I mean? Yeah, I'm glad you brought that up because this is also something that Brian McKenzie has mentioned to me various times. He's dealing with the very elite level of athletes. So sometimes these people are entering zone five, zone four, you know, even, and some mouth breathing can help them when they are absolutely peaking during a competition. That's perfectly fine to occasionally breathe through your mouth. And I just want to make that really clear because some people have written so

confused. They're trying not to ever open their mouth during the day and say, oh God, what have I done here? So right now I'm breathing through my mouth a little bit, right? When we laugh, we breathe through our mouth. I'm going to sigh right now. I'm breathing through my mouth. This is perfectly fine. I'm talking about habitual breathing and that includes in athletic performance. So Brian trains some of his athletes. When they really reach these extreme states, you might want to default to mouth breathing for about 15 seconds and then bring it back down. And that's great. So with jogging, the whole point of athletic performance is to work at peak efficiency, especially when you're competing.

Why would you want to be expending energy on something if you didn't have to? And then analogy that I've used before, it's imagine you're in a car and would you at every stop sign just be revving the motor? Would you just be peaking the RPMs like every single time you could without moving fast? No, you want to be working that car at the level of the performance you need. So if you want to go fast, yeah, pedal to the metal. But the rest of the time, it should be operating in a state of efficiency. Your body is no different. We have this huge piston right here in our chest, right? And it's called a diaphragm and it goes up and down just like a piston. So if you can allow that diaphragm to go up and down fewer times and each time it goes up and each time it goes down, you get more energy. Why on earth wouldn't you want to do that and so that's what nasal breathing can help you do you tend to take very deep breaths when you're nasal breathing especially when you're working out

and you will be taking slower breaths so you will be able to gain more energy with less effort and i'm very curious to see what happens rangan I hope you don't get hurt because then this whole theory is just thrown out the window. There's a lot of pressure now not to get hurt. These analogies with exercise, with diet, they're so apt. We don't see breathing in the same way, but we really should. We understand that people have got to find the right diet for them. There's some broad principles that most people, not everyone, most people would agree on. But within that, you can experiment to find what really works for you. And I kind of see breathwork and breathing practice in the same way.

There are some broad things. Generally speaking, we want to be breathing through our nose as much as possible. But there are various techniques we might want to use at various times to get a certain effect. And as you say, there is that confusion and it becomes oversimplified. Oh, I tried that. It doesn't work. I'm not going to bother with breathing. And really, we need a bit more nuance than that. And I've got to say, I think you've put us a fantastic job off that nuance there and showing that there's all these different methods, these different techniques. You know, James, I'm really struck chatting to you that when you tell these stories, there's still this real passion and fire

in your belly that I heard from you almost 12 months ago when we first spoke. And your book has been a global smash hit, right? You will have done hundreds of interviews, short form ones on television shows, long form ones like on my podcast and other long form shows. Why are you still so passionate about it? Do you ever get bored talking about this stuff? Because I'd never get that impression from you that you're done talking about it. Well, either I'm a great actor, which I'm not, or I'm genuinely interested in this stuff. And I'm more interested in it now than I ever was. I know that sounds like a cliche, but it's really true. I get really turned on by this because I know how much it can help people.

I know how much it's helped me and it's helped the hundreds of other people that I've talked to and the thousands of people that I've heard from. And what I like about breathing so much is it's free. It's available to everybody. You can use it when you want to. You can use it on the couch. You can use it when you want to. You can use it on the couch. You can use it on your bicycle. You can use it during a conference call. It's always with us. And so, if it's always with us, we always have an opportunity to do it a little better. And this doesn't require you to wear special robes and to sit in a corner for an hour a day. It's something

that just as you had mentioned, you're walking around, I'm going to try my breath holds. You're sitting watching TV, I'm going to try to breathe more slowly. You can really do it at any time and always get the benefits from it. And that's really the last thing is, I have seen no negative side effects to breathing better. You only get benefits from it. And it's a small ask for a lot of people. It's one thing to ask someone to go, who's a carnivore, to go vegan or keto. It's another thing to ask them just to take something they're already doing all day and to slightly tweak it so that they could be a little bit healthier and in some cases be a lot healthier. So I think that's the thing that keeps me really excited about this.

Another thing is I have been lucky enough to speak at various medical schools in the U.S. here at Harvard, at Stanford, at Yale. And I am seeing the excitement within these places, which is ironic because so much of the research that I put in this book was researched at these institutions. And these people are like, where do you find this stuff? And I've said, in your medical library, here it is, here are the 20 papers I found there. And that's what's really exciting because I really believe that this message shouldn't be a us against them or this or that. It needs to be a collaboration and it needs to be based on real science, real measurements. And that's what this stuff is based on.

And so to be able to now collaborate with some of these people is an absolute thrill. You know, it's making my days a little more hectic, but it's something that I'll never give up doing. And there's various initiatives we're trying to put together right now that are all volunteer based, trying to get the word out, you know, especially to kids, especially to people in developing nations, who this stuff could really help. Yeah. I mean, the subtitle, I think, of your book says that all the new science of a lost art, you really give homage to where this comes from in all the interviews I've seen you do before. Tell us a little bit about that some of these origins. Tell us a little bit about that, some of these origins.

So again, my job was to look at the full story of conscious breathing. And I had no interest in just focusing on one thing or the other, which is why this book was such an absolute nightmare to write and put together. Because when you're taking something that's been around for 5,000 years and misunderstood for most of that time, there's a lot of weeds to go through to find the real kernels of truth. But one of the most interesting things that I'm able to do as a researcher is to look through history and make these connections. And this is the part of book research I actually love the most, is to read these ancient texts and to see what so much of what they've been saying

we have then rediscovered but we have just rephrased it in different ways so that includes ancient chinese texts of the tao to ancient hindu texts and i was able to meet with Sergio Alvarez de Rose, who is a real scholar of the ancient Hindu text. And he's the one who really was able to point out the text that showed me that this concept we have today of yoga, of this vinyasa flow, of these these movements and then you hold a pose and then you move again which I'm a huge fan of I do it all the time I love it that has nothing to do with ancient yoga so ancient yogis didn't move around they sat in one place and breathed so yoga was a entire technology of breathing. And it started in the Indus Valley civilization about

5,000 years ago, even longer than that. There are figurines and there are sculptures of people in conscious breathing poses, unmistakable poses. So scholars attribute that as the beginning of yoga and of breathwork. It had probably been around for thousands of years before that. And then we get into when people started writing these practices down, Rig Veda, other books in yoga, and they start really describing the specifics on how to do these practices. They collect them all. Pantanjali's Yoga Sutras is the famous text, really codifying and including all of these different practices. But what was so interesting to me, one of the many things that was interesting, was to see this tract in ancient Hindu text, right? Understanding breathing, adopting these specific practices.

Then seeing the exact same tract in ancient Chinese texts. Saying the exact same stuff, you know, just in different words. And so you know that there's something there. These people didn't have pulse oximeters. They weren't able to check blood pressure. But what they did have was time. They had time and they had patience

to look at what worked and what didn't work. And luckily today, we have all these instruments to measure what they were saying and to actually see how it pans out. And it turns out that so much of what they were saying was 100% true. And again, don't believe me, you can see this in the measurements on modern machines. believe me, you can see this in the measurements on modern machines. I spoke to Ryan Holiday a little while ago on the show, and a similar theme came up, which is some of these truths that he writes about. You can see, yes, in ancient Greek texts and Roman texts and Indian texts and Chinese texts, you know, very different civilizations at different times and different parts of the planet. And we were just talking about how that should just give us more confidence that, hey, this stuff is real. It's so humbling. And I think it should be very humbling for modern humans. You know, if we, I think we do sometimes have this arrogance that we've got all this incredible science now, and I not against it i think it's great to have the science to to back stuff up but it's also very humbling to know

actually you know what humans have been pretty clever for a long period of time and it kind of figured out a lot of stuff that they kind of just knew worked well i think we are apprehensive about things that we've discovered in the past because a a lot of that stuff was false. If you look at all the hucksters, the snake oil salesmen at the beginning of the century, I think this is what made people so paranoid about accepting and using things that weren't in the system, even though a lot of people didn't realize a lot of what was in the system was also false and didn't work and had been co-opted by by corporate look at sugar look what happened to our diet eat more processed grain everybody it's good for you

let's put that at the very top of the u.s food pyramid we know that stuff is a disaster for our health right um and yet it's taken us 50 years to start to reverse that. So even when you think about nasal breathing, here's a quote from the Tao that's about 1300 years old. It says the breath inhaled through the mouth is called ni qi or adverse breath. Be extremely careful not to breathe your breath through the mouth. I mean, this goes to do with everything that we had just been mentioning about nasal breathing. And I sprinkled the book, some of these quotes throughout it, but there were so many more that were even more profound. They just happened to be even longer. So I think that this idea that whatever is new is better, we know this is false

because if you look at medicine, and this is something that three different doctors told me about years ago, they said about 50 to 70% of what we've known about medicine in the past has been proven wrong, including now. Today, about 50 to 70 percent of how we're treating ourselves with medicine will be proven wrong in the future. So when you think about things like that, you think that, oh, that's impossible. How can that be? Look at all the procedures we used to do 20 years ago. Look at all the different drugs we used to use 20 years ago that aren't being used now. So if you think about some of these practices, which have really been time proven over hundreds or thousands of years, why would a practice continue if it weren't working? Books were extremely valuable back in the day. Why would

they continue to fill their books with the same exact message over and over if this stuff wasn't working? You could say, or maybe they were clueless, or this is spiritual stuff and it doesn't apply to us now. That's fine. But again, as I keep mentioning, we have instruments to measure it. So why not? If something sounds crazy, that's fine. Be skeptical, but measure it. That's how science is supposed to work. Science is supposed to be the exploration of the unknown, right? You're not supposed to keep proving the same thing over and over again, which is what so

much of science is doing right now. You're supposed to explore the unknown. And it's those scientists and researchers, which really change our worldview. And in many cases have drastically changed our understanding of health. And those are the people that I try to track down and write about. Yeah. I think it was in first year or second year at Edinburgh Medical School, we were told the exact same thing by one of our professors, 50% of what we're teaching you is going to be false. The problem is we don't know what, which is the 50%. Um, and I think we all need just to keep that humbleness and humility as we, as we go through the world,

thinking, you know, is this really true? Or may we just be seeing one side of this here? It's, it's kind of super fascinating. I mean, you mentioned scientists and researchers. I would also add to that clinicians. I really love chatting to experienced clinicians who have, you know, these are often N equal one things. I totally understand you. You can't replicate proper science done in proper conditions that can be repeated over and over again. But I think sometimes we get the ideas from clinicians who

say, you know what, I'm trying this and I'm seeing this over and over again, that this is helping people and this is working. And I know certainly that's been a huge part of my own journey, a real frustration that the tools I was taught, I found brilliant for some people, but for a lot of my patients, I thought this is just really limited. I don't really feel I'm helping them. I feel I'm often just putting a sticking plaster on their symptom. And speaking to breath work, about six or seven years ago, I started talking to patients about something that I call the 3-4-5 breath. Breathe in for three, hold for four, breathe out for five. And I've written about it before, and I still get messages from people saying, this is my go-to for anxiety.

This is my go-to before, you know, before a stressful meeting. It just helps to calm me down, or students before their exams. And again, there's no research done yet on the 3-4-5 breath, but the principle of a longer exhale than inhale, consciously slowing down your breath. I mean, there's research on that. It's just something I found to be super practical that people can put in their back pocket. They don't need to remember anything complicated wherever they are. They can access it there and then without spending a single penny. Well, what you found is, I believe it is scientifically validated.

Because just as you mentioned there briefly, when you're inhaling, you're eliciting a sympathetic response, which is why your heart rate goes up, right? You're activating your body. And when you exhale or hold your breath, you're activating your body and when you exhale or hold your breath you're relaxing your body so if you're exhaling or holding your breath for three quarters of the time you're breathing you're going to become more relaxed so all those things are measured some people prefer the four seven eight breathing i've noticed with people with anxiety or asthma that that's way too long. It's too long, isn't it, to do? Yeah, but if you look at 4-7-8 too, it's just doing the exact same thing. Box breathing,

what's that doing? Four in, four hold, four out, four hold, three quarters of the time you're holding your breath or exhaling. So this is kind of what I was talking about. You find just these same variations on the same themes that are eliciting the same responses. And in my opinion, and this is just my opinion, I believe that the information, the data we get from clinicians who deal with people day in, day out, who have dealt with thousands of people, that in many ways is more important and valuable than a study with 20 people in a controlled environment. And the reason I say this is because the randomized controlled studies, that's the gold standard, and it's fantastic. Double blind. I love it. But look at all the different drugs and procedures that have passed through that gold standard and look at how many of those drugs are no longer used because they

killed people or made them sicker so there's something slightly off with that it's only when you get these things out to huge groups of people, if you can do randomized double-blind controlled studies in enormous groups of people, which is basically impossible, that you get the real kernel of truth there. So if we know that's not possible to have these huge randomized studies with thousands and thousands of people, what's the next best thing? An objective, scientifically minded clinician who sees what has worked, who adjusts his or her own practices to suit the patients and watches what happens. To me, that's solid gold right there. And that's why I think so many of these breathing practices have been developed by clinicians, right? And they've been tweaked by clinicians who have found just small little alterations here and there will have an even better effect and a better outcome. Before when we were talking about being in a car accident and

wanting the very best treatment that modern medicine has and contrasting that with the sort of more chronic conditions where we can put in practices like breathwork or preventive practices like breathwork to stop people getting ill in the first place. I think that broadly works. But when you were talking about Carl Stuff's work with emphysema, these are people, you know, severely ill at the end of the life, These are people, you know, severely ill at the end of the life, having huge benefit from learning to use their diaphragm better. I mean, that also speaks to the fact that it's about integrating it everywhere. Yes, it's prevention. But also when people are seriously ill, yeah, maybe they have to take some medication, but

you can also do breathing practices as well. I have several patients who use breathing practices. They've got very advanced pain from autoimmune arthritis type conditions and breathwork actually reduces their need for pain medication. Breathwork helps them sleep better. So again, just emphasizing, it's not either or. It can just be part of that armory that we're using no matter what we're facing. If we want to stay healthy and well, we can implement breathwork practices. But if we are severely ill as well, we can also use certain ones, I think, to help us.

Before we get back to this week's episode, I just wanted to let you know that I am doing my very first national UK theatre tour. I am planning a really special evening where I share how you can break free from the habits that are holding you back and make meaningful changes in your life that truly last. It is called the Thrive Tour. Be the architect of your health and happiness. So many people tell me that health feels really complicated, but it really doesn't need to be. In my live event, I'm going to simplify health and together we're going to learn the skill of happiness, the secrets to optimal health, how to break free from the habits that are holding you back in your life. And I'm going to teach you how to make changes that actually last. Sound good? All you have to do is go to drchatterjee.com forward slash tour,

and I can't wait to see you there. This episode is also brought to you by the Three Question Journal, the journal that I designed and created in partnership with Intelligent Change. Now journaling is something that I've been recommending to my patients for years. It can help improve sleep, lead to better decision making and reduce symptoms of anxiety and depression. It's also been shown to decrease emotional stress, make it easier to turn new behaviours into long-term habits and improve our relationships. There are, of course, many different ways to journal, and as with most things, it's important that you find the method that works best for you. One method that you may want to consider is the one that I outline in the three-question journal. In it, you will find a really simple and structured way

of answering the three most impactful questions I believe that we can all ask ourselves every morning and every evening. Answering these questions will take you less than five minutes, but the practice of answering them regularly will be transformative. Since the journal was published in January, I have received hundreds of messages from people telling me how much it has helped them and how much more in control of their lives they now feel. Now, if you already have a journal or you don't actually want to buy a journal, that is completely fine. I go through in detail all of the questions within the three-question

journal completely free on episode 413 of this podcast. But if you are keen to check it out, all you have to do is go to drchatterjee.com forward slash journal or click on the link in your podcast app. Yeah, that's really true. You know, one thing that Michael Gelb, who's a doctor and dentist and sleep researcher, and he's on every board of dentistry imaginable, and he's been doing this stuff for 30 years, he said that, he's like, oh, I only deal with the walking dead. It's only when people get so bad that they come to me.

And then, oh my God, now I have to fix you of that problem. The point with so much of health, if you look at health from an ancient yoga perspective, if you look at health from an ancient Chinese perspective or a Persian perspective, it is to not get sick. Health is used to as a preventative maintenance. You don't want to get sick. as a preventative maintenance, you don't want to get sick. You stop paying your doctor when you get sick in Chinese medicine, and you continue paying as long as you're healthy. That seems like an interesting way of doing this. I'm not saying that's the best way to go, but it's interesting

that they've taken that philosophy. So yeah, I want to be clear that breathing is so effective as preventative maintenance to keep a healthy lung volume as you grow older, to keep yourself calm, to keep yourself running efficiently. So very effective for that. But for even acute serious problems, it depends what that problem is. Stage four cancer, don't just do breath work and stop everything. That's a bad idea. And this is where I think that people get the wrong idea about this. They want to learn something and say,

oh, this is going to fix me. I'm going to ditch everything else and just go into this. Well, that's where you get into real trouble. But for people with these long standing chronic respiratory issues and autoimmune issues, breathwork can be incredibly effective. Alyssa Epple, she is a researcher here at University of California, San Francisco, just completed a study in rheumatoid arthritis and breathwork and cold exposure, basically the Wim Hof method. And you're starting to see this all over the place right now, because I think that this is one of the reasons there's no drawbacks to breathing better. You know, there's some drawbacks, there's always side effects to taking certain pharmaceutical drugs,

even though the health benefits are going to far outweigh those side effects most of the time. But learning how to breathe better has zero negative side effect. And for people with COPD and emphysema, what I found that was so sad is Carl Stau found a way of helping so many of these people. And again, the science is there. It's validated. But when he left the hospital system, so did his research. So does his practice. And emphysemics are treated much the same they were in the 1950s right now. And I think some of that is due to cost. It's very expensive to have a personalized respiratory therapist train each and every patient. But it also has to do with apprehension within the larger medical community that breathwork could actually benefit people with emphysema. All you have to do is look at the science and you'll see the answer

to that question. What goes wrong, James? What happens? We were born as babies, right? We, you know, presumably a lot of us at that point have got good posture. We've got good positioning of everything. We're able to breathe. What happens so that we then need these dozens, these hundreds of breathing practices to sort of enhance our health. Presumably some of them are just bringing us back to where we might have been had we not sort of gone off track some way. What has happened to us as a species whereby we need so much help at learning how to do one of the most basic and most important functions that exists? Well, I think you can see right now what's happening with the different ways that we found are very effective for healing our bodies and healing our minds is the further we get away

from the modern environment that we've lived in all our lives the healthier we get if we replace processed food and cookies and fritos and tortilla chips and all that other stuff that we've been told is healthy with the food our ancestors ate we can vastly improve our health if we get rid of we can vastly improve our health. If we get rid of the phones that we have on or the laptops at night, if we regulate the amount of time we spend on the internet and social media, this can have a vast effect on our mental health. So we've lost the ability to breathe properly. You can see the proof all over the place. The first thing that

we've lost is the skeletal structure of our faces. And as we mentioned in the last podcast, this is due to the shrinking of our mouths caused by lack of breastfeeding and lack of chewing when we're young. If we don't have that stress, our faces don't build properly. And if they don't build properly, our mouths will grow too small, which is why we have crooked teeth. Our teeth have nowhere to go. So they grow in crooked. And having that smaller mouth also impacts the sinus cavities. So this is not a theory. It's not a hypothesis. This is a fact. And if you don't believe me, you can just look at ancient skulls, which is something I did for a few months with some real leaders in the field. I was absolutely shocked to see I could not find an ancient skull with crooked teeth. skull that ever had their wisdom teeth removed or braces or any sort of dentistry or orthodontics. They didn't need any of that stuff. Just like today, we need supplements, vitamins,

goose powders to supplement a diet that is so devoid of proper nutrition. If you look at our ancestors, they needed none of that stuff. Were they popping their vitamin C so they wouldn't get scurvy or their vitamin D so they wouldn't get rickets? No. Their environment provided all of that because of course it did. We evolved from a wild environment, which is why other animals that live in the wild don't need any of these interventions that we need now to be healthy. Okay? It's only when we put them in zoos and feed them a western diet and acclimate them to our modern environment that they get really sick. So breathing is a huge part of this because losing the ability to breathe, losing the anatomy to breathe properly, then gaining these very improper habits that make it very hard to breathe

in just a healthy way, it's dramatically affected our health. And we could talk about the anatomical changes, we could talk about posture, we could talk about pollution, but it's really been a perfect storm of different modern day environmental inputs, which have made us the worst breathers in the animal kingdom. A couple of things to pick up on. There's a lot of young parents who listen and watch this show. You mentioned last time about chewing real food and how important that is. But we also have this modern fear sometimes that we shouldn't give our kids these foods that need to be mushed and pureed and soft. And it all kind of speaks to what you were just saying, doesn't it, about how far removed our lifestyles now are compared to how we've evolved. And so,

you know, what are some of those simple things that people can think about doing with their children whilst they're still young to enhance their breathing, you know, in childhood and beyond. I was talking to my mom about this when I was first researching this book. I said, hey, what did I eat when I was young? I was trying to understand why my mouth was so small, why I needed extractions and braces, and how that might have impacted my breathing and how it might have impacted my facial form. And she said, you know, when I was growing up in the 70s and 80s, nobody was breastfeeding. She said, no, absolutely not. Everyone was bottle fed. And then you were weaned onto Gerber applesauce directly onto it. And I just thought that was interesting.

But she said that it wasn't even something people talked about. This is just what it was done because modern science had said, oh, bottle feeding is better. You have to wean onto canned and bottled and jarred processed foods. This is the scientifically sound way of doing it. And as she was talking, I was thinking about how odd this is that all of our ancestors up until 200 years ago were breastfed and then they were weaned on the hard foods. These foods were not processed before they were given to kids.

These foods were not processed before they were given to kids. And if that was so injurious to health, why are we all here today? And why did they all have perfectly straight teeth and were able to breathe so much more efficiently and effortlessly than we are right now. So I think it's just this lap and a lap of truly long-term thinking that has given us this new worldview that everything new has been both vetted and is better for our health. So to answer your, that's a very long way of saying, to answer your question specifically, there's this huge movement called baby-led weaning. I am not the expert in this, so I will not speak very in detail about this, but this is all about returning our kids and returning infants to their natural way of developing proper facial structure. And it does that by incorporating as much breastfeeding as a mother is able to do, as long as a mother is able to do it, and then weaning onto hard foods, just like our ancestors did. And it sounds dangerous, but again, if you look at the past, and if you look at indigenous cultures

right now, who don't have processed food, you know, they turn out just fine. And they don't have any of the many of the chronic problems that we have later on in life. Yeah, I mean, even related to that, you see this, you know, in cafes and restaurants, I'm not talking about babies now, but kids as they get older, there's kids meals and there's adult meals. You go out somewhere and it's like, oh, there's real food on the adult's menu. And on the kid's menu, it's chicken nuggets and fries. And again, I'm not super clear. I'm not trying to criticize anyone for the choices they make with their own children. I understand that there's certain things that are normal in society that we often end up doing

without thinking about it. But I just I've always found it quite fascinating that we have kids meals as well as adult meals because food is food, right? And if anyone needs more vitamins and proper nutrients, it would be the kid. But instead, we just put about 50% more sugar in the kids meals and remove all the vegetables. I never thought about this. But I think that that's a very clear reflection on how far divorced we are from where we really need to be and how many more benefits a kid would get not only in the nutrition of eating proper, quote unquote, adult food, but also in the masticatory stress, the chewing stress, which kids need so much more than adults because they're developing very quickly. Yeah. Changing tacks slightly. I went for a walk this

morning and I was really thinking about the second conversation. You know, the first one I enjoyed so much. My audience loved it. James, it's the most viewed video on my entire YouTube channel. I don't know what happened with that one, but people absolutely loved it. I think over half a million people so far. So it was like, okay, where can we go in this conversation that we didn't cover first time around? And we've obviously done that a lot so far. But I kept coming up with this idea of untapped potential. I thought, you know, from reading your book again, from thinking about breathing, I think we're all walking around with this reservoir of untapped potential that we don't even know how good we could feel,

how fit we could be, how well we could sleep, how much less stress we could feel in our lives if we found the right breathing technique for us that's going to suit our lifestyle and the way we choose to live. And I thought a good place to really think about this is by talking about Swami Rama, who we didn't talk about last time. Because I think he is really showing just how far you can go with this. And I'm not saying we all need to go that far. But I think it beautifully illustrates just what is possible when you really learn to harness the power of your breath. really learn to harness the power of your breath. Yeah. And, you know, before we get into Swami Rama, I just want to mention, pick up on one thing. We were just talking about kids and we didn't mention this in the first chat either, but since the book has come out and since you and I

chatted, how many months ago was that? I've heard from so many sleep medicine researchers, people who specialize in pediatrics. And what I learned from them is that the pandemic of ADHD, about 10% of the population in the US suffers from ADHD. Most are kids from age two to five, and then it picks up again from ages around 12 to 17. But most ADHD is tied directly to breathing and breathing quality. And they showed me the percentages of 75% of kids who have ADHD also have sleep disordered breathing. And by improving their breathing during the day and during the night, so many of these kids can overcome what is considered this psychological or neurological problem. And that has just blown me away that simply breathing properly can have such a

transformative effect. But then I was thinking about it more. I said, this shouldn't be shocking, because if you're doing something wrong throughout the day, and if you're doing something 100% wrong for a third of your life, it's going to destroy your body. And that's what we've been seeing with these kids with ADHD. And Dr. Stephen Park at Albert Einstein College of Medicine is doing some incredible work in this area as well, looking at what happens when you allow a kid to breathe better. Look at how quickly they're able to overcome some of these chronic issues. So I just wanted to tie that on before we talk about Swami Rama. But in many ways, I view that these things are related

because it just shows you the potential of what breathing can do, not only to heal us of some chronic issues, but to also put us up that next rung of human potential. And I think that old Mr. Rama did that better than anyone. This is to give a little backstory on him. This is somebody who grew up in the Himalayas, and he was taught yoga and breathwork at the age of around four. And he stuck with it his whole life, spent years in a cave honing this skill.

And he got so good at it that by the time he was in his 30s, he went off and traveled the world. He studied at Oxford. He studied at various universities. He knew like eight different languages and He was so impressive that Researchers at the manager clinic which at the time was the largest psychiatric training facility in the US and the most renowned a Navy physicist there had heard about all these things he was able to do.

In other tests, he apparently was able to stop his heart just by focusing on his mind and breath, and he was able to increase the temperature in his fingers. And this Navy physicist didn't believe these stories, even though the data was right there so he brought swami rama into his facility and conducted a battery of tests and they found that he was able to remain conscious while he lulled his brain into a delta state so delta state are the states of very deep sleep we're supposed to be unconscious we're supposed to be unconscious. We're supposed to be asleep. But he was able to remain conscious during these states. So that was pretty impressive. But what impressed them even more was that he was able to control his heart rate. He was able to increase it

about 20 beats per minute within a space of about eight seconds. And he was actually able to make it beat at a rate of more than 300 beats per minute with his mind. And he did this for more than a minute. That state, atrial fibrillation, is supposed to be, you know, it will kill you after a while, but apparently Swami Rama could do this for about a half an hour to an hour. All of these things are medically impossible, and no one would believe it unless there was a real doctor there, researcher there, recording the whole thing. And still, this was reported in the New York Times, so it was reported in Time magazine. And still I get letters from doctors that say, you should check your sources. This is obviously impossible.

No one can do this. And, you know, how much more science do you need? But that has more to do with how people want to view the world than to actually look at data and numbers. Could he also change the temperature on his hand? Yeah, I mean, there's a whole laundry list of things this guy could do. I didn't want to bore you with it. But in another experiment, since you asked, of course, he was able to take his hand and focus on his hand

and turn one area gray from lack of blood flow and the other area bright red. And they went and they measured the temperature on the same hand and it varied by 11 degrees. So not only could he take over entire organs like the heart and the brain, but he could take over specific parts of his body and pinpoint where he wanted to control his conscious energy. And a few people who had studied with Rama have written me. And they said, oh, you know, it was great to read that you were able to track down this research and track down these studies. But this was child's play to him. This was apparently nothing. And he's now passed away, but I am now currently trying to get a hold of some other people

who have learned Rama's methods and who can do things that, according to them, I've not seen any of this, will really make what Rama did in these studies seem very insignificant. So, you know, COVID has put a big fork in that, but things are starting to open up. And I'm hoping to go back out into the field and to record and write about more of this stuff. I mean, it is interesting to hear the skepticism that will come back on these sort of extreme stories. You often get the skepticism around Wim Hof as well. It's still there, even though I think he's shown through a lot of science, a lot of real life people have adopted these and are writing and are sharing their experiences. So there's a lot of

real world data out there as well. Yet there is that skepticism. And it really speaks to what I was thinking about today, which is this untapped reservoir of potential that we all have within us. The body's pharmacy that we're not properly opening up and accessing. And I guess one of the reasons Vim has been so relatable to people is because, certainly in the Western world, I should be really clear, in the Western world is because the name Swami Rama, I guess, might put a block there for certain people. Oh, that doesn't apply to me. And of course, this guy was rocking meditation and breathwork at the age of four, which is fantastic in the Himalayas as well. So it answered this kind of romanticism and mystique that people then sort of feel, well, that's not relevant for me. I it answered this kind of romanticism and mystique that people then sort of feel, well, that's not relevant for me. I live in the middle of the city. I've got to work six

days a week. I've got to do this and take my kids to after school club. It seems quite distant, whereas Vim, I think to some people at least, feels a lot more relatable, but they both speak to the potential there because Because what you've just described Swami Rama doing, mind-blowing, incredible. But Vim has also done some incredible stuff where people have injected endotoxin, which would make most people sick. And through his breath, through his controlling his immune system, he doesn't get sick. And again, I've been thinking about this theme recently, that yes, we want science. And I know we want science. And it's great to get the science to really give it that validation to spread the message. But it feels to me on some

level that breathing is so fundamental to who we are as humans, that there's almost a three-dimensional quality to breathing, you know, the life force, the energy it gives us. As soon as we stop breathing, we die. But actually, I wonder sometimes, do we look at it through a very sort of one-dimensional reductionist scientific lens, whilst that has merit merit I sometimes wonder if we're missing some of that broader picture that some I guess of these ancient practices may have been speaking about and talking about for many years well I think when it comes to people's apprehension there's nothing much I can do about that and the last thing I want to do is to become an evangelist. I really want to be even keeled here and just provide what I have found. You know, I'm not the one doing the

research here. I'm reporting. And there's a big difference in that. I think when you look at Wim Hof and Tumo, and I've gotten some blowback on this as well. I've had people say, it is impossible for a human to sit in snow for eight hours at a time and melt a circle around themselves without wearing any clothes. This is scientifically impossible. And then I'll send them the study done by Herbert Benson at Harvard Medical School that was published in Nature, the most esteemed scientific journal on the planet, that shows that people can do this with their breathing. And that's usually when I never hear back from these people again.

And that's fine, right? So Wim has come up with the exact same resistance, but the difference is he's not wearing a robe. He's not wearing beads. He drinks beer, eats pasta, plays guitar, you know, just like every other middle-aged adult male. And so that has made him very approachable in many ways. He's also volunteered to do whatever study people want to do. And I think what he's discovered, especially with the study with the endotoxin, when they first shot Wim up with the endotoxin of E. coli, and he didn't suffer any symptoms. And they said, oh, you're just a weirdo. There's no way anyone else can do this. He's like, well, let me take a group of people that you can pick. I'm going to train them for four days, and then they're going to

come back and do exactly what I did, which is exactly what happened. So I think that it's this kind of science in this accumulation of data, which is so necessary. You'll certainly get to a point where people just don't want to hear about it. If you look at climate change, how many studies are there showing climate change is real? 1,200? 1,300? And you still have people saying, ah, I don't believe any of that stuff. What can you do about that? To me, you can just offer them information, right? And if they want to approach this in a scientific way with truly an open view, then they can do with that what they will and really look at the data. But when it comes to these superhuman feats of Swami Rama and Wim Hof and even Chuck McGee has

these to a certain extent, I don't view these as superhuman at all. These are human abilities that each and every one of us can hone. And when we hone them, we can maybe not be able to sit in snow for eight hours at a time and melt a circle around us, but we can improve our health. And I think that that is Wim's most impressive and important message. He's saying, don't go to Everest and run a half marathon and bare feet and bare chested like me. I already did that. But why don't you take control of your breath? And then once you take control of your breath, you can use that to help establish better healthy habits throughout the day.

And I think that's why he's resonated with so many people across the globe is because he's allowing them to use something that we are all born with, right? It's our own natural human body to improve our condition. It's beyond health as well, James. It's, you know, everything we do in life, we're breathing whilst we're doing it, right? We take our breath everywhere with us. No part of our life is lived separately to the breath and therefore improving our breath has the potential to improve every aspect of our life. You mentioned health, but our relationships can be significantly improved because if we can control our breath, we can breathe better, our stress levels will be lower, we deal with stress

and friction much better, your sleep quality can potentially be better. We spoke about that at the start, about nasal breathing at night. You know, yes, there's going to be an impact on chronic disease as well, but it is this three-dimensional kind of, this is sort of what I was getting at, that you don't live your life without your breath. So improving the quality of your breath absolutely can have profound benefits, whether you want to climb Everest in your shorts, or whether you just want to get through the day better, calmer, more peace. I guess that's why as a doctor, I'm so passionate about breathwork. In each of my

four books, breathwork has come up in all of them, even though I write about different topics, because the breath is central to so many different aspects of our lives. I learned this from a sleep researcher and biochemist. He said that we get most of our energy, not through food, but through our breath. through our breath. So if you look at how glucose is broken down, it takes six times more oxygen than glucose to fuel us. And he broke down the whole chemical structure of how that works with oxidative phosphorylation. And he said, so if you explain to people that, you know, all of the food that they're focusing on every minute of the day, all of the supplements, yes, food is incredibly important for health and for energy. Of course it

is. But that food can't do any of its magic if you don't have the breath there as well, if you don't have that proper and efficient supply of oxygen. So just as you mentioned, this is not woo-woo new age stuff. This is the most basic biochemistry in the human body. And breathing has to be considered as important as what we eat and how much we exercise and how well we sleep it really does and I think it's starting to I think it's been pushed to the background for a little while now but people are starting to recognize it and just concerning how the human body is able to function better with breathing and what happens when we put the body in a state of nature. There's a quote by Albert Svent-Gyorgy,

who won the Nobel Prize for his work in vitamin C, that I love. And as you were talking, I was just reminded of this quote. He said, 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.

That's pretty wordy, but what he's saying is the further we put ourself away from nature, the sicker we're going to get. And the more we return to the state in which we naturally evolved, the better we can get. And breathing, again, is a huge part of that. Returning your breathing to the way your ancestors used to breathe. Not superhuman breathing, not super turbo breathing, just regular natural human breathing is all you need. Follow your ancestors as the guide or any of the other 5,400 different mammals in the wild right now. And that to me is really the best teacher as far as breathing is concerned. To breathe well and to breathe optimally, we need a certain physical structure. We need a certain posture. We need to be able to get

into certain positions. And I've read somewhere in your work, James, that 30% of breathing is dictated by posture. Yet we're living in a society where many people have got rounded back, sort of craned out necks. There's many reasons for that, sedentary jobs, smartphones, laptops, whatever it is. But how does this play a role in our ability to breathe? Because some people will be hearing this and go, okay, James, you convinced me. I'm in. I want to breathe better. I want to get your book. I want to check out the techniques. I want to find the right one for me. But where does posture play a role and what can people do about that? Well, if you consider that in your chest right now are these two huge balloons, right? These are your lungs. And these balloons need to inflate properly and deflate for you to

get a consistent and easy flow of air. And by getting that consistent and easy flow of air, you will be able to consistently and easily get a flow of oxygen, which is what is going to fuel all of your cells. So when we're sitting like this, hunched over, which is how I sit a lot, or if we're sitting on a couch with our feet up, and if we're walking around with our shoulders like this, even if we wanted to take a full and easy breath, we can't because we can't inflate those two balloons in our chest, those two lungs. So Dr. Belisa Vranic has done some amazing work in the biomechanics of breathing. And I talked with her recently and read her books. And they're fantastic if you're looking at the biomechanics of breathing. And she has found that most of us tend to breathe

up and down, right? But what we should really be doing is to be breathing out and in. Because what you want to do is you want to be engaging the diaphragm and inhaling the lungs, air into the lungs very softly. So in order to do that, your rib cage needs to be flexible, right? And if you think about what yoga does, what is yoga more than just a way of stretching your rib cage and your intercostals

so that you can breathe more easily? So Vranich has this test, it's called the BIC test. And what you do is you place your hands and you put them above your hip bones and you breathe in and you want to feel your hands moving out laterally, not just your stomach going out. That's where a lot of people get it wrong. Like they think belly breathing is about pushing the stomach out. You want your belly around here to expand outward and inward. And if you can do that, then you're breathing correctly. If you can't and you feel no movement there, then you're an up and down breather. And the more you focus on this, on breathing out and in, the more you start to feel your diaphragm descending

in the proper way, and the more you start being able to breathe more easily. This has made an incredible difference for me in my understanding of breathing, not only that, but also in athletic performance, whether I'm surfing or running or whatever, me in my understanding of breathing, not only that, but also in athletic performance, whether I'm surfing or running or whatever, to focus on breathing outward and inward instead of up and down. Yeah, it's incredible. And it's, I guess, what you're showcasing there is that it doesn't

matter if your posture's a bit altered from years of not breathing well and being hunched over. I guess the positive note is there's things you can do once you now flip that switch in your brain and say, right, okay, I'm going to take breath seriously. I'm going to start working on certain things. I'm going to every day just try that and just see if I can get a bit more expansion out rather than up and down. I really think people are going to start to feel those differences. And as I said earlier in our conversation, they're going to start tuning into things that they weren't even aware of before. I said, James, that I'm training for the London Marathon in October, and I was actually challenged by a radio DJ last year to do it live on air. And I

said, yes, it was due to be in 12 weeks at that time. And I wasn't a runner, but because of COVID and the restrictions, it's been delayed. It's been delayed. It's now meant to be happening this October. Now, at the time, I was having some hamstring issues. And I was put in touch with one of the best movement therapists I've ever come across. And I've dealt with many over the course of my career. And she's got this machine, there's only three of them in the world. She's got these machines where they can literally measure every bone in your body as you're running and see the positioning. And she just uses that as a tool. But what's interesting is that we do lots of things together and it's been transformative for me in my running, but also in my breathing. And once we did this thing where my spine, all the bones of my spine, one of the big problems for me

is that they always face right. They never come around to the midline and go to the left. This is something you really wouldn't know until you'd been on a machine like this and you can actually see. And then a lot of my issues start to make a lot of sense. And she gave me this gorgeous spiral breathing exercise to do that took about three minutes. We did it together. I felt totally open and my ribs expanded afterwards. So we went back on the machine. No word of a lie, everything came back online and my spine is now going right. And then when I went, it's going all the way to the left. It's like, I said, Helen, that has completely changed. And all I've done is three minutes of breath, which goes, yeah, I see this all the time. It's because once we can get this working better,

you know, I don't want to oversimplify what she does. Once the diaphragm's working better, more efficiently, you know, it affects everything around that affects your spine. And I guess I'm just sharing that with you. Because again, that is n equals one, that is just my own experience, but super, super powerful. So I do that three minutes spiral breathing exercise every day. I don't need any more motivation now because I've seen firsthand that my gates, my biomechanics change simply on the back of it. So this once again reminds me of another ancient quote I'm going to bore you with. That's about 1400 years old. I'm loving these quotes, man.

Loving them. So this one, I think, speaks to exactly what you just said. It says, what the bodily form depends on is breath, and what breath relies upon is form. When the breath is perfect, the form is perfect too. So if you are hesitant to think that your breathing may impact your posture, just consider those huge six liters of air, those two balloons in your body, and just take a deep breath and feel what happens to your posture when you take a deep breath and feel what happens to your posture when you take a deep breath and feel what happens to your spine.

I was talking to Dr. Andrew Weil about this, and he had learned from a doctor early on in his studies. He's a famous American doctor. I'm not sure if he's made it across the pond here. But he said, just look at scoliosis. So this is the sideways curvature of the spine. It comes on right before puberty and throughout puberty. And we still don't know what causes scoliosis. Sometimes MS can definitely influence it, and other diseases can influence it. But for the mass majority of people who have scoliosis, we don't know what causes it. How strange is that? So many people have this and we still don't know why they have it. So he was convinced from the doctor that he talked to that this starts early on when dysfunctional breathing is present. When people tend to breathe, tend to be turned like this too much, and tend to keep breathing

into the right lung, or tend to keep breathing into their left lung while they're sleeping, while they're awake, while they're playing. Just like you, I tend to be a left side person. That's where my posture is. Whenever I get my spine cracked and fixed, they say every single person tells me that. They're like, why are you leaning to the left so much? I don't know. It's just one of those things.

So an extreme version of what you and I are both doing is scoliosis. So when someone has this dysfunctional breathing, again, this is so hypothetical. You can't run a randomized controlled study of this, and no one ever should. But just as a thought experiment, I thought that that was interesting. And then I researched the work by Katerina Schroth, who was a teenager living in Dresden, Germany at the beginning of the 1900s. She had scoliosis. It was very bad. She was given a brace and a wheelchair and told that this is what you're going to do the rest of your life. You're going to be in this brace. And she realized that she had two lungs and these acted like balloons and that when you

place something around a balloon and inflate it, whatever is around it will take that form. So she developed something called orthopedic breathing, where she would breathe into one lung and exhale, breathe into the other lung and exhale. And she actually breathed her spine straight and went and taught this to thousands and thousands of women. It's still being used at Johns Hopkins University. The pictures are there, the studies are there, and it's still interesting that so many people with scoliosis now are completely unaware of how breathing, just breathing and stretching, can have a really profound effect on posture. And for those of us lucky enough not to have scoliosis, how you breathe vastly affects your

posture. If you're breathing unhealthy, it's going to affect your posture. if you're breathing unhealthy it's going to affect your posture if you're breathing healthy that's going to improve your posture and the proof is all over the place breathing better able you know being able to use our diaphragm more fully um breathing out and in rather than just up and down you know these things will have an impact on our lung capacity and of course lung capacity you know better lung capacity is going to make you fitter if you're an athlete or certainly give you a better ability to go harder for longer but I think lung capacity also really has benefits for us beyond fitness for health well-being day to day health and well-being but also longevity can you speak a little bit around lung capacity

and and just how important that is sure so larger lungs for athletes is a bigger gas tank they can go longer without having to fill up so obviously that's going to affect their performance and it's also going to affect their recovery as we were talking about earlier but just having larger and healthier lungs has been discovered to have a profound effect on lifespan and i found this in the framingamingham study, which is the 70-year-long longitudinal study focused on heart health. But what they found was that the most significant and accurate marker of lifespan wasn't genetics or exactly what we were eating, it was lung size and lung function. And they found this with a study of more than 5,200 people. The more quickly our lungs deteriorated, the more quickly we lost

that lung capacity, the sooner we would die. And the better our lungs function, the bigger they were, the longer we would live. So there's been various studies done that have found the exact same results as the Framingham study. I even found one study with something like 800, they looked at 800 people who had lung transplants, and they found that people who had been transplanted, larger lungs lived much longer lives. So no matter how we get these large lungs, healthy lungs, they're going to benefit us. They're going to benefit our performance. They're going to just benefit our health in general. Luckily, we don't need to go out and get larger lungs surgically implanted in our bodies. We can just breathe healthy, stretch and exercise. And by doing those things, we can not only stave off

the entropy of lung capacity, what happens after the age of about 30, we lose lung capacity. Every decade, it really drops off precipitously once we get into our 60s and 70s. We can reverse that and we can keep the same lung capacity and same lung function at the time when we need it most, and that's when we're older. So across the board, you can only get benefits from having larger, healthier lungs lungs and healthy breathing and stretching is the number one most effective way of doing that. I wonder how many of the benefits of exercise on longevity and well-being may be related to lung capacity because obviously if, if you go for a run, whatever your current state is, you're going to have to work that diaphragm hard. You're going to have to

work those lungs harder. They're going to be coming back a little bit stronger than had you not done that. And yeah, it just makes me think all the research on exercise and movement, how much of that is related to our diaphragm and our lung capacity? Do you know what I mean? much of that is related to our diaphragm and our lung capacity do you know what i mean endurance athletics is absolutely determined by lung capacity look at vo2 max right this is the measure of athletic endurance and this is what brian mckenzie and patrick mcqueen have been saying for years and years and years now you cannot perform up to a competitive level if your lungs are too small, if you don't know how to breathe properly. And this is one reason why some people think that female athletes are at a natural disadvantage. Not only are their airways different because they have different facial structure,

but they also have smaller lungs. People with XX chromosomes have smaller lungs. And by having those smaller lungs, they will have less energy. And the good news is we can do something about that. We can drastically affect our lung size. And a great example of this is just look at freedivers. These are people who focus on their breath all the time and look at their lung capacity. Herbert Nitsch, a world champion freediver, he's won innumerable awards and competitions.

He has a lung capacity of 14 liters. So that's about twice the size of an average adult male. And he didn't get this when he was born. This is something he did by conscious will, by breathing exercises. So even if we're born with something, and for the vast majority of us, we can change it and we can improve that. Other organs in the body, we can't do much about our liver, our kidney, right? But we can influence the size and function of our lungs. I think, James, that's so optimistic for people. We're seeing that thread at various times through this conversation and our first conversation that

no matter your starting point, no matter where you are right now, there are things that you can do that will start to improve your lung performance, your lung capacity, you know, your body's physiology. So I really want to hammer that point home for people that it is worth starting, even if you've never done anything before. Start with something small, you know, maybe try taping your mouth up at night, right? Just start to see and feel the benefit. Because once you feel the benefit, you're much more inclined to repeat it and continue doing it. Yeah. And I know that you would, I believe you would agree with me here that we're not here to tell anyone to do anything. I'm not here to force feed anyone or to shame anyone on to eat a certain way or breathe a certain way.

The only thing I want to do is provide people with information. And you can do with this information whatever you choose to do. But just know that the information that we've been talking about in this program so far, this is stuff that has been scientifically validated. And again, there aren't any negative side effects to it. It convinces you that there is something really magical going on with our breathing, something that we can harness and better understand to improve various different functions in our body and brain. Yeah, James, I completely agree. Everyone can make their own choice. I like you just want to share information. In fact, I really feel the only way for people really to make long term changes

when they kind of feel ownership on something and go, right, this is now something that I want to take control of. And hopefully there'll be a few more on the back of this conversation, but you know, only time will tell. James, one of the many things I love about the book is this idea of breathing plus or breath plus. This concept of, I mean, you can probably better explain it than me, but these kind of supercharged breathing practices that aren't the kind of the base level ones, but ones that you can tap into if you want. We've mentioned Tumo and Wim Hof breathing already. I did want to briefly touch if we could on holotropic breath work, because I think people are hearing about this. I know you've also spoken

in this conversation. And I think in the book, at the point that you bring up Sudarshan Kriya, I think you say that may be your favorite breath practice up to that point in the book thus far. So I wonder if you could explain how you came up with this term of breath plus what it means, and then dive a bit into holotropic breathing and sudarshan kriya i just wanted to create an umbrella term that all of these other breathing practices that do require more time they require more effort right but they also can have really profound effects they can often give you more than just the standard mellower breathing practices. So, you know, the book is set up that in the middle of it, it's like, here's the stuff that everyone can benefit

from. It's like, oh, you want some more? Okay. Well, if you want to keep pushing this, this is going to take more time. And some of it may not always be pleasant, right? You have to like really work through this. But I get interested in that stuff. I said, okay, where can breathing really take us? What are the absolute limits of where our breath can take us? And that's where I put all of those methods. And holotropic is certainly within this breathing plus category. And what holotropic breathwork is, is it was developed in the 1970s by Stanislav Grof. He was a psychiatrist in Czechoslovakia

and one of the first test subjects of LSD. So before LSD was illegal, psychiatrists could administer it to their patients, and it did a bunch of amazing things. Groff went to work at Johns Hopkins. He worked at various institutions on the East Coast of the U.S., very respectful and storied institutions, and he was having a lot of success with LSD when it was in a very controlled environment. So when LSD was made illegal, he said, oh, no, what am I going to do? How am I going to help all these people with schizophrenia and all of these very serious mental conditions? So he developed a breathing practice that he believed elicited many of the same effects as LSD.

So that's how holotropic breathwork started out. And what it is, is it involves you sitting in a room with a bunch of other people lying down on a mat and listening to extremely loud music and breathing as hard and as fast as you can for three hours at a time. And if three hours seems like a long amount of time, you're watching a football game, you're like, wow, I almost spent three hours in front of the TV. That took a while. Try sitting and breathing as hard as you can for three hours and it will feel like an eternity. So I did this. I wanted to try to understand it from the inside. I had an interview with Groff, who was amazing. And I looked at all of the science, which is actually a little flimsy in holotropic breathwork, but it is certainly an experience. And this is

what I mean by breathing plus. This is not something you can just casually show up and do. It will kick your ass. And for some people, they've had very profound breakthroughs using holotropic breathwork. Dr. Jimmy Eierman, who is a psychologist, used this with 11,000 patients over 10 years and found it did more than any other therapy for people with addictions or schizophrenia or severe disorders. That's all true, according to that study. I was not the hugest fan of it, but that's just my opinion, you know. So other people get incredible benefit from it, and I would never take that away from someone. If it helps them, then that's great. But just looking at the science and my own experience, it was a lot skinnier than, say, Sudarshan Kriya or the Wim Hof method as far as the studies are concerned. There's some new science, I think, coming out soon on holotropic breathing. Is that right? So ever since the book came out, some of the holotropic people are saying, hey, you know, what about us? That's not fair. And I said, what wasn't fair? I looked at every single

study that had ever been put out on holotropic breathwork. And I honestly told the readers exactly what I had found. I didn't say this is a bad thing, you shouldn't do it. I said, this is what the science says, and this is what happens in your body. So some instructors that I went to said, when you breathe this way, you increase oxygenation to the brain. And with that oxygen, your brain is able to process thoughts better. That is 100% BS. What you're doing is denying oxygen to the brain because when you hyperventilate you cause vasoconstriction and in states of extreme hyperventilation you can inhibit up to 40% of your blood flow to your brain and that's why holotropic breathwork sends people on these very

deep hallucinogenic journeys so ever since the book has come out, I've talked to many amazing holotropic breathwork therapists. Some, you know, thought that I should have looked at the case studies a little more deeply, which I thought I did, but they were very fair about it. And I've gotten to be friends with one of them. And she said, hey, I want to study this further because I know you're absolutely right. The science is so skinny on this stuff. And before it's accepted very seriously within the medical community, we need some experiments that are conducted at established institutions. I said, sign me up. I'm ready to go. at established institutions. I said, sign me up. I'm ready to go. So we're working with Johns Hopkins right now, which in the US is one of the leading medical institutions here. And we will be doing some studies. We're just developing these right now on what we want to

look at. I really want to do blood work before and after, but that may be too logistically difficult at this time. So we're definitely looking at brain states and how this affects the brain. And I'm running into a problem that I had before is there's just no money for this stuff. So yeah, we'd love to have 300 people in a very tightly controlled study looking at every imaginable metric, there's zero money. So this will likely be coming out of pocket from me and the other people who want to study this. So if there's any researchers out there who want to do some research, this stuff is very worthy of study. Again, science is the exploration of the unknown. We don't know a lot about what holotropic breathwork

does. So what an exciting field to go into right now. Yeah, I mean, you know, James, I really admire your integrity with this. As you said, you just want to report on what's there. You want to look at it. You want to examine it and share that information with people. You've been very clear about when you're giving an opinion versus when actually it's backed up by science, which I really, really like. And I think you've really touched on, you know, potentially, I won't say controversial, but an interesting point about there's no money in this. You know, earlier on in the conversation, you mentioned that study

on rheumatoid arthritis patients where people, you know, I think, did you say cold showers and sort of the Wim Hof type hyperventilation methods showing some really promising results. And that doesn't, no one can make any money out of that. You know, people hyperventilating, going in a cold shower, you don't even have to heat the water to pay for, you know, to pay for hot water. It's just cold water. And I guess, you know, it really does speak to, I think, the wider problem that potentially has been with getting breathwork into medical curriculums, because if no one's going to make money out of the research, who's going to do the research in the first place? Therefore, you know, I'll be honest, I really think, as I said, I know

medicine can be very helpful for many things. But the more experience I get, the more I reflect on my career, there was a huge pharmaceutical bias to our training. And that may be because there was research there at the time. But because that's what we get taught, that is what many doctors end up using because that's what they're familiar with. Whereas breathwork, for example, is not taught. Even, you know, when I went to med school in 1995, there was research on breathing, but we're not taught that. We're not shown how that could help respiratory conditions and other things. So I think, you know, without getting too political, I sort of feel that money component there. I think that's a big one, really, in terms of getting this out there.

So this is what I've heard from just about every single researcher that I've talked to. These are researchers at leading institutions, Stanford, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, is they say if you look at how studies are funded, especially studies in medicine, more than 75% come from corporations. And this is why they believe that the results are often skewed towards the results that these corporations, pharmaceutical companies, want to get because they have a vested interest in it. There's no controversy about this. I don't think what I'm saying, people are going to be shocked to hear this because we know that this is how things work right now. We also know that there's really no money to be made in Carl Stau's breathing therapy for emphysemics. If anything, this is going to cost hospitals so much more money.

We also know that not only will researchers not get funded for a lot of these studies, but they could also possibly lose tenure, you know, if their names are attached to something that sounds completely crazy. But it's these things that sound completely crazy that, to me, can help really move the needle forward. Again, why not explore something that hasn't been studied? If your results say, oh, this is total BS, this doesn't do anything, that's really important information to have. And it'll really clear up a lot of the muck that's in the air. And if they lead to another answer that, oh, it looks like there's a lot of potential here, then what a wonderful thing that there's a new way

of exploring a way of treating some certain diseases or allowing people to become more healthy. But it does come down to money. As someone, as a business person told me, he said, 99% of the questions in the world can be answered with money. And I think that that's true for medicine as it is for anywhere else. So we shouldn't be shocked by this. I want to be clear, I'm not opposed to pharmaceutical drugs. And again, I, in my family are doctors, but it's allowing yourself to look at the true benefits and look at everything on the table first, and then choosing what can work best for you. It's actually the same.

Breathing has most of these practices. Certainly, if we take breathing plus out for a moment, the simple, less supercharged practices, there's no downside of these things at all. So, you know, primum non nusere, first do no harm, you know, the fundamental tenet of medicine, kind of breathwork really fits so beautifully into that model. You know, try it, see it, experiment. Before we finish, I do want to hear about Sudarshan Kriya because you speak so passionately about it. What is it? What does the research say? And why are you such a big fan? So Sudarshan Kriya is another variation on that same theme of stressing your body out, holding your breath, breathing slowly, stressing it out again, holding your breath,

breathing slowly. So just like Wim Hof method, just like so many other pranayamas, just like some Chinese Qigong practices as well. So I think I have such a fondness for this practice because it was the first breathing practice that absolutely blew my mind. I had done other healthy breathing practices. I said, oh, I definitely feel better. Oh, I'm sleeping better. But Sudarshan Kriya definitely cracked something in me. And that was very apparent when I had just learned it.

And the weekend workshop was interesting. I didn't get that much out of it, I'll be honest. But this workshop is based on the teachings of this guy Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, who developed this breathing technique in the 1980s and has developed all these different nonprofits around the world to teach this breathing. It's called the Art of Living Organization. this breathing, it's called the Art of Living Organization. And, but even though this breathing has been around thousands of years, he was able to put it in this very controlled way. And so it wasn't until several weeks or months, this is a long time ago, 10 years ago, that I went for a

repeat session of this, where I absolutely, I don't know if you would call it a breakdown or what, but physically I had such a profound response and nobody could explain what exactly happened. I sweated so profusely. My hair was sopping wet. My t-shirt was wet. There were sweat blotches on my jeans. And I was just sitting in a corner of a room of a very cold house here in San Francisco, just breathing in this calm rhythm and sweated as though I had just run an ultra marathon. So that got me intrigued in the potential of what breathing could do for us. I also got intrigued where I could not find a real scientific explanation for

what had happened to me. And most people said it was a placebo effect, which makes absolutely no sense that your body can just break down into this extreme sweat. So I've stuck with this breathing. I love it. It offers me a clarity. It calms me down as well it's very simple the one problem is you do have to take a weekend workshop that costs money so you can't learn this online um but i i find the workshop is is worthwhile because you learn this this breathing uh technique and i can't get into all the the minute details of how it works. It's pretty complex. But I will say it is interesting to see there are over 100 independent scientific studies in Sudarshan Kriya, done at Harvard, done at Yale, done at top institutions, looking at how effective

it is for all the things we just talked about panic anxiety even asthma autoimmune problems diabetes so it is scientifically validated and that helps for people who are skeptical James you've been on some Journey over the past year since this book came out um lots of people are getting in touch with you I know you've been doing some work with the UN on trying to educate kids around the world. Tell us a little bit about that, because that sounds incredibly fascinating and has the potential for huge impact. Yeah, so this is something I got interested in because, again, I'd seen what a tremendous effect healthy breathing habits can have, especially on kids. You know, it's easy,

easier to change the habit of a kid and have them develop in the right ways. And then once they're developed in the right ways, it'll be easier for them to maintain proper health. And so many of these chronic conditions that so many of us suffer from, even heart disease, diabetes, and their origins start when we're young. I mean, they really do. And a lot of them, I've noticed, can be helped or at least improved in certain ways by improving the breathing, just as we mentioned with ADHD. So I was able to work with this incredible organization called The Global Classroom. They're there in the UK. And they do free all-volunteer-run programs for youth around the world focused on kids in developing nations. These are hour-long video programs that are free to everybody that are piped into schools that teach kids about health. Because a lot of these messages don't get filtered out. We tend to get them in the West more easily

than other people in developing countries. So it was an extraordinary experience. Wim Hof volunteered a whole technique and a video program. Jason Mraz, the famous musician. Lindsey Stirling. All of these people dedicated their time to putting together a video program. You know, the video program isn't an end-all be-all, but we look at it as a good introduction to why you should think about your breathing when you're a kid, what you can do to improve it, and how to keep breathing healthy in the future.

So it was such a blast and honor to be able to speak along with this amazing cast of characters and to get that out. So this is available for free for everyone. There are no Pepsi logos on it. There's no Cheeto logos. This is just something that everybody came together to want to do sans any corporate sponsorship to get out into the world. Yeah, incredible. What's next for you, James? Because, you know, I'm still sensing that passion to learn more. There's research coming up, you want to go and talk to more people you know is that is there a breath too in the making or you know what's coming next yeah you know i'm just gonna do another book that

is just gonna be the puffy rice version of everything we just talked about no i will not i will not do that people i promise you i think last time you asked this question i said oh i'm i'm planning on sleeping more uh I still haven't done that. So this has been combining the ongoing book tour with a global pandemic. And I think I need to reboot. So I really want to go somewhere and turn off my phone and computer for a month if I can. That might be impossible, but even for a few weeks. But I have a few different projects, some video miniseries

opportunities where we're hoping to take a lot of the general themes we've talked about during this program and the previous one and put them into a video program to try to get this out to a whole another group of people who don't read books. But the most exciting thing I'm working on is another book idea, which I won't bore you with right now. But I am excited after being able to having the opportunity to talk about this stuff in the public, which is great. But I am also excited to go back into my little shed in my backyard and close off the world and to sink very deeply into another subject to start exploring it i really feel that hunger to learn more and do research and go meet some amazing people and interview with them and i'm so lucky to have a job that allows me to do that well james

look uh as i said just before we started recording, we've had, well, at that time, one conversation, now two lengthy conversations. I've never met you. I feel as though I know you really well from our interactions. I think you're an incredible human being. I think what you have done for this whole field is transformative. I genuinely believe that you are changing hundreds of thousands of people's lives across the globe, if not more, based upon writing such a thorough and fabulous book. So I just want to appreciate you for that. It really is something special. And I'm delighted to see it do so well. Just to finish off today, as I probably said on our first conversation, this is called feel better,

live more. When we feel better in ourselves, we get more out of life. When we breathe better, we're going to get more out of our life. Do you have any final words of wisdom, practical tips, advice for people that go, yeah, all right, you've convinced me, I'm in. I want to get into this breathwork game. What would Mr. James Nestor say to them them all i would say is just start with this start by breathing through your nose to a count of about five or six then start exhaling to that same count continue breathing this way for maybe 10 or 20 cycles and then just check in with yourself and ask yourself how you feel. And I think you'll be surprised that doing something so simple, so basic, can really elicit such a strong response in your body.

And if you're intrigued with that, then you can go so much deeper into breathing practices. then you can go so much deeper into breathing practices and these practices each of them have their own wonderful benefits to offer but it really just starts with that single breath and then you can take it from there james it's always a pleasure i know we're planning to meet up in person at some point as the world opens up i'm looking forward to that and in the meantime take care and get some rest. Thanks a lot, Rangan. Thanks a lot for having me back. Really hope you enjoyed

listening to that conversation. As always, do have a think about one thing, maybe one breathing technique that you might be able to take away from today's show and start applying into your own life. And don't forget James's book, Breath, the new site of a lost artist now out in paperback.

Of course, do like James and I know what you thought of this week's show on social media. But before we finish, I really want to let you know about Friday Five. It's my weekly newsletter that contains five short doses of positivity to get you ready for the weekend. It usually contains a practical tip for your health that you can

experiment with, a quote that I found particularly inspiring that I'm reflecting on, an article or a video that I think would be really useful to share. Basically anything that I feel would be helpful in your life. I get such wonderful feedback from my Friday Five readers. So many of you tell me that it is one of the only weekly emails that you actively look forward to receiving. So if that sounds like something you would like in your inbox every Friday, you can sign up for free at drchatty.com forward slash Friday Five. And if you enjoyed listening to today's podcast and found the content useful,

please do share with your friends and family. You can do this on social media or you could just send them a link to this episode on your phone right now, along with a personal message. Please also do consider leaving a review or whichever podcast platform you listen on. And of course, please do

support the sponsors. You can see the full list of discount codes at drchatterjee.com forward slash sponsors. If you are brand new to my content, you may be interested to know that I've written four books which are available to buy all around the world, covering all kinds of different topics like mental health, nutrition, sleep, stress, behavior change, weight loss. There's a whole chapter on breathwork, my take on breathwork and the stress solution. So if any of that appeals to you, please do take a moment to check them out. They are all available as paperbacks, e-books and as audio books, which I am narrating. Thank you so much for listening to the show. I really do appreciate your time each week. I hope you have a wonderful rest of the week and please do press follow on whichever podcast platform you listen on. So you will get

notified when my latest conversation comes out and always remember, you are the architect of your own health. Making lifestyle changes is always worth it. Because when you feel better, you live more.