Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee - #247 BITESIZE | The Breathing Secret That Will Transform Your Body and Mind | James Nestor

Starting point is 00:00:00 Today's Bite Size episode is brought to you by AG1, a science-driven daily health drink with over 70 essential nutrients to support your overall health. It includes vitamin C and zinc, which helps support a healthy immune system, something that is really important at this time of year. It also contains prebiotics and digestive enzymes that help support your gut health. It's really tasty and has been in my own life for over five years. 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 to

Starting point is 00:00:51 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. Welcome to Feel Better Live More Bite Size, your weekly dose of positivity and optimism to get you ready for the weekend. Today's clip is from episode 124 of the podcast with journalist and author James Nestor. Breathing is information and in this clip James explains why the way we breathe is so important for the health of our body and our mind. When I think about breath work and the breath and breathing practices, the phrase that keeps coming up in my mind is untapped potential.

Starting point is 00:01:51 Like so many of us as humans are walking around, taking our breath for granted, without any knowledge that actually a bit of care and attention, a bit of deliberate practice, can potentially yield some quite dramatic benefits, right? How we breathe absolutely affects us. It even affects the density of our bones. It affects us down to the subatomic level with electrons. So to think that how we breathe does not matter is not based in any real science. The average person breathes about 25,000 times a day. And most of us aren't thinking about any of those breaths. We take in 30 pounds of air into our lungs and out of our lungs every single day. So if you think that that

Starting point is 00:02:40 air and how we take that air in and how we expel it doesn't affect us. It's crazy. So much more than food. In my opinion, after talking to researchers for so many years, you can eat all the right foods. You can exercise as much as you want. But if you're not breathing correctly, you're never, ever going to be healthy. And I've seen this repeatedly with people who look to be the most fit people on the planet, and they have chronic respiratory problems, and they suffer from that in numerous ways. So once we take control of this unconscious ability to breathe, we can then

Starting point is 00:03:17 harness all of the power within that and use it to do some incredible things. Some things that scientists thought were absolutely impossible have been proven to be absolutely possible by focusing on your breathing. When someone breathes through their nose compared to their mouth, what is going on and why does it make such a difference? So when we breathe through our nose, we are humidifying air, we're pressurizing air, we are filtering that air out and we're conditioning it so that by the time that air gets to our lungs, it can more easily be absorbed and we can extract oxygen

Starting point is 00:03:53 from it. So we know this. This has been proven time and time again. And yet about 25 to 50% of the population habitually mouth breathes and when you mouth breathe you get none of those benefits you can almost think of the lungs as an external organ when you're mouth breathing right they're exposed to everything in your environment and if you live in a city like i do i don't want to expose my lungs to all those allergens and pollutants. So the quickest way of filtering air and conditioning it is this wondrous organ right in the front of our faces called the nose. And it is completely underappreciated and underused in society. Yeah, absolutely. So how did you become a nose breather? And is it possible for anyone to actually listen to this and go, okay,

Starting point is 00:04:48 I hear you, James, there's all these benefits. I want those benefits. How do I start? Yeah, I remember breathing through my mouth as a kid. I see pictures of myself when I was young, and I'm breathing through my mouth, not all the time, but it definitely happened. And even until adulthood, I thought it was normal just to go to sleep with a pint of water by my bed every single night, to wake up every few hours with a dry mouth, take a swig of water, go back to sleep. I did that for decades until I met Dr. Jayak or Nayak down at Stanford. And he said, this isn't normal at all. We should be breathing through our nose all the time, especially during sleeping hours. That's a third of your life. And if you're breathing

Starting point is 00:05:30 through the mouth, you're just exposing yourself to everything in your environment. And also you're loosening the tissues at the back of your throat and making yourself more apt to snore and have sleep apnea, which is another thing that blew my mind. So once I learned this, I was shutting my mouth all the time, practicing nasal breathing. At the beginning, it was very difficult. I felt very congested here, but the nose is a use it or lose it organ. I also learned that from Stanford, that the more you use it, the more it's going to open up. Those tissues are going to acclimate and open up. So I focused on that. And at night, this sounds a little crazy, but I used a little piece of tape, which I still do just on my lips to train my mouth shut at night.

Starting point is 00:06:19 And this sounds a little, you know, like like new age science, age science, but it's not because I heard from a breathing therapist at Stanford, Ann Kearney, who had used it herself and uses it for her patients. I talked to other researchers who did the same thing. And that has helped me tremendously. And it's helped so many other people as well. And it's free. Yeah. Hey, James, look, I'm totally with you on that. It is incredible, the difference. I think it really is quite profound what you can feel like. You may not

Starting point is 00:06:53 even know how good you can feel until you start breathing in a more optimal way. But when you talk about tape over your mouth, some people will probably feel claustrophobic and the thought of actually taping their mouth shut probably is going to scare them. But you would say it's not like that, is it? No. And just to second what you were saying, it's one thing to have a subjective experience and say, hey, I feel better after taping and that means something, right? But it's another thing to measure this stuff. If we can measure it, we can study it. If we can study it, we can figure out if it's actually working.

Starting point is 00:07:29 And that's exactly what we did, working with NIAC at Stanford. So all you need is a teeny piece of tape. I use a piece, it's about half the size of a postage stamp, and I put it right across my lips. I can still talk to you. I can still breathe from my mouth if I want, but it just reminds me when I'm unconscious to keep my jaw shut, and I can take it off with my tongue. So this is not a hostage situation, duct tape kind of thing.

Starting point is 00:08:02 This is a teeny piece of tape just to train the mouth shut and just anecdotally i've received several dozen emails from people who have had chronic snoring for the past few decades who have had even mild or moderate sleep apnea and they've recorded their sleep and they no longer suffer from those things so So that's not psychosomatic. It's not a placebo effect. That's what happens when you close your mouth and you allow that air to be pressurized, push the soft tissues further back in your airway and open them up to breathe more efficiently. You get 20% more oxygen through a nasal breath than you do through a mouth breath. And if you think that's not gonna affect you

Starting point is 00:08:45 over the longterm, you're nuts. It will have a tremendous effect on your health. Yeah, absolutely. I start pretty much every day now with this kind of breathe light to breathe right exercise where I really try and slow down my breathing through my nose. I hope I breathe through my nose pretty

Starting point is 00:09:05 much all the time these days. I've been working on it for a long period of time now, well over a year. For about five minutes, I'll do this very slow breath practice through my nose. And I personally feel that if I want to meditate afterwards, I'm way more focused and in the zone. But a lot of people will think, well, hold on a minute, oxygen's good, right? I want more in my body. Why are you saying that people are over breathing? Why are you saying I need to breathe less? So I wonder if you could just sort of unpick that for people. Sure. So it's basic physiology. So the more you breathe and the more often you breathe, you're going to be taking breaths in, but you're going to be exhaling them more quickly and if you

Starting point is 00:09:45 look at the airway you've got your mouth you've got your nose you've got your throat you've got the bronchi all of this is dead space and by that i mean there is no oxygen that can be absorbed in these areas oxygen is absorbed in the lungs and most oxygen is going to be absorbed in the lower lobes because blood is gravity dependent and there's more blood in the lower lobes of the lungs. So if you're breathing at a rate of 20 breaths a minute at a tidal volume, minute volume of about six liters, you are going to take in about 50% of that air is going to make it through the lungs into the bloodstream. Only 50% because so much of it is here. You're just... So 50% is in that dead space at the top of the lungs.

Starting point is 00:10:38 Yeah, you only get to use 50% of it. So if you breathe 12 times a minute, of it. So if you breathe 12 times a minute, you're going to bring that air down a little deeper, okay? And you will be able to use about 70% of that air, which is a huge, huge difference, 20% difference. But if you breathe six times a minute at six liters, you use about 85% of that air. So you can see how much more efficient it is. And not only is that more efficient for oxygen exchange, you are also allowing your heart not to be overburdened by constantly beating. You are going to decrease your blood pressure. The systems of the body are going to work in harmony with one another. You're going to also increase your diaphragmatic movement. And we know when you do that, you can help release more lymph fluid. So the diaphragm not only helps expand. So the diaphragm is this muscle that sits

Starting point is 00:11:36 under the lungs that when we breathe in, it sinks down to allow the lungs to expand. And when we breathe out, it rises up to exhale for an exhalation. But that movement also has many other benefits to have more diaphragmatic movement, including removing lymph fluids. So you just see it's a lot of people think, well, I want to breathe more breaths, more air because I'm getting more oxygen. The opposite is happening. By breathing most closely in line with your metabolic needs and slower, you are getting more oxygen and you're able to do so much more with so much less effort and your body really

Starting point is 00:12:17 likes that. So we know that this slower breathing, we know how it affects us, and we know that most of us are breathing too much and too often. Dr. Patricia Gerbarg and Dr. Richard Brown, who's at Columbia, have used this for people with anxiety and depression, even bulimia and anorexia. All of these different maladies that you would think wouldn't have anything to do with breathing. But these populations traditionally breathe way more than they should. They're constantly stressed out. And it's completely touching to see these people be reacquainted with their breath because they've completely lost control of it over decades. And just to take a slow and steady breath in, a lot of them instantly freak out because it's way too slow to them. They associate that with an attack. But once they acclimate to it, this might take a session or two to really get this down. You watch this transformation occurring. You just watch the

Starting point is 00:13:15 stress just lift from their faces. By changing the way in which you breathe, you can actually change how your mind is processing thoughts and feelings and emotions. Anything I'm guessing slower than what we're normally doing is probably going to yield some kind of benefit. Yeah, they found four to 10 breaths a minute. What you're talking about is how do you breathe day to day? What is your normal? is how do you breathe day to day? What is your normal? You know, can we improve that?

Starting point is 00:13:49 Can we consciously for just a few minutes a day, just remind your body what it's like when you take six or eight breaths a minute? Anything in that range is going to have some profound benefits. So much of us breathe way too much. And by slowing that down, breathing in line with our metabolic needs, you'd be surprised what a transformative effect that will have on your health.

Starting point is 00:14:11 Hope you enjoyed that bite-sized clip. Have a wonderful weekend. And I'll be back next week with my long-form conversation on Wednesday and the latest episode of Bite Science next Friday.

Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee - #247 BITESIZE | The Breathing Secret That Will Transform Your Body and Mind | James Nestor

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