Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee - BITESIZE | Reduce Stress and Anxiety With This Breathing Practice | James Nestor #337

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 197 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 minds. One thing I don't think people still quite fully understand is how intimately our stress levels

Starting point is 00:01:50 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, 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. 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.

Starting point is 00:02:36 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 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

Starting point is 00:03:19 myself through those means. 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. One of the most memorable bits in your book for me was when you were talking about your own experience of trying tumo 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,

Starting point is 00:04:17 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.

Starting point is 00:04:53 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. 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. Controlling the stress and using breathing as your presser release valve can have enormous benefits to your day-to-day health. What these practices do is they

Starting point is 00:05:55 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 again,

Starting point is 00:06:52 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. 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.

Starting point is 00:07:23 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.

Starting point is 00:08:05 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. 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

Starting point is 00:08:55 with the food our ancestors ate, 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. 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. 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 on your bicycle. You can use it when you want to you can use it on the couch you can use it on your bicycle

Starting point is 00:09:46 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 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

Starting point is 00:10:40 so that they could be a little bit healthier and in some cases be a lot healthier. 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. 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. Do you have any final words of wisdom, practical tips, advice for people that go,

Starting point is 00:11:30 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? 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. 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.

Starting point is 00:12:24 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. 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. Hope you enjoyed that bite-sized clip. I hope you have a wonderful weekend. And I'll be back next week

Starting point is 00:12:57 with my long form conversation on Wednesday and the latest episode of Bite Science next Friday.

Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee - BITESIZE | Reduce Stress and Anxiety With This Breathing Practice | James Nestor #337

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