Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee - Why Changing The Way You Breathe Will Transform Your Body and Mind with James Nestor #124

Episode Date: September 22, 2020

In today’s episode, we’re returning to one of my favourite topics. Breathwork is where my personal and professional interests collide. How we breathe affects every body system we have and I’m excited to welcome James Nestor, science journalist and author of new book Breath, which explores the data behind this ancient, but some might say lost, art. And yes, it is an art. As we discuss, it doesn’t matter whether you follow a new or ancient technique to harness the potential of your breath, the principles are the same. What I love about James’ approach is he has no agenda to push. He hasn’t developed his own breathing technique, theory or product. He’s a journalist with an enquiring, sceptical mind. By his own admission, he came from a place where – like many of you, perhaps – he thought, ‘What’s all the fuss about breathing? It’s automatic, it’s easy, our bodies know what they’re doing’. But do they really? During this conversation, we cover some of the fascinating – objective – insights James has uncovered in his research. He explains the benefits of nasal breathing, the importance of masticating and how diet affects the skeletal development of our children’s mouths. James reveals how learning to chew more, chewing on one side and using mouth tape at night has changed the structure of his own mouth. His airways – and his wellbeing – have never been better. We discuss the long list of conditions breathing may improve; how athletes can benefit. And James reveals the therapeutic process behind some ‘super breathing’ techniques. Whether you’re already practising breathwork, you’re curious or yet to be convinced, James has a no-nonsense, rigorous approach we can all take something from. I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did! Show notes available at: https://drchatterjee.com/124 Follow me on instagram.com/drchatterjee/ Follow me on facebook.com/DrChatterjee/ Follow me on twitter.com/drchatterjeeuk 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.

By changing the way in which you breathe, you can actually change how your mind is processing thoughts and feelings and emotions. How we breathe absolutely affects us. It even affects the density of our bones. It affects us down to the atomic level, subatomic level with electrons. So to think that how we breathe does not matter is not based in any real science. Hi, my name is Rangan Chatterjee. Welcome to Feel Better, Live More. Hello and welcome back to the podcast. This is episode 124. back to the podcast. This is episode 124. Now, before we get started, I just want to give a really quick thank you to everyone who has bought a copy of my new book, Feel Better in 5, which has just come out in America and Canada. It is, again, really amazing to see all the feedback and how

many of you are sending me messages saying you're feeling less anxious, calmer, happier, less stressed, your sleep's improved, you've got more energy, so many different benefits that I have got all year from people who've already got the book in the UK. It's just really incredible to now hear that from my audience over in America. So keep sending me messages and of course do share the information with your friends and your family. Now on today's show we're returning to one of my favourite topics which is breathing. I'm really fascinated by the breath and I think it's fair to say that breath work sits in the sweet spot of where my personal and professional interests collide. You see the power of our breath is something that humans have

known about for a long period of time. Traditions like yoga have been talking about the breath for literally thousands of years. And it's just very recently that modern science is starting to catch up. How we breathe affects every single system in the body. And I'm delighted to have James Nestor as my guest on the podcast today. James is a science journalist but he's also the author of a frankly superb new book called Breath which explores the data behind this ancient but some might say lost art and yes breathing is an art as we discuss it doesn't matter whether you follow a new or ancient technique to harness the potential of your breath. The principles are actually the same. What I love about James's approach is that he has no agenda to push. He hasn't developed his

own breathing technique, his own theory or product. He's simply a journalist with an inquiring, skeptical mind. And by his own admission, he came from a place where, like many of you perhaps, he thought, what's all the fuss about breathing? It's automatic, it's easy. Our bodies know what they're doing. But do they really? You see, during our conversation, James explains the benefits of nasal breathing, the importance of masticating, and how diet affects the skeletal development of our children's mouths. James reveals how learning to chew more, chew on one side, and use mouth tape at night has changed the structure of his own mouth, and the result is that his airways and his well-being have never been better. We discussed the long list of conditions that breathing may improve and how athletes can benefit and James reveals the therapeutic process behind some of the more commonly known super breathing techniques.

Now although I have covered breathing in previous episodes with Patrick McKeown and Brian McKenzie. There are a lot of brand new insights and tips in this episode, which I think some will find incredibly valuable. In fact, my wife, although she already knew about the benefits of nasal breathing, she wasn't fully able to integrate this into her life until she tried James's suggestions that you will hear about in today's conversation. Whether you're already practicing breathwork, you're a little bit curious, or you're yet to be convinced, James has a no-nonsense, rigorous approach that we can all learn something from. I thoroughly enjoyed my conversation with James, and I'm pretty sure you will too. Now, without further delay, this is my conversation with James Nestor.

So James, welcome to the podcast. Thanks a lot for having me. Hey, no worries. I see you've had to get up a little bit early today. Just a bit of context for people listening to this or watching this. I'm currently in the UK in my new podcast studio, actually in my garden. So you're the very first guest I'm interviewing from the studio. So I'm delighted it's you. But we're going through a bit of a heat wave here in the UK. It's about 32 degrees outside at the moment, which for the UK is hot. So I'm dripping and I'm really sweaty. So you're in San Francisco, is that right?

I am, yes, where it's extremely cold. So our summers here are freezing. Yeah, we wouldn't be expecting that, would we? From the UK to San Francisco. We've got this perception of California that it's always sunny and always hot. But you're sort of dispelling that myth right here. Complete fiction. Yeah. Complete fiction. Okay. Well, okay. But a concept says, so look, I was sent your brand new book, Breath, an early copy, I think March or April time. And I get sent a lot of books, but this book stopped me in my tracks. Like it's one of those where I

opened it and I couldn't stop reading it because it's exactly where my personal interest and my professional interest as a medical doctor coincide. Breathwork is something I've been thinking a lot about, talking a lot about. I've spoken to Patrick McKeown, Brian McKenzie on this podcast in the past. People really enjoying that content. And when I saw the depth to which you had gone to in this book, I remember emailing your publisher saying, I've got to talk to James. When's he coming to the UK?

I think this was just before the pandemic kicked off. And I was like, let me know when he's here because I want to meet him in person and have the conversation. So first of all, thank you for writing such an amazing book. But for me, what's really interesting, when I've done a bit of research on you, you're a science journalist, right? And it's really interesting for me, why did a science journalist who, by your own account in the past, was a sceptic about breathing and breath work. How did you end up writing such an amazing and detailed book on breath? Well, first of all, thank you very much

for those compliments. I really appreciate that. And I had never intended to write a book about breathing. That was just something that I had never planned. But all the pieces of this puzzle kept coming together over several years until finally I had enough tangents that I wanted to put them together into one coherent story. So when I first started writing this book, when I got the contract to do it, my friends were like, why on earth would you ever want to write a book about breathing? It's just something we automatically do. We unconsciously do. How could that be of any interest? But once I started telling them about the real research happening here, how it influences every function of our

body, how once we take control of it, we can really help heal ourselves, we can even heat ourselves up, we can do all of these amazing things, then they got a little more interested. And so did I in this subject. So, you know, the beginning point for me was really a breathing experience I had several, several years ago that nobody could really describe. But it wasn't until I talked to freedivers and researchers who were studying freedivers that I truly understood the full potential of breathing. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that word potential, I think is really, really fascinating because when I think about breath work and the breath and breathing practices, the sort of phrase that keeps coming up in my mind is untapped potential. 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 well we breathe 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 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. And in my opinion, after talking to researchers for so many years, you can eat all the right foods.

You can eat paleo or keto or vegan or whatever. 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 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. Yeah. Well, we're going to delve into that during this conversation today, because there are so many fascinating stories that you've written about research, you know, case studies, really quite incredible. And there's, you know, you've done so many interviews since this book came out. And it is great for me as a medical doctor to see that there appears to be a huge amount of interest now, you know, with books like yours really raising awareness of how important the way we breathe is. But I was really struck by your subtitle in the book. And so the book's called Breath, but then the subtitle is The New Science of a Lost Art.

Now, not only does that sound amazing, there's a real magic there. The new science of a lost art. Science and art fascinates me because I say the practice of medicine is art and science. You know, it's not just science. It's not just looking at publications. It's how do you put that all together with the person in front of you, the patient in front of you, and how do you sort of blend it together to come up with the right solution for the right patients? So, tell me about that subtitle in the context of the breath. Why is it a lost art? Well, what I kept finding as I researched breathing and the art of breathing, starting from the last century to the century before that and going back thousands of years,

is people have been talking about this and writing about this and studying this for millennia. So, the earliest dated conscious breathing practices date back, you know, about 3,000, 4,000 years. And if you look around the world, all of these different cultures started studying the same things. They started coming to the same conclusions about breathing, that if we do it improperly, our health is going to suffer. If we do it properly, we can really help use that to help heal ourselves and to go up that next rung of human potential. So the thing that was frustrating is we would discover these things and then for some reason, in some way, they would be ignored and lost. Then they would be rediscovered, renamed something else, rediscovered by someone else at a different time, and then be proven at that time and forgotten about.

And this just kept happening over and over and over. I guess the more accurate title would be Lost and Found because that's what kept happening. And it really feels like right now we're at this moment where we have the instruments, we have the interest to really study breathing and to prove how it's working, how it alters our minds and our bodies and how it can benefit us and that would be the new science of that subtitle it's a new science new measurements looking at a very old practice yeah it's interesting when you compare this to other old practices such as let's say Chinese medicine, which for years has been telling us that different organs in the body function in different ways at different times of the day.

Something that Western medicine until recently has almost sort of looked down upon. You know, the liver is the liver, the kidney is the kidney. But there's a lot of science now, circadian biology showing that these organs at different times in the day, there's different amounts of genetic expression and they have different functions, different enzymatic functioning and all kinds of things. Yet we need almost, well, we've needed modern science now to go, oh, actually, yeah, you were right. And I sort of understand that you are a science journalist, so I guess you may, or is it fair to say you always approach topics with a bit of scepticism? Because I, I kind of

feel that it's not a little bit of arrogance in us as modern humans that we, we sort of feel that, you know, I'll prove it, you know, prove it. Like we, you were saying this has been written about 5,000 years ago. So it's so striking that,'ve forgotten it. We need reminding of it. But then also, why is it at this moment in time in 2020, why does it appear to be such an interest now in breathing and breathwork? Because yes, your book is incredible, but Wim Hof has been gaining notoriety and popularity for a good few years now. Hopefully Patrick McEwan and with the oxygen advantage, that's getting more and more awareness. I mean, what is going on? Why are people interested now? I think the main thing for me was I had no slant going into this story. There's no benefit

for me to say nasal breathing is better than mouth breathing, or one version of breathing is better than the other. So my job as a journalist is to go in, talk to the experts in the field, accumulate as much information, and objectively come out and give my assessment of this world, of breathing. So there was a lot of what I found, which was not supported at all. But the areas that I focused on on the book have such a firm foundation of science. And I think a lot of it has to do with the way that science is set up, especially medical science right now.

At the beginning, about half of the professors and doctors and other experts I talked to said, breathing doesn't matter. So how we do it does not matter. Nose, mouth, 20 times a day, 10 times a day, your body is going to compensate, which is 100% true. Our bodies will compensate, but that doesn't mean they're fully working at their best potential. That doesn't mean we're healthy. Just getting by is different than being healthy. Then you have all these other researchers who have studied breathing for 50 years. Some of these researchers stand up for 50 years. They said, how we breathe absolutely affects us. It even affects the density of our bones. It affects us down to the

atomic level, subatomic level with electrons. So to think that how we breathe does not matter is not based in any real science. And again, my job was to go in and talk to these people and look at the studies and piece together a story from that. Yeah. Now, thanks for sharing that. When I think about breathing and when I talk to people, whether it's my family, my friends, patients, I think people are starting to get awareness now that actually it's important, but there's a bit of confusion. There's so many different breathing methods out there. And I think some people struggle to know, well, what sorts of breathing methods should I do? And I really want to sort of delve into that today in this conversation. But I guess before

we do that, is it worth clarifying? You know, what is the problem at the moment? Is there a base level breathing practice that everyone should do, for example? Because I think it'll be easy. And I want to go into, you know, all different kinds of breathing practices. But I also want to make sure we don't lose people so that they can see the big picture, but they also know a simple thing that they can take away and start applying? Yeah, and that's a great question. And it's a question I had early on because you've got dozens of books on breathing. There's some books on pranayama that have 300 different practices in it. Where do I begin here? What I found is so many of them all come to the same

conclusion. They're all doing the same thing. So they're means to the same ends. So if you look at ancient Chinese practices of breathing, they are almost identical to ancient Hindu practices of breathing, which are almost identical to the yoga practices that are being used now or the other practices that are being used by psychiatrists for anxiety and depression. They're all doing the same thing. We know this from measurements.

So what I try to do in the book was not to focus on these individual breathing techniques, but to focus on the larger story around it. How do they affect us? What are they? Where did they come from? Because it doesn't matter. You could call it by 12 different names. Slow breathing is slow breathing.

And there's a very simple way of doing it. So the center of the book is a foundation of breathing that everybody can benefit from. And again, it doesn't matter who invented this or who claims to have invented this stuff or at what time. have invented this stuff or at what time. It's simple practices of breathing through the nose, exhaling more, breathing less, breathing slowly. So that's what I tried to focus on, the general view of this. And if you want more of the specifics, there's already a zillion books on the how-to with hundreds of different practices. You're just past 8am at the moment in San Francisco. So I don't know what your normal wake up time is. But have you done any breath work this morning as a way of preparing for the day ahead? I'm a night owl. So my normal wake up time is much later than

this. Hence, hence the tea over here. Oh, wow. But, uh, you know, people think that since I studied breathing for so many years, I'd be the best breather in the world. And I'm not. I've got a lot of work to do. But at least the first step about breathing is to be conscious of it and to understand that this isn't something that should just be running in the background, in the back of our minds, but something that we can take control of. So I'm acutely aware of when I'm breathing improperly, and I'm acutely aware of then how to fix it. So more intense breathwork practices, I will do about three or four times a week, usually at night. But throughout the day,

I'm adopting very simple, healthy breathing habits. And that to me is one of the most important things about this. This isn't asking people to go out and run six miles a day or to completely change their lifestyle. You can adopt healthy breathing habits no matter what you're doing. If you're sitting in front of a computer, if you're watching Netflix, if you're walking around. And just by adopting those, you can have a transformative effect on your health. That sounds like a huge claim, but I've seen it and the studies have shown it. Yeah, brilliant. And I think that's a great message for people.

So let's dive into something that you have written about. You've touched on it in the conversation so far, nasal breathing, okay? And, you know, for people who've been listening to my podcast for a while, they will have heard me talk about this with Brian McKenzie and with Patrick McKeown, right? But I think we've got a lot of new listeners, and I think it's always reiterating how important it is to breathe through your nose. So what's going on? 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 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 go from i think i've read you say before or i think maybe i heard it in an interview that you used to be a mouth breather um how did you become a nose breather and is it possible for anyone to actually listen to this and go okay okay, 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. Jayakar 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 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, you know, once you realize how dangerous mouth breathing is, you can then take a conscious effort to change it, how you're doing, how you're breathing throughout the day. But that won't help you when you're unconscious at night, right? 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. And this sounds a little, you know, like like new age science, but it's but it's not because I heard from a breathing therapist at Stanford and 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. In fact, I actually spoke to a buddy this morning on the phone who I've not spoken to for a few months. And I said, hey spoke to a buddy this morning on the phone who I've not spoken to for a few months. And I said, hey, he was saying, how's the podcast going? I said, yeah, great. I'm actually speaking to someone. James Ness said this afternoon, you've

got to get his book. It's just incredible. It's all about breathing. And he said to me that the thing he's changed a few months ago was he started to tape his mouth up at night. And he said he cannot believe the difference. He said, I don't wake up thirsty.. And he said he cannot believe the difference. He said, I don't wake up thirsty. I'm not groggy in the morning. I've got more energy, better cognition. And I think for people who are sceptical, and I know they are out there, even within my own family, they're sceptics to how important breathing is. I think it really is quite profound what you can feel like. You may not 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. We can figure out if it's actually working. And that's exactly what we did working with NIAC at Stanford. So the measurements from these instruments aren't going to lie. Yes, I felt better. But to me, as a science journalist, it's much more convincing to have data, because what works with one person may not work with somebody else. And that's, they're finding right now that Stanford and Kearney is booting up a study of 200 people

looking at sleep apnea and snoring and sleep tape. And I so happen to have a little roll here. And I want to explain to people that I would highly suggest not going on YouTube and looking how to sleep tape because there's a lot of really sketchy stuff there. All you need is a teeny piece of tape. I use a piece that big. 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. 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 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 going to affect you over the long term, you're nuts. It will

have a tremendous effect on your health. Yeah, absolutely. In your research, Yeah, absolutely. In your research, you know, you've mentioned sleep apnea. And, you know, these problems we have, sleep problems are endemic now. You know, there's, it's, you know, sleep deprivation is an epidemic. There's many reasons for me that, you know, I think back, I always try and look at the way we're suffering now or the maladies of the 21st century and try and put them in an evolutionary perspective and a context to go, what's really going on here? And I don't know if in your research, did you ever come across that sleep apnea and sleep problems are quite a modern problem? I mean, do we know if this existed 300, 400 years ago? Was any part of your research on this at all? Well, we can't go back and test people, but what we can do is look at skeletons. And so I talked to the experts in the field, biological anthropologists, who look at the shape of skeletons. And our ancestors, anything older than around 400 years, maybe 500 years, they would have these very powerful jaws and they would have these faces that grew outward and these huge nasal apertures in the back. So from those skeletons, we can decipher that these people had larger airways.

They had more room to breathe. We know that obesity absolutely affects snoring and sleep apnea as well. And people were not as obese as they are now. And that seems very clear and understood. But this idea that our ancestors had these huge, powerful faces and we do not is less acknowledged.

And yet it's very clear in the skeletal record and an example of this is looking at the teeth of an ancient skeleton if you were to look at the teeth of one of your ancestors 400 years old 4 000 years old 40 that doesn't matter on back they would have perfectly straight teeth there There's like a 99.9% chance perfectly straight teeth. Today, 90% of us have some sort of crookedness in our teeth because our mouths have grown so small. With a very small mouth, you also have a smaller airway. And that's one of the main reasons so many of us suffer from snoring, sleep apnea, respiratory problems, it's even implicated in asthma, allergies and more.

Yeah, wow. And why do we think that's happened? Why have we got such a smaller mouth, smaller jaw? Are there some sort of theories out there? Yeah, there's a few theories, but there's also a few absolute facts that have been very clearly identified in the past 20 years. 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

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We chewed less. Our mouths grew too small. Environmental inputs had some effect on that. When you're walking around breathing through your mouth, especially when you're a kid, your face will grow differently. It's so common that this is called adenoid phase from when the adenoids or tonsils inflame and you have to walk around like this. But most of it is caused by food, by the softness of our diets. And there's been some incredible research done in this. And I just think it's so under-acknowledged, the role that chewing, masticatory stress, plays in the structure of our faces. But it's also so simple. The less you use something, the less it's going to develop.

And especially, this is important in infancy, they've done studies where they've looked at infants who have been bottle-fed versus those who have been breastfed. And when an infant is breastfed, it requires a tremendous amount of stress and exercise and helps push the face outward, which will then create a larger airway. Yeah. You know, it's incredible. You're talking about food that we chew more. food that we chew more and what you're fundamentally talking about is more natural foods less highly processed industrialized foods so we we often think about food in the context of our health our well-being particularly a lot of people talk about it in the context of their weight

but you're sort of saying yeah sure but what you, your weight, but health and well-being is so broad. And now we're introducing mouth size and teeth strength and teeth structure and jaw structure into the potential benefits of eating real food. Yeah. And here again, as an example of all these disparate people in these disparate areas of science, all coming to the same general conclusion in just slightly different ways. So we're usually looking at foods in terms of calories, at least in the U.S., we're looking at it in terms of calories. We're not looking at it in terms of toughness or softness. And I think it's quite interesting that even today, you think about what's considered healthy food today oatmeal avocados yogurt you know goo bars all this stuff is soft it requires basically no chewing at all

and the less you're chewing especially when you're younger the less you'll be working out these muscles the less you'll be developing your face yeah you said especially when you're younger the less you'll be working out these muscles the less you'll be developing your face yeah you said especially when you're younger now that's really interesting because one thing yes as a doctor but also as a parent that i've always found quite curious is this idea that all the adults will eat proper food but' menu, I don't know if it's the same in the States, the kids' menu is generally full of junk. It's like the adults will order the proper food, but the kids will have some sort of, I don't know, you know,

hyper-processed industrialized foods. And, you know, I am not blaming anyone or criticizing anyone for doing that. I understand that's almost the conditioning as well. But one thing we have very much tried hard from a young age with our children is they eat the same as what we do. We eat as much as we can, minimally processed, you know, food as close to nature as possible. And, you know, I appreciate we're lucky to be able to have access to that, but we do that. And that's what we give our kids. We don't make separate food for them.

to that, but we do that. And that's what we give our kids. We don't make separate food for them. And it's just interesting. You know, you say all roads are sort of leading to Rome in the same place to actually, yeah, eat the right diet. It's almost like, it's basically what you're trying to say is live, eat and breathe in the way that we have evolved to and we will be more thriving healthier happier human beings i guess yeah nature already did all of this for us it's just in the last hundred years we thought that we were smarter than nature and we thought we could take some some side tracks into this and condense food down to one pill or some mush that you could squirt in your mouth and it would have the same effect. Yeah, we're not getting scurvy from that or berry berry from that. We're not getting these diseases that we used to suffer from,

but we're also denying ourselves so many of the benefits. And exactly what you had said, many of the benefits. And exactly what you had said, there's this huge, I would even call it a revolution right now in baby-led weaning, which is not to give babies, infants, this soft mush in jars, which we've only been doing for the past hundred years anyway. And look at what's happened. Look at what's happened to our weight. Look at what's happened to our weight look at what's happened to our faces look what happened to our teeth i mean on and on and on is that is a modern invention so to allow kids especially early on to be able to really work out that masticatory stress to to chew properly is going to have benefits down the road and that's been very well proven at this time. Yeah. And it really, you know, the phrase use it or lose it, which is common parlance in

the English language, both in the US and in the UK. You know, we understand that, don't we, with muscles, we get that, you know, if I do a bicep curl every morning, my bicep is going to get stronger. If I stop doing it over time, it's going to get smaller. I think we understand that with our physical muscles. But as you say, I don't think we've thought about it in terms of our jaw, our mastication muscles. It's like, if you don't chew regularly, if you're not sort of having that stress put on your jaw, like the stress on the bicep, what your jaw is then going to adapt. It's going to adapt to what it feels that you need. I think I've heard you mention before that there's something about chewing on one side as opposed to two sides.

And I found that really interesting. So I'd love to just explore that. But I also just want to make sure we've covered that many people listen to this show. Some, I'm sure, are avid meat eaters. Some are vegans. And when we talk about natural food, I think it's just important to say you can probably, you know, whilst obviously meat is quite tough and there's bones to chew on, you know, there's a lot of vegetables like a carrot, for example, or, you know, a lot of tough veg that you have to chew. You can probably also get that sort of stress on the jaw, right? So I just want to make sure we include everyone in this conversation that they all feel as though this applies to them. Yes, I wonder if you could just expand on that at all. Means to the same end. That's again, you've got these different people in these different camps.

But of course, if you're chewing on carrots, if you're chewing on celery, I mean, just think of natural foods, even wheat. You know, we got really good at removing the bran and the germ from wheat and creating this this processed white flour. And the same thing with rice, white bran and germ remove we just have this this little seed left so chewing is is essential especially with early on to developing proper airway health proper mouth uh we we know that and it's how you chew what you're chewing is i don't want to get into that that gets very very political because the carnivores are going to say one thing. Vegans are going to say the other. But do not underestimate the power and benefits of chewing.

And this is a whole new science that is really being deeply explored now, which I find is fascinating. For people listening, thinking, okay, I've got kids. for people listening, thinking, okay, I've got kids. For whatever reason, I wasn't able to breastfeed. And maybe I have been giving them a lot of soft food because that's what I thought I should be doing. Can we change things? Do we know, you know, if we change a diet, if we start to give the jaw a new stressor, particularly that one-sided stressor, which I'd love you to expand to expand upon you know how late can we still make those changes because it's it's not quite just in those infant years is it it goes on quite quite a lot longer than that well I was curious about that and I will get to the

one side or other side I promise um but I was I was you know, I was young a zillion years ago. So I, you know, I cannot take advantage of infant breastfeeding or baby led weaning or chewing hard foods when I'm eight or nine years old. So I wanted to find out what an adult could do if an adult could improve his airways. And from what I'd understood, what I've heard from many people is you really couldn't. Whatever you've got on the inside is what you're stuck with. But I met a few researchers that had been conducting studies for decades, and they told me that most of us understand that we only start losing bone mass past around 30 years old. It starts going down and down and down.

But there is one bone in our bodies that we can remodel at virtually any age. And that's the bone right here in our faces, in our maxilla. So they told me, this seems impossible. They showed me pictures of people before and after these treatments, these chewing treatments, other treatments to expand their palate, in which they had gained more bone in their faces. And as a journalist, I said, I looked at all the studies. They were legit. They were confirmed by a Mayo Clinic advisor. And they had also been written about by a Dr. Jeremy Mao in Columbia. But I wanted to see this for my own interest and curiosity. So I said, okay, you've got a year.

I'm going to do whatever you want me to do. We're going to take a CAT scan before and after, and we're going to look at my airways to see what happened in that time. So during that time, I wore this device at night. I have a very small mouth, especially my upper palate did not develop properly because I wasn't chewing enough when I was young. The palate starts like this and should come down and be more flat mine is v-shaped as are the the vast majority of the population has a palate like this so i wore this device to help expand the upper palate of my mouth and by doing so expand my airways and also to help model new bone in my face that would be advantageous to breathing so this sounds like crazy stuff but we took cat scans and that's exactly what happened i gained about five pennies worth of bone in my face my

airway opened up about 15 to 20 percent which is an incredible amount all this pus and granulation that had been stuck in my sinuses was gone. Subjectively, I can say I've never been breathing more easily in my life. So you don't need a palate expander to do this. I wore one because I just wanted to see if this was possible. And yes, it is. By chewing, and specifically by chewing on one side or the other, you can help tone your airway. The airway is a muscle. This is a muscle tube. And if you're just eating soft mush, and if you're eating it improperly, like that, you are not working out this muscle as well as you should be.

And it will become lazy and flaccid. So you want your muscle to be toned and open in the airway to be clear. And that's what chewing helps to do. So specifically, the right side, left side, and this is what Dr. Ted Belfort and Scott Simonetti told me, which blew my mind. If you think about chewing, we won't talk about if you're chewing meat or carrots, just vegans, imagine chewing celery, carnivores, you've got a big rib or whatever. You're not chewing on both sides of your mouth. You chew on one side and then you switch the food over and you chew on the other side. So our bodies identify that side-to-side chewing with a

parasympathetic, a relaxation response, which will make it easier to digest that food. When you're clenching your jaw, think about before a fight or you're stressed, you clench both sides of your jaw, which spikes a sympathetic response, a fight or flight response, which makes it harder to digest. a fight or flight response, which makes it harder to digest. So when you're chewing, when you're masticating, you want to have this relaxation response because during that response, you're also able to help grow bone more easily. I'm blown away, James. I mean, hearing that, the fact that if we chew on one side of the mouth, it stimul you know parasympathetic tone so the relaxation part of the nervous system as opposed to both sided which is jaw tension which then activates the sympathetic the stress part of the nervous system absolutely incredible then again we go back to evolution we as you say nature figured it out you know if we're eating something of value, it's on one side. It really is incredible.

This idea of, you know, you say all roads leading to Rome. I love that because you can think of breath in the same way. So, you know, James, I've been practicing now for almost 20 years as a medical doctor. And, you know, I'm very proud to be a medical doctor, but I do have concerns over the way we treat certain things. We're very reductionist. We put things in their little boxes. There's often not cross-talk between, you know, that's a lung problem or that's a stomach problem, that's a heart problem, without this recognition that everything is connected together. without this recognition that everything is connected together. And I've been using breathing practices with patients, I don't know how, at least five years, probably longer now, maybe even 10 years, and seen incredible benefits across a whole variety of different conditions. So

breath for me in many ways is almost the great unifier. You can apply it to anxiety, to panic attacks, to just generally feeling stressed, to improving your sleep. And the beautiful thing about it is it's free. It's available to everyone. You know, in this era where a lot of people are making the claim that wellness and looking after yourself is the preserve of the middle classes, I just don't agree with that i think i think yes some things that have been marcus it are but we all breathe every day what

you're asking people to look at is well how do you breathe can you improve the quality of your breath and yeah just to be clear in no ways do I view breathing and the science of breathing as contradictory or butting against so many doctrines of Western science. My father-in-law is a pulmonologist. My brother-in-law is an ER doctor. So we've been talking through this entire process, and they are so good at what they do. So as a pulmonologist, you're dealing with pathologies of the lungs. I get in an accident, my lungs get ripped up, I have cancer. I want to see a pulmonologist. I want the latest, most advanced technology to help fix me. What a wonderful thing. I likely wouldn't be alive

without Western medicine. So this is not them versus us or anything like that. It's coming together and looking at the limitations from each area. So what they have told me repeatedly is they're so frustrated because when you're just looking at the lungs, you're not even looking at the airway. You're not even looking at what's happening in the nose, but this is all one connected system. So what's happening in the nose and in the airway is absolutely going to be affecting what happens in the lungs. But at least in the US, where you've got private medical care, everyone is siloed off and they don't really even talk to one another. But our bodies aren't just a liver. They aren't just kidneys. They aren't just lungs or brains. This is one complete body. And what happens up here affects what happens

down here. And so breathing to me is this thing, even though we may not be able to take conscious control of our heart rate, of our circulation, of our blood pressure, of our liver function, of our digestion, when we breathe, we can influence all of these functions and willingly help ourselves function in a completely different way that's beneficial to our health. And again, what I think is so interesting about this, it's not just a subjective experience. You can measure the effects of someone just shifting their breathing within a few minutes. I have borderline higher blood pressure. It's not too bad, but I can breathe in a certain way.

And two minutes later, take my blood pressure and it will go down 10 to 15 points. And you imagine that's after a couple minutes. What's going to happen after a couple days,, a couple of weeks, a couple of months of adopting healthy breathing habits? What we're seeing, these people are able to overcome so many chronic problems and really put themselves up that next rung of human potential. What are some of those cases you've come across? What sort of chronic problems have you seen people overcome and leave behind once they start focusing on their breath? The most dramatic have been asthmatics, asthmatics and emphysemics. So asthmatics as a population

will be much more apt to breathe through their mouths and they will have much lower end tidal CO2. And what that means is they are breathing too often and too much, and they were blowing off too much CO2. And a lot of us understand carbon dioxide, CO2, as being this really bad thing. It's the thing that's causing global warming, acidity of the ocean. All of that is 100% true. But in the body, it really wants a balance of CO2 and oxygen. Oxygen can't do its thing without a balance of CO2 and oxygen. Oxygen can't do its thing without a balance of CO2. So if you don't have enough CO2 in your body, you are causing vasoconstriction and you can exacerbate asthma

attacks. We see this with asthmatics. They're so scared they're going to lose the ability to breathe because that reminds them of an asthma attack that they start breathing more and more. Guess what happens? They blow off more CO2. They get more constricted that they start breathing more and more. Guess what happens? They blow off more CO2. They get more constricted. They start breathing more and more, and they are caused to have an asthma attack. And by simply changing the way in which they breathe, to be clear, this isn't going to work for everybody. But the studies have shown Alicia Murrett at Southern Methodist University did this incredible story with 120 asthmatics. The only thing she changed was how they breathe. They carried around this little device that calculated their carbon dioxide.

Whenever their carbon dioxide was getting low, that showed that they were breathing too much. She would have them slow down and breathe more slowly. They had such a profound change from just doing this. Not only significantly fewer asthma attacks, but increased respiratory function. They were calmer. They felt better. And again, this isn't some psychosomatic thing.

This is allowing the body to function the way it's naturally designed to function and so much of asthma i think has been i won't say misdiagnosed but i don't think asthmatics have been properly served with the right information on how they can potentially change their their asthma and really improve their health yeah Yeah. And I want to reiterate what you said just before we got onto asthma, that this is not about it's breathwork or Western medicine. No, it's about saying Western medicine is brilliant at so much, but there's also some things that we might be able to add into our practices. It's like breathwork and breathing practices could

help expand our toolbox. And so for an asthmatic walking in, yeah, sure, they may need their brown inhaler or their blue inhaler. Absolutely, particularly in the acute phase, because if you can't breathe, you know, that's a very powerful signal to the body. You know, it's scary. It's problematic but it could be also that with this science well maybe uh breathing protocols can also be prescribed in the same way and and i really feel strongly that if you know people look up to the medical profession so if if you you know you listen to this podcast or you read your book or you listen to another podcast and then you go to your doctor with asthma and your asthma says no it's about this brown inhaler and this blue inhaler, you are automatically going to prioritize that. And it's not either or, it's saying, hey, look, sure, take that. But what if you spent five or 10 minutes a

day working on breathing less, breathing slower through your nose, what may happen? Maybe over time, you're going to be able to reduce how many inhalers you need. Maybe you're going to have less attacks. You know, that's where I think it's not about being combative one side against another. It's trying to bring people together and go, look, that's another tool here that, you know what, has no side effects. Which I think is a really important point to sort of hammer home. So oral steroids and bronchodilators are absolute lifesavers for asthmatics. And no one would say, just take a breathing, ditch all that stuff.

Absolutely not. But those are dealing with the symptoms of asthma. And we know that after being especially on oral steroids for decades, which a lot of asthmatics are, there is an increased chance of blindness, of bone density issues, of autoimmune problems, of worsening asthma symptoms. And we know this. This is very clearly defined. So what I would really like to see happen is when asthmatics come in, yes, they get their medication for their acute asthma attacks, absolutely necessary, but they also get information. So what they do with that information is up to them.

But I really believe that they would be better served to know that there are protocols that have profoundly changed other asthmatics. And I've talked to people, one woman was 70 years old. She had had asthma since she was 10. Couldn't walk a couple blocks without suffering from an attack. And she had been on all these drugs for decades and decades. She changed the way in which she was breathing, and she no longer has symptoms of asthma. She's out hiking. She's out traveling. So this is real stuff.

I've talked to dozens of other people. Patrick McEwen's a great example. Same story. He told his story on the show. It's the same story. And it's like, why not try it and see if it works? And if it doesn't, okay. But why not try it?

So I've heard this story dozens of times, and I've seen the effects. These people on heroic doses of steroids and bronchodilator 20 times a day. And it helps them keep the symptoms at bay, but it does not help with the core issue of asthma. And so much of that is tied to inflammation. And what's the quickest way of reducing inflammation in the body is to put it in that parasympathetic state. That is going to reduce inflammation. It's going to relax you. You're going to breathe easier. So not only asthma, though, there was this researcher named Carl Stau, who was a vocal teacher, choral conductor in the 50s, and found this new way of breathing, this deeper way of breathing that really helped singers. And he was then brought in to the VA

hospitals in the US on the East Coast. And just by teaching emphysemics who were laid out and basically left to die, they didn't know what to do with these people just by teaching them breathing they were able to walk out of the hospital and there's x-rays of this there's interview with pulmonologists who who were there to witness this so it's just another you know reason that that or example of how powerful simple breathing techniques can be for so many chronic conditions. Yeah. Thanks for sharing that. And I just want to reiterate to people that, look, if you have got asthma, if you are already on a prescribed regime of inhalers, neither James nor I am asking you to reduce that at all without consultation with anyone.

What we're trying to say, and I don't want to speak for you, James, but if you don't agree with this summary, then please feel free to jump in. But saying, look, listen to the conversation, check out some videos. We'll sort of, maybe I'll link to them at the end or in the show notes of how you might want to start practicing some of this stuff and see how you go. And maybe you can go back and see the asthma nurse or the doctor and tell them how you're feeling differently. We're definitely not saying to stop anything or do it of your own accord. So sort of fair summary of what you said, James? Absolutely. I need to second that. And go out and look at the science yourself. I would suggest

be skeptical. Go out, look at the science, look at the experts in the field, look at what they've put together, and you can make your mind up from there. I also want a second, one other thing you mentioned is this stuff is not requiring you to change your diet or to go jogging for 10 miles a day. It is free, okay? It's accessible to anybody. And these techniques are freely available online. You can buy a book, probably cost you 10 bucks. Patrick McKeown's books are fantastic. They're all based in science. There's references at the back.

So at least I believe that this information should be offered to people. What they do with it is up to them, but it should be offered. And we know through decades of studies that it can have a really profound effect. So one thing I've changed, I'm always experimenting with different practices and different things, but the more I've got into breathwork, so I've written about it in some of my books before, I've been experimenting with different formats. I've been chatting to people on the show about different breathing techniques. And I was very lucky. Patrick came to my house the day. He did a session with my children. Then we recorded the show. And,

you know, A, he's a lovely man. But B, I was really convinced afterwards that I had to, or I would benefit from working on breathing less. Now, I think this is quite counterintuitive for some people. So I'm going to ask you about this in just a second. But just to give a bit of context, 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, which is, I hope I breathe through my nose pretty much all the time these days. I've been working on it for a long period of time now, well over a year. But I work for about five minutes. I'll do

this very slow breath practice through my nose that Patrick taught me. And I personally feel that if I want to meditate afterwards, I'm way more focused and in the zone. But I mean, I can share more of what I do if people are interested. But, you know, 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. 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,

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app. 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 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. 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. 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. All 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 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 fluid. 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 likes that. It's almost a way of really sort of assessing modern society, this idea that more is better, I need to go harder,

I need to go more, whereas actually many things, whether it's breathwork or other things, it's about slowing down and doing less. And I think that word efficiency really, really sort of hits the nail on the head there, because if we thought about our car, for example, we'd understand if the fuel we put in, if we could drive in such a way that that fuel goes longer, we don't need to fill up petrol as often, we'd go, yeah, that sounds brilliant. But that's kind of what we're talking about in the body, aren't we? We're saying you're going to be more efficient. You're going to be using less resource in your body to actually get those benefits. I mean, I think that analogy works with the car. Yeah. And just to sort of vibe off your car analogy, imagine being at a stoplight and just revving your motor, just being in neutral and just... That's going to wear that car down so much more quickly, and it's completely unnecessary.

You're going to use more gas. It's just bad news across the board. That's what you're doing when you're over-breathing and you're just sitting here at rest. If I'm breathing at 18 breaths per minute, which is considered normal, by the way, 12 to 18 is considered in the normal range. If I'm doing that, I am causing so much unnecessary wear and tear on my heart or my cardiorespiratory systems, blood pressure, vascular system, your brain, you're stressing yourself out, anxiety, sympathy. I mean, I could go on and on. So why would you do that? Why not breathe more closely

in line with your metabolic needs? And this is not only a benefit for people with asthma and anxiety, this is a huge benefit for athletes. Because if you go out into the street and if you could go to, I don't know if gyms are open over there, but they certainly aren't open here. Every time I went to my gym, you'd see people just working out, thinking they're getting more oxygen in by doing that. So right now, if people are sitting at home, you can breathe those breaths with me. After a while, you're going to feel your fingers getting a little cold. You're getting a little dizzy to your head. That isn't from an increase of oxygen. It's from a decrease of oxygen to those areas, to vasoconstriction to those areas. So when you're over breathing, you are actually inhibiting circulation throughout areas of your body. So breathing less, you can do so much more.

Yeah, I want people just to really sit with what you said there, you know, because a lot of people will know that feeling of tingliness in their fingers. People who suffer from panic attacks will certainly know that feeling. It's like one of these cardinal symptoms that we talk about. And yeah, I think a lot of people would think that that's because, well, I don't know, whatever, maybe they need to breathe even faster to sort of get rid of this. But it's the opposite, right? That's exactly right. People think, oh, I'm not getting oxygen to my fingertips and my toes. That's why they're always cold. I need to get some more air in there to get some oxygen. And

the opposite is happening. And you can see this by, instead of breathing those 18 times a minute, which is again, way too much, you can slow down your breathing to about six times a minute. And if that's difficult, make it eight times a minute. No one's watching you. This is not a competition.

But by just breathing more slowly and more efficiently, I think you will be amazed how your body's going to heat up and how you're going to feel your fingertips. All that numbness will tend to go away. Not for everybody, but for a lot of people, because you are increasing circulation to those areas, you're making those areas more, it becomes easier for them to offload oxygen because there's an increase in CO2. There's a balance of CO2 and oxygen, which is what it's all about. Again, for people with chronic problems or for athletes, it's that balance, which is essential. A lot of people these days suffer from cold hands and cold toes.

Did any of your research come across this? Some of this may be related to breathing. Of course, there are other causes of this, but it would seem pretty reasonable to me looking at the basic physiology that that could absolutely be a cause without a doubt which is why you look at populations it's no coincidence that a lot of asthmatics also have anxiety and a lot of people with anxiety and asthma have cold fingers and cold toes so so this is this is measurable stuff and you can see by by really super breathers be it a yogi or wim hof when you take control of your breathing you can not only return circulation to these areas you can super heat the body to such a degree that you can go and sit in an ice bath. Wim has sat in an ice bath for

two hours and not has his core temperature go down. And yogis have been doing this for thousands of years. It's been studied at Harvard by Herbert Benson. We know it's real and it just shows you what the human body is really capable of. But the first thing before you go off and do that, what the human body is really capable of. But the first thing before you go off and do that, become a super breather, is to get that foundation of breathing right. And 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. Yeah, I was struck by you mentioning what is considered the normal breathing rate, or what we call the respiratory rate and you know i remember from medical school and early days as a junior doctor you know it's ballpark is sort of 12 to 16 or 12 to 18 depending on which guidelines you look

at and before this call today before our chat i thought i'm just going to look up some you know big medical institutions to see what's going on. And I came across the Cleveland Clinic website where they were talking about breathing rates. And they said normal, I think is 12 to 16 or 12 to 18. Under 12 is far too little. Over 25 is far too many. And I thought, wow, that's incredible because we're talking about maybe optimal efficiency might be six breaths a minute or not might be. I mean, you're going to tell efficiency might be six breaths a minute, or not might be, you're going to tell me it is six breaths a minute, but our medical guidelines are actually giving us almost double that, which again, it's just remarkable, isn't it? It comes back to this normal versus optimal. What is optimal for a human being?

Well, so much of those guidelines were based on people with pathologies, you know? And I was talking to my father-in-law about this. I saw that same Cleveland Clinic guideline, and I was like, that seems high. And I sent it to him. He said when he was in medical school, it was 8 to 12. So within 30 years, it's almost doubled what's considered normal. So he was shocked to see that as well. He's like, that is way too much.

And we know by measuring what happens when you're breathing at a rate, and again, people get so tied up. I say in the book, 5.5 second inhale. People have written, said, I'm a half a second off. Am I going to be okay? And I said, oh my God, what have I done to these poor people? So anything in that range. So you could go down to five, four breaths per minute to six or seven or eight, what you're comfortable with. We can so clearly see what happens to the body when we're breathing at this rate and when we're breathing slightly

deeper than we're used to. We can see what happens to blood pressure, circulation, and almost most importantly, autonomic nervous system function. If you get a heart rate variability monitor and look at what happens when you're talking or when you're not focusing on your breathing, compared to what happens after just a minute of breathing at a rate of about six breaths per minute. You will find these lines that were jagged and disorganized become these beautiful sine waves because your body is entering a state of what researchers call coherence, where all the systems are really working at peak efficiency, which of course,

why wouldn't you want to be working at peak efficiency? When you're doing that, you can think better, you will feel better, and your body will be allowed to help heal itself. Yeah, it's just incredible. And I just want to, you know, we are going to get into Wim Hof stuff and Tummo and all these kind of, I wouldn't say crazy, all these kind of like super breather territories that people may want to hear about. But, you know, what you're sort of talking about is how do you breathe day to day? What is your normal? You know, can we improve that? 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? And, you know, it doesn't surprise me that people

have emailed in saying, oh, James, you said 5.5. I'm on 5.7 or 5.8, you know. And I think this is almost, I see this a lot as well. I get messages on Instagram all the time, like, yeah, but what about this and that? And I think sometimes we get so caught up in the tiny details, we lose the big picture. Big picture is we're breathing, as a society, we're probably over-breathing, okay? Can we individually practice a little bit every day where we sort of slow that down. I think that's quite simple. If we can get to 5.5 or six in and six out, great. But 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. All of those, anything in that range is going to have some profound benefits. of those, anything in that range is going to have some profound benefits. So I just want to second something that you said. We're so, as Westerners, we hear, oh, breathing is the latest thing. I'm

going to go and do it 100%. I'm going to push it all the way. And I'm going to do it perfectly. So this isn't what I tried to stray away from in the book was this granular detail. And look at this overview. What is healthy breathing? How can we do it? What does it do to our body? And you can focus on the specific ways of breathing, the hundreds of different ways of breathing, once you've already built that foundation.

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. So even a few minutes a day of this six breaths, we're just going to call it six breaths a minute. It might confuse people going into the five point. We'll just call it six breaths a minute. Start with that and then go down to 5.5 or five or whatever you want to do. A few minutes a day, 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 stress just lift from their faces and again this isn't just a subjective measure this is this is their bodies entering a state of of healing that we can very clearly see with instruments so the fact that psychiatrists are using this, MDs are using this for asthma, it works across the board for athletics, for performance, it works as well. So even five minutes, they found that can have an effect on blood pressure,

five minutes of healthy breathing a day. So start with that. Just focus your time. Again, unlike meditation, we know the benefits of meditation. No one's going to argue that. My argument is that so many of those benefits early on are tied to the way in which you breathe, because I don't know of any meditation where you're sitting there and you're not focusing on your breath. So if it's difficult for people to sit in a dark room and look at a wall, you can breathe this way while you're watching TV, while you're driving, at the dinner table.

I mean, whenever you want. Start with a few minutes and start developing that, because after that, hopefully it will start to become a habit. But first you have to acclimate your body to this new form of breathing, which is really the natural, healthy form of breathing that we've all forgotten. When you mentioned anxiety, depression, and other conditions, I would even make the case for weight loss. And I'll explain what I mean by that. When I say, I very much believe that a lot of these chronic conditions, a multi-pronged approach often works much better than just looking for that magic bullet. And if we think about excess weight gain, a lot of the issues driving that, I'm not here to talk about the right diets, okay? Because

as you've said, it's a religious type debate that I'm not sure is that helpful a lot of the time. debates that I'm not sure is that helpful a lot of the time. But stress and our emotions drives a lot of our eating behavior. There's no doubt about that. There's one study which shows 80% of us change our eating behavior in response to stress. About 45% of us eat more, 35% of us eat less. So I would argue if you're someone who eats more in response to stress, then perhaps working on your diet, you know, whether it's paleo or vegan, to take two extremes, maybe that's not the best use for your time. Maybe it's working on your stress levels. And if we're over breathing, if we're breathing too much, that is information for your brain, you know, that is keeping you in that stress state.

So a daily breathing practice, and I have done this with patients as part of a multi-pronged strategy helps them to feel in control of themselves and go, oh, I feel less stressed. Therefore I'm no longer needing as much food to compensate for that stress. You know, I'm not, I'm not trying to make too many leaps there. I understand that you're looking at hard research and you put that in the book. But as a clinician, I really see this work in a whole variety of different conditions. It helps you sleep better. You know, so which of my patients don't want to sleep better? Blood pressure, do you know what I mean? So I think you can make the case for many different conditions because breathing is fundamental to who we are and, you know, how our body thinks we are in that moment. You know, are we running away from a tiger

or are we chilling out, relaxing and thriving in a place of safety? When I first heard that breathing and breathing problems specifically could be associated with metabolic disorders, it seemed like a crazy tangent. Until you look at how the body functions and you look at how blood sugar functions and you know that if you're in a constant state of stress, your adrenaline is going to go up, blood sugar is going to spike. And the longer your blood sugar is spiking, the less sensitive insulin is going to get. And so we know that sleep apnea is directly tied to diabetes, the onset of some forms of diabetes. But you don't need to suffer from sleep apnea just to be more apt to have these conditions. If you're walking around all day stressed out, you've got this IV drip of adrenaline.

Your blood sugar is jacked the whole time. Your body can handle that for a while, but it's eventually gonna break down. So I could not agree with you more that if you're focused on losing weight, it can't just be about calories. It has to be how your body is processing those calories. Because if you're constantly stressed,

you have this unconscious stress, it's gonna be so much harder for you to digest food. So you're not going to be able to process this food efficiently, which is going to cause all kinds of problems. Dr. Stephen Porges did some amazing research into the vagus nerve. And this is this nerve that really is this throttle that can either turn on fight or flight functions in the body or make us relax. And it's connected to all of our organs. So he kept seeing patients that they would have sexual problems. They would have digestion problems. They would have sleep problems. They would have kidney problems. And they were treated for each of these problems individually.

But there was nothing wrong with their stomachs or their genitals or anything else. What they had were problems with connectivity with the vagus nerve because they were constantly stressed. So by being in this state of constant stress, all of the signals that those organs normally send to the brain were cut off. So by fixing this vagus nerve connectivity, specifically through breathing practices, through calming practices, all those organs start functioning and all those problems can go away. I'm not saying this is going to work for everyone with multiple problems, but if you think of the body as a complete system, and if you think of the vagus nerve as a telephone network, and if you think of breathing as this way to crack into that network and open up those lines, then it starts to make sense. And that's exactly what breathing does to the body.

a researcher who can predict whether you're going to have a panic attack or not just by looking at your breathing rate. That was incredible. And that makes me think about all these kind of tracking devices we now have. And is there a way of sort of, you know, predicting a panic attack? I mean, tell me a little bit more about that. I think people would be very interested to hear that. That's exactly right. And guess how she was doing it. She was looking at respiratory rate. Specifically, she was looking at CO2. So the lower the CO2 got, she was able to predict a panic attack an hour before it came on. Because panic attack is preceded by an increase of breathing. And the more you breathe, the more CO2 you're going to be blowing off, the more constriction you're going to be getting throughout your body, the more that's going to exacerbate and shuffle in that attack.

So by just having, she was able to identify it an hour before, and then she would send a little alert to these people to slow down their breathing. And by simply slowing down their breathing and allowing their bodies to build up to that healthy level of CO2, she was able to abate panic attacks. This was after a few weeks. Several of her patients continued to do this onwards for a year, and the numbers were incredible. Something like 80%, don't quote me on this, but it was around 80% were no longer suffering from these attacks. So this is a study that was out about eight years ago. It's widely available. Her name is, this is Alicia Murrett again at SMU. Wow. stream work. But if you really, that sounds crazy, that breathing could be so closely attached to panic attacks. But if you look at how the systems in the body work, and you look at the influence

of breathing and all those symptoms, systems, it makes perfect sense that it would be so closely tied. Yeah, it really is incredible. And then I think about rising levels of anxiety, which of course is linked to panic attacks, not quite the same thing, but it's sort of, you know, they're broadly in the same area. And, you know, emails, and now we're moving into a culture where loads of Zooms. And I think I've heard you talk about this before, how the way you breathe changes. And, you know, we can almost induce a feeling of anxiety and panic by changing the way that we breathe. Of course we can. And if anyone wants to do that, you can start breathing in this

very unhealthy way right now. You will stimulate a sympathetic response and that's easily measured. simulate a sympathetic response, and that's easily measured. So I thought this was interesting as well. At UCSF, which is very close to my house, University of California, San Francisco, Dr. Margaret Chesney had worked for decades on National Institutes of Health Research looking into something called continuous partial awareness, also known as email apnea. And what she had found was that when we sit down at our desks in the morning, one estimate says that 80% of office workers do this. We open up our email, got Zoom on, got Twitter on. Oh my God, I have 60 emails. We stop breathing. We just stop breathing. And then we go. So she called it email apnea because we're so distracted and stressed out by what's going on. If you think about when you're extremely, let's say there's a tiger coming around the corner here in my house, what am I going to do? I'm going to be silent because that is a reflex reaction

to be very scared, to be silent so you don't become prey. And once it's on, once the fight is on, I'm going to breathe a ton to get more energy to my body, to feed more energy to my brain and heart and other essential muscles to get me out of that situation or to fight off that thing. But we do the same thing unconsciously at work. Even though there's no tiger around, even though there's nothing threatening us, our sense of threat has become so sensitized that so many of us will stop breathing or start breathing completely dysfunctional. And she's found that if you do this for long enough, it can have some of the same effects on us as sleep apnea. By that,

I mean neurological disorders, physical problems, again, spiking blood glucose, adrenaline. And it's just something so few of us are aware of. And I was wearing a pulse ox and all these different measuring what happened. Every morning I put the stuff on and sit down. My breathing would go to hell every single morning. And I realized that, you know, that's probably a reason why around 1130 I'd get I used to get the slight headache. I used to feel kind of fatigued. It was still morning time and I wasn't full of energy. And so by just switching your breathing, again, you can allow your body to work so much more efficiently. Yeah. I mean, thanks for sharing that. And I

think that term email apnea is brilliant because it just brings it to life for people that, wow, who doesn't check email every day? Who doesn't spend a lot of time on their computers, that, wow, who doesn't check email every day? Who doesn't spend a lot of time on their computers, particularly now more than ever? And I really, I can't stop shaking the feeling. You mentioned the tiger, right? That might be popping around the block in San Francisco around from where you live, which I hope is not happening. But your body's actually doing what it's meant to do in response to a threat. Your body is meant to become anxious. It's meant to become hypervigilant. Your blood sugar's meant to go up, right? Your blood pressure's meant to go up. All these things are happening to prepare you for danger so that

you can escape from that danger. So actually, your body is functioning the way it is designed to function, given the fact that it perceives that to be a threat. So the problem is that we're perceiving the email inbox or the multiple screens open to be a threat. So your body is reacting in the same way. So it's not that there's anything wrong with people, right? I actually, I think it's very empowering this. Your body is not broken. Actually, your body's doing what it's meant wrong with people, right? I actually, I think it's very empowering this. Your body's not broken. Actually, your body's doing what it's meant to do. You've just got to give it a different signal. You've got to just teach it, go, hey, you know what?

I'm not in danger. There isn't a tiger there. It's just 20 emails, right? So I'm a big fan of talking to patients about transition times. So a transition time, let's say from work to home life, instead of just coming all ramped up from work into then trying to relax with your partner and your children, maybe have a five minute transition where you do some breathing or you do some yoga, something just to move you, shift you from one gear to the other gear. And I've been talking to

a lot of people, particularly during the pandemic about Zoom calls. I said, before you eat your lunch, just take a couple of minutes, maybe get outside in the garden if you're lucky to have one, maybe just slow down your breathing, do two minutes of nasal breathing, put your body in a different state and you will digest your food better. You'll crave different amounts. I've actually seen, James, I'm not sure if you've come across this, I've not seen any research to support this, but I have seen with some patients in the last few years who thought they were reacting to a certain food. Now, of course, some people do react to certain foods, whether an intolerance or an allergy, but sometimes I've realised they were reacting to the way that their body was whilst they were

eating. So when they did a couple of minutes, I have a breath called the 3-4-5 breath, which I've been recommending for many years. Again, a similar theme, right? A longer exhale than an inhale. But people who try that 3-4-5 breath for two minutes before they have their dinner, sometimes they would say, hey, I'm not actually reacting to that food anymore. So I'm saying, well, maybe it's the fact that you're eating in a completely stressed out state. Your body's not able to receive that food, but when you chill out and relax, your body's like, hey, this food is okay. Absolutely right. Again, it comes down to nature. And I thought you made a really good point there. There's nothing wrong with us feeding more circulation to our skeletal muscles when we get threatened. This is really good. This is what allowed our species to survive in the wild for so long. danger and that perceived threat that is so sensitized right now that people will react to an email the same way that they would have reacted a thousand years ago to that tiger

or to being attacked by a mammoth or whatever. And so, you know, some of this is a lot of this is psychological. But the neat thing about breathing is by changing the way in which you breathe, you can actually change how your mind is processing thoughts and feelings and emotions. And we know that because this is a two-way street. So there are signals coming from your brain telling your organs what to do, but there are also signals coming from your organs telling your brain what to do. So another reason why that slower breathing works, you're like, I can actually not only do I feel better, I can think more clearly. Not a placebo. This is how it works in our bodies. And it's so important to acknowledge this throughout the day. Those transition times,

what a wonderful thing to do, before a meal especially if you have gut issues take a couple minutes that's not asking a lot breathe calmly relax yourself and go in and eat and i think that you'd be amazed by how how quickly you will show benefits of digestion i don't think it's too much of a mystery why in so many cultures there's grace before a meal. You sit down, you calmly recite whatever phrase, doesn't matter what religion, you sit there a moment, you be thankful for the food you're about to eat, then you eat it. I think that there is a scientific foundation for how effective that is. I completely agree. And actually, a few weeks ago, I finished writing my fourth book on weight loss for people who are looking to lose weight. And I've written a section on this exact

area, exactly what you say, that actually, I don't think this is by accident. There are many benefits of doing this. And it's reflective of our busy modern culture. We don't have time for this kind of stuff. You know, we've evolved as humans. We don't need all that kind of slow stuff, that gratitude, that grace. But you know what? We're realizing more than ever now, actually, we are. It's, as you say, it's a lost art.

It's a lost art. Just speaking to that, this 5.5 breaths a minute, 5.5 second inhale, exhale, this is nothing new either. This was all adapted, researchers found, from prayers, from Buddhist prayers, from kundalini yoga prayers, from Catholic prayers. All of them that they looked at locked in to this respiration rate of about 5.5 seconds. And these Italian researchers said, this is probably no coincidence. All these different cultures came to the same conclusion that, wow, we feel so much more connected to ourselves, to the universe, to everything by reciting this prayer.

A lot of that had to do, this is what the researchers said, to the respiration rate, to breathing in this certain way to calm your body and make you more receptive to that message. Yeah, thanks, James. I was chatting to my videographer, Gareth, who's just nipped out at the moment. And I was saying, hey, I'm going to talk to James. I know since you heard my chats with Patrick and Brian, he's changed his life. You know, he's now, he's tried the mouth taping at night. He sleeps better. He now runs. He does some light jogging, only nasal breathing and really feeling the benefits. But he said one thing, I wonder if you could ask James about, is he says, when I go upstairs now,

if I go up a lot of stairs and I nasal breathe, my recovery is so much quicker than when I mouth breathe. Well, you've already answered that, really. You said that throughout this conversation. You're basically saying your physiology changes. It works more optimally when we breathe through our nose as opposed to our mouth. But there is another kind of real life example. This was minutes before we started the call today. He said, you know, it's just incredible. And you mentioned athletes. And I just wonder if you could briefly, I mean, the time that we've got left, I'd love to cover this and also maybe some of those more super breathing techniques. So if we could just cover athletics and kind of recovery and why people really should make that effort,

I think it would be super helpful. So the key with athletic performance is you want to do more for longer in a state of pure efficiency. And we know that nasal breathing is going to allow you to perform harder with a lower heart rate. You're going to be getting more oxygen more efficiently

by breathing less. Again, we know how counterintuitive this is, but the science is very clear on that. And you can see this with professional athletes who have adopted to nasal breathing. Sandy Richard Ross, the best runner, sprinter for 10 years going. It's fascinating to look at pictures of her in the Olympics, closed mouth, nasal breathing, all of our competitors beside her breathing through the mouth. She's in front of the line winning golds time and time again. And she's just one example of what we've already known for decades. Dr. John Duyard has done tons of science, tons of work in this, looking at cyclists' nasal breathing versus mouth breathing, and looking at their endurance, looking at their

performance, and looking at recovery. And it is such a drastic difference between those two. One reason why a lot of people give up is they try nasal breathing. They've been habitually mouth breathing while they're jogging for sometimes decades. They try nasal breathing and they're like, I can't get enough air in there. I'm giving up. But sometimes it can take weeks or even months to truly acclimate this organ here to breathe properly. But once you do, the benefits are huge. And check out the work by Phil Maffetone, Dr. John Duyar, and some of the athletes that have adopted proper nasal breathing. Or try, most importantly, try it yourself. And you can very clearly see the difference. I would say to people, because I've literally been experimenting this

for maybe 12, 18 months now. You know, when I go for a walk, I'm nasal breathing. Like I'm, it's, you know, no question. I will make sure, I don't think about it now because I know I do it. But initially I had to, you know, consciously think about it. I do, you know, I take the kids for walks.

We all go, we're all sort of trying to spot if one of us is mouth breathing. I'm trying to instill it in my kids from a young age that this is important. Actually, I went for a run with my son yesterday. He's like, daddy, daddy, look, that guy's running, he's mouth breathing, that guy's mouth breathing. I'm like, I'm sort of conflicted. Have I started something in him? I'm not sure. But on one level, I like it because I think, okay, as you said before, awareness is key, right? Without awareness, we can't make any change. So first of all, let's be aware of what's happening. Let's not beat

ourselves up. Be aware. Then let's go, well, maybe I'll start with a walk, maybe a five-minute walk each day, nasal breathing, and see how you go. And for me personally, now I sort of am getting into running. I was going to buy a heart rate monitor. And I thought, you know what? Forget it. I sort of don't want more and more tech in my life. I'm trying to sort of go more minimalist. And I use nasal breathing as my barometer. As soon as I go too fast where I cannot nasal breathe and I have to open my mouth, that's my trigger to slow down. And I really feel I'm getting more efficient and it feels really good. And you know what? I'm not stiff the next day or that evening. I recover quickly. Again, I will

admit this is a subjective experience, but it backs up the data and the science that you've written about so beautifully in your book. But there's exactly, it may be a subjective experience, but it's grounded in real science. If you look at nasal breathing and you look at using that oxygen most efficiently, you are allowing your body to operate in an aerobic state for longer than to go anaerobic and have that lactic acid build up and all of that. And this is very well known, having that balance, again, of CO2 and oxygen. And something that Patrick McKeown told me, which I really liked, he said, never work out harder than you can breathe correctly. So once

you've reached that threshold and you're breathing, you're like, I really got to breathe through my mouth or you're breathing in a dysfunctional way. You have to slow down and work yourself back up. And by slowly working yourself up this way, your performance is just going to shoot through the roof. And we've seen that time and time again. And again, these weren't studies that I was doing. These are studies that have been around for decades that right now there's this new interest in breathing in athletics. And I have a feeling these people who are going to be adopting these healthy breathing habits are just going to show some incredible improvements. Yeah, no, absolutely. And it's, again,

it's just reflective of culture. It's the more now, we're quicker, faster. It's like, I'm going to work out, I'm going to push it hard. I'm going to be grunting. I'm going to be, you know, it's, is it a Western thing? I guess it is on some level. I really feel we're at that point now in Western culture where we have to go, look, we do so many things beautifully well, but we're kind of a bit lost on some of these other things and maybe just slowing down and doing less. When we, you know, in inverted commas, work out or move our bodies, maybe use your nose as the barometer. And then, you know, you'll be working on your efficiency. Maybe you'll go, you'll run less, but you'll run more efficiently, which actually will lead to you running more just a few months down the line. Yeah, it still ties. There's nothing wrong with

running further and running faster than a competitor, right? That's human nature to want to do that. But if you really want to do that, you have to take control of the systems in your body and you have to be operating more efficiently. Why waste energy? Like why not store that energy, then use it to best your competitor? That's what sports performance is all about. And something you mentioned that I thought was interesting is in so many ways, like what we know about eating now, food. I remember growing up in the 80s, just the only things that were around the house were just like processed food. This was normal, white bread, Velveeta cheese, and everyone seemed to be eating this way. Well, we know that eating that stuff is bad news. I'd be hard-pressed to find

someone who is going to defend eating highly processed foods. It's bad news. It took us a while to get to this point, right? So it took about maybe 20 years of science to come out. Now we all know it. And I really think breathing is this next thing. So 20 years ago, even nowadays, some people are poo-pooing it and say, how we breathe doesn't matter. The science is so clear. And you can go back in history thousands of years again, and they had been studying this for so long. And it really feels like this wave of awareness is really starting to crash right now.

No, I would agree, James. So just for the sort of final stage of this conversation then, we've just to sort of really put it in perspective, you know, we're setting the scene that people are breathing too much, they're breathing too fast. And it's not necessarily how,

yeah, of course, breathing when you're working out and running, sure, work on it if you want to. But again, if you want to do a sprint, you want to breathe through your mouth to beat an opponent, that's okay. What we're talking about is how do you habitually breathe, right? Because I know there's some confusion. So just to clarify, what you're saying, I think, and certainly what I would say is practice breathing through your nose, practice for a few minutes a day breathing less, try and go for that six or even eight breaths a minute, see how that feels. Now, if you want to go beyond that, if you want to go into super breathing territory, right, the cool stuff that people get, oh, you know what,

I want to do a marathon up Everest like Wim Hof or, you know, which again appeals to us culture of doing more and I want to do all that crazy stuff. There are quite a few different methods on there where we consciously over-breathe. So you were talking about under-breathing. Now I want to talk about, you know, Wim Hof, the breathing technique or one of his breathing techniques, certainly the one that I've experienced when I saw him speak in LA a few years ago and I recorded a podcast with him a few weeks back. It's not come out yet. And we actually did it where you actually, you know, for 30 or 40 breaths, you take these big breaths in and out, and then you do a hold. What is that doing? Why should

people think about these over-breathing practices? Did you try them as part of your research? Did you look into the research here? And what would you tell people about these practices for those who are interested? Sure. So the first thing, I just have to second something that you said. I'm talking about mouth breathing as a habit. Some people have written me and said, I noticed I was laughing today and I took a few mouth breaths. And again, I'm like, I thought I had made this very clear in the book. So I've been breathing through my mouth talking to you today, right? And when I swim in the ocean, I'm breathing through my mouth. When I'm laughing, I'm breathing through my mouth.

This is perfectly fine and perfectly natural. So a few hundred breaths per day, breathing through the mouth is fine. If we're taking 25,000, it's about that habit and that chronic breathing. You want to be breathing through your nose as often as you can, but that doesn't mean you should hate yourself for laughing or for breathing through your mouth. So I just want to make that really, really clear for everyone. Or swimmers, right? Swimmers, swimmers. Like, you know, when you're swimming, you sort of have to have to take it you don't have to but you may gulp in a lot of water unless you breathe in through your mouth so it's it could be normal for swimming it can be fine you know um i swim and surf almost every day out here in san francisco and i'll tell you i'm not breathing through my

nose when i'm doing that it's impossible there. There's salt water up there and there's nothing wrong with that. It's chronic, it's habit. So in the book, after you get that foundation of healthy breathing that everyone can benefit from, I kept hearing about Wim Hof breathing, these intense pranayamas, holotropic breath work, these long breath holds. I said, this is completely counter to what I learned before. We shouldn't, like apnea is a bad thing. Over-breathing is a bad thing. All of that is true when it's unconscious. But when you consciously do it, when you place yourself into a position in which you tell yourself to follow with this ancient breathing technique, and some of these include mouth breathing, exhaling through the mouth or even inhaling

through the mouth. Something amazing happens because you're allowing yourself to consciously take control of unconscious functions in your body. So with WIM specifically, what I thought was so interesting is we have this autonomic nervous system that turns us on for sympathetic stress or turns us off and relaxes us, parasympathetic. And we've been told if you get to pick up a textbook, it's going to say this is autonomic as in automatic, as in beyond our conscious control. But we can control it through breathing. And when we control our nervous system function, we can take control of our immune system functions as well.

And we've seen this. It's no coincidence that people who have been practicing Wim's version, which he calls it Wim Hof method, but he's very clear that this stuff has been around for at least a thousand years. He didn't invent anything. He was able to take this thing and distribute it to the masses.

And he's done that better than anyone on the planet for breathing awareness. But it's no coincidence that the people who practice this, people with autoimmune diseases, with arthritis, eczema, psoriasis, whatever, they can show a marked decrease in the symptoms of their problems. And sometimes they claim that they're completely healed by adopting these simple breathing habits. Because what they're doing is they're breathing in a way that purposely stresses themselves out for a short amount of time so that they could spend the rest of the day relaxing and healing themselves again seems a little counterintuitive why would i purposely want to stress myself out

if i'm stressed out throughout the rest of the day the point is to focus that and to regain a balance in your body and in your health and that's exactly what these more intense over-breathing practices do. I think what you said there about where this has come from, that nobody knew has invented anything, you know, Vim hasn't. These are all practices that have been there. But you also paid homage to Vim. He's got it out there to the masses in a fantastic way. You've said that, you know, to the masses in a fantastic way. You've said that, you know, that in the Indus Valley 5,000 years ago, there's writings on this and that. You actually, I think you wrote about that yoga or the scriptures you saw showed yoga initially was just a breathing practice. I think that's exactly it wasn't even is that true the apps app there were no standing poses there was no movement it was focusing meditating and breathing only in the last

hundred years have we developed vinyasa flow that wasn't around until a hundred years ago and i want to make this very clear to all the yogis out there. I do yoga all the time. Love it. I've seen the benefits. There's science proving the benefits. But this practice, this modern yoga that most of us do is just that. It's modern. So the first yoga was a practice of breathing and focusing. And then it developed into holding one pose and breathing, opening up this side, inhaling into that lung, opening up the other side. And then about 100 years ago, 110 years ago, those poses were combined into this sort of dance-like movement, which had nothing to do with the early yoga. So it really was all based on breathing and

focusing on the breath. Yeah, amazing. And one of the, I think you quote someone in the book, I can't remember who it was, but someone said to you, there are as many breath practices as there are diets. I've never heard that before. I thought that was incredible because we talked about conscious over-breathing and if we had more time, I would talk about tumo breathing and holotropic breathing. But you know what?

It's all there in your book for people to read about. But that is, who said that phrase? Who was it? A freediver told me that very early on, which I thought was very surprising. I didn't know that there were different ways of breathing. This was years and years ago. But by adopting those different breathing practices, you can push your body into different states.

You can relax yourself on purpose. You can stress yourself out on purpose, which has pronounced benefits to doing that as well. And again, you can find books. There's yoga books with 400 different breathing practices with all of these crazy names. All of that as well. And again, you can find books. There's yoga books with 400 different breathing practices with all of these crazy names. All of that's great, but I wanted to focus on the general concept behind these. There are heavy breathing practices, over-breathing.

There's breath-holding, there's slow breathing, and there's nasal breathing. And you can call it whatever you want. You can practice the Chinese version of that, the Greek version of that, the Indian version of that. It doesn't matter because they're really all doing the same thing. To me, it's no coincidence that Wim Hof Method, also known as TUMO, has so many of the same benefits of Sudarshan Kriya, which has been studied in 60 different independent studies to help people with anxiety, depression, autoimmune problems. There's no coincidence that these things are

helping people in the same way, because guess what? They have you breathe really intensely and then breathe really slowly. It's almost the exact same practice, just coming in from different directions. Yeah, no, absolutely. Before we wrap up, you mentioned freediving. And I know you wrote a book on that. I haven't read it yet. And I am definitely it's on right at the top of my list to sort of read when I want to get some time. But one question I had about freedivers who obviously have masterful control of their breath. who obviously have masterful control of their breath. Did you notice, was there a theme that, you know, a freedriver, by definition, needs to have a very high level of control over their breath, you know, a high degree of carbon dioxide tolerance, so they can actually go down and

actually maintain that, you know, tolerate the buildup of carbon dioxide in their body without having that strong urge to breathe. Given the multiple benefits of improving your breathing, have you heard any stories in free drivers that actually a lot of them had mental health problems or depression or anxiety or autoimmune conditions that got better? Or the flip side is, was it those conditions that actually led them to free driving in the first place? I don't know. It's so interesting for me that. Many of them had anxiety issues, sometimes depression issues, sometimes addiction issues. There's a great film that somebody made, a very short film, Jonathan Rempel, about a freediver who had all of those things. And she found freediving because when you freedive, you are putting it is almost like a force meditation. You cannot freedive stressed out.

You cannot freedive with anxiety. You cannot freedive with a sense of panic. You cannot freedive with a sense of panic. You have to completely give yourself over to the water and connect so deeply in your body. And when reconnects people with themselves when they're up on dry land afterwards. And so some people have found that salvation through freediving. And so much of that is due to breath control. So I've never seen, I've met dozens and dozens of freedivers

that both deep looked at the ocean from the surface to the very bottom of the sea, looking at the human connection. So towards the surface, there was a lot of freedivers that that book deep looked at the ocean from the surface to the very bottom of the sea looking at the human connection so towards the surface there was a lot of freediving but i've never seen one who suffered from anxiety i've never seen one who panicked because you just can't do that when when you're down deep in the water holding holding your breath there hasn't been any studies on this i think it would be fascinating to look at the physiology of someone before and after training for free diving look at markers of panic look at other issues even blood glucose yeah um and how they react because free diving is that is the ultimate art of breathing you're focused on your breath connected to your breath the whole time it's's breath, it's mindfulness, it's meditation, it's everything all in one, right? To be able to

do that practice. And one study that we've not had a chance to talk about, which I've underlined heavily in my book, and I'd encourage people to read it in the book, is just this idea of fear. And that lady who had that genetic condition without the amygdala, this sort of emotional center, the fear center of the brain, and how basically you can't stress her out. She would get scared of nothing until carbon dioxide went into her. She got a dose of carbon dioxide

and that then stressed her out and scared her. I won't sort of spoil the rest of the story there for people, but what's really incredible for that, and I really want people to get this, is that we think fear and anxiety is always about an external event. Oh, that is happening to us. We forget that it can be biology, it can be physiology. And I really, I know how many people suffer from these sort of conditions. And I really, really want to encourage them that what James has been talking about, read the book,

learn about these techniques and start small because it can really transform every aspect of your life. James, look, I really, I don't say this often, but that is a phenomenal book. I feel quite lucky actually. I've got these early copies. It's still very sort of the early unproved manuscripts. So I feel I've got these early copies still very sort of the early unproved manuscripts so I feel I've got sort of something quite special here the podcast is called Feel Better Live More because

James I it's pretty obvious but fundamentally I I've seen time and time again where people feel better in themselves they get more out of their lives and I think it's pretty clear that you're making the case that if we breathe better, we're going to live more. So I want to, if, you know, I want people to get inspired by this. I want them to get your book, but I want people to take action. I don't want them just to hear it and go, that was interesting,

and then get on with their lives. So I always like to leave the podcast with my guests with some sort of practical advice. I know you've covered a lot of it already, but just some sort of what would you say if someone's heard this and they're still skeptical, how would you encourage them to get going with a breathwork practice in their daily lives? I would say go see for yourself because you're your best judge of this. If you have a blood pressure monitor, and a lot of people do, take your blood pressure before and after a simple breathing practice six times a minute. You can start with that.

Start small, exactly as you had said, and give it a while. By that, give it a week. So adopt a simple practice. And again, this isn't requiring you to go to a monastery or sit in a dark corner. You can adopt healthy breathing practices anywhere. And we know that there is a solid foundation of science between all of these things. We have seen people absolutely transform by adopting simple breathing habits. This is not a placebo effect. It's absolutely real. And I'm convinced I've experienced this myself. I've talked to dozens and dozens of people who

have also experienced it. I've talked to the leaders in the field who have introduced me to all of their data. And I find that this is an underappreciated and underacknowledged aspect of our health, but that's starting to change and it couldn't happen sooner, especially right now in the midst of a pandemic. Focusing on your breathing can really have some transformative effects. James, thanks so much. Really, really helpful advice there. Thank you for writing a brilliant book. Thank you for your time today and good luck with the rest of the promotion. I'd love to see this book, a bestseller in every country around the world. Get out there,

give people this information, this knowledge that really has transformed. So thank you. Thank you very much for having me. Appreciate it. That concludes today's conversation. I really hope you enjoyed it. If you are interested in breathing, don't forget two previous episodes of the show, episode 99 with Patrick McKeown, episode 113 with Brian McKenzie, also covered breathwork. There's loads of tips in these episodes. And if you go to my YouTube channel, I made some tutorials with some of my previous guests to help you put some of these ideas into practice. As always, do remember that inspiration and ideas are not enough in and of themselves. You have to take

action if you want to create change. And as always, my advice would be to keep things really simple and think about one thing that you can take from today's show and implement into your own life immediately. My wife loved James's tip of a really small bit of tape, you know, sort of less than a postage stamp, popping that on her lips at night. It has transformed her sleep. She can breathe through her nose now, which she couldn't do before.

She's waking up early. She's got more energy. So maybe that's the tip that's going to work for you. Please do let James and I know what you thought of today's show on social media. And if you want more info on James's books, media articles, blogs, videos, please go to drchatterjee.com forward slash 124 to see all the show notes. If you get value from my weekly podcasts, please do take a moment to share them with your friends, family, and work colleagues. In fact, a really beautiful thing to

do for people is to share an episode of my show with them that you think will really help them. I think it's a great gift to give someone, and in many ways is a simple act of kindness which has benefits not just for the other person but for you as well. So have a think about which people in your life would benefit from today's episode and send them a link as well as a personal message. Don't forget each episode is also on YouTube in high definition so if they prefer videos to audio podcasts, that may work better for them. Quick reminder that my third book, Feel Better in 5,

is now out all over the world. UK, US, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, India, and it's coming very soon to Holland and Sweden. It is so great to see the feedback in different countries to my own. Please do pick up your own copy if you've not managed to do so yet. It the feedback in different countries to my own please do pick up your own copy if you've not managed to do so yet it is available in paperback ebook and as an audiobook which i am narrating a big thank you to my amazing wife vedata chattachy for producing this week's

podcast and to richard hughes for audio engineering have wonderful week. Make sure you have pressed subscribe and I'll be back in one week's time with my latest conversation. Remember, you are the architects of your own health. Making lifestyle change is always worth it because when you feel better, you live more.