Instant Genius - Breathing, your hidden superpower, with James Nestor

Episode Date: January 17, 2022

Science journalist James Nestor explains why so many of us are breathing wrong, and why it matters. Once you’ve mastered the basics with Instant Genius, dive deeper with Instant Genius Extra, where you’ll find longer, richer discussions about the most exciting ideas in the world of science and technology. Only available on Apple Podcasts. Produced by the team behind BBC Science Focus Magazine. Visit our website: sciencefocus.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

You said this place was steps from the water. We just haven't found the steps yet. How much did we save? Enough. Enough to get lost. Or you could book a stay with Hilton. Welcome to your ocean front room. Just steps from the water.

The Hilton sale is on now. Book on Hilton.com or the Hilton app and save up to 20% to get the stay you expected. When you want savings, not surprises. It matters where you stay. Hilton, for the stay. No one goes to Hank's for his spreadsheets. They go for a darn good pizza.

Lately, though, the shop's been quiet. So Hank decides to bring back the $1 slice. He asks Copilot in Microsoft Excel to look at his sales and costs. To help him see if he can afford it. Co-pilot shows Hank where the money's going and which little extras make the dollar slice work. Now, Hanks has a line out the door. Hank makes the pizza.

Co-Pilot handles the spreadsheets. Learn more at M365Copilot.com slash work. When you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work, use Indeed sponsored jobs. It gives your job posts the boost it needs to be seen and helps reach people with the right skills, certifications, and more. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsored job credit at Indeed.com slash podcast. That's Indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs.

This podcast is sponsored by name, audio and focal. Streaming has made music more accessible than ever, but true listening is about more than ease. It's about quality. British audio experts name audio, alongside French acoustic specialist focal, combine handcrafted tradition with cutting-edge innovation and high-end materials,

delivering digital precision with analogue warmth. So you can experience exceptional sound at home. Music just as the artist intended. Visit name audio.com to learn more. From BBC Science Focus magazine, this is Instant Genius, a bike-sized masterclass in podcast form. I'm Sarah Rigby,

online staff writer at BBC Science Focus magazine. This week, I'm joined by science journalist James Nestor. He's the author of Breath, The New Science of a Lost Art, which was shortlisted for the 2021 Royal Society Science Book Prize. He explains why so many of us are breathing wrong and why it matters. So breathing is an automatic process.

We all do it every day. So why is it something that I should think about? Surely it's something that I can just leave my body to it and it'll handle it all for me. Well, that's what's wonderful about breathing, right? We don't have to think about it 25,000 times. Every time we need to breathe, we do it unconsciously. But the problem is we could be doing it improperly or inefficiently.

that could be our habit. And then we carry this habit around with us our whole lives. And we can suffer from some very serious health consequences if we aren't breathing correctly. And you see this all across every population on the planet. So how is it possible to breathe incorrectly? Well, you can just look at the data across populations. I've focused on the United States, but it's very similar in Europe. You can look at the percentages of people with asthma. You can look at the percentages of people with chronic sinusitis who snore, who have sleep apnea, who wheeze, who have COPD. I can go on and on. And you realize that the majority of the world's population is suffering from some chronic respiratory issue. It's so widespread. We think it's just normal.

We think it's normal to choke on ourselves all night. We think it's normal to struggle to breathe when we're exercising, but there's nothing normal about this. And as I've found, so many researchers have been studying this stuff for decades and decades, and they have found that it affects us mentally, it affects us physically, it affects our lifespan, and more. So how do humans compare to other animals? We're terrible.

We are the worst breathers in the animal kingdom. That's quite a claim, but if you don't believe me, go into the wild and look at how animals are breathing in the wild. If you look at primates, they breathe into their stomachs. They breathe very fluidly, very calmly. If you look at a cheetah running at, what, 100 kilometers an hour, it is breathing through its nose very calmly. If you look at someone on the street in a city, like in San Francisco, where I live, someone

just jogging at a very slow rate is so this over-breathing is forcing yourself to over-breathe is causing the body so much stress and you can see that with very simple measurements what sort of measurements can we can we take that we can see the stress that it's causing well the wonderful part about living in this day and age is so many of these machines that would have cost $10,000, $20,000 a few decades ago now cost about $100 and you can put them on your finger, you can put them on a wrist. You can check your blood oxygen levels. You can check your heart rate. You can check your heart rate variability. You can check your stress levels, even brain waves. And when you switch your breathing, nothing is more powerful and nothing is more quick to as a way

of creating a sense of peace, a sense of balance, and calming yourself down, than breathing. This is the hack. I'm not saying it is the most powerful in the long run, changing your diet, changing other habits, exercise. That has an incredibly huge effect. But in this moment right now, if you want to take care of anxiety, if even you want to help abate an asthma attack, you have to take control of your breathing. And this is something that so many people just have not been taught.

Right. And one kind of feature of this that I think most of us will have heard of is the idea of nose or mouth breathing. I think we all kind of know that nose breathing is better than mouth breathing, but what's the science behind that? Why is it different? How can the body tell the difference between breathing through my nose and breathing through my mouth? So once again, all you need to do is look at wild animals as our guide on how properly to breathe. how many wild animals are mouth breathing at night? How many wild animals are breathing through their mouths when they're in the midst of very intense physical activity?

You know, there's 5,400 different mammals on the planet, and none of them are breathing the way humans were. The interesting thing here that I discovered from various researchers is our ancestors were breathing very differently than we are today. So the reason why this is so important is because when you breathe through the nose, you are forcing air through all of these very intricate structures. And as that air is forced through these structures, it's heated up, it's humidified, it's pressurized, and it's filtered. So that air, when it gets to your lungs, can be so much more easily uploaded into your bloodstream. We can extract about 20% more oxygen breathing through our noses than we can equivalent breaths through our mouths. And if you think 20% isn't going to make

a huge difference to your health and well-being and your athletic performance, you're crazy. You can take a mouth breath right now. That's how much resistance there is to breathing through the mouth. You're exposing yourself to everything in the environment. And especially now in this new age of COVID, you don't want to be exposing yourself to raw air all day long. You want to to be filtering that air. And there's been some very interesting science, very interesting studies showing how the nose is our first line of defense, including against viruses and bacteria. That's what the nose does. So you have to be breathing through the nose. You mentioned that we can tell that our ancestors breathed differently to how we do now.

How could we tell that? We can tell that by looking at their skeletal structure of their faces. This is something that I heard a few years ago that I thought was absolutely crazy until I was invited to go to the University of Pennsylvania to the Morton Collection, which is the largest collection of pre-industrial skulls in the world. Thousands and thousands of these things, skulls from Africa, from Asia, from South America, from Polynesia, all over the place. And it was extremely jarring, a little scary to walk into this lab and see these rows and rows of skulls on these shelves and every single one of them had perfectly straight teeth. So crooked teeth is a modern problem. And the first thing you

ask is, well, why do we have crooked teeth? We have crooked teeth because our mouths have grown so small. And when our mouths have grown so small teeth have nowhere to grow in straight. So they grow in crooked. With that small mouth, you also have a smaller airway and the breathing and respiratory problems that come with that. So we can also tell by looking at populations of hunter-gather cultures, there are just a few left. They breathe, they don't breathe through their mouths. They breathe completely differently than we do. They breathe slower. They breathe into their bellies. And so this, by looking at the skeletal record and looking at the few populations that are around right now, We know that our ancestors were very likely not suffering from this huge chronic widespread

list of chronic respiratory issues. And again, Hunter Gathers right now, they don't have hypertension, they don't have asthma, they don't have COPD, they don't have diabetes. So I think that they're a good guide to how we once were. And you mentioned that a lot of people will go for a run, or they'll do some heavy exercise and then immediately start to mouth breathe or after a certain time start to mouth breathe, whereas hunter-gatherers or other animal species don't. So should we be breathing through our nose when we exercise? Is that something we can train ourselves to do?

Yes, it is. So this gets a little tricky, so I want to unpack this just a little bit. Some people have such severe damage in their noses. They have polyps. They have severely deviated septims, they have other structural issues that it makes it really hard to breathe through their nose. So for those people on the extreme end of this, they will very much benefit from some sort of treatment. And there's tons of treatments. There's surgery. There's other interventions you can do. But for the vast majority of us, it comes down to a habit. Our nose will respond to what is given to it. So our noses are covered with erectile tissue. So this tissue will flex, it will flex open and it will flex close.

The more you breathe through the mouth, the more this tissue is going to stay closed. The more you start breathing through the nose, the more this tissue opens. And we've seen this so many times. I worked with a researcher at Stanford who had studied this with people who had tracheostomies, little holes drilled in their throats. And she noticed within two months to two years, their noses were 100% blocked. blocked. So it's really a use it or lose it organ. I'm not going to say this is easy when people convert to nasal breathing. It's miserable and it's miserable usually for for weeks or even months.

But once you make it over that hump, as we've seen time and time again, performance often increases, recovery decreases, and you're able to function so much more efficiently. You've experienced this yourself, haven't you? I have. I try to keep my own personal stories out of this because I hate when authors use the N1, hey, this worked for me. It's definitely going to work for you. I don't think that that's a proper way of thinking because everybody is different. So everybody breathes differently. Everybody has a slightly different breathing problem. Everyone's going to respond to switching these habits in a different way, in a different timeline. But on a personal note, having given you that big caveat there, it completely

transformed my life. I had so many chronic respiratory issues. And the treatment for that was antibiotics. Every time I went to my doctor, I'm not saying they didn't work. Antibiotics are fantastic when you need them, but year in, year out, the same issues kept coming up. And I thought that maybe something was wrong here. And so that was really what got me interested in the subject at the beginning, but I didn't know what to do with it because I'm a science journalist. I wasn't going to write a memoir about breathing. But, you know, so that's a long way saying, yeah, it completely changed my life. It had changed my athletic performance. It changed my health. It changed my sleep. It changed my anxiety levels. I mean, more and more. Can you tell us a bit

about your experiment in nose versus mouth breathing? Sure. I was talking with one of the leaders in Rhinolegy, real nose guy, knows everything about it at Stanford. His name is Dr. Jaiak, or Nyak. And we had had many conversations. And so he knows. all of the deleterious effects of mouth breathing. This is what he studies all day long. He knows all the benefits of nasal breathing. Not a lot of controversy with that. But what he didn't know is how soon that damage from mouth breathing came on. So there have been animal studies where they plugged animals' noses and had the mouth breathe from six months to two years. Don't read those studies. They're absolutely awful. And it was very clear what happened. Structural issues, the animals were

extremely unhealthy while they were mouth breathing, but no one has done these studies with humans before. And according to NIAC, doing so would be unethical. That was his term. So I volunteered for an experiment, me and one other person, in which we were plugged up for 10 days, just breathing through the mouth, and we took data on our physiological state three times a day. And then we went down to Stanford in between the phases and did blood work and PFTs and, I mean, every imaginable MRIs and all the rest. And, yeah, as advertised, mouth breathing completely destroyed us. And the data is very clear on that. Yeah, I can imagine.

I personally had a bad cold a couple of months ago that meant my nose was completely blocked for even just a couple of days. And I was in a horrible mood for that time because I couldn't sleep properly. I was struggling to breathe. My throat was sore because I was breathing through my mouth. I can't imagine living like that for weeks at a time. But, you know, it's interesting. Once you lose something, then you start appreciating it,

just like you lost your ability to breathe through your nose. Then you start appreciating it. It's one thing to do this on purpose or to have a cold for a few days. It's another thing to live half your life in this way. And this is people with chronic allergies, 50% of the, The population has inflamed turbinates in their noses. They have trouble breathing through their nose. What is it?

15 to 20% have seasonal allergies. So for three or four months out of the year, they can't breathe through their noses. They're just breathing through their mouths. And we've been told that this is normal. You see these kids that are just mouth breathing. Their noses are completely stuffed up. And we don't realize what damage this is doing to our bodies. And especially our sleep, that was one of the most interesting.

findings from the Stanford experiment is I have never snored. I've never had sleep apnea. I know that because we took weeks of baseline data before the study. And just plugging my nose made me a snore. It gave me sleep apnea. The other subject in the study had the exact same thing. And then I started finding these studies that when allergy season comes up, guess what else comes up? Snoring in sleep apnea. Yeah. So I just haven't seen people talking about this of how your sleep quality and how apt you are to suffer from these nighttime disturbances are tied to just the pathway in which we breathe. Why are snoring in sleep apnea so bad for you? So we spend about, if we're lucky, about a third of our life, sleeping. And if during that third of her life, which is supposed to be dedicated to resting and restoring the body, it's very, very, important for the body to rest. If instead of that time you are doing this, that's what sleep apnea

sounds like, about 20% of the population has it, or you're doing this, you are stressing your body out at the exact time you need to help it heal and restore. So your body never gets that reboot. And you can exist like this for a while, but after a certain amount of time, your body is going to break down, which is why you see people with sleep apnea. They have a much higher incidence of Alzheimer's. They have a much higher incidence of they get adult onset diabetes who knew that metabolic syndrome was tied to our sleep quality, but it is. So I could give you a whole laundry list of other issues. But just the general premise is that is the sound of someone struggling to breathe. So there should be nothing cute or quaint about someone snoring or suffering from sleep

up. They're struggling to breathe. And especially with kids and infants, this has become such a huge problem. And parents think it's cute, but it's really going to inhibit their development later on in life. So how can we train ourselves to nose breathe at night? Well, nasal breathing is much easier to train in the daytime because you're conscious of your breathing. You just close your mouth. But at night, it's very difficult because what happens when you're, you are unconscious, your muscles relax, and your mouth tends to open. So about 60% of the population, it's actually more than 60%, breathes through their mouth at night. And you will know if you're a mouth breather when you wake up in your mouth is parched and dry, and you have to drink

water throughout the night, which is something I was doing for decades before I realized that that I was breathing through my mouth at night. And again, that the majority of the population does this. So back about 100 years ago, 120 years ago, I found ads for people wearing chin straps. And these chin straps will keep your mouth shut, not the sexiest thing in the world. But I was later told by several different researchers

that you could use a little piece of tape over your lips. And that worked great for me. I was told by a Stanford researcher that she prescribes this to all of her patients. This stuff called sleep tape. It's no fancy tape. You can use various kinds of tapes. And the technology is pretty simple, but it's absolutely transformative to my sleep. And this is the one thing that I've heard from literally thousands of people that this is the biggest hack that they've had for their health.

And luckily now, we have instruments, or rings. whoop bands, whatever, that can actually track the quality of your sleep. So it's not just subjective. We have data behind this. Right. Wow. So we've learned to take a nice deep inhale through the nose, which is, you know, warmed and humidified the air. What about the exhale? Does it matter at all how we exhale? The exhale is less important, but you still want to be exhaling through your nose. There are some yoga practices, pranayama practices. that they have you do ocean breath. Totally fine when you laugh.

You're breathing through your mouth, right? But as a rule of thumb, like chronic, like habitual breathing should be in and out through the nose. You don't see any animal in the wild inhaling through their noses and exhaling through their mouths day in and day out. So if we're trying to calm someone down or something, might say breathe in through the nose and breathe out through the mouth. Is that good advice? It is for a specific practice or a technique that's fine. As long as there's a bit of resistance

through the mouth, it's no coincidence that so many yoga techniques, what they do is they have you do something called unjai breath, which is you create tension at the back of the throat to inhibit that airflow back out. So what is that doing? But it's mimicking that pressurizing effect of exhaling through the mouth or exhaling through the nose. I'm sorry. Because when you exhale through the nose, it takes a while to push all that air out. That pressure is really good. That pressure during that exhale, we extract oxygen as well. So for anxiety, it's much better. It depends on the person again. Very anxious people have a hard time breathing through their noses. They have a hard time breathing slow, so you have to start them very slowly. But breathing in and out.

through the nose is going to be the best technique for them and breathing slowly. And you'd be surprised how many people cannot breathe slowly in and out of their noses, especially populations with asthma and panic and anxiety. Does the speed of your breathing matter? Yes, it does. So many of us believe that breathing more air will give us more oxygen and that is usually in most situations completely false the opposite happens right now if you were to take 10 or 20 big breaths you're going to feel lightheaded and your extremities might start feeling like they're cooling down

that's from a decrease of circulation to these areas a decrease of oxygenation to the cells and that's what happens when we hyperventilate so you can think about this diaphragm in the middle of chest like a big piston and why would you want to overwork this piston why would you want to breathe more than you have to it's completely inefficient if you take these slower breaths and fewer breaths but more thorough breaths you will get more oxygen for far less effort which allows you to function more efficiently throughout the day an analogy i use from the book is you know imagine you're rowing across a lake. You can take thousands and thousands of short stilted strokes,

and you'll get there across the lake. Or you can take a third of those strokes as very fluid, easy strokes, and you'll get there quicker and you'll get there with a lot less effort. That's how you should be breathing. Is there an ideal speed for us to breathe? Well, it depends on what you're doing, and it depends on who you are. Kids need to breathe more than adults. Babies especially have a higher respiratory rate. At rest, a optimum rate when you're not focusing is maybe 10 breaths, 12 breaths. It's interesting. My father-in-law is a

pulmonologist. And 40 years ago when he was in school, he was taught that a normal respiratory rate was 8 to 12 breaths per minute. What is considered normal today is 12 to 20 breaths per minute. So it's interesting how quickly our minds tend to change here, but slower breathing. When you're sitting on a couch, a great exercise to do is to breathe, try to breathe at a rate of about five to six seconds in, five to six seconds out. That equals five to six breaths a minute, so it's very easy to remember. When you breathe this way, so many studies have shown that your body enters the state of coherence, where everything's working at perfect efficiency. You're getting maximum oxygen to the brain.

Your heart rate goes down, your blood pressure goes down and more. So there's no such thing as having too much efficiency in your life. So if you can breathe that way often while you're answering emails, while you're at work, you will only benefit. I've seen no negative side effects to breathing in this efficient way. But it's impossible to do that for the 18 hours, 16 hours, you're awake. So a respiratory rate of, you know, about 10 to, in the 10 to 12, I think is very good. If your respiratory rate is higher up towards the 20s, I think you should do something about that and really help decreasing.

So if we practice breathing more slowly, say if we breathe too quickly, is that something that we will start doing automatically? So what you're doing when the whole reason you practice these slower fluid breaths is to create a habit. But in order to create a habit to do this unconsciously, you have to acclimate your body to this. And so what usually happens is those slower breaths at the beginning for a lot of people are really uncomfortable because their bodies are used to a certain amount of carbon dioxide in the bloodstream,

which is usually lower than where it should be. They're used to this certain rhythm within their bodies. So for some people it can take weeks, for some people it can take months. But the point is, not to walk around all day and be worried about your breathing. We have enough things to worry about nowadays. It's to practice this often enough that it becomes an unconscious activity. For me, this process took a long time, but you're never going to find me mouth breathing while I'm

exercising or while I'm walking around or while I'm sleeping. I still wear that sleep tape. It's just not going to happen, but it took a long time to get there. Other people are different. They may take less time than it took me. You mentioned in your book that studies have found that people with larger lung capacity live for longer. So why does that happen? That bears out because of the rhythm in which you are taking that breath and the stress you are causing on your body. You were operating more efficiently when you have larger lungs. The reason is you can take fewer breaths and in those breaths, and in those breaths you get more oxygen. So you can just think of it almost like a car.

If you're driving a car, not an electric car, a good old gas-powered car, but if you're driving one of these cars around all the time and the pedal is to the metal, you just have the RPMs up all the time, that car is going to break down sooner. It just is. If you are relaxing the car, and I know this because I have a 42-year-old car, and you are allowing it to have those low RPMs when you don't need them. The car will last for longer.

Your body is the same way. So that rate that you breathe significantly affects your heart rate. And we know that an increase of about 20 beats in your heart rate per minute equals about a 30 to 50% increase in mortality. So the faster your heart is beating at risk. rest is the more chance it can help determine how soon you are going to die. And that's what the data says. So the data also says that larger lungs equal longer lives. And there's been a few big studies on this, these huge studies where they looked at 30 years worth of data. And that wasn't good

enough for some surgeons. They said, oh, we don't believe this. So what they did is they looked at hundreds of people who had lung transplants, because that's a truly objective population, right? And they found out that these people who had been transplanted with larger lungs lived way longer than those with smaller lungs. So no matter how you get those larger lungs, the data bears out that they're going to help you, help influence your lifespan. And the good news about the lungs is you can affect your lung capacity at any age and you can do this by breathing properly by stretching with mild to moderate exercise all those things have a significant effect on your lung size wow okay and just finally what three things do you think everyone should know about how to breathe

well i'm going to sound like a broken record here but breathe through your nose people please The science is there. The anatomy is there. If you don't believe me, there's 200 different studies on my website that you can look up. But I have become more convinced now than ever. And I believe these researchers that I was learning from for years and years that you can never really be healthy if you're a mouth breather. Period. Doesn't matter what you eat, how much you exercise.

It's never going to happen. So that's the first one. The second one is try to breathe more slowly. With those slower breaths, you get more oxygen for less effort. That's efficiency. Your body really likes efficiency. I guess the third one, and this is the most important, in my opinion, is just to become aware of your breathing. This seems so simple and mundane.

But when you become aware of your breathing, you notice how dysfunctional it is throughout the day. And at those moments, you can fix your breathing and you can feel within just a few seconds how your body responds. This is not a placebo effect. This is a basic physiological function that you are taking control of to moderate your nervous system function, to moderate your heart rate, your circulation, and more. And it can be a very powerful thing, as the scientist clearly shows. Thank you for listening to this episode of Instant Genius. That was James Nester. If you want to know more about the science of breathing, check out his book, Breath.

Or, to hear him tell me about how we could hack our breathing to improve our health, head over to Instant Genius Extra, available only on Apple Podcasts. The new year issue of BBC Science Focus magazine is out now. Pick up a copy in store or visit ScienceFocus.com. This podcast is sponsored by name, audio and focal. The texture and emotional depth of music can be lost through digital sources or poor signal. Name Audio believes you can have digital precision with analog warmth. Alongside French acoustic specialist vocal,

Name creates high-end audio systems combining innovation with craftsmanship, so you can listen to music, just as the artist intended. Discover more at name audio.com. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building. Fit for your ambition for Citizens Bank. Ryan Reynolds here for MintMobile.

I don't know if you knew this, but anyone can get the same premium wireless for $15 a month plan that I've been enjoying. It's not just for celebrities, so do like I did and have one of your assistants assistants switch you to MintMobile today. I'm told it's super easy to do at mintmobile.com slash switch. Up front payment of $45 for three-month plan equivalent to $15 per month required. Intro rate first three months only, then full price plan options available. Taxes and fees extra.

See full terms at mintmobile.com.