Modern Wisdom - #350 - James Nestor - Change Your Breath, Change Your Life

Episode Date: July 26, 2021

James Nestor is a journalist and an author. We get more energy from our breath than we do from food or hydration or sleep. And yet most people have never considered assessing how properly they breathe. Thankfully James has spent years speaking to the world's leading researchers, breathwork teachers, monks and free divers to find out exactly what we need to know. Expect to learn why computer use is affecting your breath, how poor breathing can cause diabetes, why snoring is a dangerous habit, James' tips for optimising your daily breathing, the best strategies to use for athletic performance, how to improve your breathing while you sleep and much more... Sponsors: Get 40% discount on everything from boohooMAN at https://bit.ly/manwisdom (use code MW40) Reclaim your fitness and book a Free Consultation Call with ActiveLifeRX at http://bit.ly/rxwisdom Extra Stuff: Buy Breath - https://amzn.to/3eJzLei Follow James on Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/mrjamesnestor  Get my free Ultimate Life Hacks List to 10x your daily productivity → https://chriswillx.com/lifehacks/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Join the discussion with me and other like minded listeners in the episode comments on the MW YouTube Channel or message me... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/ModernWisdomPodcast Email: https://www.chriswillx.com/contact Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What's happening people? Welcome back to the show. My guest today is James Nester. He's a journalist and an author. We get more energy from our breath than we do from our food, hydration or sleep. And yet, most people have never considered assessing how properly they breathe. Thankfully, James has spent years speaking to the world's leading researchers, breath work teachers, monks and freedivers to find out exactly what we need to know. Today, expect to learn why computer use is affecting your breath, how poor breathing can cause diabetes, why snoring is a dangerous habit, James' tips for optimizing your daily breathing, the best strategies to use for athletic performance, how to improve your breathing

while you sleep, and much more. This is just one of those game-changing fundamental insights that everybody needs to know about the way that they live their daily lives. The same as Matthew Walker's, why we sleep and understanding that you need to get sufficient sleep. The insights and the principles that James gives you today are so crucial to ensuring that your health is looked after in the short term and in the long term plus It'll mean that you maximize your performance as well day to day This is like an absolute must listen. You should be hysterically fanatically intensely focused throughout this throughout this entire episode because James gives

Some absolute bombs of advice in other news before I get to other news modern wisdom reading list Neely finished I promised just a couple a few more final amends and it will be released 100 books to read before you die, everything that has had the biggest impact on me over the last few years. That will be available for free very soon, keep your ears and eyes peeled and I will tell you once you can get your copy. But now, it's time for the wise and wonderful James and Esther Three two one all right we're rolling. James, welcome to the show. How crazy has the last year been for you after your book came out? Because it feels like breath work is everywhere at the moment.

Well, I think it was a crazy year for everybody for so many different reasons. I mean, you put a pandemic onto a virtual book tour onto me finally coming out of my closet after so many years of research and writing to be on the other side of the mic and it's been complete nutter chaos to put it mildly but in all almost all good ways. I'm very grateful for the attention and I'm very grateful that people have discovered breathing as a way to help improve their health. Yeah, and you talk about how these insights of breathing have been around for a very, very long time, you know, thousands and thousands of years, but aren't still now super widely known.

Isn't it crazy in the 21st century that we can still have gated information, that there's stuff that monks in monasteries somewhere know, but that the internet doesn't? information that there's stuff that monks in monasteries somewhere know, but that the internet doesn't. Well, I think that if you look at medicine and if you look at so much of science, this is exactly the pattern it takes is in one culture, a group will discover something to be true and then another culture where that group had no association with the previous group, they discovered the same exact thing.

This is true with nutrition. It's true with exercise, and it's certainly true with breathing. So it wasn't that surprising to see that we've had this huge blind spot because we've had huge blind spots in regards to so many other things, so many other very basic things that have to do with human health. Yeah, we saw that with Matthew Walker's book, right? That why we sleep? Well, why should a book about something that everybody does for a third of their life, be so revolutionary?

I was just talking with Matthew Walker a couple of weeks ago. I was lucky enough to interview him at a conference, or a first conference, since the pandemic is somewhat lightened up here in the US. And I was cracking up because when I first heard of that book, I said, you have to be kidding me. Oh, now some guy wants to teach me how to sleep. I sleep just fine. And then we realized that breathing and sleeping,

both people expect them to be a default reaction, something that we don't need to think about. But then you look at populations across populations of people who are sleeping, people who are breathing dysfunctionally. And there is an epidemic going on on both of those fronts. And there's a lot of crossover that that then diagram between disordered sleeping and disordered sleeping and disordered breathing. And so, you know, these simple things, I think, get so ignored because they're so simple.

And yet, just adopting the most basic, simple human habits can really enrich your life. And so many levels in the science is very clear about that. Yeah, very much. I think people are looking for the fancy new pill or the weird funky workout regime, the contralateral single arm overhead press with a kettlebell balanced on one leg. Like, that's what people are after. They don't want to do deadlift, spend press and squats. The same with this, like, what's the new biohacking tool that I can use to measure my HIV for whatever,

whatever, not just need to focus on breathing, eating and sleeping correctly? Well, what I heard from so many researchers, including my father and law, is a pulmonologist. And I heard this from top level people at Stanford and Harvard. They were all saying the same thing. They said, listen, there's no way to make money off of breathing. And that's one of the reasons why this sounds very cynical, but if you think about it, it's true. And it's really hard to make money off of sleeping. You can make money off of sleeping pills, but as Matthew Walker made very clear, is sleeping

pills will put you unconscious, but they won't put you to sleep. All of the restorative processes that happen in sleep are excluded when you're taking sleeping pills. So I think some of this is commercially driven and trust me, businesses are gonna find a way of commercializing breathing. They're already finding a way of commercializing sleeping and some of those wearables, I think, are fantastic, by the way.

But I think that now people are much more empowered to take their health into their own hands because we've been so let down by the current systems. And we've really come to this point where people have been forced to understand what ATP is and understand how to really lose fat and understand how to really build muscle because so much of what we've been told to eat the whities in the morning, each or Cheerios has been just a complete lie. You know what people say a lot, they call it a post-truth world. And it's kind of like that now.

Have you ever seen the midwit meme? Do you know what this is? So you have a guy, so it's a meme and on one side you have this dude that looks a bit like in the anderthrol with the with the brow and then on the other side you have a guy that looks like a sage with his hood up and then in the middle You have this sort of screaming internet sort of wantrapreneur and it talks about the the IQ curve the bell curve And it talks about the fact that the simpleton and the genius do the same thing and you need a particular level of Intellect in the middle to actually get confused and get caught up in the weeds. And it kind of seems to be the same here

that you go through this period where maybe there's too much information. The information that's out there is trying to hack the wrong things. And then after a while you get back to like eat, sleep, move, breathe. Like, you know, do you think it's fair to say this is something I've been thinking about?

Is it fair to say that breathing is the most direct window into our autonomic nervous system that we have? Without a doubt, we get most of our energy from air, from our breath. People say, well, how is that possible? We get most of our energy from food and drink, not true. If you look at how we make energy, we get most of our energy from our breath. And so if you think that how you're inhaling 20,000 times a day, how you're exhaling 20,000

times a day, is not going to make a difference in your energy levels and how your body operates, that efficiency of how you get that energy, you're crazy. And you know, this stuff is so simple. It's not very sexy to a lot of people. They said, well, I don't want that. I want something that, you know, I have to, I mean, look at what we've done with nutrition. It's nutrition isn't that complex. And yet for the past 50 years, it's, I need this vitamin, I need K2, I need my D3 right

now, I need my fiber because I don't get enough fiber, I need this mineral because I'm deficient. I mean, this is insane or you could just eat foods that we're designed to eat and you don't need any of that stuff. So breathing is similar in some ways because we're so removed from the natural environment. Hunter gathers don't need breathing reeducation, right? They don't need sleeping reeducation. They don't need nutritional reeducation. They are already doing that because they're in a natural environment. And the further we get away from a natural environment, the more patches we need to just keep our bodies sustaining. And we've

gotten so far into an industrialized, modern living environment that we've had to re-equate ourselves with the most simple things, movement, breathing, sleep. And you can see what a difference these things make to your life and overall wellness. It's really weird, isn't it? Because we can't, I can't make myself digest any quicker or any slower, I can't make my pancreas secrete things if I want more. Is there anything else I was trying to think? Is there anything else that we can actually impact with regards to the sort of rest and digest system other than our breathing? So you're right, we can't take control of our kidney function, right?

Just with your brain, you can't take control of your, your, the amount that your heart is beating, right? per minute. But when you breathe in certain ways, you can control and influence all of these different functions. And even our organs, you can actually influence how you're digesting food. You can influence your kidney function. You can influence your liver function. You can influence your heart rate. If you don't believe me, take an inhale to account of about three and then take a very long exhale

to account about eight, do that a few times and feel how your heart rate lowers, right? Your blood pressure is gonna likely go down as well. This is magical voodoo stuff. No one would believe that we would have the ability to control this. The autonomic nervous system is called autonomic, as in automatic, beyond our control. And yet we can immediately affect it and influence it by impacting and controlling our breathing and what's so great about this is you don't have to take subjective markers You can measure what happens within a few seconds your body responds to breathing if all that magic

Gonna happen after a few seconds What's gonna happen if you breathe in a healthy way after a few weeks or a few months? Well, we're seeing these these people are able to overcome these chronic illnesses they've had for years and years. All right. So if you were going to instruct someone to breathe as poorly as possible, what would you direct them to do? I would direct them to sit in front of Zoom all day, hunched over and get stressed out about emails. And then when they get up, they're gonna do their 30 minutes of jogging a day, right?

So they're gonna put on their sneakers, they're gonna go out and they're gonna breathe like this as they're jogging. Ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, and then at night, you know what they're gonna do? They're gonna go to bed, they're gonna put their head on a pillow and they're gonna immediately open their mouth

and breathe through an open mouth all night. So what I'm, the portrait I'm painting here is obviously the majority of the modern human population. And we're breathing in ways that are so dysfunctional that are causing so much damage to our bodies on so many different levels. So I mean, I'm just being a little joky about this, but it's actually true.

There is even, you know, a whole field of study looking into something called email apnea, continuous partial attention syndrome, because people, when they sit down and get stressed out, the breathing goes to hell, okay? And something like 80% of office workers suffer from this. So how's that characterized email apnea? It's characterized by you opening up your email and you becoming so overwhelmed and so stressed so immediately. And your threshold of stress is very, very low, right? Because we're not running away from tigers anymore.

So everything is stressful to us. Oh, I'm watching the bachelor rat and she's not going with this guy. I'm totally freaked out. So I mean, I'm not trying bachelor rat and she's not going with this guy. I'm totally freaked out. So I mean, I'm not trying to be joky. I mean, this is what is happening to our society. So when you start your day off that way, what do you do? What is the body's reaction to fear? You hold your breath or You hold your breath or you breathe too much. So our threshold for fear is so low that we get a nasty email from our boss. What that triggers is the same reaction that our ancestors had to hiding from a bear or hiding from a saber tooth tiger.

We're doing the same thing. And that's fine to do for short amount of time. That's why we're still around today, right? To be able to respond this way. But to do that all day long is gonna trigger this constant IV drip of stress. And what are the vast majority of modern chronic diseases tied to stress and chronic inflammation,

almost all of them. So breathing ties into this. How you breathe influences your levels of inflammation and stress. We know that to be true. It's so interesting thinking about how, because the biggest threats that we come up against now are down-regulated, we're in such a safe environment,

that our bodies can't tell the difference between a bad email or an upcoming awkward conversation with our spouse and being chased down by something that was life-threatening. Like anybody that's had a really, really nervous period at work knows just how overwhelming that sensation is. Like, oh my God, like is my body even capable of creating this much anxiety and concern? And then when you look back on it, you

think, God, what is it even it feels like you're in some sort of a trance? It feels like you're under hypnosis or something. Well, I think it's you nailed it right there is our world to become so controlled. The climate is controlled no matter where we go. The light is controlled no matter where we go, the light is controlled no matter where we go, and the more controlled and coddled you get, the less receptive you can be to actual threats. What's interesting is we move so far away from nature and actual threats that when people are confronted with situations in which they really need to react like this, right? In order to survive, what do they do?

They completely shut down. So those reactions that enabled us to live in jungles and savannas for millions of years are no longer useful and they're a hindrance to our health. And just like anyone who's worked in an office who's worked with nasty bosses, even good bosses and co-workers, there are times when you are stressed where you can't sleep right.

I don't feel like eating. When you're in this state, your blood sugar goes up, your adrenaline goes up, your cortisol goes up, you can't rest and restore. So, this isn't controversial. Everyone knows this, but what do we do about it? We resort to pills and powders, some of which can work really well.

Okay, some supplements can work really well, but why not use something that you carry with you all day long and all night long that will allow you to immediately take control of that stress. And that's what breathing allows you to do. I know this sounds like I'm overbilling this, but it gets some instruments, get a heart rate variability monitor and breathe in a certain pattern and see what happens to your heart rate variability or your blood sugar or your blood pressure anymore. What was the moment when you went from being a skeptic to a believer? Was there a particular piece of research

that you came across or an experience that you had where you went, okay, there's really something to this and it's now undeniable? I would not call myself a believer. I always want to remain a skeptic. And I still am. I mean, after all, journalists were supposed to be skeptics. I mean, that's what I, back in the old days, that was your job is to go in without any preconceived notion of something without any bias. And it's so hard to find that. And so as someone who is a journalist and grew

up in that world, I want to approach things and look at all sides. Why wouldn't I talk to everyone I could possibly find when I'm researching a subject? Yeah, there's a lot of doctors and researchers, but there's also a lot of clinicians and therapists who have worked with people for 30 years and they have something valuable to share as well. So, you know, I think this book took me so long because I did not believe what I was finding for so many years and this is true. Even though the stuff was coming out of Harvard

and was coming out of Stanford and I was talking to these experts in the field, it took me years and years before I convinced myself and then I had to convince my publisher and my agent. I said, I think this is I think this is real and they said no, no, no for another couple years until I finally had enough scientific studies and enough interviews and I gave them audio files. I said, well, don't listen to me. This is straight from the person who studied this for 40 years at one of the top institutions. This stuff is real. And so it was a progressive thing for me. I would understand and how mouth reading

was really that bad for you after doing all of the research and the science and some studies of my self and then I would go on to the next thing and finally it got to be so weird like you can really heat your body up with breathing. Well, there's the study done at Harvard, you know, if you don't believe me, look at the videotape from that study. Tell us about that. Tell us about that heating up study. So this was something that I kept on the back burner for a long time because I didn't want to approach it because it seemed so crazy. Whenever I told anyone about this, including my people and my family who are doctors, they said, this is impossible. So it's this this process, this breathing technique called tumum, that has been practiced for at least a thousand years

into bat before that it was practiced by ancient Hindus. And what it is is using your breath and using meditation to heat up your body. And there are stories that date back hundreds of years of travelers going to India, going to the Himalayas, going to Tibet, and seeing monks sit outside at night in the wintertime, melting a circle around them. So eight or nine hours with just a very thin sheet around, just breathing, melting a circle. Nobody believed this, even when hippies were going to Tibet

in the 60s, they would come back and say, there's these people, they do this. Even when hippies were going to Tibet in the 60s, they would come back and say, there's these people, they do this. So Herbert Benson at a researcher at Harvard Medical School, heard enough of these stories, or he thought, maybe there was something behind it, or he was going to bust this myth. So he went out to Darm Sala, the way a good scientist does, is goes out there with equipment, with sensors, sets up a study, and found out these people could do all of this and more. And there's videotape of the studies. You can read the study that was published in Nature, which is the most highly esteemed peer-reviewed journal of scientific studies on the planet. Any show that these people are able to raise the temperature in their extremities by 17 degrees,

they were able to dry a wet sheet placed over them in a cold room in about 40 minutes. And again, there's video of this stuff. So it just shows you, when people actually show up when researchers and scientists actually show up and do the research, you can really discover some amazing things. Unfortunately, there's just not that much money to be made in these kinds of studies. There's no way to market too much reading. You can't market monks trying your clothes

by laying them on the back. You know, maybe as a new washer dryer situation, someone can get a monk and put them in the basement. That might be cheaper, feed him some rice, there you go. But you know, to, Wim Hof has, his, he's done such an amazing service to people by taking these abstract obscure breeding techniques, which he did not invent.

And he is the first one to tell anyone that, and to make them approachable to everyday people. And so what he practices is a form of tumble breathing, which is why he can sit in an ice bath for almost two hours and not suffer from frostbite or hypothermia. It's supposed to be totally impossible. There it is. There's the study of him doing that. Are those monks the same ones that manage to heat? Is it different hands or different parts of the same hand or something? They're all using these are all variations on the same theme. So that was Swami Rama who grew up in more of a Hindu tradition. But what I try to make clear in the book is we name these breeding techniques, different names. They were different cultures, claim them as their own. But so many of them are all doing the same thing, and they're eliciting the same effects. When you look at Wim Hof breathing and compare it to Sudarschenkria and compare it to other

vigorous pranayamas, they heal people in the same ways because they're doing, they're listening the same reactions in the body. What is that reaction? If you get any idea what the mechanism is that's worth, like how, what's happening with the breath that causes the body to heat up or the hand to heat up? Well this is where it, to me, it gets very, very interesting. So if you take the Wim Hof approach, this very, very breathing, some of your listeners, I'm sure, have done this breathing. This is a listening, a very severe sympathetic nervous system response. So it is stressing your body out. You get a squirt of adrenaline, you get some cortisol, some epinephrine.

That's why your heart starts racing. You start sweating, you feel tense. In short bursts of time, this stress called hermetic stress or hormesis is so beneficial, because just as we were talking about earlier, how we just stay all day in the state of chronic low-grade stress, this chronic state of inflammation, the short breathing techniques compound that stress so that you can

chill out the rest of the time. That's why you're so relaxed after doing that. So that's how WIM is able to keep warm. What's interesting is that these monks were able to decrease their metabolism by 60%, which is way lower than someone in a coma. You should not be conscious, and yet they were able to heat their bodies up with this reduced metabolic state. So what the fuck's going on there? Wimph, Wimphph's method increases metabolism, which is why he says he consumes twice as much oxygen, even 40 minutes after doing the Wim Hof method, right?

So to answer your question, what the fuck is going on with these monks? We still don't know which is what is so awesome about this After so many years of testing these guys with every imaginable sensor with every EEG looking at their heart rates, looking at their body temperatures, looking at their blood pressures, we cannot understand how the human body, someone can take control of it, to reduce their metabolism, increase their heat. And on that same line, Swami Rama, right, here's a guy who on a single hand can increase the temperature on one side of his palm while decreasing the temperature by 11 degrees on his thumb. So on the same hand, still don't know, still don't know how they do it. That's what makes my job interesting is I get to fall into these worlds and try to figure it out. These guys are freaks.

Like this is insane. Well, you know, that's an interesting perception because I think they view us as freaks. For not having this capacity. Well, we all have this capacity. That's what they're saying. They're like, how dare you be born a human with this capacity to do these amazing things and instead sit in front of your computer

and watch Netflix all day eating popcorn, you know? How dare you not use your body to heat yourself up, to lose weight, to control your heart rate, to control your blood pressure? So that's what I've learned. And I've heard the same thing from freedivers. A lot of people call them freaks. These are these people who can hold their breath for six, seven, eight minutes at a time. And they can dive down to 300 to 400 feet on a single breath of air. I've seen it. I'm a freediver myself. I've

experienced some of this. We're born with these mammalian dive reflexes that trigger The deeper we get in the water and you feel them coming on and so people may look at freedivers as freaks But freedivers think of other people is like you're born with this everyone has this ability to dive and experience this true spectrum of Life and what this body is given us and so few of us do anything about it. So I guess it depends on what side of the argument you're on, but I guess I'm somewhere in the middle. I don't want to spend 12 years in a cave learning how to do this, but I do want to tune in to some of what my body is able to naturally do for me.

Yeah, I guess that the perspective I have, like, then bringing a freak is only relative to the fact that I'm a normal person, to the freak, the normal person just looks like someone that isn't maximizing their potential, I suppose. Yeah, I mean, talk to a Buddhist monk about how we're living our, so many of us are living our lives in this extremely materialistic world where it's doggy dog every single day and But we don't have a larger context on on what life is Hey, where did we come from where are we now? Where are we going when when we die?

So they view us as freaks and then we see monks sitting around meditating all day and we view them as freaks So I don't think the answer is to go full-bore into either of those sides. You can do that and that's great, but we have the luxury now in the modern age to be able to dip our toes in different things and see what works for us and what's really sustainable. With that stuff, it feels like cultural conditioning, masquerading as human nature. You just have a particular group of people and in that, this is what's going on, and you think, well, everyone does this.

Everyone thinks like this. You're all, that's just a scope in sensitivity that you've got going on there. Well, even closer to home, think about how people in the US and in Britain, I suspect, view this daily Ciesta. We're like, wait, what?

You wake up, work a couple of hours in the morning, then you go home, eat lunch for two or three hours and go to sleep, and then come back for a couple more. We view them as people in the Mediterranean as complete freaks for doing this, but we know in Matthew Walker's book, when they've converted their lifestyles to the typical US or UK or North American lifestyle, their rates of cancer go way up, the rates of hypertension go way up, the rates of inflammation, the rates of sickness

are off the charts now. So maybe it's we who are the freaks. I don't wanna get too deeply into that, but I really think it depends on context. And even more importantly, you can look at science and see what the human body really responds to, what the brain responds to, what is the healthiest and choose your path that way. Okay. So going back to our poor test subject that you've given some instructions to and is now

Breathing in the worst way possible. You talk about them breathing too much wise too much breath a bad thing I would have thought more breath would be good Yeah, and a lot of people thought more food would be good Because more food equals more energy. So what's very confusing when you get into the biochemistry of breathing and this took me Months and months. I don't have a background in this stuff, which was a real hindrance. It was a pretty steep learning curve. Is that you start to understand, it's the efficiency of breath

that is so much more important than the volume. So a lot of us think we want more energy, right? We want more oxygen. We need more oxygen to get more energy. So I'm going to breathe more. That allows me to get more energy. So I'm going to breathe more. That allows me to get more energy. It's completely false. So the opposite is true. And we've known this for more than 120 years. That when you breathe over breath over your metabolic needs, you offload too much

carbon dioxide. And without getting too deeply into the weeds here, what that does is it inhibits blood flow throughout your body, and it makes it harder for you to get oxygen. You can see this for yourself by overtake 10 or 20, very deep breaths, and you'll feel some tingling in your fingers and in your head. That's from a decrease of circulation. So, in order to get the optimum amount of oxygen, you should be breathing slowly, you should be breathing low, you should be breathing through your nose.

By doing that, you were pressurizing that air and you're allowing that air more time in your lungs to travel down deeper, where that gas exchange can happen so much more efficiently. You get more oxygen with less work and less wear and tear on your body breathing this way. And you can see this by feeling your heart rate when you breathe in these slower breaths. And then if you have a pulse oxymeter, a lot of people do nowadays, look at your blood oxygen levels. If anything, they'll stay the same or often go up. So this is just simple mathematics, and yet we've gotten this so wrong for so long, and it's great that people are starting to correct this. And again, we

have wearables that can show us and can prove to us how we're breathing, how efficiently we should be breathing in the future. What is some of the health effects of poor breathing then? If someone doesn't fix the awful instructions you've given them? Well, look around. Look at the rates of asthma. Look at the rates of panic disorder.

Look at the rates of sinusitis, of increased risk of allergies, increased risk of snoring, increased risk of sleep apnea, diabetes is tied to disorder breathing as well. I mean, this list goes on and on because if you're struggling or if you're doing anything inadequately all day long, all night long, guess what's gonna happen? Your body can keep itself alive, that's good,

but it can't keep itself healthy. So it really starts with stopping mouth breathing. And this is the number one thing. Look at nature, look at any other animal in the wild, look at how they're breathing, right? They're breathing through their nose, look at an infant breathing deep into the belly, into the nose. So this is the very first step. And once you condition yourself to be breathing through your nose, you're a lot of the way there because that breath through the nose slows down, slows things down. It's hard to hyperventilate when you're breathing through your nose, right? So that takes care of a lot of those, those rules and regulations.

I got to tell you this story, man. So I had a guy called Stephen McGinty on the show. He's just written a book about the Pisces III Submarine Rescue, which is the deepest ever submarine rescue that happened in about 1970. And these guys, Roger Malinson and Roger Chapman, were stuck 15,000 feet down in a submarine for 86 hours on a bottle, two bottles of oxygen that were meant to last them 60. So they were talking through the breath cycles that they needed to do. They were collecting the condensation from their breath on the surface to drink. They had oxygen tanks. So what they were doing, and this was really, really interesting,

they were purposefully alternating between breathing through their nose when they needed to make a decision and breathing through their mouth when they needed to conserve oxygen, because the mouth breathing was less efficient, but that's actually what they wanted. They didn't want to take as much oxygen in, they simply wanted to exist, so they tried to dial their breathing down to about six breaths a minute and breathe through their mouth. And then if they needed to do something, communicate with the surface, run the scrubber, run the O2 tanks, make a check on some sort of measurements, then they'd breathe through their nose for a little while beforehand. The headache would

then they'd breathe through their nose for a little while beforehand. The headache would abate a little bit. They would have a little bit more cognitive function. They'd do the thing, they'd go back to breathing through their mouth quite slowly. I thought that was such an in-depth understanding of how breath works. And they stay down there on this bottle of oxygen for a day and a half longer than they should have done. Crazy. than they should have done. Crazy. That's a great story. We know that nasal breathing affects how the brain works. There have been numerous studies. There was one a couple years ago out of Northwestern University that was fascinating. Looking at rhythmic slow breathing through the nose and how different areas of the brain will come online. different congregations of neurons will start

lighting up in different areas to allow communication to work more fluidly between different brain regions. So the researcher said that actually bringing through the nose can help you make better decisions because it's changing the neurochemistry of your brain. And the fact that these guys knew about this in the 1970s is really impressive because a lot of the breathing research was coming out after that time. You don't have to tell them the importance of nasal breathing or how the body responds to two different breaths. I mean, they experienced it firsthand and what an incredible story. How does breathing fix the chronic health conditions that you're talking about?

So I understand how it can cause things that are related to sinuses and air flow and stuff like that. But I less understand inflammation and diabetes and things like that. I would have thought that I don't know. I don't understand how it fixes it. So I want to be very clear. Breathing is not going to fix all of your problems, right? I'm not going to offer anyone a blanket prescription.

A panacea. Yeah. For anything. No, I'm not going to do that. And I'm not a doctor. I'm not a breathing therapist. But what I have found is that when people have very dysfunctional breathing, when you start controlling your breathing and you breathe in a more efficient way,

the body can come back into balance. I can get into a few of these specifics. Let's just talk about asthma, okay? Populations with asthma tend to breathe way too much. They tend to breathe through their mouth. They tend to have very low CO2. So they have low CO2 because they are constantly overbreeding, which is why a lot of people with asthma feel coldness in their fingers, okay? And guess what happens

when you start overbreeding? And you breathe more and more. You know that constriction I was talking about in blood vessels? Guess how asthma attacks start? You begin over breathing and that leads to this downward spiral of more over breathing, contrigerent attack. The same exact thing happens with panic. So researchers did some incredible studies several years ago. This was NIH research, very official stuff. What they took, groups of people with asthma and panic, the only thing they had them do was breathe more slowly. That's it. Okay.

And they were looking at their CO2 levels. And they said they wanted to get their CO2 levels up because when your CO2 levels are up, that's an indication that you're breathing in balance with your metabolic needs. Just by having them breathe more slowly, these people were able to reverse their asthma and reverse their panic. People were no longer having panic attacks or asthma attacks. You may think, oh, this is only one study.

No, there are literally dozens and dozens of clinical studies that have been done at hospitals throughout the world just looking at breathing as an intervention for asthma and panic. So let's go to the other end of this. Let's talk about metabolism and breathing. You're like, how the hell could breathing be implicated in the onset of diabetes, right?

This doesn't make any sense. But we know this is true. When you go to bed at night and you have sleep apnea or sleep disorder breathing. What are you doing all night long? When you're breathing this way, you are stressing your body out, which is why people with sleep apnea and other sleep disorder breathing problems have hypertension. And it's also why when you're stressing out your body, every one of those times that you're holding your breath and stressing your body out, your blood sugar goes up.

Okay, your insulin goes up. After a while, you get desensitized to that. And after a while, that can lead to adult onset diabetes. And this is not my research. This was studied 30, 40 years ago at Stanford. And you can look at sleep apnea and diabetes and find that. It's even directly connected with Alzheimer's, the onset of Alzheimer's, because sleep is our time to rebalance the body and restore ourselves. Matthew Walker can tell you all about this. If sleep is the time when you're stressing yourself out,

when you've been stressed all day, your body is gonna be destroyed, and that's what we're seeing right now. One of the things that I'm really interested to try and dig into is how much people can influence their non-conscious breathing with breathing exercises. So we can't spend every minute of every day thinking about our breath. We've got other stuff to do, drive the car or feed the kids or answer the email

or do the podcast. Is there some sort of a spillover effect that happens from focusing on your breathing that then makes your non-conscious breath pattern throughout the day improved? Have you got any idea of how this works? Yeah, so the point of this stuff isn't to be walking around with a note pad and wearing three different wearables and to be a complete neurotic about this. I already did it for you folks. It's not fun. I did it for years. I did every imaginable study just to get a deeper view into this. Most of those studies didn't even make it into the book because I didn't want the book to be about me. I wanted to be about the reader, the person who was breathing and reading. So what I found is the point of these things is to train yourself to acclimate yourself to make healthy breathing a habit. Okay? If you've been doing something dysfunctionally,

breaking that habit can take weeks or months. It can take a long time, but the key is to start very slow and to gently go into this. Don't kick your breaths, ask. A lot of us in the West have this approach where we just want to go 100%, 110% into something, save that for something else. With breathing, you want to slowly acclimate yourself so that it feels natural so that your body

can slowly respond to it. And that's what these breathing techniques do. And after a while, you won't need to remind yourself to breathe through your nose because you will always be breathing through your nose, including during exercise. Okay, I'm living proof of this and the hundreds and hundreds of other people who have written me have found the same exact thing. For some people, they're lucky enough after a couple of weeks, they're like, cool, I got this,

I never breathe through my mouth. Others take a few months. If you're talking about jogging or doing zone four fitness, this can take a lot longer than that, but we know that the performance gains of nasal breathing and recovery times can be very profound. So the simple answer is, yeah, the point is to have these things become a habit.

Sometimes that takes a while. At sleep, it's harder because you're unconscious, which is why I like some training wheels, sleep tape, nasal strips, nasal dilators can all help with that. Let's get into the sports performance thing. There'll be lots and lots of people listening that are athletes and want to try and maximize their performance. What did you learn about breaths impact on athletic output? I learned that athletes are more concerned with efficiency than anyone, especially competitive

athletes. That's what it's all about. Who can run most efficiently so you can beat your competitor, right? We've got 11 pounds of muscles operating our respiratory system. And so many athletes are focused on every other muscle. I'm going to work out my wrists today. And now I'm going to work out my neck and my ankles. You're not focusing on the muscles that are delivering energy to you when you're competing.

And I think that this has been so chronically overlooked for so long. And now people are really clueless into it. So I will say that I've talked to some of the real leaders in the field, Brian McKenzie is a good friend, Patrick McEwan is a good friend. These are people who have been training elite athletes for decades. On the first thing they do is they have them breathed correctly.

They said before anything else, that's what they start with. So what they've found, and there have been numerous studies on this, is performance will improve after you get over that hump of becoming a nasal breather. Your performance will go down at the beginning, and this is what a lot of athletes don't wanna see. They don't wanna see their performance go down. But once you acclimate, acclimate slowly, your performance,

by and large. This is what they have told me with hundreds and hundreds of people that they've worked with, will improve and then your recovery times will improve. Your VO2 max will likely improve. You can likely build more blood to more red blood cells. So you're able to do this because you're breathing in line with your metabolic needs. Most of us when we're competing, are working out, are breathing too much that will trigger an excess of lactic acid, which will make it harder for us to recover. It will also trigger

constriction in our blood vessels right at the time when we really need oxygen. If this is correct and it's more efficient for us to breathe, slower through our nose, why does our body want to do anything else? Because our bodies are acclimated to have a very low threshold of CO2. So what they're finding now, and there's been a lot of research done on this in the path, but now there's a lot more interest in this. So, what they're finding is that need to breathe is not dictated by oxygen. Okay, it's dictated by CO2.

Right now, if you exhale and hold your breath, you're going to feel this nagging need to breathe after a while. Okay, that's dictated by rising levels of CO2. And the more acclimated you get to being comfortable with more CO2 in your body, the more oxygen you can deliver to your hungry self. So whenever you feel that, I really need to breathe, I really need to breathe.

Overbreeding is not gonna deliver more oxygen to you. You want to breathe in line with your metabolic needs, and that almost always is way slower than you think it is. Pulse oxymeters can help do this. Breath holding exercises can really help get over that hump, which is exactly why they're using so many of these for elite athletes. But don't take my word for it. Talk to the athletes who have converted to nasal breathing, who have adopted healthy

breathing practices, and it's been a complete game changer for these people. Did you watch Elliott Kipchowge's Breaking Two attempt? You see him sprinting towards the finish line? And the guys, I don't, I can't work out if his mouth is shut or not but it's not far off. It's definitely not wide open and he just looks it's the same cadence it's the same facial expression the man's just zen. I wouldn't be surprised if he's a very very heavy nose breather. Of course he is. So I want to mention one thing, especially for the people who really like edging into that zone four, zone five level, there is a time and a place for everything.

And this is what I've learned from Brian McKenzie who works with elite Olympians. So if you're about to dunk on someone's head, like it's okay to open your mouth, take a huge breath. If you look at Michael Jordan right before he's dunking, he takes this huge breath and that's perfectly fine. As long as you use that mouth breathing as a tool, just like those people in that submarine, right? They're using their mouth breathing

as a tool. A lot of people aren't used to or even want to get to those elite states of athletic performance, which is why I don't mention this too often. But for those people who do, yeah, resetting with some mouth breaths, if you've really reached your top, go back to nasal breathing, totally fine. And if you look at Sanio Richard Ross, who was the top sprinter for 10 years, check out her crossing the finish line and everyone else behind her mouth breathing mouth close breathing through her nose. And Kip Chogi is the same thing. It's okay to have your mouth open a little.

Maybe he's ex-samely in a little because he's been running for two freaking hours. It's 20 miles per hour. That's fine, but the majority of his breasts, I guarantee, are nasal dominance. And something that joggers can do, if you have a heart rate monitor, if you have a strap, the straps are the most accurate by far, check out your heart rate when your nasal breathing versus mouth breathing. And you will see your heart rate when your nasal breathing versus mouth breathing and you will see your heart rate lower and if you're able to perform at the same level of endurance with a lower heart rate,

guess what you're doing, you're operating more efficiently and that means you then have more energy to go a little faster, to go a little longer. That's what athletic performance is based on efficiency and breathing has to be a huge part of this. Brian McKenzie was on the show a couple of years ago and he said he could tell an athlete performance simply by getting them to do a CO2 tolerance test. He had a very good indication of what this athlete was going to be like across a number of different domains by just getting them to do one slow breath from the top. Okay, you've got as much time as you want.

Breathe in fully. Breathe out, start the clock. As soon as you stop breathing out, I'm going to stop the clock. That was it. That's the only test that he needs. And on his state app, that's the regular retest that you do, right, is you continue to work up through it. So yeah, it's so crazy.

Here's something else. So let's say there might be a lot of people listening that are maybe powerlifters, crossfitters, they do sort of interval-style work, perhaps other athletes. How would you advise someone to recover in between sets? Because I'm a right in thinking that we've got the cadence, either the speed of the breath, and then the depth of the breath.

Are those the two main characteristics, the two main parameters that we're playing with when it comes to breathing? In between reps, I think nasal breathing is so important, but I also want to be very clear here, once you have acclimated, a truly converted to nasal breathing is where you're really going to see these benefits. At the beginning, some people may need surgery. Okay. Some people do need surgery because their nose are so messed up, but a lot of people just need conditioning, just like you need conditioning with anything else. So there's two different things I can talk about. Before you're conditioned, nasal

breath as much as you can, right? It's gonna be uncomfortable, but don't push it. Like try it for maybe half of your breaths or a quarter of your breaths at the beginning, then go back to your mouth breathing. That's fine at the beginning. That's what you've been doing, but then just gently start increasing it as you go along. It really helps to be nasal breathing at night.

This will help condition all those tissues and different structures in your nose and will help more easily acclimate your body to what you're doing in the daytime. Also nasal breathing, wearing a little piece of tape, while you're answering emails or doing stupid stuff around the house can really help condition you to nasal breathe. So to answer your question in between reps is absolutely when you want the heart rate to come down a little bit, you want your oxygen to go up and you want to recover. You don't want to be stressing your body out. I can't tell you how many times I used to see this at the gym is people working out doing a few reps and then just it was like this macho thing to walk

around and go Like they're really working out the same thing on a treadmill on an elliptical there's people just You're not doing yourself any favors if you want to burn more fat You need more oxygen which means you need to be nasal breathing more and breathing in line with your metabolic needs So it's just basic biochemistry, but again, so a few of us have heard about this until recently. That's an interesting one. So even though nasal breathing will reduce your heart rate, which most people would associate,

lower heart rate less calorie burning, nasal breathing with lower heart rate will actually increase calorie burning. Your metabolic rate is gonna be going up from lifting weights and your metabolic rate continues to go up after you work out, right? That's where you get the benefits from the fat burning. It's just not always during the workout. It's afterwards that that's the real benefit of exercising.

So if you're talking about burning fat, you need oxygen to burn fat. And you can run anaerobically. You can do that for a while. It's extremely inefficient. That's an inefficient way to burn. You're burning sugar. That's cool. But you're also building lactic acid and causing, which is fine in small amounts, but it can

cause problems later on. So you want that combination where you want to be working out into your zone three, zone four. You want the heart rate going up, but you also, this is what heart rate variability is, you also want it to be able to go down. You're, and the benefits of that fat burning will be happening after as well. If you go on a three hour jog, it will be happening during that, as long as you're fat, adapted, and you're not just burning sugar, as long as your body can easily switch over to burning fat. And you need oxygen to do that. You also need proper food to do that.

One of the things I've just thought there, it feels uncomfortable, right? The CO2 tolerance is your... I tried to do it today, so I'm listening to the book earlier on today and I'm going for a jog and I'm right, right James and Esther's listening, well he's not listening, but he's talking to me, so it's kind of the same thing. Shoot your mouth.

Like breathe, breathe through your fucking nose, come on. And I'm jogging along and you feel the discomfort and it rises and it rises and it rises and the air thirst to want to breathe more deeply through your mouth gets more and more compulsive. I've got to guess based on how few people I've ever seen faint while running that that is almost all psychological and very far your physiological limit for how much carbon dioxide you can tolerate and how much oxygen you need and how much more you need to breathe through your mouth is

miles away from where your brain thinks it is. Yes and no, but it depends on the person. People who are very tolerant for high levels of CO2 can push it too far, right? But then you have freedivers who are almost inhuman in their abilities. They've measured brain oxygen levels of 50% in a freediver. So this is so far below what is supposed to support consciousness, and yet it does.

So I can't give you a cutoff point. What Brian McKenzie does, what Patrick McHuman does, is they take you through interval training with breathing, and that's what freedivers do as well. When you're in a controlled environment, you're laying down on your couch, and you're just holding your breath for a minute at a time, then you're holding your breath for a minute and a half at a time, then you're breathing for 30 seconds and holding your breath.

That's the best way to acclimate yourself to CO2. While jogging, I do not recommend, especially turbo people really like to push it to just hold your breath as long as you can and say, I'm not. This is just psychological. I don't want to be responsible for you actually passing out. Face pump. What you can do are these simple interval training where three seconds in, six seconds out, right? Four seconds in, eight seconds out. And maybe you do that, you start very lightly at the beginning.

This is what I found really help with my surfing and jogging, even though I hate jogging, I try to do it anyway. Even walking, you can do this. Three seconds in, 10 seconds out. It's gonna feel uncomfortable. Then after a few days or a few weeks, you're going to be like, hey, I'm comfortable with this. I'm going to push it a little more. This is the responsible way of doing it.

And you're going to notice something that I thought was fascinating is you're going to feel all this heat, all this warmth in like your fingertips, in the back of your neck, and this is circulation. This is a vasodilator. That's what CO2 is. It's all of this circulation. If your body has that circulation, it's able to process metabolites, it's able to deliver oxygen, it's able to remove other toxins. You want that movement and that circulation, and that's what this breathing allows you

to do so again i would not suggest doing these epic breath holds while you're working out but work on the inhale and exhale ratios and play around with that and do it on a very softly in a mellow way at the beginning Okay, so sleep is snoring natural or not? No, no, it's not it's not natural at all and it neither is sleep apnea. It just so happens to me that so many people do it. We think it's normal just like having crooked teeth. It's not natural. Okay, we weren't intended to have crooked teeth. How many people have crooked teeth about 90% right? We weren't intended to have crooked teeth. How many people have crooked teeth? About 90 percent, right? So there are some breeds of dogs that have been bred to have very flat faces. Guess what? They have the same breathing problems that we have. But any other animal in the wild, the vast majority of the animals, they're not going to snort and they're not going to have sleep apnea. And according to the skeletal record, our ancestors very likely suffer from very

little snoring and sleep happening as well. What causes snoring? Snoring is caused by this soft tissue in the back of the throat vibrating, right? So it can happen at the back of the nasal pharynx as well, which is why some people breathe through their nose, they're like, hey, I'm still snoring, because it can happen back there. So that's from this flabby tissue. Sleep apnea is different. That's a blockage. Usually your tongue, it can happen that way, it can also happen in other areas of the oral pharynx, hypopharynx. But one of them leading reasons why so many of us suffer from sorenessly babbling it, beyond weight, which plays a huge role on this. But one of the leading reasons why people who are average weight or under weight can suffer

from these things is our mouths have shrunk. Over the last few hundred years, the human mouth has gotten so small that our teeth no longer fit. And that's the main reason why we're suffering from so many of these chronic respiratory issues. Weight lifters know all about sleep apnea and snoring because when you get too many muscles around your neck, but your throat is not developed properly to handle that inflow and exhaling of air, you can suffer from sleep apnea, which is one of the reasons why some weight left airs can suffer from hypertension is because they suffer from sleep problems.

It's fascinating to think that snoring isn't something that's natural. It's like a right of passage, you know, it's such a cultural artifact that everybody, you have someone in a cartoon and they're asleep the way that they show that they're asleep is the fact that they're snoring. Yeah I mean this is how bad things have gotten you know it's and once I started getting deeply into this field so a lot of us know by now sleep apnea is such bad news like I don't think I've got it I think I'd know if I did. I only had it when I was in the Stanford experiment

and I plugged my nose. I instantly got sleep apnea, which is really scary. It feels, well, you're unconscious, right? So you don't feel it happening. It's just you wake up and you feel like you haven't slept a wink. Your body's all messed. You're starving. You messed, you're starving,

you have anxiety, you can't think straight. It's really bad and 20% of the population can tell you how bad it is, because that's roughly the amount who suffers from it. But what people don't get is that snoring. And now the science is really coming out about this, can have so many of the same problems as sleep apnea.

What happens when you're inhibiting air flow in and out of your body, you're stressing yourself out all night? You have to struggle to breathe for eight hours out of the night. You're not getting that proper deep sleep. We know that. And in all of that rest and restoration that is supposed to happen in sleep takes a huge hit. And I was just talking to Matthew Walker about this. And he's like, I totally agree. No one's talking about snoring. They think it's cute when you see an infant snoring. This is someone who's struggling to get energy, right? And it's going to completely wreck them later on in life.

All right. So what are the top tips for improving breathing during sleep? Breed through your nose, easier said than done, right? Some people need surgery, okay? Some people can benefit from having these mouth guards, those work as well, but becoming a nasal breather only has benefit. There are no side effects. Is it gonna cure all your problems? Is it gonna cure every single person snoring

asleep happening? No. Is it gonna help you across the board at some level? Yes, so why not do it? I use a little piece of sleep tape. I found that's beneficial. Other people have used other props, whatever works. Putting the head of your bed up about six inches has been proven to be helpful for some people. Because it helps gravity. When you put in your head down flat, you're working against gravity. C'mon.

Your tongue is more apt to fall back in the back of your mouth. So putting a couple pillows up and I'm a huge fan of this and it's free. And again, there's no negative side effects. I just got some books and put the head of the bed up by six inches, it's called. So they went under the mattress. No, no, no, under under the bed stand.

You don't want to feel books when you're, yeah, okay. All right. So yeah, the entire bed is now a little bit of a stunt. It's cold. Inclined bed therapy. Check, check it out. So the whole bed is at a slant. Now they sell sleep number things. You can spend 10 grand if you commercialize that. You just need some books. You need some books or some bricks or some wood or whatever the hell you have sitting around. So I found that's helpful for people who want to try to figure out their snoring using their natural body. Sleeping on your back can really exacerbate snoring and sleep apnea. You can tape a little ping pong ball or a sock to the back of a t-shirt so that you don't

sleep on your back. They used to do this with people in the military because you get much better sleep when you're not snoring. So I can tell your listeners may be into doing this and you can record what's working for you with an app. I like an app called Snorlab. No, they aren't paying me to say that. They have a free version of it, otherwise it's like two bucks. But this records your sleep throughout the night.

And you can wear whatever sleep tracker you want. And look at the quality of your sleep. And I've found these things can make an incredible difference for some snoring and some sleep apnea. And again, they're basically free and there's only benefits associated with them. Do you know how many people are gonna go to bed with a ping pong ball strap to the back, the misses or their partner or whatever's gonna save? Is that a, what have you got there? Don't worry about it.

I'm not a wisdom, I was on earlier on. Don't worry about it. Do you know how many people go to bed strapping a terrestrial scuba mask to their face? No. So they don't suffer from sleep, a CPAP machine? Is that what it is? Is that how they manifest it onto their face?

Do you know how many tens of millions of people are sleeping with a mask that pumps air in and out of their bodies every night? Because if they didn't have this, their sleep would be a complete disaster, and they die of hypertension. So a ping pong ball may seem, here we go with that. What's really weird?

Who's the weirdo? Ping pong ball may seem like a very stupid trick, right? It's no stupider than living with sleep apnea, or snoring, which is causing a lot of health problems. So, and it's free. Wear a sock. If the sock, get a cute sock and put that on your back, if that's going to help you. But these things, you don't have to do these things.

You can wear a CPAP and CPAP's work, but here are a few tricks. You can try that. Won't cost you anything. I hadn't ever heard of the vertical bed incline thing before. That's a really, really good idea. This is right up your alley. And now there's some real science coming out. Check out incline bed therapy. And there's some guy who's been starting it for 20 years.

He's pretty wacky, but very... He's vertically now. He's managed to work his tolerance to the point where he's at 90 degrees. He's gotten so good. Yeah, now he sells straps and duct tape and you can just tape yourself up every night and there you go. Glad you brought that up. Another new market everybody. Check Amazon soon. It will be man. So you talked about free divers and stuff earlier on. I know that you've got a recreational interest in it as well. What are some of the most extreme feats with regards to breath athlete? What do you call them? Not psychonauts, what are they?

Polmonauts. Polmonauts, that's it. What are the most extreme polmonaut feats that you've seen? That was an umbrella term I made up because I didn't know what to call. What includes a researcher, a scientist, a doctor, but also a clinician and also WIM off. Like they all share the saying and comment where they're fascinated with the science and mechanics of breathing.

And so the, I mean, WIM's pretty amazing. And what I love about WIM is that he raises hand and said, I'll do any scientific experiment at any time. So he's putting his money where his mouth is and what they're finding is things that are just completely redefining our understanding of biology by him volunteering to do this. So he's pretty impressive, you know,

freedivers, any freediver impresses me. And what I love about freediving is you think of the things that you can do on this planet where you won't be disturbed, where there are no text messages, where there's no emails, where no one can really, where it's totally silent. That's what the ocean is for me, and diving into the ocean. I've found that freediving, you can do it as a competition. People do that. That's great. That's not my jam.

I prefer it as sort of an underwater meditation where you're just using these two air tanks, called your lungs, as your only tool to explore the ocean. And animals respond to this. They view you as one of their own because they go up, marine mammals go up to the surface, get it breath of air, come back down. They see you doing it. They get so excited. So it's really one of my favorite things to do in the whole world is just to have that silence and that moment where you're truly immersed in the ocean, you're immersed in nature, but you're also immediately connected to your own body and its abilities. That's sick.

Something that I've never, I've never done before, but I imagine that it must be a very meditative experience. You've taken this breath, you've worked up, you're somewhere as you say, silent, surrounded by nature, or perhaps surrounded by nothing. Must be really beautiful. It is. And I think that freediving gets a bad route because people associate it with competition. I've written pretty sensibly about the competitive side before I will not go to another competition it just. And again, I don't want to anyone wants to do that that's totally fine you free to do whatever you want to do but.

This other side of free diving the meditative the the yogic side of it, and you really understand and appreciate breathing when you're doing this as well. And you can't do freediving in an anxious state if you're panicked, because you know what? You can't hold your breath in those states. So you can only do it when you are centered into yourself. And it's something I have not been doing enough of because of the pandemic, and it's the first thing

I'm gonna go out and do once things are really start opening up. It's interesting thinking about the way that sports or a pursuit or a hobby Works as a forcing function for the state that you want to get yourself into so I had Paul Bloom on the show And he was talking about why people have Desired to do extreme sports and it's a forcing function for presence. If you're based jumping in a wingsuit off the side of a mountain, and you have a micro-second of lost attention, you're dead.

So what it forces people to do, it's, they may enjoy the actual pursuit itself, but what they also like is that the requirements of the pursuit put them into a state that they want to be in. It's like reverse engineering, the act to become the state, right? And it's the same as what you're talking about here with the free diving. The free diving can be great and everything, but you can't be stressed. You can't be hyperventilating.

You can't be thinking about these other things. You have to be in a state that you want to be in. And what you do is you use the practice or the pursuit as a forcing function to get yourself there. I think we have been evolved and our biology is as such that we really require these states and we've denied them for so long whenever we go out and exercise now we were wearing four different sensors, we've got our phone on, we've got our headset on. That's cool and I do that quite often because it's easier to work out that way. But those, you think about when we were hunting food

every single day, right? When we evolved, we were in these states of extreme quiet and focus, where you weren't thinking about yesterday, you weren't thinking about yesterday, you weren't thinking about tomorrow, you were thinking about that exact pinpoint of a moment right there. And I think that our bodies respond to this, they respond to that focus and it allows them to stay balanced afterwards.

I know that a lot of people in wing suits or even freedivers, they have a hard time living in the terrestrial world, in the modern world without having this release to reset themselves, which is why I find it so interesting that a lot of addicts, some people with some serious drug issues have found freediving and said, this is this release, this focus where I'm able to just be absolutely present on a moment and instead of having been distracted by everything else. Naval Ravikant has this quote where he says, we don't want peace of mind, we want peace from mind. And the breath work, you know, think about when you do a Wim Hof session and you're holding your breath. Your mind's not anywhere.

You can't think about anything. It forces your thoughts in that way. The same as the wingsuit, the same as the downhill mountain biking, the same as the Jiu Jitsu or the mixed martial arts fighting. And the same as other stuff that Paul talks about, I think he's got a new book coming out to do with the pleasures of pain. And he spoke to a dominatrix that said, nothing catches the attention like a whip. And she was referring to the fact that if you get slapped in the face for a couple of seconds,

you don't think about anything other than the fact that you've been slapped in the face. Peace from mind. It's interesting to think that we've developed these different things, including meditation, developed in civilization, right? So once we moved away from nature, hunter-gatherers don't meditate. Definitely, they'd be following to get back there. There were finding different ways and different tricks to just suit what our bodies have been thirsting for for so long. And no matter how you get that, if you get that through meditation or freediving or being in a wingsuit or even exercising and jogging or surfing, whatever, that's great. But I don't think that we should continue to undervalue those states of some people

call it doing nothing, right? The celebrating doing nothing. I consider that when you're in the moment being here now, that's doing everything. That's where you need to be. It's just our modern culture doesn't allow us to lull around in that state for too long and that's a crime. One year on from when you first released the book, is there something that you've discovered since then that you wish that you could have put in? So many things. It's been interesting. The real privilege is to now be in conversations with so many researchers. Not only the ones that are in the book who are all good friends now, and will remain good friends, so many other people. I've been able, I did not think that I'd be

speaking at Harvard Medical School and Yale Medical School and Stanford, but I have, I've been lucky enough to do that. And they've really sort of picked up their ears to some of the things I said, well, and I told them, I said, give me a call afterwards, I'll show you the science. And now I'm working with some of these people. We're trying to boot up some studies. And, you know, so in particular, there are so many things. And so for the US edition, I'm working with some of these people. We're trying to boot up some studies. And, you know, so in particular, there are so many things. And so for the US edition, I'm going to be slipping a few of those in, but this is an ongoing story. I did the best I could with the time I had to fit as much as I could within this book, but science doesn't stop, right? It is constantly moving forward and it's so thrilling to see

some real active interest in academic circles into this stuff. There already was for decades, but there seems to be more, and I think a lot of that has to do with COVID and looking at the importance of healthy lungs and healthy breathing to help stem off some of the symptoms of long-term COVID, and that's exactly what we've been finding. I think you're right as well with saying that often it takes someone who necessarily doesn't come from the field, you've said yourself, you're a journalist rather than some hardcore, that breath scientist, some pulmonologist or whatever it's called, but popularizing

science and being a facilitator and a communicator of it, doesn't require someone to have the deepest knowledge, it requires them to be able to aggregate it and communicate it in a way. So, yeah, I think if that's something you've been able to help those guys out with, then quite rightly, they should be coming to you for more and more communication like this. Well, it's, you know, and I'm not trying to be funny when I say this, is I'm totally ignorant of these areas. And I was talking to Joe Rogan about this while I was on a show way back when.

And he's like, I'm an idiot. And I am not embarrassed to ask simple questions. And these are usually the questions that most people want to ask, but they're embarrassed to. So I'm not embarrassed to say I know Zero about a subject before I go into it I think it would be very dishonest to sort of claim otherwise and A combination of that of this ignorance in an area, but also curiosity when I work on a book

It's not at eight hours a day thing. It's all day, all night. I dream about it. I get obsessed with it. And I love that. I love falling into that world. And honestly, I miss it a little bit. So I'll be doing that again soon, going back in the office and digging in again. But the long story is there's so much new breathing research coming out from so many top institutions and it's about time as all I can say about that.

Beautiful, man. I'm really, really glad that you're the person that's decided to put his life and his nose and his time on the line to make it work. The paperback edition of Breath is now available. Everyone can go and get that from Amazon. If they want to check out more of the things that you do, where should they go? So my website has, I know I've mentioned a lot of crazy studies

that sound impossible to believe. My publisher allowed me to publish the entire bibliography on my website, because I knew a lot of people were going to call BS on this stuff, so you can check it out at Mr. James Nestor. It's .com. It's all for free there. I've also been doing interviews with leaders in the field at Harvard and other leading institutions who can talk about breathing and the intricacies of breathing.

I'm also trying to get better at this Instagram thing. So Mr. James Nestor is my handle and all these new studies and this new research I'm finding. I'm putting out on Instagram so that people can keep following up on it if they want to get deeper into this stuff. Beautiful. James, thanks so much for today. All right. Thanks a lot for having me. of that