Plain English with Derek Thompson - Breathing Is Easy. But We’re Doing It Wrong.

Episode Date: June 14, 2024

Today’s episode is about the science of breathing—from the evolution of our sinuses and palate, to the downsides of mouth breathing and the upsides of nasal breathing, to specific breath techniques that you can use to reduce stress and fall asleep fast. Our guest is James Nestor, the author of the bestselling book 'Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art.' If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at [e-mail]. Host: Derek Thompson Guest: James Nestor Producer: Devon Baroldi Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Greetings, it's Mal. Call your banners because it's time to head back to Westrose for House of the Dragon, season two. The ringers, Dragon riders will soar alongside you each week with a heron-hall-sized slate of conversations. The dragon has three heads, and on Sunday nights immediately after Hot D. Concludes, Chris Ryan, Joanna Robinson, and I will be with you for Talk the Thrones. Then on Mondays, two more shows away. Dan Lath and Charles Holmes, Steve Allman, and Jomea Denneron, aka the Midnight Boys, Pugh!

We'll head to the tourney grounds to share their reactions. And of course, Chris Ryan and Andy Greenwald will sip the Arbor's finest vintage on the watch. Then on Tuesdays, Joanna and I will head to the bowels of a pleasure den for our House of Our deep dives. Then, on Thursdays, Joe, Neil Miller, and Dave Gonzalez will gather the Ravens for trial by content. In this season, full episodes of Talk to Thrones, House of Ar, and the Midnight Boys will also be available on video on Spotify and the new Ringervverse YouTube channel. Podcast episodes available on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Today's episode is about the science of breathing. From the evolution of mammalian breath to specific breathing exercises that you can use on any given day to reduce stress and increase focus.

First, a brief history of breath on Earth. Four billion years ago, the single-celled microorganisms that roam this planet evolved to produce energy by eating the air. At the time, the atmosphere contained very little oxygen, so they learned to feast on carbon dioxide instead. These little microorganisms took in the gas, broke it down, split off the carbon, and spit out the remains. Oxygen. For a billion years, our primordial goo ancestors did this. Eat the gas, excrete the oxygen. Until sometime, around 2 billion years ago or so, when there was enough oxygen waste going around to the atmosphere,

organisms evolved a different mechanism to harness its energy. producing potential. This was a happy accident in the history of evolution. Oxygen, it turned out, produced 16 times more energy than carbon dioxide. Aerobic life grew more complex. We became plants, trees, bees, and the earliest mammals. In his book, Breath, the author James Nestor describes how evolution essentially invented the modern act of breathing. But fast forward to merely not billions of years ago, but millions of years ago, and our ancient ancestors were breathing in a very different way. They had huge forward-facing jaws, big sinus cavities, huge broad mouths, straight teeth.

Their faces grew forward, creating big, huge reservoirs for oxygen to flow into their bodies. But in the last few centuries in millennia, the fossil record shows that the human face has changed. As our brains grew, those big reservoirs for oxygen shrank. Our chins moved inward. Our jaws slumped back. Our sinuses got smaller. Evolution executed a reconstructive surgery on our facial skeleton, and it's changed the way we breathe. In fact, humans breathe in a way that basically no other mammal in the world does. Of the 5,400 different species of mammals on the planet, the only one that routinely shows misaligned jaws, overbites, underbites, snaggle teeth that isn't domesticated by humans, is human beings ourselves. The average adult breathes in about 30 pounds of air a day. That's 11,000 pounds of oxygen a year, an elephant's weight in air.

And James says most of us are doing it wrong. We are, to use a term from past guest Daniel Lieberman, disevolved. to breathe well. Today, Nestor says, 90% of children have acquired some degree of deformity in their mouths and noses. 40% of today's population suffers from chronic nasal obstruction. 25% are choking at night with sleep apnea. Modern human beings might not have the perfect skeletal machine for sleep that our ancient homo-habelous ancestors did, but if we all learned how to breathe a little bit better, how to better take in that annual elephant of oxygen, we would be healthier, sleep better, have more focus, and feel less stress. James Nestor is today's guest.

He is the author of the best-selling book, Breath, the new science of a lost art. We start in the distant past with the history of the evolution of mammalian breathing. We talk about why human beings have all the problems we have, how they are rooted natural selection and our own failures to learn or even just remember the basics of breathing. And finally, we offer specific advice in terms of what we can all do to get our breath back. I'm Derek Thompson. This is plain English. James Nestor, welcome with the show. Thanks a lot for having me. This incredibly interesting question of how modern humans became poor breathers led you to the Morton

collection at the University of Pennsylvania. Let's start here. What is the Morton Collection? And what did you learn there? I had heard that the human face has been shrinking over the past several centuries. And I had seen pictures of it. And I talked to people who attested to this, but I hadn't seen it myself in real life. And I wanted to see this for a number of reasons, journalistically and personally, because it's such a weird fact that I had never heard in any college class, any high school class, and it seemed to be pretty significant. So I went out to the University of Pennsylvania, which is the home of the Morton Collection, and the Morton Collection is the largest assemblage of pre-industrial skulls in the world. So they have hundreds and hundreds

of these things from Asia, Africa, US, wherever. And you go into this place and you're amidst all of these rows of skulls, and they're all smiling back at you with perfectly straight teeth. And it just makes you wonder, what has happened? Why did 90% of us have some sort of deformation in our mouths? And why did all of our ancestors have perfectly straight teeth? So it proved to me what I had been hearing for months and months that this is real and it merited further investigation. You write that the story of our smaller faces, our cramped mouths and cramped sinuses, is really a story about our brains and a story about the Industrial Revolution.

I know this is a story that takes place over a very, very long period of time, but in your own relatively brisk recounting, how did I, our faces shrink. I'll give you the elevator pitch on this one. So if you look at how they naturally shrunk through the different eras of human evolution, a lot of this happened when we learned how to cook food, specifically cook meat, and we gained a lot more calories, a lot more quickly. What happened is our brain started growing very, very quickly compared to any other time in human history. And as our brain started growing, they took away real estate from the front of

our faces, and including our mouths. We didn't need such huge mouths and such huge teeth when we were eating softer, more processed foods. What I mean by processed is foods that we had put into the fire, right? And we had learned how to cook. So that combination of these softer foods and And those more calories allowed our brains to grow much quicker. And this is not a hypothesis. You can see this. Right at Homo erectus, the reason why that species was so successful is because they grew a brain so quickly, evolutionarily speaking.

So our brains are stealing face from our sinuses and palate. You write, quote, when mouths don't grow wide enough, the roof of the mouth tends to rise up instead of out, forming what's called a V-shaped or high-arched palate. The upward growth impedes the development of the nasal cavity, shrinking it and disrupting the delicate structures in the nose. The reduced nasal space leads to obstruction and inhibits airflow. Overall, humans have the sad distinction of being the most plugged-up species on Earth. Expand on that for a bit. Compared to our ancient ancestors and also compared to our current fellow mammals, we have much smaller palette, this affects our ability to breathe. What are the consequences of this

scrunched face that we live with thanks to the invention of fire? So all of those evolutionary changes that I just mentioned took place over tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of years, right? So we had an ability to adapt to them. So our ancient ancestors with those larger brains and slightly smaller mouths were breathing just fine, right? They were still perfect. They were functioning perfectly. What I'm talking about from the last passage, you just mentioned, is all of this sudden, very sudden, rapid change that occurred with industrialization,

when our entire food supply changed in a single generation. And that's when our mouths shrunk precipitously that the rest of our bodies couldn't keep up with them, and that's why we all have crooked teeth. So those are two slightly different things going on here. But nonetheless, the result is, yeah, we're completely screwed up. And if you don't, believe me, go look in the mirror. And go ask yourself, did you have braces? Did you have teeth pulled?

Did you have your wisdom teeth pulled? Do you have breathing problems? Do you have a plugged-up nose? And the vast majority of people say yes to those questions. Creates a situation where 90% of children have some degree of deformity in their mouths and noses. 45% of adults snore occasionally when sleep. a majority of the population, you say suffers from some form

of breathing difficulty or resistance. So let's talk about how we breathe. I'll start by giving a personal confessional. I breathe from my mouth. When I sleep, I know my mouth is open because I'll wake up and the drool is right there on the pillow. I breathe through my mouth all the time.

I'm just a slack-jawed kind of guy. You, and this book really opened my eyes to all the problems I be creating for myself. You write that mouth breathing, literally changes our physical body. It transforms our airways for the worse. How? Well, in so many ways.

And just to reassure you, you're in good company with about 50% of the population. I was one of those people. And I thought it was perfectly normal to go to sleep every single night, to be hitting off of water throughout the night, wake up with a dry mouth, to have slobber all over the side of my face. I thought this is just how people sleep. Until you look at animals in the wild and how many animals in the wild sleep with an open mouth. How many indigenous cultures, human cultures, are sleeping with an open mouth?

The answer is none. And so something has really gone wrong. And so many people are doing this that we've accepted it as normal, but it's not normal and it's not good for us. And this is where I really went down a deep rabbit hole trying to figure out specifically how this is causing harm to our bodies. And I was surprised to learn that the science is absolutely there. And it's been there for decades, even centuries, doctors were talking about this in the 1800s of all this damage that was occurring to us when we did this. So the first thing that can happen is when you are younger and you're quickly developing and you constantly have this slack-jawed posture, the skeleture and musculature of your face will adopt to this. And it's so common that researchers

and scientists call it adenoid face. When your adenoids get inflamed, you become a mouth-breathing. and then you keep that as a habit, and it changes your facial profile and helps it influences your mouth to be even smaller later on in life. You have a fascinating passage about mouth breathing and needing to urinate at night. You write that mouth breathing causes the body to lose 40% more water, and you know, you would think that that moisture loss would decrease the need to urinate, but weirdly the opposite is true. Can you connect mouth breathing at night to people needing to go to the back? several times in the middle of the night, which is obviously disruptive to their sleep on top of the sleep apnea and nasal problems that can develop from this.

I learned about this from Dr. Mark Berhenna, who had written about it about 15 years ago, and I thought, what a weird fact. This is how can this be true? But it all stems from our lack of good sleep that happens when we mouth breathe, and we tend not to have as much time in deep sleep. And that deep sleep is so important. This is when everything starts filtering out of our brains. Our body helps repair itself. And during that time of deep sleep, we also release this chemical, this hormone called vasopressin. And that vasopressin is what allows us to hold our pee at night. And if we're constantly waking up, if we have sleep apnea, if we're snoring, if we're constantly awake, that is not secreted as efficiently as it could be otherwise. And so we don't get that hormone, and we're not able to hold our pee.

And so we have to keep getting up throughout the night. Can you tell a mechanistic, like causal story about how exactly mouth breathing changes the face? Because I have to imagine some people maybe who haven't read this book, might be thinking, how is just sipping air through my mouth? mouth, going to create a domino effect of anatomical phenomena that end up with my face actually having a different structure. Can you sort of fill in the dots there? So if you have poor posture, let's just use an analogy here, and your head is constantly craned over and you're looking at your phone and you start this by the time that you're about

age four and you keep that poor posture until you're 18, I promise you, that's going to affect the curvature of your spine and your posture. So your bones will start to mold around that posture. And the same thing is true about holding your mouth open all the time. This is not a theory that I have baked up. I'm a journalist just like you. And I don't have opinions, right? But I talk to people who have based their opinions on scientific facts and data. And so if you are constantly having your mouth open in this posture, this is how it will adapt. this will become your new posture. And you can see this all over the place, which is why it has a name called adenoid face, because it's so common, because researchers see this all the time.

And when you have that mouth that is constantly hanging down low, that can also push the flesh from the face more downward. And so you have a different profile. You have a retro-nathic profile. And feel free, if anyone is doubting this, look it up yourself. Look up the studies, and it's all there. Let's move to the other place that Eric can enter the lungs, not through our mouth, but rather through our nose. There are passages in this book that truly read like a kind of Homeric ode to the nose, a peon to the nose. Before we move to the mechanics of nose breathing, maybe share a few of the facts and ethics.

few of the facts that you discovered and you're reporting about just how marvelously complex the inside of our noses are. So, yeah, we've talked a bit about the depressing facts of constantly breathing through your mouth. And just to be clear, some mouth breaths are fine, right? It's a great backup system. And that's what it's designed to be. If something happens to your nose, if you are really sick, then you can breathe through your mouth. That's great. We have the option to do so. But this should not be the default. Mouth breathing should not be the default. And again, as I had mentioned, the science is very, very clear on that. So why don't we want to breathe through the mouth? For all those reasons, I mentioned, more prone to respiratory dysfunction, more prone to asthma,

allergies, anxiety, and more the list goes on, makes you much more prone to snore and even have more severe sleep apnea when you're breathing through the mouth. All this is known. So why do we want to breathe through the nose? Because we are designed. Our bodies have evolved to be nasal breathers. This is our first line of defense against allergens, against pathogens, against dust, against mold. Our nose helps filter that stuff out. It also helps slow down the air so that when we breathe through the nose, we get about 18% more oxygen compared to equivalent breaths breathing through the mouth. So I could go on and on the benefits of mouth breathing, but this is how we're designed to breathe, which is why you look at any other animal in the wild, a dog breathes through its mouth when it's

thermoregulating, right? But a healthy dog is going to be breathing in and out through its nose the rest of the time. Pugs and all those dogs that have been so interbred, that's another story. But look at animals in the wild and look at a horse running at top speed. How is it breathing? It's breathing in and out through the nose. And that's what we're designed to do as well. Is there evidence that breathing through different nostrils can have different effects? Well, if you're a yogi, there is yogic evidence to that, which is why so many people do it.

They call it alternate nostril breathing. But I was more convinced with the, instead of just the subjective experience, yeah, I feel mellower. I feel good. You know, this nostril is the moon and this nostril is the sun. Like, okay, that's cool. Can we measure it? And it turns out that a surprising amount of studies are out there where they've measured the difference between left nostril and right nostril breathing. There's about, I think about two dozen or so studies.

Half of them are pretty good, but the other half are pretty legitimate in that they're looking at brain waves. They're looking at blood pressure. They're looking at heart rate. They're looking at stress. They're looking at nervous system function. And it absolutely makes a difference, a measurable difference, depending on which nostril you're breathing in and out of. And what is the difference of breathing of unilateral left nostril inhales versus unilateral right nostril,

inhales according to the science? If you breathe in and out of your left nostril, you can try it right now. This is safe. Anyone can do this. You just plug your right nostril, put your thumb. thumb over your nostril, just put a little bit of pressure, breathe in and out of your left nostril. Measurements have shown that your heart rate's going to go down. Your blood pressure is going to go down. You are going to get more activation in the right side of your brain, what some people consider the

more creative side. I know that a lot of that has been disproven, but that's what they've found. So why would the body do this, right? And the right nostril has, has the opposite effect. Inhaling through the right nostrils stimulates the body, increases heart rate, increases blood pressure. And it's interesting that the yogis, for the past 2,000 years, have been saying the same thing. You know, it's just now we have modern instruments that can measure and prove that a lot of what they were saying was actually correct. When I read this passage, I have to confess, I thought, this just can't be true. I cannot believe this is true. So I went to a site called Consensus.

which I encourage other people to go here. It's sort of like an AI-powered search tool for research, and they find ways of scanning through all sorts of different research papers and measuring some of them that are RCT, measuring the citations for these various papers. You can choose the methodology and the citation count that you want to trust. And it does seem to hold up. You know, just go to consensus and enter unilateral national breathing,

and you'll find a bunch of studies. And just as you said, there is a mixture of... of randomized controlled trials versus observational trials. There are some that seem clearly to be more qualitative, just asking yogis how they feel. But others like Raj at all 2016 found, quote, unilateral left nostril breathing significantly reduces systolic blood pressure and heart rate,

potentially helping with hypertension management. End quote. My question for you is, how can this be, what is the anatomical explanation for why something as subtle as the nose hole the oxygen passes through, would have a dramatic and measurable, by some scientist claims, measurable change on the sympathetic nerve system? Well, I think the scientific answer is we don't know. I can tell you what I think is happening. So what we do know is that the body naturally shifts dominance from the left nostril to the right nostril, from the right nostril to the left nostril, every 30 minutes to three to four hours. Our bodies naturally do this. Now that you know this fact, you can go throughout your day,

and you'll start to notice it. You're like, wow, I'm right nostril dominant. Now, why is my left nostril a little bit congested? And then a few hours later, the opposite thing will happen. So the question I had is, is why? Why would we evolve to do this? What would be, you know, nature doesn't work completely randomly. It's a very pure system. So, Why would the human body do this? And my hypothesis, just to be clear, this has not been proven. And the hypothesis that other people have is that the body is doing this as a way to self-regulate, to help balance itself. If you are stressed up and too hot and your heart rate is jacked, perhaps it is then going to shift your breathing in and out of the left nostril.

If you're very tired and you need more energy, perhaps it's going to start shifting to the other nostril. I can't think of any other explanation. And considering that, we know that yes, there are measurable and significant differences when you breathe through the left or right. And yes, our bodies absolutely do this. And we've known this for 130 years right now. Then that seems like a logical conclusion, a logical answer to it. wish someone would be studying this more. No one studies this stuff. There's no money in studying nostril breathing. So, you know, I think that's one of the problems. But, you know,

thank God a few people were curious enough that they did spend the time and studied it. And I think it's fascinating stuff. The last relationship that I want to talk about with nose breathing is that it seems to increase nitric oxide production. What is the benefit of nitric oxide production? And how exactly does that strengthen the argument for nose breathing? It absolutely increases nitric oxide production. So you get about sixfold more nitric oxide when you're breathing in and out of your nose. So why do we want nitric oxide? Because if you want efficient delivery of oxygen, if you want more elasticity and more dilation of your blood vessels,

if you want to kill more viruses, if you want to kill more bacteria, then you want nitric oxide. is absolutely essential to the exchange of oxygen in our bodies. And a little factoid along with this is that these erectile dysfunction drugs guess how they work. Just take a crazy guess. They allow the body to produce way more nitric oxide. That's how the blood flow gets to where it's going through nitric oxide. You can do that naturally by breathing in and out of your nose. And another thing is that when you,

hum, just humming anything, you can increase your nitric oxide by 15-fold, which is why one study found that this could be a very efficient remedy for chronic sinusitis and other issues of congestion. Let's say I'm convinced, and I decide I want to experiment with mouth taping tonight. How would I go about this? How did you go about this? As you were discovering the benefits of nose breathing. It's nature's easiest, cheapest, aphrodisiac, it increases nitric oxide,

it increases blood flow, it seems to avoid the problems of mild facial deformity that comes with mouth breathing. You're learning all of this and you think, all right, time to tape my mouth at night and really take this seriously.

How did you start? What was the first three things you did? I was at Stanford, and I had just interviewed the chief of Ronell research at Stanford. And there is a respiratory therapist right down the hall from this guy. And I noticed she was in her office. And, you know, I had my recorder, had my pad, my pen. And I just thought, this is someone who knows a bit about breathing. This was years ago, right when I was really beginning

my journey into trying to understand this weird thing called breathing. And I went into her office, introduced myself, we sat down, and she had this role of light blue tape by her, desk. We got talking, I was like, well, what's that? She's like, oh, this is, this is tape. I said, well, what do you use it for? And she has been prescribing this for about the last 20 years to all of her patients who come in to use this little piece of tape to tape their mouth shut. And it sounds insane. And I thought it was crazy. If it hadn't been coming from her, I wouldn't have believed it. But she said, no, this is a way of gently reminding yourself, not forcing yourself, gently reminding yourself to keep your mouth shut. You wear it in the day for a bit and then you see if it's right

for you to wear at night. So I'm a curious person. I track my sleep. At the time, I had a pulse oxymeter that I was wearing every night to look at any oxygen dips, right, if I was, if I had sleep apnea. So I tried it out and I cannot tell you the difference this made for my sleep quality. All those issues I was talking about before dry mouth, waking up to pee all the time, drinking water throughout the night, were all gone after a few days. And that's my subjective reaction, but who cares about my opinions, right? What did the data say? The data showed I had such huge increases in sleep quality across the board, and I felt it. And I said, wow, I think there's something here. And that's when I went into that world and started exploring that a bit more.

And there's so much disinformation about it that is frustrating. And a lot of people give me a lot of flack for even mentioning this, but I'm glad you mentioned it. I'm happy to talk about it as long as you want to. Well, I circled that particular page and underline and start it, because I have had middle of the night insomnia practically my entire adult life. I'm 38 years old. I have a new baby who's 10 months old, whose quality of sleep the last week

I would summarize as absolutely fucking terrible. And so I saw this page and I thought, well, this is absolutely fantastic. I would love to experiment with this. I'm not sure if I'm ready to go with taping my mouth during the day. That might be the bridge too far. But at least at night,

it seems like, again, one of the cheapest possible experiments that I could run on myself. And if it works, well, I've avoided years of lunesta prescriptions with a annual Amazon order for another masking tape circle. Do you use a particular kind of tape? I've never taped my mouth. So I have no idea if some mouth tape is really sticky and annoying and other mouth tape is like the Ferrari. of mouth tape. Well, I'm not here to give you a prescription, okay? Just to be super clear, I can tell you what I have learned by other people who are qualified to give people a prescription. And so just being the filter here, for the real sources of wisdom, this is what you do. Do not rush out and get tape and try

it at night. Bad idea. What you're going to have to do, even though you are already resistant to wearing this in the day. Too bad. If you want to do this and do this in the right way, you get some micropore tape. You can buy this anywhere, any drugstore. It is meant to be put on the skin, which means it can be taken off of the skin very easily, and it doesn't leave a sticky residue. I found a brand I like. I'm not going to promote it because I'm not here to promote any brand of tape, especially the tape you put on your mouth, but they're out there. The common brand seem to work. Great. And you take a little piece of tape about the size of a postage stamp and you place it not over your mouth, but just on your lips. Just a little bit on your lips. The key here is it is a reminder to keep your mouth shut. You are not forcing yourself to shut your mouth. At any time, you can go and it comes right off. And that's the right way of doing this. So I invite you to use it for 10 minutes. in front of your computer answering boring emails. If that is comfortable, then use it for 20 minutes

the next day. If that is comfortable, you see where I'm going. Use it for 40 minutes. If that 10 minutes is terrible, taping your lips closed with this tape is not a good thing for you. So use some common sense and don't do it. And this is the one thing that people don't seem to be communicating. They're like, oh, everyone should be sleep taping. Wrong. It's only good for people who don't have serious structural issues in their nose. And if you literally cannot breathe in and out of your nose, that is something you have to figure out way before you start experimenting with this mouth tape. So after about a week or two weeks of wearing it in the daytime, I like to say if you can

wear it for two hours straight, you can do it watching TV, watching, you know, doing the dishes, driving, whatever. Two hours straight, okay, maybe try to take it. take a nap with it on, and then slowly integrate it into your sleep. And if it doesn't work for you, right off the bat, don't give up. It took me about two weeks to really get used to this. I would wake up, it would be stuck to my forehead. I got really paranoid the first couple nights, not, you know, because your body reflexively

doesn't know you can just go, and it comes off anytime. So the first couple, like, a couple weeks were a little rough. now it is so hard for me to sleep without it and I feel the difference and I'm going on six, seven years of using this stuff. If you think we're inhaling all wrong, my guess is that you also think some of us are exhaling wrong too. Can you tell me how? So inhaling is easy. If you look at someone breathing in a very dysfunctional pattern, someone with COPD, someone with anxiety, with absinquent,

asthma, you can't see me. So I'll just try to demonstrate this over the mic here. They go, they're just packing air on air, on air. And so they don't get a lot of fresh air doing this, right? They're just packing a little bit of air on top. So they have to breathe more. And the more they breathe, the more stressed out they get. And the more stressed out they get, the more they start breathing. And guess what happens? They have an asthma attack or they have a panic attack or an anxiety attack, and they lose the ability to breathe properly. What I learned is that there were a bunch of people talking about this. The most famous person was this guy, Carl Stow, who trained singers, how to sing better. And he said, inhaling's easy. It's all about the exhale, because you can

only take a big breath if you get that old breath out, and if you get it out efficiently. So he trained people to learn how to exhale more. And when you do that, you get this excursion of the diaphragm. The diaphragm is this muscle organ that sits underneath the lungs. And you get more movement of that diaphragm. It pushes up a little more so that it can push down a little more and allow you to get a deeper, fuller breath. So the mechanics of that on paper, it made sense to me. I said, okay, this makes sense, you know, who has benefited from it? And it turns out everybody. Like, there isn't anyone that won't benefit from breathing better, especially people with chronic respiratory issues. And what is so beneficial about, I think you said, excursion of the diaphragm? The same way

that moving from inhaling through the mouth to inhaling through the nose can have all the benefits that you enumerated, is there a separate set of benefits that come from having slower, longer exhales? 100%. So just from a nervous system function, the faster you're breathing, the more signals you're sending to your brain that you are unsafe, that you are stressed out. And a lot of those signals between the brain and the diaphragm are coming from the diaphragm to the brain, not the other way around, right?

So that is one thing that it will make you more stressed out if you're breathing these short stilted breaths. So that's the nervous system. If you look at the biochemistry of this, if you are only breathing short breaths, very small breaths, then in order to get the oxygen you need, you need to breathe so many more breaths just to get the equivalent oxygen that you would need to take one full deep enriching breath. So it's very inefficient, which is why athletes are now so into learning how to breathe properly. So they have a bigger fuel tank with each breath that they take. So that's the biochemistry of it. And the other one we can talk about is the biomechanics, the posture part of this.

When you learn to breathe constantly packing air on air on air, it can have a bunch of deleterious effects on your rib cage, on your posture, on your whole chest area. And you see this with older people who have developed these really bad habits where their ribs tend to flare out because they've been breathing this way for such a long time. C-O-P-D patients, you see this all the time of just packing in air over and over and over. So to summarize here, it's way more efficient to take fewer deeper breaths. than it is to take four times as many shorter, very stilted breaths. It will calm you down a lot more to take fluid, soft, deep breaths,

and send your brain messages that you are in a safe place, that you are relaxed, and there are so many benefits to go along with that. And you can also help preserve your posture, especially as you grow older, by learning how to take these slower, more enriching breaths. That's what yoga is. It is a technology, an ancient technology, of stretching and breathing. That is the foundation of yoga. The idea of breath as a technology to send messages of your brain reminds me that before I was a journalist, I was an actor.

I acted a lot in high school and through college and a little bit after college and did a lot of work with people who strongly believed in breathwork, not only as a means of preparing for a scene, but also as a means of emoting really high arousal emotions in scenes. So, for example, if you are in a scene

where the actor has to cry, one strategy for forcing yourself to cry is sort of, you imagine sort of like, an invisible pinching of the eyes. You imagine a lot of pressure behind your eyes. You sort of force the tears out that way. But for really dramatic scenes, I always found it much easier

to think about the directors that would encourage me to breathe as if I was sad. And then the rest of my body would essentially get the message from the breath that sadness is being communicated. And then it would actually be much easier to, yes, even cry on stage.

And obviously that can work in the other direction. that, you know, breathe to be sad, breathe to be happy are directions that actors can take. But it's just, it's just, I haven't thought about that in so long because truly my acting career feels like something that I did in a previous lifetime in a, you know, homo-habelous ancestor lifetime. But it absolutely is, is the case, especially when your job is to represent 17 different emotions within an hour. There's no better period to internalize the lesson that emotions can come from breath and that breath can be a kind of lever on your sort of, you know,

emotional machine. But yeah, it's funny. I have not thought about that in years, but it's something that used to be very much a central part of my life. I think that if you look at the range of emotions that we have, and if you couple them with very specific breathing patterns, it's very rare that you will be having one deep emotion that isn't coupled with a very specific breathing pattern that is tied to that emotion. You think about weeping, you think about laughter, you think about being very happy. So it makes perfect sense to me that when you breathe in a certain way, you send your brain messages that this is the pattern that you recognize as being associated with this emotion. And so the brain takes that as a cue and then opens up the floodgates

to whatever specific emotion that is. I can also speak to having done a lot of breathwork and seeing a lot of breathwork classes and seeing people open up on levels that you just would not think is possible just by breathing differently, it's hard for me to think that this is a placebo effect, especially when you see the people who are most resistant to this stuff open up more than anyone else. So I think that there is a very deep connection between our breath and our emotional states. And once you understand that connection, just like you were doing, you can start to hack into it, use it to control emotions, or use it to elicit certain emotions. I want to close by talking about several techniques that people can take away from the show. First, I know a lot of people

in my life who have started doing box breathing for focus or for sleep. Can you tell me how box breathing works? This is a very simple technique that actually dates back thousands and thousands of years. It's only gotten popular in the West more recently. It's as simple as it can be. It just goes like this. You inhale for four, you hold for four, you exhale for four, you hold for four. So imagine breathing around a box. People like it because it's so simple. They also like it because you can do it anytime, anywhere. And another thing that's good about it is a lot of people feel immediate responses from breathing this way. Talking about down regulating your nervous system, getting in control of your emotions, calming yourself down, focusing on the task at hand. I think it's really, really effective.

And now that so many people have wearables, they can see in real time how these different breathing techniques are affecting them. And what is box breathing typically used for? I think I said it was for focus or for sleep. That might not have been right. You said it's typically used for down-regulating. So moving from a state of high arousal or anxiety to a state of calm or even sleepiness. Is that right? It depends where you are and who you are and how you respond to this stuff.

But we know that Navy Seals, many of whom I know about three or four of these guys, this is what they were taught to use before they went into very sticky situations because the heart's racing you know when the heart's racing you start to get tunnel vision you start to be much more apt to stress out at smaller things and this is a way of just getting laser focused on the task at hand now a lot of us aren't navy seals but we deal with a lot of stress throughout the day so anytime you feel stressed you can hop into the box breathing, and I think you'll be surprised how effectively you can deal with the stress at that moment. You know, there's other techniques for dealing with stress. There's pharmaceuticals,

which can absolutely work for some people. There's exercising more. There's eating right. There's all that stuff. But most often what happens is we are confronted with a stressful situation in an instant. And so none of those other modalities are going to do you any good unless you know how to take care of that issue and downregulate yourself and get focused at that moment. And we carry our breath around us with us all the time so we can use this whenever we need to. And it's free and it's easy. So I love it. I use it at times. There are better ones to go for sleeping that I prefer, but that's me and everyone's different. I have to ask you then, what is your favorite breathing technique for sleep? Let's all try it, everybody.

you're going to inhale to a count of four inhale two three four hold for seven keep holding and out for eight four keep exhaling seven eight and you just do that as many times as you like i've found on flights this is really effective for putting myself to sleep. And I've measured all this stuff and noticed big changes in blood pressure increases in HRV, all the rest. But again, everyone's different. So the good thing about these techniques

is you can try 12 different ones, see what works for you, and then just use those. That first technique was box breathing. What is the name of this sleeping technique that you just taught us? 4-78 breathing. People sometimes do 4-8-8-8.

breathing doesn't matter. The whole point here is you are either holding your breath or exhaling for the majority of the time. And you look at those techniques, you're like, huh, 4-7-8 breathing, like three-quarters of the time, I'm holding my breath or I'm exhaling. 4-7-8 is the same, you know, basically the same work most of the time you're holding your breath or exhaling. and that alone can help you relax, lower your heart rate, all the rest. Right now, if you place your hand over your heart and you inhale, if you can really be sensitive to feeling your heart rate, you're going to feel your heart rate increase.

And when you exhale, your heart rate decreases. This is completely natural. And it's those pauses between the heart rates of when it's decreasing and increasing that HRV measures. That's how it's measured right there. It's called respiratory sinus arrhythmia. So this is a natural biological function of inhaling and exhaling. So once you understand that foundation, you can start to hack it.

And these techniques we've just gone through show you that inhaling just a little bit. That's when you are activating the body, heart rate goes up, but spending most of your time exhaling and holding your breath, you can see what that will do for your heart rate and your nervous system and more. There's an interesting tension that just came to mind, which is that at the beginning of this show, we talked about how humans have, to use Daniel Lieberman's term, disavolved in a certain way toward breathing well,

that we had these big sinus cavities, these big wide mouths, and then the brain ate up all this real estate, and now we're left with a facial skeleton. It's a slightly more apt to have these nasal and sinus problems and these breathing problems. And so on the one hand, it seems like what we should want to do

is to get a little bit back that, not natural, but the pre-modern breathing, not techniques, the pre-modern breathing mechanisms that we had. But what's interesting about these techniques, and I'm not prepared to poo-poo them, I think they're fascinating, and I absolutely believe that they can work. But they are in many ways very unnatural.

It's incredibly unnatural for me sitting here, listening to you, to hold a breath for seven seconds for the purpose of falling asleep. And it made me wonder, obviously animals, you know, hold, their breath, right? Like mammals that live underwater or spend a lot of time underwater or holding their breath of the time, is there any evidence of other mammals using what we would call breathing techniques that is using unusual breathing patterns not for the purpose of surviving

in a particular environment like underwater, but for the purpose of self-regulating? Well, animals that live in the wild don't need these techniques. The same reason they don't need to lower their blood pressure or to get in their 10,000 steps a day, or to eat the right proportion of protein, fats, and carbs, or to take their supplements, or to turn off blue light at night. They're in nature. They're already in their perfect form.

And I think that the human body was very close to that for a very long time. industrialization until probably the past 600, 700 years. And so it seems so awkward that now we have to relearn how to breathe, but we also have to relearn how to eat properly. And we have to relearn how to exercise. Like if our ancestors from 500 years ago saw us now with gyms inside of our house, we're picking up heavy stuff to put it back down in the same place, then we're walking on a treadmill, which used to be in prisons in the Victorian era, right? Because this was torture. Why would

anyone doing this be doing this? But we know we need to do these things because what we're trying to rediscover is stasis. We're not trying to be superhuman, at least I'm not. I'm trying to be normal. But the industrial world has taken us so far away from what has been normal, what our bodies are used to adapting to that were so many of us are sick, right? And we have these chronic, why do so many of us have back pain? Why do we have trouble walking? Why do we have problems with our feet? And Lieberman, I've learned so much from him in his books. And he wrote a lot about the shrinking of the human face and the mouth. And that's when I knew this stuff was legit. I said, this guy's at Harvard. He wrote a 700 page book about it. It has to be legit, you know, with like 700 scientific

So it's ridiculous. We have to train ourselves to breathe this way, but the point is not to carry on the rest of your life breathing in the box breathing pattern. The point is to bring yourself back down to a state where you can be natural and normal. But for a lot of people, that's going to take months and months of doing practices like this. If you are extremely weak, you're going to have to work out with weights for a long time to get up to what is considered normal to just carry yourself throughout the day. And I think that's where these breathing practices come in handy. Ultimately, you don't want to have to think about your breathing. It should just be running in your unconscious, but you have to have good habits in your unconscious for that to be a default.

And that can take weeks and weeks and months and months to get there. That's why I think these techniques work. I think that's a great place to end. James Nester, thank you, much. This is great. Thanks a lot for having me. Thank you for listening. Today's episode was produced by Devin Beraldi. Our summer schedule for plain English for the next few weeks will be one episode a week on Fridays. We'll see you next week.