Science Vs - Breathwork: A Bunch of Hot Air?

Episode Date: September 14, 2023

The latest hot new trend is: breathing. Yeah, that’s right — there are claims that so-called breathwork can cure depression and supercharge your brain. Breathfluencers reckon that we're breathing all wrong but that with the right kind of breathing, you could be living a happier, healthier life. So what's the deal here? Are you really breathing badly? And if you learned the right way to breathe, could you become a better you? To find out, we talk to psychiatrists Professor David Spiegel and Dr. Patricia Gerbarg, memory researcher Dr. Artin Arshamian, and speech pathologist Ann Kearney.  Find our transcript here: https://bit.ly/ScienceVsBreathwork In this episode, we cover: (00:00) Meet the Breathfluencers (05:27) Can breathwork reduce stress? (10:18) Can breathwork help with depression and PTSD?  (14:48) How does breathing work?  (21:04) Are you a mouth breather? (23:58) Can mouth-breathing ruin your memory?  (31:05) Benefits of nose breathing (33:41) Should you use mouth tape?  (35:47) Are the Breathfluencers right? This episode was produced by Wendy Zukerman, with help from Joel Werner, Rose Rimler, Nick DelRose and Michelle Dang. We’re edited by Blythe Terrell. Fact checking by Erica Akiko Howard. Mix and sound design by Bumi Hidaka. Music written by Bobby Lord, Emma Munger, Peter Leonard, and Bumi Hidaka. Thanks to all the researchers we spoke to including Professor George Dallum, Dr Theresa Larkin, Dr Justin Feinstein, Dr Daillin Tavoian, Professor Margaret Chesney, Dr Anthony Bain, Dr Jayakar Nayak, Professor Leslie Kay, Professor John Hanrahan, Professor Andrew Allen, Dr Shirley Telles, Guy Fincham, and Shikha Malviya. And a big thank you to Jill Harris, the Zukerman Family and Joseph Lavelle Wilson. Science Vs is a Spotify Studios Original. Listen for free on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Follow us and tap the bell for episode notifications. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

So what I'm going to ask you to do first is get very comfortable in your chair. So first, we're going to take two deep, relaxing breaths. Hi, I'm Wendy Zuckerman, sitting comfortably in my chair. You're listening to Science Versus. Dr. Patricia Gerbarg is a psychiatrist who runs breathing workshops. I called her up to interview her and asked her to walk us through a quick breathing exercise. If you can, why don't you join me? Let's take a deep breath in and let it out with a long sigh. Good. Let's do that one more time. We'll take a deep breath in.

And let it out with a long sigh. Ah. And as you let it out, let your eyelids close gently and soften the muscles around your eyes. Wonderful. And just begin to slightly slow down your breathing rate. Nice and easy. Breathing in and out through your nose. You don't have to push or pull in your muscles or your belly or worry about anything. Just breathe naturally and gently.

Wonderful. And I'm going to use my voice to help you slow your breathing down even more. I'm going to count a little to lengthen your breaths. Gently in. Two. Three. And softly out. two, three.

Gently in, two, three, four, and breathing out, two, three, four. You know, within a few minutes, what did you start to feel? I noticed you smiling. It feels great. It feels really nice. It feels very relaxed. And I almost wish I'd done the breathing exercises at the end of the interview because now I have to, to like get myself going again.

What do you notice about, what did you notice was happening to your thoughts and what was happening in your mind? My mind started to quieten down because doing the interview, it's funny, there's a lot of things to think about. It's the quality of the recording, all that stuff. But I just stopped thinking about all of that stuff. And I just let the sort of lovely air just enter my body without even trying. I wasn't even trying. Exactly.

It's so simple. And yet it has, it'll change, completely change the way you're feeling. Doing all this nice breathing with Patricia was a great reminder that it is lovely to take some nice deep breaths, which isn't too surprising, eh? But what has been surprising is some of the wild claims I'm hearing about the powers of breathing. If you haven't noticed, breathing is having a bit of a moment. Breath fluences. Okay, so I made up that term, but it's pretty great, right? Breath fluences are telling us that breathing, this thing that you've been doing your whole life, well, you're doing it badly.

Okay, so know this right now, you're breathing wrong. 95% of you are. Take a big breath in. Not the correct way to breathe. And all over socials, I'm hearing that with the right kind of breathing, you could supercharge your brain, wipe away depression, and even get rid of traumas

that have haunted you for years. Breath is the gateway to feeling better. Taking deep breaths can help manage stress and improve cognitive function. What if it was as simple as just breathing? Because the science is undeniable. The quality of your breathing determines the quality of your life. And this trend has wafted far beyond social media. Breathwork gurus have headed to NASA, Nike, and maybe even your workplace to teach you how to breathe better.

The military is looking into it, and the mayor of New York City just announced that New York City public schools will have to give kids a few minutes of breathing exercises every day. Instead of having bullets, we will have breath. Today on the show, we are inhaling the science of breathing to find out, one, can breathing actually help our mental health and make traumas melt away? And two, are we really all breathing wrong?

When it comes to breathing, apparently there's a lot of... Not the correct way to breathe. But then there's science. Science vs. Breathing is coming up just after the break. What does the AI revolution mean for jobs, for getting things done? Who are the people creating this technology and what do they think? I'm Rana El-Khelyoubi, an AI scientist, entrepreneur, investor, and now host of the new podcast, Pioneers of AI. Think of it as your guide for all things AI with the most human issues at the center.

Join me every Wednesday for Pioneers of AI. And don't forget to subscribe wherever you tune in. It's season three of The Joy of Why, and I still have a lot of questions. Like, what is this thing we call time? Why does altruism exist? And where is Jan 11? I'm here.

Astrophysicist and co-host. Ready for anything. That's right. I'm bringing in the A-team. So brace yourselves. Get ready to learn. I'm Jan 11. I'm Steve Strogatz.

And this is... Quantum Magazine's podcast, The Joy of Why. New episodes drop every other Thursday, starting February 1st. Welcome back. Today on the show, breathing. And while a lot of the science that we're talking about today is super new, around the world, many different cultures have been using different kinds of breathing practices for thousands of years. And in the West, the science is just kind of catching up. And one guy who's catching up is David Spiegel. He's a professor of psychiatry at Stanford. And once you hear his voice, you'll know David was born to lead breathing exercises.

My mellifluous voice will instruct you every step of the way. It is quite mellifluous. Thank you. So a few years ago, David and his mellifluous voice wanted to know if doing just five minutes of breathing exercises each day could make people feel better and less anxious. We started it like in March of 2020. Great time to start a study, right? Yeah, just as the pandemic hit. David and his team, which included Andrew Huberman, you know, the guy from that other science podcast. And they got around 100 people into their study

who were split into different groups. One group did a breathing exercise where you spend more time exhaling than inhaling. Another group spent more time inhaling. And then finally, there was a group that breathed in and out evenly. This exercise is called box breathing. It's something that Navy SEALs do when they're getting ready to jump in an icy ocean. For a moment there, I thought I didn't hear the Navy and I just thought you said SEALs, which was a very true image. Well, SEALs might do it too, but I know the Navy SEALs do it.

Just picture it. A bunch of SEALs, eyes closed, breathing in and out. So, David asked the people at his study to do this for five minutes every day for about a month. And they were also asked to fill out surveys about how they were feeling. And David told me that actually him and his team were pretty skeptical that breathing would help people, particularly during the pandemic. Oh, yeah, we were. I, you know, we during the pandemic. Oh, yeah. We were. You know, we did the study. We were hopeful.

But, you know, I'm not a breath fluencer. It's already catching on. I wasn't at all sure that it would work. As the results started rolling in, David held his breath. I mean, not really, but it's good for the pun. And it turned out that these breathing exercises, they worked. Compared to a control group that

was doing mindful meditation, so they would spend five minutes kind of chilling, but not controlling their breath, the breathers reported doing better, feeling more positive and even less anxious. I was pleased and a little bit surprised, frankly, that we got the results that we did.

And one breathing exercise seemed to help more than the others. It was where people exhaled longer than they inhaled. It's called cyclic sighing. And David's team found something really cool with this group. You see, everyone in the study was wearing these devices to measure things like their breathing rate. And compared to the control, they could see that for the cyclic sires, there was this objective measurable change. Their breathing rate got slower in a way that suggested they were feeling more relaxed. The respiratory rate actually went down. Their average respiratory rate over the month went down. Even when they weren't doing the exercises.

Exactly. That was the interesting thing. Now, if you ever want to give cyclic sighing a go when you're stressed, I asked David and his mellifluous voice to walk us through how to do it. Inhale through your nose halfway, starting with your belly. Hold. And then fully inhale, expanding your chest all the way. And then slowly exhale through your mouth. Nice, huh? And it's not just David's study that's found this kind of thing.

In fact, one review paper out this year looking into 12 studies on breathwork and stress found that on average, it did reduce people's stress levels. And so David talks to people about giving it a go. I tell a patient that, you know, you will begin to notice that you're feeling somewhat better. You know, you're not euphoric, you're not really happy, but you're just a little more upbeat and chipper than you were before. So breathing exercises can help us feel more chipper. And one thing we haven't mentioned yet is that these studies, they aren't showing huge effects. You know, they're helping us to feel a little chipper, which is nice. But it does make some of the claims around breathing rather surprising. Like, there are some people who are saying that breathwork could become almost like a medicine to treat serious conditions like depression or post-traumatic stress disorder.

So could they be right? Well, Dr. Patricia Gerbarg, who we met at the start of the show, is also an assistant professor in clinical psychiatry at New York Medical College. And she told us that back when she was in medical school at Harvard, she would have never believed that breathing could make a big difference for our mental health. Not in a million light years. No. but then she met the man who would become her husband and he was obsessed with breath work and martial arts when you guys started dating and he would talk about his breathing what would you think that wasn't what he most wanted to talk to me about i must confess when we were dating

that was not the subject of conversation. What was the subject of conversation? You know, when you date, there's certain things you talk about and other things you wait till later. I did go to his Aikido classes and got thrown around the mat a bit myself because, you know, I'd go to any lengths when you call on a date. You never know where you're going to end up. But whatever, whatever. No, the point is that... The point is that her husband, Dr. Richard P. Brown, who is a psychiatrist too, ultimately convinced her to try breathwork. And about 20 years ago, they started seriously studying and researching it to see whether

breathing practices could help people who were really struggling. She tried it with her own patients. When I started teaching them some of the breathing practices, things began to happen in therapy that I never saw happen before. People she'd been working with for years, who'd had horrific traumas, been abused. Through breathing exercises, she found they were feeling a lot better.

And when Patricia and Richard saw what breathing could do, they started working with folks around the world. In 2009, they published this study of more than 100 people who had survived the Southeast Asian tsunami and were living in refugee camps. For four days, their team gave them this breathing-focused workshop, which went for a couple of hours. And then they'd keep doing the exercises for 20 minutes a day.

Six weeks later, on average, their depression scores plummeted. More recently, Patricia and Richard have been working with Ukrainian psychologists who have been dealing with the horrors of the war. They came in such a state of trauma, they said, I haven't stopped shaking since the war began. But after doing three-hour breathing courses with Patricia and her team over Zoom and then practising those techniques at home, some of them came back to Patricia and told her things like,

I haven't been, this is the first night I've been able to sleep. I was able to use this to help my child. It was amazing. So that really got me, because when you talk about children, that's where you get me. Now, there's not a lot of science here, but there are other teams who have also found some pretty cool things here. Like in one small study of people whose depression was so bad that they were hospitalized, after about a month of breathing exercises, two-thirds of those who tried it had significantly lower depression scores. With PTSD, a paper published this year from Veterans Affairs in the U.S. found that breathing exercises worked about as well as

conventional therapy for PTSD, which usually helps about a third of the people who try it. So one in three. And when those researchers checked back a year later, the benefits were still there, which is pretty remarkable. I mean, we're just talking about breathing exercises. And when Patricia saw stuff like this? Of course, I'm thinking, oh my gosh, how does that work? Just as you would. Okay, we're logical people. We want to know why. There must be a scientific explanation for this. So Patricia dove into the research to try to find a scientific explanation. And here's what she and other researchers think is happening here.

So basically, in our lungs, there are millions of tiny little receptors that are like sensors detecting what's going on. Every time that we breathe in and every time that we breathe out, many of these little receptors will fire. When they fire, they send a message through the nerves in our body. And depending on the kind of breathing you're doing, fast or slow, inhaling or exhaling, those messages are different. So you could breathe in fast or you could breathe in slowly. You're going to have different effects. So, for example, when you breathe in, you can activate this huge collection of nerves called the sympathetic nervous system. If you think about your body like the wiring of a car with an accelerator and a

brake, the sympathetic nervous system is the accelerator. It increases your heart rate and releases this hormone called noradrenaline that can kind of amp you up. So you could try it now. Just take a big quick inhale. See, it's kind of invigorating. So that's the accelerator. But then there's the brake. So meet the parasympathetic nervous system. It does the exact opposite. It gives you your rest and digest response. It tells the body, you can relax. When we breathe out, we activate the parasympathetic system. So if we slow our breathing down and we prolong the out breath, that's very parasympathetically activating. It is really quite beautiful. When you slowly exhale, it also physically pushes more blood into your heart. And the heart can sense that. So it's like, oh, I don't have to work so hard. And it can slow down your heart rate.

And David reckons that cyclic sighing might have worked better in his studies than the other breathing exercises, because with it, you're spending more time exhaling. And so spending more time triggering the parasympathetic system. But it's not all about the exhale. Studies have found that when you just slow your breathing down to, say, four to six breaths per minute, which is quite slow, even just that can bump up your parasympathetic activity. So generally speaking, that's why we think that breathing slowly can calm your body. And then those messages from your body get sent up into your brain.

And Patricia's team has even found that slow breathing can boost the activity of a neurotransmitter in your brain called GABA, which calms nerves down. Which is really cool because when you think about trying to use breathing to treat mental health, it's really a breath of fresh air. I talked to David about this and he said that traditionally we've thought about treating mental health with a lot of talking. You know, you have to talk through your problems, articulate what's bothering you and why it's bothering you and how to make it stop bothering you. But with breathing, it's like, screw that. Start with the body and work upwards. You know, most people with tension think, oh, I've got to solve this problem and then I'll feel better.

And we're saying, you know what, feel better first. But still though, there are some big mysteries when it comes to mental health and breath work. Because calming the body and the mind is one thing, but really helping someone with their depression or PTSD, well, that might be quite another. And something I haven't mentioned yet is that in these studies with PTSD and depression, they're often not just getting people to breathe in and out nice and slowly. They'll do other kinds of breathing as well that's really fast. And so that's not even necessarily parasympathetically activating. Something else must be going on here. One idea is that in all that huffing and puffing, our body sends different and important messages up into our brain, which rejigs something in there in a good way. It also might not just be about the breathing. So these studies, they often do other stuff alongside the breathing

exercises, things like slow movements or even group therapy. And that could be important here. So bottom line, breathwork is actually looking pretty promising. And for the kinds of breathing that David is doing, you know, you can give it a go right now. No prescription. It's safe. But just remember, looking at the data, it doesn't help everyone. It's not a panacea. You know, I think it's possible it could help, but it's a lot to say that, you know, you're responsible for not getting out of your depression because you're not breathing right. Yeah. That's such a good message. You're not responsible for your depression because you couldn't breathe your way out.

Right. Exactly. Exactly. You don't want them in a situation where they're blaming themselves for one more failure. After the break, we air out a completely different problem. Some say that as you've been listening to this podcast and going about your day, you've been breathing all wrong and it is messing with your health. After this little breather, we'll dive in. Welcome back. Today, the science of breathing. We've talked about how breathing exercises might help you feel calmer and possibly reduce symptoms of depression and PTSD. But now we are diving nose first into this idea that many of us are

breathing wrong. Why? Because we're breathing through our mouths. Yeah, there's this idea out there that by simply breathing through your gob for a bunch of the day, you are damaging your health. And the list for why this is bad for your health seems almost endless, from causing facial deformities to making you sick and even messing with the way that you think by mucking up your memory. One newspaper called mouth breathing an, quote, unrecognized epidemic. Now, the truth is we don't know how many of us are mouth breathers. The best data out there is in kids, and it estimates that anywhere from 10% of us to more than 50% of us might be mouth breathers. Now, funnily enough, for this episode, I kept speaking to researchers

who were well aware that they were a bunch of mouth breathers. I probably breathe through my mouth a lot. I breathe through my mouth all the time. He looks at me like with disgust, like, ugh. I was like, what? I almost had a level of anxiety. If like a robber ever came into my house and taped my mouth shut, I would die because I can't breathe through my nose, right? All of these mouth breathers gave me a

level of anxiety about what the devil I was doing. Could I be a mouth breather? Probably the biggest sign that you might be a mouth breather, at least at night, is if you wake up with a dry mouth, suggesting that while you were asleep, you were sucking in air through your pie hole. One researcher I spoke to told me that a simple way to see if I was a mouth breather was just to get some tape, tape up my lips, and see if I could breathe comfortably. Okay, I'm going to put it over my mouth. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm! I'm taking it off. Tap, tap, tap. Okay. It's funny.

I could do it. I could do it. But I didn't like it. I didn't feel comfortable. So I think I might be a mouth breather. I think I might be a mouth breather. Is this a big deal though? Is it such a big deal?

Let's find out. Starting with perhaps the most ridiculous claim, that by breathing through your mouth, it could be bad for your memory. Which I thought was completely bonkers, until I called up the researcher at the center of all this. Okay, my name is Artin Arshamia. I work at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden, Stockholm. Artin told me that this whole idea that breathing could affect memory

really started because of this fact that we've known for a really long time. And it's that smells have this strong connection to memory, which you might know from experience. What is a smell that takes you back to your childhood? One of the smells is chlorine in water because it's kind of enjoyable when you're a kid and going to swim, right? So I have this really nice association. So that one I know 100% it will trigger it.

Another one that is super nice, it's the smell of, you know when you have these plastic uh balls where you have on the beach where you blow them up you know yes yes yes yes super plasticky super plasticky super plastic probably super poisonous that smell that smell is i love because that smell really brings me back to being on the beach also. Chlorine is one of my childhood smells as well because it was this, we would go to the, I'd go to the mall with my mum, I think, and we'd always get to eat like fun muffins at the mall. And they had this like gaudy kind of water feature that smelled of chlorine.

And so now every time I smell that, I'm just like transported back. It's really cool that, so I've tested a lot of people with a lot of different, because it's hard to find odors that really good triggers our memories. And I have to say, chlorine is the best. Interesting. It's the best. Wow. Yeah, yeah, it's the best. And the reason that smells like chlorine produce such powerful memories is because there's this structure in your nose called the olfactory bulb. And the olfactory bulb, it's way up in your nose. So just imagine you put your finger in your nose and went for your deepest pick. If you kept going. If you kept going, yeah, you will reach. That's where they are.

Yeah, that's where they are. So when you smell something, that information of, ooh, chlorine, hits the olfactory bulb, which then sends a message to parts of the brain that are super important for memory, including the hippocampus. And what scientists have uncovered is that even when you're just breathing through your nose, like nothing to smell, those neurons in your schnoz still fire. But for us mouth breathers, it's different. When you breathe through the nose, it seems that the effects are way bigger than if you breathe through your mouth. So that's kind of exciting. But then the next question comes like, okay, so what?

Artem's like, all of this research opens the door to the idea that breathing through our nose could help us create memories in our brain. But you got to test it, right? Well, Arten did one of the first studies to say if just by breathing through our nose, we could remember more things than if we breathe through our mouth. And here's what he did. So let's say you're in Arten's experiment.

So you come in and we say like, hi. Hi. So the task is very simple. Using these things called sniffing sticks, which is basically a pen filled with odor, he'll waft some smells under your nose. So smells that are very common, like strawberry or garlic. But we also use very unfamiliar smells that are super hard

to even describe. Like, what the hell is this? Like fertilizer mixed with chocolate cake. Yeah, something like that. But you would be like, uh. So Arten whips out 12 pens with 12 different odors and one by one places them under your nose. I will ask you, sniff this, try to remember it, right? Yeah. Smell these things and try not to forget the odor. Then he'll take you to a room, you sit in a comfortable chair. He'll put tape over your mouth and get you to breathe through your nose for exactly one hour. When that hour is finished, I walk you back and I test you again. I give you these 12 odors again, but I also give you 12 new odors. And I ask you,

did you smell this before or is this a new odor? So it's a very simple task. Another day, you'll go to the lab, same experiment, batch of different smells, he'll waft them under your nose, Sniff this. Try to remember it. But the big difference is that after you've done all your smelling, he'll put a clip on your nose, forcing you to breathe through your mouth for an hour. And basically, Arten is trying to work out, does it matter?

If you breathe for an hour through your mouth after smelling all these sticks, are you less likely to remember what you smelt? And he found that on average, you were. People actually remembered worse when they spent an hour breathing through their mouth. Or on the flip side, breathing through their nose improved their memory. Arten was so excited when he realized it actually mattered which hole you breathe into that he ran out of his office to tell his supervisor. He was like, Oh, wow. Oh, this is super cool. I can't believe it worked.

Were you really? Yeah. Yeah. And after Arten's study came out, there were all these exciting headlines like nose breathing boosts memory and how to breathe your way to better memory. So, I mean, let me just stop you there. That is, of course, just rubbish, right? What? This wasn't a big effect, right?

Right. I'm like, the results didn't exactly knock it out of the park. When people were breathing through their nose, on average, I was like, the results didn't exactly knock it out of the park. When people were breathing through their nose, on average, they only remembered one extra odor out of the 12. One more odor. It is not much. You won't notice this, right?

It's not like, oh, I'm studying. So, and this is an important word I have to remember. So, I will take, I will inhale now. Like, it doesn't work like that. It does not work like that. No, it does't work like that. It does not work like that. No, it does not work like that. It does not work like that. So how does it work?

We're still working that out. Other research looking into whether nasal breathing affects memory is actually a little mixed. Some studies, like this one from Arten, find that it does matter. Other research says maybe not so much. And Arten says that part of the reason for this could be because the studies only run for such a short time, you know, like only an hour or so. I mean, we don't know what a lifetime of mouth breathing does. It's not black and white, it's like 50 shades of grey here. So while research into whether mouth breathing affects our memory sits in the rather

unsexy land of 50 shades of grey, we do have some black and white findings when it comes to the benefits of breathing through our nose. I talked to Dr. Anne Kearney, a speech pathologist from Stanford about this. She's one of the mouth breathers we heard from earlier. And she told me, you know, your honker isn't there as a cozy home for your finger. I think the reason the nose is on our face, is to handle air. I mean, that's what it's designed to do. I mean, the black hairs in your nose filter, the membranes in the nose help moisturize and heat. Yeah. Just behind your nose is this cave of wonders called the nasal cavity. It's filled with wing-like structures and packed with blood vessels filled with warm blood that can heat the air that you breathe in,

making it less irritating for your respiratory tract. In fact, a few studies have found that nasal breathing can reduce your chance of getting exercise-induced asthma. The nasal cavity is also lined with mucus that can trap pathogens like nasty bacteria. There's also a bit of evidence that mouth breathing can increase your risk of getting dental cavities. And if you mouth breathe throughout your childhood, it could possibly even change the shape of your face. Although that's a little controversial.

And just finally. Snoring. I really think nasal breathing could help snoring. So for example, right now, as you have your mouth closed, where's your tongue? Down the bottom. It's on the bottom. It should be on the top. So right now your tongue, can you feel it on the roof of your mouth? Really? Really? Yeah, no, that's not good.

Your tongue should be up. You've got to work that tongue. Great. Something else to do. But seriously, for you right now, where is your tongue tongue is it on the roof of your mouth well if it is basically if you sleep with your mouth open your tongue might droop down and fall back and so it kind of gets in the way of air as it's trying to wriggle through your mouth hole making it more likely you'll make that noise. Okay, so our last question for today.

If you are a mouth breather, is there anything you can do about it? Well, one of the biggest trends out there is to use mouth tape. Yeah, pop some tape over your mouth, particularly at night, and force yourself to breathe through your nose. It's so buzzy right now that Anne is getting swamped with different kinds of mouth tape. I don't know where they're coming from, but all of a sudden, a new one is on the market. It's this crisscross one. And then there's this one that goes around the lips. There's a glue out of Australia, a glue that will seal your lips shut. I'm not going to try that one. Skip that one. Anne is the mouth tape it girl because several years ago,

she tried taping her mouth at night to get rid of her mouth breathing ways. And at first, it was so frustrating. She'd rip it off in the middle of the night. But over time, it worked. It was really hard at first. I converted more. I can easily breathe through my nose now. There's not much evidence that mouth tape will magically turn you into a nose breather, but I did find two small studies in people with mild obstructive sleep apnea. It's a condition where you stop breathing from time to time throughout the night. And it found that for some folks, mouth tape was helpful and they snored less throughout the night.

Another study I found in 50 people with asthma reckoned that mouth tape did not help with their symptoms. Anne says if you are planning on trying mouth tape, start by testing it out for an hour or so during the day. See if you feel okay. And just be careful. You know, it's better to breathe through your mouth than not at all. So, when it comes to science versus breathing, where are we at? Are the breath fluences right?

Well, we are getting more and more research showing that taking some time out to do some slow, deep breathing with nice long exhales, it can make us feel better. And if you're struggling or even just having a crappy day, why not give it a go? Even if the results don't take your breath away. And as for this idea that we're all breathing wrong, well, Anne says it is better to be a nose breather. But if you're healthy and not particularly bothered by this, you don't need to glue your gob shut. I always think people take things too far. And then I find people come to me and they're anxious because they're not breathing properly. It's like, am I breathing right?

Am I supposed to breathe in four or five and breathe out four or five? I mean, they're just like, whoa. Well, I am now. I'm like listening with 95% of my brain, but 5% is like, put your tongue up. Yeah. That's science versus hi hey don't wet it supervising producer at science versus hey wendy zuckerman host and executive producer at science versus you were quite skeptical of the science of breathing i was deeply skeptical i didn't expect this to be the episode that turned me around,

but it has. Like I've got a few small humans, like all small children, sometimes they can feel big emotions. And I've actually found myself, I can't believe I'm saying this, but actually found myself using cyclic breathing techniques with them and getting them to do the breath in, the breath out. And it works and and it works, and it's great. Look at you. Are you a breath fluencer in the making? I'm a breath-dad fluencer or something. It's going to be big.

You're going to be big. Now, in this week's episode, Joel, there are 96 citations. Ooh, nice. Where can people find those citations, Wendy, if they want to check them out? They can go to our show notes and there is a link to the transcript. And if you haven't seen our script, when we say there are, what did I say? 96 citations. Like basically every single thing I say has a citation next to it. So if you do want to know anything more, you're like, what did she say?

What, really? Just go to the show notes, click on the script, and go read more about it. Read about the studies. Fun way to spend your weekend, you know, dive into our citations. All right, Joel, I'll let you go do some more cyclic science. Thanks, Wendy. See you.

Thanks. Bye. Science Versus is a Spotify Studios original. You can listen to us for free on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. If you are listening on Spotify, then follow us and tap the bell icon so you'll get notifications when we have a new episode out. Also, if you do like this show, we would love it

if you gave us a five-star review. Yeah, if you can, just do it now. Just rate us five stars. That'll make me really happy. Happiness is supposedly something else, but I think it is a five-star rating from you. This episode was produced by me, Wendy Zuckerman, with help from Joel Werner,

Rose Rimler, Nick Delrose, and Michelle Dang. We're edited by Blythe Terrell. Fact-checking by Erica Akiko Howard. Mix and sound design by Bumi Hidaka. Music written by Bobby Lord, Emma Munger, Peter Leonard, and Bumi Hidaka. Thanks to all the researchers we spoke to for this episode, including Professor George Dallam, Dr. Teresa Larkin, Dr. Justin Feinstein, Dr. Dallin Tavoyan, Professor Margaret Chesney, Dr. Anthony Bain, Dr. Jay Karnayak, Professor Leslie Kaye, Professor John Hanaran, Professor Andrew Allen, Dr. Shirley Tellis, Guy Fincham, and Shikha Malviya. A big thanks to Jill Harris, the Zuckerman family, and Joseph LaBelle Wilson. I'm Wendy Zuckerman. Back to you next time.