Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 492: You’re Breathing Wrong. Here’s How to Fix It | James Nestor

Episode Date: August 31, 2022

At times, self-improvement can seem like a never-ending hallway filled with limitless shame and insufficiency. So when something as simple as the breath falls into this category, it seems only natural to meet that news with some resistance. Our guest today, James Nestor argues that many of us, of all things, are breathing incorrectly but that by fixing our breathing, it can help with both physical and psychological ailments. Nestor is a science journalist who wrote a book called, Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art, which spent 18 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and was translated into more than 35 languages.In this episode we talk about: How Nestor got interested in breathing in the first placeWhy we are the worst breathers in the animal kingdomThe importance of postureThe deleterious effects of mouth breathingWhy we need to chew moreThe relationship between breathing and anxietyThe relationship between breathing and sleepAnd we dive into a variety of breathing exercises Full Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/podcast-episode/james-nestor-492See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This is the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hey gang, I know, I know, trust me, I know that at times the whole self-improvement game can seem like a never-ending hallway filled with limitless shame and insufficiency. So I fully sympathize with anybody who might greet the following news with some measure of resistance. And here's the news. Turns out many of us are of all things breathing incorrectly.

Again, I understand there may be some resistance here, but my advice is to approach this news as an opportunity. My guest today argues that fixing your breathing can help you with all sorts of ailments, both physical and psychological. What's more, the history of how our breathing got screwed up in the first place is downright fascinating. James Nester, as somebody I've wanted to have on this show for a long time, he's a science journalist who wrote a book called Breath, the new Science of a Lost Art, which

spent 18 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and was translated into 35 languages. In this conversation, we talk about how he got interested in breathing in the first place, why we are the worst breathers in the animal kingdom, he says, the importance of posture, the deleterious effects of mouth breathing, why we need to chew more, the relationship between breathing and anxiety, the relationship between breathing and sleep, and we dive into a whole bunch of breathing exercises, many of them pioneered by a group he calls the pulmonauts. Before we jump into today's show, many of us want to live healthier lives, but keep

bumping our heads up against the same obstacles over and over again. But what if there was a different way to relate to this gap between what you want to do and what you actually do? What if you could find intrinsic motivation for habit change that will make you happier instead of sending you into a shame spiral? Learn how to form healthy habits without kicking your own ass unnecessarily by taking our healthy habits course over on the 10% happier app. It's taught by the Stanford psychologist Kelly McGonical and the great meditation teacher Alexis Santos to access the course. Just download the 10% happier app wherever you get your apps or by visiting

10% calm. All one word spelled out. Okay, on with the show. Listen to Baby, this is Kiki Palmer on Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcast. James Nester, welcome to the show. Thanks a lot for having me. It's a pleasure I've been wanting to have you on the show for a long time and my wife who's a pulmonologist, a lung specialist, has your book and it's been on the show for a long time. So I've been feeling guilty that I haven't had you on. So thank you Ed Longlast for coming on. Of course, yeah, my pleasure. Let me start with a really obvious question, which is how did you get interested in breath in the first place?

When you start off as a science journalist, you don't think you're going to be spending years and years writing about breathing. Seems like such a mundane topic, but it wasn't until I had a number of respiratory issues that I really couldn't find any help for over a number of years. I was healthy in every other way, or at least I thought it was, eating the right foods, exercising all the time. But my breathing was having issues when I was working out. I was getting chronic bouts of bronchitis and even mild pneumonia. And every time I went to the doctor, I was given a bronchodilator and a biotics

and sent out my way. And I thought that that was normal until a few years later. I heard from another doctor that maybe switching the way I was breathing, improving my breathing could help. And it did had a profound effect. And I thought that there might be something to explore there, even though I wasn't going to write a memoir about my breathing.

It definitely got me more interested in this unconscious thing that we do all day and all night. I love that you turned a pain point into something that's helping so many people. I wanna quote you back to you and get you to hold forth on this rather compelling set of words that you put together here. Breathing, you say, breathing is a missing pillar of health.

What do you mean by that? I mean that for so long, we've been focused on exercising to be healthy, which is 100% true. You have to exercise in some capacity. We've been really focused on nutrition, eating all the right foods. How many different diets are there now? It's keto, vegan, paleo, whatever. But we haven't been focusing on our breathing. And what I learned years and years ago that I believe even more now today is that no matter what you eat or how much you exercise or how much you sleep or whatever, you can never, ever really be healthy if you have dysfunctional breathing. And the vast majority of us are breathing in a dysfunctional way.

So it's really another pillar right along with sleep, right along with exercise, right along with diet, all those things are very important, but so is breathing and it's been mostly ignored. So when you say we're breathing wrong, what do you mean by that? I have no idea what to do with that information at first plush. Well, when I was first told that the majority of us do have some breathing problems and I had breathing problems, I thought, well, how could that be true? I mean, we're alive, right? Everyone that is alive now is breathing. We should be doing it well enough. But if you really start to look at the science, if you look at how many people have asthma, how many people have chronic sinusitis, how many people snore, have sleep apnea, have other more serious respiratory problems, infocema, other forms of COPD, you realize that it's actually the

majority of people on the planet have some chronic respiratory disorder. And they usually don't associate the problems that they're having, sleeplessness, or even blood sugar regulation, or increased risk of stroke inflammation. They don't associate that with breathing. They associate it with so many other things. And it turns out for a lot of these people, what's causing them to be so sick for so many years is their dysfunctional breathing. And this seems like a crazy thing to say

and to assume until you look at the science and tell you talk to the experts and until you look around, think about your family or your friends, how many people snore? How many people have sleep apnea? How many people have asthma? And you realize it's most of us.

You call us, I'm going to quote you again. You call us the worst breethers in the animal kingdom. What's going on that that is the case? Yeah, it's a dubious thing to be awarded, but humans have won in most things and we've certainly won that prize of being the worst breethers. So if you look at animals, the other 54 or under or other mammals in the animal kingdom right now, they don't have asthma.

Some dogs snore. Dogs that have been bred, you know, bull dogs or pugs can snore, but the vast majority don't snore. They don't have sleep apnea. They don't have respiratory issues. They don't get pneumonia. And then if you look at them, how they breathe, they breathe in a very different way than we do. So because of what we've done to our environment and the industrialized living that we all

live in, we have enabled ourselves to not breathe properly. There's a very weird way of saying it, but we've created so many barriers to being able to breathe well from our posture, from pollutants, from the way that our faces have changed throughout the last 300 years, which they have dramatically. What's going on with our posture that might damage our breathing?

So if you're in a car right now, if you're in an office, if you're sitting down on a couch, you're going to notice how you're sitting. And if you're like the majority of us, you are sitting kind of slumped over. Even if you wanted to take a big deep and reaching breath, you could not, your posture is not allowing you to do that. So we are not designed to be hunched over in this position for 14 hours a day, 16 hours a day. We're designed to be upright most of the time. And so right now, if you're still hunched over, you can take a big deep enriching breath.

And you notice what happens to your posture, your spine gets straighter, your shoulders go back. That position is the most efficient way for us to breathe with that straight spine sitting up. Because when we do that, we are allowing our lungs to easily inflate and for the diaphragm to sink down a little lower. That's what animals do. If you look at an animal sleeping or an infant sleeping, they're breathing very slow, deep breaths into the belly. That's what modern humans are designed to do, but we live in an environment that doesn't allow us to do that too often.

We're going to talk a lot, I hope, about specific breathing exercises. But since you mentioned posture and kind of sent me off in this direction, is there anything that we can do about our posture on a daily basis that would help us breathe better? Well, what's great about so much of the stuff is these are all fixable problems. Some people with very severe respiratory disorders, it's going to take them a lot longer to fix their issues. But for most of us, it's just about creating better habits. And posture is one of these things.

So when you're sitting, you should be sitting with your shoulders back and your spine straight. And you can tell this once you learn how to breathe better, breathe the way that we were naturally designed to breathe, your posture follows. There's this ancient Chinese adage from 1500 years ago that says, your breath dictates your form, your form dictates your breath. your breath dictates your form, your form dictates your breath. So it's just about creating those habits, sitting in a better chair, noticing when you're slumped over for a long amount of time. And you'll notice when you start improving your posture and you start improving your breathing, you're going to feel better because of course you are.

Your body is operating at a more efficient state, which is exactly what you want. So is what you're calling for here just to be mindful of how you're sitting and try to develop the habit of sitting with good posture more frequently? Well, posture applies to your body and it also applies to your mouth. There is something called oral posture, which is getting really big now.

And because so many of us are mouth-breaters, we let our jaws hang open. And when we do this, our tongues aren't in the proper position. And this obstructs our airways. A lot of us know this at night, because we snore or have sleep apnea. And sleep apnea is when you choke on your tongue over and over and over.

And something like 20% of the population suffers from this. But in the daytime as well, so many people aren't holding their mouth in the proper position, which can lead to chronic congestion of the nose. It can make it more stressful to your body to take in a breath and to exhale a breath. If you think about it, we take about 20,000, 25,000 breaths a day. If you're struggling to do that just a little bit, if your posture and your body is off, the posture and your mouth is off, then you're going to pay the price for that eventually. You're forcing your body a little bit of stress every time you take a simple inhale or exhale of air. How do you know if you're a simple inhale or exhale of air.

How do you know if you're a mouth breather? Pretty easy. If your mouth is always dry, there's a very good chance you're breathing through your mouth, especially at night. People say, well, is there any way to figure out if I'm breathing through my mouth at night, about 60% of the population breathes through their mouth at night? And this is terrible for us, terrible for so many reasons. So if you're waking up, if you're constantly drinking water, if you put a little piece of tape on your lips, and at night, you can tell if that's very uncomfortable, then you are, there's a very good chance you're breathing through your mouth.

And the one thing I've heard more from people, from thousands and thousands of people, is once they've figured out that they need to close their mouth, breathe the majority of their breaths during the daytime through their nose, and all of their breaths through their nose at night, this can make a tremendous difference to your health. I've seen it a zillion times, and the science is there to support it. I buy it.

I guess I'll just go back to the same question I had about posture, which is, how do you actually do this? If you've lived a whole life breathing through your mouth, how do you just forcibly revert to the nose? Well, how do you change your diet? How do you exercise more? How do you get your 10,000 steps in? You create a habit out of it. And the very first thing you do is you become aware of it. It's not that hard. This isn't asking someone to go keto or vegan, right? This is asking someone to improve their posture throughout the day and just to become aware and notice when you're slumped over. And I think that these two things go hand in hand. As you're improving your posture throughout the day, you're improving your breathing. day, you're improving your breathing,

and as you're improving your breathing, your posture is gonna get better. So, you know, the point of this isn't to make people feel guilty. It's not to have another thing to feel bad about. Breathing's really easy. We do it all day long. So we can improve that throughout the day.

You can set little alarms to do this. You can check in with yourself once an hour, how am I sitting, how am I breathing? There's a bunch of apps you can use, wearables, all that stuff. Whatever works for you to set that habit is really the key. Everyone breathes slightly differently. Everyone has a slightly different dysfunction.

So everyone is going to respond to these shifts in their habit at different times. This is a very selfish question, but in terms of posture, am I better off at a standing desk? It depends. I think that going from standing to sitting is the best thing you could be doing. Shifting every hour, Daniel Lieberman at Harvard has studied this and it's has found like that's what you want to be doing. You don't want to be in the same position all the time. If you are standing and I have one of those deaths that I can stand or sit at, it's helpful

to put a little ball under your feet. So you're doing these little micro movements and you're not just standing there like a Greek statue the entire time, but moving a little bit. There was a study that found like just walking around for five minutes every couple hours can have such a huge and significant impact on blood sugar, on diabetes regulation and on blood pressure. Because we aren't designed to just be statues.

We evolved in an environment where we weren't constantly running or constantly walking, but we were moving. We were sitting from one spot, standing up, doing something else. That's how our bodies are designed to function. And that's where we're the healthiest. I think some people are descended from very athletic, really great hunters and stuff, but I think I am descended from accountants, because I'm sure that somehow my ancestors made it

through the natural selection loophole as not designed to move, but anyway. The other thing you referenced before in terms of a sort of pernicious aspect of modern life that impacts our breathing is pollutants. Now, I get you've convinced me that posture, both in terms of our mouth and our torso, you can take steps to fix that, but many of us

don't have the option to just move. So what do we do about pollutants? Yeah, and all these things I'm mentioning, I'm not trying to make an argument for going and living in a cave somewhere. I live in a big city, right? I'm constantly surrounded by technology. I work at a desk all day long.

What you're doing is incorporating some things to allow you to function in this modern environment a little better, to work a little more efficiently to be able to survive and not break down. So that's what I try to do. And I don't think it's a coincidence that so many of these interventions that have been found to have profound effects on our health are just helping our bodies return to a more natural state. If you think about food, don't eat processed food, eat whole foods, okay, think about exercise, walk 7,000 to 10,000 steps a day, okay, our ancestors didn't need these directions because they were eating whole foods

because they were walking all the time. And in the same regard, breathing is the same way. You didn't need breathing techniques 500 years ago, but we live in a modern environment in which our posture is suffering and in which there are pollutants, you have to look at these things and understand that a lot of the issues that were suffering from health wise are coming from the modern environment. So with pollution, sure, they're smog and they're soot and there's mold, but carbon dioxide is, mark my words in the next few years, this is gonna become a public enemy number one

because in these enclosed environments, CO2 levels can go up sixfold, sevenfold, eightfold. And people are working in these environments for hours and hours a day. And if you do that for long enough, it causes chronic inflammation. This isn't some hypothesis I have. This is standard science that's been studied. And so to get fresh air, to open your door when you're sleeping, to crack a window when you're in your living room,

is really beneficial. So carbon dioxide is just one of many different pollutants in the environment that people should be aware of. You have all chapter about the surprising power of the nose. Can you just educate us a little bit about the marvels of the nose? Sure, a lot of us ignore this wondrous organ in the front of our faces because a lot of us are chronically congested for all the things that I have mentioned.

But what has happened in the past about 300, 400 years is that our mouths have grown so small that our teeth no longer fit. That's why we have crooked teeth. It's not a tooth problem. It's a mouth problem. And because our mouths have grown so small, they have pushed up into our sinus cavities. So the upper palate of your mouth

is supposed to be flat and very wide. All of our ancestors had a mouth like that. The majority of us now have this very caved in upper palate. I'm a great example of this. When that upper palate caves in like that, it pushes in the sinus cavities and makes it harder to breathe through the nose. So when you're not breathing through the nose and you're breathing through the mouth, you're exposing your body to everything in the environment. All those pollutants, I just mentioned, in the environment, all those pollutants, I just mentioned, all of the allergens,

cold air, unconditioned air, because the nose is our first line of defense for our bodies. It heats air, it humidifies it, it removes particulates, it helps fight off viruses and bacteria infections. So that's one of the main reasons that we are designed as animals just like all the other mammals to be breathing the majority of our breasts in and out of our noses. Because this is what allows us to keep our bodies balanced and helps us defend ourselves against stuff in the environment. Why have our mouths grown so small? What's happening?

The eternal question here. I spent months and months trying to figure this out, and I would talk to leaders in the field, and they would say, oh my god, that's a good question. I don't know. So I finally had to talk with anthropologists, and I looked at hundreds and hundreds of skulls, and it's fascinating. You can go into a museum and look at ancient skulls, hundreds of them up on these walls and in these cabinets,

and they're all looking back at you with perfectly straight teeth. Doesn't matter if these skulls are from Africa, Asia, North America, I don't care. All of them had straight teeth, and they all had these very powerful, pronathic, that's this forward-growing face. Then around 300, 400 years ago, maybe even later, for some areas, in a single generation, Arteeth, Crew Crooked, and our mouse grew smaller. And so these anthropologists have traced

this back and right when cultures went from eating their traditional diets, which were usually very chewy, hard, whole foods went to eating industrial processed wheat, processed corn, canned stuff, bottled stuff. Their teeth went to hell. And as their teeth went to hell, their mouths were shrinking. That's why their teeth were crooked. With that smaller mouth, they got a smaller airway and respiratory problems went through the roof. So it's fascinating. You can see the exact time where this happens in cultures all over the world. Now since

we're all eating industrialized foods, the vast majority of 90% of us have these problems. So you write a whole chapter about how we're chewing wrong. And since we're on the subject, now what can be done about that? The fix is so simple. You just eat real food. You just do what your great, great, great, grandparents did, quit eating Cheetos,

even though they're delicious, quit eating, putting, and eat the foods that our ancestors ate. So it's not as though we're chewing wrong, we're not chewing enough. All of our ancestors were chewing a couple hours a day. Like, starchy roots, meat, like these things take a lot to chew. Raw roots, vegetables, takes a lot of chewing. A salad, think about eating a huge bowl of salad. It'll take about a half an hour to get through that. That's great. When you chew, you're creating more muscle, you're creating more sculpture in your face,

especially when you're younger. This is important if you're older, if you're an adult, but it is vitally important when you're young to get that chewing stress because your face is going to form around that. They've actually done studies where you can look at kids fed industrial foods and look at kids who weren't and they have vastly different facial profiles and vastly different airway profiles as well. So just to put a fine point on this, the more we chew, the more we use these muscles in our face, that helps our breathing.

That's absolutely right. Beautiful summary there. And chewing starts in infancy. It starts with breastfeeding. And that's why kids who are breastfed for two years, well, I've less chance of having storn and sleep happening later on in life. They'll have a different profile.

I'm a dude, last thing I'm gonna do is tell women to breastfeed their kids. That's not my role here. I'm just providing facts that I learned from anthropologists. That's all I'm doing. And I wash clean of that. I'm gonna do a lot of trouble talking about this. I want to be very clear.

I'm a science journalist presenting objective facts. I'm not going to comment because I don't feel like getting in trouble either. But on this issue of chewing, you mentioned that one thing we can do is he real foods. What about chewing gum? Chewing gum is great for people who don't have temporal mandibular joint issues, TMJ issues, a huge percentage of the population have these issues where if they open their mouth very wide, they'll hear a popping sound in the back of their ear and when they clench their teeth down, they'll feel a little pain right where the jaw joint meets, right below the eyes and I'm parallel to the ears. So for people with TMJ issues, chewing more

is probably a bad idea because you're gonna exacerbate that problem. For people who don't, yes, chewing gum has been shown to have a lot of benefits. I'm not talking about chewing 10 hours a day. People wrote me and they said, I'm really taking this chewing thing seriously. I'm chewing now eight hours a day, like all day.

No, this is just maybe half an hour here and there. Harder gum, the better, obviously sugar-free, void, saccharine and all that, but hard gum. And now there's some gums coming out that are designed to do this, to chew, but a carrot works really well as, you know, you can do that as well. Back to the nose for a second. Should we not trim our nose hairs?

Just as I'm not going to tell women they need to breastfeed more with all the stresses they're dealing with in life right now, I'm not going to tell people that they should not be trimming their nose hairs. I will provide some factoids and you can do what you want with this, that people who have a denser nose hair have less of an incidence of having asthma, which I think is interesting, because what these nose hairs do, they're there for a reason, right? This isn't a random thing. They're there to catch particular. They're there to slow down the air that you're taking into your lungs, and they're there to capture moisture.

So all of these things are very important. You don't want air to just go into your lungs very quickly. You want it to go in in this very fluid, rhythmic way. And this is what the nasal hair helps to do. You know, if you're one of those people who are just sprouting nasal hair freely all the time, you might want to trim that back a little bit just for social reasons, but as far as trimming all of the nasal hairs out of your nose, I think that's a bad idea because you're denying your body the ability to do what it's naturally designed to do and to

help protect your lungs and to get oxygen more easily. Coming up, James Nester, on why proper breathing is so connected to curing anxiety, breathing techniques that act as a pressure relief valve for your body and your brain, and how to become a nasal breather after this. Hey, I'm Ares, and I'm Brooke. And we're the hosts of Wundery's podcast, Even the Rich, where we bring you absolutely

true and absolutely shocking stories about the most famous families and biggest celebrities the world has ever seen. Our newest series is all about drag icon RuPaul Charles. After a childhood of being ignored by his absentee father, Rue goes out searching for love and acceptance. But the road to success is a rocky one. Substance abuse and mental health struggles threatened to veer Rue off course. In our series, Rue Paul born naked. We'll show you how Rue Paul overcame his demons and carved out a place for himself

as one of the world's top entertainers, opening the doors for aspiring queens everywhere. Follow even the rich wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen ad-free on Amazon Music or the Wondery app. Much of your book is dedicated to consciously changing the way we breathe. And I never heard this term that you use quite a bit here. So I want to say that term to you and get you to talk about it a little bit.

Pulmon nuts. So I was trying to find a word that encompassed everybody who has a deep interest in breathing. And a lot of those people are researchers and academics, but not all of them. Some of them are people like me who couldn't find any help for their chronic respiratory issues found a way of fixing it and got really interested in breathing. Some of them are people who had infosima and managed to significantly reduce the symptoms of infosima. Some of them are people who significantly reduce the symptoms of infosima. Some of them are people who had mild

to moderate scoliosis and straighten their spines with proper breathing. It's true, that's actually happened. So under that umbrella is, you don't have to have an MD to be a pulmonaut, but these are people who have spent a large portion of their lives dedicated to understanding and bettering their breathing

and the breathing of other people around them. So let's go through some of what you've learned from these folks. Use a phrase, the art of exhalation. What does that mean? So I'm happy that we are done with all the depressing topics of why we're the worst breathers in the world. And now, gentle listeners, we're on to the more inspiring topics. Let's talk about exhaling. So so many of us are really good at inhaling, right?

We think breathing is all about inhaling, but you can't get an enriching inhale unless you first really get a proper exhale. And singers know this more than anybody. You have to learn how to exhale all that air out and then take that enriching breath in. And what allows us to take in air and to exhale it, or lungs don't do this by themselves, right? We've got this big muscle that looks like an umbrella that sits underneath the lungs.

It's called the diaphragm. And that diaphragm goes up and down about 50,000 times a day. Most of us are only allowing that diaphragm to extend maybe 10, 15, 20% of its natural ability, by allowing that diaphragm to descend more, and then to rise back up a little more, you are able to take fewer breaths more easily. And the kicker with the diaphragm, not only does it help control our breathing in this way, but when it descends, it massages the organs right below it, kidney and the stomach and the intestines. Our organs need this to purge lymph fluid. So when we're holding our breath and we're just

breathing these very shallow breaths throughout the day, our body and specifically our organs aren't able to function properly. And this is why so many people have gut issues and other issues down below in the stomach area because they aren't allowing their diaphragms to really extend to their full width. So, what do you recommend in terms of boosting our diaphragm activity and massaging the organs and all that other good stuff? There's this thing called yoga that's been around for about 5,000 years. And guess what it does, the one thing it does is it teaches you to make your ribcage very flexible, your inner costles very flexible.

It teaches you to take these big enriching breaths, then it teaches you to softly massage your organs. So the benefits from yoga are right there. Yeah, there's some muscles involved and stretching involved. All that's great, but 90% of the benefits from yoga are from that deep breathing and the massaging of these organs. So you don't have to do yoga in order to get these benefits. What you can do is just learn to take slower, lower breaths. And anyone can do this. When Westerners hear this, they want to go from zero to 100 and they start going, oh yeah, I can really, really feel it. Yeah, this is really benefiting me.

Start slowly. You're not going to go, if you've been sitting on a couch for five years, you're not going to go around a marathon. So start very slowly. And I think a great exercise is to inhale, do account of about five or six and exhale to that same count. This is called coherent breathing. Anyone can do it. It's free. You don't need an app for this. No one's trademarked it. So just breathing in these slow rhythms in these cycles allows your diaphragm to descend a little more

and allows it to rise up a little more. And what you'll be feeling from this isn't some placebo effect. This is you accessing your biology and allowing your body to function more efficiently. So if I'm here, you're correctly, this is an exercise we can do periodically throughout the day. It's not that we need to learn to breathe like this all the time. I've been doing it during this entire interview.

You can do it whenever you want. You can do it answering email, doing dishes, watching Netflix, whenever, driving in a car. And that's the great thing about breathing. We carry it around with us all day long. So we can improve it all day long if we like. So with an exercise like this, the point isn't to have this on your to-do list as another thing you have to do every hour.

It's to acclimate your body very slowly to what natural breathing is, so that it becomes a natural habit, so that it becomes unconscious, so that you don't have to think about it. But that takes time for people. It takes a couple weeks or a couple of months. So this slow breathing, you can do it anytime. Okay, so just again, to put a fine point on it, you're saying that if we start doing this

exercise with regularity, it will change our default mode of breathing all the time. You will make a conscious exercise, which is your conscious breathing exercise unconscious. Yes, that's exactly it. I cannot guarantee when that switch will happen for people because everybody's different. Some people will feel it happen after a couple of weeks. Some people a couple of months took me a couple of months because I was such a dysfunctional breather. And now there is no way I'm ever breathing through my mouth during the daytime or night. And I track my breathing, and it is consistent throughout the day. It just takes a while.

It's something you need to do. You can't pop a pill for this, but I tell you that the science is very clear that this can have a profound effect on your health. And the technique you're recommending here, coherent breathing is what can make that switch for us. Breathing into account of 6A and breathing out to that same count. That's a great place to start. You can do innumerable different ways of breathing healthy. The very first thing you should do is train yourself to breathe through your nose almost all the time. It's okay to breathe through your mouth when you're laughing, when you're doing some exercise, whatever, but the majority of your breaths should be through your

nose. Just doing that, your nose is going to regulate the amount of air that's coming in and out of your body, right? Because it takes much longer to breathe a nasal breath of air than it does, to breathe a breath of air through your mouth. So just doing nasal breathing here, about 70% there, and then you can add into this slower breathing. I don't care if you do five to six breaths per minute. You can do even shorter than that or longer than that, but this is just, you have to find what feels good for you and get comfortable with it, and then you can increase that time. And you'll feel the difference. You can take your blood pressure before and after a few minutes of breathing this way,

and this slow, smooth rhythm, and see what happens. And for me, it's profound. Sloan-ness seems to be really important. Another phrase you use is, we've become a culture of over-breather's. So the Sloan-ness, I'm only mentioning Sloan-ness so often because we're breathing too much and because we're breathing too many breaths and because the volume of our breath is too much. So what I'm trying to say is that all of these tricks that we're doing are just getting us

to be natural breeders, the way that we were designed to breathe. If you look at indigenous cultures, the few that remain on the earth right now, they don't need diet advice or exercise advice or breathing advice. They're already breathing perfectly. They're eating natural foods.

They don't have high blood pressure or diabetes or get strokes or heart disease. They don't. So how can we breathe to allow ourselves to enter that stasis? We need to get normal before we can go up the next wrong of human potential. So by saying you need to breathe slower, it. So by saying you need to breathe slower,

it's essentially me saying you need to breathe normally, but for the vast, vast majority of the people, breathing slower is gonna get you closer to normal. Okay, I think I'm gonna pick up now on this phrase you just use about moving up the next level on human potential. So I think this is an appropriate segue. What is breathing plus? So breathing plus is another one of those umbrella terms that I wrote to try to encompass all the ways that once you're normal, right? Where else can you go with breathing?

What can I do for your mind? What can it do for your body? And this includes pranayama, some things people have heard of, maybe Wim Hof method, holotropic breathwork, all of these different modalities that will require you a lot more effort. Okay, some of these things can take half an hour or an hour to do, But with that effort, you get a lot more benefits, especially when you're looking at people with chronic conditions or looking at people who want to climb mountains, climb Everest without supplemental oxygen, you know, or who want a freed eye for eight minutes underwater. These are people who've accessed these different ways of breathing to do really incredible things with their bodies.

As I referenced before, I am descended from ancient accounts who were not doing incredible physical things. So I don't care about freediving for eight minutes. I do, however, want to live a long and healthy life, as I believe we are on the precipice of exploring these various breathing plus techniques. Are there benefits here for, you know, boring people like me who don't want to do extraordinary physical feats? You say you were descended from accounts.

I kind of believe that. Maybe not. If you look at our ancient ancestors, we were all the same, right? And then we started segmenting off once we got into villages and industrialized society came up. So there's a reason why we all had the same straight teeth. And there's a reason why doing these things can allow you to, the body is malleable. You can get back to that thing that you were born from

because we were all part of the same community. Yeah, with thousands of years ago, but that still doesn't mean you can't see improvement from these different techniques. And if you're talking about breathing plus, from what I've seen, you are only going to benefit from improving your breathing, just like you're only going to benefit from eating a better diet. You're only going to benefit from sleeping better, right? It's always a net gain.

Some people benefit a very little amount and some people it's completely transformative. And this doesn't mean you have to breathe in these certain ways to free die for eight minutes or to hike Everest without supplemental oxygen. A lot of the people who come to this are suffering from the things that most of us are suffering from.

Depression, anxiety, panic, sleeplessness, they're stressed out, and that's where these modalities really come in handy. And they've been studied, literally thousands of studies have shown how effective they are. So that's really compelling. You're saying that these breathing techniques that we're going to talk about in more detail can help you, even if you're not planning to do something physically extraordinary like hike without supplemental oxygen, it can help you reset your basic unconscious mode of breathing and it can

help with lots of physical elements that come from having a default mode of breathing that is dysfunctional. Yes, and I've heard from so many psychologists and psychiatrists, I was just talking to Dr. Richard Brown at Columbia, who the very first thing he does with his patients with anxiety, depression, panic, whatever, is he sits them down and he has them fix their breathing. And this is the most powerful thing, more than anything else, because they are all terrible breathers. They're over breathing,

they're constantly holding their breath. So you don't need to want to be a superhero and athlete to do this. This is allowing you to bring balance back into your stressed out body. And I was just talking to another psychologist who said, you can never, ever heal anxiety, ever without first fixing breathing. You can take pills and powders, which will numb the symptoms and those pills and powders work wonderfully for a lot of

people. They're great, but you can never really cure it unless you first fix your dysfunctional breathing. And these breathing plus methods, yeah, they're a bit more strenuous, but they can get you there faster and the benefits are more pronounced. That's very exciting. So let's talk about them. One is more on occasion. So when I was talking about a lot of us are overbreathers.

I'm talking about being an unconscious overbreather. When you're at your desk and you're... That's really bad to be doing that because that's sending stress signals to your body. Your blood sugar is going to go up. Cortisol is going to go up. All of those bad things to have go up constantly throughout the day. It's going to wreck your health eventually. But to consciously over breathe for short amounts of time, this is like a pressure release valve for your body and for your brain. What you do is you focus all that stress throughout

the day into this breathing technique. And then you get it all out, which is why you can look at your data before and after. Look at your blood pressure, look at your blood glucose, look at other, your heart rate variability, before and after these techniques. And they can be really transformed in some significant ways. So there are various ways of doing this. They have various names because they've been developed over thousands of years in different cultures. You can call it yoga, pranayama, whim off method, whatever, but they're all generally doing the same thing, where for about 20 minutes or some are even longer, you do these heavy breathing, rhythmic breathing patterns. And these have been around for thousands of years,

but luckily in the day today, where we live, we can measure what happens to the body objectively, what happens to the brain. And they're very powerful, and it's been proven time and time again. Can you run us through some specific exercises that fit into this bucket? Sure, and I'm not preaching for one or the other. People need to find what works best for

them. And the reason why I saved this section for the end of the book is you first have to figure out your normal breathing. Okay. You need to breathe through your nose. You need to breathe more slowly. Breathing in this rhythmic pattern should not be mouth breathing. So once you've got that figured out, some exercises I like doing, especially if I'm traveling a lot or Kundalini breathwork, which has been around for thousands of years. And I can't demonstrate it now

because you have to really see someone doing this, but it's forcing yourself to over breathe. And it's almost like interval training. You breathe a lot, and then you stop and breathe more slowly. Then you breathe a lot and you breathe more slowly. By doing this, you're acclimating your body to these different rhythms. You're working out that diaphragm and you're teaching your body that you can control when stress comes on and when and how to turn it off.

Because you can feel stress increasing in your body when you're breathing very vigorously. That's what it's supposed to do. Then when you switch your breathing, you can feel this calmness take over your body and you can use that on off switch throughout the day. Just sounds very compelling. Just to make sure that I understand this, though.

You said at the beginning of the last answer, we need to make sure we get our normal moment to moment breathing under control. Before we dive into these breathing plus techniques like Kundalini or the Wim Hof technique, so I shouldn't, before I get real excited about, you know, do the typical Western male thing of going zero to 150 in 0.5 seconds, I should start with something like coherent breathing, which you referenced earlier, and make sure that I'm not as doing as much mouth breathing, et cetera, et cetera, before I dive into the deep end. Well, I'm not going to tell you what you should do with your life

for any other listener. You can do whatever you'd like. Some people go straight into these intensive breathing techniques and they love it. I have found by talking to so many researchers if you really want to improve your health, figure out your breathing before that, learn how to take a normal breath.

You're gonna get a lot more out of these exercises. If you learn how to take a normal breath. You're going to get a lot more out of these exercises if you learn how to take a normal breath. And especially when I was talking to Matthew Walker about this, he's a sleep specialist in Berkeley right across the bridge from where I live. And such a huge percentage of the population is suffering from sleep disorder breathing. You have to get that under control. So to answer your question, yes and no. If you want to just jump into these intense breathing techniques, that's great. They'll probably have a benefit for you. I think they'll have a lot more of a benefit if you can get your regular breathing down

first. That's what I've experienced, and that's what a lot of breathwork teachers have told me time and time again. And again, to get the regular breathing under control, it's about doing what you recommended earlier, which is getting into the habit of these long, slow breaths throughout the day, which at some point will click over into becoming your unconscious habit. Yes. So the very first thing I would do is learn how to become an obligate nasal breather. This sounds crazy, but I'm going to tell you a little trick that has worked for a lot

of people is you get some tape with a very light adhesive on it, surgical tape, micro poor tape. You can buy this of Walgreens or wherever. And take a little bit of that adhesive off. So make sure it's not too sticky. And next time you're answering email alone in your office or doing something where you're not gonna be talking, put that little piece of tape on your lips. And do it for 10 minutes at the beginning.

Do it for half an hour after you get comfortable with that. Do it for an hour after that. This is going to unconsciously train you to keep your mouth closed. You would be amazed how many people are breathing through their mouths, especially doing office work. After you figure that out, try to become a nasal breather at night. Easier said than done. That same little piece of tape that you were using in the day, you can use it at night.

This sounds insane. I thought it was insane until I heard about it at Stanford from a respiratory therapist who said, I've been prescribing this to my patients for dozens of years. I just can't talk about it because everyone thinks I'm crazy. And I've heard that same story from pulmonologist, from Dennis, from respiratory therapists, hundreds and hundreds of times now. So I'm not here to prescribe anything to anyone. You find something that works for you, but I've seen that work for so many people. And once you've gotten that nasal breathing down,

I think then you have graduated to do some more intensive breathing. Coming up James Nester on the connection between breathing better and getting better sleep. And he'll tell us about the practice that made him aware of the full potential of breath work. After this. As it pertains to the intensive breathing, I am notwithstanding the fact that I believe that I did descend from neither hunters nor gatherers, but the nerds who were pouring over actuarial charts in the jungle, although I

somehow am not good at math either. Notwithstanding all of that, when I hear you talk about breathing exercises and you're backing up with all the science, I do have the urge to really dive in here. And then I realize, well, I spend, you know, 30 to 60 minutes exercising and stretching every day. I meditate for upwards of an hour every day. So how am I going to find the time to add something else in here? Now, I know you're not prescribing anything, but I'm just curious to hear how you respond to people who must come up to you with the same concern. If you're meditating, you're already focusing on your breath.

I don't know of any meditation where you can sit there and focus on something and go, The very first step of any meditation that I've done is, Okay, I want you to sit down and focus on your breath. By sitting and focusing your mind and calming yourself down, you are automatically breathing in this coherent, rich, beneficial way. So my argument, and this has not been proven, but it's a theory that, and I've heard this from so many people who've studied this stuff for decades, that the benefits that people get from meditation

at the beginning for the first six months, or first year, 95% of those are tied to the way in which you're breathing while you're sitting there focusing. Of course, after that, when you get really good at this, you can, you know, affect how your brain is working. You can grow more white matter like all of gray matter, all of these different benefits. But at the beginning, this is forcing people

to slow their breathing down. And it's interesting that if you just breathe as though you're meditating, because a lot of meditators breathe in these slow rhythmic patterns of about five breaths per minute and Think about whatever you want watch tiger King on Netflix, but like something just Toxic and awful, but breathe in these beautiful Patterns you look at what happens to your body and you're getting those benefits to your blood pressure, to your vascular system,

to more oxygenation by just breathing this way. So you're already doing it. So you don't need to add that. When you're exercising, notice how you're breathing. Are you breathing through your mouth? Are you breathing through your nose? If you're breathing through your mouth, then start to switch to breathing through your nose. If you're breathing through your mouth, then start to switch to breathing through your nose. Take longer breaths, more fluid breaths while you're exercising.

This is going to allow you to stay in the aerobic zone for longer. It's going to allow you to get oxygen more easily and operate more efficiently. There's been so many studies looking into this athletic performance and nasal breathing. I want to stick with this subject of whether breathing exercises might be useful for people who are already meditating because I believe a lot of people listen to the show are already meditating. But let me start with this though. The type of meditation I do is explicitly not a breathing exercise. I do often spend two to three minutes at the beginning of a meditation, doing a long

breath in through my nose, and then an even longer breath out through my nose, just to kind of settle the body and arrive. But generally speaking, when you meditate in mindfulness meditation, you are not manipulating the breath in any way. Does that fact set in any way, obviate some of the reassurances you were giving me earlier? You are manipulating your breath. The only way to get into that zone of deep meditation is if your body is calm and your body cannot be calm if you're breathing dysfunctionally. You can call it what you want. It's a chicken in the egg, you know, thing. But by being able to enter into that complete stage of focus and restfulness and balance,

you cannot do that breathing dysfunctionally. So whether you like it or not, you've been doing breath work for a long time now. So there you go. Okay, duly noted, and I like that answer selfishly. So then onto the other thing that came to my mind, which is, so for people like me, and I think many of our listeners who are committed daily-ish at least meditators,

would there be no benefits to exploring a Kundalini or Wim Hof? I should say Wim Hof is a person who is from, I believe, Scandinavia, who's quite well known, they call him the Iceman and he gets people to jump into cold water and has all these breathing exercises. Would going whole hog on breathing, manipulating your breathing, would it have no added benefit for people who are already meditators?

Breathing is only going to complement your practice. There's no way it can detract from it. You will only benefit, maybe you're going to benefit a little, you know, maybe you're really going to be transformed by it. Everyone's different, so it's hard to reassure someone that this is going to happen or that's going to happen. But that is peanut butter and chocolate, those two things. And that's why you see so many meditators getting into breathwork and so many breathwork

practitioners getting into meditation. To me, they're all part of the same umbrella. They're all the same thing. There's a Venn diagram. They're almost bled into one another completely. But I know people who have done very calming meditations for years and years, Buddhists who have discovered breathwork and it's a different sensation, it's a different thing, but it contributes to that balance and that overall health that you are establishing in your brain and in your body. And there's only one way to find out, it's to do it

and to see if it's right for you. Check it out. Another selfish question this has to do with sleep. I'm curious about the link between getting better at breathing and sleeping better. Now I think we all know and we've covered this a lot on this show that sleep apnea is something you should get checked out for.

But if you don't have sleep apnea like me and you have trouble sleeping, would engaging and breathing plus in the suite of breathing plus options potentially help with insomnia. It helps a lot of people. I'm not going to say it's going to help every single person suffering from every single sleep problem, of course not, but it's been shown to be very beneficial for a lot of people in the same way that having a meditation before you go to sleep has been shown to be very beneficial. What you don't want to do when you're sleeping

is to be stressing your body out. This is the time for your body to reset itself, to flush out all those toxins from your brain, to really restore itself and get ready for the next day. That's a really hard thing to do if for eight hours you're going, and you have sleep apnea or you snore. Like in the US, we look at snoring is almost this cute thing. There's videos of like kids on YouTube snoring and parents say, oh, look, look how

cute this is. This is someone who's struggling to breathe when they're supposed to be restoring their body. There's nothing cute about it. It is so damaging. And somewhere up to 50% of us snore on occasion in 25 quarter of the population snore is constantly. This is really, really bad news. And it's been studied for decades. No one is arguing about the science behind this, but people don't seem to get the message that you're never ever gonna really be healthy if you're struggling to sleep. And especially if you're struggling to breathe

when you're struggling to sleep. So that's the first obstacle is to make sure you're breathing in a healthy way when you're sleeping. Then you can tackle the anxiousness or anxiety or other reasons you may be suffering from insomnia. But from the data that I've seen, a huge percentage of the people complaining about insomnia suffer from sleep disorder breathing.

So you've got to get that taken care of first and foremost. There's a kind of breathing exercise that you've gotten into. I'm going to mangle the pronunciation Sudarshan Kriya, I believe. Very good. It was that, okay, good. You said it's the most powerful technique you've learned. And again, I know you're not prescribing or pitching, but I'd be curious to hear about your personal.

What is this exercise and how and why has it been helpful for you? So this was the exercise that really made me aware of the potential of breathing from being an extremely skeptical guy. I'm in San Francisco, there's a lot of woo-woo stuff around here. I'm on the opposite end of that spectrum. But after suffering from a lot of respiratory issues, this was the class I went to that a doctor suggested I check out. And I went to it and at about the third or fourth session, I had this experience, which was very weird.

This is going to really freak out your listeners here, but you're breathing in these rhythmic patterns. You're just sitting, sitting cross-legged breathing in these patterns. It's San Francisco, so it's cold by nature. I was very cold, this is wintertime. And by just sitting down and breathing in this pattern, I sweat through my t-shirt. I, there were sweat blotches on my jeans.

My hair was sopping wet. I'd never experienced anything like that in my life. And I was like, that was super weird, not doing that again. And then it turned out that a lot of people have these experiences because you're tapping into something. What's great is everything we know about the human body and science, we still don't know exactly what is happening with some levels of breathing. So once I experienced that, I looked into the science of this and there's a hundred studies that have been done at Harvard and Columbia looking into this technique into asthma, into anxiety, into depression, and they found it's been very, very effective. So I am not promoting this specific technique. This has been around for thousands of years. People can have these experiences and these benefits from innumerable techniques. But from my own personal experience,

I really liked this one. It's intense. It takes a while. But man, you come out on the other side of that and you feel squeaky and clean. And a lot of the stress that you carry with you tends to be gone at the end of that process. You will have heard of what I'm about to say, but just for the listeners, there's a Tibetan Buddhist technique called tumo. And these practitioners of tumo, many of them, they live in the Himalayas, and it is said that they can be outside in the middle of the winter with wet blankets on their back, and through the process of this breathing meditation,

I think it's called the bliss of inner fire, they are said to be able to dry those blankets in midwinter. So that's very interesting. It gets me wondering what, if anything, you've learned about the possibility of breathing plus exercises, again, your term, to change our mind states to produce or provoke transcendent or psychedelic experiences. So, that tumotech technique is very similar to Sudarshan Kriya. So, these are just different names for essentially the same thing. You're breathing in very similar ways and the effects are the same. After having my experience, I found that study by Herbert Benson at Harvard Medical School who, after hearing these stories of these monks doing these

incredible things, did what a good researcher would do, went to the source, covered these people with sensors, and recorded what happened. And they can absolutely do this. So he placed them in this cold room. That was around 50 something 56 degrees, put wet sheets over them after about 30 or 40 minutes. They had dried the sheets with the heat from their body breathing in this way. So if people don't believe this, check out the scientific study in nature, the most esteemed scientific journal and the work of Herbert Benson and you find it is. So as far as these different practices, so that's what it can do for the body.

You can create heat on demand. These monks were increasing the temperature in their extremities by 17 degrees on demand. So we know you can do that, but what can it do for the brain? That's still an area that is a burgeon area of research. There are many people who can share their own experiences, but if you're looking at objective science,

it tends to do what a lot of other therapies can do where it can help rewire different parts of the brain that are tied to anxiety or even depression, which is why there's so many studies that have shown that this can be beneficial for doing that. Can't say that this is going to cure everyone of depression or anxiety or whatever, everyone's different, but again, from what I've seen, there's only a net gain from practicing these things. And as far as hallucinations or spiritual experiences, that's up to the individual,

but I think people will be surprised where you can go with your breathing after an hour of very intense breath work instruction with a professional. I've found it's just fantastic. And the good news is this is something that's completely natural and if at any time you don't like where it's going, you can just stop it and stop breathing and come back down to earth. So have you had some interesting experiences while doing these exercises?

As the objective science journalist, I don't mention any of this in the book, but I will tell you, yeah, I've had some incredible experiences, some of which I tried to get into the book, my editor cut them, including when I went to UCSF and did Sudarshan Kriya hooked up to all of these different sensors and completely freaked out the lab tech so much that they wanted to rush me into the ER because my blood pH was so extreme. They're like, Oh my God, you know, we thought you were sick. I said, No, I feel great. So I'm not saying this as because I want people to go out and do these things. You need to do this under careful supervision.

The stuff is very intense, but it can take you places because you have been accessing your biology in ways and you become the master of your own body. You're able to turn your blood pressure off and then turn it way down, increase your heart rate and then decrease it very quickly. Put yourself into a dream state, and then take yourself back out. I mean, a lot of this is what very good meditators can do already.

Breathwork is kind of the bullet train to get there a little bit quicker in some cases. I mean, your book did so well, so I'm not here to criticize your editor, but man, I think it should have didn't book. I really fought for it, but you know, something at about 90, as you know, 95% of this book was cut. That is on the editing floor. So we did what we could. This all started your work in this sphere because of your own This all started your work in this sphere because of your own

Malodies now that you're you know of the breather par excellence. How's your health? Well to be clear, I'm not a breather par excellence. I am I'm just a meager journalist who's learned a few tricks along the way People think that since I wrote this book. I'm sure they think the same thing about you that you know We're just hanging out in robes and counting our beads around our necks and, you know, sniffing oils and, you know, meditating and breathing. That is not the reality. I have an insane work life here and I use breathing to help balance myself throughout that. I specifically did not measure my own experiences and mention this in the book because I don't want it to seem that what happened for me is going to happen for other people. Everybody's different, but I can tell you now that I have not had one of those respiratory

ailments since I've improved my breathing. No pneumonia, no bronchitis, no chronic sinusitis. None of that. Was it due to my breathing? Very likely. Can we scientifically prove that in control? No, we can't, but you can do your own math there and draw your own conclusions. Is there something I should have asked you, but failed to ask? I think the part of when you're talking about breathing plus and you're talking about

all these incredible things, one thing I got a lot of pushback from people in the medical community, they said, okay, I see the blood pressure, a breathing can affect your blood pressure, okay, it can affect your blood sugar, it can affect stress, obviously. But come on, man, this stuff about infosima and straightening a scoliotic spine, this cannot be true.

You know, there's a reason why 30% of the book contains 500 scientific references at the end of it, because I knew people weren't going to believe this stuff because I didn't believe it. But the science is there, the pictures are there, the data is there. Yes, you can significantly improve emphysema through breathing techniques. More than any other therapy. Yes, you can help straighten a crooked spine with proper breathing, something that was developed in the 20s called orthopedic breathing. It's still being studied at Johns Hopkins. These things sound impossible, sounds impossible that you can heat your body up by breathing. Look at the science,

try it yourself. And I think you'll be able to see that we're really have been selling our body short about what their real potential is and what we can access by just concentrating on our respiration. From what I can tell James, you're doing a lot of good in the world by getting this message out. Could I push you in this final question for me to please plug your book and anything else you've put out into the world? So all of these breathing techniques, well most of them and including interviews with professors at Harvard and so on and so far, they're all available for free on the website. I'm not asking for emails. There's no paywall. My website is mrjamesnester.com. That's mrjamesnester.com because some other jerk took jamesnester.com. So I had to put that MR in there.

There's also links to a bunch of other stuff. The entire bibliography, all 400 scientific references are available for free for everybody. I have a book out that we have mentioned and I'm trying to get better at the social media thing. So I'm on Instagram and I don't post pictures of delicious food I'm eating. I only post things in the science of breathing. And my Instagram handle is Mr. James Nestor.

Well, Mr. James Nestor, it's been a pleasure to talk to you. I really appreciate you taking the time to do this. Thanks a lot for having me. That was a lot of fun. Thanks again to James Nestor, really fun to interview him. Before I let you go, one important order of business, our team is preparing a special episode about anxiety. And we would love your help.

If you have questions about anxiety that you want answered, please record a voice memo and send it to us via email at listener at 10% dot com. That's listener at 10% all one words spelled out dot com. We might just play and answer your question right here on the show. This show is made by Gabrielle Suckerman, DJ Kashmir, Justine Davy and Lauren Smith. Our senior producer is Marissa Schneiderman. Kim Regler is our managing producer and our executive producer is Jen Poient, scoring and mixing by Peter Bonaventure of Ultraviolet Audio. We'll see you all on Friday for a bonus.

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