Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - The Science of Breathing | James Nestor

Episode Date: February 7, 2024

You may be breathing wrong. Here’s how to fix it. 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 exercisesWhere to find James Nestor online:Website: www.mrjamesnestor.comSocial Media:FacebookInstagramBook Mentioned:Breath: The New Science of a Lost ArtOther Resources Mentioned:Daniel E. LiebermanThe Wim Hof MethodDr. Stanislav Grof and holotropic breathworkDr. Richard P. BrownMatthew P. WalkerMore on Kundalini Yoga and BreathingSudarshan KriyaDr. Herbert Benson and tummo breathing techniqueRelated Episodes:Three Lessons from Happiness Research | Emma SeppäläSign up for Dan’s weekly newsletter hereFollow Dan on social: Instagram, TikTokTen Percent Happier online bookstoreSubscribe to our YouTube ChannelOur favorite playlists on: Anxiety, Sleep, Relationships, Most Popular EpisodesFor tickets to Dan Harris: Celebrating 10 Years of 10% Happier at Symphony Space: click hereFull Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/tph/podcast-episode/james-nestor-rerunAdditional Resources:Download the Ten Percent Happier app today: https://10percenthappier.app.link/installSee 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. Okay, 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 totally fascinating. James Nester is somebody I've wanted to have on the 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,

and why we need to chew more, the relationship between breathing and anxiety, the relationship between breathing and sleep. And then we dive into a whole bunch of breathing exercises, many of them pioneered by a group he calls the pulmonauts. I love that name. Just to say before we dive in here, this episode is part of our Deep Cuts series

where we dig into the archives and find some of our most popular episodes and repost them. Maybe you've stayed in an Airbnb before and thought to yourself, this actually seems pretty doable. Maybe my place could be an Airbnb. It could be as simple as starting with a spare room

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on an elegant Viking longship with thoughtful service, destination-focused dining, and cultural enrichment, on board and onshore, and every Viking voyage is all-inclusive with no children and no casinos. Discover more at Viking.com. MUSIC 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. It 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, I 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 or antibiotics and sent on my way. And I thought that that was normal until a few years later, where 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 gonna 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? 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 blush.

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 with 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, emphysema, 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. 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,

until you talk to the experts, and until you look around the science, until 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 gonna quote you again, you call us the worst breathers 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 breathers. So if you look at animals, the other 5,400 other mammals in the animal kingdom right now, they don't have asthma. Some dogs snore, dogs that have been bred,

you know, bulldogs 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 down on a couch, you're gonna 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 enriching 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. 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, depress 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 gonna 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. 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 breathers, 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. Sleep apnea is when you choke on your tongue over and over and over. It's 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 in your mouth is off, then you're gonna 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 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 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. And as you're improving your breathing, your posture is going to 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 gonna 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 found, like that's what you wanna be doing. You don't wanna be in the same position all the time. If you are standing, and I have one of those desks 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 we're suffering from health-wise are coming from the modern environment. So with pollution, sure there's smog and there's soot and there's mold, but carbon dioxide is, mark my words, in the next few years, this is going to become a public enemy number one, because in these enclosed environments, CO2 levels can go up six-fold, seven-fold, eight-fold.

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 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 into the sinus cavities and makes it harder to breathe through the nose. So when you 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, 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 breaths 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 anthropologist 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, our teeth grew crooked and our mouths 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 can 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, you know, even though they're delicious, quit eating pudding 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 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 skelchure in your face, especially when you're younger. This is important if you're older, if you're creating more skelchure 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 will have less of a chance of having storing 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. Am I washed clean of that? I've gotten into a lot of trouble talking about this. I wanna be very clear, I'm a science journalist presenting objective facts. I'm not gonna comment

cause I don't feel like getting in trouble either. But on this issue of chewing, you mentioned that one thing we can do is eat real foods. What about chewing gum? Chewing gum is great for people who don't have temporomendibular 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 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, no, this is just maybe half an hour here and there. Harder gum, the better. Obviously, sugar-free, void, saccharin 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 gonna 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 particulate. 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 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 anxiety. And we talk about breathing techniques that can act as a pressure relief valve for your body and brain. I'm Afua Hirsch. I'm Peter Frankopane. And in our podcast, Legacy, we explore the lives of some of the biggest characters in history This season we delve into the life of Michael Gorbachev. This season has everything. It's got political ideology

It's got nuclear Armageddon. It's got love story. It's got betrayal It's got economic collapse one ingredient ingredient that you left out, legacy. Was he someone who helped make the world a better place, saved us all from all of those terrible things, or was he a man who created the problems and the challenges of many parts of the world today? Those questions about how to think about Gorbachev, you know, was he unwitting character in history,

or was he one who helped forge and frame the world? And it's not necessarily just a question of our making, there is a real life binary in how his legacy is perceived. In the West he's considered a hero, and in Russia it's a bit of a different picture. So join us on Legacy for Mikhail Gorbachev. Get ready for Las Vegas style action at Bette MGM, the king of online casinos. Enjoy casino games at your fingertips with the same Vegas Strip excitement MGM is famous for.

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pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. Quick reminder, you can join the 10-day Taming Anxiety Challenge over on the 10% Happier App right now. The challenge kicks off on February 5th. Much of your book is dedicated to consciously changing the way we breathe. And I'd never heard this term that you use quite a bit here. So I want to say the term to you and get you to talk about it a little bit. Pulmonauts. 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 emphysema, and managed to significantly reduce the symptoms of emphysema. Some of them are people who had mild to moderate scoliosis,

and straighten their spines with proper breathing. It's true, this 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. 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, our 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, the 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 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 rib cage very flexible, your intercostal is 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 that 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 a hundred 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 gonna go run a marathon. So start very slowly. And I think a great exercise is to inhale to 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 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 hearing you correctly, this is an exercise we can do periodically throughout accessing your biology and allowing your body to function more efficiently. So if I'm hearing you 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 a into a count of six, say, 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 breath should be through your nose. Just doing that, your nose is gonna 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, you're 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 a 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 it's profound. Slowness seems to be really important. Another phrase you use is we've become a culture of over-breather. So the slowness, I'm only mentioning slowness 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 breathers, 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 rung of human potential. So by saying you need to breathe slower is essentially me saying you need to breathe normally, but for the vast, vast majority of the people breathing slower is going to get you closer to normal. Okay, I think I'm going to pick up now on this phrase you just used about moving up the next

level on human potential. So I think this is an appropriate segue. What is breathing plus? 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 it 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 breath work, all of these different modalities that will require you a lot more

effort. Okay, some of these things can take a 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, who want to free dive 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 accountants who were not doing incredible physical things. So I don't care about freediving for eight minutes.

I do, however, wanna 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 boring people like me who don't wanna do extraordinary physical feats? You say you were descended from accountants. 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, it was 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 gonna benefit from improving your breathing, just like you're only gonna benefit from eating a better diet. You're only gonna 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. This doesn't mean you have to breathe in these certain ways to free-dive 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, an 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 over breathers, I'm talking about being an unconscious over breather. 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 gonna go up

Cortisol is gonna go up all those bad things to have go up constantly throughout the day. It's gonna wreck your health eventually but to 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, Wim Hof 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. OK, 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 it's, 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 and then you breathe a lot and you breathe more slowly. And 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. This 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, uh, 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, etc., etc., 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 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 wanna 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. And especially, 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 wanna 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 breath work 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 gonna 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-pore tape, you can buy this at 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 going to 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've figured 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 I've run things, I'm crazy. And I've heard that same story from pulmonologists, from dentists, 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 talks about the connection between how you breathe and how you sleep. Hi, I'm Anna. And I'm Emily. With the hosts of Wanderer's podcast Terribly Famous, a show where we bring you outrageous true stories about our most famous celebrities. And our latest season is all about the one and only Katie Price. You might think you know her, you might have an opinion,

but there is way more to the former glamour model than just her cup size. Yes, this is a woman who's gone from pin-up to publishing sensation. We all have teenage dreams, and for Katie, it was simple, massive fame, and everlasting love. I just wanted to kiss a boy.

Just one boy. Well, she does kiss a few boys, but there are plenty of bumps along the way. And when I say bumps, I mean terrible boyfriend choices, secret dates with spiky-haired pop stars, and a tabloid press that wants to tear her apart at every opportunity. And she surprises even herself when suddenly she becomes a role model for a whole new generation of young women who want to be just like her. Want to hear more? Follow Terribly Famous wherever you listen to podcasts or listen early and add free on Wondery Plus on Apple Podcasts or the Wondery App.

Hello, I'm Alice Levine and I am one of the hosts of British Scandal. So I want you to imagine that you're being offered 500,000 pounds to introduce someone to your ex. I mean the answer is still no. So you shake hands and agree to do it. But it's all about to get a hell of a lot more complicated because the you in this story is Fergie, the Duchess of York, ex-wife of Prince Andrew and the person who's offered you half a million pounds is an undercover tabloid reporter who's recorded the whole conversation. Oh, and just one more thing, promise last one, it's all about to appear on the front page of the news of the world. In the latest season of British Scandal, we take you inside the story

of the so-called fake shake, the investigative journalist Mazem Amoud, and the series of explosive sting operations he used to con public figures from Fergie to singer to Lisa and former England football coach Sven Gorin Erickson. Follow British scandal wherever you listen to podcasts or listen early and ad free on Wondry Plus on Apple podcasts or the Wondry app. Honestly, a million pounds and I still wouldn't introduce you to him. And that's for your sake. still wouldn't introduce you to him. And that's for your sake.

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 like pouring over actuarial charts in the jungle. Although I somehow am not good at math either. Notwithstanding all that, when I hear you talk about breathing exercises and you know you're backing up with all this science, I do have the urge to really dive in here. 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 gonna 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, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, 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 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. Take longer breaths, more fluid breaths while you're exercising.

This is gonna allow you to stay in the aerobic zone for longer. It's gonna 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. So you can call it what you want. It's a chicken in the egg, you know, thanks. 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 ice man and gets people to jump into cold water and has all these breathing exercises would Going whole hog on breathing, you know manipulating your breathing would it have no added benefit for people who are already meditators?

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

meditators getting into breath work and so many breath work 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 breath work 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. In the US, we look at snoring as almost this cute thing. There's videos like kids on YouTube snoring and parents saying, oh, 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, you know, 50% of us snore on occasion and 25 quarter of the population snores constantly. This is really, really bad news. And it's been studied for decades that no one is arguing about the science behind

this, but people don't seem to get the message that you're never ever going to 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. Was that okay? Good. You've 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 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 had 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, 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. 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 tumo 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 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 burgeoning 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 gonna 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 breathwork 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 SUDARSENKRIYA 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, we thought you were sick. I said, no, I feel great. So I'm not saying this because I want people to go out and do these things. You need to do this under careful supervision. This 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 been in the book or at least in the next book. I really fought for it, but 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 maladies. Now that you're the breather par excellence, how's your health? Well, to be clear, I'm not a breather par excellence. 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 we're just hanging out in robes and counting our beads around our necks and sniffing oils and 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 and 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, you know, I see the blood pressure, how breathing can affect your blood pressure,

okay, it can affect your blood sugar, you know, it can affect stress obviously, but come on, man, this stuff about emphysema 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's 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? 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 forth, 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 Nester. Well, Mr. James Nester, 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 Nester. If you want to learn more about breathing, we're going to drop a link in the show notes to a previous episode that we did with the great Emma Sepula, where we talk about the powerful physiological and psychological benefits of breathing exercises.

Thank you for listening, really appreciate that. We could not and would not do this without you. Thanks as well to everybody who worked so hard on this show. 10% happier is produced by Gabrielle Zuckerman, Justine Davy, Lauren Smith, and Tara Anderson. DJ Kashmir is our senior producer. Marissa Schneiderman is our senior editor. Kevin O'Connell is our director of audio and post production,

and Kimmy Regler is our executive producer. Alicia Mackey leads our marketing, and Tony Magyar is our director of podcasts. And finally, Nick Thorburn of Islands wrote our theme. If you like 10% happier, I hope you do, you can listen early and ad free right now by joining Wondery Plus and the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Prime members can listen ad free on Amazon Music. Before you go, tell us about yourself by filling out a short survey at Wondery.com. and resources to help you hire persons with disabilities at Canada.ca slash right here. A message from the government of Canada.

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