The Wellness Scoop - Simple Tools for Health: Breath

Episode Date: July 14, 2020

Over the course of the day we take about 25,000 breaths. It’s a process that is so automatic for so many of us but could it be a missing pillar of health? Today we explore the topic of breathing looking at the history and latest scientific research with journalist James Nestor, author of Breath. We look at the potential power of consciously breathing from the roots of breath in Buddhist, the Chinese Tao and the history of yoga to its links to stress, anxiety, mental health; why we should be breathing through our nose; why breathing less can give us more; how office life stops us breathing and how the little things can have a big impact on our lives.   James Nestor: Breath   Book Links for Quick and Easy: UK https://www.amazon.co.uk/Deliciously-Ella-Quick-Easy-Deliciousness/dp/1473639247/ref=zg_bs_books_17?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=611B9X4WM0Y13KJ08QGZ AU https://booktopia.kh4ffx.net/aEA5M NZ https://www.whitcoulls.co.nz/product/deliciously-ella-making-plant-based-quick-and-easy-pre-order-6514060 CA https://www.amazon.ca/Deliciously-Ella-Making-Plant-Based-Quick/dp/1529325161/ref=pd_lpo_14_t_0/143-7550823-4337857?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=1529325161&pd_rd_r=82a80e66-4323-40c6-b510-2caad50ae135&pd_rd_w=5FqGN&pd_rd_wg=Iz1hO&pf_rd_p=256a14b6-93bc-4bcd-9f68-aea60d2878b9&pf_rd_r=AGH47NRSK1FWBQC482PG&psc=1&refRID=AGH47NRSK1FWBQC482PG US https://www.amazon.com/Deliciously-Ella-Making-Plant-Based-Quick/dp/1529325161/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=deliciously+ella+quick+%26+easy&qid=1593163576&sr=8-1 Free worldwide delivery of the UK edition:  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Visit BetterHelp.com today to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp, H-E-L-P.com. Hi everyone and welcome to the Deliciously Ella podcast with me, Ella Mills. I just wanted to start today by saying a humongous thank you for all the lovely feedback that we've had on our brand new book Quick and Easy. The book's been out since last Thursday so it's been a whirlwind couple of days and honestly it means everything seeing you enjoying it like it's been a humongous project and to see it finally released into the world and get good feedback is just yeah it's so encouraging so huge thank you and it's also so lovely to see some of our favorite recipes being cooked because

we've been cooking them at home for ages and again to see them come to life in your homes is amazing some of my absolute favorites which seem to be going down a storm are the walnut and mushroom ragu the chocolate chip banana bread. That one is like a pregnancy addiction of mine. The turmeric and courgette pancakes, the cauliflower cheese, and then also all the speedy 10 minute lunches, which are kind of dream for anyone still working at home, like the cucumber cashew noodles, the peanut sesame noodle salad, the garlicky broccoli and butter beans for pesto. So yeah, just absolutely thrilled to see you loving them. If you don't have the book yet and you want to get it, it's still half price in the uk on waterstones and amazon so i'll

pop those links in the show notes and if you're abroad the book depository ships worldwide but it's also on amazon us and canada and available in australia and new zealand so i'll put loads and loads of links below if anyone wants to get cooking and the other piece of news for this week is that our frozen desserts are going live onto waitrose.com this week we've been wants to get cooking. And the other piece of news for this week is that our frozen desserts are going live onto Waitrose.com this week. We've been trying to get our frozen desserts, so our fudgy brownie, our apple and blackberry crumble, and our brand new ultimate vegan cookies into Waitrose for literally a year. So this is a good step for us at Delicious Yellow. It's a test really going online to see if we can get them into stores so they're not in store yet they're just on waitrose.com they're not on all postcodes yet but they are available all around london so if you fancy trying them and supporting waitrose test

to see if we should go into store then we would absolutely love that and the vegan cookies are an addiction but yeah so on to today's episode um If you have been a listener of the podcast for a while, or perhaps you're actually reading the chapters inside the book, which are all focused on general well-being rather than just the recipes themselves, then you'll know what believers I am and we are at Delicious Jella about the little things when it comes to health. You know, it's not really about those kind of massive changes, the quick fixes and the fads. It's so much more about the kind of simple everyday habits that we can implement really relatively easily into our lives. And that those

little habits can collectively really transform the way that we feel both mentally and physically. And so it's just little things like walking, sleeping, stress management, you know, whether that's five minutes of meditation here or five minutes of yoga there, maybe a quick walk, it's a 10 minute meal or something you've batch cooked and can just take out the freezer. But there's one thing that we haven't actually looked at yet when it comes to these kind of simple, accessible and actually also totally free practices and that's breath and something absolutely incredible happens in our body about every three seconds or so and that's the length of time that we take normally to inhale and exhale. And over the course of a single day, we take about 25,000

breaths, which also means that about 30 pounds or 13 kilos of air is flooding in and out of our lungs every single day. And this process is just so automatic for so many of us that we barely ever stop to think about it. It just happens. And and of course we're so incredibly lucky if and when that is the case but it does make me think if we do take a minute to stop and reflect on it and obviously coronavirus and the respiratory effects of that maybe have made us think a bit more about our breath recently then there is actually a moment of wonder about those 25,000 breaths and how much our body is actually doing for us without us even considering it. And with so much happening with such little effort, it kind of begs the question, if we did dedicate a few minutes to it, if we did think about it sometimes, could it positively impact on our health and happiness? You know, is there more to breathing than basically

just allowing the body to get on with it? And our guest today thinks the answer to that question is most definitely yes, there is a lot more to it and it can have a huge benefit on us. So our guest today is a brilliant man called James Nestor, who has just written a really, really interesting book, which is simply called Breath. And it looks at everything to do with breath and it looks at the history of breath. So everything from kind of cutting edge, really modern research coming out of the best universities in the world, to the ancient beliefs and teachings of the Chinese Tao in 400 BC, Hindu teachings, Buddhist philosophies, and so on and so forth. And so I think we've all got a huge amount to learn and absolutely thrilled to have James here today. So welcome, James.

Thanks very much for having me. So I'd love to start, I guess, with the history, with all those ancient beliefs and what you learned there and whether you found that there were some interesting parallels. Obviously, you know, some of it dates back to some of the oldest medical texts ever found from something like 1500 BC. And, you know, again, in kind of yogic philosophy and things, and were there any kind of key parallels you found that then start to correspond to the science today and what you were discovering there? Sure. Well, if you look at any major culture throughout the last 3,000, 4,000 years,

breathing was an integral part of their system of medicine. So it was really as important as what you ate or how much you exercise. And in some cultures, like ancient Chinese culture, the specific form of exercise was just to get you to breathe differently. That's what they thought the benefit was from, just by breathing differently. And you can trace this back to Hinduism, the beginning of Hinduism, 3,000, 4,000 years ago, they were starting to study this. And then the same things were discovered in China about 2,000, 3,000 years ago. The same things were studied in Japan and Buddhism and on and on and on, ancient Greece. And what I thought was so interesting is they would develop one system and one culture at one

time, then the same system would be developed in another culture at another time. And this just kept repeating throughout human cultures. And it turns out that those systems, they're so similar because we know in modern science, we can measure them now. And now we can see how robustly they work. And I thought that that was so interesting that now with our capabilities, our technologies to measure these things, it's really bolstering so much of what we've learned in the past. And what were those key findings? The key findings is that breath is something that we do automatically. You know, luckily, we don't have to think about it, we're just going to

automatically breathe. But when you take control of of breathing you're able to take control of so many different aspects of your body so we can't control our heart function with our mind or liver function or stomach but we can control how we inhale and exhale when we do that we can influence and sometimes override certain functions to our will, which is a fascinating thing because in Western medicine, we've been told that the autonomic nervous system is called autonomic because it's supposed to be automatic as in beyond our control, but we can control it with breathing. So it's really breathing is this lever inside of our body that we can turn on and turn off to control our minds, to control our other functions.

And there are a zillion different ways to breathe, to do a zillion different things. I heard from one breathing therapist, there are as many ways to breathe as there are foods to eat. So it depends on what you want to do. But the one thing that there seems to be a lot of consensus about is that breathing slowly and breathing deeply can have an extremely restorative effect on the body. And this is something that people in Western culture just don't practice that much. And what is it because a lot in the book about breathing through your nose versus breathing through your mouth. And

again, that seems to be something that's weaved throughout history as well. We even see it kind of, you know, in Genesis, you know, you've got the line from that Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils, the breath of life, and man became a living soul. So you know, this is something you said, it's in the ancient Chinese Taoist texts from the eighth century, nose breathing seems to have a long history, and it's something that you found a lot about as well. Yeah, I had never thought about this. As a kid or whenever I exercised as an adult, I would breathe through my mouth all the time until I met the chief of rhinology research

at Stanford, which luckily is just about 40 minutes from where I am in San Francisco. And he studies the nose and all the nosees functions. And, you know, he says, this is the most incredible organ that is given absolutely no respect here in the U S we have the national institutes of health, and there's 27 different departments of things that study, you know, the liver or circulation or the heart, but none of them is studying the nose. None of them is looking specifically at breathing. And he found this to be criminal. So he took me into his lab. And if you right now take your fist and imagine just putting it in front of your face, inside of your head, that is how much space the nose is taking up and all of these sinuses that extend to

even above our eyes. So all that stuff is there for a reason because the nose filters stuff out, it heats air, it conditions it, it humidifies it. So when we breathe in, that air that enters our lungs is preconditioned and is much more easy for our lungs to process. And when we breathe through the mouth, we're taking in cold, polluted air that hasn't been conditioned or heated, and we can really irritate our lungs that way. So just breathing through the nose, you can increase oxygenation with each breath by 20%. That means you have to take 20% less breaths that you would be taking through the mouth. And there's a laundry list of other benefits, but I thought this was fascinating because it's something that I had never heard about before.

Absolutely. And what does that, you know, this is obviously such a basic question, but just to kind of really get into the basics of why that breath helps, what does that extra oxygen allow our body to do? How does that help us? It allows us to do more with less if you think about breathing 20 000 times 25 000 times a day what you don't want to do is make your body work for those breaths right you're gonna just put so much unnecessary wear and tear

on your body and especially on the heart. If you breathe heavy right now through your mouth, your heart rate's going to go up and your heart's going to start pumping more blood and your blood pressure is usually going to go up because of this. That's all bad news. What you want to do is allow your heart to work at minimal effort to do maximum for your circulation. And you can do that by breathing through the nose and breathing slowly. If you have a blood pressure monitor, I'm a nerd, so I have all these different tools around my house, but you can take your blood pressure before and then breathe at a rate of about five to six seconds in, five to six seconds out through the nose and take your blood pressure about three or four minutes after that. There's a good chance your blood pressure is going to go down, maybe 10. I've even seen a drop of 15 points. And that's because when you breathe like this, you're decreasing the burden on the heart. You're

allowing everything to work at that peak efficiency, which is really what you want. Yeah, I think I read a stat in your book that said a typical adult engages as little as 10% of the range of the diaphragm when breathing, and that that has a really big impact. Has a huge impact, because if you look at people who have chronic respiratory problems, people with asthma, people with emphysema, COPD, on and on, they're engaging such a small amount of diaphragmatic movement, which means each breath, they really, they have to take more breaths for one, which is going to increase their blood pressure, increase their heart rate. But each breath is a labor. So, you know, people think,

well, you know, why do we have a mouth if we're not supposed to breathe out of it? And the mouth is there as a secondary device. If anything happens to the nose, you're not supposed to breathe out of it. And the mouth is there as a secondary device. If anything happens to the nose, you're not going to die because you can breathe out of your mouth. But an analogy I've used before is, so pretend you have sprained your ankle. You can still walk, you can still get by, but the rest of your body has to compensate

and shift all its weight. So you can get by breathing incorrectly, but after a while, your body is just going to get worn down from that. You can go so much further if you're breathing properly. So just by increasing, and they found this 50 years ago, there was a researcher been working on this specifically with emphysemics, but just by increasing their diaphragmatic movement about 35, 45%, a breath like that, he found that he was able to help heal these emphysemics better than any other therapy in these hospitals. And these people who had been left for dead got up and walked away.

And I know that that seems like a huge claim, but there's videotape. You can see it on my site. And there's x-rays and data showing just what a drastic change you can elicit by just breathing differently and you talk a little bit as well about having a slightly longer exhale what does that do that helps so every time you inhale and you can try this right now you can place your hand over your heart and take an inhale about four seconds or so. You're going to feel your heart speed up.

Then exhale for about eight seconds. You should be feeling your heart slow down. So every time we inhale, our heart is going to slightly speed up. And every time we exhale, it's going to very slightly slow down. So the longer you extend those exhales, the more relaxed you're going to get. And this is not some subjective experience or some placebo effect. This is how our body operates. So before bed, something that I've done if I was trying to go to sleep is you can breathe into a rate of about three or four, then you exhale to

about eight. And doing that is just going to place your body in a much more restful, much more relaxed state. You know, I found it that it's great before if you're nervous before an interview, if you want to take a nap, you can start breathing like that. There's a zillion different methods of doing this longer exhale, but that's just one of them that I use. I thought it was really interesting the part where you were talking a little bit about an interesting link of that exhale and how it links some different very common Buddhist mantras, the sound Om, the Ave Maria, and that all these prayers had this kind of six seconds in common, and all had an amazingly calming impact? So, about 20 years ago, some Italian researchers were looking at

different prayers in different cultures, and they brought a bunch of subjects in and hooked them up to all these censors, and had them recite the Ave Maria in Latin, which is dictated by a priest at the beginning, recites a phrase, and then the congregation. It's a call and response. So this goes on and on and on for 50 cycles, quite long if you've been into a Catholic church. Then they looked at the Buddhist prayer, the Om Mani Padme Hum, which is the traditional most popular Buddhist mantra. Then they looked at Om, then they looked at the Kundalini Yoga Sata Nama, and they found that all of these prayers require about five to six seconds to speak, and you're only speaking during an exhale. And then there was a rest of about five to six seconds to inhale. And they recorded that when we breathe this way, the

praying is optional. You can do it if you like, that's great. But just by breathing this way, you lull your body into the state of peak efficiency. What I mean by that is you're increasing circulation to your brain and throughout the rest of the body, and you're increasing the blood flow into that thoracic cavity so you're allowing that heart to function so much more easily than you would be otherwise and all of the systems of the body the respiratory systems circulatory systems cardiac systems all came into this synchrony where they work together just perfectly. And this has been extensively studied for the past 20 years. And psychiatrists now use this breathing technique,

sans the prayer, for people with anxiety, depression, for some lung ailments, because it's so therapeutic to the body. What I found was so interesting is it works out to about five to six breaths per minute. I say in the book, you know, 5.5, that's the perfect breath. But this is twice as slow as what is considered normal in Western medicine, breathing

this way. So breathing this way to a pulmonologist would be considered an abnormal way of breathing, even though it is the most beneficial to our body. It's a very healthy state. How do you change that? I mean, I'm sure from all your research, you have consciously, I imagine, changed the way you're breathing. Did you find that it was quite strange? I mean, when I was reading your book over the last few days, and you said at the beginning, you think it's about 10,000 breaths, or you breathe about 10,000 times or something while you're reading it. And immediately, obviously, as soon as I'd read a page or so, I was starting to think about breathing slowly through my nose. And it feels quite, and I'm sure people are doing it right now listening to this, it feels quite strange to start with. Yeah, try writing a book

on this stuff for two and a half years, you become a complete neurotic about it. And that was never my intention going in. I'm a science journalist. I'm a reporter. So I just went into this field because I thought this was an interesting story. But you can't help but wanting to incorporate these techniques into your own life after a while. I had various respiratory problems. I always focused on eating well, on exercising a lot. I was still getting sick all the time. I had various respiratory problems. I always focused on eating well, on exercising a lot. I was still getting sick all the time. I was getting bronchitis, mild pneumonia year after year. And so I became invested in this research and started really interviewing these different scientists to find out what was wrong with me as well. And I never intended to have that as part of the book.

I wanted to stay outside of it, but my editors convinced me that having myself in there, just here and there, not too much, would allow the reader to see how I was able to improve my own life and improve my own breathing by adopting these different functions. And I certainly have, I mean, to the point where I expanded my airway over the

course of 12 months. I haven't had a plugged nose once in the past two years when I came down with a cold. So I haven't had any of those respiratory issues. And all of this was with something that is free and easily accessible to everyone. That's another thing that I thought was interesting. You know, it's one thing to ask people to get in shape and jog six miles a day. A lot of people are going to have a hard time doing that or to drastically change their diet and just eat keto for a month. You know, that's hard as well. But asking people to change the way they breathe, something that we carry with us all the time, I think is less of an ask. And what I found is it is as important as what we eat, how much we exercise, how we take in and exhale those 20,000 breaths a day.

And did you feel you had to make a very conscious effort with it? And with thinking about your breathing so much more than you ever had to start with. And then after a period of time, it became kind of second nature to breathe slowly, less through your nose. Yeah. You know, the point of this isn't to walk around with a bunch of different timers on the phone and pulse oximeters on your fingers. That's all the stuff that I, I did just because I was curious. A lot of us, when we start breathing slowly, are going to feel, oh my God, I'm not getting enough oxygen. This can't be healthy. But actually, the opposite is usually happening. You're usually getting more oxygen. And you can see this by having a pulse

oximeter on and breathing those slower breaths. This is so antithetical to what so many people think that it took me a while to get my head around it. So the point of these practices of this slow breathing, this five seconds in, six seconds in, five to six seconds out, all these other practices is to acclimate your body to this different kind of breathing, this healthy breathing, so that you don't have to think about it. So, you know, habits take, what, one month, two months sometimes to really establish. So what you want to do is to be building this foundation so that these things become habits so that they become automatic. And just going back to what we were talking

about before about doctors starting to use it with patients, what is the link between the way that we breathe and our nervous system and stress, anxiety, depression? Well, I think that if you look at asthmatics and if you look at people with anxiety and people with fear-based disorders, panic, even anorexia, by and large, these are populations that breathe far too much. And many of them breathe through their mouths, especially asthmatics. I was working with a neuropsychologist at the Laureate Institute of Brain Research in Oklahoma, and he's been studying breathing and these different mental conditions for more than a decade. And he's been looking at the neuroscience of it. And he is

convinced that so many people with these issues, and this is a huge swath of the population, that they have been acclimated to only accept a very low amount of carbon dioxide in their bloodstream. So they're constantly breathing too much. I'll explain a little bit about what that means. So we take in oxygen and we exhale carbon dioxide. Most people know that. But the carbon dioxide is also essential for the functions in the body. We have a hundred times more carbon dioxide than we do oxygen in our bodies at any time. So without having adequate carbon dioxide, you're going to get constriction in your blood vessels. So your circulation is going to slow down. So this is why if right now you were to breathe really heavy

and do that for about a minute, you're going to probably feel tingling in your fingers, in your toes. That is caused by you off-gassing too much carbon dioxide and all those blood vessels are going to shrink up. So a lot of people don't realize this, and this was complete news to me, that we need healthy levels of CO2 in our bodies to have that proper circulation. So a lot of these people suffering from asthma or anxiety always complain about coldness in their toes, coldness in their fingers, being lightheaded. That's because

they're breathing too much and it has nothing to do with lack of oxygen. Lack of carbon dioxide is the real cause. So by teaching yourself to breathe slowly, you are acclimating your body, you're training your chemoreceptors to accept more carbon dioxide and to be comfortable with that. So that's why this slow breathing is so effective. There was this researcher at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, which is a very well-respected scientific-focused university here in the U.S., and she found that just by training asthmatics and panic sufferers to breathe slowly when they felt an attack coming on she was

able to blunt the symptoms and so many times blunt these attacks just by breathing by by nothing else wow and is there a link between any of that and stimulating the parasympathetic or sympathetic nervous systems oh for sure if you look at people with anxiety or even people with ADHD or other mental conditions, fear-based conditions, they call those, these are people that are just ramped up on their sympathetic nervous system. And the sympathetic nervous system is that fight or flight system. It's very beneficial to us when we need to fight off a tiger or run from someone who's attacking us. We want that system to come on full bore. So what happens when we turn on that system is the blood is shifted from less important organs at the time, like the stomach and like the liver, and it's shunted into our heart, into our brain so that we can be ready to really fight so that we have the most energy. The problem is very few of us today are actually running away from tigers or running away from people who are attacking us. But we're so stressed out by work stuff or other personal stuff that

that sympathetic system is always on in the background. And the longer that system is on, the more you're denying circulation to the other elements of your body. So specifically, a lot of people who have anxieties have stomach issues, they get upset stomachs, or they have GERD, gastro reflux, you know, esophageal reflux syndrome, or they have erectile dysfunction, sexual problems. There's nothing wrong oftentimes with these individual organs. What these people are suffering from is that constant stress. And so once you take care of that core problem of constant stress, so many of these problems that are clustered together usually go away. And this is what scientist Stephen Porges has studied for 30 years,

is the connection between all of these different organs. Because in Western medicine, usually those things are treated separately. Your stomach troubles are treated with one drug, and then your bowel troubles are treated with, with one drug, and then, you know, your bowel troubles are treated with another. But again, there's usually nothing wrong with these specific organs. It's that connectivity, which is tied to the nervous system. It's unbelievable, as you said, that it's, you know, it's so simple. And I, you know, you said in your book, and I'm sure people will think it when they see a book or, you know, a whole episode dedicated to breath, you know, thinking thinking why do I need to breathe I've been breathing my

whole life and we just don't think of it as a pillar of health but as you're saying it's so interesting because what is so simple and we don't even think about necessarily actually connects to our heart our lungs you know our brains. And it's really interesting as you start to think of it as a pillar of health. And one of the things that I thought was so interesting that so many people I'm sure will be able to relate to is you said, I think it was a study showing that about 80% of office workers can suffer with continuous partial attention. So we're kind of never really focusing on any specific thing. So, you know, you kind of read an email and then you check Twitter and then you speak to a colleague and then you write

something down and then you check your phone and then you're back to one email. And it's a kind of perpetual cycle of distraction to some extent. And during that time, we probably have no idea what's happening, but our breathing can become kind of quite shallow and erratic. And sometimes we don't breathe for about half a minute or longer. That's right. I was talking to various researchers who had been working on this for a long time. We know the damage of sleep apnea. Sleep apnea is this condition in which you stop breathing throughout the night, usually because your throat becomes clogged by your tongue, falls back into your mouth. And something like 25% of the US population suffers from this. And it has so many problems attached to it, neurological issues,

autoimmune issues, on and on and on. But we don't think about our breathing during the day. It's something that's so obvious, just as you had said, when I first started writing this book, people are like, you're writing a book about breathing. I've been, you know, why do I need to know how to breathe? I'm alive, which means I'm breathing, but it's not that we're breathing. That's so important. It's how we're breathing. And, you know, so many of us are in front of computers all day and try, try doing this sometime because I did this and started recording myself is whenever I sit down and see like 30 emails, I need to get back, get back to all these people in about a half an hour. So a lot of stress. I immediately stopped breathing and, and I can hold my breath without

ever knowing it for 30, 40 seconds. And I think what, this is a sympathetic response if you think about when you get scared or something happens that's what we do because we want to be quiet because there's a tiger in the bushes right and that's that's this this response and we also have a low-grade version of that in the office because we're so seldom are confronted with real danger that we're now perceiving things that aren't really dangerous as serious threats because we're so oversensitized. So Margaret Chesney here at the University of San Francisco has been studying this for decades, and she found that the damage of breathing like this, of this stilted breathing, can in many ways be similar to the damage of sleep apnea, where you're cutting

off that constant flow of oxygen to the brain, and you're not allowing yourself to function properly. And this could be why so many people in an office are so cold, their fingers and toes are so cold all the time, because they're cutting off that proper circulation. And I thought that was fascinating. And the numbers really stunned me. That's an estimate no one really knows because no one's studying the, you know, 1 billion office workers right now. But we know it's a huge number. And I certainly suffered from that a lot. So I try to be a lot more attentive to my breathing when I sit down and start getting stressed in front of my computer. Yeah, I mean, I definitely related to it. And I'm sure everybody listening will. And so there's a

real connection then between breath and as a kind of tool for stress management, which I think is something that pretty much every single human being is looking for. Oh, I think so. And you could just look at the studies with asthmatics and panic sufferers. And these are people who get extremely stressed very quickly, which is often why they have an asthma attack. Asthma can be brought on by allergens as well, which is why they have a panic attack about an hour before it happened just by looking at someone's breathing. So if we're clued into our breathing, if we notice that we're breathing differently and we're breathing in an unhealthy way, we can cut off problems before they get really bad. And this is what I think breathing was really used for over thousands and thousands of years, not as a tool to help once problems are already very serious, right? But as a preventative maintenance tool to once you get out of balance, breathing can bring you back into balance.

And that's what Eastern medicine was all about. It was preventative maintenance. They never wanted to get sick. You saw your doctor when you were healthy so you could stay healthy. And this is just, you know, it's a tool that we carry with us all the time. And if we really start to focus on it, don't get neurotic about it, but just become aware of it. We can use that tool to turn our moods up or down, to give us energy or to make us more inclined to go to sleep or to rest. And I think that it's so important.

And again, it's so easily accessible to people once they figure it out. Absolutely. And I think going back to what you were just saying about Eastern medicine, almost to circle back to the beginning as we start to wrap up, I think lots of our listeners are keen yogis

and very interested in yoga philosophy and things. And you added some really interesting notes on the Indus Valley, the Vedas, the Yoga Sutras, and then also a Swami Rama and Pranayama and his exploration of yoga nidra and yoga sleep. Could you just tell us a little bit more about that? Sure, I kept that stuff for the end of the book. What I tried to do in the book is to set it up and first identify the problem, why we're breathing so poorly now. And a lot of it is evolutionary and anatomical. So there's no one specifically to blame. It's just how the human species is at this current point in time.

And then the second part, the largest part, is the foundation of breathing that everyone should adhere to. These are simple hacks and the science behind it and where all this stuff came from. But for the back of the book, what you're talking about is, this is stuff is once you have that foundation of healthy breathing, once you know... And to paraphrase healthy breathing here, we're talking about slow inhale and exhale out the nose.

Yes, through the nose, chewing. I know that seems like a weird one to throw in there, but chewing is something so few of us do now. And that affects our ability to take air in and take it out. So big exhale, slow through the nose, that solid foundation. Then towards the end of the book, I get into the stuff is once you have that down, where else can breathing take us? Where is the true potential of breathing? And you can get into Tummo and the Wim Hof stuff and holotropic breath work. But I was curious to know where the first conscious breathing came from, where in history it was first documented. And it turns out that in the Indus Valley 5,000 years ago, there are statues of people in a very obvious yoga poses, breathing.

And I learned that the first yoga, there were no movements. There were no downward dogs. There was no vinyasa flow. This was a science of sitting and breathing. All of those poses came about about 2,000 years ago. And they were held like there'd be a triangle but it would be held and never repeated because the point was to bend your body in a certain way so you could breathe into those different areas of your lungs

so vinyasa flow is only about a hundred years old so the original yoga the foundation was in breathing that's where the benefit is and that's where I believe most of the benefit is today And that's where I believe most of the benefit is today as well. There's nothing wrong with vinyasa. I practice yoga all the time and I do this, but I think the benefit is to be able to stretch your lungs in certain way, increase your lung capacity and really focus on your breath. And any yoga class worth its salt is going to have you focusing on your breath the whole time and that's what's so important incredible it's absolutely fascinating and so

just to finish what are the kind of breathing exercises that you go to every day that you feel can have a really genuine impact i like that five seconds in six six seconds in, and five to six seconds out. Don't get neurotic about if you're half a second off or whatever. Anything in the ballpark is going to have some big benefits. I also practice four, seven, eight breathing before bed or when I want to relax. That is inhale to a count of four, hold for seven, and then you exhale for eight. And I found this to be extremely relaxing. And when I've done this and hooked myself up to heart rate variability monitors, and you just watch your heart rate variability soar, which is a good thing. That's autonomic nervous

system balance. So I do that one. And also when I i work out i try to breathe much more slowly than feels comfortable and uh i've tested myself because i've said i'm definitely not getting enough oxygen and when you're breathing that slowly i found that every single time not only would i have enough oxygen but sometimes it would increase and so that need to breathe isn't dictated by oxygen it's dictated by an increase of CO2. So there's a reason why if you're breathing slowly and you're jogging, you're going to feel this warmth throughout your hands and the back of your neck. That's an increase of circulation, which is what you want. So I guess the final thing is, you know, at the end of the

book, there's a bunch of breathing techniques. But to me, the important story of this book wasn't the how of it. There's dozens of books on how to breathe right. It was the why and the what and where this stuff came from. But just speaking to your question, those are three I use often. And there's many more, but I won't bore you with those. No, honestly, it couldn't be less boring. It's absolutely fascinating. I think it's, yeah, as I said at the beginning, I'm a huge believer in the fact that I think we overcomplicate health a lot. And

we look at, you know, the latest trend and the latest fad and a quick fix. And often these things are kind of quite expensive or, you know, quite out there and just not something that are necessarily an easy part of people's everyday when they're're genuinely they're busy they're juggling work kids whatever's going on in their lives and I think what's interesting is to look at the practices that we can all incorporate that feel genuinely doable for the long term that feel like things we can actually do every day to help us no matter what we have going on in our lives and I think breathing is obviously like literally the most obvious thing to start with there. And it's not something we think about enough, but it's absolutely fascinating how if you

just take it back to the basics that literally the simple act of breathing can impact every organ in your body pretty much. For sure. And the most, I would say, emotional part of this journey of researching this book was to find these people who had had asthma for 50 years, who had had autoimmune problems, who had chronic inflammation, and who had adopted simple breathing habits and massively changed their health, who no longer had the symptoms from asthma. And I know that these sound like huge claims. I realize that. But this stuff is backed up with several studies. The asthma study was written about in the New York Times. So this is not sketchy outlier stuff. This is something that's really coming to a fore. And I would just like to echo what you said. These fad diets and fad

fitness trends, those are very difficult to keep up with. The whole point of these things is to make these healthy habits a part of your everyday life. And so they have to be easy enough and accessible enough, which is exactly what you do with eating. The point isn't to go on this fast for a week and say, okay, I'm better now. It's to make these healthy habits, you know, just a part of how you go about your day and night and to be able to enjoy your health because of that. James, I can't thank you enough for coming on and sharing this absolutely brilliant information. I so recommend the book. It's so interesting. It's simply called Breath. I'll put the details in the show notes below for anyone wanting to look it up. And we'll be back again next Tuesday.

Thanks so much, James. Have a lovely day heard only in Canada. Reach great Canadian listeners like yourself with podcast advertising from Libsyn ads. Choose from hundreds of top podcasts offering host endorsements or run a pre-produced ad like this one across thousands of shows to reach your target audience with Libsyn ads. Email bob at libsyn.com to learn more. That's b-o-b at l-i-b-s-y-n dot com.