WHOOP Podcast - How Nasal Breathing Can Transform Your Life with James Nestor

Episode Date: May 10, 2023

On this week’s episode, WHOOP VP of Performance Science, Principal Scientist, Kristen Holmes is joined by author James Nestor. James is an international bestselling author and journalist known for his book Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art. Breath has sold over 2 million copies worldwide, was translated into 35 languages, and was an instant bestseller in the New York Times. Kristen and James will discuss the research that inspired the work for Breath (3:20), how breathing is linked to performance and health (5:05), where we went wrong with breathing (6:48), why people weren’t paying attention to breathing issues (8:54), the connection between asthma, allergies, and breathing (11:20), people using James’ teachings and techniques (16:45), negative effects of mouth breathing (18:55), getting started with nasal breathing (22:15), elite athletes working on their breathing (25:30), HRV’s correlation to breathwork (32:05), breathing protocols and optimization (33:30), seeing benefits from breathing protocols (40:40), and the connection between breathing and weight loss (46:05).Resources:mrjamesnestor.comBreath: The New Science of a Lost ArtSupport the showFollow WHOOP: www.whoop.com Trial WHOOP for Free Instagram TikTok YouTube X Facebook LinkedIn Follow Will Ahmed: Instagram X LinkedIn Follow Kristen Holmes: Instagram LinkedIn Follow Emily Capodilupo: LinkedIn

What's up, folks? Welcome back to the WOOP podcast, where we sit down with the best of the best. Whoop is on a mission to unlock human performance. And I'm your host, Will Amit, the founder and CEO of Woop. This week's episode is a good one. We've got WOOP VP of Performance Science and Principal Scientist, Kristen Holmes, back again. And she's joined by author James Nestor. James is an international bestselling author and journalist known for his book, Breath,

the new science of a lost art. This book is incredible. It's sold over 2 million copies. Highly recommend it. And it's an instant bestseller in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, Sunday, London Times, and more. So check that book out. That is Breath. Kristen and James discuss the research that inspired James' work for Breath.

They talk about how you can pinpoint the moment. in history when humans went away from proper breathing. I'm a big believer in breathwork, so this resonated for me. How breathing is linked to performance and good health. The negative effects of mouth breathing. How to get started with nasal breathing. Turns out a couple minutes each day can make a big difference. The importance of practicing the right breathing techniques for elite athletes.

And the impact of breathing protocols on stress, weight loss, and your overall health. Turns out you can see an impact on your body in just 30 seconds with the right breathing protocols. If you're considering joining whoop, now is a very unique time. You can sign up for whoop literally with a free trial. So just come to our website, sign up for a free trial, get a whoop in the mail, and you have 30 days to decide if you'd like to become a member. That's at whoop.com to get set up and start on your journey to higher performance. If you have a question, once you answered on the podcast, email us, podcast at whoop.com. Call us 508-443-4952.

Without further ado, here are Kristen Holmes and the breathing expert, James Nestor. James, so great to have you here. Thanks a lot for having me. Yeah, you wrote just a sensational book entitled Breath, The New Science of Lost Art, and I think its contents truly highlight how vital it is to breathe correctly. If indeed, the goal is to unlock higher levels of health and fitness. So I'm so excited to kind of dig into everything that you learned in writing this book. But I'd love to start, if we can, just to take us through some of the research that really

inspired you to go down what is truly just this insane rabbit hole of all things, breath. Mm-hmm. So, I mean, it depends on what angle of research. We could talk about anthropology. We could talk about CO2. We could talk about biochemistry or physiology. But which angle? Maybe, yeah, let's start from just the evolutionary roots.

You know, how has our, how has breathing, you know, how we evolved, you know, and what did you, yeah, what did you find? So humans used to be really good breathers. We know this because we're able to look at ancient skulls and look at their upper palates and able to look at their sinus cavities and able to look at how their mouths formed. And we looked very, very different than we look today. And where a lot of this change started occurring was around 300, 400 years ago when industrialized foods began flooding into cities and the countryside and more. And so all of those foods dramatically and immediately changed the way our faces looked

and changed the way our airways functioned. So we can pinpoint the moment when we became the worst breathers in the whole animal kingdom. And I did not know this when I was first researching this book. So this was complete news to me. And the more I learned about it, the more impossible I thought it could be because I had understood that evolution was something that took tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of years. But this change that occurred throughout countries, throughout continents, throughout generations happened just so quickly. And that was

interesting to me. And it was also interesting to learn what a poor breather I have become because of that. And why were all poor breathers because of that? were you what did you notice about you know as you started to to learn about you know how are our kind of just do the aesthetics have have changed and the way we breathe change what did you see in the research that started to link this to you know performance and health was there anything that kind of stood out well yeah i started talking to the researchers who who study this stuff and have been studying it for decades and decades. And this is a little controversial, but I'm going to mention it anyway. They began

showing me pictures of sports stars. And they began showing me pictures of their faces. And I said, why are you showing me these faces of these sports stars? And they said, do you see anything that all of them seem to have in common? Not all of them, but most of them. And they have these very wide faces. They have these pronatic outward growing faces. They're able to breathe really well. And if you are not able to breathe really well, you are struggling to get energy. We get most of our energy through our breath, not through what we eat and what we drink. Most of the energy comes from breathing. And if you're struggling to do that, you're never ever really going to be able to perform at your top levels. So I started to see all of those connections between sports stars and their

level of performance and their facial growth and their facial shape. And then you start to see other people around the street who don't have that facial shape who are struggling to breathe. So, you know, this is, breathing is not just a conscious act. It is also tied to our skeletal development. And it's tied to so many other things of how we're able to do it and what level we're able to really access that breath and use it. Where do we go wrong in the developmental process? You know, so I assume, you know, we come out of the womb and I would imagine our default is we probably breathe perfectly, right? Like, at what point do we go awry, or is that not the case?

Well, I think nowadays we go wrong in every possible direction we go wrong, which is why indigenous populations don't need breath coaching, right? They don't need to be told to walk 10,000 steps a day, or to eat the right food, or have a lot of fiber, or get vitamin D through sun exposure. So it's just a disaster. Just modernity. in modern life. You know, I love living in a climate-controlled place. I'm a big fan of, you know,

a lot of the mod cons, but at the same time, we paid a very severe price because of this, and breathing is just one of them. So you mentioned that when we come out of the womb, we're good to go, but not the case now. We used to be hundreds and hundreds of years ago. We used to be completely good to go. And if you weren't, you weren't going to survive, right? But nowadays, because mothers are such poor breathers. They're passing this on to their kids. So we can actually see in the womb, we can look at a fetus right now

and see how apt this fetus is going to be to suffer from snoring and sleep apnea later on in life because our faces are changing before we're even born. And this wasn't the case before. I looked at a lot of fetal skulls from the past and they look like completely different animals. So just because we're at a disadvantage right when we get going doesn't mean we can't fix this. And that was the real driver behind this book

and this research. It's like, okay, here's the core issue. What do we do to really fix it, not just the Band-Aid, but to fix that core problem. I mean, I can't imagine that practitioners, doctors, you know, when you think about sleep problems and anxiety and, you know, performance issues or, you know, just the desire to lose weight and build muscle, like, is anyone asking, well, how do you breathe? Like, I feel like that conversation really isn't happening. So what should that conversation, understanding you're not a medical doctor? But, you know, what did you, what did you uncover?

Like, you know, what does this conversation actually need to look like if we're to get to, it seems to me that how we breathe is kind of root, root cause here. No one's having that conversation. You're right. There's doctors in my family. My father-in-law is a pulmonologist who've been pulmonologist for 40-something years. Most of my friends, half of them are doctors. So we talk about this stuff all the time.

And you're right, no one's talking about it, especially with the young kids, which is an absolute disaster. If you have a kid that snores or has sleep apnea, this is not cute. It's destroying their health. It's inhibiting their growth. It's inhibiting their neurodevelopment. It's inhibiting so many other problems. So this is something that I was shocked by how few people were even diagnosing it and how fewer people were treating any of these problems.

And some of the treatments they were using, we're actually making the breathing worse and making these kids worse. Like sleeping pills, make your breathing worse at night. So if your breathing is a problem at night, and that's the root issue behind so many of your chronic issues, then you have to fix that. So the answer is not a lot of people are looking at it. It's Dennis are actually becoming the breathing people.

I've been talking at a lot of dental conferences. You think that when you write a book about breathing, that you're not going to be talking to Dennis, but they're the only ones taking charge of this because they're the ones who spend the most time in patient's mouths. And they see the same patterns over and over and over. So there's hope in that. And I think that that whole field of dentistry is changing because no one else is taking this up. Your family physician very likely isn't going to be assessing your adenoids or tonsils or airway or snoring or sleep apnea. They don't have

time to do it. I'm not pointing fingers at doctors. They don't have time to do this. You're seeing 20 patients in an hour. You can't show them breathwork, you know? Yeah. Yeah, my son suffered from pretty bad allergies. It just, you know, just the stuff he knows, chronic stuff he knows and, you know, just a lot of sneezing. It didn't appear to be allergic to anything specific. I read a book in 2015, The Oxygen Advantage, Dr. Patrick McEwen, and started taping his mouth. And sure enough, he has really no allergies. I found this really interesting. Is this something that you found in your research?

Is there, you know, what is the connection there between just asthma allergies and breathing? Yeah, I'm nodding because I just, I hear this every single day. And I've heard it every single day for, I mean, people say I've gotten thousands of letters. Wow. And every talk I do, people come up, you know, some of them are laughing. Some of them are crying because people are so frustrated that they're not being taken care of properly or they're getting the wrong advice. So you're smart enough to go out and diagnose the issue and try things out. And look, look what happens.

It works. And it's free. Totally. So just to be clear, it's like not always. Like, not all allergies are caused by mouth breathing, right? You know, some people have dairy intolerance. That's a big one. Sometimes it's pets or other things.

But you can only benefit from breathing in and out of your nose. And sometimes that benefit is very small, and sometimes it can change your life. And this is what I keep hearing over and over again, and especially at night. So how we breathe at night is setting us up for the next day. And people say, oh, you know, breath is breath. I'm just getting air in. I'm getting air out. It's just 100% wrong.

And your son is living proof of this. How you're breathing at night is going to dictate your stress levels. It could help control your blood sugar. It can help control your cortisol. It can allow you to get into deeper, more restorative stages of sleep. I mean, on and on and on, because if you're struggling to do anything at the time when we're supposed to be resting and restoring, everything's going to go off the rails. And our bodies are really good at compensating, so they can compensate for a while, maybe months, maybe even years, and eventually things are just going to break down. So this often happens with kids with ADHD, with learning difficulties, with growth problems.

with wetting their beds, they're in their teenage years, they're wetting their beds, they can't sleep at anyone else's house. I mean, I've heard these dozens and dozens of times and no one is looking at their breathing. So specifically this sleep tape, I'll get off my soapbox here and talk about some pragmatics. So let's talk about sleep tape. So about 65% of the population breathes

with an open mouth when they're sleeping. So not everyone needs sleep tape. So when you hear these people saying, Everyone's going to benefit from it. You know, that 35% isn't because they're already closing their mouth. So the first thing you have to do is, are you a mouth breather at night? There's a pretty good chance you are. Do you wake up with a very dry and pacie mouth?

Are you drinking water throughout the night? Do you get a lot of cavities? The number one cause of cavities I heard from Dennis isn't sugar. It's mouth breathing. So if all of those things are happening, there's a good chance you are sleeping with an open mouth. For those people, sleep tape appears to be beneficial, but you have to start in slow. Start by wearing a little piece of tape for 10 minutes in front of your computer answering boring emails, then do 20 minutes the next day, 30 minutes, you get where I'm going.

So after about a week, are you comfortable enough? Have you watched TV laying down? Have you taken a nap wearing sleep tape? Try it at night. Is it right for you? Only you can decide that. Don't listen to anyone else. Listen to your own body.

But the sleep tape thing, it just keeps going. I just keep hearing about it. And people send me their sleep scores all the time. And it's doing something. Yeah. It completely transformed my sleep and really help to transform my health. And again, this is a free and easy thing. Is it right for everyone?

No. Is it right for you? Find out. Yeah. Over the years, I mean, I've been with Woop now for almost seven years. And, of course, we collect a whole bunch of, you know, all but we collect lots of hurry data and we stage sleep. And there's no question.

that when folks begin consciously being more conscious of nose breathing instead of mouth breathing and incorporating taping at night, we see huge improvements in the restorative sleep. We see massive decreases in sleep disturbances. You know, and it's funny, like, when, you know, I used to work a lot more with just with teams, but that was always the first place. When I would see a lot of disturbances with athletes, sure enough, they'd have a deviated septum or, you know, or they'd have, you know, problems with asthma, but, you know, it always would kind of go back to sleep. You know, I have lots of examples of athletes who are literally

would take a redshirt ear just to correct their deviated septum and they would come back just levels above where they're at. I mean, they're already elite, you know, playing in some of the top collegiate programs and they'd come back at even a higher level. So it's, it's really interesting to see the performance gains, for sure, that can that can happen once corrected, but just, the overall quality of life. And maybe if you want to talk about a couple stories, just, you know, you're at these conferences, you're speaking, you know, you're getting tons of letters, you know, what have been some of the really kind of, I guess, heartwarming moments that were maybe surprising to you just the benefits of, you know, the knowledge that you're putting out there and people adopting

these kind of new way of living. Well, one of them really echoes your experience. A lot of people frustrated parents are writing about their kids. And so this dad sent me the sleep data from his kid. No one had ever talked about his kid's breathing. He had learning different. I mean, everything. His growth was stunted. ADHD can sleep at night, wetting his bed, asthma, allergies, on and on and on. He's been on fistfuls of different drugs for over years, something like, you know, seven to nine pills just, just pumping this kid up. No one ever looked at his sleep. So his dad went in, recorded to sleep. It was a complete disaster, convinced the kid to wear sleep tape. He didn't do the recommended, I'm going to try for 10 minutes, just went full

bore into it. The next night, the kid from snoring and sleep happening, choking on himself all night to zero the very next night two weeks later the vast majority of the issues were 100% gone and the doctor of course would just say oh what a coincidence oh that's strange i guess you're doing something well no interest in looking at this connection between breathing and sleep quality so the good news is that we have different sources and different ways of getting information now so people who want to take charge of some aspects of their health can do that and the other good news is all of these things we're talking about are free they're available for everyone someone's going to try to monetize sleep tape blah blah blah you can buy that stuff it has a fancy package it works great so does the stuff down at

wall green so whatever works well for you but it just comes down to awareness it starts with awareness and then there's a lot of people they become aware but they're just like i don't want to wear sleep at night that's cool i don't i don't care what you do but but as long as you have a choice to know what is good and what is bad and what may improve my health and the health of my family, then I think that's what counts. What's missing out when we're breathing through our mouth and not through our nose? Like what's kind of happening physiologically that is, you know, is, you know, kind of negative? So I think like a few mouth breaths, some people become so obsessed with this.

And I get those letters as well. you know, I counted five mouth breasts today. Is that going to injure my health? I'm just like, dear, dear God. So I'm talking about the vast majority of the breasts you're taking. Not all of them. I'm breathing through my mouth a bit here. I'm talking to you, right? Which is one of the reasons why when you're talking for three hours, it's so, so exhausting. Totally. When you laugh, you're breathing through your mouth, when you're doing some pranayama exercises, you're breathing through your mouth. If you get into zone four and zone five, you can use mouth breathing as it as another gear to crank you up to get more air. It's a wonderful thing. But for the vast majority of your breast, when you're

not working out, when you're not doing pranayama or Kundalini or whatever, or laughing or talking, it should be in and out through the nose. And here's why. Because when we breathe air in and out through our nose, we are cleansing it, we're trapping that moisture, and we're conditioning it. And that's what you want. You don't want to expose your lungs to everything in the, outdoor environment. If you live in a city, like I do, that means allergens and pollens, smog, and dust. And when you breathe through the mouth, your lung is basically an exterior organ. It's exposed to everything. And again, we're built to deal with this. We'll start coughing more and expunging some of that. But in the long run, it's going to wear us down. So the nose is our first

line of defense against bacteria and viruses as well. Finally, I'll mention, because I know there's a bunch of high performance athletes out there. Your nose is controlling the amount of air you can take in and take out. And it does that for reason because that allows you to extract so much more oxygen. When you have that buffer, that baffle, it creates that pressure in your lungs and allows you to more easily get more oxygen and maintain healthy levels of CO2, which allows for better blood flow. So this is not a hypothesis. It's not a theory. This is a fact that anyone who studied any level of this knows. And this is a fact that all of the other mammals certainly know because check out a horse when it's sprinting. Check out a cheetah. When it's sprinting, check out a

lion. I mean, they're all breathing through their noses. So we should be as well. So how would you recommend someone start? So for example, if let's say, you know, we've, we've, we've, we've been using, closing our mouth consciously and using tape, you know, throughout the day and, you know, we're sleeping with our mouth closed. And now we want to try to exercise with, you know, breathing exclusively through our nose. What would be, what can someone expect when they start that journey? I know my own experience, your capacity reduces significantly and it's really humbling. But just maybe walk us through, like, what is that process? And, you know, if you can kind of ride it and really stick to nasal breathing, you know, through interval training or,

you know, whatever type of trainer doing, weightlifting. What are the benefits that people can expect if they kind of ride it out? Well, expect it to be miserable. Expect your performance to go down. Expect to curse a lot at me and anyone else who has told you to do this. So what you need to do is to get rid of your Western mindset and not try to go. out there and kick this thing's ass as you're used to doing with everything else but go into this very very slowly in a controlled and patient way because that's how you're going to be able to diagnose if there's a larger structural issue in your nose that you will need to get fixed for the vast majority of people that is not the case what they need to do is start to use their nose more

and more breathe in and out of your nose so what i would do as far as the step by step and instructions is I would start off when you're walking around the neighborhood, walking your dog, walking to work, walking through an airport, breathe in for four steps, breathe out for four steps. Breathe in for four steps, out for four steps. Does that feel comfortable? Do you want to push it a little more? You can start extending it. Breathe in for four steps. Breathe out for six steps. You see where I'm going with this. So you can start to extend that and to continue breathing in and out of your nose. Once you get more comfortable with that, you can start to incorporate that into your jogging. Start playing around with your breath just to that level of discomfort with your

jogging in and out. And it should be, if you're going to extend anything, it should be the exhale you are extending. So you don't necessarily want to be extending how many steps you take on the inhale, but the exhale, because when you exhale, you are relaxing your body. I think you will be amazed, especially if you jog a lot, what a difference the cyclical, easy breathing will make. It also makes jogging a lot more fun because it gives you something to focus on and to do. So I would start with that. And if you were still having issues, if there is just an incredible amount of congestion in your nose after a few weeks of doing this, that's right, a few weeks of doing this, then there could be a structural problem. You may want to see an E&T and see if there's something that could be done

about that. But otherwise, for most people, just using the nose and using it more often can help to open up all of those tissues and make you an obligate nasal breather. Perfect. Okay. I guess I guess to be interested, you know, for elite level athletes, you know, there's going to be decreases in performance. So I guess I'm wondering, you know, what are those tradeoffs? Like, you know, if I have, if I'm an athlete, I'm preparing for the World Cup, you know, in six months, is it worth it to me to kind of take a hit for four to six weeks as I'm trying to build my efficiency and become a better breather? you know, what would you advise, I suppose, a kind of a high performance coach who's training an athlete or a team, you know, is it, is it worth it to like really go down this rabbit hole in terms of the improvements that they might see? Or is this really at the margins? Everybody's different. So everyone breathes slightly differently and everyone has a slightly

different breathing dysfunction. So some people can convert to nasal breathing pretty quickly because they're already breathing the majority of their breasts in and out through their noses. If you've got someone who has just been jogging and running and performing obligate mouth breathing the whole time, this is going to take this person much longer. And you're right that performance is going to dip precipitously, especially with someone who is an obligate mouth breather. But the more you try this, the more that you will notice that once you reach that very low dip of converting yourself to breathe and to react and respond in this completely different way, I have never heard of anyone whose performance did not only rebound, but also

increase. Sometimes that increase was very small. Sometimes it was profound. So I'm not saying there isn't someone out there. But from all the people that I've talked to and all the elite trainers that I know, which are several of them who are training Olympians. I mean, top level people, they have never, ever heard of any of their athletes having a decrease in performance. And some of these people have just become monsters afterwards. Sometimes it takes a few months. You know, if you're training for the World Cup in six months and you've only been mouth breathing, probably not the right thing to do at that time. You know, wait until you have that three and a half years off and then convert then. And again, the benefits can be really profound. A lot of people may

think, well, it's just breathing. How can I? The whole point of performance, especially in competition, you have to be operating as efficiently as possible. So if you are wasting energy, breathing too much, struggling too much, your competitor is going to get ahead of you. And just imagine what you can do by conserving that energy in using the least amount of effort to do the most, your performance is going to increase. And that's what we've been seeing time and time again. I love it. Yeah, I spent bulk of my life as an athlete and as a coach.

So I'm used to trying to squeeze efficiencies out of performance. But I, so I guess I wonder, you know, you think about we do a beep test. We do, you know, do various strength things. We do we test flexibility. You know, we do all sorts of tests, but do we actually test how efficient an athlete is in terms of their lung capacity and their oxygen and CO2 exchange? Like, would you recommend a bolt test, for example, for, you know, for athletes? Like, what would be the best entry point for a team who's like, you know what?

I want to figure out who are a breather, you know, who are a great breathers who aren't, and is there are other efficiencies that we can, that we can create with these athletes? Yeah, there isn't one prescribed list of things that you should look at. Lung capacity is important, right? Of course it is, but it's also how you're using the lungs that you already have. So you can use smaller lungs much more efficiently and have your breathing much more efficient and be a lot better of a performer and an athlete than someone with larger lungs. You know, so it's not just that.

There's so many things that go into that. I think CO2 is going to be huge. Yeah. I think looking at CO2, instead of oxygen, most people, unless you're chronically sick, have emphysema or long COVID or whatever, don't have oxygen problems. You have CO2 problems. You're breathing way too much. So that one, I think, is going to be coming online and being used a lot more.

And again, I want to be clear, like larger lungs are better, but it's not just the size that matters. It really depends on how you're breathing. So, to answer your question, it's a whole bunch of different things that you need to look at. What Patrick McEwen and a lot of other people do is they have people do a bolt score, and it's basically a breath hold. So what you do is you take an inhale in, just soft, not exaggerated, that's cheating, and then just calmly exhale to neutral. Don't push that air out. Hold your breath.

How long can you hold your breath? So you're supposed to be able to comfortably hold your breath on that exit. to neutral to about 40 seconds. And what we've seen consistently is the better you are an athlete, the more easily you can hold that breath because your respiration is locked in because you know your body is used to having that level of carbon dioxide in its bloodstream. And that CO2 is going to help open up blood vessels and help deliver more oxygen. So that's a great thing that you can do. That's also free, that Bolt score. I think there's a lot of benefits in it, not just for

athletes but for asthmatics panic suffers and more just as a baseline right it's blood oxygen level test right is the acronym okay and in basically less than 20 seconds you're probably over breathing what would be that room for improvement as we would say diplomatically okay yeah you want to be you you you don't and i know that everyone's going to just struggle to hold your breath i should have mentioned this too this is not holding your breath until your face is red and you're struggling This is the first palpable need to breathe. So maybe you're swallow, right? Maybe your abs sort of, your diaphragm sort of moves up for a second.

So whenever you feel that, you mark it, mentally market. And another thing I want to mention, this is not a one and done thing. What you have, your body is changing all the time after you eat, it's harder. If you have jet leg, it's harder. If you slept like crap, your bolt score could be 15, right? So take these over the course of a week, take it a few times a day, and then look at that delta. What is that average amount? Do you, have you worked at all with a marker called heart rate variability?

Oh, yeah. Okay, okay. I figured, yeah. Yeah, so it's a metric that we track on Woop. Very good at measuring hearty variability. And would you expect to see, you know, my hypothesis is always when I see individuals with kind of a lower baseline hearty variability like i always am like i wonder how you breathe um what would you would you expect to see kind of lower HRV um would there be a relationship between one's HRV and how

well they breathe 100% there would be and this is the thing that if if you've got a real skeptic someone's just like it's just breathing don't worry about it i think this is all BS hook them up to woo, have them breathe at the coherent breathing pattern, which is about five to six seconds in, five to six seconds out, five to six seconds. And that's, that's all it is. And then look at the heart rate variability after 30 seconds. Yeah. And I think that you are going to see huge jumps in HRV. I've never seen someone's decrease. I've always seen it increase. And this is the thing where people are like, oh, my God, because a lot of people have said, oh, this breathing is a placebo effect, which is bizarre.

This is a biological function. If you want data, go for it. Look at your HRV. Look at your blood pressure. Look at other metrics. Look at your sleep once you start breathing if you don't believe anyone else. Listen to your own body. What are the most efficacious, you just kind of outlined one?

One of the most efficacious breathing, you know, protocols or practices. I mean, one that I practice religiously is resonance frequency breathing. You know, I'd be curious to kind of get your thoughts in terms of, you know, how do we train ourselves to be, you know, the most effective, you know, at breathing? People always, like they expect, since I've studied this stuff for so long, talks to so many people, they think it's like some mysterious, complicated secret. I'm going to let them in on. It's like, oh, this is what I learned in the cave of Tibet.

that I hate to burst everyone's bubble, but it's the simplest stuff that is the most effective. And it's the most unsexy stuff too. People like tend to want to feel like they need to go to Hawaii for a week to learn some fancy breath where to become a better breather. Sorry, it's about shutting your mouth at night. It's about breathing in a slow rhythmic manner throughout the day. It's about understanding your breathing

when you are working out and using your breathing shift gears, right? And knowing that mouth breathing when you're working at really intense levels can be a wonderful benefit to your body and your brain as long as you shift it back down. So those simple things that we talked about are the most powerful. You have to become a normal breather before you're going to become a great breather. And normal breathing is the majority of the breasts in and out through the mouth. It's not snoring. It's not sleep out. So once you get all of that very uninteresting stuff out of the way, then you can start playing with stuff. So resonance, frequency, breathing, coherent breathing, whatever the hell you want to call it.

Inhale to the point up for about five to six seconds in, five to six seconds out. For people who are taller, over six feet, I learned this from a doctor, relatively new information, should be breathing even slower. So you should be extending that to around eight seconds in, eight seconds out. larger lungs larger diaphragm and i'm six two so i've noticed that slower breath with my hrv goes way up you can still get benefits from the five to six you know so so that's that's a good spot to start kids they need to breathe more so you could start them at three or four right and and so you just start at a place where you're comfortable then you can start working it up

so that's a very powerful tool something else that i use all the time use a few times times today, especially when things get spicy and frustrating is take two breaths. So one breath in, hold for three. Another breath on top of that breath, extending the chest out. And you just let it fall out to neutral. We're going to try that again, everybody. One breath in. Hold to three, two, three. Another breath in. And just let it fall out. so i do that about see i can just feel it right there do that about three or three or four times when you are really stressed out when something is really aggravating when you're putting in your password and they change the password and you have to upload the all that crap that we have to

deal with every day that's very effective for me maybe for you as well and then to go into that resonant frequency that coherent breathing pattern so once you've got those easy ones down. And once you're a normal breather, then I think you can start experiencing all of the really weird stuff. And you're going to get most benefits with these long breathwork sessions once you know how to breathe properly. I can't tell you how many people I see in breath work or they're dysfunctional breathers. They're getting some out of it. But I'm like, my God, you could, if you actually open up your lungs, if you had the right biomechanics here, you'd be able to really be able to push this into some interesting ways.

So that's what I would do. That's my blanket prescription for people who want to get into better breathing. Yeah, that's beautiful advice. I definitely am a firm believer to get the foundation right first. And if you don't, you're just building inefficiency on top of inefficiency, and no one wants to do that. So talk maybe a little bit about, so you talked about the calming and relaxation type of breath work.

What about a tumo type of breathing, you know, this really cyclic hyperventilation type of breathing? What kind of place does that have in, you know, just the spectrum of all things, kind of breathwork and breathing and everything optimization? This was something that really confused me because I learned from people like Patrick who were just like it's slow, low to the nose, you know, all the time you want to be chilled. And yet we know the science is very clear. many benefits to vigorous pranayamas, vigorous creas, tumo breathing, wimaw breathing. They're all doing the same thing, right? So it doesn't have to be this thing or that thing. And that's what frustrates me about the breathwork community.

Some people glom on to just one specific thing, but breathing is vast. We can do it in a bunch of different ways. It's been interesting to see Patrick sort of changing his views on this and seeing the benefits of these hyperventilation techniques. So what these do is they're done for a short amount of time and they're extremely stressful. You may be thinking, well, why do I want to be stressed out? Like I'm stressed out throughout the rest of the day. What you're dealing with through the rest of the day is this low-grade stress,

which we know is the main driver behind the majority of modern diseases right now. These extremely stressful breathwork practices sort of are a pressure release valve. They let you get it all out. for the rest of the time, you're able to chill out. This is hermetic stress. It's the same thing with a cold bath. You wouldn't spend two hours in a cold bath, unless you're Wim Hof, you know, but there's no benefits to doing that.

That's where you're going to start to injure yourself, but two minutes, three minutes, huge benefit of doing that. So these breathwork practices, they're a little longer than that. Some of them are 15 minutes, sometimes 20 minutes. Once you get better at this, they can go on for 90 minutes. That's where things get really, really wild. But that's the benefit is they allow you to release all of that stress, start again from neutral and get on with your day. And I think that there is incredible benefit behind doing these practices.

I don't care which one you do. They all kind of do the same thing. But you have to know, you have to have that foundation set. And again, don't believe me, you can look at the science and the studies, these vigorous breathwork practices and see. for yourself. And your book is so beautifully outlines like all the research that exists around these different techniques. And so, yeah, thank you for being so, I think, rigorous and just putting all of that together is, yeah, it's really beautiful. So people can definitely look at that as a source of insight and an inspiration, really. How often do you think

one needs to practice these techniques to see benefits. Do you have any sense? Have you read anything in the literature that, you know, gives us some parameters in terms of, you know, when do we actually start to see benefits? It depends on who you are. And markers of inflammation and, you know, anything that can be measured. Yeah. So from what I see, usually in the first 30 seconds, you're seeing benefits. Oh, I love that. Just from very, very simple practices. And again, and hook yourself up with every wearable, every device, and see for yourself. Literally a few focus breaths, your body will start reacting to that and it will start functioning differently.

Both of us, we did that two inhale trick and I don't know about you, but after 10 seconds, I bet my blood pressure decreased. I bet my, there was more blood flow to the brain and all of these things are measured. So it's not just about doing it for 30 seconds, though. It's about building better habits and building better habits can take weeks and weeks. So this is what I like about breathing as opposed to the benefits of eating, which we know we can eat better and you're going to have benefits, but you'll see those benefits a couple weeks or maybe a couple months later down the line, especially if you're looking at lipids or something.

Like it takes a long time. With breathing, you can feel these benefits and you can see them on readouts and wearables within a few seconds. So if all of that's going to happen within a few seconds, what's going to happen after a few days or weeks? So, so it's, again, it's hard to say because different people are in different levels. I've never seen anyone that has not benefited of operating more efficiently, of allowing their body to restore better at night. So, again, it's what level of benefits is, but that's up to the individual. Yeah, we saw it. There was a paper just published in Cell Press.

Dr. Andrew Huberman was one of the authors on the study, and they looked at a bunch of different breathing protocols, and one of them was the cyclic sigh, and that really did emerge, of all the other breathwork techniques in the study that emerged as being the most efficacious and reducing anxiety and stress. And so it was really, really cool to see that just even in five minutes a day, folks experienced decreases in perceived stress and decreases in perceived anxiety. And these subsisted, you know, long after that five minute, to your point, you know, it's like if you just spend five minutes, you know, you're going to feel the benefits and the effects of that technique, you know, after, well after it's over.

And I know that people don't want another thing to have to do. Like people are already on their supplements and, you know, eating right and working out. But this is something that you can do while you're working. It can be something you can do while you're commuted to work in your car or whatever. It doesn't matter. It's not like people think that proper breathing is you have to go to this class. and do this thing for 40 minutes. You have to do it every day.

That's garbage. You have to become a normal breather first and foremost. So what helped me train is the sleep day, is learning how to do that at night. That's a huge benefit. And then when I'm in front of a computer, which is like all the time, sometimes I'll put on a little, you know,

chiming sound on my phone. There's a zillion different apps that can do this. That can just train you when to inhale, when to exhale, when to exhale, When to inhale, when to exhale. So it doesn't stop you from what you're already doing. And if you walk your dog every day like I do or if you jog every day, you can incorporate. These are things, again, you're already doing so you can incorporate different breathing techniques

and different practices to help make that process more efficient and enjoyable. So it's less of an of an ask than it is asking someone to meditate for a half an hour day every day, which 95% of the people are going to fail it to. Right, right. Meditation's hard. You know, it's like it's a really interesting skill. I found personally, I struggle with meditation, you know, for, and that might just be my personality type. But yeah, I mean, I find mindful meditation a little bit easier. Mindful breathing is my go-to, you know, but yeah, meditation could be hard. And I think breathing is just a way more natural and potentially like more beneficial. And that's what we saw in the Hebrew and study. But yeah, you know, I was always not very good at meditating at all until I figured out how to breathe properly. And now it's something that I find extremely easy to do because it starts with proper breathing. That's where it starts.

And that is sort of the door that opens up these other things that you can do with meditation. We know that the benefits of meditation are profound, no one's going to argue with that. It's just really hard for us to get all of our monkey minds into that space. But once you figure out this coherent breathing, I tell you, meditation gets a lot easier because you're able to consciously control your nervous system and how your brain is functioning. And it allowed me to finally be able to do this as a regular practice. That's great. Maybe I'm part of myself.

I don't know. Maybe I'm better at it than I think. But I definitely try. I would say that one of the top three reasons why folks come on to the Wu platform is they're interested in losing weight. I'd be very curious to know what you've learned in terms of, you know, between the connection between breath and weight loss. It's really hard because there aren't many studies that have looked at specifically breathing patterns and weight loss. but we do know a few things you burn fat with oxygen okay and a lot of people who are overweight are running anaerobically especially in certain areas of the body which makes it almost impossible

to burn fat so the key is to get blood flow to all of these areas and to deliver oxygen easily to these areas and that's how you're going to burn fat how do you do that you have to start by breathing properly. We know that a lot of people, once they start gaining weight, that weight can accumulate in the chest and stomach area, which allows, which does not allow them to take a proper deep breath. So many of them start breathing in and out of their chest. A shallow. Yeah, which stresses the body out, blood sugar spikes, cortisol, spikes. You're not able to really get that blood flow into all of these areas. Another thing that happens is when you start breathing shallow, you start offloading too much CO2, not just shallow, but when you're

breathing too much, you are offloading too much CO2, which causes all of those blood vessels to start to close up, which also inhibits that blood flow, you know, allows you to run anaerobically in these areas where you don't want to be running anaerobically. So proper breathing is, I believe, is essential for easier weight loss. And we do know that, what is it? Eight pounds of every 10 pounds that you lose comes out through our breath. We lose weight through breathing. And a lot of people think, well, I'm just going to breathe more,

and then I'm going to offload more fat. That's not how it works. Sorry, it's tied to metabolism. So that is how we lose weight is through our breath. So by doing that more efficiently, I wish someone will. would do a big controlled study of this. I'm convinced that it can benefit in easier weight loss. I mean, it makes a lot of sense. You know, if you're a poor breather, I mean, it's hard to know exactly the mechanism just because there's so many things that play, you know, when you don't breathe

properly, you don't sleep well, when you don't sleep well, your hormone and, you know, your hormones don't fire as they should, you know, ghrelin levels, your leptin levels. Like, you know, it just seems that there's just some really, I think, direct effects for sure, but probably lots of indirect effects as well that make it hard to kind of unpack. But yeah, I feel like that would be a really, really cool study to run. What we do know, there's a bunch of studies, dozens and dozens of them looking at people who are overweight and controlling their breathing and carbon dioxide levels. And the higher the CO2 levels, you can lose weight precipitously, so much faster, so much more efficiently. And you can look these up on PubMed or whatever. They call it

normaric, you know, carbon dioxide therapy. It's all of these crazy different names, which is something that makes it so confusing. But it's great for diabetics and it's fantastic for weight loss. That's something you likely have to do in a lab because they're messing up with the amounts of oxygen and CO2 that you are inhaling. Nonetheless, there's a lot you can do not being in a lab. That is breathing in and out of your nose. That is getting that CO2 level up to a healthy state where you can allow for that proper blood flow. Amazing. So what do you, what did I forget?

Yeah. Like, what are, is there kind of an area that you feel like is just so important for people to, to be aware of that maybe we haven't covered? I just think that a lot of this stuff may sound really kooky. It sounded pretty crazy to me until I spent so many years in this field. And when you start to look at different Olympians, that this used to be like this little secret that they wouldn't tell their competitors about it is. breath training but you look at all these olympic teams that have adopted proper breathing or sometimes crazy breathing practices and their performance just goes through the roof and this is all recorded stuff so what we're talking about here this it's not uh you know some placebo effect obviously but it's it's an essential part of our biology like what we're talking about here is how our bodies work and to allow your body to work better is going to allow it to perform better, whether that's

losing weight more efficiently or whether that's, you know, jogging a marathon. So to me, even though it sounds nuts at the core of it, at the foundation of it, it makes perfect sense. And don't listen to us. Go try it for yourself. See how it works out. Nice. Would you say, so for the folks who are really skeptical out there, what would be the three kind of nuggets that you would, like if you were trying to kind of, you just, there's a gunpoint you had, you had to sell this idea of like nasal breathing. You know, what would be your kind of top three things that you would mention? So if you have high blood pressure, go in, take your blood pressure and then breathe for two minutes at that five to six second rate, five to six seconds in.

five to six seconds out. You just close your eyes and breathe. Don't push it. We tend to very lightly. No one should be able to see you breathing. Breathe deep down into your belly. After a couple minutes doing that, you can take your blood pressure and see how that works for you. You can look at your heart rate variability while you are doing this. Okay. So again, don't believe us. Believe your own body. Believe the own data that you are collecting. Beyond that, you can see if you're a mouth breather at night. There are different apps you can use. A snore lab is one. No, I'm not being paid by them. They have a free version of it. And it just, it allows you to record all the snoring and choking that you're doing. It's available for everyone. It's not an

official sleep study, but it's a good general gauge. And then try to close your mouth at night and collect your sleep data and see what changes for you. So that's the second thing I would do. And the third thing I would do is you can adopt these different practices, the cyclical sci, physiological sigh, whatever you want to call it. You can try some breathwork that's available for free and just see how you feel because that matters too. I know everyone's all stuck on data and numbers, but it ultimately comes down to how is your body operating? How do you feel? And you can start with that. And if you like what you're seeing, you can go further into it and see what it can do for you.

So I want to be very clear. I can't stand the idea that I'm actually offering prescriptions to people because I'm a journalist here. Like, I want to give you a choice on what to do, but I don't care what you do. I'm not going to follow up on you. This is up to you. And if you want to ignore all this information, it's perfectly fine for me. I just want to offer people some, you know, some choices and ways of them to possibly improve their sleep.

their athletic performance and their anxiety levels. That's right. Well, thank you so much for your time today. It's been so fun chatting. Where is the best place for folks to find you and all the good work that you do? So my publisher allowed me to put all 500 or so studies up on my website because we knew that people were going to be very skeptical about this. So that's available for free. There are pictures there. there's some graphs there i'm not collecting email addresses there's no paywall you can just go to mr james nester mr jamesnester.com you can see the bibliography there i also went and interviewed a bunch of experts in the fields and people from stanford people from harvard you don't believe me you might want to believe

them there are interviews available for free there and some breathing exercises uh i also have an instagram thing but my god that social media stuff is a lot of work so i'm extremely lazy at it. But there's some stuff I did in the last couple years that might be of interest. That's right along these lines. Amazing. Well, thank you so much. And we'll link to all that in the show notes. And yeah, and just thank you again for putting all of this out into the world. Big thanks to James Nestor for coming on the show. Check out the book, Breath and his insights on the Power of Breath Work. If you enjoyed this episode of the Wood Podcast, please leave a rating or review, please subscribe to the WOOP podcast.

Check us out on social at Woop at Will Ahmed. If you have a question, you want us answered on the podcast. Email us, podcast at Woop.com. Call us 508, 443-4952. New members can use the code Will, get a $60 credit on Woop accessories. Alternatively, new members can sign up for a free trial. So check that out. That's Woop.com.

And that's a wrap for the week. Thank you all for listening. We will catch you next week on the Woop Podcast. As always, stay healthy. and stay in the green.