The science of breath with James Nestor

0:02 A listener production. This is Crappita Happy, and I am your host, Cas Done. I'm a clinical and coaching psychologist and mindfulness meditation teacher, and of course, author of the Crappita Happy books. In this show, I bring you conversations with interesting, inspiring, intelligent people who are experts in their field and who have something of value to share that will help you feel less crappy and more happy. This week, I'm chatting with James Nestor. James is an author and a journalist who has written for publications such as The New York Times, The Atlantic, and many many more. I recently came across his most recent book called Breath The New Science of a Lost Art, as part of my own deepening interest in breath work, which I find really interesting, and as soon as I read it, I knew that I had to get James onto the show to share some of the fascinating things here writes about in this book. Now, what I did not know when I reached out to James was that this book, actually, after it was published in May twenty twenty, spent eighteen weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. It was also on Instant Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times and Sunday London Times top ten bestseller, so obviously I am not the only one who found it to be a compelling read. In the book, James explores the history of how the human species has lost the ability to breathe properly and why as a result, we're suffering from all sorts of chronic conditions like snoring, sleep, apnea, asthma,

1:37 autoimmune disease, allergies, and so much more. Who would have thought the simple act of breathing, which comes so easily and naturally to most of us, would be the cause of so many physical and psychological problems. If you were anything like me, you might think that there is nothing you really need to know about how to breathe. But like me, you might find you're very mistaken. I really hope you enjoy this conversation with James James Nessa, thank you so much for being on the Crapy to Happy podcast. Thanks a love for having me, James. I recently read your book Breath, The New Science of a Lost Art. I was absolutely fascinated, and I went hunting to find you to talk to about your research. What I wanted to start with is what led to this interest of yours in better understanding the breath and breathing and going down this whole path of the research that you did.

2:30 It wasn't one thing in particular, it was several things that kept happening over several years. It took me a long time to convince myself that breathing was a topic worthy of spending several years writing a book about. I was not convinced for a very long time until I talked to enough researchers and enough doctors and polmonologists and anthropologists that I realized that there was a story behind this seemingly simple thing that I could not find anywhere else. I didn't see that anyone else had tackled it. There's a lot of books on how to breathe, but not why we should be breathing in certain ways and what it's doing to us and where it all comes from.

3:12 And so that's what I tried to focus on. And as a part of your research, you put yourself through a whole lot of personal experiments. You used yourself as a guinea pig to really better understand the power of the breath and breathing. I would be really interested for you to share what you know, some of the things that you learned, and some of the things that you did. That was never my intention writing this book. I did not think I was going to be in this book at all, and you could see that from the book Possal. Yeah, well, that was not really what I set out to do, and it always annoyed me reading nonfiction whenever I saw the author involve. So when I do pop up, I try to get out of the way as soon as possible and let the science come in, because I feel it's pretty pointless, especially when you're talking about nonfiction. If there's constantly this magnifying glass on the author, there should be a mirror on the reader. And that's how I approach my writing is I want the reader to be understanding what's happening to their bodies, what has happened, what will be happening in the future, and sometimes the reader needs some handholding, and so in those circumstances I try to pop in and say, hey, I don't know anything about the subject either, and I'm going to take you through the process of me learning about it, and by that you can learn about it too. So some of that process was involved in doing experiments and studies that I could not find anywhere else. I had spent a

4:43 lot of time at Stanford Medical School and was looking through all of their studies and talking to so many researchers, and in particular looking at the difference of mouth breathing and nasal breathing. We've known that there's a huge difference to your brain to how you're body functions, how your heart functions, your blood pressure, on and on. But what we didn't know was how quickly the changes when you change the pathway through which you breathe really turn on. And so that's what we studied at Stanford, And honestly, there was no one else who was going to do this experiment, so I had a volunteer for it. So what you did was you spent ten days. Wasn't it completely with your nose basically glued shut, like stuffed shut, so that you could only breathe through your mouth twenty four to seven. It sounds so incredibly uncomfortable. What was it like and what did you discover?

5:39 It sounds uncomfortable, And I realized, to some listeners, this may sound like a supersize me stunt or some jackass jokey stunt. But that's not how we viewed it, and that's not how the researchers understood it. You've got about twenty five to fifty percent of the population that habitually breathes through its mouth, and you've got a population of about out sixty to seventy percent of us who breathe through our mouths at night. So what we were doing was just lulling ourselves into a position that so much of the population already knew, that already lives with the difference was we were collecting a tremendous amount of data to actually see what was happening to the brain and to the body.

6:21 And what did you I mean, I was fascinated with what you with what you found after ten days, that was. The cliffhanger there. Come on, Well, we knew it wasn't going to be fun, and we knew something was going to happen, right, because the science is very clear, these very longitudinal studies looking at kids the difference between mouth or and nasal breathing. What we didn't know was how quickly it was going to turn on. So within a few hours, my blood pressure was as high as I've ever seen it in my entire life, and I thought it was a stressful day. I spent eight hours in a lab getting poked and prodded and scanned. Maybe I'm just tired. And I went to sleep that night and I snored for the first time that I've ever been aware of. And we know this because we took about two weeks of baseline data. So I was not snoring before and the other subject in the study, and Resulsen, wasn't snoring before zero And within a single night of mouth breathing, we were both snoring. And as the study went on, our snoring got severe, snoring through most of the night. We started suffering from sleep apnea, which is when you're choking on yourself so bad that you're holding your breath throughout the night. So we were anxious. Our athletic performance went down. I mean, you name it. And what was so strange is that so many people are going through their days and nights feeling this way, but not realizing that the pathway through which they breathe is

7:54 causing a lot of these symptoms, and just by changing how you breathe, you can help reverse so many issues. Truly fascinating. I just wanted to make the point there you said, we've known for a long time that the long through those longitudinal studies the effects of nasal breathing versus mouth breathing. I personally was not aware of that. I didn't know that was a thing. So that's I think for inflictitors that would be news as well. How dramatic those effects are of the difference between nasal breathing and mouth breathing. Well, here's the tricky thing about breathing, right, is an anatomical function, is it a physiological function? Is it biological?

8:35 You know, it kind of falls through the cracks of all these different medical specialties. I was so surprised. My father in law's a pulmonologists. He's been a pollmonologist for about forty years, so this is an expert in the lungs. He's one of the top pulmonologists. I asked him all these questions early on. I said, well, what's the best way of breathing. Should we breathe into a kind of four and out through kind of six or is it more like a read eight or should we do a four to seven eight. He had no idea. He's like, that's not what we do. We fix problems. You come in get in a car accident. I'm the guy you want to talk to. You have emphysema, I'm the person you want to talk to. All this other stuff. No one's taught it. Even pulmonologists, like they're the lung guys, right, and they're not taught this. So there are certain sub specialties of people, especially in sleep medicine, whereas where a lot of this information has been housed, and who in the general public is reading sleep medicine articles. There's hundreds and hundreds of them showing the direct correlation between breathing and mental function and physical function and performance, but they're stuck in academic journals. So that's what I spent so many years doing is talking to those experts at Stanford, at Harvard, at Yale, at the top research institutions, and digging through their data and putting together a story and.

10:02 Just to flip that. Then you spent was it another ten days breathing only through your nose? Yeah, this was the best part of the study because we knew that that mouth breathing part wasn't going to be too pleasant. We didn't know it was going to be so awful. I mean, so so truly awful. So the good part was we got to remove the plugs and then focus on breathing as much as we possibly could through our noses. So that includes at night we wore a little piece of tape on our mouths keep our mouths shut. We throughout the day were conscious of our breathing the whole time. And what was so fascinating is all of those issues that I had developed so quickly, and the other subject in the study we developed the exact same things at the same time. They all disappeared.

10:51 So I went from snoring at my worst four hours a night to zero. Within a couple of days, he went from snoring six hours a night to zero, and our sleep apnea completely disappeared, to our athletic performance increasing. I mean, it's just across the board. And I want to be clear, A study with two people doesn't prove anything scientifically, right, I wish we had done this with ten thousand people. We had to pay for the study, there's there's no funding for this kind of thing. But what we were doing, if anything, was just experiencing personally what the science has already known for so long about the difference of nasal breathing and mouth breathing, and hopefully we contributed just a little bit too more to it, showing how quickly this stuff can turn on.

11:39 And right now our audiences, I think around seventy five percent women, everybody who is married to a snore is running out to buy tape to tape their husband's mouth shut. I have no question would you recommend that? So I am not here to recommend anything. I'm a journalist, I am a reporter. I am not a doctor. I'm not a breathing therapists. Climate disclimate, but that is the. Big caveat right here in bright bold letters, and I hope everyone has heard that very clearly. What I did spend so long doing is talking to the people who study this, is talking to people who have worked with tens of thousands of people with ADHD, with snoring, with other issues, mental health issues and more. Nasal breathing only has benefits. There are no negative side effects to breathing through your nose. You will only benefit. So at night, I learned this from doctor Ann Kearney at Stanford. She mentioned She's like, oh, I give tape to every single one of my patients. Then I heard it from doctor Mark Burnna who's been in sleep medicine for about thirty years.

12:45 He said, every single one of my patients gets this, So it seemed a little less crazy when you actually talk to the experts in the field who have been studying this stuff for a long time and what the sleep tape is. No, it probably seems nuts to a lot of people. Is this is not a fat strip of duct tape, right, This is in a hostage situation. It's wearing a teeny piece of tape the center of your lips, about the size of a postage stamp. This is not to inhibit the flow of air in and out of your mouth. You could still breathe that way if you wanted to. All it's doing is gently reminding you to keep your mouth shut. When you go unconscious and your muscles relax, what happens our mouths open up.

13:32 So I'm not going to say it's going to cure everyone of snoring and sleep apnea. I will say that there is plenty of evidence showing that some people can reduce and some people can even reverse actually have zero snoring and even sleep apnea wearing this. But everybody is different and everyone has a different issue. So what I would suggest is listening to the expert who will say, wear a little piece of tape during the day for about a week, put it on for half an hour twenty minutes, who cares. Get used to that, and then start using it at night, and you're going to hate it at the beginning. The first couple weeks is going to be awful. Then it might get a little easier, and then your nose will actually acclimate and start opening.

14:22 And that is what I found to be so powerful is how quickly that happens. And doctor Ann Kearney at Stanford was scheduled for nasal surgery. She was a mouth breather, and within a couple weeks she no longer needed surgery because her natural body did what it was supposed to do. She just needed the right inputs. Can you just run through, I mean, from all of the study that you did, what are some of those specific physical health consequences that people can experience from not breathing correctly or not breathing properly. So the first part of that, we'll just stick with mouth breathing as opposed to naser breathing. So what happens when you breathe through your mouth is you aren't breathing through your nose, and by not breathing through your nose, you are not filtering air, you're not heating air, you're not humidifying it, you're not pressurizing it, so that air goes in very quickly. You can almost think of your lungs as an external organ when you're breathing through your mouth, because there's nothing in the way of all the pollution and allergens in the air making it into your lungs.

15:35 Another thing that happens when you breathe through your mouth, you tend to breathe very shallow and up into the upper lobes of your lungs, which are really inefficient at extracting oxygen. So what does that require you to do? Requires you to breathe more just to get oxygen. So it's about fifty percent efficiency when you're breathing often and into the upper lobes, and that efficiency increases by thirty five percent when you're taking low, deep slight breaths. So we know that you get twenty percent more oxygen breathing through your nose than you do equivalent breaths through your mouth. If you think that's not going to make a difference to how you're thinking and how you're feeling throughout the day.

16:19 You're crazy. So again, this is not controversial stuff. All you have to do is look at a cross section of a human skull and see all of these ornate, beautiful structures in our sinuses. None of that exists in our mouth, and. The downstream effects of that in terms of like you listed a whole lot of things in the book, in terms of you know, diseases and chronic illnesses that people experience, which can all potentially be linked back to, at least partly, how we breathe. So your body can get by breathing through the mouth, just like we can get by just eating twenty cookies a day. Right, We'll get our calories that way. Maybe some people that would be a wonderful way of living, and that's that's great. But compensation is different from being healthy, and I think that we confuse those two things. We can get by eating this terrible food, and most a lot of the population is, but eventually it's going to catch up with us. So by breathing occasionally through your mouth, that's perfectly fine. Right right now, I'm going to laugh, haha, I'm breathing through my mouth. I'm gonna sigh. Breathing totally fine, even at some states of athletic endurance, when you're really reaching for those extreme states. Totally fine. But as a habit, as something you're doing all the time, it's going to catch up with you. So you're going to irritate your lungs more. You're going to be much more apt to

17:51 suffer from panic. You're going to increase your chances of having asthma. You're going to increase your chances of having sinusitis and cavities imperiodic disease, because when you open your mouth and breathe all the time through your mouth, you change the pH in your mouth and you make a breeding ground for cavities and bad breath. Scientists have known this for over one hundred years. I found studies one hundred years ago of Dennis warning patients against this, and yet here we are one hundred years later, just discovering this as though it's some new thing. We probably don't have time to get into the whole evolutionary biology aspect. But I was really interested to better understand how the shape of our face and our head has changed, and that is kind of what has led to these problems that we didn't used to have, these breathing problems, you know, back when we had more apish kind of faces. Did you just want to talk about that a little bit. Yeah.

18:50 You know a lot of people had mentioned to me, they said, well, you know, you look at all these other animals in the wild, chimps and apes and sheetah is. They don't need breathing therapy, they don't need sleep tape, they don't need any of this stuff that we have. Why do we need to relearn how to breathe? And it turns out that around three hundred years ago, a massive shift occurred in the human face. Our faces started growing flatter, Our mouths started growing smaller, so much so that our teeth no longer we're fitting in our mouths.

19:30 They grow in crooked That's why we have crooked teeth. Okay, our ancestors had perfectly straight teeth. They didn't need to get their wisdom teeth yank. They didn't need braces or headgear. They all had straight teeth. When you have a mouth that's big enough to accommodate all thirty two teeth, you have a larger airway. So with our shrinking mouths, we've shrunken our airways, and this is one of the main reasons so many of us contend with chronic respiratory issues. I hope that you're enjoying this conversation and realizing the benefits of positivity in your own life. If you are enjoying the show, please be sure to like and subscribe so that you get notified when you epps drop and head on over to Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen and leave us a rating and review. I really wanted to share with you that, so my daughter and I both very conveniently have this genetic issue where we have some teeth missing, right, And so when I was growing up, the whole approach was go to the orthodontist and you put braces on, and you just bring all the teeth together and nobody notices that there's teeth missing. So my daughter's got the same thing, and the orthodontists were planning to do the same thing with her, and I happen to find one for a second opinion at a dentist actually who was trained overseas, and she took one look and said, no, we're not going to put braces on and make her mouth we're going to put an expander

21:01 in and make her expand her jaw. And she showed me and explained to me how the shape of her mouth and the size of her jaw impacted her breathing. She said, oh, I bet she had breastfeeding problems when she was a baby, And I said she did, actually, and nobody knew why. And she explained all of this to me, and we've gone down this much longer, more complicated kind of process. But we both are so happy we found her because she explained this whole issue of the power of expanding the jaw, not just for the breath and the airway, but the face shape and the fullness in your cheeks and all of these other things. And she said, typically orthodontists they're only interested in symmetry of the teeth. They're not interested in the shape of the mouth and the jaw and the airway. And then she went on to tell me that her daughter, she has had taping her mouth shut to sleep for her, you know, most of her life. And so when I read that in your book, it was very validating, I have to say. And Proba was just something that I think too many people just I'm not aware of. I mean, where all the kids are just getting braces, right, We're all just making actuals am out smaller.

22:13 Well, what you discovered was exactly what I had discovered years ago as well, and I think I had the same reaction as you had. I said, what on earth are you talking about. I've never heard of this before. You must be crazy, you must be some sketchy person who doesn't hasn't gone to the right school, who is doing things on their own. And then you actually do the research. And I'm lucky enough to I spend my days and nights usually researching this stuff because I'm very curious about it. And it turns out that expansion was exactly how we used to treat crooked teeth and breathing problems a hundred years ago. So where braces and removing teeth really got started was in the nineteen forties. With production line dentistry. You can rip teeth out, you can put them in braces, you can do the same process for every person that comes in. Expansion is trickier. So this is a very contentious thing. There's this sea change happening in dentistry right now that we are all witnessing.

23:22 And ten years from now, Trust me, we will not be treating kids the way that we have the way that I was treated teeth yanked, braces on headgear, on retainer for two years. Oh, your teeth are still crooked. Let's put them back in braces. Let's do it again. Let's make the mouth even smaller, let's ruin the profile. So to me, if people don't believe this, all you have to do is is think of the basic geometry. What happens when you have a mouth that's too small for its face, teeth are growing in crooked. What will happen when you remove teeth and then take the remaining teeth and crane them in to a mouth even more.

24:02 What's going to happen to that mouth. It's obviously going to get smaller, so the rest of the face is going to cave in, and you're going to deny the airway the space it needs. Especially in early development, these kids put in braces when their mouths are trying to grow with the rest of their bodies, and it's almost like footbinding. You're just keeping them small as the rest of the bodies are growing. So this is a very hot topic right now. It's been thrilled for me to be speaking at dental conferences. And I've been talking to people who since the nineteen sixties have been saying this, Dennis, who were the top of their field, and they just said, yeah, you know, it took you a while, but you finally caught up to how things really work. So it's fascinating to hear you experiencing exactly what I've experienced. And I can't tell you how many parents I've heard this from hundreds and hundreds. Now, really, you're doing your daughter a big favor, is all I got to say.

25:03 And she knows it too, you know, like she she wishes all this orthodonic work was just done, but she also understands the purpose of it, which is which is good. You know, she would much rather have that those long term benefits of this process that she's going through at the moment. Bless her. You know. I wish that I had had that option when I was growing up. Now, in hindsight, the interesting thing, though, is what they by the time I got her to this dentist, she's actually not even an orthodontist. She's a dentist who does orthodonic work. But by the time I got there. She said, oh, we have to do this straight away. She should have had this done, you know, when she was eight, like when the jaw is the most malleable. But we'll do it now and we'll see what benefits we get. But that's the other thing that fascinated me, James about your book is that apparently the jaw can continue to be malleable through into our adult life. It doesn't just stop growing and then it's fixed and permanently set at that size.

25:59 And shape, the upper jaw and the upper palette. There is a reason that if you take a thumb, if you have a clean thumb, you can take your thumb and feel the roof of your mouth. You're going to feel this ridge. It's like a fault line going from the very center of the roof of your mouth all the way back. That's a suture. Okay, it's the same suture that's around our skull, right and these sutures are there so that the skull can expand and contract, which it does when you chew. You can chew real hard, you can feel your skull expanding and contracting. So that suture right in the middle of our palettes can actually open up at any age you can expand in adulthood.

26:40 It is much easier to do this when you're a kid, though, trust me, off the swim. So this is what pediatric dentists have been saying, and there's this whole new mission at six months kids should be looked at for breathing problems, for airway problems, for mouth issues, because it is so much easier when a kid is younger to build a solid foundation right to make sure their mouth is in proportion with the rest of their heads. And guess what happens when you do that as they grow their teeth growing perfectly straight. Not only that, but you save them a collapsing profile and you save the airway. So those are important things as well. Really interesting. I'm just waiting for my inbox to be flooded with people asking me for the refer good luck, good luck with that.

27:29 I've been there, yeah, which is why I can no longer give anyone my emails. So yeah, chewing, the whole chewing thing that you know, that was another that's another really interesting thing too, and that's something that's been reinforced the importance of chewing solid food and how through evolution we have you know, we cook food and we eat soft food and how everything is suffered as a result. Well, chewing really starts at birth. It starts with breastfeeding. Because breastfeeding allows the face of the infant to be pulled outward. It actually expands the palette and opens up the airwaves. It also teaches infants how to breathe through their nose. They're able to breastfeed as they're breathing right.

28:13 And so after that, what we usually do is we wean kids onto soft foods, apple sauces, other jarred stuff, powders. Did our ancestors ever have Gerber's apple sauce? They went from weaning to eating normal food. And that's so important in early stages years two, three, four to be chewing, really chewing masticating, because the more you do that, the more skeletal structure you're going to be building, the more musculature you're going to be building. So it's just like anything else. If you don't walk around for the first ten years of your life, how are your legs going to be, how fit are they going to be, how are they going to grow? You need to have that same ax or size in your mouth, and there's other benefits for chewing beyond just growing a proper airway. It delivers more blood to the brain, It calms you down, It empties sinuses and an indolent fluid, which is why there are a few tricks for people of constantly plugged ears to be chewing more and swallowing in this certain way.

29:20 So what these tricks are doing is just returning us to nature the way that we were supposed to have been evolved. And when we go back to nature, something magical happens. Our bodies start becoming more in balance, and breathing and chewing are just two examples of that. So, James, there seems to be you know, there's this real focus now on breath work as a tool for people to use to enhance their well being and mental health and physical health. But the whole jeeus, even just the term breath work is confusing for some people, Like you said, what am I supposed to be doing? Is it in for four out for four? Is it infra?

30:00 You know, the five seven eight breathing or whatever it is. In all of your research and all of your studies, how is it that we should be what did you discover that we should be aiming for in terms of the perfect breath, if you will. This does get confusing because so many people are telling us different things. If you look at whim Hoff and vigorous proniamas, they want you to breathe a lot. If you look at Booteko and other more meditative practices, they want you to breathe very little and slowly. And the answer is they're all right, It just depends on what you're looking for. What I tried to do in the book, because so much of this is confusing, is that the middle of the book is like, here's the foundation of breathing.

30:44 This is something that anyone and everyone can benefit from. Doesn't matter if you're an ultra marathon or or an asthmatic. Everyone will benefit from nasal breathing. You'll benefit from breathing slowly, lightly and softly deeply, and you can benefit from exhaling more and relaxing the body. Once you get that foundation down, then you can start playing around with different stuff. So breath work is just like going to the gym, but instead of working out your muscles, you're working out your respiratory system. So you wouldn't go to a gym for twenty four hours a day right, that's an awful thing. Even go to a gym for three hours a day, it's too much for your body. But the short burst of intense breathwork, of intense breathing can be so powerful and resetting your nervous system, resetting your thoughts, resetting your respiratory system. And so that's the real purpose of it is.

31:41 You can think of breath work as going to the gym, something to be done for a short amount of time, and then you go back to that healthy breathing, all of those healthy habits. I'm a psychologist and I don't do really one on one clinical work anymore, but when I did, whenever somebody came to me presenting with anxiety, I would always just ask them to count how many times they breathed in one minute. Just count the inbreaths. And anybody can do this at home, you know, just set a time, set a one minute on your phone, and sometimes the number of breaths per minute would be as high as you know, thirty three. There were anything from twelve thirteen, fourteen through to eighteen twenty three, twenty eight, thirty three, which when you think about it, I mean that's just really short, shallow breathing up into the top of your chest. I don't know how anybody does it, but I would just then ask them for the next minute to just breathe to my count, and I would count in for three and out for three, which gives you ten breaths in sixty seconds. Right, Many people found that very, very uncomfortable.

32:47 But then what we would do is we would chat for five minutes, and then I would get them to count their inbreadths again and their breath break. It wouldn't have necessarily stayed at the ten per minute, but it might have come from twenty eight to eighteen or something, you know, like there would be this sort of lag effect where their breathing rate would stay lower for a period of time. And so for me, I just knew that that was important because of the effect of rapid breathing on your physiology and in the case of anxiety, like really important to calm down that physiological arousal. I was completely unaware of all of the physical health ramifications.

33:28 But is that something you know in for three out for three, just doing something like that, or in for five out for five, you know for a couple of minutes. Is that's just something people should be starting to I know you can't give advice, but you would suggest if you're talking to a. Friend, absolutely, I'm going to give that advice. I fully embraced this one. So what these people are responding to, people with panic, anxiety, other fear based disorders. I talked with a lot of psychologists, talk with a lot of psychiatrys, talked with a few neuropsychiatrists and psychologists, and what they've found is that people with these problems traditionally have a very low tolerance for carbon dioxide. So right now, if you exhale and you hold your breath and keep holding your breath, you're going to feel that nagging need to breathe that is not dictated by a lack of oxygen, but by an increase of CO two. So what people with panic and even asthma, they become conditioned to breathing too much, too often because they associate that increase of CO two, that breath hold with an attack. What happens when you have a panic attack or an asthma attack, you can't breathe, So they condition themselves to breathe like this,

35:01 and after a while that becomes normal. So one of the quickest tests and they just did a test with people with COVID and found that people who are going to be much more susceptible to having severe symptoms of COVID cannot hold their breath for a few seconds. It's the same thing with panic sufferers and asthma sufferers. A lot of therapists now have their clients exhale and hold their breath, and a lot of people with issues can't hold their breath for three seconds, they freak out, they go And so what you've experienced with the three seconds in three seconds out, if someone can't hold their breath, if they're reacting to that short amount, that small amount of CO two, then they've got this negative feedback loop which is causing them to overbreathe, and that overbreathing is causing them to be overstressed, and it's cutting off blood flow to their brain, and it's cutting off blood flow to their fingers, which is why their fingers and toes are cold, and it's creating more adrenaline and cortisol in their bodies. On and on. It's this downward spiral. Again.

36:06 We can survive just fine breathing this way for a while, but after doing it for too long, it's going to wear our bodies down, And they're perfect examples of that. I am so much more conscious of my own breathing. In fact, to get through the amount of books I try to read, I will often get the paper copy book as well as the audiobook, and I listen in the car, and then I pick up and read when I'm at home. But I happen to be doing some long driving trips when I was listening to your book on audio book, and I just you can't help but slow your breathing down. Just the more that you understand and the more that you learn about the impact. I'm so much more conscious of my own breathing, like I said, like even when I go to bed at night, I'm always thinking about how am I breathing.

36:57 That I think that awareness is really the first and by no means should people become a neurotic about this, like I was for several years wearing all these different doodads and collecting all this data on how my breathing was affecting athletic performance, to sleep and so on and so forth. The point is to condition yourself to become a nasal breather, to breathe slowly, to breathe rhythmically so that you don't have to think about it, so that it becomes a habit. This is your default. Sometimes changing a habit can take weeks or even months, but once you do it, you will never go back. And I can attest to that someone who was a mouth breather.

37:39 I am nasal breathing all the time now and I can't for an anecdote here. I can't tell you what a difference it has made in my life. And I've seen that, I've calculated the measurements, and I'm not alone. You know, this only has benefits. Some people may experience more minor benefits at the beginning, but a lot of you will experience benefits that you would not believe would be possible just through breathing. And one other thing I want to mention is we get the majority of our energy from air from breath. A lot of people think, oh, we get it from food and drink. We do. We You know, we break that down to glucose and that's helpful and getting energy. Most of it comes from air.

38:22 So if you're not getting that air efficiently, you're denying your body the ability to really function at those peak levels. I wanted to You just mentioned wim Hoff, James, and I just wanted to just come back to that for a second, because what I'm only fairly new to wim Hoff and his work and his ice and breath. I always just assumed he was the ice person, and somebody said, no, no, it's all about the breath and breathing. I just know it goes by the ice man. But the power of the breath that you also discovered to like you referred to the ancient Buddhist monks, I found this fascinating as well, and the power of using their breath to regulate their body temperature, which is what Wim does too. Right, he uses his breath to regulate his body temperature, which is how we can stay in the ice. Am I understanding that correctly?

39:09 It's exactly right. The only way Wim is able to be Whim and do all of his amazing things, breaking twenty six world records is by harnessing the power of his breath. That's how he was able to sit in ice for almost two hours and not suffer from frostbite or hypothermia, and these tricks. A lot of us think that he's just some freak of nature. They have been practiced and studied and used for thousands and thousands of years. And the first scientific study of these people who were able to use their breath to heat their bodies up was actually done in the late nineteen seventies by a Harvard Medical School researcher named Herbert Benson. So again, we've known this stuff for a long time, and the ancients have known this stuff for a very long time. It just took i'm on as charismatic as Whim to get this out to the world. And I know Whim. I am a huge fan of what he's done. And I think it's so thrilling that so many, hundreds of thousands of people are now taking better control of their health with breath.

40:16 It does seem like, as you said, so much of this has been known for so long, and it makes you wonder why we are only just understanding this better, you know, even in the science world. I mean, you know, like you say, there's been research done in the sixties and the seventies, and yet we're only all just becoming aware of it now. I think that this is how it works in our culture, for better or for worse. You know, things come and go and you don't get on a fast track to tenure digging up some old research. You get a fast track to tenure developing your new research in your new studies. I am a huge fan of Western medicine. I want to be very clear that this book is looking at breathing, but I be alive. Without Western medicine, most of us would be in pretty bad shape. But it's not a one way street. Health doesn't need to just you don't need to just pick one side the future in medicine.

41:11 You can ask any doctor in one that studies this stuff. Is an integrative view of medicine. And that's why I think breathing is so important, because you can see within your body and brain within a few seconds of changing your breathing what a powerful impact that has. And just imagine what a few days of healthy breathing or a few months will do for you. And you can start to understand why people have reversed chronic illnesses that they were told were incurable, like asthma, like autoimmune diseases, by focusing and harnessing their breath. Would it be fair to say, James, to finish this up, that whether somebody's called to Whim's method or Kundolini or some other breathwork practitioner, you know that they should just venture out and just try and find what works for them.

42:02 Absolutely different people are going to be coming into this with different needs. So someone who is an extreme athlete might really want to bump it up. Their lungs are already in good shape, right, maybe they're already nasal breathing. They can go straight to whim off breathing and really experience those benefits. For someone who has chronic anxieties or panic or asthma, I would start very very slowly. This does not have to be a competition with anyone. This is about adopting healthy habits, letting your body acclimate into a new way of being. And what I'd love about breathing so much is it's free and it's available to us at any time of the day or night. There's really no excuse not to focus on your breathing because you can do it while watching a movie on a couch, you can do it while jogging, while walking your dog, whatever.

42:54 And again it's you can see the measurements of how this will change your physiology and sometimes your anatomy. Because we know that the pathway through which you breathe will affect how you look and how your face will grow, and other issues in the airway when you're young. I guess also in this whole area of wellness, people can sometimes feel like, oh, it's just one more thing. I've got to meditate and journal and you know, do my thirty minutes of exercise, and now I've got to think about how I breathe as well. Is there one small thing or one small change that people could just implement that's fairly simple. I like to call them kind of micro actions or micro commitments that people can just slowly introduce into their life without feeling like this is another thing that they have to go and study and explore and implement.

43:45 Yeah, it does seem overwhelming. We've been talking about breathing. Whim off out that we've been talking about breathing slowly, breathing through the noose. I get it. But I would just look at the natural world and look at animals as as your guide. They don't have to think about their breathing because they're already breathing naturally and they don't lose that ability. So this is going to sound so boring. People want some secret I'm going to let you in know on on healthy breathing, but it's really not that complicated. Breathe through your nose is the very first thing you should do beyond becoming aware of your breathing. And this doesn't mean that you have to be paranoid about it or beat yourself up if you notice your self mouth breathing, just become aware of it and then at moments where you feel stressed. I learned this from doctor Andrew Huberman down at Stanford who's been studying this breathing method called a physiological sigh. This is something I've found to be very helpful. It's taking two breaths and then an exhale, so that's two breaths in the nose, and then just like deflating your body, you try to gain two breaths in one on top of the other. There is actually a subsect of no neurons in the brain responsible for sign and when you consciously do this, you trigger those neurons and when that happens, your whole body relaxes, which is why you see a lion or even a dog right before it goes to sleep. So this is the

45:19 absolute quickest way of getting in control of your anxiety and balancing yourself out. There is a bunch of other stuff you can do after that, but start with these breaths, and then once you've reset, try to exhale longer than you're inhaling. Inhale to around three or four, exhaled to around six, and you will feel your nervous system calming down. So you can start with those tricks, and then after that you can build on those. That's amazing, James. This has been fascinating for me, I'm sure for the listeners as well. Thank you so much for your time and for your research. Thanks for having me.

46:02 If this has peaked your interest in learning more about the power of breath, James actually lays out a whole lot of breathing practices in his book, along with all of the science behind them. You might also be interested to know that he wrote a book back in twenty fifteen called Deep, which is all about his experience of free diving and getting up close and personal with whales and sharks, and I can only imagine that that would be a great read too, if that is something that is of interest to you. His books are available in all good bookstores. You can find out more about James at his website mister James Nestor dot com. That's an e stoer. He's also on Instagram at mister James Nestor.

46:42 Speaking of books, all three of my Crappy to Happy books, including my latest release, Crappy to Happy Love Who You're With, are now available in all Good bookstores, or you can get a signed copy from my website casdone dot com. Come and connect with me on Instagram at cast Done underscore xo, facebookcast Done dot xo. And if you enjoy the show, please do hit the subscribe button on Apple Podcasts hit the follow button on Spotify. That is how podcasts get heard by more people. So I would really appreciate your support and I look forward to catching you in the next episode of Crappy to Have You Listener,