James Nestor - Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art

Foreign.

Welcome to the mantalk Show. Training for Men, Answers for Women. I'm Connor Beaton and today joining me is James Nestor, who is the author of a book called Breathe. Been wanting to interview him for a while and today's podcast is going to be all about breathworks. Let me tell you a little bit about James. He's the author and journalist who has written for Scientific America, Outside Magazine, the New York Times, the Atlantic, National Public Radio, Surfers Journal, the San Francisco Chronicle, and more. He spent the last several years working on a book called Breathe the New Science of a Lost Art. It released through Riverhead and Penguin random house on May 26th in 2020. So just earlier this year and was an instant New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Los Angeles Times Sunday London Times Top 10 Bestseller this book explores the million year long history of how the human species has lost the ability to breathe properly and why we are suffering from a laundry list of snoring, sleep apnea, asthma, autoimmune disease, allergies, all because of our ineffective and inefficient breathing modalities. James ended up traveling the world in an attempt to figure out what went wrong and how to fix it. The answers, as he would discover, weren't found in pulmonology labs, but in the muddy digs of ancient burial sites and secret Soviet facilities, New Jersey choir schools, and the smoggy streets of Sao Paulo. So we're going to talk quite a bit about this book, Breathe, but we are specifically going to talk about some of the research, some of the incredible experiences that James had along the way. And this book is going to unpack a few different breathing techniques. Specifically on this episode we're going to talk about a few different breathing techniques that you can start to implement and some real changes that you can make in your life today that are going to support you in having a healthier One of the interesting things that we talked about really was getting into using nasal breathing in many different aspects of your life and the benefits of that. And James shares a few techniques on this, which is incredible and this is a huge passion of mine. You may have seen earlier on this year I put out a breathwork course called Room to Breathe and that was pretty successful for a lot of people that were looking at integrating breathwork into their life as a practice, because breath work, since my days in singing, has been a staple on an almost daily basis and is now my daily routine. So if you are looking to learn more about breathwork or if you know somebody that loves this topic, definitely pass it on to him, man it forward and send this episode to somebody that you know is going to enjoy it. And this is a really in depth look. So James gives us some insight and behind the scenes look at some of his experiences and in the research behind Breathwork. So without any further delay, please welcome Mr. James Nestor.

Thanks a lot for having me.

Yeah, it's a pleasure to have you on the show and I've had the honor of reading your book and listening to you on a few other shows and kind of going down the rabbit hole of your work a little bit, which is just incredible. So I'm excited to dive into this. But first, first I have to ask you the question which I ask everyone, which is to tell us a story about a defining moment in your life that made you who you are today.

I think one that really sticks out for me, this was several years ago is when I got an assignment from Outside magazine to write about the World Freediving Championship. And I had never seen anyone freedive before. I'd certainly never done it, didn't know much about it. And so kind of on the fly I booked a ticket, went out there and took this little boat out about a half a mile off the coast, this was in Greece. And was sitting there on the bow of the boat and watched this guy take a single breath of air and completely disappear into the water below. And the visibility was probably 200, 300ft in Greece and completely disappear and come back four minutes later and be totally fine. He wasn't even wearing fins and he had just dived something like 330ft on a single breath. And I thought, my God, what have I been missing out on? There's so much of the world and so much potential for the human body that I had certainly never heard about and that I think humans as a species had forgotten about. So light really went on in my head to want to not only explore freediving and our human potential in water, but. But also outside of it.

Yeah, very, very cool. I think freediving is one of those things where I think we sort of look at it and it gives us an insight and a glimpse into the human capacities that we often don't come into contact with. And I think people like Wim Hof have sort of started to mainstream and popularize some of the capacities of what breathing can do. And so I'm interested to get your perspective. Like, why did you decide to take this on? Was that a pivotal moment for you where you saw this freediver and you're like, holy smokes. I have to dive into this, I have to dig into this. Like what goes into this? Or was there something more personal for you that you wanted to research this? Because writing this book, I'm sure, was an endeavor, to say the least.

Well, I think it was a couple of things. I had not started in journalism when I got out of school, so journalism was always something I did on the side. I had professional jobs in which I had to wear a tie. Remember those? Remember those jobs? They existed decades ago, and that's what I did. And I never thought I could make a living writing anything. Even though I was writing professionally. I was writing copy ads, that kind of thing, but different kind of writing. So I was always writing magazine pieces just to fulfill this creative need. I was working at night, I was working on weekends. And that freediving experience happened right when I had cut the cord, which was extremely precarious. I thought, you know, I was getting into my mid-30s at that time, and I thought, if I don't do this now, I'm never ever going to do it. And I think I'm always going to regret that. And so I cut the cord on my, on my real job. And, you know, the first few months were a total disaster. I thought I was going to be getting all these gigs, these different writing gigs, magazine assignments, and nothing was working out. So after several months of doing that, even after a couple years of real touch and go work, I happened upon that story. And Outside was cool enough to send me out there and write about it. And I knew that there was something larger than just a magazine story. I was sent out to write a story about the competitive angle of freediving, but. But I saw a completely different story in that I talked with free divers who didn't like to compete. They thought it was idiotic. They compared it to like competitive yoga or competitive meditation. They said, why would you corrupt something so pure and make it just a competition? And so it was those free divers I really glommed onto, and they were able to take me very deep into that world and to truly see the potential of the human body, which I had not been in contact with at all. Having grown up in suburbia, immediately went to college, got a job. You know, you live a pretty cloistered life. Many of us do. At least I certainly was where I wasn't really exploring all of the things that our ancestors had been doing for thousands of years. There's archaeological evidence of freediving that dates back at least 10,000 years. So this was a part of who we were as A culture as a species. And we completely forgot about it once machines came into view. And so it was amazing to me to find people who were rediscovering this power within themselves and using it to do things like commune with oceanic animals, to get in touch with their own potential and to see how far the human body really could go.

Fascinating. I love it. I love it. Well, I think one of the interesting things that I, that I really appreciated in terms of how you started off your book was just sort of diving into the concept of human beings as us beings for like the worst breathers in the, in the animal kingdom. And when you think about it, when you, you know, as I sit here in my apartment in Manhattan with the, you know, air conditioned blazing and cars driving outside with fumes just sort of pouring out into the streets, stuck in the streets with concrete buildings, I realized that we generally have built our society in a very ineffective way for breathing, for our basic function. And I'm curious if you could just really elaborate on this for the listeners in terms of what does make us ineffective breathers. And obviously we know why it's important for us to breathe properly and accurately. And people that have things like sleep apnea or asthma obviously know the importance of healthy breathing. But I would love for you to just unpack a little bit of that and we can dig into it.

Well, I think it's many things. It's the fact that breathing is an unconscious act. We don't have to think about it. And so a lot of people think that how we do it is not important. And I think even in the medical communities, my father in law is a pulmonologist, my brother in law is an ER doctor. And when I started years ago, when I started really delving into this research, I would send them studies they said they had heard of none of it. You know, a pulmonologist had no idea what proper breathing was because he was too busy cutting out cancer from lungs, doing lung transplants. But we weren't looking at the more subtle power of breathing. And the way our society has been constructed is because this is an unconscious act. We, we haven't really paid any heed into what healthy breathing is or how to foster that in our environments. You're completely right. If you look at city life, modern city life for the past couple hundred years, you've got pollution, you've got really tight fitting clothes, you've got corsets, you've got belts. All of these things make it really hard to do our most basic biological act. And that is to breathe fluidly and freely. And it's. It's bizarre when you start looking at that, at what has happened, then you start correlating what's happened with our health and the onset of all these respiratory problems, and so many of them are caused by these improper breathing habits. And you think, wow, if these things are caused by improper breathing, could we help fix them by breathing properly? And the answer that I found is a resounding yes.

Yeah. I love one of the lines in the book that you sort of unpack. At the very beginning, I was talking about, um, how we sort of evolved to learn how to eat air. And I just never thought about it that way. I was like, yeah, we're just constantly consuming air.

And I just. I loved that line.

I remember highlighting it. I was like, oh, this is. I got a good chuckle out of it. But so. So what makes us ineffective? Like, what are some of the things that. That make us ineffective breathers? Because I think when people hear this, they're just not too sure how to conceptually even think about it. Is. Is it. And I know you talk about mouth breathing, and so maybe we can get into that here in a minute, but, you know, is posture, is it the environments? Is it, you know, the ineffectiveness of how we're breathing? Is it that we're unconscious to it? Or maybe a little bit of all of above, like, just maybe unpack some of that for us?

I think it is a little bit of everything. So you've got the psychological problems of anxiety and panic. Your breathing goes to hell. You've got environmental problems like pollutants, like allergens, like particulate in the air, which makes breathing more difficult. But the main culprit that I've found is morphological change that's occurred in our mouths, in our faces, over just the past few hundred years. And a lot of people may think that's impossible. How could we evolve traits that are deleterious to our health? But just look around. If you question that, look at humanity. Right now. We're developing rates of diabetes, heart disease, cancer. None of these things are advantageous to us. And our breathing has taken one of the biggest hits. So this is something that still astounds me. I was just talking to two of the researchers this morning who first introduced me to this research, which when I saw it, just blew my mind. It started, if you look at an ancient skull, it's going to have straight teeth, it's going to have this forward growing face. And because of that, our ancestors were able to breathe more easily than we are. And if you look at a modern skull, I mean, go look in the mirror, 90% of us have some sort of crookedness in our teeth. We have smaller jaws, we have flatter faces. All of which makes it much harder to breathe. So the reason why so many of us have sleep apnea and snoring, beyond just weight, we. Which has a huge influence on it as well. You can find very skinny people with sleep apnea and snoring is because of this change that's occurred in our faces and in our mouths over just the past few hundred years.

So interesting. So our bone structure is literally starting to take a different shape and that's inhibiting our capacity to breathe properly. So what are some of the things that. That impact that. Like, why are. Why is our bone structure specifically in our jaw and our facial. Facial structure starting to change? What's contributing to that?

The main problem has been industrialized foods. And a lot of people would think it was tied to vitamins and minerals, which certainly plays a part. Right. We know that whole foods have so many more nutrients than industrialized food. And by that, I'm talking about white flour food, wheat that had the bran and the germ removed. White rice had the bran and the germ removed. And we really learned how to do this really well. A couple hundred years ago, it got very easy. Sugar came online. It wasn't just an expensive thing for rich people. Everyone was able to eat sugar. So as we were just slopping up the soft, industrialized mush, we were not working out our jaws. And our ancestors used to chew for about four hours a day. And if you think about the food 200 years ago, and then you think about the food right now, that even stuff that's considered healthy, that actually is avocados, peanut butters, smoothies, yogurt, tofu requires basically no chewing at all. And without that masticatory stress, every, especially in infancy and especially for young kids, their mouths don't grow properly. And there is about 30 years of research into this, Robert Corcini, Daniel Lieberman at Harvard, all showing this, coming to the same conclusion. And it's something that even the NIH is not really recognizing. Now, if you go to the NIH website and you look at the causes of crooked teeth, they say it's hereditary or caused by tumors or deformations. But so much of it is tied to chewing. And this is a story that my hunch is in the next few years, this is really going to start to open up because it's so obvious and it's been right in front of us the whole time.

Interesting. And so are there ways to combat this? Like, how do we go about rectifying this? You know, if you're somebody that's listening to this podcast and you're a big soft food eater and smoothie, smoothie drinker, which, you know, I think many people in our modern culture certainly are, especially on the coast, what do we do about that? Like, how do we even start to engage in? I mean, I've actually seen a device recently that was talking about toning your jaw and you sort of like put it in the side of your cheek and you just basically chew on it. It's like this rubber piece and it's supposed to tone your neck muscles and tone your jaw muscles. And it's sort of an interesting device. But I do recall somebody saying that it was helping them structure their face differently and that they were, they were starting to breathe a little bit differently. And so it was sort of opening up their sinus cavities. And so are there things that we can start to do or the things that you sort of played around with that, that make a difference? Like what was some of the research on that front?

Yeah, it just astounds me. American entrepreneurialism, you gotta love it, right? Yeah, it's like, so, so keep, keep eating. Go gurt every morning. And by the way, buy this thing that will stimulate the same chewing stress as whole foods and have a good time. That, my friends, is what is keeping America open for business. I'm not going to say that doesn't work. I don't know much about that device. There's one device called Jawsr size that the whole reason people do it is. Oh, yes, yes. I've gotten about 400 emails from people saying, can I just do this? Why do I have to eat real food? This is completely bumming me out. But if you look at how our species has evolved for millions of years, you know, we're chomping the whole way through. And that is why if you talk to anthropologists, and I've talked to quite a few of them, they say they have never seen a hunter gatherer with crooked teeth ever. They all have perfectly straight teeth. They have their wisdom teeth growing just fine. They don't need to get them extracted. They wouldn't have needed Invisalign or Smile Direct or any of that stuff, because nature has made us with perfectly straight teeth. Look at any other wild animal and you will see perfectly straight teeth. Marine mammals, lions, tigers, bears, whatever you want. So Again, it's much easier to do this when your bones are still forming, when, when you are taking in these environmental inputs that will affect how you look and how you breathe later on in life. So infancy breastfeeding versus bottle feeding. Every two hours an infant breastfeeds, which pulls its face out, which helps widen its mouth, which is a fascinating thing because a lot of kids can't be breastfed now, they're bottle fed and they will take a hit in their airway health because of that. That's what the data shows. So beyond that and beyond eating real food, I know that may seem offensive for some people, giving, you know, instead of giving kids gerber soft applesauce, there's this whole movement called baby led weaning where you just start them off on food, right when they're done weaning on regular food to help build that masticatory stress. If you think about it, our ancestors didn't have Gerber, they didn't have yogurt, they didn't have any of these things and their infants were able to eat. So that makes perfect sense to me. So now let's get to people, you know, close to our age. I thought I was completely screwed because here I am middle age and I had had extractions, braces, headgear for years. And to me that was just normal part of growing up. Everyone I knew had this stuff, but I found that even someone in middle age can really affect his or her airway health. And we can do this by chewing. As long as you don't have TMJ problems. We can do this by swallowing properly, we can do this with correct oral posture and we can do this with breathing. So I took a CAT scan and then used this device to help expand my palate to the way it should have been. Had my ancestors and had I not eaten so much soft mushroom and showed about 15 to 20% improvement in my airway after a year, which is a huge amount. And these are CAT scans. This isn't subjective, like, hey, I feel better, I can breathe better. This is data, this is hard data. So it just goes to show, like the body will adapt to what inputs is given to it. And if you give it the proper inputs, it can do amazing things. It can really help heal itself.

That's incredible. And I think, I think one of the things that I just want to back up on and maybe just unpack is the impact of not having these sort of fully formed airways and access to that. And it might seem sort of initially obvious of, well, if you're not taking in as much oxygen, then your body is probably impacted by that in some capacity. But I would love for you to just maybe lay some of that out for the, for the layperson that's, you know, listening to this, myself included, so that we have a bit of more of a full spectrum of what the impact is of not being able to take in the proper amount of breath. So do you have a deviated septum or, you know, if you just like you're talking about, don't have the proper airway, whether it's breathing through your mouth or through your nose, what the physiological and biological impact of that's actually going to be?

Sure. So what happens is this is why there's this huge growing industry of pediatric dentists. They want to see kids before the age of two. Because whatever facial growth you are starting to develop that early on is going to be reflected in who you are at 16, at 30, at 50, and so on. So you have to start with a good foundation. And by that I mean an airway that is clear. So the point of this chewing, what it does for us is it allows us to grow, to develop, I should say, a wider mouth. And to have a wider mouth means your airway is going to be larger. So so many people suffer from something called upper airway resistance syndrome, along with sleep apnea, along with chronic breathing problems. You hear people wheezing all the time.

Whether they're sleeping or whether they're awake. Any resistance in the airway is going to cause huge problems. They found that you don't even need to have medically diagnosed sleep apnea or snoring to be suffering from the neurological problems, the stress problems and some of the metabolic problems associated with these maladies. All you need to have is some resistance in your airway because we breathe from some 20,000 to 25,000 times a day. And if you're doing that incorrectly, if you're struggling just a little bit with each of those breaths, guess what's going to happen? Your body is going to be able to compensate, but it's never truly going to be able to ever be in balance. So you're going to constantly, all your energy is going to be exerted to try to compensate and to keep you alive. And you see this with so many chronic people who have these, these chronic diseases, these chronic respiratory problems. They then flare off and have all of these problems downstream. Type 2 diabetes, you know, I mentioned neurological problems, ADHD, Alzheimer's, all of these things have been correlated to improper breathing to some sort of struggling while you're breathing. And this whole thing is about to be blown open right now because for so long we've been looking at the symptoms of each of these individual problems, but we have not been looking at the core issue. And the core issue to so many of them is improper, inadequate, or to be struggling while you're breathing.

Yeah. And I can imagine that just to sort of like layer on top of that, that the. The physiological impacts of not breathing properly is that your body's going to try and compensate for it.

Right.

Tension in shoulders, neck, throat, you know, chest, back, all sorts of musculature, tension. Is that something that you found along the research?

Of course, for sure. I mean, think about it. Most of us are trying to get 10,000 steps a day. Right. That's the magical number, which isn't totally based on science, but that's a whole nother can of worms. All you need is about 7,000 is what I've found. But nonetheless, if you were to go and take those 7,000 or 10,000 steps a day and just slightly turn your ankle just a little bit, or just slightly be walking on one foot, just a little off your other foot, your left foot, if you're doing that with your right foot, is going to take the weight from that. It's going to take the burden. But even after a few minutes of walking this way, you're going to say, wow, my back hurts, huh? That other leg is starting to hurt. Not only does my ankle hurt, but now my knee is hurting. Because your body is still going to be able to get you where you want to go. It's going to be able to compensate. That doesn't mean you're going to be able to get there. Well, and what we're finding with people who have been breathing in such a dysfunctional way, they have not been using their diaphragms correctly, they've not been extending their lung capacity at all. Is they get in this habit of doing this. Their bodies compensate, but then after a while, their bodies will just start to break down. And this doesn't just mean, like, asthmatics or people with serious pathologies. Even athletes, even. Even track runners, even joggers can suffer from this if they're not doing it correctly.

Yeah, I think one of the. Just to sort of bring in a personal experience there, in my late teens and early twenties, started to. Started to sing. And I was singing classical music at the time. And I, you know, not. Not performed as a kid, not sung as a kid, not been trained, but then got into this endeavor. And it was so interesting for me because I come from a sports background and so I was used to playing hockey and, you know, excessive mouth breathing, right? Like when you're on that, when you're on the ice in the arena, like you're just through the mouth, in and out. And when I started to breathe, I remember one of the first things that my teacher taught me was to start to take the inhale in through the nose before I would start to sing. And it was nearly impossible for me. And it like legitimately was one of the most frustrating things here. I was, you know, this very active, in shape, 18, 19, 20 year old guy and just taking a nice deep breath in through my sinuses was impossible. And so I had to breathe in through the mouth and I had all this tension through the right side of my shoulder and through my neck. And just my body had sort of adapted and compensated in a really unhealthy way. And it was inhibiting my capacity to sing. And so I had to spend hours and hours doing nasal breath work. And it slowly but surely it started to release this, this sort of like death grip that was in my right shoulder whenever I would try and take a deep inhale in to sing and perform. And so I've sort of experienced this a little bit firsthand. And so reading through your book was. Was just mind blowing for me because I would have never correlated all those things in the past. And so with that said, tell us a little bit about mouth breathing, because you sort of start the book off with that. And it's something that again, most of us don't think about. We just sort of breathe. And we aren't really taught how to breathe at all unless we've done something like yoga or singing or playing an instrument like a tuba or something like that, or trumpet. And so tell us about mouth breathing and where, where do you stand on it? Like, what's your, what's your political stance on mouth breathing?

So so much of this problem with having a mouth that's too small, having a smaller airway, so much of that is tied to what happens to your breathing. And almost all of this dovetails into mouth breathing. Because what happens when that palate doesn't grow properly? The palate is the roof of your mouth. When it doesn't expand and grow properly in infancy and in childhood, it can tend to push upwards. And if you take your thumb, if you've got a clean thumb, don't do this with a dirty Covid thumb. And you put it up on top of the Roof of your mouth. If there is a large indentation, just like there is with my mouth, that roof of the mouth can go and impede the airflow through the nose. So you're actually taking real estate from the nose to be able to breathe properly. If you look at pollutants and if you look at other unhealthy breathing habits, they can start to inflame the adenoids and tonsils, which makes it almost impossible to breathe through the nose. So people, as a default, start breathing through their mouths, something like about 25 to 50%. That's the upper end of the Estimates show that the population is chronically mouth breathing, which to me is insane because I never thought that there was a difference. We have a mouth. We should be able to breathe through the mouth, and we can. It's a great backup system. Thank God we have it. If you're ever punched in the nose, you can breathe through your mouth. But we are not designed to be mouth breathers. And you can very easily see this by looking at a cross section of a skull. It doesn't matter if you're talking about a dog skull or chimpanzee skull or human skull. The sinuses take up this huge amount of real estate. And every time you breathe through the nose, that air is forced through this labyrinth before it can make it into the throat. That is essential for cleaning air, humidifying it, and treating it so that by the time it gets to the lungs, we'll be able to absorb so much more oxygen, so much more easily that way. So we get 20% more oxygen breathing air through the nose than we do equivalent breaths through the mouth. And if you think that's not going to make a big impact on your health after a while, you're nuts. So, having learned all this because I don't have a medical background, okay, this is the first time I've ever written about this stuff. But luckily I was able to learn from the experts in the field. And I'm in San Francisco, very close to Stanford, one of the top research institutions on the planet. And I got to be friends with the chief of rhinology research down there, who told me all the problems with mouth breathing and showed me all the benefits of nasal breathing. No one was really arguing with any of that, but nobody knew how quickly the problems associated with mouth breathing came on because nobody had studied it. So we developed a little experiment in which me and one other very sad person by the name of Anders Olson, we were to have our noses plugged up for 10 days and to lull ourself into what 25 to 50% of the population is dealing with. The only difference was we were calculating exactly what was happening to our bodies. Physical health, mental health and more.

Interesting. So you willingly signed up for this, having your nose plugged for 10 days?

Willingly is. I would use that term. I would say the opportunity was available for me and I regretted it the first two minutes. My nose was plugged.

Yeah, I was going to say, I was like, man, that sounds like a nightmare. I feel like every single one of us that has spent a few days having plugged up sinuses and a really bad cold is like, oh, that sounds terrible. So, okay, all right. So what were some of the things that you experienced? What were some of the things that you found? What was some of the research that came out of that?

It was terrible, don't get me wrong. But again, I never viewed this as some sort of jackass stunt. People thought it was just like, oh look, some crazy thing. I'm going to make myself suffer. Haha. But if you look at people with chronic sinusitis, if you look at, I would even say the majority of the population who suffers from chronic nasal congestion, they're breathing from their mouths all the time. So, you know, in some ways this wasn't really an extraordinary thing that we were doing. It was a normal thing we were doing. But we were just measuring what happened. And what happened within the first couple hours is my blood pressure went up about 20 points. So that was interesting. Then I went to sleep that night and my snoring increased by 1,300%. That was interesting. Whoa. Started getting sleep apnea first night, started choking on myself. So sleep apnea is different from snoring. Sleep apnea is when the tongue falls back into the throat and you go.

So every time you breathe like that, you are eliciting a severe stress response in your body. You are never able to get into deep sleep when you where all the magic and healing happens. So you're just. It's this IV drip of cortisol the whole way through. We know the problems with sleep apnea. Those are very clear. But the fact that that happened the first night and the second night, both of those things increased. And by the fourth night, I was snoring through half the night. So four hours from zero to four hours. And the other subject, Anders, was snoring even longer than I was and had even more sleep apnea. The day we thank God, the day when we removed all this crap from our noses and were able to breathe through our noses. Instead of breathing through our mouths, snoring almost completely disappeared the first night. Within two nights, 00 sleep apnea. So that alone, just the sleep data on this was so mind blowing that Stanford is now they're trying to boot up a study of 200 people with sleep apnea and looking at the pathway through which we breathe air and how much that will affect their problems.

That's incredible. That's so wild, man. And, well, good for you for sticking.

It up.

Because that sounds like quite the endeavor, but, you know, a worthy cause to say the least. And so, okay, so a couple ways that I'm hearing from what you're saying.

To start to expand on nasal breathing, which is what we're going to kind of move into here. One is this device you were talking about. Can you just elaborate a little bit more on that? Because you've talked about. I think I heard you talk about it on Rogan's podcast and it sounded like quite the experience. So it goes in the roof of your mouth and the intention is to expand the palate, the hard palate of your mouth, so that you create more space within your sinuses. Is that accurate?

Yeah, that is. And I just want to be clear. A lot of people don't need this device. I did it because I had heard about it, I had seen some case studies. I thought, why not? I'm just going to see if this claim that we can't improve our airways, whatever we have, we're stuck with, which I heard from numerous people. They said it was impossible. What Belfor, Ted Belfour was claiming was impossible. Even though I had the X rays, even though I had the data, they said, yeah, yeah, yeah, sorry, this has been photoshopped. So that pissed me off a little bit. Because Ted did the work. He's been doing the work for 30 years. All this work was based on work by JJ Mao at Columbia University, who is the head of dentistry. So this is not fringe stuff. So this device, he wore it at night and it just very softly opened up that palette. If you could take that same finger, lot of a lot of thumbs in the mouth during this interview. But you can try this if you want. You take that thumb and put it to the roof of your mouth. You're going to feel this little indent at the very roof of the mouth. That is a suture. And it's the same suture that goes on in the rest of the head. So that can split open. I won't say split open. It can generally gently open up and expand at virtually Any age. So if you have good oral posture, and by that, if you're not mouth breathing, if you're. If your tongue is on the roof of your mouth, and if you're eating food properly, by pushing your tongue on the roof of the mouth, not out into the teeth, you can naturally keep this palate open, especially in early age. This has such a huge influence on how your face is going to grow, on how your palate's going to be later on in life. But I wanted to see if I could speed it up, if I could hack it. Most of all, I wanted to put prove these other jerks wrong. Sorry, that's just the way it was because the science was so clear and they didn't even bother to look at it. So I took a CAT scan. I wore this thing for a year, and I wore it every night. And at the beginning, totally sucked. I did not want a retainer in my mouth, but I stuck with it, got a lot easier. And I grew about 4 pennies worth of bone in my face, which. Which was supposed to have been impossible, by the way. These CAT scans were analyzed at the Mayo Clinic, so not quite a fringe institution. And my airway opened up about 15, 20%. I have never been able to breathe more easily in my life. That, again, isn't just a subjective measure. I had pus and granulation in my sinuses, likely as a result from upper airway resistance syndrome, which is just a slight resistance every time I was breathing. What that can do is bring up stomach acid from your stomach because it essentially creates a pump. And this is why so many people have GERD and other acid reflux problems, is because they're not breathing properly and that acid gets sucked up. So some of that was likely happening to me. It was all gone. And, you know, so it's. It's fun to have these scans again. This is real data. These are scans. They have not been photoshopped, I promise you. These came from the Mayo Clinic. And people can look at them if they want. But to me, it's more fascinating to find people who willingly won't look at them because it compromises their worldview. And that is not how science is supposed to work. Science is not a closed book. It is constantly changing. And if you're not keeping up with the latest developments in science, you are not a scientist. And I firmly believe that.

Well said, well said. I agree wholeheartedly with that. And I mean, it's such an interesting piece and tying in the.

Not acid reflux, but just what's happening within the body in terms of its response to not being able to get in the proper amount of air and not being able to access those airways. I think you also talk a little bit about the impacts of. And this part was sort of surprising around deviated septums and how.

Common that actually is. And so can you just speak a little bit to that and the impact that that has on the body?

Sure. So I had been told that I had a deviated septum and NIAC took a CAT scan and was looking at my sinuses and just kind of cracking up, which is a really bad thing. You don't want a doctor to be laughing at how deformed you are. And he was looking at my septum. He's just like, oh, my God, how many times have you broken your nose? I said, about three or four times. So he said that I was a perfect candidate for surgery, but I had seen people restore themselves naturally and thought the natural thing, the best thing for my body, was to try these other methods first before I just resorted to surgery. Right. I have nothing to lose. Breathing's free. All of these methods I'm talking about are free. That homeoblog from Ted Belfort costs some money, but chewing correctly doesn't, proper oral posture doesn't. It's all free. So I was inspired by Ann Kearney, who's right down the road, Hull from niac, who is the doctor of Speech Language Pathology at Stanford, who was able to really change her breathing in so many significant ways by just nasal breathing and by focusing on each breath. So, you know, with. With that knowledge, I was able to take my deformed sinuses and optimize them to their maximum potential. They're still deformed, but I can breathe just fine. And it turns out that 75% of us, 75%, have a septum that is clearly deviated to the naked eye. So if ever you go into an ENT and they say, oh, man, you got deviated septum, we got to do surgery immediately. You should step back a bit and look at the science and look at what's really happening here and perhaps try some other approaches before going under the knife. I want to be clear. Surgical interventions are absolutely necessary for some people. I've seen people's health be absolutely transformed through surgery. But what I've found, my personal opinion, is that we can do so much with our natural bodies to improve our breathing and improve our health.

Yeah, I would emulate that as well. Just, again, with my own experience, when I was singing quite a bit I had to go see an ENT on a regular basis. And I remember him, you know, putting the camera up my nose and down, down the throat to view my vocal cords this one, this one time. And, and sort of saying like, oh, you have a slightly deviated septum on and you should probably deal with that. And. And I remember through certain breath work practices and just being conscious of it, you know, over time and getting significantly better. I'm curious for people that do want to start to action on this and you know, they're sort of hearing this. Where. Where do they sort of start? Like, what are some basic pieces is. Do they just start with the sinus breathing? I think in. You talk about an experiment of sleeping with your mouth taped shut. Is that. Is that correct? Can you speak a little bit about to that? Sure.

Well, you start with this incredible book. It's called Breath. It's by this guy, James Nestor. And he. Stop. No, no, no. All this stuff is free people. If you want to know the who, what, why and where, that's in the book. But these hacks. So this is what you can do. First thing you have to do is breathe through your nose. Breathe through your nose all the time, period. No exceptions. That means exercising. That means jogging. That means sleeping. A lot of you are saying, going to be impossible. There's no way I can breathe through my nose. I've been jogging for 30 years. Can't do it. Figure out a way of doing it. Never work out harder. Then you can breathe correctly. And correct breathing is nasal breathing. And chances are you're going to show huge advantages and benefits to performance and recovery by switching that channel in which you're breathing. So as Nayak told me, if a sink is plugged, you find a way of clearing it. The nose has to be considered the same thing. So that's the first homework assignment. The second assignment, for those of us who are chronic mouth breathers when we sleep, that includes me, and that includes a large percentage of the population. You don't want to do that. I had always thought it was normal to sleep with just a huge glass of water by the side of my bed and just take hits of that water all night because my mouth was constantly dry because I was mouth breathing, not normal at all. So I've found that a little piece of tape, not duct tape, not masking tape. Getting so many questions about this, uh, you know, not painter's tape, a teeny piece of surgical hypoallergenic tape at the center of the lips. Doesn't matter if you Have a mustache. Doesn't matter if you have a beard. I show you how to do this on my site. It's all for free. Can help train the mouth shut. You don't want to hermetically seal the lip shut. Why would you want to do that? You don't want a hostage situation going on every night. If you can breathe through the sides of the mouth, cool. You can even cough that way. You can even talk that way. You talk like an idiot, but you can still get words out. So just by training that mouth shut, you will be breathing through your nose, which will help tone your airway. Because when you breathe through the nose, right now, if you open your mouth up, your tongue is going to naturally fall back in your throat a little bit. When you close your mouth, that tongue is going to naturally rise up to your palate. Guess what happens when that. When you do that, when you close your mouth and the tongue rises up to the palate, helps to open the airway. And so by having that pressurized air, that vacuum coming in and the positive pressure coming out, you can actually help tone the airway, the shape of the airway, and you can breathe better. And this is something that can take people a couple weeks to really get comfortable with. It took me even longer. I thought it was an awful idea. I'd last five minutes, rip it off. Now I have trouble sleeping without it. I'm so reliant on it. For a lot of people, after a few weeks, few months, they don't need tape. They've got the habit down. I need it. I have a weak jaw, and I need it to keep my lips closed.

Okay. So all of that is fascinating, and I really love this conversation. And I think one of the things that I was curious about diving into is, you know, and we've kind of touched on a few different pieces now about nasal breathing and the importance of it. But I'm wondering if you can unpack a little bit more of the research behind why nasal breathing is so important, what happens in the body and some of the practical applications that people can start to use. Nasal breathing. And in terms of working out and in terms of just their everyday life.

I think the most important thing about nasal breathing is that it's not mouth breathing. So when we take in breaths and exhale through our mouths, we're not conditioning that breath. We're not heating it, we're not filtering it. It's just completely raw. So you can almost think about the lungs like an external organ. When you're breathing through your mouth. They're just exposed to everything in the environment. And if you live in a city like I do, that means allergens, pollutants, so many other things. So if you look at the human nose and sinuses, it's this vastly complex organ that they call it the nasal concha because it looks just like a seashell. And seashells use organisms that have seashells. They use those shells to filter out invaders. And our noses do the exact same thing. That's why we have nasal hair. That's why the bones that make up our sinuses, the turbinates, look just like a maze. They look like a labyrinth. And when we breathe through the nose, we force that air through this labyrinth. It has to run this gauntlet where it gets heated and filtered and humidified so that by the time it reaches the lungs, the lungs are getting air that is conditioned. And it's so much easier and healthier for them to take in that air through the nose. It's more efficient for oxygen too. We get 20% more oxygen through the nose than we do through equivalent breaths through the mouth. So there's so many reasons to nasal breathe, but so few of us do it. Something like, you know, I think I'd mentioned 25 to 50% of us are habitual mouth breathers. And we just don't realize how much damage that's doing to our bodies.

I'm curious because one of the parts of the book talks about the hold, you know, holding it, and there is this rise. And we've talked a little bit about, you know, free diving, which is where, you know, where this conversation started. And you told such a wonderful story about witnessing freedivers. And there is this sort of like rise within the breathwork community of doing breathwork and holding. And I'm, I'm curious as to whether or not there are sort of research backed studies that have talked about the benefits of breath hold and what it does within the body and nervous system.

So for centuries, different people, it didn't matter if you were in the army. Samurais used to do this. And about 70, 80 years ago, this was a quick diagnostic that a researcher in Russia used to just assess the general health of his patients. So it's just to hold your breath on an exhale and see how long you can hold it. And consistently. People with asthma or anxiety or their mental disorders or physical disorders can only hold their breath for a few seconds because their bodies aren't operating efficiently. And the samurai used to test a soldier's readiness by placing a feather underneath Their noses. And if that feather moved while they were breathing, they would kick them out of the samurai army or whatever you called it. So breath control and being able to hold your breath and breathe slowly, there are direct links to physical and mental health. So this is coming back because I think it's really based on science. You look at people with chronic fear based conditions, even depression, anorexia, you look at people with chronic respiratory problems, underlying conditions, they just can't hold their breath very long. And so what a lot of people do in the morning, they take a soft exhale and they hold their breath. And they use that as a general gauge of how their health is that morning. Now, this isn't a perfect metric of health, right, but it's a good general overview of how you're doing. So so much of this is tied to tolerance of carbon dioxide. So many of those populations, asthmatics, people who suffer anxiety and panic, have these very low levels of carbon dioxide. And when you have consistently low levels of carbon dioxide, you, your body has to compensate for getting that CO2 up because having not enough carbon dioxide is going to inhibit blood flow. You need CO2 as a vasodilator. You need CO2 to use oxygen. So this is one of the most underappreciated molecules in our body is CO2. And so by allowing yourself to elevate your levels of CO2, we've seen this with asthma, we've seen this with anxiety, we've seen it with panic. So many of the symptoms of these chronic problems can be abated by just learning how to allow more CO2 in your body, specifically learning how to breathe slowly and using breath holding as a metric of general health.

Interesting. Okay, very cool. And I mean, I remember reading about some Buddhist practices, this is like a decade ago, where they talked about certain Buddhist practices would actively try and slow the breath down. It was always referring to in through the nose, but it was slowing the breath down and seeing if you could reduce the breaths to like something like six breaths a minute or something like that. And this was sort of like a meditative practice of getting, you know, active meditation. So I'm wondering, because I can sort of hear my listeners, you know, with all this information and all this research, it's like, well, where, where do we begin? Where should people start? Are there, you know, what's the practical application of some of this work? Because I think people are always looking for the exercises and the experiences they can do from home.

So when I was first starting this research, I found dozens and dozens of books of how to breathe, filled with practices, 400 practices, all with crazy names, and it was pretty daunting. So I was like, which one do I pick? Do I pick this one? Do I pick this one? Do I pick this one? And. And I think that the first step is not to focus on a specific practice. So many of these practices doesn't matter if it's qigong, doesn't matter if it's pranayama, doesn't matter if it's kriya, doesn't matter if it's meditation, Buddhist meditation. They're all doing the same thing. So they're teaching you to get control of your breath, and all of them are teaching you to breathe slowly and to focus on those breaths. There's some pranayamas and kriyas that teach you how to breathe very intensely and in very heavy, intense way, but that's only for a very short amount of time. The rest of the time, you need to take control of your breath and slow it down, because this is something a lot of people don't realize either. You are actually getting more oxygen when you breathe slower and fewer breaths than just breathing many breaths into your chest. If you look down at your chest now, when we're breathing 20 times a minute, which is pretty common in our culture, we're just bringing air in to our throats, to our mouths, to the bronchi, right at the top of the chest, but not so much into the lungs. And it's only in the lungs where that gas exchange happens, where oxygen is absorbed. So we're literally bringing in air to just put it back out. Which is why people who breathe so often in their chest need to breathe so much just to get oxygen. But you'll get about 40% more efficiency by slowing down those breaths and taking them deeper. Because blood is gravity dependent, and most of the gas exchange in our lungs happens at the bottom of the lungs, not at the top of them. So a great first thing to do is to train yourself to breathe at an inhale of about six, count of about six. Don't freak out if you're half a second off. I say 5.5 in the book, but since then, people have written me all worried that they're a half a second off, and I'm just like, oh, my God, I need to correct that in the next edition. So you can use that as a general gauge. If you breathe a little less than that, that's cool. If you breathe a little more than that, that's totally fine. But around five to six seconds in Five to six seconds out. And just by breathing this way, they've measured what's happened to the body. 20 years of studies, look at the work of Dr. Patricia Garbarg or Richard Brown at Columbia, they've used this for anxiety and depression. But just by breathing this way, you get an increase of blood flow and oxygen to the brain. Your circulation is going to increase, your heart rate is going to lower and start pumping more efficiently, and the systems of the body are going to enter the state of coherence, they call it. And that's where everything is working at peak efficiency. You can do more with much less effort. And that's exactly what your body wants. So it seems so simple and basic to really do anything but try it out. Look at the science. I certainly have. And if you have a blood pressure monitor, which I have, take your blood pressure before breathing this way and then after a couple minutes of breathing this way, and I've seen drops of about 10 to 15 points just by switching the way in which you're breathing. You just imagine that's after a couple minutes. What happens after a couple weeks or months of breathing this way.

That's awesome. I love it. I love it. And I definitely have adhered to that before in the past and found a significant relaxation within, within the nervous system, you know, so people that sort of deal with, with not chronic anxiety, but, but certainly with heightened levels of anxiety that are usually a little jacked up and jittery and whatnot. This is certainly a good exercise. I'm curious if you did any research around the correlation between oxygenating the body and an emotional release. And so I know you don't. I don't think you talk about this in the book, but there's a great book called the Body Keeps the Score. And it's really a lot about how we store emotions in the body and that emotions produce that. There's a lot of research that's showing that emotions produce peptides, so like the base chain of amino acids, and that when we repress and store emotions like that, we can actually increase the acidic nature of our ecosystem. And there's people like Wim Hof that are sort of claiming that as we hyperoxygenate the body, it's breaking down and allowing our bodies to become a little bit more like the litmus in the body is actually starting to balance out. And so the ph balance balances out within the body. And I'm curious if you did came across anything in that realm, even though this might not be sort of directly attached to the book.

Sure. Well, they call them toxic thoughts for a reason. Right. Of course. That we place our body in a state of stress. We're going to be eliciting more stress hormones throughout our body. And that that's been very well studied. So it's interesting to note that just breathing through the nose, you are going to increase your memory, your ability to memorize things, and you are also going to be synchronizing the emotional centers of the brain to allow you to process emotions more efficiently and better not to just jump to crazy conclusions just by breathing through the nose. And that was a study that came out just a couple years ago. I was just rereading it a couple days ago, which was fascinating. I think when you're looking at what whim is doing and when you're looking at what other psychologists have been saying and finding is you have to consider the nervous system is pivoting between this stress response and this parasympathetic response. And when you're constantly, even if you have this low grade stress throughout most of the day, which most of us have, you are going to constantly be just slightly inflamed and you're going to have this IV drip of cortisol and other stress hormones, which is great. We need those stress hormones. Inflammation is a wonderful thing when we need it. But when it becomes chronic and we have it all the time, our bodies after a while, completely break down with the presence of cortisol. Our blood sugar is going to jack up with more adrenaline. And this is one of the reasons why so many people are getting diabetes. It's one of the, there's many reasons, but that is one of the reasons of being in this state of chronic stress. In fact, most diseases right now are related to chronic inflammation caused by chronic stress. So you can think of your breathing as these two levers. We can use breathing to bring on stress, which is exactly what Wim Hof is doing. And I call them breathing plus methods because he didn't invent that method, he just found a way of promoting it. He's an awesome guy. Been talking to him. I love what he's doing. But he's using stress to kill stress. It's like fighting fire with fire. When you do the Wim Hof method, you are stressing your body out to its maximum for 20 minutes out of the day so that you can spend the other 23 and a half hours of the day relaxing and restoring, which is exactly what your body wants to do. So forcing yourself to breathe too much will stress you out. Forcing yourself to breathe less and breathe slowly will calm you down. So right now, if people were to take an inhale of about 4 and an exhale of 6, you are exhaling more. And on each exhale, you are gently pivoting your body into that rest and relaxation state of your nervous system. So inhaling is considered a sympathetic and activating state. So if you want to get pumped up before a meeting or whatever, you can inhale more than you're exhaling. And if you want to relax, you can exhale more than you're inhaling. And so many breathing practices are built around just that. Some of your listeners may have heard of box breathing. Inhale to four, hold to four. Exhale to four, hold to 4. Guess what you're doing. For 75% of that, you're either holding your breath or you're exhaling. And that's why it calms you down. And the great thing about, about breathing, just one, one other little tidbit here is it's not a placebo effect. It's not psychosomatic. Breathing is so easy to measure. You can measure it with heart rate variability, you can measure it with blood pressure, pulse oximeters, EEGs, whatever, so you can really see what it's doing to your body. And what I love about it too is it's almost instantaneous. Just switching your breathing within a few seconds can elicit that different state of nervous system activity. And so just to know that you have this tools within you when you get stressed out, I've found has been very beneficial.

Wonderful, wonderful. Well, listen, James, this has been a pleasure, a treat. It's been wonderful selfishly on my side to geek out with you and talk about breath, which is something that has really been a huge part of my life. I like to say I got a degree in breathing, not because I have a degree in music. And so it's not really super applicable to the work that I do today. But I learned a tremendous amount about breath back in the day and I and I learned just as much by, by digging through your work. And so for everyone that's out there that that is looking to dive into this or really like this conversation, definitely head on over and check out James Book. We'll have a link in the show notes. But if they're wanting to follow you along a little bit more closely, where can they find you?

So traditionally, I've hated social media. I've been absolutely awful at it. But I've seen a few accounts that have been pretty inspiring. Andrew Huberman and Brian McKenzie. And I thought, oh, I'm going to put all the cutting room floor tidbits on social media. That's a long way of saying you can find me on Instagram. I'm trying to get better at it. I'm on Facebook as well. I'm really bad at that account. But I'm trying to post not like puppy pictures and pictures of my food, but just things relevant to breath on Instagram. And there's been some wonderful conversations there. So rjamesnester is my handle on all social media beauty.

Well, thanks so much for joining me and I look forward to having you back on the show, man. You're quite a gifted researcher and writer. And so whatever you do in the future, I'm looking forward to digging in with you again. So thanks. Thanks again for being on the show.

Thanks very much for having me. Yeah.

And for everyone that's out there, don't forget to share this episode with somebody that you know is passionate about breath or would enjoy this conversation. And until next week, this is Connor Bean signing off.