How to feel alive in an exhausting world

This message comes from Great Wolf Lodge. There's adventure for the whole family, including an indoor water park that's always 84 degrees, attractions, spacious suites, and more. You're just a short drive away from an unforgettable family getaway. Learn more at greatwolf.com.

This is the TED Radio Hour. Each week, groundbreaking TED Talks—

Our job now is to dream big.

—delivered at TED conferences— To bring about the future we want to see. —around the world. Understand who we are. From those talks, we bring you speakers and ideas that will surprise you.

You just don't know what you're gonna find.

Challenge you. We truly have to ask ourselves, like, why is it noteworthy?

And even change you. I literally feel like I'm a different person. Yes! Do you feel that way? Ideas Worth Spreading from TED and NPR. I'm Manoush Zomorodi. Today on the show, the age of exhaustion: what's making us so tired and how we can get some of our energy back. Have you ever closed your laptop at the end of a long day and felt like all you could manage next was to crawl over to the couch to look at your phone or watch some TV or both? There was a day when this happened to me and I got so annoyed. Why didn't I want to spring up from my chair at the end of the day? I hadn't moved for hours. Where did my energy go? Obviously, a lot has happened over the past 6 years, which is when I first started hosting this show. A pandemic, of course, political turmoil at home and abroad that has put us all on edge. And then there's that AI future that we seem to be careening towards. That's a lot to keep up with. No wonder the average U.S. adult spends over 12 hours a day interacting with media. All that time spent looking at screens— well, we've heard about the effect on our mental health, but what about our physical health? According to researchers at Johns Hopkins, every day, the average 19-year-old moves about as much as the average 60-year-old. Over the past 20 years, rates of type 2 diabetes in young people have doubled. 3 out of 4 American adults have at least one chronic disease, many of which are preventable. Modern life is clearly doing a number on us. And so today on the show, antidotes for our age of exhaustion. How our anatomy is responding to a pace of change that feels relentless. New research into how the mind and body communicate on a cellular level, and what we can do to feel alive again. For me, as much as I felt frustrated with all the typing, swiping, and sitting I have to do, going off the grid is not an option. And so I wanted to understand why I felt so bad and how I could feel better without having to move to Walden Pond. All this led to NPR's Body Electric project and a study in 2023 that you may have been part of. And a few months ago, I shared the story from the TED stage. So how can we stay connected without slowly destroying our health? That was the question running through my mind when I came across this guy. Keith Diaz is a physiologist at Columbia University Medical Center, and he has spent his entire career trying to figure out How little can we get away with moving so that sitting doesn't kill us, basically? And in 2022, he published a, a small study that gives us a great idea. He found that just 5 minutes of gentle movement every 30 minutes had dramatic effects. It slashed blood sugar and blood pressure. In another study, he found that inactive people who traded 30 minutes of sitting for 30 minutes of movement every day could lower their risk of a premature death by 18%. And so maybe you're like, "Yeah, I worked out this morning, so I'm good." Or maybe you're like, "Phew, I'm so glad I got that standing desk." I am so sorry, but no. If you sit or stand for the majority of your waking hours, your health is in jeopardy, too. "¡No pares de trabajar!" Keith told me. But he said, "What you have to do is break up these long stretches of sedentary screen time." I decided I would join the study. So one day I went to his lab, and I sat and worked on my laptop for 8 hours straight. The next day, I took those movement breaks every half hour or so. They checked all my vital signs. And the results were actually quite extraordinary. My glucose was cut nearly in half, My blood pressure was down by 5 points, and my mood was so much better. The science was clear, but, like, what did it matter if no one could actually do these movement breaks? Like, it was easy in the lab. Somebody tapped me on the shoulder and led me over to the treadmill. So we decided to ask people out in the world, out in real life, to see if they could do it. We, our teams at NPR and Columbia, combined forces to create a podcast and a global clinical trial called Body Electric study, and over 20,000 people signed up. We had to cap it at 20,000 people, and they could choose a movement dose, so they could move 5 minutes every half hour, 5 minutes every hour, or every 2 hours. They could dance around the house, they could pace on calls, they could walk the dog, they could take out the trash. It didn't matter, they just had to break it up, break up those long periods of sitting. And you guys, I was so excited. I was like, "We are gonna launch a movement for movement." Yeah, I've got a way with words. Those first few days of the Body Electric Study were tough. If you participated, maybe you remember how much intention and rebellion it takes to move more in a world built around screens and chairs. But people started figuring out how to integrate movement breaks into their lives. And when they did, they started having breakthroughs.

My energy went way up. So when you get home from work, you don't feel like cooking dinner, you don't feel like doing anything. I didn't really get any of that while I was doing the study.

I feel so much better, have more energy, can focus better, and I'm happier. I felt as if I could go for, for longer, and I really felt like the cloud in my brain kind of dissipated. That was Jordan Smith, Roger Eastman, and Dana Lopez-Maile. People told us they felt less pain, they were less tired, they could focus and felt more positive. Surprisingly, taking breaks did not hurt their productivity. People said they got back to their desks and were able to concentrate better. But why? What was going on in their bodies? Keith explained to me some of the reasons why these gentle breaks can have such an outsized impact. So when we sit, our arteries get bent at our hips and our knees, kind of like a kinked vacuum hose. Blood starts pooling in our legs and our muscles stop contracting. But leg muscles need to move, be stimulated in order to clear out fat and sugar and reduce blood pressure. If they don't, over months and over years, that's when those chronic conditions can start to creep in. And that is where screens come into this— the picture. So screens can mess with something called interoception. Interoception is the body's way of telling you what it needs. It needs a snack, it needs to go to the bathroom, it needs to move. The more we focus on screens, the less we listen to the signals that our body is sending us Your body could be begging for a break, but what do you do? You keep scrolling past the anxiety, scrolling past the exhaustion. That eventually can lead to burnout, yes, and again, those chronic conditions. At the end of the clinical trial, we found that of the people who started taking movement breaks, 80% managed to stick with them for 2 solid weeks. To be sure, this was a self-reported study with lots of very motivated public radio listeners. But still, the data showed that the more often people took breaks, the better they felt. People who went outside got an extra boost. Some people lost a few stubborn pounds. And most people actually liked taking the breaks. So how did they do it? That's what I wanted to find out next. While Keith Diaz wrote up the research for Scientific Publication, which is now under peer review, I've spent the last few years combing through the surveys and stories and data that all the participants shared. I wanted to understand why some people dropped out almost immediately, but others stuck with movement breaks and thrived. And one of the many things I found was that different life stages required different tactics. Retired people, for example, they often moved more during the day, but they needed to take breaks around the house to disrupt long evenings usually spent sitting at screens. Information workers, those who sat at a desk all day long, were typically interrupted by annoying messages and pings from their colleagues. But when they scheduled purposeful interruptions and added 5 minutes of movement, they reported that the quality of their work improved and they liked their jobs more. So how can you start making a change and feeling better? Well, first, think about your most sedentary stretches of time and then make yourself a mantra. So like, if you are a student, you could say, "I'll take an extra lap around the quad before class instead of checking TikTok." "so I get to class with more oxygen in my brain and I can actually focus." Or if you work from home, you could decide that on long Zoom calls, "I will march in place in order to manage my glucose and avoid the post-meeting crash." If you're a parent, you could say, "I will take a lap around the soccer field once so that I have enough energy to get through the dinnertime chaos." You can have a dance party while you microwave your leftovers, you can walk the concourse instead of sitting and waiting for your flight. A mix of all these habits will keep your muscles firing and your mood steadier. My favorite story came from a 43-year-old woman named Dana, who works in HR. So Dana was a Type 2 diabetic with all kinds of health issues. Her doctor told her she needed to take a long, brisk walk every morning, and she was doing this, but her numbers just were not changing. So with her doctor's permission, she decided to join the study. She started fitting in movement breaks between all of her meetings, and within a couple of weeks, she told me, her blood pressure dropped by 40 points, her cholesterol went down, and her doctor told her she could start tapering her insulin. She's actually off all of her meds today. I know. Yay, Dana! We love you, Dana. We know that too much time online is not great for our mental health, but it's not just in our heads, it's in our bodies. We need movement to be as much a part of our lives as screens are. We need our schools, our neighborhoods, our workplaces to give us time and space just to move. You can help push this reset forward. Take movement breaks. And when people look at you like you're weird, Just tell them why you're doing it, because you just want to feel a little better. Get them to put down their phone and join you. Start soon, start small. Should we start now? Yeah! Let's— can we have some music? You could do— you could do the march, you could do the shuffle, little hands in the air if you can't get up. Feel it. You're alive! You're alive! I'm Manoush Zomorodi, the host of NPR's TED Radio Hour and the author of Body Electric: The Hidden Health Costs of the Digital Age and New Science to Reclaim Your Well-Being. You can see my TED Talk at ted.com. And if you participated in the Body Electric study, thank you so, so much. When we come back, new research into metabolism and how your body gives you energy on a cellular level. On the show today, antidotes for our age of exhaustion. You're listening to The TED Radio Hour from NPR. We'll be right back. This message comes from the Arbor Day Foundation, planting trees with intention and scale to support a greener future. For more than 50 years, the Arbor Day Foundation has connected local experts with the support they need from passionate people and companies who care to plant trees in communities and forests around the world. They use data and mapping to ensure they're focusing efforts in high-priority areas where trees will make the most impact. Like places affected by natural disasters. Disaster recovery work involving tree planting can take years to do right. In the two decades after Hurricane Katrina, the Arbor Day Foundation has planted hundreds of thousands of trees in response. And the work continues to this day as the foundation is working with partners on the ground in New Orleans' Lower Ninth Ward to help rebuild a greener community through trees. Most recently, they've brought that same spirit to Los Angeles, planting at several sites throughout the city impacted by the Heat and Fire. Learn more and see how you can support their work at arborday.org/NPR.

Support for NPR and the following message come from ID Tech. ID Tech is a summer camp for ages 7 to 17 with over 50 courses like BattleBots, AI, coding, game design, and more. Visit IDTech.com and use code IDTECH to save $150.

This message comes from Total Wine and More. For the weekend, share a bottle with someone. Find what you love and love what you find, only at Total Wine and More. Shop in store or online. Spirits not sold in Virginia and North Carolina. Drink responsibly. Be 21.

This message comes from Charles Schwab with their original podcast, Choiceology. Choiceology is a show about the psychology and economics behind people's decisions. Download the latest episode and subscribe at schwab.com/podcast. It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Manoush Zomorodi. Today on the show, the age of exhaustion. What's making us so tired, and how can we get our energy back? There are some people who just seem to be up for anything. They are always on the go.

There are certainly people who look and feel and behave as if they have more energy than others. That's a fact.

This is Martin Picard. He's a medical scientist who studies human energy on a cellular level. And Martin thinks the answer to why certain people have more energy might be found in—

Those beautiful little things that are in our cells, the mitochondria.

Yes, researchers are taking a new look at mitochondria, the tiny organelles that swim around in some of our cells.

What we've discovered in the last few years is that different people have very different kinds of mitochondria. And some people's mitochondria seem to be quite a bit better at flowing energy.

If you haven't thought about mitochondria since middle school, here's a quick refresher and some new knowledge about how they work in the body.

Every living creature is made of cells. But if it wasn't for the energy flowing through the mitochondria, then we wouldn't be alive. Right. So the difference between a thinking, breathing, conscious person like you and I that are having this discussion now and a cadaver, the main difference is the flow of energy. And what mitochondria do is they take energy in one form, which is food, and then they transform it first into a little electrical charge. So they literally create this little electrical charge, and then they use that electrical charge for all sorts of things, dozens of things that mitochondria do.

I remember learning mitochondria are the powerhouses of the cell. Are we right?

Yes, the powerhouse analogy was very useful in the '60s and '50s, 1950s, 1960s. '80s, that's when the—

and more recently, my kids were told it was the powerhouse. I know, I know.

I was told that. I was told that too in school, and I still hear this from new students that come in the lab. That analogy is too simple. A powerhouse is a little machine. It does one thing. Mitochondria are living beings, and they do dozens of things. So mitochondria produce hormones like cortisol and the sex hormones that allow pregnancy and, like, testosterone, and that allows the male characteristics. They regulate ions inside the cell, like calcium. They are responsible for regulating oxidative stress inside our cells, turning on genes, turning off genes, regulating the epigenome. So mitochondria do a number of things that are critical to cell life.

As a medical scientist, my team and I work hard to understand the basis of human health.

Martin Picard explains more in his TED Talk.

As Peter Sterling says in his book, "What Is Health?" Health is the ability to optimally respond and adapt to challenges. Why do some people remain healthy for decades while others get sick often and die early? For the past 2 or 3 decades, scientists have approached this question by focusing on genes, static stretches of DNA packaged in the cell nucleus. But you see, our genes are like the inert stuff inside our phone. The screen, the computer chip, the charging port. And health is more like the interactive nature of your phone. Like how it vibrates when you press something, or how the screen turns on when a call or text comes in. Without charge and energy, there's nothing on the screen. Blank. The hardware doesn't allow you to experience or to connect with anything unless it's energized, just like your genome. And in terms of longevity, the best research from over 50 million people shows that genes predict less than 7% of how long we live. Less than 7%. So when it comes to health and longevity, science shows that genes are mostly not in control. I think medicine has failed to understand health so far because we've essentially focused on the hardware without understanding the role of energy in our health.

Okay, so we know now that genes are not as responsible for as much of our health as we used to think. But you've been studying how genetic defects of mitochondria can teach us more about how important they are to our overall biological system. Yes.

So, you know, for many years now, I've been going to the clinic where I see patients with rare mitochondrial diseases that impairs the ability of their mitochondria to flow energy from food to oxygen. And, you know, more than 90% of them, the thing that bothers them the most is fatigue. They feel like they have no energy. So we know it feels like something when your mitochondria cannot flow energy properly. So then the next question is, well, Is this then the driving force behind other people who feel fatigued and tired, like people who have chronic fatigue syndrome or long COVID or any other normal human being who goes through a phase in their life where they're completely depleted and exhausted? Is this because the mitochondria are impaired? And we don't know the answer to that question, but it's quite possible.

But let's say I have, like, a cold and I'm tired and I don't feel like eating. What is making me tired with that? What's the thinking? And how does that relate to mitochondria? Yes.

What's going on there? That's a great question. What happens then is not that your mitochondria are broken or dysfunctional or that something's wrong with the energetic circuitry of your body. What's happening here is what we called energy trade-offs or energy constraint. And when one part of the body is burning more energy than it should, it steals energy away from other parts of the body. So the body makes really rapid decisions about where is energy most essential. So if there's an infection, to survive another day, another week, you need to allocate energy towards the immune system. So as a result, because the immune system is burning all this energy, it kind of steals energy away from from the mind and from cognition and from everything else in the body. So that feels terrible, and rightfully so, because then if you feel terrible, you just want to lie down in bed, conserve energy so that there's as much energy available for the immune system. And it seems like what we feel is not the total amount of energy we have on the body, but it's how well energy is flowing. Yeah.

So, I mean, I think we hear the mind-body connection, and that sounds kind of woo-woo or something, but your research suggests suggests that actually the mitochondria might be the sort of missing link, that the, the way that the mind and the body are conversing. Exactly.

The mind and the body are not two things that are kind of conversing. What they— they're two expressions of a, of a deeper underlying process, uh, and, and that deeper underlying process is energy transformation and, um, the flow of energy, really. Fundamentally, the question that I think we need to solve in medicine and biomedical research is how is it that the biology of energy and other aspects of biology, how is that related to the human experience?

How mind and body communicate to shape our long-term health remains one of the biggest mysteries in medicine. And that's not a problem of genes, but one of energy and communication. So what about mitochondria? Do they communicate? Well, if you look at their behavior inside the cell, you see that they function as a dynamic network. And just like your phone connects wirelessly to other mobile phones, mitochondria produce wireless signals that influence each other. Mitochondria can also often migrate around the cell nucleus. And as they surround your 25,000 genes, mitochondria dictate important information to turn on or turn off specific genes. They can even jump between cells to rescue other cells in trouble. Mitochondria have evolved into a social network. They're collaborative and communicative. And we know that this kind of biological communication is vital because losing that alone causes disease. For example, depression is caused by impaired communication between neurons. Alzheimer's disease involves impaired communication between different parts of the brain. And the ultimate loss of communication between cells causes cancer. Cancer cells are cells that have lost touch with their mitochondria and therefore start to rely on other energy sources. They effectively revert back to their ancestral bacterial nature before endosymbiosis, to their selfish unicellular state where growth is all that mattered. Because of that, cancer cells become disconnected from the rest of the network, just like a dead phone unable to connect to anything. Without normal mitochondria and communication, cancer cells end up breaking the social contract with other cells, which threatens the whole organism. So it's becoming clear that to understand the basis of health, we cannot just study human biology or psychology because the body and the mind are powered by the same thing and communicate via their mitochondria. Naturally, this led to a new interdisciplinary field of research called mitochondrial psychobiology. The goal of mitochondrial psychobiology is to map new pathways of communication between the mind and the body, or the mind-mitochondria connection, to better understand human health.

So all the mitochondria, when they're healthy, they are all talking to each other. Is Is that because they all work the same way, or are there different kinds of mitochondria? Like, do different parts of the body have different types of mitochondria? Yes.

Different types of mitochondria in different types of cells in different organs. So the mitochondria of the liver are very different than the mitochondria of the kidney, which are different than the mitochondria of the brain and the heart and the muscles, the pancreas, and so on. You can think of the human body as kind of a social collective. And there are different organs, different cells that play different roles.

See, the brain receives, integrates data and input from all senses, and it coordinates every cell and organ. Just like your phone needs energy in its battery to receive, process, and send data, the brain needs energy to do this. A lot of energy. So the cells in your brain are packed with lots of mitochondria. In fact, the brain is only 2% of your body weight, but its mitochondria consume up to 20% of the oxygen and energy of the whole body. It's like a phone with 100 apps running in the background, constantly needing to be charged. Every second, we breathe to bring oxygen into our lungs and blood, and our heart circulates the blood to carry oxygen to every cell and organ, including your brain. Just how important feeding oxygen to mitochondria is becomes obvious when things go wrong, like when a stroke or heart attack cuts off oxygen to the brain. Without the constant delivery of oxygen to mitochondria, everything stops. Your inner screen goes blank and your consciousness ends. Energy doesn't just power all biochemical reactions in the body, It gives us the ability to think, to feel, to worry, and to create.

Energy powers our mind. Do you mind, like, I wonder if you just take me into a brain cell, put me in there with the mitochondria and explain what exactly it's doing.

So let's imagine we shrink and we enter the brain, and then there's this amazing density of neurons, different kinds of neurons. and then we see this one neuron. And what you would see as you enter the cell is these spaghetti, bean-looking units, the mitochondria, that are kind of gently and slowly moving around in the cytoplasm, kissing each other, fusing with each other, dividing. And those mitochondria are there receiving inputs, integrating information, and then sending outputs to the cell nucleus that kind of sits there in the middle. Of the neuron. So because of this little collective of mitochondria in the cytoplasm, which is what we call the inside of the cell, the neuron can come to life and it can express the right genes and it can receive information and produce action potential, right? The neurons fire. That costs a lot of energy and it comes mostly from the mitochondria transforming energy.

So if you see like a scan of a brain and they show you where there's activity, that means that the mitochondria are are sending out the signals, electricity is being generated, and processing is happening. Yes.

What you see is typically the oxygen levels that are changing in the brain, and the oxygen levels that you see on a scan really reflect the mitochondria consuming, breathing the oxygen of the brain, right, and then transforming energy.

So mitochondria are really they're driving our metabolism. Is that fair to say? Exactly. Yeah. So let's talk about how we can— I mean, is that a good health goal to increase your mitochondrial health?

There's science certainly that says if you have lots of mitochondria, can flow energy easily. This is associated with better health, physical health, mental health, and with longevity. One way to do that, to make lots of well-functioning mitochondria, is moving, exercising. Because when you exercise, what happens is you cause energy resistance in the body. If you contract your muscles because you're running or lifting or swimming or biking, you're causing energy resistance in the body. And it feels uncomfortable because you're pushing and blood lactate increase. Then the body will say, next time this happens, I need to be ready. So I'm going to make more mitochondria. So that's called mitochondrial biogenesis. So exercise is something that enhances overall health because it improves the number of mitochondria in your body. And then if you have more mitochondria, you can flow energy more easily. Fascinating.

So if I am like, I want to feel energized, I want to feel positive, what are some of the things you recommend doing so that we can keep our mitochondria functioning and talking to each other and getting energy into the rest of ourselves?

Yeah, great question. The first thing is moving, exercise, right? Anything you do that makes you breathe harder, including running, rowing, swimming, biking, making love, whatever it is that makes you breathe harder, you breathe harder because your mitochondria are using more oxygen. And then if If you're driving mitochondrial energy flow, then the body is going to make more mitochondria to be ready the next time this happens. So moving and exercise, number one. Number two, not eating too much. Huh? When we eat too much, it seems to give mitochondria excess energy and then that drives energy resistance. And that's, that's not good. If you feel hungry once in a while, what this does is it stimulates mitochondrial biogenesis. You get rid of the old mitochondria that are less efficient and you make more of the new mitochondria that are more efficient. And that's probably why fasting, intermittent fasting, or 24 or 48, 72-hour fasting are very healthy in many contexts and why every ancient tradition in the world has a fast as part of their tradition or their practice. Unfortunately, the science that we've cultivated in the Western world, biomedicine, is all about the stuff, the biology outside of us. And the mind is kind of this one thing that we've thrown out the window and that we've left for others to study. I think we need to bridge this. Most of the actionable knowledge, the new things that are there to be discovered that will make a meaningful impact on our health, right, that the discoveries that have the ability to touch human lives lies at the intersection of disciplines and at the intersection of the biological sciences and the science of the mind. That was Martin Picard.

He's a mitochondrial psychobiologist and a professor at Columbia University. You can watch his full talk at ted.npr.org. On the show today, the age of exhaustion and how we can feel better. I'm Manoush Zomorodi, and you're listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR. We'll be right back.

Support for NPR and the following message come from ID Tech. ID Tech is a summer camp for ages 7 to 17 with over 50 courses like BattleBots, AI, coding, game design, and more. Visit idtech.com and use code IDTECH to save $150.

This message comes from Total Wine More. Memorial Day is almost here. Grab some refreshing beers and wines at the lowest prices. Shop Total Wine More in store or online. Spirits not sold in Virginia and North Carolina. Drink responsibly. Must be 21.

This message comes from Charles Schwab with their original podcast, Choiceology, hosted by Katy Milkman, an award-winning behavioral scientist and author of the bestselling book How to Change. Choiceology is a show about the psychology and economics behind people's decisions. Hear true stories from Nobel laureates, historians, authors, athletes, and more about why people do the things they do. Download the latest episode and subscribe at schwab.com/podcast or wherever you listen.

This message comes from LinkedIn Ads. Ever invest in something that seemed incredible at first but didn't live up to the hype? For marketers, that's impressions. When ads don't create revenue, that's a tough conversation with the CFO. Instead, invest in results your CFO will love. LinkedIn Ads generates the highest ROAS of all major ad networks, so advertise on LinkedIn. Spend $250 and get a $250 credit. Just go to linkedin.com/mprpod. Terms and conditions apply.

Your phone is full of distractions, but make sure it's full of insight too. The NPR app gives you access to world-class reporting without a paywall. And with our push notifications, we will keep you up to date to the second. Download the NPR app today. It's The TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Manoush Zomorodi. Today on the show, the age of exhaustion and how we can get our energy back. We have talked about how movement and cellular function are crucial to feeling good in our mind and body. And now a look at another basic function that gives us energy: breath. Without enough oxygen, of course, you are gonna get tired pretty quickly. But should we be breathing better?

I don't think that most people realize just how important how we breathe is—

Breath and breathwork are hot topics on so-called bro wellness podcasts.

How would you guys like to learn a 60-second breathwork technique? I just finished up, like, a 7-minute guided breathing session. Oh my God, bro, why am I shaking?

Whose idea was this? Yeah, well, writer James Nestor has no time for this.

Most of those bros who claim to be at absolute peak health are the worst breathers you can find out there. Really? I'm being serious. Because a lot of them are completely vain and they do not allow their stomachs to relax. Ah, if you are constantly inhaling and sucking up your gut, you're inhibiting the extension of the diaphragm, you're inhibiting blood flow, you're inhibiting the ability of the body to pump lymph fluid. You are causing stress because you are clenching your stomach and sending signals up to your brain that you are in a state of stress. So don't look to those bros for healthy breathing.

James is a science journalist, but he embarked on trying to better understand what happens when we breathe properly because of personal problems.

I was suffering from chronic bronchitis. I was getting mild bouts of pneumonia every year. I was starting to wheeze when I was working out, and I thought I was doing everything right, you know, eating the right foods, exercising, sleeping 8 hours a night, all of that. But I just kept getting sick with breathing problems. So it wasn't until a doctor friend suggested I look into my breathing habits, which is something I had never thought about before. And once I adjusted those habits and started understanding that It's not just that we're breathing, but how we're breathing. It had a huge transformational effect, not only on my respiration, but on other aspects of my health.

Yeah. Can, can you explain like what is poor breathing and what is good breathing?

Poor breathing is what you see when you look at around 90% of the population. It includes breathing through the mouth. It includes breathing up into the chest. It includes unconsciously holding your breath, breathing too much, snoring, sleep apnea, asthma, on and on and on.

And what are the consequences of that? How does that impact a person's health? Because I think people think, well, if as long as I'm like breathing, I'm alive, right?

Well, on the milder spectrum, the consequences are more asthma, more panic, more anxiety. More stress. On the more severe spectrum, if you continue having very dysfunctional breathing habits throughout your life, especially at night, that can lead to increased risk of stroke, heart disease, periodontal disease, uh, diabetes. So all of these major chronic diseases that we're contending with have some sort of connection to how we're breathing.

You call breathing like this, a lost art. When did we lose it?

It's hard to trace the exact moment, but you can trace a lot of this to the age of industrialization. We lost so much 400 years ago, 300 years ago. So we lost our food supply that used to be whole foods and natural and require a bunch of chewing, which allowed us to expand our mouths and tone our airways and breathe better. But we've also lost our ability to have proper posture. And without having proper posture, it is very difficult to take a proper breath. If you are hunched over, you can't extend your belly. You can't take that soft, slow, deep breath. All your breath gets caught up in your chest, and that is extremely inefficient.

You're right. There's no room. I just caught myself like I'm leaned over my laptop and there's nowhere for it to go. The air just has to go up. Whatever happened to stomachs in, shoulders back? That's what I used to be told.

The old days. Yeah. So if you are ever apprehensive about how you're breathing, look at how a healthy dog breathes, healthy infant breathes, a cheetah, a horse, a cow. They breathe very deep. Their stomachs expand very gently when they breathe. They breathe very slowly. And they breathe in and out of their noses. So the problem with chest breathing is that the majority of the area of the lungs that absorbs oxygen are those lower lobes. So if you're just breathing into your chest, you're taking air in that you never use. About 50% of that air you won't be using. And so that causes you to breathe more. And the more you breathe, you start sending stress signals to the brain. And if you have dysfunctional breathing habits in the day, absolutely, it's gonna affect your ability to focus, to get oxygen efficiently, to regulate your emotions and more.

In your book, um, you write about your participation in a study where you plugged your nose for 10 days straight, um, breathing only from your mouth to see what sort of effect it had on your health. Can, can you share that story, what it was like for you and what you ended up discovering?

Yeah, I had been talking with the chief of rhinology research at Stanford, and I said, why don't you get a group of 100 people and have them just mouth breathe? And we can take a bunch of data and then have the other 100 just nasal breathe. And, and he said, this is a great idea. I will never do it because of ethical reasons. Oh, yeah. He said, I know the damage that will be done after just a week of mouth breathing. And so I finally convinced him. I said, well, what if we did it with two people, me and one other person? And for 10 days we were just mouth breathing. For the other 10 days, we were just nasal breathing. And a lot of my friends gave me a lot of grief because they said, oh, this is like some Supersize Me stunt. Whatever, but we didn't view it this way. I mean, we really didn't because you've got up to 50% of the population is mouth breathing. They don't realize the damage that's happening to their bodies. So we tried to measure that over 10 days. That was the maximum he would allow. And as advertised, it was an absolute disaster for our health. So much more so than we even thought. What did you find? So I do not snore. I do not have sleep apnea. Within a single day of becoming a mouth breather, I was snoring about an hour and a half throughout the night. Within 3 days, about 4 to 5 hours a night, just constant. I felt awful the next morning every single time. The other subject in the study had the same thing. It was very hard for us to focus. Our athletic performance went down. We were extremely agitated. Stress levels went through the roof, blood pressure went through the roof. And when I shared this data with people in the field, they were not surprised at all. They said, of course, this is what's going to happen, right? We've known this for decades and decades. You just experienced it personally.

So, so that's why mouth breathing is bad. But what's so good about Breathing through your nose. What are the benefits?

Let me just tell you a little— another mouth breathing study that I thought was interesting. A study in Japan got a bunch of rats and they plugged the noses of one group of rats and they left the other rats as they were, as nasal breathers. And they looked at them throughout several weeks and also tested them to see how efficiently they could navigate a maze. Those mouth-breathing rats took significantly longer to get through the maze as the nasal-breathing rats. And then they looked at their brains and they found that their brain structure had literally changed after around 15 to 16 weeks of mouth-breathing. They had significantly fewer neurons in areas of the brain that are associated with memory, learning ability, brain development, more. Mm-hmm. So we know it's bad, and I don't think you're gonna find anyone who studied this who would say otherwise. However, the other side of this nasal breathing is so beneficial for us because it slows down the breath, which calms us down. It allows us to get about 18% more oxygen per breath than equivalent breaths through the mouth. It filters the gunk and even bacteria and helps sterilize viruses. It allows for better circulation. I mean, I can go on and on and on. So we also know that, and there's no controversy around this. These aren't hypotheses. This is documented scientific facts.

I have to say, that chapter in your book, every night I get into bed and I like consciously, I'm like, okay, relax your mouth, close it. I even like, this is a little TMI, but I stick my fingers up my nostrils to try to expand them. Because I don't want to wear one of those bandages, but it does help me. And I find that once I get into that position at night, I am able to— most mornings I do wake up with nose breathing.

That's a great habit to have. And various people use various different training wheels to get there. You can use those little strips that go on the nose that open up the nostrils, allow for about 30% more air. You can use different flushes and sprays that help open up the nose as well. So everyone's different, so everyone needs a different kind of thing. But I am more convinced now than ever that I don't think you can be a healthy breather and you can have quality sleep if you are not nasal breathing. It is so important for so many reasons, and this is something I've heard from literally thousands of people have sent me for some unknown reason, their sleep data showing the difference of sleep quality, deep sleep, HRV, on and on and on, of just switching to nasal breathing.

I'm thinking someone might be listening and, and wondering, do I do this? I don't even know if I do this. What is a way that we can really see how well we're breathing during the day while we are trying to do our work?

It's hard. You know, you can go into a lab and be assessed that way. Few people are going to do that. HRV is one thing that can provide a good general outlook of your stress levels. HRV, heart rate variability, right? Heart rate variability. This is the latest craze in wearables. Everybody's measuring it nowadays. So right now, if you were to place your hand over your heart, if you're really focusing. As you inhale, your heart rate speeds up, and as you exhale, it slows down. So the more space you have between those heartbeats on the inhale and exhale are indicative of your stress levels. You want more of a difference, more of a variability between those two things.

That's funny also, because I, I always thought a nice steady heartbeat is what you want, but actually you don't.

That is harbinger of disease and future death. That's what I've been told by cardiologists. Once they start hearing a heartbeat that sounds like a clock, they get really scared.

I worry about— well, I worry about adding more worries to people's plates. There's a lot to worry about these days, and I don't want people to be like, "Oh my God, please tell me— don't tell me one more thing that I need to measure or need technology for, or I need to think about. What is, I don't know, a more holistic, somatic, internal way of checking in with yourself during the day?

So nobody needs more boxes to check, right? I think that breathing doesn't have to become a burden. Maybe for a couple of weeks as you develop better habits, that might require you to spend a little more time and energy. But once you develop those habits, you don't have to think about it because no one wants to have to think about the 20,000 breaths they're taking every single day. You want to have good habits so your body automatically does that.

Can you take us through a sort of reset, an exercise that we could do um, to, to just sort of bring ourselves back to that healthy breathing?

The first thing I would ask people to do is taking your hand, placing it around where your belly button is, just lightly over your stomach. And as you inhale, you want to feel that slight expansion of that abdominal region. And then as you continue inhaling, try to lift that breath up to your chest area. So you start low and you work it up a little higher. And then if you slow that down, breathing in and out of your nose at a rate of around 5 to 6 seconds in, 5 to 6 seconds out. You'll start to notice your shoulders relaxing. You'll start to notice the muscles in your face relaxing. You'll feel your heart rate lower. If you are looking at your blood pressure, most people see a significant drop in blood pressure because this is your body re-entering its natural state, the state in which it was designed to be in that we are so divorced from today.

So this is taking some concentration on my part, and it's lovely.

It's going to take some concentration at the beginning, especially with people who have never taken a focused, deep, easy, soft breath. But then tomorrow when you do it, you're going to say, hmm, this is a little bit easier. And then the next day it gets easier, and a few weeks from now you're going to be doing this unconsciously. I cannot tell you what a difference this is going to make for your stress levels at work, for your ability to focus. There's been studies that have found that people make significantly better decisions when they are when they are breathing slowly, when they are breathing calmly. Helps you regulate your emotions better. Breathe this way for 2 minutes a day. And I think even that's going to make a difference.

What I love about our conversation is that it feels like it's something that you could work on and then maybe your body would take over. In some ways. That feels like a relief to me.

That's exactly the point of so many of these practices. Once you establish it, you don't have to think about it. And once you don't have to think about it, you start to notice that you're feeling different. And this is backed up by any wearable that you happen to have on your body. And then you feel so much better that you want to go further into this. You want to explore what else breathing could what we can do.

That's James Nestor. His book is called Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art. Thank you so much for listening to our episode. It was produced by Katie Monteleone and James Delahoussaye and edited by Sana Azmashkinpour and me. Our production staff at NPR also includes Phoebe Lett, Fiona Guerin, Matthew Cloutier, Harsha Nahada, and Rachel Faulkner-White. Our executive producer is Irene Noguchi. Our audio engineer was Jimmy Keely. Our theme music was written by Ramtin Arablouei. Our partners at TED are Chris Anderson, Helen Walters, Roxane Hailash, and Daniela Ballarezzo. I'm Manoush Zomorodi, and you have been listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR.

This message comes from Capital Group. Some of the best lessons don't come from a classroom. They come from experience. On The Power of Advice, a new podcast series from Capital Group, you'll hear from CEOs, investors, and founders about how they built careers, took risks, and reinvented themselves. If you're starting your own journey, this is the kind of advice you won't want to miss. Available wherever you get your podcasts. Published by Capital Group Inc.

This message comes from NPR sponsor Certified Financial Planners. Asking the right questions can greatly impact your future, especially when it comes to your finances. So if you're looking for a financial advisor you can trust, Certified Financial Planner professionals are committed to acting in your best interest. That's why it's gotta be a CFP®. Find your CFP® professional at letsmakeaplan.org. Support for NPR and the following message come from ID Tech. ID Tech is a summer camp for ages 7 to 17 with over 50 courses like BattleBots, AI, coding, game design, and more. Visit idtech.com and use code IDTECH to save $150.