How To Use Your Breath To Prevent Disease

Coming up on this episode of the Doctor's Pharmacy.

The reason why breathing is so important is because we get most of our energy from air, from our breath.

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Code in your cart. Hi, this is Lauren Fein, one of the producers of the Doctor's Pharmacy podcast. The way we breathe impacts everything from how well we sleep to our metabolism, cognitive function, immunity, and more. Breathing is one of the most basic of functions, yet most of us aren't doing it correctly. We tend to breathe through the mouth, but we get 25% more oxygen when we breathe in through the nose. In today's episode, we feature four conversations from the Doctor's Pharmacy on why our breath when we know how to use it is one of the most useful tools for health and vitality. Dr. Hyman speaks with James Nestor on why we need to breathe through the nose, with Dr. Luis Ignarro on increasing nitric oxide using the breath, with Wim Hof on how breath work can reduce illness, inflammation and improve mood, and with Dr. James Gordon on a technique called soft belly breathing.

Let's jump in. How is breath so important in our health? Because we all breathe, we don't think about it. We're just breathing every day. In fact, I think we breathe 25,000 times a day without really thinking about it. But it turns out that how we breathe is critically important to our overall health. And, it's not something I learned in medical school, but I'd love you to sort of break it down for our audience. Why is breath important? Why has it been so neglected? And, what do we know scientifically about the importance of breath and health?

I think humans are a very reactionary species only when we lose something to be do we become aware of it? And that's exactly what happened during COVID We lost the ability to breathe, and we're like, oh, my god, maybe breathing is important because this is just something that's been in. It's an unconscious activity. It's in the back of our minds. So once you establish, I think once you lose the ability to breathe, you appreciate it. And once you appreciate it, you can start focusing your breath to really significantly impact your mental health, physical health, bolster immune function, athletic performance, and more. And, the reason why breathing is so important is because we get most of our energy from air, from our breath. A lot of people think that we get most of our energy from what we eat and drink. Not true. We get most of our energy from air. And, I can prove this to you by, why don't you hold your breath for about four minutes and see how.

Much energy you have. Yeah, not so much.

Don't do that at home, everybody.

Yeah, well, I think you're right. I think we don't connect to our breath. And, you know, when I was younger, I took yoga teacher training course, you know, I was 23 and became a yoga teacher and learned the science, the ancient science of pranayama, which is a whole series of breathing techniques to activate different aspects of our health and well-being. and whether you, they're calming breaths, activating breaths. It's such a powerful thing that we have pretty much ignored as a vehicle toward health in this culture. And yet, in ancient cultures, it's pretty amazing. And you've got like Wim Hof, who is this kind of crazy dude who they call the Iceman, but he's mastered techniques of breathing that allow him to climb Mount Everest in his underwear, basically, and with no shoes on, or not freeze to death. to sit in an ice bath for whatever bazillion minutes he sits in ice bath for. And he's been able to train other people who are just regular humans how to do the same thing. So it is a doorway to accessing all sorts of our physiology that we just sort of ignore. So can you kind of break down for us what is going on with our breath? Why does it affect us so importantly? And how do we start to develop better relationship with our breathing?

Well, breathing practices have been around for at least 5,000 years. Ancient Hindus studied it, ancient Chinese study it, Native Americans studied it and more, and they understood our breathing as a medicine. This wasn't just something we did unconsciously. It was something that you can control. So this knowledge has been around for a long time, but lo and behold, in the 1900s and in this century, we have instruments that can actually measure objectively what happens when you breathe in different ways. So no longer is this subjective. It's objective. It's a science. You can collect data. That's what I think is so exciting that a lot of people can access wearables that can tell them what happens to their heart rate, what happens to their heart rate variability, what happens to their stress levels, what happens to their blood pressure, their blood oxygen, more and more and more by just shifting their breathing. And I think that this is one of the things that has really made this stuff so convincing. It's one thing to read scientific papers and hear people talk about it. It's another thing to change your breathing. for two minutes and watch your blood pressure go down 10 to 15 points and watch your heart rate variability store. And I think that's why so many people have personally experienced the benefits of this from not a lot of effort and work and said, wow, it actually does what it's supposed to do. And the science just confirms that.

It's amazing. Tell us about the distinction between nose breathing and mouth breathing. why is mouth breathing not good for you and why is nose breathing good for you?

So, when we breathe through our mouths, we're exposing ourselves to everything in the environment. If you live in a city like me, that means pollen, that means pollutants, it means smog, it means mold, and there's nothing filtering that air all day long. If you breathe through the nose, and I so happen to have a special guest here is a cross section of a human head. And, if you see what happens when you breathe through the nose here, you're forcing this air through all of these very ornate structures. And, as that air goes through these structures, it's heated up, it's moistened, it's filtered, and you get this huge profusion of nitric oxide as well, which guess what? Nitric oxide helps kill viruses and bacteria.

Yes.

And, it's a vasodilator. So, when you're breathing through the mouth, you get none of those advantages. You can survive mouth breathing, but it's going to wear you down and make you sick. And, that's just how things work. And, you can very clearly see this by just looking at our physiology and looking at our anatomy. It's quite amazing, what you just brought.

Up is really important. We had Louis Ignarro on the podcast who won the Nobel Prize for his discovery of nitric oxide. And, he's this cute little 80-year-old Italian guy who thinks he'd be like your uncle or something. he's so sweet. And he just, he just really explained how important it is to breathe through your nose and how nitric oxide is produced, which is, like you said, antimicrobial and also increases in your ability to fight inflammation as an antioxidant. And, you know, it's the main, main thing that happens when you take Viagra, which is you increase nitric oxide, which is dilation of blood vessels and so forth. So it's fascinating. And he's, he even said, this was fascinating. They're doing some preliminary studies around COVID. where they were giving nitric oxide gas to COVID patients and seeing remarkable changes in their biology and improvement in their lung function and their overall health. So, it's kind of interesting that our body knows what to do, but we often have sort of latched to these habits around mouth breathing. And actually, there's this kind of new trend out there. I'd love to hear what you think about it. Are using mouth tape at night? for people to breathe through their nose at night instead of through their mouth.

What do you think about that? Well, what I learned about nitric oxide was from Ignaro. So, he won the Nobel in the 90s. I think last time, last interview I heard with him, he said there were 11 clinical trials looking at patients who had severe COVID and giving them nitric oxide. Some of those trials have come out. They're official published studies and it works incredibly well because of course it does. you know, it's just we're supplementing what our natural body in its natural form would be doing otherwise. It's important to note, too, if you hum, you increase that nitric oxide 15-fold so I. I think that this would be an interesting thing to explore. And there. A lot of yoga practices have you hum. I wish someone would do this study. You know, it's never going to get funded, but. But, he's an amazing guy. I've learned so much from him. That's so great.

And, you did an interesting study where you were at Stanford when you were sort of researching the breath for your book where your nose was completely plugged for 10 days and you had to breathe just through your mouth. So, what was that study and what did you find out?

So, I've been working with a chief of rhinology research at Stanford, a guy named Dr. Jayakar Nayak who probably knows more about the nose and nasal breathing than anyone on the planet. so we had had several interviews, and there had been animal studies looking at what happens when you make an animal, a monkey, specifically, a mouth breather, and all the awful things that happen to their health and their facial structure. Don't read those studies. They're, they're horrendous. But I asked Nyack, I said, has there ever been a human study of this? And he said, no. And I said, well, why don't you do it? You're at Stanford. You You study this stuff all the time. He said, doing so would be unethical because he knew of all the damage it could do. So I said, well, why don't I volunteer for an experiment?

I'll try to- I'm gonna inform consent, right?

Yeah, and two, I wish it were a hundred people. We had to pay for the study ourselves, which at Stanford was not cheap. And the longest we were allowed to do this was for 10 days, 10 days just mouth breathing, 10 days nasal breathing. and as advertised, it completely destroyed us. And we have all the data to show that there was extreme fatigue. My blood pressure went through the roof. I got home after about three hours of mouth breathing. My blood pressure was 158 over 100, which was about three times higher than I had ever seen it. And I said, oh, you know, I'm. I'm stressed out. I need to go to sleep for the first time that I'm aware of. I started snoring, then I started getting sleep apnea. It got worse and worse the longer we have this. The other subject in the study had the exact same thing at the same time. We had trouble focusing. Our mouths were completely dry. We were miserable. Athletic performance plummeted. I mean, this, to be clear, two people in an experiment means nothing. What I was doing was personally experiencing what science has known for literally decades and decades.

Well, there are N of 1 studies, so I don't think it's meaningless. There is a whole science and the NIH is actually advancing this, which is looking at changes in an individual and that being relevant. And, if you measure changes before and after, it's actually not insignificant. So, I wouldn't discount what you're saying as being more widely available to sort of think about. And, I think that you know, you actually have a lot of different things that you talk about as a way of fixing your breathing pattern. Maybe you can share a little bit of what are the tips? How should we breathing? How do we get enough quality breath? How do we stop mouth breathing? What do we have to do?

Luckily, in that Stanford study, we did 10 days of mouth breathing, followed by 10 days of just nasal breathing. This is where the sleep tape comes in. So it's easy to nasal breathe in the day. You just shut your mouth. but at night, more than 60% of us breathe through our mouths. And so how do you keep your mouth shut at night? About a hundred years ago, they used to have chin straps, so they knew how damaging mouth breathing was a hundred years ago. We seem to have lost that knowledge, but nowadays we have tape. So I learned from a breathing therapist at Stanford. She prescribes tape for her patients, for every one of her patients to tape their mouths at night. This is not full on It's not duct tape.

It's not that.

No.

And there's a little hole in it.

There's a specific tape. It's a surgical tape. It's called micropore tape. And it's very light adhesive. You want to take this stuff off with your tongue, never pull it off of your lips. That's where people go wrong. But what this tape does is it's just a gentle reminder. At any time in the night, you can go, if you're uncomfortable and it pops off. But this has been, all of that snoring that I was doing mouth breathing immediately went away by just with one hack closing my mouth. And this is the one thing I've literally heard this from thousands of people have written and they said this was the most profound health hack that they've experienced. It's for a lot of people.

I've heard the same thing.

And I'm not saying it's going to work for everyone, especially with Advanced severe sleep apnea. You're going to need more treatments, but it's free. And breathing through your nose is only going to help you. So you may benefit a little or you may benefit a lot.

And it.

I I cannot sleep. I mean, I technically I can sleep, but I can't sleep well without sleep tape. Now it's. It's a real.

All right, James, so tell us what tape you use and what are the options out there for people? Because it sounds like I, after this conversation, a lot of people are going to round and want to buy tape, but I don't want them to get scotch tape or some masking tape or something. It's not the right tape.

Well, there's so many different types of tape that work and it really depends on the person and their preference. I went through about 30 different types of tape before I found one that I really liked and that worked for me. I'm not getting paid to say this. It is a micropore tape, a surgical tape by 3M. It has a really light adhesive. for sensitive skin. That's the best stuff I've found. Other people like different brands. There's specific brands now that are just sleep tape that you can buy on Amazon or wherever else. They work great. So, I would say play around, find something you like. You want something with a very light adhesive. And, most importantly, as I mentioned, you don't need a very fat strip of this stuff. All you need is something about the size of a postage stamp. This is the whole technology here. That's sleep tape. Okay? It's just keep it. I can even talk to you when I have this stuff on. You take it off with your tongue. Not. Don't rip it off. Take it off with your tongue, and you won't get any irritation to your mouth. That way. I love that.

That's amazing. Okay. That's a wonderful hack. You think everybody should do that or. How many people breathe through their mouth at night? Is it a common thing? Why would we if it's not supposed to? Is it just because we're unhealthy or because we're stressed or what?

I think that about 60%, this is the percentage I heard, more than 60% of us breathe through our mouth at night. And, if you were like me, you would go to sleep with a huge mug of water because you would wake up throughout the night and be hitting on this water because your mouth was so dry. Breathing through the mouth at night, especially for eight hours, Eight hours at a time will also change the pH in your mouth and make you much more susceptible to having cavities and periodontal disease. So, everyone should be breathing through their noses at night. You need to find a way of doing this.

So, that's one technique. What are the other techniques around breathing that you could do when you're not sleeping?

Well, breathe through your nose as often as you can. That includes while working out. That includes while sitting in front of your desk. There are so many different breathing techniques to practice nasal breathing techniques. It doesn't matter if for 15-20 minutes a day you're doing Wim Hof Method or Tumo or Kundalini and you're breathing through your mouth during these practices. Perfectly fine. Ocean breath, totally fine. I'm talking about habitual chronic breathing needs to be through the nose. So we've got that. When you're breathing through your nose, you will also be breathing more slowly, lightly and deeply. And that's the other part of this. Most of us breathe way too much air. We think that by breathing more, we are getting more oxygen, but the opposite is happening. And I can prove this to you by if you took 30 really big breaths right now, you're gonna feel some tingling in your fingers, lightness in your head. That's from a decrease of circulation. And that's what happens when you breathe too much. So you want to be breathing such simple stuff through the nose slowly, lightly and deeply. Just doing that can be really transformative for people.

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Okay. Once again, there was a really great study that was conducted not by me, but by two of my really friendly scientific colleagues in Stockholm, of all places. And they showed about, oh, I don't know, 10 to 15 years ago, that they were looking at asthmatic patients. And to make a long story short, your nasal passages, the nasal sinusoidal passages in your nose, produce relatively large amounts of nitric oxide. Gas. Your mouth does not. Only the nose does. And so what they worked out, I'm skipping through all the experiments, what they found was that your nose makes nitric oxide so that when you breathe in, when you inhale through your nose, the nitric oxide does several things. One, it relaxes the trachea and the bronchioles, in other words, the airways. the airways have smooth muscle. Nitric oxide relaxes smooth muscle, arteries and airways. So the nitric oxide widens the bronchiole so you can get more air into your lungs. That makes sense. But also when that nitric oxide gets into your lungs, it dilates the pulmonary arteries, so you get more blood flow deep into your lungs to undergo oxygen exchange. And more recently, it was found that that same nitric oxide elicits antimicrobial effects. In other words, nitric oxide is very, very strong in killing bacteria, parasites, and certain viruses. So our lungs are exposed to the outside air. Isn't that right? I mean, we're breathing air. We're taking in germs. We're taking in germs all the time through our nose. So it makes sense that Mother Nature would design the nose to make nitric oxide so it would go into the lungs when we breathe to keep those bugs from dividing, replicating, and causing damage inside the lungs. So those are the three major effects of the nitric oxide in the lungs. And I think that's- But you can.

Activate it through- But you can activate it through deep breathing. And it's not just any kind of breathing. You have to breathe in through your nose and out through your mouth. Yes. You talk about- Because we say, oh, you're saying it just happens naturally as you breathe, but we can really magnify that and increase our nitric oxide production.

By how and we breathe. So tell us about that. Well, let me put it this way. Now, I'm not sure whether breathing in through your nose stimulates more NO formation, but what I can tell you is this. If you're breathing in through your mouth and not through your nose, your nose is still making nitric oxide, but it's not getting in your lungs. It's just hanging around there. So the idea, every time you inhale, whenever possible, you should breathe in through your nose. Sometimes, if you're running a hundred yard dash or you're climbing a mountain, it's almost impossible to get enough air or oxygen through your nose. So of course you're going to breathe through your mouth and inhale through your mouth because you got to get the oxygen in. But it's good to have a balance of the two. So if you can remember, if people can remember to breathe in, to inhale through the nose, then they're going to get a lot of nitric oxide benefits in the lungs. Now, often I say, you know, breathe out through the mouth. Well, I've been criticized for that because by people who do yoga and they tell me, and I'm not a yoga expert, you know, and they tell me, well, you know, it's a, you should breathe out through your nose as well. You know, I guess it's okay as long as you breathe in through your nose, I don't care how you put it out. I think you're good. However, sometimes in yoga, and I've had conversations with people, they will exhale through the mouth, okay? But they'll do it slowly. Like they'll make sounds when you do yoga, like, ah, whatever. When you breathe out slowly through your mouth, you're giving more time for the nitric oxide, which is constantly being made in the nose to build up. so that when you do breathe in through your nose, you're going to have a lot more nitric oxide in the lungs. Amazing. So I was able to satisfy a few yogis with that. Oh, good.

You don't want to get angry yogis at you.

We are built to be able to tackle disease, to prevent from disease. For that, we have our will and our ability through our breath manipulation of our breath to go deeply within and to change the biochemistry, to be on the alert, to activate the adrenal access to the utmost and then danger can be emotional danger, emotional stress, mental stress, bacterial stress, viral stress. Any stress in the end is cell biological stress which is danger. And then the adrenal axis activation takes care of that.

Wow. There it is.

But you said you did also the study with people who weren't you. And I read that they actually were also able to do the same thing you did, even though they weren't the Iceman. They were like four other volunteers who were agreed to be injected with these toxins.

Exactly. 18 others.

Oh, 18 others.

Wow.

Yes.

Okay.

And 12 randomly chosen of those 18 after four days of training were exposed to the E. Coli bacteria as well. And they all showed 100% being able to control and suppress the cytokine storm, the inflammation. They all felt good. They made jokes. They said, They didn't inject the dose with E. Coli, but with sugar water.

That's unbelievable. And they measured the cytokines and they measured all of that and they saw that change in your biology, which we only see often with medication or not at all. I mean, it almost seems like this is such a simple technique to everybody to learn to help fortify them against coronavirus, right? I mean, even if you have coronavirus, do you think you could actually help to reduce the inflammation as a result.

Absolutely. Especially when you feel the symptoms, and I heard many already, but it is not medically researched.

I don't know why.

Maybe they are not interested like yourself in your position with integrative medicine. You cannot make their money out of that. But it doesn't matter. Let's go past and let's get back to the facts. The fact is that the cytokines, the interleukin number one, number six, number eight and eleven are the damaging factors of the COVID And we showed in 2014 in a comparative study within groups, we showed to suppress it within a quarter of an hour. When you feel symptoms of COVID Then get into the breathing and you will be effectively able to suppress the cytokines. That's it.

That's unbelievable. So share with us what a technique of breathing that you teach us.

You just lie on the sofa or in bed and then relax. A relaxed body is able to store up oxygen in the tissue. So relax, there's nothing going on.

Nice.

Then you take a full breath in from the belly, chest, and you let it go. And once again. And once again. We do this 30 times.

Fully in.

Let it go.

Fully in. Let it go. Keep on going. I explain what is happening. We are blowing off the carbon dioxide, but it becomes very alkaline, more than normal. And that is a sign within the brain Two alkaline, two alkaline, adrenal axis activation. The adrenaline pumps in, it peaks, and anything that should not be inside of the body is going to be eliminated, suppressed. And what is it in COVID? Cytokines.

So.

If you activate the adrenal axis through doing this, 30 times, then we go after 30 times because the oxygen trigger, the trigger to breathe is carbon dioxide, but it's blowing off. Body is very alkaline. Biochemistry is great. It's great. And you just exhale. You hold after the exhale. So only a residual amount of air is left in the lungs. and you stay in that condition. And then easily you are able to go one minute, one and a half minute, maybe two minutes if you have done well the 30 deep breaths. Two minutes with a residual amount of air in your lungs for two minutes without breathing. And that what happens, of course, They brainstem the primitive oxygen parameters. They say, There is no oxygen, no oxygen! And they shoot into the adrenaline, it's all reactive. So the brainstem, the reactive part of our brain, it's just the buttons are pushed and then the adrenaline shoots out, a pinprick shoots out. Over, older body. And this is very good to detoxify. So people with a hangover, if they do this, 20 minutes, they detoxify. They can go for a drink again.

So the idea is you do 30 breaths, then you hold your breath for a minute or two, and then you do it again.

After the exhalation. And then at the end, or when you feel the urge of breathing again, You take them fully in, you hold for 15 seconds. Fully in, hold and squeeze a little bit to your head because it's nice. You bring in cerebrospinal fluid to the head. Then it gets into the brain stem and into the limbic system, into the midbrain where we normally don't have so much blood flow because we overthink. think, think is where the blood flow goes. Now we push it from the inside, inside the deepest part of the brain. And then suddenly it begins to become neurally alive. And then we are able to connect at will because that's neurology. So we are. And then we get a sense of control over our mood. That is mood. Absolute mood regulation. In case of people with depression, mostly it's caused by inflammation and stress and emotional deprivation. All that creates a biological or a biochemical deficit. And through doing this, you feel you're filling up the tank. And you feel that you are in control. And nobody wants to feel bad, then they feel good again.

That's incredible. So basically the technique is 30 breaths, hold for a minute or two, take a breath, hold for 15 seconds, and then repeat.

Yes, you will see, find out that every time it goes and easier and longer.

So do this for 20 minutes a day is what you're saying. That's it.

That's what we do right now in San Francisco, big study on the DNA. with this method, with this breathing. And it's amazing. The results are amazing on the DNA.

So let's see. Two or three minute cold shower and 20 minutes of breathing and you can give up all your winter clothes.

Yeah, you can hit the road anytime without cop.

You can fight coronavirus. You can feel happy, empowered and control of yourself.

You feel the connection. And then when you need it, you know what to do. You just go within. And then you learn about the lost connection within because of our exterior way of gaining information, control over the world, etc. And that the control inside we lost and now it's back. And we don't need to sit for nine years in a cave.

That's incredible. That's incredible. It's incredible to me because I've always thought that you need to practice and practice and practice and meditate, meditate, meditate for decades in order to feel that.

There it is.

You know what, Mark? They compared 10 minutes of this breathing, specifically breathing, it brings people deeper in the brain than people who are doing exercising for four hours. A mindfulness a day for years.

Wow. All right, I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm in. I'm starting to.

Anybody can do this.

I'm starting today.

A major part and a beginning part of the work we do is bringing people into the present. Meditation is the time honored way to bring us into relaxed moment to moment awareness of what's happening to us right now.

And you have people use the breath, the soft belly breathing, which is a.

Soft belly breathing. We can do a minute or so. We can teach, this is the techniques, I was doing a workshop with a number of traumatized people this weekend and somebody said to me, and as I was teaching many techniques, she said, this is not always easy. I said, no, it's not always easy, but it is simple. And soft belly breathing is just, as you know, because we've done it together, it's just simply sitting quietly and closing your eyes, and breathing in through your nose and out through your mouth.

Don't close your eyes if you're driving.

Don't do this while you're driving. And just breathing deeply in through the nose, out through the mouth with the belly soft and relaxed. And focusing, this is technically a concentrative meditation, and we're focusing on the breath, on the word soft as we breathe in and belly as we breathe out, and on the feeling of our belly being relaxed. And as we do this, more air is going to the bottom of the lungs, more oxygen is going to all the cells in our bodies and helping them to feed them and helping them to be healthier. And we're activating the vagus nerve. Vagus means wandering in Latin.

Not Las Vegas, but- what's that? Not the Las Vegas nerve.

Not the Las Vegas nerve, the Vagus. And that nerve is the antidote to the fight or flight response. And it quiets activity in the amygdala, the center of fear and anger in the brain.

So, you have pathways to actually access different parts of your brain, and these are the techniques you teach, and they really work.

Exactly. It's all grounded in our biology.

And there's a lot of great science behind this.

Yeah, the science now is showing that meditation, simple techniques like soft belly, can not only help the brain to function better and more effectively and help us to integrate parts of the brain like the left and right hemisphere that have been disrupted with trauma, but also we can build new brain tissue. We can decrease the amount of not only activity but tissue in the amygdala, the fear and anger center. We can increase the amount of brain tissue in the hippocampus, which is responsible for memory and modulating the stress response, and we can increase brain tissue in the frontal cortex in those areas responsible for self-awareness and judgment and compassion.

You literally can grow new brain in the right spots and you can calm down brain that's overactive in the wrong spots. Exactly.

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Hey, everybody, it's Dr. Hyman. Thanks for tuning into the Doctor's Pharmacy. I hope you're loving this podcast. It's one of my favorite things to do and introduce to you all the experts that I know and I love and that I've learned so much from. and I want to tell you about something else I'm doing, which is called Mark's Picks. It's my weekly newsletter, and in it I share my favorite stuff, from foods to supplements to gadgets to tools to enhance your health. It's all the cool stuff that I use and that my team uses to optimize and enhance our health. And I'd love you to sign up for the weekly newsletter. I'll only send it to you once a week on Fridays. Nothing else, I promise. And all you have to do is go to Dr. Hyman.com/picks to sign up. That's Dr. Hyman.com/picks, P-I-C-K-S, and sign up for the newsletter and I'll share with you my favorite stuff that I use to enhance my health and get healthier and better and live younger longer.

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