Biohack Your Breath With Nose "Boners", Carbon Dioxide Inhalation, Tibetan Longevity Stretches & Much More: How To Unlock The New Science Of A Lost Art.

Guess what, everybody, I have great news. I am going to do an ama. What's an ama? It's ask me anything and this is going to be on Reddit. This AMA is on all things keto and low carb. So all you got to do is show up and you can ask me anything on all things keto, carnivore, carb, cycling, metabolic efficiency, biohacking, your diet, you name it. So the AMA is going to kick off. It's open now. You can go. Leave your questions now, but it's going to kick off Monday, June 8th at noon Pacific. Monday, June 8th at noon pacific. And here's the URL where you can go to do this AMA. It's BenGreenfieldFitness.com keto AMA BenGreenfieldFitness.com Keto AMA. We're going to kick things off on Monday, June 8th at noon. Going to be a ton of fun. So I hope to see you there. Spread the word to your friends, tweet it around, or do the social media thing. Let's fill the room and have fun talking about all things low carb on.

This episode of the Ben Greenfield Fitness Podcast.

Evolution isn't about the survival of the fittest. Evolution means change. And right now, humans are changing for the worst. If there's anything good to come out of what's happening now with this foul Covid flu, it's that I really think that people are going to start paying attention to their breathing, not just when they're sick, but when they're healthy as well. Why don't you start there instead of getting a CPAP on your face, like lift your bed up. It's free. Anyone can do it.

Health, performance, nutrition, longevity, ancestral living, biohacking, and much more. My name is Ben Greenfield. Welcome to the show. All right, you guys, I've been super duper excited to get this podcast out to you because this book actually came out a couple of weeks ago.

I was wanting to release this podcast for you right when the book came.

Out, but there should still be copies available, I would imagine. It was one of the best books I've read in the past few months. I will let you wait with bated breath, pun intended, to find out a little bit more about what this mysterious.

Book is and what we're going to be talking about.

But my guest has been on the show before, crazy immersive journalist James Nestor. You are going to dig this one.

All right, folks, you sick of hearing me talk about breathwork? Well, you're just gonna have to keep on Soaking it up. Because, as you know, I've been immersed of late in books on breathing and interviewing breathwork experts and doing a lot of breathwork myself, breathwork courses and breath work with my children and using all sorts of different breathwork biohacks and tools like hyperbaric oxygen chambers and holotropic breathwork in the sauna. And as case is, I also keep my finger on the pulse of the entire literature surrounding breath. And a brand new book just came out that I just. I soaked it up. I think I read that thing probably with my breath held the whole time I was reading it. It was so good. Matter of fact, it was so good that I told my kids they should read it, and one of them read it and actually wrote a book report. My kids get little bonuses and extra, extra books or toys, things like that, when they grab a book from dad's office and write a book report on it. And one of actually wrote a book report on this book, which is written by a previous podcast guest of mine. So there's this guy named James Nestor. He came on my show, I think, like three years ago, and we did a big episode about free diving and breath holding. And it was an amazing show. And actually after that show, I was so stoked, I flew down to Florida and I took, I think, what may have been the same freediving course that James took from Ted Hardy down in Fort Lauderdale. And it absolutely changed my life. It changed my breath work. It changed my ability to be able to swim comfortably at deep depths in the ocean, my ability to be able to spearfish, just absolutely amazing. But James, being the immersive journalist that he is, went on and began to dive into breath. He traveled all over the world to pulmonology labs and ancient burial sites and secret Soviet facilities and Sao Paulo and choir schools, and just tracked down all these ancient breathwork practices like pranayama and tummo and krya and probably a bunch of other breathwork that I'm going to bastardize the pronunciation of. But anyways, he just tinkered all over the place with pulmonary function from a scientific and an ancestral standpoint and wrote this book. And it's absolutely fantastic. The book is called Breathe, but there's so many things in the book that I want to delve into that I had to get James on the show to go over all the pages that I folded over. The subtitle of the book is the New Science of a Lost Art. And so the show notes for everything that James and I talk about today, you can find@BenGreenfieldFitness.com that's BenGreenfieldFitness.com LostArt James, welcome back to the show, man.

Thanks so much. Great to be here.

Yeah. So did you, by the way, to warm up for this super high pressure show, do any kind of breath work this morning or do you have a morning breathwork routine? Especially after having written this book, I.

Went and walked my dog and did some static tables, which always chills me out. So I'm here postpark, post dog walking, ready to roll.

I love it. Did you do. So static tables, these are like the carbon dioxide and the oxygen training tables.

Exactly. Really long exhales.

Hold.

Hold as long as you can inhale longer exhale. Great for parasympathetic response. Really chills you out, increases circulation. And I love it. And that's usually what I do with my dog. I'm the weirdo in the park holding his breath.

I dig it. And by my understanding, by the way, a carbon dioxide table is different than an oxygen table. So like a carbon dioxide table, you would hold your breath and then you would recover. Let's say you hold your breath for two minutes, then you recover for two minutes, and then you would hold your breath for another two minutes and recover for a minute 45, hold your breath for two minutes, recover for a minute 30, and just have increasingly shorter recovery periods. Whereas I think with the oxygen, it is holding the recovery periods constant and then just doing longer and longer breath holds. Right?

That's exactly right. What you're doing is you're increasing your tolerance for CO2. And CO2 has such a bad rap right now, but hopefully we'll get into why that rap is not fair at all to this wonderful gas we have in our bodies that is totally misinterpreted and misrepresented in so much of medical literature.

Totally. Yeah. Well, I definitely want to talk about carbon dioxide. I actually interviewed Scott Carney. Do you know Scott?

Oh, yeah, sure.

Okay. So, yeah, we. We talked about his book the Wedge, where he actually did, I think, a little bit of the same stuff that you may have done with carbon dioxide. Although I want to hear your take on it, like the inhalation of pure carbon dioxide or looking into some of the benefits of carbon dioxide, which. Which I'm just intrigued with. I need to find some kind of like a carbon dioxide generator for my home.

They're coming out right now. They're on their way out.

Well, make some intros, bro, if you get a chance. I definitely want to try this thing Out. So I actually want to start here because this was kind of interesting for me because I never really thought about this way. But you hypothesized early in the book about physicians treating patients and how little they actually look at breath. I mean, what would a doctor find if they actually started looking at things like respiratory rate or oxygen consumption or carbon dioxide tolerance or any of these other factors when someone say went to a doctor's office for just like a basic physical or blood work, well, they're.

Going to get a window into physical and mental health that no other measurement could give. And this is something that I brought up with my father in law as a pulmonologist. So I've been asking him about CO2O2 breathing and his concern and the concern with most people in the medical community is that you're breathing. It's not how we're breathing. There can, you know, breathing is very binary for so many people. We breathe, we live, we don't breathe, we're dead. But there are so many nuances in those 25,000 breaths we take every day. And they're reflection how efficiently our bodies are running. But also it's a tool that allows us to harness control of our nervous system, organ function, heart rate, mental state, on and on and on. So you know, this is something that a few researchers mentioned me early on. They said it's how we breathe is as important as what we eat, how much we exercise, whatever genetic makeup we have. So it's really this missing pillar of health. And if you're not doing that right, doesn't matter if you're doing the other things right, you're always going to be a little off.

Yeah, and it is true. I mean it'd be so simple to have like. And you could even do this with telemedicine, right? A pulse oximeter, some type of ventilation device. They just now and I think one's getting shipped to my house in a couple of weeks, developed a new tool and I'm sure I'll talk about it on apol podcast once I get a chance to try it. Simple metabolic rate analysis via indirect calorimetry. But not like the big clunky device that you got to use all the tubes and masks for. Like a simple device that you could breathe in and out of. Perhaps something that could measure respiratory rate, maybe the movement of the chest versus the belly as you breathe. I mean it's not as though this stuff would be rocket science to quantify in a far more robust manner than medicine currently quantifies it and just in my own experience, there'd be as much benefit as testing somebody's blood work, possibly more.

I absolutely agree. And so many people have been researching this for the past hundred years. But something I just kept finding in my book over and over and over again is someone makes this great discovery, it's used, it completely works, it's forgotten. Someone else discovers it in a different country at a different time, they use it, it completely works, it's forgotten. So these cycles just keep happening over and over and over. And if there's anything good to come out of what's happening now with this foul Covid flu, it's that I really think that people are gonna start paying attention to their breathing, not just when they're sick, but when they're healthy as well.

Oh, yeah, they absolutely are. And as a matter of fact, as you mentioned at the time we're recording this, it's during the quarantine and the coronavirus pandemic. So if you're listening to this 10 years from now, that's why we're bringing this up. But yeah, I mean, like, you know, you hear talk about, for example, how some natural things like sunlight might have some amount of antiviral activity. Some compounds like methylene blue, for examp, might act on some of these pathways as well within the body and interact with photons of light. And then you also hear about nitric oxide. Right, Nitric oxide, which would be increased via, say, nasal breathing as being something that might have some antiviral activity. Granted, it kind of rubs me the wrong way when I see kind of the alternative health world. Take that and run with it and be like, oh, if you breathe through your nose, you're never gonna get sick. It's not quite that simple. I mean, in many cases we're talking about bathing cells, in some cases in vitro in nitric oxide, or intravenous administration of methylene blue with some type of a UV light in a doctor's lab. Not like taking fish tank cleaner and going for a walk in the sunshine. But regardless, we at least have clues as to some of the benefits of some of these type of practices, such as increasing nitric oxide availability or concentration. And the thing I want to start with here is this concept that you get into early in the book. I think you call it dysevolution. But it's essentially this idea that maybe we aren't breathing the same way now as we did for a really long time. Can you get into that?

Yeah. So this is something I heard really early on several years ago that humans are the worst breathers in the animal kingdom. And I thought, well, how did that happen? How was that possibly true? I always understood evolution as being a constant upward slope. We're getting better, we're getting more refined, everything's going great. 20 years from now, we're going to be even better than we were before. So I went to the Morton Collection, which is at the Museum of Anthropology and Archaeology at the University of Penn. They have the largest collection of pre industrial skulls in the world. Some of these things dating back thousands of years. And something that was completely shock is all of these skulls, all of these old skulls had straight teeth, they had huge jaws, they had huge nasal apertures, huge sinus cavities. So if you look at an old skull and compare it to a modern skull, what do we have? 90% of us, me, perhaps even you, Ben, and almost everyone we know, we have mouths that are so small that our teeth no longer fit, so they grow and crooked. Our sinuses are small and stunted. And so a smaller mouth and smaller sinuses makes it harder to breathe, which is one of the reasons why we have chronic sinusitis. We snore, we have sleep apnea and other respiratory problems. So all of this happened in the last, on a wide scale, in the last 400 years with industrialization of the food chain. And this completely shocked me that I understood growing up, you know, with the sniffles, wheezing, everyone I knew had asthma. I thought, oh, this is just a part of childhood, but it's not. It's completely unnatural. And evolution, I also learned this. Maybe I should have learned this years and years ago, you know, isn't about the survival of the fittest. Evolution means change. And right now, humans are changing for the worst, which explains why our bones are becoming more brittle, our feet hurt, our backs ache, all of that. And that's the concept of disevolution, which is coined by Harvard biologist Daniel Lieberman. And it explains why we're breathing so poorly now and why we need to really fix that before we do anything else.

Well, you said like the past 400 years, but I mean, I think if you look at the innovation of food and the development of fire, that our faces may have begun to change even earlier than that, even farther ago than 400 years. Because if you look at mashing food and cooking food and fire and less of a need to chew intensively, it seems like, you know, just the evolution of our food preparation tactics could change the mouth structure or the sinuses pretty dramatically. Couldn't they.

And they absolutely did. But what happened is that did not have, as far as we know, a deleterious effect on our ability to breathe because our throats were still wide, our noses were still wide. I mean, if you look at a skull from right at the invention of cooked food, we've been cooking food for, what, 800,000 years. Our brains just started growing like crazy, and those brains needed space. So they took it from the front of our faces and they took it from our sinuses. But as far as is known, we were breathing just fine. We were able to adapt to this because it happened over generations, you know, thousands and thousands and thousands of years. What happened to our modern faces. All of this happened in the last few hundred years. So we have not been able to adapt properly to it, which is why we're so messed up. I mean, if you think about it, there's 5,400 different mammals on the planet. We're the only ones with chronically crooked teeth and with all of these respiratory problems. So, you know, the painting's on the wall, and this is something that I had braces, I had orthodontics, all that crap. And now I understand a bit of how that came to be, and it helped me better contextualize how to fix it.

Yeah, well, what you started to do from the impression that I got in reading the book, was you kind of started by reverse engineering it, like you started by purposefully doing the complete opposite of what would be considered healthy. And that's like total mouth breathing. Can you walk me through why you decided to take that approach and what you experienced by basically keeping yourself from breathing through your nose like humans are supposed to do?

Sure. So I had heard that mouth breathing was really bad for you, so I did a deep dive into that and found one study that said up to 50% of us are habitual mouth breathers. And the science is pretty clear that when we do breathe from the mouth, we're breathing in unfiltered, unheated raw air. It saps us of moisture, irritates the lungs, loosens the back tissues of the mouth, so we're more apt to snore. Neurological problems. I could go on and on and on. It's really, really bad. But nobody really knew how quickly this damage came on. You know, some people are saying, oh, it takes years. You have to mouth breathe for years and years as a kid for all of these problems to arise. So I managed to convince the chief rhinologist at Stanford, a guy named Jayankar Nayak, to run a Little experiment where for 10 days, me and another guy, Anders Olson, who's a breathing therapist.

Oh, yeah, I know Anders. He's been on the podcast before. He's amazing.

Okay, So I don't know how. I mean, he's one of the best breathers in the world, right? Just like a master of this. I said, well, why don't you be one of the worst breathers in the world for me, with me for 20 days, and we'll actually test out some of your theories and see how much breathing, how we breathe really affects us.

Right? And by the way, to contextualize this, this would be like me saying, okay, I'm going to eat at McDonald's and not exercise for the next four weeks and see what happens.

Exactly. You know, it is. There are definitely tangents of a kind of super size Me, you know, experimentation going on here. But the interesting thing is, though, you know, not too many people eat at McDonald's three meals a day every day, but so many people breathe out of their mouths. So in some ways, we were just. We were making ourselves like the majority or at least half of the population and seeing what happened to our minds and our bodies and everything else. So we jammed silicon plugs up our noses and took every imaginable metric. We tested ourselves three times a day. We had CGMs, nitric oxide monitors, cortisol level, I mean, you name it. The most stunning thing to me, and this is something that I don't think anyone really thinks about, is within a single night, my snoring increased 1,300%. A few days later, it doubled. Then it tripled. Before I knew it, I had been snoring for maybe a minute or two a night. I was snoring for four hours a night, and my blood pressure shot up about 20 points. I had stage two hypertension, and I felt absolutely awful. And so, given that the other half of the study was to see what happens when you just breathe from your nose, could we reverse some of that damage that had been happening?

I have a quick question before you get into what you just. These silicone plugs that you put in your nose, did those just, like, stay in your nose for 40 days?

We had. It was 10 days. We had to change them out due to infection problems, but we never breathed. Our noses were so plugged up, we couldn't have even gotten a breath through there anyway.

You know, by the way, never write a book on gut health, because I could just imagine you shoving, like, an anal plug up and not pooping for 20 days. As a self experiment. So you need to be careful, man, with which orifices you're plugging up here.

You just read my latest book, proposed. How did you know? Spoiler alert. Hacked into my computer. No, I'm not going to do this. I'm not a huge self experimenter. And this was something that came up randomly just because we wanted to put ourselves in the position of most other people. So what happened when we took the plugs out and just breathed from our mouths? Sorry, Just breathed from our noses. We used mouth tape. We exercise with tape on our mouths just so we could constantly. Nasal breathe is. My snoring the first night completely disappeared. Decreased 30 fold. I went from having 52 sleep apnea events to zero. My blood pressure lowered about 20 points to where it was before. And Anders showed the same damage and the same restoration from nasal breathing. HRV shot through the roof once we started breathing from our noses. So, I mean, the big takeaway for me from all of this was that if you snore or you have sleep apnea right now, you go get a sleep test. What do they do? They give you a CPAP and they say, good luck, this is gonna help you. And it will. It will definitely help you. But nobody's talking about the role of mouth breathing in snoring. You know, 50% of the population snores. About a quarter has sleep apnea. No one's talking about just breathing through your nose, especially for mild or moderate problems. And so, you know, it's something I'm never gonna ever repeat, but it definitely taught me a valuable lesson in nasal breathing. So that's the first step, everybody. Don't breathe through the mouth. You're hurting your body and you look like an idiot, so don't do it.

Alright, so I've already brought up the asshole, so we might as well just move straight onto the penis. The nose. The tissue in the nose is very special. I did not realize until I read your book. I told my wife this and she was chuckling. I'm like, did you realize that your nose is just like your clitoris in a certain way? And we were just chatting about the erectile tissue in the nasal cavity. Can you get into why the tissue in the nose is so special? Because this just fascinated me.

It is. They are made of the same stuff. So they're made of erectile tissue and they function the same as one another. So your nose gets erections all throughout, throughout the day. And nose boners, nose boners all around. People are having them right now. Those listening You've got some nose boners going on. Because what happens is each of your nostrils opens and closes throughout the day. So every around 30 minutes to 4 hours will open and close. And your nose does this for a number of reasons. Part of it is because it can help heat or cool your body down, depending on what nostril you're breathing through. And it activates different hormones. And so your body uses this as almost kind of an H vac system to adjust your body. And they used to. About 100 years ago, women with very bad PMS used to get their erectile tissue taken out of their noses. And they claimed that this had a miraculous effect on the symptoms. And Freud was all into this too. People with sexual perversions, he would recommend that they go get their noses drilled out. Not sure if that worked. And I don't recommend this at home either. People don't, don't, don't do it.

People used to do the strangest things for limiting sexual urges. Like that's apparently where Kellogg's Cornflakes came out of as well. Like, they discovered, like, a high carb, grain fed. Not that I have anything against grains, but, you know, relying upon grains and cereals and high amount of carbohydrates as a staple in the diet seemed to somehow suppress sexual function. And one of the ways that Kellogg's Corn Flakes was originally marketed was to limit sexual urges.

Well, if you think about it, if you've got a bleeding nose with a bunch of bandage up there, like, you're the last person someone's gonna wanna have sex with. So maybe this is like a really good. Maybe it actually worked for that reason. Same with Kellogg's. You're eating cornflakes all day. Maybe you're just feeling bloated and maybe not too sexy. So maybe that's the real reason why it worked. But the actual. The actual connections between the nose and the genitals and nipples is a real thing. And so maybe, you know, next time everyone's sexually stimulated, you can kind of figure out what your nose is doing. I do know that some people that have this a little too close of a connection, their noses will plug completely and they'll start sneezing. And it's so common that it has a name. It's called Honeymoon Rhinitis. So hopefully nobody will get that either. It sounds very inconvenient.

Crazy. It's like the nose almost has its own brain. And, you know, you get in the book and we don't have to rabbit hole into this as much Because I actually have a few other questions about the nose. I want to ask you about how it may even be influenced by, like, moon cycles and some of the very interesting kind of ayurvedic research behind how the nose responds to things like environment and moon cycles and all these crazy rhythms like. Like, it's super, super complex and fascinating. And even if folks don't understand the science or the history of it, it should definitely influence people to develop a more intimate, pun intended, in this case, connection with their nose. And maybe even somebody will listen and come up with some kind of a newfangled nose vibrator or something. But regardless, the other thing about the nose is the right and the left nostril seem to act differently. And I've talked on the show before about alternate nostril breathing, but I didn't realize until I read that the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system actually respond differently to left versus right nostril breathing. Can you explain that?

Yeah, that's exactly right. And that's one of the reasons you want to let your nostrils do their thing. Your body's responding, and it's adjusting itself by that intake of air into one nostril or the other. So the right nostril is more closely linked to the left brain, and it heats your body up. Your heart rate's going to increase, circulation's going to increase, you're going to get. Get warmer. The left nostril cools your body down and your heart rate's gonna go lower, and it triggers more of a parasympathetic response. I found this one researcher at UCSD that found this woman with very serious schizophrenia. They adjusted her breathing because she was so left nostril dominant that she was stimulating. They hypothesized her creative brain all the time to hallucinate. So they switched her breathing and balanced her breathing. And she had significantly fewer hallucinations because she was more balanced. So this stuff is real, and there's so much of this in ayurvedic medicine. And so alternate nostril breathing is just a way of hacking into what your body is already doing and controlling that for a certain setting. Before you eat, you're supposed to breathe through the right nostril to heat your body up. And when you're done eating, you're supposed to breathe through the left nostril to cool yourself down before you go to sleep. So it's fascinating stuff, and there's a thousand years of at least ayurvedic science behind it. And it's Interesting that in just the past few decades they're showing that there's real facts behind all that.

Oh yeah, the yogis seem to repeatedly be found to be pretty far ahead of their time, as I'm prone to do because a lot of times I'll call bullshit when I'm reading a book if somebody makes a claim like that and actually go dig into the literature. And it turns out you said ayurvedic medicine or Ayurvedic preference practices. But then if you go to PubMed, like there's actual studies, like there's a study in the Journal of Physiology and Pharmacology about breathing through the different nostril and how that alters metabolism and autonomic activities. And I'll put these studies in the show notes, people want to check them out. There's another one that assessed alternate nostril breathing on parasympathetic nervous system and that this was like in the past five years. So I mean this is stuff that there's actual science behind and just the idea that you could sit down to a meal and for example, you know, breathe through your. The right nostril would be parasympathetic, right?

Right nostril, sympathetic. You want to heat your body up.

Right. So that would be after. That would be after. But you could cover your right nostril, breathe through your left nostril if you want to get into a parasympathetic state or if you were just stressed out. And so if you were going to do alternate nostril breathing to control stress. I never thought which nostril you breathe through is important, but it turns out even that is something that should be paid attention to. So it's just fascinating. You mentioned some of these Ayurvedic practices and how a lot of this comes from ancient Indian literature. But then there was also like a. There was some kind of a tribe, I think it was a Native American tribe that you talked about in the book that it was this badass tribe with these barrel chests and amazing bodies and absolutely fantastic physiological function and they had like a deep rooted nasal breathing practice for sure.

And I just want to go back for one second. So there's so much of this stuff seems like it's based on conjecture or hypotheses and no one's really going to believe it. And that's what kind of killed me writing this book because I knew I was going to have to do my homework. So on my website, and this should be up by the time people listen to this. I'M going to have all 600 studies that had been cited in various ways and functions in the book and including I went down to this deep dark hole into alternate nostril breathing and found 20 studies. The facts there are now irrefutable. And so whether or not people want to appreciate them or listen to them is up to them. But just as you had said, this stuff is proven at this time, so we can use it or not. And it's just great to have those tools at your disposal. They're right under your nose. So again, this stuff has been around in various cultures at various times. And the Native Americans knew about it more than anyone. And it wasn't just one tribe, it was 50 tribes. This guy, George Catlin in the 1930s got sick of living in western civilized society, quote, unquote civilized. So he packed a gun and some canvases and brushes and headed out to the Great Plains and covered more miles than Lewis and Clark to live with 50 different Native American tribes. What he found was that every single one of these tribes shared nasal breathing as a medicine. And they to the point where mothers would stand over their infants and close their mouths if ever they were breathing at night with an open mouth and they'd wrap them in this certain way and put them to sleep on these boards so that it would be harder to breathe through the mouth. And this was shared throughout their lives. They called it. You know, the great secret of life is to always breathe out of the nose to the extent where they said this is. Nasal breathing is one of the reasons why your face is balanced and looks good and is handsome and wide. And we found later that that's 100% true. If you're constantly mouth breathing, your skeletal structure is going to start adjusting in certain ways. So just the way in which you breathe can even change the way in which which you look. And Catlin even went down to South America at the age of 56 and looked at a bunch of other indigenous cultures and found the exact same thing, that breathing was medicine for these people. And it still is.

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You talk in the book about how some of the Plains tribes would strap their infants to a board and put a pillow beneath their heads. Not that I condone that.

For.

For your children these days to create a posture that would make it harder for them to breathe through the mouth. And I'm curious, you didn't mention a lot about sleeping positions or sleeping postures in the book, but after writing the book, did you do any changes to, like, your pillow structure or side sleeping versus back sleeping or anything like that?

I always sleep with sleep tape. I didn't realize this until I started writing this book, that I was a habitual mouth breather at night. So I use sleep tape every single night. When I don't use it, I can definitely. My mouth, I wake up, my mouth is dry. I'm also a big fan of inclined bed therapy. So lifting the back of your bed where your head is about 7 inches increases circulation and also helps to keep your mouth shut as well. Sleeping on your side, especially if you feel the onset of pneumonia. And New York Times just had a big article about this a couple days ago that side sleeping is so much better than back sleeping. And this is something that Buteyko, who was this breathing Guru FROM the 1950s, a cardiologist who discovered, rediscovered so much of this stuff, found that back sleeping is so bad. So side sleeping or stomach sleeping is much better from that standpoint.

I'm gonna have to ask another guy that I've had on the show, and I'll find that article, by the way, and link to it for people in the New York Times. Times. I interviewed Peter Martone. Peter developed this thing called a neck nest. And he. He came up with the idea for. After watching the movie Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, where folks were sleeping with basically like a. On their back with a piece of wood under their necks. He developed a pillow that supported the neck in such a posture. I think he calls it the neck nest. That would allow for proper mouth and nasal, nasal alignment while asleep. I think it does some of the stuff that like, inclined bed therapy does. But he's a huge proponent of back sleeping. However, I think his twist on it is that you're back sleeping with your head in kind of a different anatomical position using a special pillow.

Well, I think that that would make all the difference. Right. And I do know that for people with chronic respiratory problems, back sleeping is a bad idea. So I know that if you're a healthy person and you really want to sleep on your Back if you really focus on adjusting your neck then it sounds like that would work. I know a friend of mine had been through three sleep studies. He has sleep apnea fit. Dude surfer, always works out awful breather at night. So I simply had him raise his bed and put a couple pillows beneath his neck and he went from 100 apnea events to zero in a couple of days. And so this again is like, why is nobody in sleep medicine talking about this stuff? Why don't you start there instead of getting a CPAP on your face, like lift your bed up. It's free. Anyone can do it.

Yeah, for the bed thing, are you just buying on Amazon those little, they're like stackers almost that you would put on the back of the posts if you had a regular bed platform that would just mildly lift the back post of the bed compared to the front post of the bed. Or are you talking about like getting one of those full on expensive gravity incline bed setup?

Well, I think all of those would do the same trick. I just went to my library and got a bunch of books that I haven't read in a while and don't really have any interest in reading. You know, the standard Oxford Dictionary, which is about, you know, freaking six inches thick. So I got a few of those and I just use books and I just put them on the back post and it works great. People can use what, you know, buy stuff on Amazon. You can buy the fancy $10,000 version. I'm sure they all work great but. But so does a piece of wood or a few books. That's why I think it's especially with people with snoring sleep apnea problems, there's really no excuse not to try this. The worst thing that can happen is. Oh, that didn't work out too well for me. Didn't cost you anything.

Yeah, for mouth taping did you just use plain old duct tape or a home solution like your cheap ass book solution? Or did you use. There's got it on my shelf somewhere back there. Some company sent it to me. I'm looking at the Somnifix. Yeah, Somnifix. You use those?

I've tried them. And again I found that a more simple solution to me personally worked just as well. I went down to walgreens and bought some 3M Durapore micropore tape. It's just surgical tape that has a bunch of teeny little holes in it. It so it's easy to go on and off, which is what you want on your lips. You don't want to use duct tape or gorilla tape or any of that kind of tape. You want something that's going to go on very easily and come off very easily. So I'm a big fan of that stuff. And, you know, if you go on YouTube, you're going to find a whole bunch of different ways of mouth taping. This one guy who uses eight pieces of tape every night to create, like, this tape beard that he's a big fan of. I'm not such a big fan of that. I found a piece of tape the size of a postage stamp just moved. Imagine like a Charlie Chaplin mustache just moved an inch down to your lips. I found that that works great. You just need to remind your body to keep your mouth closed. I don't think you need a huge fat strip, you know, from. From ear to ear. So just something very. Start really small and start with tape that is not super sticky. Trust me on that one. I think, Ben, in your book, you recommended coconut oil or a little bit of olive oil, and that's great. That'll work great.

Yeah. So I have a few thoughts. First of all, I'm definitely not gonna do the tape beard, because no matter how big my nose boner might be, my wife's just not gonna go for the tape beard thing. And then also, I personally my take on the mouth breathing while you're sleeping. I think for people with sleep apnea who are severe mouth breathers, it's a good solution. For me, what I used was a solution of teaching myself how to nasal breathe under intense periods of stress. So I would nasal breathe during 5Ks. I would nasal breathe while training for Spartan races. I would nasal breathe during tabata sets on an airdyne. Pretty much force myself when my whole body's screaming at me to breathe through my mouth, to breathe through my nose. And there was one device that I used called an Opti. I think it's called an Opti O2 that I'd stick in my mouth. That keeps you from breathing through your mouth when you're exercising. And so I kind of trained myself how to do it during pretty intense periods of stress. And then I also would go on really long walks using our mutual friend Anders Olson's relaxator device, which forces you. I actually just got those for my kids, too. So I'm teaching my kids we're to going. Going on walks now, and they each have their own relaxator, and I'm teaching them how to use it and how to breathe through their nose during the entire walk. And for me, I train myself how to do it so much in a conscious state that I don't have any issues with sleep apnea. I've used a pulse ox, I've used the bio strap monitoring tool. I've used a lot of tools to just make sure that I'm doing okay with snoring or with mouth breathing at night. And I'm fine. But. But I think that's one solution for people who might not like to sleep with the mouth tape. I know some people, it keeps them awake, but I would just say teach yourself how to nasal breathe pretty much every other time, except when you're asleep or perhaps when you're eating. And you'll be able to train yourself how to nasal breathe, in my opinion. In many cases.

Sure you can in most cases. But some of this is anatomical, right? Some people who have very strong jaws and have a certain facial structure are going to be much more apt to keep their mouths closed at night. My wife does not need any sleep tape. She sleeps with her mouth shut all the time. So even though I've trained myself so hard to breathe out of my nose, my mouth still drops open because I think it's just. And this is something I was talking to a surgeon about as well. So it depends on your jaw size. So having said that, you're 100% right with training yourself to nasal breathe all the time, working out at extremely intense rates. I know people are going to think, well, how am I going to get enough air in there? How am I going to get enough oxygen? You have plenty of oxygen. You need to adapt yourself to that increase of CO2. And once you do that, you're going to increase circulation, you're going to get more oxygen, you're going to be able to recover much more easily than you would otherwise.

Oh yeah. I mean, you have more oxygen. It may be that you're breathing through smaller holes, so to speak, but the nitric oxide release is going to vasodilate the tissues and allow for better oxygen delivery. The drop in cortisol is gonna allow for a little bit more hyperoxygenation. The retention of CO2, even if you're breathing less air, will cause more dissociation from the oxygen in the red blood cells into tissue. And so, yeah, you might be breathing less, less actual air, tidal volume wise, but you're getting way more oxygen delivery. You're right.

One more thing along those lines, a little quickie is I found it was helpful to convince myself of this to wear a pulse ox while working out. So I would Go on a stationary bike in a gym and just go for it as hard as I possibly could while breathing at a rate of about three times less than I would otherwise. About six breaths a minute. Minute. And I found that my O2 stayed consistently at 97% the whole time, even though I was breathing three times less. So it's not an O2 problem. Exactly what you said. You get so much more nitric oxide, and you're actually increasing the efficiency, slowing your heart rate down so you can push even harder by breathing through your nose. So there's a zillion benefits to doing it, but that pulse ox trick for people who aren't completely convinced is worth a go.

Yeah. And by the way, you just brought up respiratory rate, and I think that's something super important to think about in terms of the number of times you breathe per minute. Now, you got into some research in the book that has actually looked at the ideal pace of breathing, and I believe it was based on a lot of these cultures, like the Booth, Buddhists and Taoists and some Christian and Native American cultures, and all these different breathing patterns for a calming effect or the health effect of a certain breathwork frequency. What did you find in terms of the inhalation, exhalation rhythm, or the amount of breaths per minute?

Yeah. About 20 years ago, some Italian researchers brought a bunch of subjects into the lab, and they hooked them up with every imaginable sensor, and they had them recite the Ave Maria, the Catholic prayer. Then they had them recite O Mani Padmi hum, which is a Buddhist chant, the most famous Buddhist chant. And they found that it took these people almost exactly 5.5 seconds to inhale and 5.5 seconds to exhale. So they were breathing at a rate of 5.5 times a minute every time they practice these prayers. Then they looked at Hindu and Taoist and Native American cultures, the sutta nama or the Om, I mean, on and on. And almost all of these prayers were locked in at that breathing rate. And they found something amazing. When people breathe like this, you don't need to pray to do this. You don't need to chant a Buddhist mantra, although maybe that'll help. But blood flow to the brain increases, the systems of the body enter a state of cold coherence where everything's really functioning at peak efficiency. The heart, circulation, nervous system, all of that. So whenever these people went and started spontaneously talking or returning to a different breathing rate, all of that fell apart. Whenever they breathed like that again, it all sinked in. So various researchers and scientists are using this. Therapists are using this simple, simple twee, which is breathing in for about five or six seconds. Don't worry if it's five and a half or six. I mean, anything in the ballpark is good breathing out for that same amount of time. If you want to relax yourself a little more, you're going to exhale a little longer. So this is something I try to do all the time, especially when I'm working in front of my computer, which is basically all the time anyway, is to breathe at this rate and you can instantly, at least I can instantly feel the benefits of doing this. Even when you're walking to be breathing at this rate, don't ever try to sit, stress it, or push it, or get mad at yourself for missing a second or so. The point is to relax yourself, let your body function the way it wants to function. That's what breathing at this rate does.

Yeah, it's so fascinating how all these different cultures kind of settled on that perfect breath weight. It says something for just overall human wisdom and following our natural innate tendencies. If we are in an unstressed state and not kind of living surrounded by all this, you know, dis. Evolution and, you know, evolutionary mismatches. So it's five and a half to six seconds in, five and a half to six seconds out. It makes total sense. And it also kind of begs the question for me when we look at a lot of these rapid breath work tactics, you know, like Wim Hof breathwork, that's obviously more than five and a half to six in, five and a half to six out, holotropic breathwork, like super fast, and might fall into the category of over breathing, which is a huge issue in society. Are you concerned about those type of breathwork tactics causing some type of physiological damage? Because based on what everything we've talked about so far, those fly in the face of some of these breathwork tactics.

Absolutely not. They are profoundly therapeutic. And this is something I get into towards, towards the last third of the book where I'm looking at really more extreme breathing techniques, breathwork techniques. The difference is between someone being anxious or panicking or having an asthma attack. They're breathing this way unconsciously. Oh my God, what am I going to do? Late for the meeting, you know. Oh, I hate traffic. When you consciously put yourself in that state and you consciously put yourself into an extreme state of stress by breathing very heavy, you get control of those functions, which means you know how to turn it on and you know how to turn it off. And you can spend the, you know, next 23 and a half hours of the day chilling out instead of being semi stressed. So I'm a huge fan. Wim, Hof, Method, Tummo, whatever you want to call it. Kriya, Pranayamas, Holotropic. I've done all those. I studied them. And so to me, it comes down to that one thing. It's conscious versus unconscious. Consciously doing this has huge benefits and it can really shove you into some intense states, mental states, physical states, and all the rest.

Yeah, it's very interesting because you're essentially doing the exact opposite of what you'd be trying to do if you were, say, nasal breathing during an entire night of sleep and focusing on oxygenation because you're exhaling, you're breathing off a bunch of carbon dioxide. With most of these forms of breath work. So you're narrowing blood vessels, you're decreasing circulation to the brain by an incredible amount. I think in the book you say it's probably like 40% that brain blood flow decreases. And so what happens is that that hallucinatory experience. Right, which is why Stanislav Grof developed Holotropic breathwork as an alternative to lsd. And then you, you, let's see, if you're breathing off CO2, then you would be alkalizing the blood.

That's exactly right.

And so if you're alkalizing the blood, that's essentially causing a little bit of a panic signal. And when you're doing all of that, you're essentially training your body how to be more resilient to stress. So the way that I think about this is that everybody says, not everybody, but a lot of people say that the heart is like a battery. It has a finite number of beats over your lifespan. Therefore, creatures with a lower breath rate rate, a lower metabolic rate, creatures who hibernate, often creatures who do not eat many calories, etcetera, they're going to live a longer time. And then an exercise enthusiast might hear that and say, well, crap, you know, an hour a day, I'm elevating my heart rate, I'm breathing hard, I'm going into a state that's nothing like that low metabolic rate that supposedly sustains lifespan. But, but the way I think about it is those other 23 hours of the day, your heart rate is actually much lower.

Right.

If your resting heart rate is 40 instead of 70 throughout your entire life, despite that hour of exercise during the day, you know, shoving aside all the, you know, the grip strength, metabolic benefits, and the mitochondrial Benefits, et cetera. It actually is going to be a lifespan increasing tactic as long as it's not overdone. Like we know there's a law of increasing mortality with over exercise. I would hypothesize that in folks who do too much Wim HOF or too much holotropic breathwork, or if that's like a daily staple for them, that that would indeed create an unfavorable scenario.

Absolutely. You look at the most fit people, they usually have an extremely low resting heart rate. Right. So you can go out and run a marathon and then you're not gonna run a marathon for five or six hours the next day, and the next day after that, that you're going to be recovering. And so as long as you're recovering with that low resting heart rate, then the beats per day and per year are going to be much lower than someone who is just jacked up on coffee all day, not exercising, just chugging away at 90 beats per minute. So, yeah, it's just, if you look at it, and that's what yogis have said, BKS Iyengar said, a man's life is not measured by his years, it's measured by his breaths. So how we breathe directly affects our heart rate. And the slower we breathe, the slower our heart's gonna beat. And that's why those six breaths a minute, try breathing that way and really jacking your heart, it's a really hard thing to do. That's where you want to be. You don't want to create undue stress to your heart. Also breathing in those long and low breaths, that's going to activate the diaphragm, which is going to do a lot of the lug work for increasing circulation for sucking in blood into the thoracic cavity and then shooting it back out. So the diaphragm is really a second heart and you need to activate that to release the burden from the heart. Doing so much of the work, it makes total sense.

And you talk about one thing in the book that I think a lot of people are probably aware of and that makes sense intuitively. And that's the idea of when you're eating, to chew your food quite often and to consume things that might not always be constantly pulsed or smoothied or in their liquefied, purified form. And even children benefit from some amount of hefty chewing. And the approximate rate of chewing per bite, recommended for adults ranges from 25 to 40, which is no near what many people are getting. And you have fantastic information on chewing in the book about even the release on stem cells and bone density and formation of teeth in the mouth. And that all makes pretty good sense. But then you also talk about something else as a practice that I think might fly under the radar a little bit, and that's the idea of actually allowing the lungs to properly expand through specific stretching or specific therapy work. And one thing you mention in the book. Book that I very briefly looked into a while ago, I interviewed a guy named Stephen Cabral who's an Ayurvedic doc, and he was talking about different Ayurvedic cleanses. And he mentioned these Tibetans and some moves they do for longevity on a daily basis. And I didn't really think about those too much until I got to a section in your book where you were talking about these five Tibetan rites. And I'm curious. Curious if those were similar to what Steven was telling me about. Because from the way you describe them in the book, from what I understand, they're actually like lung expanding or diaphragm.

Expanding stretches for sure, as is so much of yoga. If you think of all the poses in yoga, you're breathing in, in postures that allow your lungs to inflate in a certain way to increase your respiratory health and stretch those muscles. So these five Tibetan rhymes have been around for 2,000 years. And they're supposed to heal ailments and increase longevity and all that stuff. And it's basic yoga postures. It's downward dogs, and you're leaning back, you're leaning forward, you could do those. And they certainly work just as any yoga posture works. That really allows you to access areas of your lungs and breathe into. But. But what I found, and there was this study that about 20 years ago, the Framingham Study, found that the greatest predictor of longevity wasn't genetics or diet or daily exercise. It was lung capacity. Bigger always meant better. It meant that you were going to be living longer. So whatever it takes to get that lung capacity, you can try the five Tibetan rites, other yoga stuff you can exercise, stretch out. That's really key. And we're seeing that now with this Covid stuff, too. How much respiratory health is affecting people, getting the most severe symptoms of this. So it's vital, even if you're not sick, especially if you're not sick, to start working that out now, expanding your lungs and keeping everything flowing.

Yeah. And these would be difficult to describe on audio, but I found a really fantastic infographic that will show all of you listening in what the five different stretches are I started to do them in the sauna because I have a little yoga routine I do in the sauna three or four times a week. And I started to sprinkle those in and they're incredibly opening, like you're expanding. I think it's important to actually do the deep diaphragmatic breathing as you're doing them, just as you would do during any proper yoga practice. But the five Tibetan longevity exercises, absolutely fascinating. I mean, even if you're doing the, the mouth taping or the nasal breathing or any of the other tactics that we talk about in this interview or in James Book, and you're working in maybe here and there a little bit of Wim Hof work or holotropic breathwork, you know, as kind of that over breathing scenario. I think a couple other things that are incredible would just be chewing your food 25 to 40 times per bite and then maybe on a daily basis ducking away for 10 minutes and doing these Tibetan longevity exercises. I think that's a great tool for anybody who wants to turn themselves into a little breathwork ninja. Now, another thing is hypoventilation training. Hypoventilation training. I have a Kettlebell coach, Joe DiStefano, and he's training me right now for the Russian kettlebell certification. And he's actually very into breath work. His wife is a Kundalini yoga instructor. Instructor. And he has me as one of my warm ups on the airdyne at the 22nd mark, at the 42nd mark, and at the 62nd mark while pedaling at a decent pace, like a 60 rpm pace, doing a full exhale and holding for as long as possible, which after reading your book, I get the impression is kind of similar to like hypoventilation training. But how would you personally describe this idea of hypoventilation?

It's by just breathing less when you're exercising. So there's a bunch of different ways to do this, but that's the main premise behind it. I would suggest not pushing yourself really hard unless you're jogging on grass because you can get really dizzy doing this. But what I thought was so fascinating about all of this exercise and this philosophy is that again, it had been around for decades and decades. Emil Zatopek, which is considered the greatest runner of all time, used this to become a complete badass in the Olympics, winning golds in events he had never even trained in before. Then the US Men's swim team at the Montreal Olympics used it to do the greatest performance ever of A US Olympic swim team. And so it got a lot of this training got really poo pooed in the 90s where researchers looked at it and they said oh this doesn't work. This is a big placebo effect, don't do it. And since then other researchers had looked at those poop pooers and found that they were completely wrong. There are so many benefits to breathing less and to training yourself to breathe less. And you get into some of this Ben, in your book of how you can increase. It's basically altitude training, but you can do it anywhere. So all the benefits you're getting from altitude training you're going to be able to get by just training yourself to breathe less.

Right. And it's dry land. This is not stuff you have to do underwater. You don't have to go to Laird Hamilton's house and do his underwater pool workout or join something I discovered yesterday that you, I would guess you already know about this. James, have you heard of the Underwater Torpedo League?

I think I've heard about it, yeah. And by the way, I just want to give a big warning. Do not push your breath holds underwater without supervision, people. Super stupid idea, don't do it. I'm talking about jogging on a lawn, on a beach, on sand, somewhere soft. And definitely get a trainer to help you out with this. You can increase VO2 max with hypoventilation training. You can increase red blood cells on and on and on. It's great. It sucks. It's super painful and boring and miserable. But the effects, the benefits are pretty pronounced. So back to torpedoes.

So the Underwater Torpedo League, you gotta go. I think it's utlnation.com. i think it was like Men's Health magazine or Men's Journal did a story on it. But it's essentially water polo using this fast moving underwater torpedo. All underwater, all the same rigors, the wrestling, the, the physical contact of water polo team against team using this underwater torpedo. I already filled out the contact form on their website to find out if there's any leagues up here in Spokane, Washington, which I doubt. They're all, they're probably on like LA and San Diego. But I think you would probably find it pretty fascinating, James. It's literally a full on water polo game that takes place underwater. So that's kind of the extremes of hypoventilation training.

Yeah, it's underwater hockey and they actually have this at a pool nearby. I'm sure someone claimed a different name so they can have their own league or whatever, but this has been going on for a long time. There's a pool very close to my house where these guys have been over and over trying to get me to go down there. I hear it's, you know, if you want to increase your breath holds and get better at free diving, that's the best way of doing it. And you're around a really supportive group. It's supposed to be pretty brutal, but it has definitely piqued my interest. So it's on my list.

Yeah. And when you first start this type of hypoventilation training, especially during exercise, I'll also warn people, people, you know, in addition to being careful, you know, maybe doing a bike instead of a treadmill or like you say, on soft grass or at a golf course, if you're gonna do it while running, you do get a little bit of a headache. Like the carbon dioxide increases because you're retaining a bunch of it. And then you get that increased amount of oxygen dissociating from your red blood cells into tissue and the vasodilation into the brain. And you get so full of blood that your nervous signals, your nervous system starts to send pain signals. Like it's. So it' sit's pretty crazy when you first start to do it for sure.

And that brings up something else about Wim Hof method and Tummo and Kriya, that almost all of these ancient methods, not holotropic breathing where you're just going balls to the wall for three hours, but all of the ancient versions of these very vigorous pranayamas, they have you breathe very hard for a certain amount of time. Then they have you breathe either very slow or they hold your breath, breath. So all of them do this and they do it for a reason. Because you off gas, all that CO2 when you're breathing very, very heavy. And then when you hold your breath or breathe slowly, all that CO2 comes back up to release all of that oxygen into tissues and muscles and organs. So that's why I think it works. It's that ebb, ebb and flood of oxygen and CO2 and manipulating that to maximize both of those gases, gases in your body. I do Wim Hof's method a few times a week. I love it. And I always feel that rush of circulation not when I'm breathing heavy, but when I'm holding my breath, you know, and that CO2 increases and all that oxygen is able to be, to be free throughout my body. So it's interesting. That's another parallel crea does the exact same thing Tumulta, same thing on and on and on. And I think they all do the same thing for a reason because they found for thousands and thousands of years that this was so therapeutic and effective.

You've used the word tummo a few times. Some people might not be familiar with that term.

It is the inner heat meditation. So this is what there are different versions of tummo. This is basically what Wim Hof method does. But Wim was not the only one to only Westerner to figure out tummo. It's been around for a long time and he's done more for breathing awareness than anyone else on the planet today. I really believe that. And seeing the people absolutely transformed from taking up his method is so inspiring to me. But it was interesting to me to find that there was another cat in the 1930s. He was born in 1931. His name is Maurice Dubarre and he had pleurisy and lung infections and tuberculosis. And by his 20s he was left for dead in the hospital. Doctors had given up and this missionary came in and said, hey, I've heard this thing called yoga and breathing might help. So Dubar trained himself to breathe. He trained himself in tummo. And a few years later he was completely healed. Not only that, but he gained a superhuman strength and basically did everything that Wim did. But 30 years before, sat in an ice bath for an hour hour, ran 150 miles through the Sahara Desert over six days. At the age of 72, went on a bike ride in the Himalayas at altitudes of 18,000ft. So it just shows that this stuff, this is really an ancient knowledge that we've had in various cultures, various religions, but they've all come to the same conclusions over and over again. And to me that just shows how valid this stuff is. Now we have sina scientific measurements and machines and sensors to show what happens in the body. And all of that is validating what these older cultures have known for thousands of years.

And anybody can do it. You're gonna kick out of this. And this was totally not planned. I am in my office right now. I'm looking out my office window. My twin boys, river and Taryn, the same guys who also read this book, Breathe. They're outside right now doing their workout. They get a workout document that I send to them each week. And sometimes it's balance exercises, sometimes it's breathing exercises, sometimes it's rope climbs. But they're literally doing their workout right now. I can see them out by the cold tub. We have this Cold tub called a Morozco Forge. And you, you absolutely have to like break through a thin layer of ice on top to get in. And their workout today is two minutes. Wim Hof hold the exhale. Once the exhale is done and any dizziness is gone, they're getting in the cold pool. They stay in this cold tub, which is at about 33 degrees for 90 seconds, get out 30 pushups and they do three rounds of that. And I guarantee my children's nervous system is going to be so much more resilient than mine ever was. And they're literally doing this right now. I'm looking out my window and they're out there at the cold pool. And I had forgotten I signed them that workout today. But it's reminding me how anybody, if a little 12 year old boy can do that type of thing, anybody can start to train themselves themselves in like Wim Hof in holotropic, in nasal breathing, in the five and a half to 6x10, five and a half, six seconds out using something like the relaxator on walks. I mean, this stuff you can start into if you're freaking 70 years old and start to better yourself. So I mean, it's so valuable. And again, this book I think is indispensable. Now I would be remiss because we touched on it when we first started, started our show if I didn't bring up carbon dioxide because kind of like Scott Carney talked about in his book Wedge, you talk about carbon dioxide in your book, I believe you refer to something called Meduna's mixture and this idea of carbon dioxide therapy get into carbon dioxide, explain that to people.

Sure. Well, I think we've established how important it is to have the right balance of CO2 and O2 in our bodies. That's a known thing. But, but about 100 years ago, people started hacking into that and they're like, well, what if we sort of forced more CO2 into someone's body, especially someone who was deficient or had mental problems or physical problems. So this research started in Royal in the French Alps where they were finding people with asthma and eczema and various skin diseases, respiratory problems. They would put them in these carbon dioxide pools and they would show these amazing recoveries. People with gout who hadn't been able to walk for years and years were out hiking two weeks later. So they thought, well, it's hard to get a bunch of people to go up to the French Alps to bathe in these pools. So what if we just had them inhale CO2. And this stuff was huge in the 20s. They were using it for epilepsy, which worked fantastically. They were using it for schizophrenia, which worked great. Fire trucks in New York and Chicago and other major cities had CO2 tanks, tanks on their trucks to help people who had suffered from heart attacks or strokes or asphyxia. On and on and on. And then all of this stuff disappeared. I'm sure that listeners now can see this ongoing pattern that I just kept finding over and over. It disappeared. And all those people were given tranquilizers instead, which helped with the symptoms but did nothing to address the core problem. So what they found was having this huge dose of CO2, like 30% CO2 with the rest oxygen. Oxygen was able to open up these dormant areas of the brain that were misfiring or that were static, not functioning properly. And it allowed them to open and function normally again. And so what I've seen, and this is something that's just starting to happen right now. There's an NIH researcher, Justin Feinstein, great dude, out at the Laureate Institute of Brain Research.

I'm familiar.

He's now looking at inhale CO2 for anxieties. And he's finding. Preliminary research so far is that it has a very promising effect on people because people with anxieties, even with asthma, panic problems, they're breathing way too much, which means their CO2 way too low. By increasing that, it allows them to mellow out and breathe normally again. So it's like these crazy breath hold holds, but you don't need to hold your breath. You just walk in, inhale some CO2 and it does all that for you.

Gosh, don't you just love technology? We don't even need to do holotropic breathwork. What you do is you get a dmt, vape pen, and then for the carbon dioxide tolerance, you just hook up with Feinstein's lab and maybe have him send you some type of CO2 inhalation device. Who needs to do the hard work, Get a tummy tuck if you're getting too fat.

And for people who are self motivated, right, you don't need this. You need your lips, you need your nose, you need your lungs, lungs. But there's a lot of people out there who, you know, they aren't going to show up and do their 20 minutes of breathwork. And so that's why I think these hacks, for them, not for everyone else, but for these people, it can really help them out, it can give them that boost they need to get their stuff together, you know, to be able to think clearly, to heal them. And that's why I think it's so important. It's better than keeping someone on SSRI for 30 years. Why not try this first and see how that affects them?

Yeah, yeah. And a couple of things. First of all, as you were discussing carbon dioxide, I realized, I think I referred to it as respiratory alkalosis. It would actually be respiratory acidosis. I think that was a misstatement on my part. When you're retaining carbon dioxide, it would be acidosis, not alkalosis. It would be basically like hypercapnia.

Low is acid and high is alkaline.

Right?

Yeah.

Right. Yeah. So I misspoke several minutes ago when I said that. Just, just so folks know, no need to leave me nasty comments on the show notes. Not that anyone ever does that. The other thing is that related to this idea of biohacking your way into these states with like, carbon dioxide inhalers or DMT vape pens versus learning how to do breath work and quote, the hard work, unquote, to do it. I think there is also something to be said for this idea that it's about the journey, not the destination. And, and I think that there's a great deal of mental and emotional power that you develop by being comfortable with the breathwork, by putting in the hard work and by, you know, rather than getting the calf implants, do calf raises and you'll be a better person as a result. So, you know, that's kind of my take on the use of some of these biohacks rather than just, you know, doing the hard work.

I absolutely agree with you. And to me, it's not asking you to do too much. Breathing's easy, it doesn't take much time, and it grounds you, connects you to other people, connects you to the planet, other animals. I mean, it's really, to me, it's an anchor, especially in these really stressful times, to be able to pause for a moment, breathe, reconnect with yourself, and have a greater view of everything else that's happening around you.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, this book, I think, is going to do people a lot, lot of good. The New Science of a Lost Art. And like I said, all the shownotes are@BenGreenfieldFitness.com LostArt It's a must read. I realize you may feel like you. You got a lot of it from listening to this podcast, but we didn't even delve into half the stuff in the book. So not only that, but there's also some some fantastic resources throughout the book for taking a deeper dive, as well as a lot of kind of practical instructions in the appendix for yoga breathing, for box breathing for breath hold, walking for four, seven, eight breathing. So a lot of really good stuff in here. You've even got a great tip for decongesting the nose, which I tried a couple of times and it works fantastically. So. So folks, the book just came out at the time we're recording this and it's called Breathe A New Science of a Lost Heart. Breath.

Breath.

Sorry, breath. That's right. Breathe with me with an E. Breath. The New Science of a Lost Art. And and by the way, if you go to the show notes@bengreenfulfitness.com LostArt Also, if you have a chance, listen to the free diving episode that I did with James, because in my opinion it was, it was equally as entertaining as I hope today's show was. And I think you'll get a lot out of that too, because I certainly did. So James, dude, thanks for coming back on the show.

Thank you so much, Ben. Always a pleasure.

Yes, sir. And folks, thank you for listening in. And until next time, I'm Ben Greenfield along with with James Nestor signing out from BenGreenfieldFitness.com have an amazing week. Well, thanks for listening to today's show. You can grab all the show notes, the resources, pretty much everything that I mentioned over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com along with plenty of other goodies from me, including the highly helpful Ben Recommends page, which is a list of pretty much everything that I ever recommended for hormones, sleep digestion, fat loss, performance, and plenty more. Please also know that all the links, all the promo codes that I mentioned during this and every episode help to make this podcast happen and to generate income that enables me to keep bringing you this content every single week. So when you listen in, be sure to use the links in the show notes, use the promo codes that I generate because that helps to float this thing and keep it coming to you each and every week.