My Top 3 BREATHING Books of All Time (+ a Life-Changing Idea From Each!) (#9)

You're listening to optimize with bryan johnson. More wisdom in less time. Hey guys, what's up? It's Brian. 500 of my favorite books. We're back. Optimized Philosopher's Notes Top three Books of All Time series. Today we're going to talk about my top three favorite breathing books and and why we've covered the top three books of all time. Ancient Wisdom, Modern Science Habits, Eating, Nutrition, Weight Loss, Fitness Sleeping, and now it's time for Breathing. Of course, you can follow along at optimize me top three and see all 30 of these top three series we're doing. And then also you can get, of course, access to all 600 philosopher's notes in which I distill the best big ideas from these great books into six page PDFs, 20 minute MP3s. Get it on the site, get it on the app, get it wherever you are. All that's free as part of our two week trial. Then it's around 10 bucks a month depending on how you go at Optimize Me. Then there's Coach if you want to go all in. Optimize Me Coach. We've got over 2000 optimizers in our Mastery Series and Coach program. We'd love to have you join that as well. 70 plus countries. I'm always blown away by that stat. And then of course we also have the lifetime offer optimize me lifetime. 250 bucks for access to all the notes, 50 master classes plus ones, et cetera. So three of my favorite breathing books and why and a number one idea from each, the oxygen advantage. Patrick McGown, number one breath by James Nestor, number two. And surprisingly, as I was going through the collection True to Form by Eric Goodman. Now this actually isn't a breathing book. It's a basically how to hold your body book. But in that he gave some great wisdom on how to breathe properly that I use all the time. So I thought, you know what? I'm going to use that. And then we've got a bunch of other great books. Breathe by Melissa Vrenich. The Power of youf Breath by Anders Olson. The Healing Power of the Breath, Perfect Breathing. We've got a bunch of other notes here and on this site. Breathe In, Breathe Out. I've read a lot of great books on breathing. We have breathing 101 as one of our master classes. And of course we talk about this a lot in the Mastery Series Coach Program. So the oxygen advantage. Patrick McGowan I read this book and it changed my life. And I don't say that figuratively, I mean it literally. So I've done a lot of stuff over the course of the last X decades to optimize and you know, big gains for me. Meditation. I've missed one day in the last 13 years or something like that. At this point, removing grains was a big thing for me. It reduced my anxiety levels, so did the meditation, etc. I used to be a super anxious about everything, little boy and young man. And then I chipped away at it and I thought I was doing great. But it wasn't until I started training my breathing after reading this book and doing some one on one coaching with Patrick, that I went to a whole new level of calm and what I call energized tranquility and calm confidence. Because our breathing matters a lot more than we may think. And what Patrick teaches us, that we talk about in this PDF and in a number of other notes is that you need to breathe less to breathe, right? And he says, look, just. Well, just to step back for a moment. You can live for weeks without food, days without water, but only minutes without air. Oxygen is obviously incredibly important and breathing is a fundamental practice and it should be easy. But our modern lives have distorted our breathing patterns. So we breathe too much. He says. We always think about whether we're eating good quality food and too much or too little food quantity, but you need to have both the right quality of air, obviously, but also the quantity. And most of us breathe too much and we need to breathe less to breathe, right? So literally every single morning I do a breathing exercise that I talk about in here and in our breathing 101 class and with our coaches. And the reason why we breathe incorrectly is that most of us breathe out of our mouth rather than our nose, which is also a huge theme of James Nestor's book and all of the different books we feature. He actually did a study. We'll just go there briefly. James Nestor did a study with Anders Olson, who wrote that book the Power of youf Breath, where they went to Stanford and they actually plugged up their noses for. Breathing. It's kind of important, I say in this note, and then I talk about mouth breathing and how horrible it is for you. Anyway, they had to breathe through their mouths for a matter of, you know, 10 days or something like that. And their level of anxiety, their level of indigestion just went through the roof. So we're all breathing. A lot of us, most of us are breathing improperly. So the first thing we need to know is we Got to breathe less to breathe, right? And the way you do that, we talk about a 1, 2, 3. You got to breathe in through your nose, down into your belly, and then exhale slightly longer than your inhale. This is the top three that we come back to again and again and again in our work with optimizers. We can do it right now. Let's do a nice deep breath right now. Sit or stand nice and tall. As Eric Goodman says, chest up, chin down. That's the life changing idea from that book. Chest up, chin down. Pull a thread through your head to lengthen and widen your spine to give your diaphragm room to play. Breathe in through your nose, nice and slowly and quietly and rhythmically down into your belly, your diaphragm, and then back out through your nose, which creates more pressure than breathing out through your mouth, which is good. Slightly longer than your inhale, which flips the switch on your parasympathetic nervous system. Let's do it. One breath just drops you down. We talk about perfect breathing. We talk about breathing coherence rates. I breathe in to a count of six and out to a count of, hold for one, then breathe out for a count of eight. Six, one, eight. Here's another idea from Belissa Vranich's book, Breathe. She says most people are what she calls vertical breathers. Their shoulders go up and then their shoulders go down. They're breathing with their neck and their shoulders, right? Oh, you don't want to do that. You want to breathe side, like in and out, your horizontal breathing, where the only thing that moves when you breathe is your belly, your diaphragm. And that's how I train myself in the morning. I hold my hand on my chest and my hand on my abdomen and I only move my diaphragm, breathing really nice and gentle. And what you do when you do that is you. You increase your capacity to handle and carbon dioxide. And it's a longer chap. But the basic idea here is it's carbon dioxide you need to optimize. And when you breathe through your mouth rather than your nose, you're exhaling, getting rid of too much carbon dioxide. And you need the presence of carbon dioxide to push the oxygen out of your hemoglobin into your cells and tissues and organs and actually release that oxygen out of the hemoglobin into your body. Without carbon dioxide levels being optimized, you can't do that. And if you're breathing out of your mouth, then you aren't getting the oxygen out of Your hemoglobin the way you could. Again, we talk about this in depth in the notes on the oxygen advantage. We talk about oxygen delivery 101. It's all about the carbon dioxide. The crucial point to remember is that hemoglobin releases oxygen when in the presence of carbon dioxide. When we over breathe too much carbon dioxide is washed from the lungs, blood, tissues, and cells. It's a big idea. Can change your life, right? Change mine again. This is why I'm featuring this book. Number one breathing tip, breathe through your nose. We talked about that. And then he got me to do something crazy, which is I put tape over my mouth. I thought it was crazy years ago when I started doing it, and I haven't missed a day since. Alexander and I had a date night the other day and I forgot my tape and I literally was like, oh, no. I called down, I got band aids, taped my mouth shut. I'm not breathing through my mouth, folks. No way. This is the. I use 3M micropore tape. It's a crazy idea. Sounded crazy at the time. Now I just absolutely love it. Breath, breathing, it's kind of important. What we really need is more carbon dioxide. I echo the same idea, and I lean on Patrick's wisdom. We go back and forth between these notes to really drill in the points and to help us move from theory to practice to mastery. Number one tip again. Breathe. Less to breathe. Right. They talk about oral posture. Most people have what James Nestor calls an S shape. They're hunched over their smartphone. Let me see if I can do that. Oh, my diaphragm is collapsed now. No, no, no. You want a J shape. You want to stand like a Greek statue. Then your diaphragm has room to play. And then you put your tongue near the roof of your mouth. Near the. On the roof of your mouth near the front. Your front teeth. Patrick has a kid's book called always breathe correctly. There's a wizard in there that teaches kids to touch the magic spot. Emerson, Eleanor. They know about the magic spot. Close your lips, guys. Magic spot. Boom. They're breathing through their nose. It's really important we teach our kids to breathe properly. It changes their facial structure. He talks about that a lot. James does. It's crazy. James tells us no matter what you eat, how much you exercise, how skinny or young or strong you are, none of it matters if you're not breathing properly. Isn't that powerful? Belissa Vranich goes off on it too. She says, this is oxygen is cell fuel. Other teachers talk about the fact that 70% of your detox or something crazy like that comes through your breath. There's sweat and elimination, but most of your detoxification comes through your breath. Got a perfect breath in there. Then we talked about true to form, Eric Goodman. Good guy. We lived in Ojai together for a while before we moved out here to Austin. He talks about ideal posture and then his chest up, chin down idea. Check out this guy right there. Boom. That guy, not that guy. Chest up, chin down. Proper posture is big. Boom. Strike that power pose, Amy Cuddy style. Take a nice breath in through your nose, down into your belly, back out through your nose. Slightly longer on the exhale than your inhale again. That flips your parasympathetic nervous system. If you're like me and you practice this and truly practice it like a professional optimizer, my hunch is you're going to experience more levels of calmness and the related confidence, the energized tranquility rather than the enervated anxiety. Again. Now, on one level we shouldn't, quote, need to train our fundamentals. It should be fundamental and easy and natural. But our society is just. Technology is awesome for a lot of things helping us with fundamentals, not one of them. Which is why we spend so much time eating, moving, sleeping, breathing in our general membership program with our coaches, etc. As always, get instant access to all 600 Philosopher's Notes. Thousands of life changing big ideas. Optimize me 2 week free trial, 10 bucks a month or so thereafter. If you want to go lifetime special, $250 lifetime offer at Optimize Me Lifetime, it's usually 399 bucks or something like that. And then coach Patrick McGowan is on our guest faculty. We'll be inviting the other two fellows, James and Eric. We had one of our coaches go through the program, she was actually a mom going through with her husband Asma and Asma and she had asthma. And the session that she had with Patrick, she asked him a question or she got some wisdom. She went out on a run, life was changed. Breathed through her nose on a run for the first time in her life and she didn't experience what she usually experiences. So this stuff, this stuff is powerful. You never know which idea is going to be the one that flips the switch. Let's go. That's all I got. Look forward to sharing more. What do we got next? We have covered some ground now. We've got the all time covered habits. Ancient wisdom, modern science, nutrition, fitness, sleeping, breathing. Oh, focusing. That's going to be fun. Focusing, getting your mind right, then celebrating and then prospering. Then we'll carry on with the party. All right. Hope you enjoyed. Look forward to sharing more with you soon. Again. Follow all of them at optimize metop3. See ya. We hope you enjoyed this episode of Optymyze with Brian Johnson. To find out more, go to Optimize Me. Hi, this is Bry again. Hope you enjoyed that. Quick note. If you want to go deeper into Optimize, check us out at Optimize Me. The team has set up a free two week trial where you can get instant access to all 600 plus philosopher's notes, all the PDFs, the MP3s, get it on the app, etc. And 50 optimal living 101 classes on a range of subjects and of course the thousand plus optimized plus ones. And then if you want to go all in, check out Optimize Coach Optimize Me for the free trial for the core wisdom Optimize Me Coach if you want to go all in and master yourself, serve heroically and empower others to do the same. Have a great day. See you tomorrow.