How to Breathe for Optimal Brain Performance | James Nestor & Jim Kwik

Welcome back, Kwik Brains. Here's your question of today. What are some of the best ways to breathe for optimal brain performance? We've talked about this in our online programs, in social media, and a lot of the videos that you subscribe to, that breath affects everything in our life. It affects our focus, our concentration, our mental energy, our vitality. It affects our immune system and so much more. Yet most of us are not doing it the right way because like many things like memory and focus and concentration, breathing was not one of those things that was taught back in school. And so this is such an important topic. And if you read Limitless, you know how important it is and how much I emphasized what we do during our brain breaks to do this breathing. And so what I want everyone to do is make sure you share this episode with just 2 or 3 family members or friends and learn it as if you're going to teach it to somebody else. Because this session is going to be really rich because we take advantage of the explanation effect. When you learn to explain it to somebody else, you get to learn it even better. And so here we have the expert. We have James Nestor and I'm a big fan. So I'm kind of geeking out over this. He's a science journalist and he's author of the New York Times bestselling book, Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art. Welcome to the show, James.

Thanks a lot for having me.

So we were talking a little bit about this before we started to record. And before we go into the methods, you know, I know we're familiar with each other's work that I feel like knowledge by itself is not power. It's potential power. A lot of people know what to do. Because the methods on how to breathe for optimal performance, it's pretty simple. And so a lot of people know what they do to do, but they don't always do what they know. So what I wanted to talk to you before is more those 2 other areas that we talk about in the Limitless Model, the method being the last, the first 2 Ms being mindset and motivation. You know, to overcome limits in this area, we want to address these 2 other areas. What, what does— let's talk with motivation. A big part of human motivation we found in our research is finding purpose, finding reasons. And a lot of people, they don't know why they should— we should be having a conversation about breath. They're doing it naturally. They do it 20,000-whatever times a day unconsciously. Why, why is breath so important? Why have you dedicated a whole book to this subject?

Yeah, I never intended to dedicate 4 years of my life researching something so seemingly simple as breathing. But then once you start getting into it, you notice that this, this very basic biological function controls everything in our bodies. And we can take control of this function. And when we do, we can take control of otherwise unconscious things that are happening in our body, including our mind. How we breathe affects our brain in so many ways. And if you're looking at motivation, what you need to do in order to be motivated and to memorize something and to really focus is you have to first focus on your breathing. Any meditation, if you're staring at the Buddha, if you're staring at Shiva, whatever you want to look at, staring at a cross, at Jesus, you can't do that unless you get into the zone. You can't get into this prayer unless you get into the zone. And what's the first thing you do when you start praying is you focus on your breath or you recite a certain phrase That makes you control your breathing. And by controlling your breathing, you can take control of different centers of your brain and be able to hone in on whatever message you're trying to understand or remember.

There are so many reasons to why to prioritize breath. You know, it's one of those things where people talk about food all the time, but we could go weeks without food, you know, or even water. We could go days without water, but how can minutes can we go without breathing? And so we're talking about motivation to get everyone kind of enrolled with the emotional component. How does— I believe reasons reap results. How does breath affect our immune system or longevity, all these other areas?

So many of us are existing in this state of very low-grade stress. Stress is just running in the background. This is why so many people have autoimmune diseases. This is why so many people are getting sick all the time. If you look at the top 10 killers in the world, the vast majority of those are tied to chronic inflammation as a result of chronic stress.

Mm-hmm.

So one of the quickest things you can do to help reduce stress is to take control of your breathing. Because when we have unconscious stress in our bodies, we tend to breathe too much. Sometimes we'll breathe out of our mouth, right? And this creates a feedback loop. When your body senses you're breathing too much, the brain picks up on this and starts putting you into a stress state. And then the brain sends signals and neurotransmitters throughout the rest of the body and brain to continue being stressed. So the first thing that you can do, and I learned this from Andrew Huberman down at Stanford, is You can take 2 big inhales, one on top of the other, and force yourself to sigh. So we have a separate subset in our brain of neurons dedicated to controlling sighing. And if you look at animals in the wild, what do they do before they go to sleep? If you do that about 3 or 4 times, that sends signals throughout your body and your brain to relax. And it's a great trick to do before public speaking or any other time you sense yourself getting stressed or nervous.

So breath is so very important. So these are all the reasons we're talking about. So making sure we're priming everybody who's listening and watching this to do the things you're about to learn. But a lot of people, again, common sense is not common practice. So that's wonderful when it comes to the element of motivation. One of the other things that we find James, that people don't follow through on doing the strategies is because they might have the motivation, but maybe they have the wrong mindset, you know, mindset, or maybe their attitudes about something. Maybe it's their assumptions about how things work. Maybe it's those attitudes, assumptions about themselves. You know, as maybe this is a kind of different kind of question, but when you're working with trained or expert breathers, whatever form they come in, do you see a through line in terms of how they look at breath, what their mindset is around breathing, maybe their beliefs or maybe their identity, I am something?

Absolutely. These people are all aware of their breathing and they're aware of their breathing when they're exercising, they're aware of their breathing when they're relaxed, when they're in front of a computer. And that's really the first thing. Just because this can work unconsciously, which is wonderful. I would hate to have to think about breathing 25,000 times a day. But just because it's unconscious doesn't mean we can better focus on it and adapt ourselves to really hone in on each of the different ways of breathing to allow our bodies to function in different ways, and especially our brain. Just the difference between nasal breathing and mouth breathing, what that does to your brain and how that allows you to Remember things more easily breathing through the nose. This has been well studied, and yet you look around and you see people constantly breathing through their mouths, you know, whether they're public speaking or trying to focus on something. And it's, it's, you know, we get what the brain takes 20% of our energy from, from our body, and we get the majority of our energy from our breathing. So we want to use that energy efficiently and, and Breathing and taking control of your breathing is really the quickest way of doing that.

Powerful. In mindset, in Limitless, we talk about these LIES. LIE stands for a limited idea entertained. It's not necessarily true, but we give it energy and we believe, we choose to believe it's true. So maybe one of those lies that we were told unconsciously or just through our environment or experience is that that breathing through your mouth is, is something that's beneficial, or maybe we weren't taught anything about it at all. So if that's one of the lies, what do you— does anything come to mind? Is there another lie that's widely accepted around the art and science of breath that maybe we might— it's not necessarily what we know, but what we know that's not, that's not true misinformation?

The idea that breathing more will bring more oxygen into the body. This is so counterintuitive, but you see people lifting weights or jogging and they really want to get more air into the body. Need more oxygen. I'm going to feed more oxygen to my brain. You are doing the opposite when you breathe this way. By breathing slower in line with your metabolic needs, you will get more oxygen more easily. So it's not always a more is more. Situation here with breathing. When it comes to breathing, less is, is often more when you get more oxygen more efficiently. So this idea, when we're in states of focus, when we're reading a book, when we need to memorize things, then people are over-breathing. They're breathing through their mouths. They're actually denying their brain circulation. If you don't believe me, all you have to do is take 30 big breaths. You'll feel that lightness in your, in your head, maybe some, some tingling in your fingers. That's not from an increase of oxygen, but a lack of circulation to those areas. Wow.

And this is great to be able to have these lies debunked because it's one of those things where— and I'm sure it might— must have been an interesting experience for you to look at something that human beings have been doing since human beings have been, you know, on this planet. And then seeing what people used to do and what they're doing now. Because when you, when you dissolve these lies, we're kind of, I don't know, collectively everyone who's listening transcending, branding these trance. So then that's part of where the limit happens. Like if you believe that breathing more heavily or more rapidly is going to help you, then you might not use the method that we're about to talk about, or if you don't have motivation to move forward. Or if you really believe that breathing through your mouth is more preferable than your nose for some reason. So let's get into some of these methods because they're pretty straightforward. We hear things through our friends, through online about box breathing, nasal breathing, alternate nostrils, fire breathing, Wim Hof. What is— are there certain Kind of go-to methods for different situations, or is it one way of breathing, you know, throughout the entire day? Or how do you approach— what's, what's your perspective and mindset around these methods?

So when I first started really digging into this subject, it was completely overwhelming because you've got these yoga books with like 600 different breathing methods that have all these crazy names. Then you have Wim Hof Method, which is saying breathe way more and that's good for you. Then you have Buteyko or other yoga methods where they're saying breathe less, hardly breathe at all, and that's good for you. So they all seem to be countering one another. But once you get into this, you understand that there are different ways to breathe for different circumstances. If you want more energy, if you want to go to sleep, if you want to focus, if you want to digest food better. So one person who has studied breathing for, for decades told me there are as many ways of breathing as there are foods to eat. And just how different foods can affect our bodies differently, we can breathe in different ways and affect our bodies and minds differently as well. So I guess so many of these things are based around this one premise, these variations on the same theme, that the more you exhale, more slowly you exhale, the more relaxed you will be. And the more you inhale, The more amped you're going to get. And you can see this for yourself by placing your hand on your heart, taking an inhale to a count of about 5, and then exhaling to about 7 or 8 if you can, softly. You're going to notice your heart rate speeding up as you inhale and slowing down when you exhale. So box breathing is one of these variations on this theme. Guess what you're doing when you're box breathing? You're inhaling for 4, you're either holding your breath or you're exhaling for 3/4 of the time. What's that going to do to your nervous system? It's going to calm you down. It's also going to force you to breathe less so you can get more oxygen more easily. During a breath hold, after about 30 seconds, the brain actually gets more oxygen than if you were breathing consistently. So the brain is very smart at utilizing energy. So you could go into 4-7-8 breathing as well, and, and you're going to notice these same themes coming up. Inhale to 4, hold for 7, exhale to 8. What's going on there? 3/4 of the time you're exhaling or holding your breath. And there are a zillion different ways to— a zillion different methods that have a zillion different names, but they're all working on the same premise.

Right. So that principle So there's a promise behind the principle of taking more time to exhale. And that's going more, that's downregulating your nervous system, maybe putting you in more of a parasympathetic, maybe rest and digest. Now, do you, let's talk about in context of performance, like as you span the day, the time that you're awake and sleeping is different. I'm hoping what I'm doing during the day is actually— In more becoming more ingrained in my habits at night, but we could talk about that also as well. But are there certain points throughout the day when you need to perform? Like we tell people to study or to learn for maybe 30, 45 minutes and then take a brain break. And in that 5-minute interval, we do things like hydrate, we do things like move, get some fresh air and to breathe. What would you recommend during that time if somebody is, let's say, studying or they're on Zoom calls, what kind of breathing would you recommend?

So when we're studying, we need to be awake. So we don't want to relax ourselves too much. And some of these breathing methods, when you're holding your breath and exhaling longer than you're inhaling, will maybe relax you too much. You want to be balanced in these states. So the best breathing method— it's so deceptively simple, people are going to say, oh, this isn't going to do anything for me. But give it a try and you'll see. And check out the scientific studies and you can also see for yourself. It's just to inhale at a rate of about 5 to 6 seconds and exhale at a rate of about 5 to 6 seconds. Do this through your nose in this rhythmic pattern. So just by breathing this way, you're balancing your nervous system, but you are also able to sort of— you can organize different areas in your brain. The emotional areas with the frontal cortex. And they found this, that the same thing doesn't happen with the nose, it— or it doesn't happen with the mouth. It only happens when you're breathing through the nose in this rhythmic way. You can bring these different brain areas online, and the amplitude and the brainwaves actually change. These different congregations of neurons in your brain will change to allow you To remember things more easily.

Now, in, in your work, have you looked into research between nostrils, like your left and your right, and how can we use that knowledge and wisdom to, to further everyone's performance?

Yeah, so this has been around in Hindu culture for thousands of years— alternate nostril breathing, or Nadi Shodhana, whatever you want to call it. So our bodies naturally will shift the airflow through our nostrils throughout the day. Every 30 minutes to around 3 or 4 hours, you will become left nostril dominant or right nostril dominant. And sometimes it's even, but mostly it's shifting back and forth. So for a long time, scientists have known this for over 100 years, but they said, why would the body possibly do this? So They started finding out around 30 years ago when they started conducting scientific studies that breathing air through these different nostrils affects the brain and affects the bodies in different ways. So inhaling through your right nostril, the yogis said this would heat your body up, and it's been shown to increase heart rate, increase blood pressure, and activate the left side of your brain a little more.

And then, so people who are just listening to this, so breathing through your right, that means you're holding Your, your left nostril closed.

That's, that's exactly right. And so breathing through the left nostril, inhaling and exhaling through the left nostril, will calm the body down. So it activates more of the quote-unquote right side of, of the brain, and heart rate will go down, blood pressure will go down. So yogis have been doing this forever, but luckily now we have scientific instruments that can actually measure to see what happens in the brain What happens in the body when we breathe this way. So you can use this alternate nostril breathing. Once again, there's dozens and dozens of ways to do this, but it's a great way of just checking in and rebalancing yourself by taking control of these otherwise autonomic functions.

And when you exhale, you're exhaling through your nostrils as well when you're doing that exercise and not your mouth?

Yes. Inhale through the right is the strongest sympathetic or heating effect. Exhale is is much less so. So exhale is more considered the same as an inhale through the left. This is very complicated and weird. So it's basically the inhale is the one that's stimulating through the right and through the left, inhaling and exhaling has the same calming effect.

If you're listening to this on Spotify or Pandora or iTunes, I recommend you check this out also on YouTube as well and make sure you subscribe. For more of this. How about— so that's the context of these brain breaks. What about, let's say, when you want to be able to go to sleep? Do you focus? Do you have a routine for yourself or with people that you've done research feedback on ways to be able to optimize your sleep? Sure.

So, uh, to be clear, I'm a science journalist and, uh, a lot of people now think I am a breathing guru who is the best breather in the world. And that is so far from the truth. My job was to go out into this world and talk to some of the best breathers in the world and scientists. That's not to say I didn't pick up a bunch of tricks from them and haven't incorporated them into my life. But I think what, what I do is just what I've found has, has worked. So there's a bunch of other methods in, in the book and free on the website for what might work for other people. But, but personally, I find that, that exhaling more can really put me in the zone. And when I was flying around a lot, I thought on an airplane, um, you know, this was the quickest way of relaxing myself and going to sleep is taking control of my breath, that 4-7-8 breathing. You can start with a couple of those sighs. Then you can inhale to a count of 4 through the nose softly. Hold for 7. 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. Exhale, 8. 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8. So I can see you right now.

Yeah.

You can see that maybe this is the wrong breathing technique to be doing on a podcast. But this instantly, I mean, within a few seconds, shifts your body from that sympathetic stressful state into this very calming state. And some people say, oh, this is just the placebo effect. Put on your heart rate variability monitor, check your blood pressure before and after, do your own measurements, and you will see. I've done this a zillion times in labs, and it is so profound and powerful. This is not a subtle thing. And I could tell Jim almost just fell asleep for a bit.

This is true. I felt myself really downregulating. What about in— do you practice cold therapy at all? I know you mentioned Wim Hof a couple of times. Do you recommend a breathing, like a box breathing, like 4-4-4-4 there or anything, or you just let whatever organically happens when you're in the cold shower or in the ice bath?

I swim in the ocean as often as possible. It's a little cold right now, so I'm wearing a wetsuit. I'm trying to get more acclimated to colder water. The benefits are documented. They're profound. I've seen people transformed by this. I'm also a total wimp who grew up in Southern California, so I'm not used to like real cold water. But what I do before I do that is Tummo breathing. So you could call it Wim Hof breathing, you could call it Tummo. Again, a million different names. It's all doing the same stuff. So this is when you want to amp your body up. You want that sympathetic stress. A lot of people think, Why do I want to stress myself out? I'm stressed all day. What these breathing patterns do— vigorous pranayama, Sudarshan Kriya, Tummo, Wim Hof— is they focus that stress in a controlled amount of time. So 20 minutes, you're stressing out, you're breathing as hard as you can so that the rest of the day you're chilled out. You're blowing your fuse right there. You know, this is a way of releasing pressure. So I've found that when I do that breathing and then take a cold shower, I can deal with it a lot more easily. When I'm in the shower, I try to breathe rhythmically in a very long cycle. I found that breath holds are harder in a cold shower, but that rhythmic breathing enables, enables your circulation to increase, more vasodilation. So more blood is flowing and it feels more warming to me. Whatever people do is fine, but that's, that's personally what I've done that I find works the best.

And I recommend everybody, as always, to check with their health practitioner. Obviously, you don't want to do that, that active, really fast breathing in the cold. Certainly not. But that's why just more like conscious breathing while you're in, while you're in that cold. What about— this is fascinating. We talked about sighing. What about humming? I had a voice coach, because I speak for a living, talk about the power of humming. Is that related to breathing? Or how does it—

Humming has so many benefits. This is a way of very quickly downregulating your nervous system and calming yourself down. It's also a wonderful way of releasing 15 times more nitric oxide in your nasal cavities, in your sinuses.

Wow.

And nitric oxide, for people who don't know, I'll give a real quick primer here. Uh, it so happens to be what is released when you take the drug Viagra. The way that Viagra does all of, all of its wonderful things is it's a vasodilator and it releases nitric oxide. So you can release your own Viagra in your own phone. Or in your own nose. What am I talking about? So, and it's also so good for circulation and, and distribution of oxygen, releases more oxygen throughout the body. There's so many benefits to having more nitric oxide. So humming is the quickest way of doing that.

So, and so the other ones, we had something linked to it, some kind of activity like a brain break, do this kind right before you go to sleep. I always found that the best way of introducing, we talk about this in the book on the chapter on habits, is linking it to another existing habit. So if you're going to take a brain break, great. Then you do this kind of breathing, maybe with your nostrils. If you're lying there in bed, then you could do your 4-7-8. If you're going to do your ice bath, you could do right before it, link that habit of your, your, your Wim Hof or your fire breathing or what have you. When would you do the humming? Like, um, when do you, would you like, you just basically just schedule it at any time or is it, is it like, when's the last time you hummed?

I was walking around my neighborhood before this interview and I was humming. Okay. So I, I try to do it, uh, as often as, as I can. Uh, I'm sure I look like a freak to everyone around me. Luckily, uh, people are very well spaced out here in San Francisco, so I don't think anyone heard me. But that's one thing that Wim Hof— everyone thinks like he's just breathing Wim Hof breaths all day long. He's not. He's doing that for about 20 minutes. The rest of the time, he's breathing very slowly through his nose and he's humming. He just walks around humming all day. So I wouldn't suggest— you don't have to book in 4 hours of this humming, but try with like 5 minutes here, 5 minutes there, and, and see how it makes you feel. And we know that there are so many benefits to doing it. And again, this stuff is totally free and anyone can do it anywhere.

And then another question in terms of context is anxiety. If somebody, they have test anxiety, some of our listeners, or fear of public speaking. And so where would your go-to— what method would you personally recommend? Maybe one of the ones we mentioned already.

So populations of people with anxiety or other fear-based disorders like panic or even anorexia, agoraphobia, and more traditionally breathe way more than they need to, far above their metabolic needs, and they tend to breathe through their mouths. We know this with asthmatics, with, with panic sufferers, on and on and on. It's a consistent pattern, and scientists have shown this, so The very first thing that people should do with anxiety is just become aware of your breathing, especially when you sense you're starting to panic. Become aware of your breathing. Once you become aware of it, you can start to slow it down. What happens with a lot of people with panic and asthma is they sense an attack coming on. They say, I'm losing the ability to breathe. They breathe more and more and more and more. Which, guess what happens? That triggers the attack. So there's been so many studies just retraining people with panic and asthma to breathe less, to breathe slowly and through their noses. And this can have a huge impact on these states, and it can actually help reverse them.

And so if somebody's had a panic attack, sometimes people give them a paper bag to breathe in. What's, what's that doing? Is it, is it the carbon dioxide?

Yeah, so, so these people are very low in, in CO2, which is why they're panicking. Their chemoreceptors are telling them there's a problem, they need to breathe more. So what, what the paper bag is, is doing is allowing them to capture more CO2 and inhaling that CO2. ENTs do not suggest people do this anymore. Because the problem is this became so well known that people with heart attacks who— they were having heart attacks, not panic attacks— people were giving them paper bags, which is not what you want to do. So the most effective thing to do instead of reaching for a paper bag or carrying a paper bag with you— no, we have a nose, we have lips, we have lungs, we have a brain. We can take control of our breathing. On our own, we can slow down our breathing. We can focus on it. We can start exhaling more. And that's just as effective, I would say, argue more effective than any paper bag.

And it's interesting because in the book you talk about how when you do hold your breath, it's not the urge. The reason why you want to breathe is not to get more oxygen in, it's actually to dispel the carbon dioxide. Correct.

Yeah. Holding your— so right now, if you exhale, you hold your breath. That need to breathe is not dictated by a lack of oxygen, but an increase of CO2. So CO2 is the thing telling us we need to breathe. So the problem— and this is being studied right now, I think it's just so fascinating— with so many people with anxiety, other fear-based disorders, is right now the theory is that these people are so sensitized to CO2 that they have consciously and unconsciously forced themselves to overbreathe because any increase of CO2 signals an attack to them. Because when CO2 increases, they consider that something is constricting them or they can't breathe. So they're now working on— and this is research again that's happening right now— On just conditioning them to breathe more slowly, to make their chemoreceptors more flexible so that they will be able to handle a higher load of CO2, which is actually a normal load of CO2 to calm their brain. That's a little technical, but, but that's what's happening right now.

And then we'll put this also in the bonus. And that's why every episode is always 20 minutes because they're brain hacks for busy people. who want to learn faster, be able to achieve more. And that's why a lot on Spotify, people will binge listen to many of them. But I encourage everyone to watch on YouTube because that's where we put the full conversation. Make sure you subscribe there. And we'll also put links to everything that we're talking about in our show notes, always at jimkwik.com/notes. James, I had a quick question about— before we were talking about Human beings, they did things naturally, right? We didn't have to go to the gym because we were always moving. Foods were different, breathing. Now there's this huge rise of ailments, maladies, right? Asthma, sleep apnea, these allergies. Why is this happening? And I know there's not one simple solution, right? Or one thing that's causing it. But also, what can we do about it? You talk a lot about— and I had braces growing up and all this like that. I have sleep apnea, which I talk about in the book, where I stopped breathing a few hundred times an evening. Each time was for at least 10 seconds. I had CPAP device. I had done this dental device. I eventually went to UCLA. The head of throat there, did this UPPP, and they diagnosed it wasn't— they put me to sleep and actually took a camera to see, make sure it wasn't my tongue that was the obstruction. It was really— and I gave them permission to do the surgery only if there was actual physical obstruction they could clear. And from there, I went from 90 minutes a night or 2 hours a night of sleep for 5 years almost to 4. And I got to build from there. Then a lot of the sleep hacks helped. And so that's a— this is very personal for me, this conversation. There's asthma in my family. My parents both have sleep apnea. My siblings have apnea. And so what's going on? Are we passing on these traits generation to generation? And is there anything we could do to kind of put a stop hold on it so future generations, or even our future, the rest of our life, could We can mitigate that challenge.

So this is one of the things I learned from researchers early on that I just could not believe, that I had always understood that evolution meant progress, that we're getting stronger and fitter and better with every generation. But if you look at the human species right now, that is absolutely not what is happening. And especially with our breathing, if you look at our ancestors 400 years ago on back, they all had perfectly straight teeth. They had these huge jaws, wider airways, wider nasal apertures. So So from the skeletal record, we can see that they breathe so much more easily than we have. So when you consider right now, the majority of the human population now has a chronic respiratory problem. And your story, I've heard it a zillion times. I've suffered through a lot of those things. I had extractions, braces, um, you know, constant airway obstruction. I was getting bronchitis, pneumonia. And we consider that since this is So prevalent, it's just normal now to be cruising around with the CPAP, you know, wherever you go. But it's not. And the fact that our ancestors, or no other animal in the wild suffers from this, is a big wake-up call to what's happening to us. So what can you do about it? A lot of people have problems with their nose. Some people have obstruction in their oral pharynx. Some people have central sleep apnea. It's a problem with their brain. So there's no blanket prescription. For everyone. The first thing you have to do is become aware of your breathing dysfunction and then determine where it's coming from. Then you need to double down on that. Luckily, a lot of us don't need surgery. Okay. What we need to do is to develop proper habits so that healthy breathing becomes something that can run in our unconscious. But as you know, changing habits can take a long, long time. So that's why we do the conscious breathing so that our unconscious brain will breathe this way to begin with. I know that that's probably not the answer you wanted, but there's so many breathing problems and there's so many different fixes. I just don't feel comfortable as a journalist trying to prescribe anything for anyone.

Yeah, I would recommend anybody to really good— great place to start is to start with your book, Breath. I would highly recommend all our quick readers, you know, add that into your one book a week. club as you're doing that. And, uh, final question, James, is there, is there one thing besides getting the book which— and where can people get the book? Everywhere. Your books came out the same time last year. Um, is there a website or just their favorite bookstore?

Sure. I, on my website there, I put— my publisher allowed me to put all of the scientific, uh, studies And articles. So the entire bibliography is available for free because I know a lot of this stuff seems impossible, but you can see videos, you can see interviews with Harvard professors, you can see, you know, archival photos, you can see data sheets and all that at mrjamesnester.com. That's an MR because some other jerk took James Nestor. So mrjamesnester.com will take you to that. There are also breathing techniques on there, videos of breathing techniques. and interviews with several experts in the field. There's links to buy the book there too, if you want to do that. But, but, uh, I think our books are, you know, available wherever books are sold, which I guess now is just like online, but go to your local bookstore for— ignore what I just said there. Go to your local bookstore, order it from them.

Absolutely possible. I would recommend everybody screenshot this episode and tag James on your social media, which is Are you active more on which social media platform?

I'm trying to get better at this thing called Instagram, which is new for me being an old person. But, uh, I'm on Instagram more than any other, um, and my, my handle is Mr. James Nestor on that as well.

Very good. So tag Mr. James Nestor on Instagram, follow him on Instagram also as well, tag me in it. And what I want you to do as you're posting this, share your big aha. I mean, this was a great in-depth conversation. What was one idea, inspiration, maybe an instruction that you are taking away from this conversation? That way, you, the people following you, your fans, your family, your friends, they could benefit from this also as well. I'll actually repost some of my favorites. And I actually have gifted your book to many of my friends and family members. So I'll actually gift a copy. To one person also as well, just as a thank you for being active in this process. And, uh, James, thank you so much for being on our show and taking time out of your schedule. And, uh, much appreciation.

Thanks a lot for having me. Really appreciate it.

Hi, Kwik Brain.

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