The Way You Are Breathing Is Killing You! Feat. James Nestor

The nose is the primary pathway through which we should be taking in air, because when we breathe through the nose, we're moistening air, we're filtering it, we're heating it, we're pressurizing it, we're conditioning it so that by the time it enters our lungs, our lungs can much more better absorb that oxygen.

And I love this book. I mean, I have said this publicly, that this is. I'm 52 years old now, and I've said several times this is probably the most important, most useful health book that I have read in three decades. And I thought about that this morning. I was like, glenn, is that true? I mean, I've read it recently. I've read a lot of great health books. I've read over a thousand books. And in terms of something that has impacted my thinking, my life, and something that has produced such an immediate result, I have not heard from any doctors, any health people, the things that I learned in this book. So. James Nestor is an author and journalist who's written for Scientific America, outside the New York Times and more. His latest book, the New Science of a Lost Art, was released in May 26, 2020 by Riverhead Penguin Random House and was an instant New York Times and London Sunday Times bestseller. Breath explores how the human species has lost the ability to breathe properly and how to get it back. Breath will be translated into more than 30 languages, if not already, by the end of 2021. James Nestor has spoken at Stanford Medical School, the United Nations Global Classroom, and appeared on more than 60 radio and television shows, including Fresh Air with Terry Gross, the Joe Rogan show, and more. He lives and breathes in San Francisco. His website is MrJames Nestor. M r James Nestor N E s t o r.com here's the book. I was introduced to James by Dave Asprey because Dave had him on his show and he's just a really helpful, caring, useful guy. And what I was most impressed with him by is he's getting a lot of offers to do TV shows and different things, and he's so focus on doing the right thing, not having it be attached to too much hype, being very helpful. So one of the journalists that I think is absolutely authentic and genuine and caring and helpful and awesome. If you've not read the book, get it immediately. And now I want to introduce to Genius Network, Mr. James Nestor.

James, I am going to take you through a million years of human evolution and show you why we are the worst breathers on the animal planet. Before we get to all of the goodies about why humans are so messed up, what you can do about it. I want to tell you very quickly about my journey into this world. Why me, a science journalist, got so interested in this seemingly inconsequential act of breathing? My jumping off point was really about eight or nine years ago when I went to write for Outside magazine about the World Freediving Championship, which is this insane competition in which these divers challenge one another to see how deep they can dive on a single breath and come back to the surface conscious. So I watched people hold their breath seven, eight or nine minutes at a time and dive down to 300 or 400ft with a single breath of air. But I was lucky enough to meet some other divers who weren't so into the competition side of this freediving, who used it to to explore their own limits, to explore their connection with the body and to explore oceanic animals. Here's one of them. This is Hanley Prinsloo. She's down about 200ft. Diving with sharks. They showed me you could do other things. You could dive with dolphins and if you were lucky enough, you could dive with giant sperm whales. So these free divers, as I got to know them a little better, said that this art of breathing that they've mastered to hold their breath for so long and dive for so deep and extended far beyond just freediving. You could use breathing to heal your body, you could use breathing to heat your body. They told me about someone who breathed in this rhythmic way and was able to fight off E. Coli when he was injected with it. They told me about an 80 year old who learned how to superheat his body by breathing and could sit in the snow for hours. And of course, all of this is bs, right? Impossible. But I went and spent several years in this field and found that these stories were absolutely true. So each of us takes in about 30 pounds of air in and out of our bodies every single day. So this is far more than we eat and drink. And the new science is showing us that how we take in all that air determines so much of our health, our lifespan and our human potential. So how we breathe really matters. And I learned from these researchers something else, that humans are breathing terribly and this is having grave consequences. You can take a quick look at the data here. These are chronic breathing problems. And if you don't do anything about it, these chronic breathing problems and others can lead to so many other problems. There are direct links between how we breathe and allergies, chronic sinusitis, adhd, metabolic problems, diabetes, who knew? So these researchers told me if I really wanted to understand why humans had become such poor breathers, I needed to look at human skulls. So I went here to the University of Pennsylvania Archaeology and Anthropology Museum where they have hundreds and hundreds of ancient human skulls. And it was totally creepy to be standing in these labs surrounded by skulls from 300 years old to a few thousand years old. And all of them had perfectly straight teeth. So you cannot find a hunter gatherer that has crooked teeth. So this is true for skulls 500 years old, 5,000 years old, 50,000 years old, 5 million years old, whatever. So here is the jaw of one of the oldest Homo sapiens. It's about 300,000 years old. No invisalign for this fellow, no braces, perfectly straight teeth. This guy's even older. This is a million years old. Look at this very powerful forward growing face, perfectly straight teeth. They all had them. Let's go forward in time here. This skull is about 8,000 years old, still very wide, very healthy, broad jaw, straight teeth. As we go forward in time, look what happens to the human skull. So it gets more narrow, there is less room for teeth to grow in straight. So eventually they grow in crooked. And this is what we end up having. So there's another chronic problem with having a mouth that's too small for your face. It changes your profile. So 90%, I think over that 95% of our ancestors about 300 years old and back were above that perpendicular line. So their chins grew forward above that line. Now 90% of us are behind this line. So it changes how we look, and that's a bummer, but it also does something else. It changes how we breathe. So when the jaw is not big enough, when it doesn't develop properly, look at what happens to the airways. And this is the primary reason so many of us suffer from sleep apnea and snoring and, and it's linked to allergies and asthma and on and on and on. So when I first heard this, I had a hard time believing it because I had understood evolution means progress, right? We're getting better, we're getting stronger. Totally false. Evolution means change. And life forms can change for the better or the worse. And humans, especially as far as our breathing is concerned, is changing much more for the worse. And the researchers I was working with told me if I didn't believe it, I could go look at any animal in the wild, check out their teeth. So I did. You can look at chimps, perfect teeth. Look at this handsome guy, perfect teeth. Go into the water, the ocean, animals, dolphins, whales, whatever, they all have perfect teeth. My mutt of a dog, perfect teeth. And yet we can have teeth like this when we're growing up, if we don't do anything, we can look like this. So the big problem with having crooked teeth like this. I'm going to turn on the next picture here. I was going to talk while you had to look at that, but that seems improper. So the problem is, is when our upper jaws and our upper palates don't develop properly, they can develop this V shape, where, if you have a clean thumb, you can put your thumb on the roof of your mouth. And there's a good chance the roof of your mouth is going to be jutting upwards. And if it juts upwards, it can block the sinus cavities and make it harder to breathe through your nose. So you become a habitual mouth breather. But who cares, right? We have this channel breathe through our mouth. That's just fine. It turns out mouth breathing is so injurious to our bodies, in about 25 to 50% of the population now chronically breathes through our mouths. And it affects the way we think, it affects the way our bodies function, it affects our metabolism and it affects the way we look. So this is the typical modern profile of modern humans for someone who has spent much of his or her youth mouth breathing. So this is a profile I know very well, because I had spent a lot of my youth mouth breathing. I thought it was perfectly normal. So as I got deeper into the research, I met this fellow, Dr. Jayakar Nayak. He's the chief of rhinology research at Stanford. He said, yes, mouth breathing is terrible for us. No one knows this. He's a rhinologist, he's a nose guy, he knows all the wonders of the nose. But what he didn't know was how quickly the damage from mouth breathing, the neurological problems, metabolic problems, all that. No one knew how quickly that came off because nobody had tested it. Nayak said that doing so would be unethical because he knew it would be so injurious to the body. So I volunteered for a study and I got another friend, Anders Olson, breathing therapist from Sweden, to volunteer. For 10 days. We had silicone plugs up our noses so we could only breathe through our mouths. I know this seems like a super size me stunt, but it really wasn't. We were just lulling ourselves into the position that so much of the population already knew, but we were measuring it. And then for another 10 days, we would Be breathing almost entirely through our noses. We would collect data sets and see what happened. Here I am getting plugged up. First day. If that looks painful, it's because it was awful. First night of mouth breathing. You can see on the right snoring about an hour and a half. So that was frightening. Here's what happened. A few days later. I was snoring for about four hours just by switching the pathway through which I was breathing air. This is Anders Olson. This guy was completely wrecked. Went from zero snoring to snoring the entire night. We got sleep apnea. We started choking on ourselves. I don't know if you can hear that. We were recording data every night. My dog got so worried she would run into my room thinking I was dying, which I really was, but just very, very slowly from sleep apnea. So this wasn't too much of a shock to a lot of people who study this stuff. So they know that when the nose gets plugged from allergies or from injuries, snoring and sleep apnea really comes online. But what really shocked me was how quickly that damage happened, what it did to us. The good news here is that we got to go back down to Stanford, do about four different blood draws, and then breathe through noses. Here's what happened. That was the first night on the left, about half an hour of snoring compared to four hours. Pretty good. A few days later, no snoring at all. So that was my worst to left. Right is afterwards. Here's Anders Olson when he was mouth breathing. Here is him, nasal breathing. Same exact thing happened with sleep apnea. So we both suffering from sleep apnea to zero. And I don't think a lot of people really realize that snoring and sleep apnea, this is going to crush you. If you continue to snore and have sleep apnea, it is going to affect your body in so many ways. You're going to die sooner. You're going to be so much more apt to get so many chronic diseases. And it seems like that science is just sort of coming online now. So here's what happened with my hypertension. My blood pressure on the left was mouth breathing. On the right is within a day of nasal breathing. Blood pressure fluctuates throughout the day, so it wasn't consistent. But over about the course of a week, my blood pressure kept going down. This is a day after nasal breathing, when I continued to nasal breathe. So my blood pressure dropped about 40 points and it stayed about 15 points lower than it had been when I was Mouth breathing. Overall, the point of me telling you all this isn't to bum you out, it's to acknowledge that there are several problems happening with our breathing. And what I set out to do is to find ways of fixing those problems and find out ways of how we can breathe better, to help heal our bodies, make us healthier, happier, live longer lives. So breathe through your nose, everyone. If that's not obvious from the Stanford experiment, the nose is the primary pathway through which we should be taking in air. And I'll explain very quickly why. Because when we breathe through the nose, we are moistening air, we're filtering it, we're heating it, we're pressurizing it, we're conditioning it so that by the time it enters our lungs, our lungs can much more better absorb that oxygen. Here is what your nasal passages are covered in the cilia. Millions and millions of these little hair like structures. What these things do is they remove particulate and they also help remove viruses and bacteria. And our noses also release nitric oxide, which interacts directly with viruses. They're doing 11 clinical trials right now of giving, guess what, to people with chronic problems associated with COVID They're giving them nitric oxide. We produce our own nitric oxide in our noses. So you get 20% more oxygen breathing through the nose than you do through equivalent breaths through the mouth. And if you think that's not going to make a difference throughout the day, you're not. So breathe through the nose, so you want to breathe slow and steady. About 20 years ago, some Italian researchers began studying prayer. So they looked at the Ave Maria, the Catholic prayer of the rosary. And they looked at the Buddhist mantra, O mani padmi hum. And they noticed something interesting, that to recite both of these prayers, it requires you to take about 5 to 6 seconds, inhale to 5 to 6 seconds exhalation. So when you're exhaling, you're talking, you're reciting. And they found that several other prayers also had this respiratory rate attached to them. Here's the study right here. What was more miraculous is they took people and they put sensors all over their bodies. And they noticed that when people recited these prayers, their heart rates lowered, their baroreceptivity increased significantly, blood pressure decreased, oxygen to the brain increased. All these good things. Here's some of the data here. They noticed something else. It seemed like the systems of the body entered something called coherence, where everything was working and at peak efficiency just by reciting these prayers. But the good news was you didn't need to recite these prayers. Reciting them is fine, but all you need to do was to breathe in this pattern about five to six seconds in, five to six seconds out. And your waves in your body, from heart rate to EEG waves, would look something like the above before, when we're frustrated, when we're talking right now, scattered. And they would look something like more like below. So they turn to this, to this, just by breathing in this rhythmic pattern of about five to six seconds in, five to six seconds out. Richard Brown here at Columbia has been studying this breathing pattern for about 20 years. He uses it for his patients with anxiety, depression, even nine, 11 survivors. So it's pretty amazing stuff. You can do it right here. You can follow along with this animation. You can do this for the rest of the talk. I'll be speaking for a few more minutes. And you can feel this real change happening in your body. Some researchers at Northwestern University found that just breathing in this rhythmic pattern coordinates electrical activity across the brain in areas associated with memory and emotion. So how we breathe affects how we think as well. The last thing here is breathe less. So we know that we're overeating. So in 1960, the average weight of someone who was 6ft tall was about 160 pounds. That person is now 214 pounds. So we know we're overeating. We are also over breathing. That seems impossible, right? You want to get more oxygen in you. You huff and puff, but what you're doing when you're breathing too much is you're actually inhibiting oxygen from entering into your healthy cells. You are doing the opposite. My friend Patrick McKeown, breathing therapist, who's been working on this stuff for 20 years, shared with me this chart. When we breathe at a rate of about 20 breaths a minute, we can use half that air that enters into our lungs. So look at what happens when we breathe at a rate of about six times a minute. That's about five to six seconds in, five to six seconds out. We use about 85% of that air. So we increase our efficiency by 35%. By slowing down our breathing, we get more oxygen. There's been studies into this, this is by Alicia Morett, where they've used just slow breathing for asthmatics. The effects weren't subtle. They used it for panic sufferers. 96% marked much improved or very much improved. After a year of just breathing slowly, there's the asthma study as well. So the science is very clear. How we breathe can really impact our health. The final, final thing here is Awareness. So we may not be able to control our liver function the way our stomachs function, our heart rate, but when we control our breathing, we can influence all these functions. We can influence our nervous system, we can influence our immune function. There's many people who have done this over the past century. Carl Stau here used breathing for emphysemics. Nothing else worked for these people. When you breathe dysfunctionally, that's an emphysemics neck. So he's not engaging his diaphragm. He can't. The next shot you're going to see here is of an emphysemic stomach. You can see other people breathing like this when they're not breathing fluidly and slowly. Now I'm going to show you a little before and after here. This is that same patient by using nothing but breathing. So this is a couple weeks later, he's able to walk around, cruise around. There's some before and afters here. You're going to see him one more time. That is him after. This is him before, few weeks after learning how to breathe. That's him. Totally different person, able to leave the hospital. So breathing can also allow us to heat our bodies up. We've known this for a long time. A lot of people didn't believe it until Herbert Benson at Harvard Medical School went out and found these tumor monks who could heat themselves up, increase the temperature in their extremities by 17 degrees and do this for hours. Wim Hof, a new practitioner of this tummo. There he is sitting in an ice bath for two hours. No frostbite, no hypothermia, just by using the breath. Breathing can also directly influence our immune function. That's what's so exciting. People with autoimmune problems, with, with asthma, with even type 1 diabetes have found ways of breathing and ways to really improve their health. So this stuff is not new. It's been around for thousands and thousands of years. Ancient Hindu texts, ancient Chinese texts. One quote from the Dao reads, therefore the scholar who nourishes his life, refines the form and nourishes his breath. Isn't this evident? Well, I think nowadays it's becoming a little more evident. If you look at the amount of studies being done, the effects of healthy breathing. I only hope that this time around we won't soon forget it. When we use breathing, when we acknowledge it, when we appreciate it, we can really help blunt so many of these chronic problems we have and improve our health. Sam.