"TRY THIS Technique For 7 Days To IMPROVE YOUR BREATHING!" | James Nestor

Everybody, welcome to another episode of Impact Theory. I'm here with James Nester. James, welcome to the show, man. Thanks a lot for having me. Dude, I'm going to be really honest. When you were first pitched as a guest, I thought, is there really like a whole book to be done on breathing? Is there a whole episode that we can get out of this? Uh my team made a very compelling case that I should take a look, and the as soon as I dove into the book, I realized that this was so much bigger. And I'm somebody whose life has been changed by meditative breathing, for sure. And even I thought that this was a relatively uh narrow topic. Your book was a game-changer for me. It's already massively influenced how I approach my day-to-day life. Um what was the most surprising thing as a journalist in diving into the world of breathing that sort of took you by surprise? I think the biggest thing for me, and I did not foresee this coming, was that we are anatomically predisposed to be breathing improperly. And let me sort of unpack that a little bit. Over the past few hundred years, our faces have grown in such a way, they've grown so flat, our mouths have grown so small, that we have less room in our airways to breathe properly. And that's the main reason so many of us have sleep apnea, uh so many of us snore, have other respiratory issues either implicated in in asthma or allergies. And so this was something I always thought that breathing was more of a psychological thing. It was you get anxious, and that absolutely affects your breathing. But that it was anatomical and related to this disevolution that's happened to the human species, absolutely shocked me. And what is the root cause of the disevolution? What what's going on? It's industrialized foods. So specifically, lack of chewing. So without the masticatory stress, especially in youth, you don't develop proper bone structure, you don't develop proper musculature, your mouth tends to grow smaller, your upper palate doesn't fully come down, which means you have an upper palate like mine that goes up and punch punctures into the sinus cavities, makes it harder to breathe through your nose. That's why we have crooked teeth. So, uh this was something I had never heard about and you know, I'd I'd taken all the biology evolution classes in college, no one had explained to me why humans have crooked teeth and every other animal doesn't. And so, this I thought was very interesting and those implications of that small mouth and those crooked teeth on our breathing is also something I had no idea about. Yeah, the implications, that is what really got me interested in your book is you begin to lay out all the different things that are touched by this and when I think about even just how to title this episode, I'm sure it's going to be something along the lines of like the way that you're breathing is [ __ ] up your entire life and the number of things that can be we'll say cured, but the number of things that that are impacted dramatically by beginning to change your airways, change the shape of your face, which is crazy to think that you can do that in adulthood. Um we'll go into these deeply, but I'd love for you to give like it just a quick thumbnail sketch of some of the things people might be surprised that are impacted by your breathing, by getting the nasal passages open. I didn't know it was important to breathe through your nose, for instance. And just what a few of those knock-on effects are. So, what maladies have been attributed to poor breathing? Just look at the top 20 maladies affecting the mass population right now. Metabolic problems, diabetes, anxiety issues, hypertension. I mean, I can keep going. Gut problems, GERD, anxiety, panic, asthma. They're all related to the ways in which you breathe. That's not to say all of these conditions are caused by improper breathing, but the reason why we have them has been a a contributor to poor breathing, especially in sleep apnea, which we know is a cause can cause metabolic problems like diabetes, which to me just completely blew my mind. But if you think about breathing is the anchor to all of the different systems to the body, especially inflammation, and if you think if you're doing that improperly 25,000 times a day, your body's going to compensate, cuz we're really good at doing that. You're going to stay alive, but you're not going to stay healthy. And that's exactly what's happened to us right now. I mean, just sleep apnea and snoring alone, people think it's cute that there's an infant snoring or that ah, my husband snored, I got to sleep on the couch. This is someone who's struggling to breathe during a third of his or her life. If you don't think that's going to have a downstream effect on their health, you're you're crazy. And so much science is now coming out showing that, even though we'd known it for 50 years. It's you'd be hard-pressed to find a researcher who says that's not going to affect your health in some big ways. Yeah, one of the things that I love about your approach is you come into some of this with some healthy skepticism, which I am always grateful for. Um part of the reason that I put off taking up meditation for as long as I did was it just felt super woo-woo. Um it seemed to be a wash in so much [ __ ] that I just couldn't bring myself to do something that felt so soft and potentially BS. And of course, I end up doing it and it ends up, you know, radically changing my life and gives me sort of a way to begin backing out of some of the anxiety that um I had begun to really struggle profoundly with. Yeah, and and as a my job as a reporter is not to pick sides with this stuff. It's to go out into the field, talk to the experts in the field, look at the science, and come back with a story. So unfortunately, I think so much of meditation and this breathing culture has been co-opted by people who know it works or think it works, but they don't bother to really explain how it affects us all. You know, they talk about their own personal journey, which is super helpful, and that's really awesome, but to me that doesn't really tell me anything about my own breathing and my own body. So what I try to do is separate the wheat from the chaff there, and not to pick any sides, but just to go out and just learn to learn as much of this stuff as I could. And I spent several years doing this, you know, and it was not easy. I'm not trying trying to be like some hero's journey, but it's really hard when two doctors at top institutions are calling [ __ ] on one another, and they're both published. You're like, "Who do I believe here?" Because there just has not been that much science in some of these fringe areas, but we do know the foundation of healthy breathing, what we know that poor breathing can do the body. Everyone agrees on that. What we know that healthy breathing can do to the body, how it can help abate symptoms, or sometimes cure, outright cure these chronic problems, we're seeing a burgeoning area of research there supporting all of those claims. One thing that I get excited about whenever people talk about malleability into adult life, I get very excited. Um as somebody who can I consider myself a very late bloomer. Um I didn't even come into a growth mindset until I was sort of about 26. Um and so I worried that my sort of years of adaptation were behind me and that I was realizing all of this stuff too late. Um talk to me a little bit about free divers who have who are able to do some just absolutely extraordinary things to their lung capacity. Um and then I think also touching on how much bone you personally were able to add your face, which is crazy. Um those two things in terms of what what ability does somebody who's listening to this in their 20s, 30s, 40s um have to really make change? So, that was really the jumping off point for me to write about this book. Uh when I first had the idea, I was like, "Oh, there might be a book in breathing." All my friends I have a lot author journalist friends. They were just mocking me. "Oh, you're going to write a book about breathing." You know, until you start to until you see a free diver. And so, what they're doing, these people have mastered the art of breathing. They were not born this way. These are people through just the power of will doesn't matter if they were small doesn't matter if they were tall, large, doesn't matter what country, they ethnic background. No, no, no. Through the force of will, they mastered this skill to hold their breath 6 7 8 minutes at a time, to dive to depths of 300 400 ft. No fins. Just just the the natural human body, two lungfuls of air. That's it. And I went out with Outside magazine. This was years and years ago. Saw this. I said, "Oh my god. What else don't we know about our human body's potential? What else have we forgotten?" Because we have archaeological evidence that people have been free diving for at least 10,000 years. Woah. Right? So, so they've been they've been diving down well past 100 ft for this long. And so, this isn't something like some, you know, Westerners decided to do as a stunt. This is part of what I believe has made us the species we are now. So, if we've forgotten that, what else have we forgotten? And how is it attached to breath? So, that was really a jumping off point for me to look into the terrestrial plane. I I know what free diving does underwater. I'm a free diver myself. I've seen it. I've felt it. I've experienced it. How long can you stay underwater on a single breath? How How can you stay underwater? So, this is a question I'm going to be purposely vague about because where people get in trouble is when they're watching their their watch and they're like, "Ah, I went down 150 ft yesterday. I'm going to go down 160. I was down for 4 minutes yesterday. I'm going to stay down for 5." Body changes every day. So, depending on what you eat, how you slept, you have to listen to your body, not your watch. So, having said that, big bold caveat there, people. I've had other people that have been with me and I've I've stayed about four four minutes, which is and that was after a few weeks of training and that that is uh not a very significant amount four minutes after a few weeks? Yeah. But at that point, what's the adaptation that's such a short period of time? Is it lung capacity? Is it psychological? Like, um what what is actually going on at a physiological level? Mo- mostly psychological. So, I've seen within the first workshop I did, I went from holding my breath at the beginning about 40 seconds. I was like, "That's that's pretty good." One workshop, 2 hours later, 2 and 1/2 minutes. Right out the door. And and everyone that was in this workshop was doing the same thing, more more than me. So, it's it's being able to Is that learning how to deal with CO2 and the panic that it creates? Absolutely. So, it does it does relate to to psychological, mental, much more than physical, cuz we can go a long time holding our breath. So, that need to breathe is not dictated by a lack of oxygen. Right now, if you exhale, hold your breath, you're going to feel that nagging need to breathe. That's from an increase of CO2. So, what you're doing is understanding what's happening in your body, understanding that your body is not screaming out for oxygen, you're just acclimated to a lower threshold of CO2. And so, once you get your mind around that, then it becomes a body-mind thing. Yeah, more lung capacity, that's good, but it's mostly tolerating the increase of CO2. Okay, so if you were right now sort of all the caveats in the world, but you're sort of roughly 4 minutes, what's the world record for free diving specifically? 12 and 1/2 minutes. Woah. How deep? This is at the surface. There is this competition called static breath-holding where you put your head underneath the surface and you hold your breath. And then people do it with oxygen. So, and that the record for that is 21 minutes with but that's hyperventilating with oxygen. So, just the natural body is 12 and 1/2 oxygen? Like they they have some sort of Okay. Well, they they they have hyperventilate, fill their entire lungs with pure oxygen, go under. What about free diving? Is that Is that based on depth and not time? There's different disciplines to free diving. There's static breath-hold, which is just head underwater, and then there's depth. So, most of them are associated with depth. There's depth without fins, there's depth with fins, there's depth with machines, there's depth with machines that don't have motors on them. I mean, on and on, all these different disciplines. But I watched a guy go down 830 ft I'm sorry. 830 ft down in Greece. Herbert Nitsch. I was I was there. Uh it did not end up well for him. It was awful, and at that point I said, "I will never see any free diving competition again. I don't want to this to cloud my vision of something that is so beautiful and so part of who we are as a species." And so, I that was my jumping off point for competitive free diving versus the more meditative and yoga side of it. All right, before we get to the yoga side, which has better benefits, I want to know what happened to him. In what way was it terrible? He had numerous strokes. Oh god, while he was underwater? Uh he he blacked out right from the get-go. He was on the sled. You can see this ABC 60 Minutes was there. I mean, it was just a complete [ __ ] show. I said, "Why why am I here? Why am I reporting on this?" And he took the sled down, which propelled him down. He was supposed to go down 800 ft, went down 830. He came up, and if you come up that quickly, he was supposed to stop about 30 ft below the surface and equalize. He didn't. He shot straight up. And he was rushed to the hospital, and he's still suffering from the problems associated with that. He's a lot better now, but he you know, obviously he regrets this, and that to me just showed Listen, I love people can do whatever they want. They can compete. That's badass. That's none of my business. But I just I saw what happens when the Western mind focuses on one thing as opposed to the larger picture, which is we've been gifted this incredible body to do these incredible things. Don't step too far over that line, or you're going to get hurt, and that's exactly what I saw. Oof. I don't want to derail this too much, but I I am very curious to hear more. You said when the Western mind focuses on one narrow thing, which that detached from that story, I would say, "Ooh, tell me more. That sounds amazing. I I want to focus on something like that." Um what are you bifurcating Eastern Western, and what is sort of the pathological part of the Well, first define the Western mindset for me, if you would, and then obviously that's a a good example of sort of where it goes pathological, um but I'd love to to hear more about how you view that, if that is the dichotomy. I'm absolutely bifurcating those two things, because about 6 months after that, I went to Japan. And I met with the Ama women divers. They've been diving deep in the ocean for 2,000 years, 1,500 years. And they do it as a spiritual practice. They also do it to gather food. Because they believe that the earth will stay in harmony if you only take what you can carry out of the ocean, the ocean will always provide. And they've been doing this for a long time. So, I met with women in their 70s. One was over 80 years old. She'd been diving every day, free diving every single day. Rain, shine, snow, doesn't matter. These were the most fit badass women I've ever seen. Not only physically fit, mentally so sharp. I went out there to dive with them. I wasn't very good at that time, but they were just kicking 80-year-old just kicking my ass over and coming out with an octopus, holding an putting in her bag, you know, coming out with abalone. And their appreciation for the ocean and their place within the ocean really resonated with me. Is that, yeah, you can push limits. That's that's what people do. But you also have to understand and appreciate your limits, and also understand that the ocean is always going to win if you challenge it. You have to understand and be humble within the ocean. And when I heard that, it made a lot more sense to me than hearing this western approach, which was disregarding so much of that, the feelings inside of your body, our position and our place and our appreciation with the ocean and just trying to get the metal at the end. So, I think there's a way of bridging those two things. Gear Gear me Neary, French free diver, very spiritual guy, also complete badass competitor, no longer competes because he found himself being taken too far into that other world. That's really interesting. Um I want to know more about these women. What what depth are we talking about and what do they wear? So, I was I went out there. I said I'm a free diver, custom-made free-diving suit, brand new goggles, snow huge fins. I was like, I got to like, you know, show them I'm serious about this. They're in these ripped-up old scuba wetsuits, which are awful for free diving, holes in the back, stitched up. They're wearing those masks like this, those big circular masks. Their snorkels barely work. They're wearing boogie board fins. They're probably 30 years old. So, they were probably diving to depths 100 ft, 120, but but again, it's not that's they would never come back and be like, "How deep did you dive?" Oh, I did 100 today. They're like, "How did that dive feel? How did you enjoy that? What food were you able to take from the ocean? How nurturing was that?" And to me, that seems like a much better game plan for a long life and appreciation of yourself and your place on this planet than this I'm going to kick the ocean's ass. I'm going to go as hard as I can. If I die, I die. Uh again, if people want to do that, totally that's not my business. But personally, I was much more attracted to the story and the culture on this other side. And that's what I mean by the Western Eastern approach. Mhm. All right, now I want to get use that as an example to better understand some of the benefits of um what's going on. So, the if somebody asked me to explain what about your book like literally stopped me in my tracks and made me rethink everything that I'm doing, it's it's the notion of you need to breathe less. And that was so that gave me the chills just saying that. And when when I read it, it had that same impact of like, "Whoa, is it possible that I've just approached this whole thing all wrong and that the things that I think are giving me benefits, it actually isn't the the inhalation, it's the exhalation and the hold and the learning to manage CO2 and understanding that CO2 is actually important and not just a byproduct." Why is this woman in her 80s so fit? Is it the swimming? Is it the holding her breath for extended periods of time? And look, I get it's going to be a gestalt of many of these things, but why is holding your breath important? And do you think it plays a factor in being 80 and being able to be such a badass? I think it does because breath holding and breathing, just like so many other aspects in life, come down to flexibility. You want to be able to be flexible. So, populations who have panic and who have asthma, traditionally, you ask them to hold their breath, and I've seen this, [panting and sighs] [gasps] they aren't flexible. Their threshold for CO2 is very low. So, a general gauge of health, and this is not a very clear scientific diagnostic that has been used for a long time, is they'd have doc- doctors have patients come in, exhale softly and hold their breath. And a lot of people use this to see how they're feeling day-to-day. I was just talking to Bill Bradley, the the senator who ran for president way back when. Every single morning, he he wakes up and holds his breath. He can tell how well he slept, he can tell what food he's eaten, how well he's digested that. It's a good general gauge. And breath holding has been part of breathing, the practice of breathing, for thousands and thousands of years. An early translation for pranayama was a trance induced by breath holding. All right, so one of the things that I I am still perplexed by how important it seems to be is breathing through the nose. Um, I would classify myself as a chronic mouth breather. I catch myself doing it all the time. Uh, Uh I I want to know why does it matter so much? And what are the benefits if somebody were to go to lengths to train themselves to breathe almost exclusively through the nose? So, if you were to cut my head in half, and I've done this with a with a CAT scan and gotten a deli slicer view of my whole head, you're going to see that the nose here and the sinus passages take up about the volume of a billiard ball, sometimes even more than that. So, this is an incredibly ornate and complex organ that looks so much like a seashell they call it the nasal conchae. So, seashells, they use their shells, the organisms within them, to keep out pathogens and to filter stuff out. That's exactly what our noses do. So, air doesn't just shoot in into our nose into our throat. We have to force it through this gauntlet of turbinates and mucosa and cilia and all of these different structures. And while air is being pressurized and forced through this labyrinth, it is moistened, it's heated, it's filtered, it's pressurized, and it's conditioned so that by the time it enters our lungs, we can better absorb that oxygen. So, just breathing equivalent breaths through the nose than through the mouth will increase oxygenation about 20% with with each breath. So, that's caused by a number of things. Also, nitric oxide, uh I'm I'm sure a lot of your listeners know about nitric this wondrous molecule that does uh is implicated with uh with vasodilation, it helps with gas exchange, it's essential. We make six times more NO when we breathe through our nose. And if we hum, we make 15-fold more nitric oxide. Nitric oxide is also uh some people may be interested in knowing this that what does Viagra do? It stimulates the release of nitric oxide in our bodies, creates vasodilation you know where. So we can we can do this in our in our noses as well. And if I remember right from your book, there's actually basically a erectile tissue in your nasal cavity. Why on earth would that be true? I don't [snorts] know how it got there, but we do know it's there. So the nose is more closely connected to the genitals than any other organ. by that? Anatomically? Uh their their connection in the way that they both use erectile tissue which engorges with blood which inflates it and makes it firm and also when that blood releases it makes it flaccid. So each of your nostrils has a coating of a erectile tissue. And throughout the day one nostril will become more engorged with blood and gently plug up and become more left nostril dominant. After about 30 minutes to 3 or 4 hours the other nostril will switch. Sometimes they're both open, but it's usually they they call it a nostril dominant. So everyone was just like why the hell does do our bodies do this? Why would we do this? It turns out and there's 20 years of studies showing this when we breathe through our right nostril body heat increases, heart rate increases, circulation increases. This is associated with a stimulating effect, okay? And it activates the left side of the head of the brain more which is associated more with logical functions. I know that there's a bunch of crossover, but I'm these are blanket explanations right now. [snorts] Left nostril breathing calming effect, heart rate goes down, you relax, more associated with creative functions. So, our bodies do this automatically throughout the day. You can hack this, alternate nostril breathing. Anyone who's taken a yoga class Okay? But, our bodies are already doing this. And if you're breathing through the mouth, you are getting zero of these benefits. So, we are made we are designed to breathe through our noses. And the fact that 25 to 50% of us aren't doing this, I believe is causing us a bunch of undue stress and potentially is contributing to a bunch of more serious issues. The fact that our noses close one side and open the other is this is one of those things where I and I think many many many other people have felt like we're sort of living at the end of history, that we're living at the end of evolution, like we understand everything, that there are precious few sort of mysteries left. Um and then you begin to realize that that just is not true. The number of things that we do not yet understand about the human body. And so we go in and we remove things like the appendix and think, "Ah, you don't really need an appendix." And then, "Oh [ __ ] wait, there's this whole thing called the microbiome. Maybe it actually does matter." Um and then the getting into the nose until I picked up your book. I'm in my 40s, man. Until I picked up your book, I had no idea that any of this mattered. Somebody told me a couple years ago that um breathing depending on what side of the nose you breathe through would actually have an impact. And I was like, "Uh-huh, uh-huh." Like that sounded like the biggest load of crap ever. It sounded so ridiculous to me. And now it's like I'm training myself to have this mechanism where it's like the second you want to reject something, hit the pause button because, man, there are so many things we don't understand. And I have a feeling that on that one, the fact that we have a erectile tissue in our noses so that at least one of them seems to be so that we can do the cycle thing um that we may find that there are other things that are tied to this. So, walk me now through You've gone to great lengths to be able to breathe through your nose. Um you've certainly inspired me to begin breathing through my nose. So, okay, we're moistening it, we're warming it or cooling it cuz I think we if we were in a sauna or something, um we're certainly not scorching our lungs. So, something is happening. Um what ends up happening to people? You did You did something where you intentionally plugged your nose for 10 days. What ends up happening when you plug your nose? Yeah, [snorts] so I couldn't believe all this stuff I was finding either, right? Uh and and I really mean this, but luckily I'm in San Francisco, I'm very close to Stanford. I got to be good friends with Dr. Jack or Nayak, who is the chief of rhinology research at Stanford. So, he's the one telling me this stuff. This guy publishes like 30 papers a year. He's a monster. And I if it's coming from him and it's coming with 30 papers, I'm like, "Okay, it's legit." I mean, this guy is top of his class. Um so, he was also explaining something else that nasal hairs, and this is a little pragmatic tip for people, people obsessed with pulling out their nasal hairs, they found that there is a significantly higher um chance that you will have asthma, that you will be suffering from asthma, the less dense your nasal hairs are. So, the more We have this stuff for a This helps filter air and slow it down. So, the idea that people are just like pulling all this pulling appendixes out, you know, pulling all this stuff out saying, "Oh, what what we got to get rid of this stuff. What Why do we need this?" I I think nature is a is a better gauge of how we need something and how important it is to us. So, that's It's way of saying I started talking to to Niak. He's just like, "Oh man, the note no one's breathing out of the nose and it's causing periodontal disease. It's causing all of these other issues." And I said, "Well, how how quickly does this damage come on? Does it Do I have to be a mouth breather for 10 years, 20 years? For a month?" And he he didn't know. So, he's like, "Well, there haven't been any studies done on it." So, it's like, "You're you're at Stanford, man. Why don't Why don't you do some You're like the top lab in the world. Why don't you do some studies on it?" But, he's like, "Oh, I don't have any funding allocated, blah blah blah." So, I finally convinced him. I said, "Let's Let's do an experiment. You You can collect all the data. Um it'll be me and I convinced Anders Olsen, who's a breathing therapist from Sweden, who's so dedicated to his craft. He's been teaching the stuff for 10 years. He's like, "I can't rightfully go and teach people this without knowing the full story." So, he he spent his own money to fly to San Francisco for a month to have his freaking nose plugged up. And it's it was awful. So, so for 10 days, uh we plugged our noses and we did uh PFTs, pulmonary function tests. We did cats. I mean, everything, blood work, everything you can imagine. In our home lab, we had about 10 grand, 15 grand of of equipment that we had managed to either get donated or cobbled together. Heart rate variability, CO2, oxygen, temperature, everything you can imagine. And so, what we were doing wasn't like this stunt in in my opinion. We were lulling ourselves into a position that 25 to 50% of the population already knew, but we were measuring what happened. And within the first night, didn't take long for us to see how damaging this was. I went from not snoring to snoring an hour and a half. It's like, "Shit, that that sucks." Start feeling really really awful, anxiety, you know, I was like, "Oh, it's psychosomatic, whatever." Next night, snoring even more. Three days later, snoring for 4 hours. Start getting sleep apnea. We started recording ourselves. I mean, our health just instantly went to hell. And Anders suffered even worse than I did. Right right off the bat. And the day we took these plugs out, it all disappeared. So, I I just don't hear too many people talking about just the pathway through which we breathe, how that can contribute to snoring and sleep apnea. But, they're starting to now. I've received, you know, hundreds of emails of people saying, "I'm just breathing through my nose now. I'm putting a little piece of tape here. I'm no longer snoring. Why Why didn't someone tell me this 30 years ago?" And I've not I don't have an answer for that, but, you know, it's it's curious. There There is something to the fact that, like you said, we have archaeological evidence. People been free diving for 10,000 years. Um for thousands of years, people been practicing yoga and other breathing techniques. Um and uh subhead of your book is um you know, paraphrase, but like the wisdom we had lost. And, you know, now we're sort of getting it back. It's a terrible paraphrase. Uh new science of the lost art. No, we're in the right ballpark. So, what one I know you just said that you you don't really have a take on why we don't know this anymore, but I'm so curious like how this stuff fell out of favor. And are there other things that, you know, people are like tumo, for instance? What is it What are some of these like wisdoms that you have a sense or or maybe we already have some data that back up that that it is real and it's, you know, something that people could begin deploying now? I think so much of it has been clouded in BS. I think honestly that's that's the reason. The same reason why someone comes up to you and says, "Oh, breathe out this nostril does this." You're just like, "Yeah, [ __ ] Anyway, moving on." Because we're we're apprehensive and we're skeptical for good reason. We've we've been told a bunch of of garbage for so long from both sides, really. From the more new age-y side and even from the medical institutions. How how often were we told that eating high carb, high sugar food was was totally fine, you know? Having a bowl of Trix every morning, that's that's a good way of starting your day. End it with a Manwich. I mean, we we know that that's complete garbage now, but it took us 30 years. The science had always been there, but it took us 30 years to be like, "Wait a second. This is wrong." And it didn't come from these institutions. It came from people turning to a high protein diet, high fat diet and saying, "I just lost 20 lb in a month and [laughter] I'm not hungry, you know?" It came by people actually trying this stuff out. Luckily now, there's so much science showing all of the benefits from from these things, especially in nutrition. But I think breathing is on that same path, where nobody disproved this stuff. We just moved on to other things. So, an example of that is we're talking about CO2, the importance of CO2. Having more CO2 in your body, breathing more slowly. They knew this 100 years ago. Yandell Henderson at Yale was administering CO2 with oxygen to people who had strokes or heart attacks or infants who had asphyxia. And this stuff worked wonderfully. And then it was just forgotten about and someone developed some other machine that they thought could do the same thing. So, I don't I don't want to point fingers. This is just human progress. This is how we do it, but it is interesting that there's this foundation of 3,000, 4,000 years of this technology of breathing. Every culture, doesn't matter if you're looking at the ancient Greeks, ancient Chinese, ancient Indians, they were all really into breathing and they had these very elaborate systems to breathe. Well, we have we have instruments now to measure this stuff. And the great thing about breathing is it's so easy to measure, you know? It doesn't It doesn't take much. You can breathe in certain way and a minute later, you can see what happens to your heart rate variability. You can see what happens to your blood pressure or your oxygen or your CO2. And so, once you actually see that and experience it and learn about how there is this huge foundation of science out there, it's it's irrefutable. And and it's always been there, but I think that we've just been our view has been clouded by so much other stuff. People come up with some new hack. You don't have to worry about breathing. Take take this pill and then 10 years later they're like, "Oh, actually don't take that pill. It's It's really hurting your body." You know, it's it's allowing the body to enter a state where it can heal itself, which is what it's doing every minute of every day, but we need to allow our bodies to do more of that. And that to me is really the core of what breathing allows us to do. Mhm. Tummo seems to me to be um something that shows just how crazy and powerful breathing can be. When I first heard about the stuff, um I wanted to believe it cuz I want to believe in anything that makes a person sound like a superhuman. But, if I'm honest, when I heard about them sitting in the snow and melting the snow or them being able to change the temperature on the same hand, one part of the hand would be warmer than the other part. I was like, "Uh-huh. Uh-huh." Um how real is it? And is there one specific type of breathing that is Tummo or like is it something else? So, I had heard these stories as well and the literature on Tummo goes back the the ability to heat yourself up with your breath goes back for thousands of years. About a thousand years ago, this guy Naropa um discovered it in a cave in Himalayas, but there aren't video, you know, there's no videos of him doing it. There were no scientific measurements of it. Then this woman named Alexandra David-Néel, uh Frenchwoman who in her 40s went on this spiritual sojourn throughout the Himalayas for 14 years, which is pretty unheard of in in the 1900s. She discovered it as well. And she's like, "Oh, yeah, whenever I got cold, I just do what the monks do. They have a single sheet on. They just breathe in this certain way." Everyone called [ __ ] on that, right? As rightfully as as they should. When a lot of hippies started going to India and Tibet in the '60s, they came back with these stories. They're like, "No, really. There's these monks who sit outside all night in a single sheet, and they breathe in a way to melt a circle around them in the snow. And then they go and they go back into the monastery. So, Herbert Benson at Harvard, so he was at Harvard Medical School, heard enough of these stories. He's like, "Okay, I need to go figure this thing out." This was in 1980. So, he went out to Dharamshala in India and got some of these monks, hooked them up, and there's video of this. Hooked them up with all kinds of sensors and found that they can absolutely do this. So, in a cold room, he put a wet sheet over them. They breathe in this certain way that they dried the sheet. Their their body temperature went up 17°. They never suffered from hypothermia or frostbite or any of these problems. So, this is in 1980. Still people were like, "Oh, it's just [ __ ] Man, he he was measuring it all wrong." Then Wim Hof comes around. He's like, "Oh, yeah. Okay. Well, I'm going to sit in an ice bath for 2 hours, okay? In front of all of you. And my core temperature is not going to go down. I'm not going to get hypothermia. I'm not going to get frostbite. And explain that." And I think you know, we have him to thank for just shutting up so many people. Even though the science was there from Harvard, that was published in nature, people are still like, "Uh whatever. Those are weirdos in India." So, now people are learning this Tummo, and they're finding that it not only can allow you to heat your body up and not get hypothermia in these extreme cold conditions, but it can help reset your immune system. It can help people with autoimmune diseases, which I think is its real gift. It's cool to be able to warm yourself on on command. That's amazing. But to be able to help people for whom no other therapy could help is is I think so important and and so to answer your question, uh this is a question I I could not answer uh and I kept talking to people. I was like, well, Wim Hof is going [snorts] Like you really go for it. But if you look at these these Tummo monks, they are they're hardly moving. And Benson found that they were able to decrease their metabolism more than 60%. The lowest number ever recorded and yet by decreasing their metabolism, they could superheat their bodies. And no one has any idea how they were able to do this. So we have a better idea on how Wim is able to do it, right? You're stimulating a stress response. You're really getting that circulation going. Then you're holding your breath. So you've gone from offloading CO2 to increasing CO2. That releases oxygen. You can increase your metabolism and he's even shown an hour after doing his practices, his metabolism's off the hook. So you're using more oxygen that way. But there's so many mysteries here. How how can those monks do what they do? And when I've asked researchers, they just say, "That's interesting. Not sure. Anyway, here's this research we do know." And that those are the corners I really like to to open and peer into because they show the true potential of of our bodies and how much we've lost. These These monks aren't using some new technology. Stuff's been around for thousands of years and we still can't understand it even with all the modern technologies we have. Yeah, the the thing that I find so enticing about Wim is he's talking about basically taking these autonomic functions and bringing them into I can't remember if he specifically says conscious control, but he certainly makes it seem like yeah, I I know you're injecting me with this endotoxin E. coli and so I'm revving up my immune system. I'm sending it out to attack it and shut it down and that to me is is the the frontier that I'm very eager for people to continue to explore because you know, how much of this can we bring into our conscious control and is it all going to be through breathing? Is there another you know, frontier that we have sort of equally ignored for however many millennia we've been ignoring like the real power of the breath and I heard something once that really resonated with me as soon as I started meditating which is that the the diaphragm is the um the center of the warrior or the seat of the warrior. Forget the exact word, but it's like the the core of a warrior is their their diaphragm and I thought, you know, why would that be? And then I took my first diaphragmatic breath and realized whoa, like this has this immediate impact on my ability to shift that is sympathetic into parasympathetic and I'm curious if we know with two more like what's going on at a cellular level like when they're heating themselves up, I understand the Wim Hof method because it's in revving up your your metabolism, your you're essentially igniting the furnace inside of you to burn calories basically to get this uncoupling to generate the heat. I don't understand it when it's slowing something down and was the research that was done in the 80s does it give us any hints as to what that is? It does not and this is a question at the end of the book. I was I was saying there are still mysteries to to behold here. So, just as you had said with with Wim Hof, with this intense breathing, I can probably make myself sweat by doing that. So, it's just more more kindling on the fire, right? You just have more fuel, so you're you're burning it. But, I would love if they looked at ATP of of these monks in in these like, are they able to to trick their bodies to produce more heat? Because all of that's coming from the production of of ATP, right? Electron transport chain. That that's where heat is coming from, and then water as well. So, are they able to activate more of I don't I don't think it's measurable. Uh maybe there's a neurologist or neuroscientist out there who who thinks it is. And if so, man, give me a call. Let's let's find some of these guys and and check it out. But, he was he was measuring what was happening to them externally. He was not measuring what was happening to in inside of their bodies. And that to me is where where the real mystery and magic would be. Cuz we know these people can do this. Uh you know, people have been calling BS on it for so long. They're not anymore. Because these studies have been published in the top scientific journals, and there's video tape of it. You know, you can see it for your for yourself. But, I just don't see personally be beyond the the few researchers that I was fortunate enough to work with, there's just not a lot of interest in this stuff. Especially now, we're in a pandemic, people are like, what? Superheated monks? It's the last thing we're thinking about. Like, we got to get get rid of this this coronavirus, then we'll go back to that. So, so my answer to you is is they don't know, and I don't know. What you were just saying about um people not being interested during coronavirus, that is a very bizarre response to me. When you talk about something that could have an immune system function, uh and that we're not breathing through our noses, which hey, by the way, is shaped like a conch shell as a way to get rid of pathogens. Like, this all seems pretty important. Yeah, and and guess what else breathing can do? Can and can very quickly decrease inflammation. Guess what COVID does? It increases this massive inflammation throughout your body. So, there's a whole protocol that's being developed by Dr. Stephen Porges where he's like, "Looking for this miracle cure is going to be hard. What we have to do is focus on your body. You need to focus on your breathing. You need to focus on your nutrition. That's how you're going to protect yourself." I don't want to wade into these these waters and have someone say, "You know, I was breathing correctly. I got COVID. you're full of shit." Which which happens, by the way, [laughter] when you write a book about breathing. But, I think the important thing is to know that to bolster your body's defenses, to focus on your breathing can absolutely have a profound effect on on your immune function. We've seen that. Taking a few easy breaths, right, can can release constriction in the rest of your body. You can breathe really fast. Your fingers are going to get tingly. Your head's going to get light because that's caused by constriction, not an increase of oxygenation. So, we can decrease inflammation rapidly and and profoundly by changing our breathing habits. In in what way? Specifically around inflammation. With vasodilation. So, so that's what [snorts] when we're breathing more calmly, so what happens with when we are eliciting a sympathetic response, so we're we're shuttling all this blood to areas that we need to fight or run away from something. The brain, the heart, the skeletal muscles, right? To be really strong. When we calm ourselves down, all those other channels come back online and inflammation is decreased. That's why when we breathe slowly, you take some very calm breaths, you rate about a count about five or six, breathe out to that same count. After a few minutes, there's a good chance you're going to start to feel your fingers heat up and your toes heat up. That's from an increase of circulation, from a decrease of inflammation in those areas. You talked about that in your book, so I tried it. Um and I'm curious, when you say to In the book, you specifically say 5.5 seconds is sort of the magic. Breathe in for 5.5, breathe out for 5.5. Um does that include the sort of hold? So, like when I exhale, I then hold. Then when I breathe in, I hold. If I include those periods of I'm not technically breathing in anymore and I'm not technically breathing out anymore, I can hit 5.5. Otherwise, I can't. I'm about 2 and 1/2 seconds in and then 2 and 1/2 seconds out. Am I doing it wrong? No. And just to be clear, that 5.5 is a general gauge. So, the last thing anyone should be doing is getting a stopwatch and being like [snorts] 4 to 7, 4 to 8. You know, anything in that range can be very therapeutic. In the neighborhood of five to six breaths is great, and we know that. That the science is there. Five to six-second breaths? Five to six seconds, which is yes. Which is five to six breaths at uh a minute, right? That's That's what it works out to. I say 5.5 cuz it's easy to remember. Mhm. 5.5 inhale, 5.5 exhale, 5.5 breaths a minute. That's That's how it it all works out. So, when when we do this, we are allowing just the right amount of of oxygen to come in at just the right amount of time with the least effort. So, so that's why the heart rate will slow down. That's why circulation will increase. And our bodies want this. To constantly be pushing our bodies, especially in states of recovering, is a bad idea. So, so I think that that general gauge, and we've we've seen this in studies where they've taught people with panic and asthma, who who traditionally breathe way too much. I'm talking off the chart, 20 breaths a minute. Through the mouth. They The only intervention they had them do was slow down their breathing, and their symptoms were rapidly reduced by a profound level. Uh even within a year later after 4 weeks of this training. So, this is what happens when the body comes into a state of homeostasis, where it's able to do what it's supposed to do. Mhm. I'm guessing your answer's going to be something like it depends on what you're trying to accomplish, but is there a right way to breathe, I'll say for just sort of everyday um everyday health? Yeah. What What would that right way look like? Well, sit Sitting on a couch is different than than sprinting, right? So, you're going to be breathing in different ways. So, what I tried to do instead of focusing on like you get a book on on pranayama, there's 300 different ways of breathe all with these crazy names. So, like, where do I start? I just try to focus on the umbrella items here, right? You're going to want to breathe slowly. You're going to want to breathe through your nose. You're going to want to breathe less. Many of us are going to want to breathe less to get more. And uh you know, you're going to want to chew your food. That's a whole other thing because that can help open up your airway. But, Patrick McKeown, pretty well-known breathing therapist, told me this, which totally blew my mind. He found studies where people who breathe at a rate of about 20 breaths a minute, so the average what's considered normal is 12 to 18 breaths a minute. So, 20 breaths a minute is maybe even on the low end for populations with anxiety and asthma. All they're doing is bringing air here and getting it out. That means they can only use 50% of that air. Okay? Because they're filling up their throats, they're filling up their mouths, they're filling up the bronchus. All of these areas can't participate in gas exchange. So, they're just wasting air, bringing it in, bringing it out. Only 50% at that rate when you when you're taking it 6 L a minute. If you slow that down to 12 breaths per minute, you're taking in 70%, okay? You're That's how much more efficient you are. 70% 20% different. Incredible. If you breathe at a rate of six breaths a minute, you have an 85% efficiency in your breathing. So, that's how much more oxygen you're going to be able to get, which means you can breathe less while getting more oxygen, which again is that's the key whether or not you're you're sitting on a couch and want to recover or whether or not you're really working out. Because if you're breathing in lines with your metabolic needs, that means you're going to have that much more energy to go even further. If your heart rate is lower at states of zone three, zone four, whatever, then you can push your heart rate even more, go further and farther. And Dr. John Douillard has been studying this stuff for 40 years, works with top ultra-marathoners, triathletes, Olympians, and that's that's what he's found. So, uh that that those his books and his science I thought were so fascinating, and they're really supported by so much of the newer research that's coming out now. So, let's go back to chewing for a second. So, um how can I now make some of these changes? Do I just find food that's really difficult to chew? Um do I need a device on my face? Like, what do I do to open up my airways? So, chewing is something when we lost that ability to chew because of industrialized foods, our mouths are all messed up. They look a lot like mine. I had braces, extractions, with some teeth out, headgear, all that crap. And I was convinced that at middle age, I was just screwed, right? So, I screwed up when I was young, I was hosed the rest of the time, and I learned from various researchers that's not the case. We have our our throat is basically a muscle tube, okay? So, the less we use it, the more flabby it's going to get, just like any other muscle. So, there are exercises you can do. I won't take you through all of these. Some of them are quite involved of pushing the tongue up to the roof of the mouth, sucking the tongue up there. Do this 30 times a day. They found in research that this has a profound effect on snoring and sleep apnea by just making your throat more fit. You can also do this by chewing. Chewing has other benefits beyond just helping to open your airways. It helps drain the Eustachian tube. It increases blood flow to the brain. It releases uh a parasympathetic state. It induces that in your body. That's how saliva comes on paras- So, there's so many benefits to chewing. If you think about all the crap we eat eating nowadays, even the stuff we think is healthy, y'all. Yogurt, soft foods, avocados, smoothies. There's zero chewing. So, that's a long way of saying, "Yeah, you can chew food." As long as you don't have a TMJ problem, and I need to put out that caveat now cuz people have written me saying, "My TMJ hurts. I've had TMJ issues." If If your mouth is messed up, have it checked out and fix that. But, for those who don't have those issues, chewing has so many benefits. And I've seen So, I did a little side experiment as part of the book is to see if I could improve this this uh debilitated middle-aged face and airways. And uh I showed massive improvements in the cat scan showed it's not just me saying, "Hey, I feel better." You look at the cat scans, about 15 to to 20% increase in in airway tone and airway size. Plus, the granulation from my sinuses is is gone, and I'm breathing better than than I ever had. I've I built bone through this palatal expander. We're told that we can't build bone past 30. Wrong. We can do it. We can do it in our faces. And I I added about 5 pennies worth of bone in my face. Woah. [laughter] So, so the human body is very malleable. It's malleable. It's uh it's this amazing mechanism. I think that we've haven't been utilizing it to its full potential for so long. We've been convinced that pills and potions can do everything, but you got to do the work sometimes and that will that will have its benefits in in a big way. My man. Dude, speaking of doing the work, thank you for writing that book. Absolutely extraordinary. Where can people find out more about you? Where can they get the book? At mrjamesnestor.com. Some other jerk jerk took James Nestor, so there's an mr on there. Uh all the whole bibliography is there. There's about 500 scientific references. There's also Q&As with experts in the field on breathing from Harvard and other universities. I'm also on Instagram trying to get better at the social media thing. Um I'm only posting about breathing there. So, no no pictures of like my my breakfast or my dog or anything. Just just breathing stuff, research stuff. My man. Again, thank you so much for coming on the show. Your book was really trans- transformational for me. I hope people dive way into it. Um I think it's going to be a game-changer. So, thank you for pushing all of that forward making people more aware. Uh much obliged. Everybody, if you haven't already, be sure to subscribe and until next time, my friends. Be legendary. Take care. By being non-stimulative in our [music] behavior, we lost the connection in the depth of our physiology. Because we are able to adapt about to anything.