Author interview with James Nestor | Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art

do you like books I mean really really like books then you're in the right place each week your host Sam Hankin interviews the best of today's top selling authors and the up and coming superstars of modern literature this is the avid reader here is your host Sam Hagin [Music] good afternoon everyone and welcome to another edition of the avid reader today our guest is James Nestor author of breath which will be released next week by Riverhead James is also the author of deep freediving renegade science and what the ocean tells us about ourselves kind of almost like a precursor of this book in a way James has written for outside scientific America and the Atlantic new york times lots of other publications he's appeared on Nightline NPR breath it's about something that we do from the moment we are born perhaps with the help of a slap on our bus until the moment we dive say die savers on medical situations and we're not aware of this survival technique almost all of our lives but we are dependent on this process for the human race is very existence so but what if we were doing it the wrong way and by doing it the wrong way we've distorted our bodies ruined everything from our posture and our teeth increased our risk about everything from asthma to sinusitis to periodontal disease even such seemingly far-fetched troubles as cancer and even depression so beware you may approach this book as I did with trepidation and an almost certain belief this is kind of a crazy concept and even James says that at the beginning of the book so how can all of this be true however after you finished the compelling naviga narrative you may truly become a believer not only in the importance of breathing but the importance of breathing right so with that welcome James and thanks so much for joining us today thanks for having me so first yeah your first book you kind of work it's like Abbey Road and let it be you were kind of writing this in Reverse weren't ya you start kind of started this book before he started to second yeah that's that's basically what happened I had been experimenting with different breathing techniques for a while had some very strange physiological effects from them one in particular very vigorous pranayama I sweated through my socks and my t-shirt my hair and all that but I didn't know what to do with that story it was a personal experience and I write more about science and more about an objective experience that can apply to people so I just kind of put that in the back file and until I met these free divers who were able to hold their breath and dive down 300 400 feet for minutes at a time they told me the only way that they were able to do what they do to dive to such incredible depths was to harness the power of breathing if we harness that we can not only dive we also have various benefits on land as well from healing our bodies to accessing different levels of performance to increasing our longevity one of the interesting things about your book and you're very candid about it some of the medical problems you had before you embarked on this why don't you a numerate though is because it's a good preface into what you did later sure I had had pneumonia year after year I surf a lot so that might have had something to do with it the surfing is good here in San Francisco in the winter so I was constantly wet and cold I had a lot of bronchitis had some wheezing I was snoring on occasion and I thought that this was just a normal part of being an adult right everyone I knew had these problems they had asthma they had allergies on and on and on until I realized that you know that this really wasn't normal and there's a good chance that our ancestors weren't suffering from all of these respiratory problems that we have now so I took a deep dive into what happened why we're breathing so poorly now why so many of us have these respiratory issues we carry them with us from childhood into adulthood and I found another story which I thought was so much stranger than anything I had intended on researching this dis evolution of the human face and the human mouth well so yeah and now you know I watch a youtube video where you kind of like what's the word that you morph a skull from the way it was to the way it is now and it is kind of unbelievable because natural selection generally selects for survival and thriving so what was the corollary Bennett that if there was any and then talk about what happened to the skull there there is no benefit to losing the ability to breathe properly and this is something that I didn't know about before I started this book even when after I had written the proposal and was on my way of writing a book about breathing this story came out of the blue and it really fascinated me what evolution is and what it what it does is it's it's it means change evolution means change in animals can change for the better or for worse natural selection is only a very small part of it so we've adapted a bunch of different capabilities and problems in our bodies that are a detriment to our health they have nothing to do with with making us better there's nothing good about a third of the u.s. population being obese ok there's nothing good about snoring or sleep apnea or asthma so this is a concept called dis evolution which was popularized by Daniel Lieberman at Harvard and it's used to explain why so many of us have a sore back why our bones are growing thinner into a large extent why we're breathing so poorly now so that's that's that's the nutshell it's a bit to swallow and it took me about a year research into this to truly realize a lot of what I learned in high school is wrong it's not about survival of the fittest that's not really how evolution works there are other tangents to evolution that are changing us as a species in many ways for for the worse well if that's the case I can certainly understand how the Industrial Revolution the changes in food the crooked teeth part of it but you also go back hundreds of thousands of years to so why I mean even like if you if you look at the Neanderthals and the protruding skull and and all that kind of stuff why did that happen because that was more that was nature it wasn't kind of a nurture thing absolutely and it happened over tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of years these changes occurred but what's happened to the human mouth on a large scale the REE and while we have crooked teeth the reason why we're breathing so poorly this all happened mainly in the last 300 400 years since the advent of industrialized food and this is this is a known thing if you take a skull a modern skull and compare it to a skull a thousand years old or ten thousand years old or a hundred thousand years old or million years old those older skulls by and large will have perfectly straight teeth whereas the modern skull 90% of us have crooked teeth so we can tell the age of a skull modern skull versus an ancient skull just by looking at its teeth and this was something I did not believe until I talked to biological anthropologists who have been studying it for decades and decades I saw the skulls myself I saw cat-scans of my own face my own two small mouths my own crooked teeth and it suddenly became very apparent you know it's funny because people always talk about mouth breathers things like that but apparently most of us are kind of mouth breathers even though we don't know it well there's some estimates that the numbers of murky but anywhere from around maybe 25% to 50% of us breathe through our mouths and a large percentage of that population is habitually breathing through their mouths they've lost the ability functional ability to breathe through their nose and if you start breathing through your mouth at a young age your face is gonna start molding to that right the bones are going to be developing in that certain way this is it's so common it's called add annoyed face because when kids get swollen adenoids they have to breathe through their mouth so they open their mouth like this and their face starts growing long so there's been a ton of research on this showing the correlation between the pathway in which we breathe and facial growth and your facial growth is going to determine a large amount of how your you're able to breathe right so if you're opening your mouth like this all the time your jaw is drooping back that's gonna block your Airways more often then if you're a habitual nose breather constantly keeping your mouth shut when you talk about the numbers like you talked about you know I'm gonna read 600 million times in my lifetime and 25 sextillion molecules you know more than grains of sand on the beach I think come in each breath okay there's the numbers and you've talked about the adenoids you talked about the shake of the head but then how do you and this is where people would start saying oh this is some kind of New Age how does that give you cancer how does that give you depression housing yeah I would never say breathing alone is gonna give you cancer or or depression I would say that what you breathe can contribute to these problems and can exacerbate them so if you're looking at if you have a blocked airway due to some skeletor problem because your jaw hasn't grown right because your nose is always stuff because you're breathing through your mouth when we're taking in untreated unconditioned unhuman off' I'd air through our mouth we're exposing our lungs to all of that and after a while that can cause respiratory problems and we know that and if you're constantly putting your body in the state of stress other problems can arise from there if you look at cancer specifically and this is something I won't get to too deep into cancer is going to start growing and continue growing in areas and in which there is the least amount of oxygen in in an acidic environment so how you breathe will affect your circulation and well it will affect how blood will get to throughout your organs in other parts of your body so there are some correlations between that but but no I'm not gonna go and say how you breathe is going to give you cancer or heal you of cancer but it will definitely contribute to a laundry list of problems well another thing that's kind of paradoxical and out there if you want to put it that way is this idea about carbon dioxide I mean I've been trained to think carbon dioxide is an evil it can kill you trees take it in and breathe out precious oxygen it's the cause of global warming but your book takes a completely different tack talk a little bit about that and the experiment - sure sure so when I first wrote the proposal for this book I thought I had it pretty well figured out and that's how nonfiction works you write a proposal and then you're giving them given a modicum of money to go out and research the subject and write about it so I spent a few months on the proposal found leaders in the field thought I had a pretty good idea of how the book was gonna leave and then through every single Avenue I went once I started digging deeper and deeper many levels everything was flipped on its head and co2 is one of those things so we need a balance of co2 and oxygen in our bodies it's not about constantly getting oxygen in because we need that carbon dioxide to offload the oxygen into our muscles into our tissues into our organs and this is something almost nobody is talking about so the way to balance that the best way of doing that is to take in less air than you're used to is to breathe slower it's not to open your mouth when you're at the gym or walking or even sitting on a couch and puffing and huffing thinking you're getting more oxygen the more you do that the more you're denying areas of your body oxygen and this is such a paradoxical thing to get someone's head around it took me months and months of talking to leaders in the field professors researchers to really understand this you're saying you know much talking about it how have you incorporated if you have into your own lifestyle cuz that seemed hardest to me well I had to see it for myself right and that's something I'm always interested in doing you can read papers you can talk to experts but once you actually see the effects of these things in your own body you become more convinced so anyone can get a pulse oximeter they're 20 bucks and put it on your finger and breathe in different ways and you'll notice that you can breathe very slowly and often that oh - is either gonna stay at the same level or it's gonna increase by breathing slower by taking in less oxygen and this is such a contrary and concept that people have a hard time understanding it the fact is we breathe out about three-quarters of the air that we breathe in so if your breathing faster you're just offloading all that air you're not doing anything by breathing slower you're able to balance those gases and get more from each breath with less effort and I think that that's really the key you don't want to overwork your heart have a high heart rate and to breathe more and more you want to be more economical and breathe less and use that air as much as as you can yeah you talk about those techniques and and in your first book to actually you know this idea whether I'm swimming my laps in the pool or whether you're a free diver there comes a point at least initially where you have this and you talk about this panic response that you have to breathe and how it suppose someone is trying to master those techniques that's the first thing that would become an obstacle for me it's it's the fear it's the panic and being able to go past that well I think because a lot of us are programmed to breathe too much especially people with with mental conditions people with anxiety or depression consistently breathe too much so they consistently have lower levels of carbon dioxide because they're scared of holding their breath so a very effective therapy and this is being researched by numerous scientists right now is to teach these people to breathe slowly and to teach them to hold their breath a little longer and a little longer to get more co2 in the into their bodies which will allow them to offload more oxygen to where it where it's needed so you know a lot of people are gonna feel paranoid by breathing too slow they're gonna think oh there's no way I'm getting enough oxygen right now especially exercising but I did all kinds of experiments I worked with the chief of rhinology research at Stanford and I would get on a stationary bike and instead of breathing 40 times a minute as his common I breathed about six to eight times a minute I was hooked up to a pulse ox and I was amazed to see even though I felt very stifled by this my oxygen levels never wavered so breathing slower will decrease your heart rate allow you to go longer further recover better all those things by just switching your breathing this is something coaches have known for for decades and decades a one method of training that they used to use all the time was they they would fill up sprinters mouths with water or with marbles and they'd have them run around the track and spit that water back into a cup to teach them how to breathe through your nose the more you breathe through your nose the better oxygenation you're gonna get the further you're gonna be able to go and this is this is a really an essential part of breathing that it's pretty much been been lost no one's really talking about it go to any gym I mean if gyms were open right now and and you'd see this people just that's not the way to get to where you want to go it's really different you know it really is different and then the other thing is that that when you're talking about dr. Nayak I guess it Stanford and then Marianna Evans and Olson kind of you're you're Kramer s character but then okay those are the straightforward people that but then you go off into the Tibetan stuff and the Buddhist stuff and they seem to mesh in a certain way it reminds me of how the Dalai Lama meets with the quantum physicists every year and more and more the two things come together and they realize how much there is similar than dissimilar and that struck me as being very interesting and the Dalai Lama has said he's like if at any time my beliefs are disproven by science I'll change my beliefs I mean that's a lot of confidence right in your religion but they're just finding so many similarities in the ways that they're they're thinking and approaching their view of the world in their view of science together and I see the same thing happening with breathing and it was a little frustrating to see these cycles just repeat over and over and over over thousands of years so ancient Indians knew all about breathing pranayama ancient Chinese knew all about it they wrote seven books of the DAO all based on breathing what happens when you do it improperly and what happens when you do it properly and this just continued the Buddhists got into it and they all all these disparate cultures seem to find out the same thing at different times without having any contact with with one another they seemed to find this this code to healthy breathing and you can trace this which is which is what I spend months and months doing throughout human history and even up to today a hundred years ago there was much more breathing awareness then I arguably there even is now and so I I found scientists saying never breathe through your mouth because you're gonna get cavities it's gonna make a very acidic environment it's gonna make you more apt to get pneumonia and tuberculosis and we're finding that so many of these things a hundred years ago that were written about are now being shown to be true if you look at how we're treating patients with kovat we used to a few weeks ago used to put them on their backs and intubate them now they're finding no no no put them on their sides or have them sit up because when we're laying down on our back most of the air that we take into our lungs is filling up in our back not in our chest so if you're laying down your back and trying to breathe you're not getting that gas exchange the same as you would on your side well doctors were talking about the 70 years ago you know these are the methods they were using and so it got a little maddening I you know I called it like a groundhog day where same people saying the same thing all these methods worked they disappeared rediscovered different culture different time disappeared and hopefully now we're at a new age of breathing awareness at least that's that's what I'm seeing if with everything that's happening with Kovan yeah what's struck yeah actually what struck me anyone of your YouTube videos was you're comparing a person breathing and then you showed a person in a hospital bed laying on his back with a ventilator in there and oh yeah was a ventilator or a cannula another yeah so yeah and that's that really struck me because if those two things are the same and something is drastically wrong of course and even you know if you look at I was talking to Nayak many meetings with him he's stanford rhine ologist they're 27 departments in the National Institutes of Health none of them are studying breathing none of them are studying the nose they're studying pathologies associated with breathing they're studying lung cancers and pneumonia but they're not looking at the benefits of healthy breathing nasal breathing prevention any of that and which is pretty shocking considering this is an act we do 25,000 times a day we take in more air into our lungs and out of our lungs every day then more in weight than than we do in food and drink so 30 pounds of air enters our lungs and exits our long every day if you if you think that that air doesn't affect how you think how you act your physical performance then then I don't think you're looked into the subject is enough as you should because it certainly does and and I've found it I've been pretty amazed by so many people in the medical communities still continue to say how we breathe doesn't matter it's just that we're breathing that's important I've found that as pretty false yeah and the other thing that's interesting is that you could have almost called this book the nose because so much of it is about reminding if nikolai gogol short story than knows where he shaves off his nose and then he finds the nose becoming a bureaucrat and getting out of it reminded okay it's just as important as the rest of us it's not more so and you know you talk about that one you're talking about the opening there and no one thinks about that I mean really no one thinks and in the nose is really just one it's extremely powerful organ we need to acknowledge it but it's really one of only many different parts that you need to understand you can still breathe through your nose and be unhealthy right if you're breathing too much so there are many components to this and what I found most interesting about this this subject was not the how of breathing because there's dozens and dozens of books that date thousands of years old right on how to breathe properly it's the it's the what and the who and how how specifically it affects our bodies why would we want to breathe in certain ways and why don't we know all this information about proper breathing what's what's happened in the back story of the characters these people who for the past hundred years have been talking about the stuff and proving all these therapies were extremely effective and then just kind of disappeared so it's that whole tangle of stories that that I really got immersed in well it seems like I thought after reading it I thought oh there must be a consensus now mark stall these people but you're telling me there's not I mean there's the department's don't even begin to study the specific areas you discussed in the book so how is all this gonna make a difference sure and but that's that's not my role who writes about science and that's something that I found was pretty lacking in this literature is someone who has an objective standpoint who goes into this world learns as much as I could about it and digest it for a general reader I found a lot of reading books there either from one position or the other that you can only breathe very slowly this is the only way you're gonna be helped or wim Hof's philosophy he's a breathing guru very very popular right now says you've got to breathe really hard you know once once a day and I don't think that's the right way of looking at this is one freediver told me there are as many ways to breathe as there are foods to eat and you eat different foods to do different things and you can breathe in certain ways to do certain things as well and in so - you know I'm not I did not set out to change anyone's minds if I found that mouth breathing was much healthier and the ancients were wrong I would have had you know maybe a much more interesting hook to the book so I have no skin in any game I just wanted to provide objective information which is why there's 600 studies you know on my website in the back of the book and and if you don't agree with my observations then you can look up those studies and read them for yourself and make up your own mind about that you know it's interesting because you talk about North Kilimanjaro which I climbed like 15 years ago and you say there's a 50% success rate but you know sometimes they'll they'll take you in a longer route so you you know you climb high sleep low and yeah towards the end yeah you definitely could feel the difference but it wasn't well first of all I had Diamox and there happened to be a neurosurgeon in our group and he brought decadron and so if I did have any cerebral not cerebral pulmonary edema answerable team at that that definitely helped but it's true that well it's a it's kind of an I'm rambling now but it's kind of like meditation you know Shambhala meditation is basically your breathing that's the whole thing the thoughts come in the feelings come in and they go out and you know people say well I need to meditate more what happens when you meditate and I had a bumper sticker that says nothing happens and that's kind of like it's not something that's going to dramatically change the way you present yourself to other people and things like that but there's no reason why I couldn't lead to enlightenment of a sort and it kind of seems like it did with you in a way well I yeah I'm I believe after talking to so many researchers about this stuff that the main benefit of meditation especially at the beginning is it forces you to calm down and focus on your breath almost every meditation starts with focus on your breath and slow down you're not gonna go and meditate it be extremely stressed out so this causes a physiological change in your body and the way you're thinking about things in your circulation how your organs are communicating with one another hormone levels on and on and on and I think once you get that down you can go on to the further levels of really focusing on your consciousness and getting many other benefits from that but at the beginning I'm convinced that meditation is breathing and breathing this meditation and you can start there while thinking about whatever you want to think about if you're breathing the same way you would be meditating you are gonna change your body and we know that there's a couple of things about meditation one is don't be judgmental about the fact you're not doing it enough and second thing is just the idea of the combination of breathing in and breathing in all the bad stuff and then breathing it out and but don't expect it you're not gonna breathe in the bad stuff again and so now I realize okay what you were saying about depression it definitely does make sense you know well it helps focus your mind off of other things in Patricia gar burg and Richard Brown psychiatrists in New York quite famous authors they use this breathing technique that is so deceptively simple no one would think it would possibly work but it's been studied extensively shows that you increase oxygen to your brain shows that your sympathetic nervous system is shut off you're able to relax and all it takes is breathing in for six seconds and breathing out for six seconds and breathing in for six seconds and out and doing that for even a few minutes a day can have measured change that they've shown measured change with people with anxiety depression and other disorders they even used it for 9/11 survivors who had this ghastly condition called ground glass lungs so nothing else worked for these people but breathing this way to inhale fully and exhale fully was able to purge a lot of toxins from their lungs and work better than any other treatment so I would say to people like seems so simple breathe through your nose seems so simple breathe slowly or practiced some very slow breathing's for a few minutes a day but I think you would be amazed by what this does to you and again I wasn't looking so much at what it did to my own body but how this affects everyone who practices these simple techniques you don't need spirituality you don't need religion to do this this is how your body wants to take in oxygen and how it wants to expel it so it's very natural you're placing your body in its natural state and that's what breathing properly is all about there were two examples you gave see if I can remember them the first one unless I'm remembering it wrong is men generally who were in war a weren't injured talk about that one and then I'll go to the second one okay then I don't need to write these down I'll just remember that so what happens when we are extremely stressed out as we can get sympathetic nervous system overload sympathetic nervous system is a fight-or-flight action that occurs in our bodies that shunt a bunch of blood from our extremities into our central organs makes us more aware of our environments we get a cortisol drip all of those things gets us ready to fight or flight so they found that these soldiers who had been right about to enter battle but never enter battle we're just sitting there stressed out so much they essentially blew a fuse so they could not turn that off they were constantly in the stress state breathing this way their heart rates were crazy beating twice as much as they should be and the only way to really fix them was to teach them to relax by teaching them to relax they were able to switch off that sympathetic nervous system and switch on that relaxed nervous system function and get back to normal so what they found is breathing this way on occasion if you're doing it consciously is actually good for our bodies if you think about most of us today we spend our nights half awake in our days half asleep constantly in this gray zone of stress so that's not good because we're never relaxing and we're never stimulated so many breathing techniques including many pranayamas 2mo wim HOF method forces you into the sympathetic state for 20 minutes so that the other 23 and a half hours of the day you're gonna be able to be calm and relaxed and it's incredibly therapeutic there are so many studies backing that up especially for people with autoimmune diseases whose immune systems go rogue in their own bodies cause a rash of problems these people were able to regain control of their autonomic nervous system and their immune systems and to either blunt or sometimes just stop these conditions just by breathing it's funny you mentioned earlier you know the situation we're in with Corona Kovac and I wondered now that all these people were working from home or is where I am now I'm where you are now you know now I go out I have a nice property that has plenty of places to walk so now I go out and walk I relax as I'm walking I actually have found that my breathing is different and I wonder one this is going to be beneficial at least to the first world people you know these are first world problems for us if it's gonna be beneficial and then when they go back are they not going to want to be there are they gonna say no I'd rather be back the old way is there going to be a stressor to go back into the working environment where you have your cubicle and you're sitting down well you know these maybe first world problems but the benefit of breathing is open to everybody doesn't require Wi-Fi or mobile phone or anything it requires just focused attention on how air is coming into our bodies and how we're exhaling it so anyone can get these benefits you can learn how to breathe properly for free online you know when again it's that the hal was very very obvious to me it's the why and what this does to us which I found so powerful so I think anxiety levels are through the roof as they have been for the past two months and I think people are probably breathing pretty pretty poorly now so now more than ever I think it could benefit you by just adopting a few different habits I don't want to proselytize I'm not here to preach but I've learned a few things I've had my own experiences in labs I've seen the data and I'm convinced making just a few small tweaks to your daily habits can have a transform it can really transform you in a lot of ways maybe not for everyone but it certainly has for me and for most of the people I've talked to it's funny because I have an independent bookstore and your book will be on the front table but it won't do you any good cuz no one can do it take a picture you know it's in the window and we are doing curbside now and record skipping but the so many of you will come in a nice don't tell me I just don't have time to read I know what you do have time we all have the same amount of time you just if you're watching you know the Kardashians no you don't have time to read this book but I can just see talking to someone about this and them going I don't have time I don't have time to breathe I don't have time to and basically that's what they're saying anyone has time to breathe we're breathing all the time and that's another benefit of this practice that I've found if you talk about someone getting a bunch of benefits from eating vegan or vegan keep keto or paleo that's a commitment it's hours a day you're thinking about it all the time same thing with exercise hey you should go out and exercise two hours a day do your world of good but we're breathing all the time so right now as I'm talking to you I can change my breathing and affect my body in different ways when I'm driving a car walking my dog sitting on a couch and watching the Kardashians you know you can entertain yourself with that if you choose but you can change your breathing and also get a benefit from that and that's what where I found this to be a really powerful tool and and universal you know it's an egalitarian tool that that anyone can use and no one's really thinking about it from even in the medical community very few people are looking at the benefits of breathing they're looking at the problems associated with lungs that stop us from breathing but not looking at the benefits and I feel that that is starting to change in a big way right now with all the news of kovat and respiratory health I find I've been doing it during this interview and actually I don't want to become a disciple necessarily but I wouldn't have been able to remember the second thing I wanted to tell you about I don't think if I wasn't doing this and the second thing I wanted to ask you about was the athletes in Mexico City and what they did and well first of all you know their training at height there if they have a chance to train at height and they're running at night without oxygen and that was very interesting because I didn't think that was what they did so this is one of those stories of a researcher came about discovered something and was quickly dismissed disappeared after he died so this hat came from a choral teacher taught students how to sing in New Jersey and he noticed that a lot of them were losing volume and losing resonance and tone and their voices because they weren't breathing properly so he thought what if I enabled them to breathe a little deeper so that they could exhale more because everything's on the exhale how we talk how we're singing everything we vocalizes on the exhale so he was able to develop their their diaphragms to enable them to go a little deeper and go a little higher and start winning choral competitions teaching members of the Met Opera how to sing better on and on you got so famous that the emphysema ward at VA hospitals on the East Coast said we've got some other people here who could use some help breathing their emphysema --cz and they've been sitting here for years and we don't know what to do with them so long story short these people had lost the ability to breathe properly so they would sit in bed and breathe dozens and dozens of breaths a minute so by simply allowing them to loosen their diaphragms allowing them to take a deep breath most importantly to take a deep breath out he healed these people well I won't say heal us it's a contentious term he was able to get them up to a level of health in which they were able to leave the hospital and this this therapy was more effective than anything else anyone was using it's backed up by x-rays it's backed up by data so he then went on after 10 years in hospitals he was asked by the Olympic Committee to start training runners for Mexico City Olympics Mexico City's at what 7,000 feet so he went to Tahoe and trained them to engage their diaphragms just there and they started breaking personal bests edging towards World Records they went down to the Olympics and it was the greatest you know victory of any track team and I think still to this day in history and what was even more me these runners did not take oxygen before or after the races they just breathed slowly so it just that to me just so patently this was after a few weeks of training so patently showed the effects of proper breathing and no one's dis discounted what what he's done the data holds today but when this guy died was immediately forgotten emphysema 'xs if you go on the National Institutes of Health right now there's no mention of diaphragmatic breathing a breathing deeper and developing the diaphragm to get over their condition and very few runners or trainers are aware of their their breathing this deep breathing as well so that's another you know new science of the lost art there and these stories just kept repeating over and over it's really weird it's very weird but that you know all the science is there and even pulmonologists at these VA hospitals were stunned by what he was able to do I absolutely stunned and then when he left it all it all went away so hopefully we will have deeper realization and appreciation for this the simple act going forward you know when you said there's you know there's lots of different ways to come at this tell the other technique which I did try about the Navy SEALs about breathing in holding and breathing out holding that's an interesting one yes it's again very basic and this balances your nervous system right so all it is is breathe into a count of 4 2 3 4 hold 2 3 4 exhale 2 3 4 hold 2 3 4 it's called box breathing so you inhale the same amount the to hold does the same amount as you exhale and this if you do this before you've stressed out this will focus your mind and help you become more grounded at least that's what that's what people say I've used this quite often and and I like it for that same reason if you want to sleeeeep you extend the exhales because exhaling is a parasympathetic activity it lows your body into relaxation so you can extend your exhales to six or eight and that's a pretty powerful tool to relax yourself oh yeah talk about respirations per minute back when what we do now and then talk about what Yogi's are able to do so that the data is murky here but from what I was able to scope out it did it did look like people were breathing less but it was considered normal to breathe from eight to twelve breaths per minute just thirty years ago on back and this is what what data has shown us today what's considered normal is 12 to 20 so that's the normal range so breathing less than 12 breaths per minute right now is considered abnormal but from what I've found breathing less than 12 breaths is very beneficial to the body and there's again a lot of research and a lot of people studying this so the ancient Chinese breathed 13,000 breaths a day they actually had the time to count this stuff I don't know how they did that one guy watching the other guy as he watched the but they said that was the optimum amount to breathe which works out to about nine nine ten breaths per minute so we do know that by breathing slowly and by breathing deeper you were lessening the burden on your heart you were able to circulate your blood more easily you're able to oxygen oxygenate everything more easily so there are certainly some wisdom to what they were doing way back then and we can see that in studies today yeah well there's kind of a contradiction there because what you just said was and and it's trying to do it you can slow your breathing but you're saying breathe deep the part of your book is about not breathing deep okay hi so you want to engage your diaphragm you do not want to breathing six times a minute does not mean and saying I'm breathing six times a minute I feel like getting oxygen in there you want about a half a liter in there and because you're gonna get more gas exchange deeper in your lungs we know that because blood is gravity dependent and there's more blood at the bottom of your lungs then there is at the top so breathing that way is going to be a lot more efficient for you and you breathe through your nose you're gonna be breathing deeper that's just how it works out so breathing less that's very effective for people who have chronic anxieties or people who have asthma they've they've shown that breathing because these people breathe way too much so the point of breathing less isn't to cause people to breathe way less than as normal it's to get them back into that normal range so if someone's breathing 2530 times a minute you want to train them back to the normal range so you show them the power and the simplicity of breathing slower so that they will feel more comfortable breathing at a normal range so that's that's the key to breathing is to breathe per your metabolic needs you don't want to breathe too little that you're not getting enough oxygen that's bad news you don't want to breathe too much that you're overworking your body it's to breathe just enough so that you're not over birding any system in your body it's funny that's it's easier said than done because the people that have the most anxiety are going to have the most anxiety about attempting to do this you really have to somehow push them well that's not my job to push them my job is to provide the background of why this would work and interview research researchers in the field who are pursuing this this research right now if you look at someone like Justin Feinstein neuropsychologist at laureate Institute a brain research so he's found it's really hard to get people with chronic anxieties to hold their breath they like five seconds so he is giving them carbon dioxide so to help reset them because he knows that they're not going to do this on their own but he is administering heavy doses of carbon oxide to get them used to that feeling to bring them back down to normal again so but you did you did it too right I I did I did and you also had problems with my initial problems with it I it was not fun at all I'm not saying that this is a pleasant thing that people should go out and do don't do it unless you need to and unless you're under the supervision of a professional working in a lab so he got an NIH grant to research this stuff so he's a real pro he's got it very professionally set up and yeah I did it because this is another carbon dioxide therapy has been around for a hundred years studied at Yale studied at Harvard saying all the top institutions and again it's another one of these things that came up never disproven and went away and it's fascinating now to see scientists and researchers rediscovering this stuff and saying wait this is really effective and now we have the machines to measure how effective it is and so to be in that world and it's just that that stuff is just sort of starting up right now and it's it was a thrill to be right in the inside of this and watching this sort of bubbling up one more time another way you went off on a tangent of sources how you talked about you know the guys that are I forgotten the technique you know generate heat and wood you know you go into ice baths and you swim in the Arctic Circle and I've read about some of these people but how does that eat how is that even effective I mean how does your breath actually get you to that point mmm this is a breathing practice that's been around for more than a thousand years and throughout various centuries people called BS on it right you'd have travelers going to to that into India and they would say they're these monks that sit in the snow overnight just breathing and they melt a circle around themselves and so without Instagram or video cameras or recorders no one really believed this until in the 1980s a Harvard researcher by the name of Herbert Benson went out to India got these guys hooked him up with sensors and saw measure exactly what they were doing so they were able to increase their temperature by 17 degrees and their extremities in what they were able to dry a wet sheet on their back in a room that was like 55 degrees just by just by breathing so what was even more amazing to me is that these people were able to sit in the snow for hours and hours not get frostbite not not have any not get hypothermia they'd sit there melt a circle get up and be on their ways so no one really knows that part of this right how they're able to survive and not get frostbite or hypothermia for so many hours in the snow but we know it's tied to their breathing and now hundreds of thousands of people are using this technique it's called wim HOF method which is just a form of 2mo and they're finding that it's not only effective for heating the body for walking around with your shirt off in the snow if you want to do that kind of thing but it's really helpful in helping to heal chronic diseases and I thought that that was so fascinating and this is being researched now by again by top universities by real scientists in the field and it's to me the mystery of that the story behind it that we know maybe half of how this might work but we still don't know this other half but we know it's real because we're watching these people do this thing that really intrigues me it shows the limitations of our current understanding of science and how how much further we can go and understanding our bodies so these monks would go out in the middle of the night and they'd sit there with just a thin sheet thin cloth sheet on and sit in the snow and breathe in certain ways to melt a circle around themselves for hours and hours they were able to do this night after night so nobody really understood it or believed it so all of these travelers would go to India they go to Tibet they go into certain areas of China and see these monks do this but we didn't have video cameras we didn't have her quarters a bunch of people thought it was just some myth until in 1980 Herbert Benson it was a Harvard researcher went to India God these monks hooked them up with sensors and had them do this to mow the superheating inner heat breeding and he found that they were able to increase the temperature in their fingers by 17 degrees and they were able to dry wet sheets placed on their backs in a very cold room within about a half an hour just by breathing in certain ways so this breathing technique was then adopted by a Dutch man named wim HOF now hundreds of thousands of people are doing this what they found is it not only helps to superheat the body but it can also help heal a bunch of chronic diseases and I know that sounds like pseudoscience and hogwash but there are studies at very legitimate institutions and scientists looking into this now and finding is very effective especially for autoimmune diseases what I think is so interesting about this technique is we know about 50% of how it works we can see what hormones are secreted into the bloodstream we can see how breathing in certain ways will stimulate a sympathetic response create more heat but we don't know how it's able to protect these people against frostbite and hypothermia we don't know how they're able to sit in the snow or in a bucket of ice for hours and hours and not come down with these with any problems so that's what I think is very fascinating about the science of breathing is we think we've gotten everything figured out but there's still so much more to learn about our own bodies potential and how we can use this very simple tool to do a bunch of things that just a few years ago we're considered medically impossible so are you saying since since you said it I can say it so you kind of said yeah you thought this was hogwash but it sounds like none of this is apocryphal none of this is anecdotal no not at all there's you can see the studies on the I put the whole bibliography of of the book on my site you can go there and see it or it's in the back of the book yeah gonna buy it so it's it's all available and you can look up to moe wim HOF breathing and you can see videotapes of these monks filmed by Harvard watching them do their thing and if that's not legit enough and the study that he released came out in nature one of the most esteemed scientific journals around so that this is not some some guy in Arizona is garage making claims on the Internet this is legitimate stuff and it's still so hard when I've talked to the the doctors in my extended family here they say no that's impossible now can't happen and then I send them to studies and they just kind of say that's interesting and and that's it so people are pretty confounded and I think that we're just learning the human body's true potential and its capabilities right now and breathing is definitely a component an anchor to allow us to do all these things that again were considered impossible decades ago but are showing are a part of our makeup right now and that almost everyone's able to tap into you know it's funny what's enclosing out it's like and it's a tough question to ask cause you know given the current situation as we discussed other threats global warming asteroids or our country's future as a democracy and I know you're going to just say you're a reporter and everyone from outside magazine does exactly the same thing but if we go back to our skull our lungs oxygen co2 and the future I'm not saying okay this is a panel I'm not saying your book is up a panacea I understand that you're reporting what you learned but if something was going to happen that was going to make us better in terms of health and as a species as a hypothetical what would you believe that could be well I think it's already happening and it's happening because of awareness we didn't know about these things ten years twenty years ago right I mean think think about what's happened with food I think about the stuff I ate as a kid how awful that is and think about our awareness now now we know how bad that stuff is and we know the sources that we're telling us this stuff is good our BS so I think through awareness you're allowing to give to give people a choice so not everyone's gonna dedicate their life to breathing right maybe some some people don't even want to do it for 10 minutes properly 10 minutes or 20 minutes a day but to have that choice for the people who do decide they want to do this and improve their health that's what I think it's all about and and from what I've heard from doctors and researchers one of them told me this he said how we breathe is as important to our health happiness longevity as what we eat or how much we exercise whatever genes we've inherited this is really a missing pillar of health so you can't ever really be healthy even if you're eating right even if you're exercising hours a day if you don't have your breathing in check and so I really think it needs to be considered along with those two other elements when we're talking about how we feel or what we're able to do and the awareness of that I hope is is gonna continue and again as I said at the beginning the one benefit or silver lining to this faul faul Co with flu is that I think it's making people a lot more aware that the ways in which we breathe are so important that's an excellent way of ending this so thank you so much for joining us today James it's pleasure and as I said you know it's always nice for me when I read a book because you know and that's the other thing everyone comes in my bookstore says you can't judge a book by it's cover but every single person who comes in does so you should be proud of the cover and you know it is of these of the of lungs and does show all this interconnectedness and it will you know it makes a difference and that's why publishers figure out covers a lot of debate on that cover but we finally came to I figured there yep every every author I've never talked okay thanks so much dance thank you very much appreciate it

Channel: Wellington Square Bookshop

Views: 11,511

Keywords: breath, breathe, monks, wellington, wellington square bookshop, books, bookshop, indie, james nestor, freediving, deep, deep dive, hold my breath

Id: e6u3SItwHU0

Length: 55min 55sec (3355 seconds)

Published: Wed May 20 2020