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

welcome back quick brains here's your question of today what are some of the best ways to breathe for optimal brain performance we've talked about this in our online programs in social media and a lot of the videos that you subscribe to the breath sex everything in our life it affects our focus our concentration our mental energy our vitality it affects our immune system and so much more yet most of us are not doing it the right way because like many things like memory and focus and concentration breathing was not one of those things that was taught back in uh in school and so this is such an important topic and if you read limitless you know uh how important it is and how much i emphasized what we do during our brain breaks to do this breathing and so what i want everyone to do is make sure you share this episode with just two or three family members or friends and learn it as if you're going to teach it to somebody else because this is this session is going to be really rich because we take advantage of the explanation effect when you learn to explain it to somebody else you get to learn it even better and so here we have the expert we have james nestor and i'm a big fan so i'm kind of geeking out over this he's a science journalist and he's author new york times best-selling book breath the new science of a lost art welcome to the show james thanks a lot for having me so we were talking a little bit about this before we started to record and before we go into the methods you know i know we're familiar with each other's work that i feel like knowledge by itself is not power it's potential power a lot of people know what to do because the methods on on how to breathe for optimal performance it's it's pretty simple and so a lot of people know what they do to do but they don't always do what they know so what i wanted to talk to you before is more there's two other areas that we talk about in the limitless model the method being the last the first two m's being mindset and motivation you know to overcome limits in this area we want to address these two other areas what what does let's talk with motivation a big part of of human motivation we found in our research is finding purpose finding reasons and a lot of people they don't know why they should we should be having a conversation about breath they're doing it naturally they do it 20 000 whatever times a day unconsciously why why is breath so important why have you dedicated a whole book to this subject yeah i never intended to dedicate four years of my life researching something so seemingly simple as breathing but then once you start getting into it you notice that this this very basic biological function controls everything in our bodies and we can take control of this function and when we do we can take control of otherwise unconscious things that are happening in in our body including our mind how we breathe affects our brain in so many ways and if you're looking at motivation what you need to do in order to be motivated and to memorize something and to really focus is you have to first focus on your breathing any meditation if you're staring at the buddha if you're staring at shiva whatever you want to look at staring at a cross at jesus you can't do that unless you get into the zone you can't get into this prayer unless you get into the zone and what's the first thing you do when you start praying is you focus on your breath or you recite a certain phrase that makes you control your breathing and by controlling your breathing you can take control of different centers of your brain and be able to hone in on whatever message you're trying to understand or remember there are so many reasons to why to prioritize breath you know it's one of those things where people talk about food all the time but we could go weeks without food you know or even water we could go days without water but how many minutes can we go without without breathing and so we're talking about motivation to get everyone kind of enrolled with the the emotional component how does uh i believe reasons reap results how does breath affect our immune system or our longevity all these other areas so so many of us are existing in this state of very low grade stress stress is just running in the background this is why so many people have autoimmune diseases this is why so many people are getting sick all the time if you look at the top 10 killers in the world the vast majority of those are tied to chronic inflammation as a result of chronic stress so one of the quickest things you can do to help reduce stress is to take control of your breathing because when we have unconscious stress in our bodies we tend to breathe too much sometimes we'll breathe out of our mouth right and this creates a feedback loop when your body senses your breathing too much the brain picks up on this and starts putting you into a stress state and then the brain sends signals and neurotransmitters throughout the rest of the body and brain to continue being stressed so the first thing that you can do and i learned this from andrew huberman down at stanford is you can take two big inhales one on top of the other and force yourself to sigh so we have a separate subsect in our brain of neurons dedicated to controlling sine and if you look at animals in the wild what do they do before they go to sleep if you do that about three or four times that sends signals throughout your body and your brain to relax and it's a great trick to do before public speaking or any other time you sense yourself getting stressed or nervous um so breath is so very important so these are all the reasons we're talking about so making sure we're priming everybody who's listening and watching this to to do the things you're about to learn but a lot of people again common sense is not common practice so that's that's wonderful when it comes to the element of motivation one of the other things that we find james that people don't follow through on doing the strategies is because they might have the motivation but maybe they have the wrong mindset you know mindset or maybe their attitudes about something maybe it's their assumptions about how things work maybe it's those attitudes assumptions about themselves you know as maybe this is a kind of different kind of question but when you're working with trained or expert breathers whatever that whatever form they come in do you see a through line in terms of how they look at breath what their mindset is around breathing maybe their beliefs or maybe their identity i am something absolutely these people are all aware of their breathing and they're aware of their breathing when they're exercising they're wherever they're breathing when they're relaxed when they're in front of a computer and that's really the first thing just because this can work unconsciously which is wonderful i would hate to have to think about breathing 25 000 times a day but just because it's unconscious doesn't mean we can better focus on it and adapt ourselves to really hone in on each of the different ways of breathing to allow our bodies to function in different ways and especially our brain just the difference between nasal breathing and mouth breathing what that does to your brain and how that allows you to remember things more easily breathing through the nose this has been well studied and yet you look around and you see people constantly breathing through their mouths you know whether they're public speaking or trying to focus on something and it's it's you know we get what the brain takes 20 of our energy from from our body and we get the majority of our energy from our breathing so we want to use that energy efficiently and and breathing and taking control of your breathing is really the quickest way of doing that powerful in mindset in uh in limitless we talk about these lies lie stands for a limited idea entertains not necessarily true but we give it energy and we we believe we choose to believe it's true so maybe one of those blo those lies that we were told unconsciously or just through our environment or experience is that that breathing through your mouth is is this is something that's beneficial or maybe we weren't taught anything about it at all so if that's one of the lies what do you does anything come to mind is there another lie that's uh widely accepted around the art and science of breath that maybe we might it's not necessarily what we know but what we know that's not that's not true misinformation the idea that breathing more will bring more oxygen into the body this is so counter-intuitive but you see people lifting weights or jogging and they really want to get more air into the body need more oxygen gonna feed more oxygen to my brain you are doing the opposite when you breathe this way by breathing slower in line with your metabolic needs you will get more oxygen more easily so it's not always a more is more situation here with breathing when it comes to breathing less is is often more when you get more oxygen more efficiently so this idea when we're in states of focus when we're reading a book when we need to memorize things then people are over breathing they're breathing through their mouths they're actually denying their brain circulation if you don't believe me all you have to do is take 30 big breaths you'll feel that lightness in your in your head maybe some some tingling in your fingers that's not from an increase of oxygen but a lack of circulation to those areas wow and this is great to be able to have these lies debunked because it's one of those things where and i'm sure it might must have been an interesting experience for you to look at something that human beings have been doing since human beings have been you know on this planet and then seeing what people used to do and what they're doing now because when you when you dissolve these lies we're kind of i don't know collectively everyone is listening transcending branding these trans so then that's part of where the limit happens like if you believe that breathing more heavily or more rapidly is going to help you then you might not use method that we're about to talk about or if you don't have motivation to move forward or if you believe that breathing through your mouth is more preferable than your nose for some reason so let's get into some of these methods because they're pretty straightforward we we hear things uh through uh through our friends through online about about box breathing nasal breathing alternate nostrils fire breathing wim hof what is are there certain kind of go-to methods for different situations or is it one way of breathing you know throughout the entire day or how do you approach what's what's your perspective and mindset around these methods so when i first started really digging into this subject it was completely overwhelming because you've got these yoga books with like 600 different breathing methods that have all these crazy names then you have wim hof method which is saying breathe way more and that's good for you then you have buteyko or other yoga methods where they're saying breathe less hardly breathe at all and that's good for you so they all seem to be countering one another but once you get into this you understand that there are different ways to breathe for different circumstances if you want more energy if you want to go to sleep if you want to focus if you want to digest food better so one person who has studied breathing for for decades told me there is many ways of breathing as there are foods to eat and just how different foods can affect our bodies differently we can breathe in different ways and affect our bodies and minds differently as well so i i guess so many of these things are based around this one premise these the variations on the same theme that the more you exhale more slowly you exhale the more relaxed you will be and the more you inhale the more amped you're going to get and you can see this for yourself by placing your hand on your heart taking an inhale to a count of about five and then exhaling to about seven or eight if you can softly you're gonna notice your heart rate speeding up as you inhale and slowing down when you exhale so box breathing is one of these variations on this theme guess what you're doing when you're box breathing you're inhaling for four you're either holding your breath or you're exhaling for three quarters of the time what's that going to do to your nervous system it's going to calm you down it's also going to force you to breathe less so you can get more oxygen more easily during a breath hold after about 30 seconds the brain actually gets more oxygen than if you were breathing consistently so the brain is very smart at utilizing energy so you could go into 478 breathing as well and and you're going to notice these same themes coming up inhale to four hold for seven exhale to eight what's going on there three quarters of the time you're exhaling or holding your breath and there are a zillion different ways to a zillion different methods that have a zillion different names but they're all working on the same premise right so that principle so there's a promise behind the principle of taking more time to to exhale and that's going more that's down regulating your nervousness maybe putting you in more of a parasympathetic maybe rest and and digest now do you let's let's talk about in context of performance like as you span the day the time that you're awake and sleeping is different i'm hoping what i'm doing during the day is actually more becoming more ingrained in my habits at night but we could talk about that also as well but are there certain points throughout the day when you need to perform like we tell people to to study or to learn for maybe 30 45 minutes and then take a brain break and in that five minutes enter we do things like hydrate we do things like move you know get some fresh air and and to breathe what would you recommend during that time if somebody is let's say studying or they're on zoom calls what kind of breathing would you recommend there so when we're studying we need to be awake so we don't want to relax ourselves too much and some of these breathing methods when you're holding your breath and exhaling longer than your inhaling will maybe relax you too much you want to be balanced in these states so the best breathing method it's so deceptively simple people are gonna say oh this isn't gonna do anything for me but give it a try and you'll see and check out the scientific studies and you can also see for yourself it's just to inhale at a rate of about five to six seconds and exhale at a rate of about five to six seconds do this through your nose in this rhythmic pattern so just by breathing this way you're balancing your nervous system but you are also able to sort of you can organize different areas in your brain the emotional areas with the frontal cortex and they found this that the same thing doesn't happen with the nose it or it doesn't happen with the mouth it only happens when you're breathing through the nose in this rhythmic way you can bring these different brain areas online and the amplitude and the brain waves actually change these different congregations of neurons in your brain will change to allow you to remember things more easily now in in your work have you looked into research between nostrils like your left and your right and how can we use that knowledge and wisdom to to further everyone's performance yeah so this has been around in hindu culture for thousands of years alternate nostril breathing or naughty shot hannah whatever you want to call it so our bodies naturally will shift the airflow through our nostrils throughout the day every 30 minutes to around three or four hours you will become left nostril dominant or right nostril dominant and sometimes it's even but mostly it's shifting back and forth so for a long time scientists have known this for over 100 years but they said why would the body possibly do this so they started finding out around 30 years ago when they started conducting scientific studies that breathing air through these different nostrils affects the brain and affects the bodies in different ways so inhaling through your right nostril the yogi said this would heat your body up and it's been shown to increase heart rate increase blood pressure and activate the left side of your brain a little more and then so people who are just listening to this so breathing to your right that means you're holding your your left nostril closed that's that's exactly right and so breathing through the left nostril inhaling and exhaling through the left nostril will calm the body down so it activates more of the quote-unquote right side of of the brain and heart rate will go down blood pressure will go down so yogis have been doing this forever but luckily now we have scientific instruments that can actually measure to see what happens in the brain what happens in the body when we breathe this way so you can use this alternate nostril breathing once again there's dozens and dozens of ways to do this but it's a great way of just checking in and rebalancing yourself by taking control of these otherwise autonomic functions and when you exhale you're exhaling through your nostrils as well when you're doing that exercise and not your mouth yes inhale through the right is the strongest sympathetic or heating effect exhale is is much less so so exhale is more considered the same as an inhale through the left this is very complicated and weird so it's basically the inhale is the one that's stimulating through the right and through the left inhaling and exhaling has the same calming effect if you're listening to this on spotify or pandora or itunes i recommend you to check this out also on on youtube as well and make sure you subscribe for more of this how about so that's the context of these brain breaks what about let's say when you want to be able to go to sleep are you do you focus do you ever do have a routine for yourself or start with people that you've done research feedback on ways to be able to optimize your your sleep sure so uh to be clear i'm a science journalist and uh a lot of people now think i am a breathing guru who is the best breather in the world and that is so far from the truth my my job was to go out into this world and talk to some of the best breathers in the world and scientists that's not to say i didn't pick up a bunch of tricks from them and haven't incorporated them into my life but i i think what what i do is just what i've found has has worked so there's a bunch of other methods in in the book and i'm free on the website for what might work for other people but but personally i find that that exhaling more can really put me in the zone and when i was flying around a lot i thought on an airplane um you know this was the quickest way of relaxing myself and going to sleep is taking control of my breath that 478 breathing you start with a couple of those size then you can inhale to a count of four through the nose softly hold for seven two three four five six seven exhale eight two three four five six seven eight so i can see you right now you can see that maybe this is the wrong breathing technique to be doing on a on a podcast but this instantly i mean within a few seconds shifts your body from that sympathetic stressful state into this very calming state and some people say oh this is just the placebo effect put on your heart rate variability monitor check your blood pressure before and after do your own measurements and you will see i've done this a zillion times in labs and it is so profound and powerful this is not a subtle thing and i could tell jim almost just fell asleep forever this is true i felt myself really down regulated what about in um do you practice cold therapy at all i know you mentioned wim hof a couple of times do you recommend a breathing like a box breathing like four four four four there or any door you just let whatever organically happens when you're in the cold shower or an ice bath i swim in the ocean as often as possible it's a little cold right now so i'm wearing a wetsuit um i'm trying to get more acclimated to colder water the benefits are documented they're profound i've seen people transformed by this i'm also total wimp who grew up in southern california so i'm not used to like real cold water but what i do before i i do that is is too much breathing so or you could call it wim hof breathing you could call it tumo again million different names it's all doing the same stuff so this is when you want to amp your body up you want that sympathetic stress a lot of people think why do i want to stress myself out i'm stressed all day what these breathing patterns do vigorous pranayamas sudarshan kriya tumo wimhoff is they focus that stress in a controlled amount of time so 20 minutes you're stressing out you're breathing as hard as you can so that the rest of the day you're chilled out you're blowing your fuse right there you know this is a way of releasing pressure so i've found that when i do that breathing and then take a cold shower i can deal with it a lot more easily when i'm in the shower i try to breathe rhythmically in a very long cycle i found that breath holds are harder in a cold shower but that rhythmic breathing uh able uh enables your circulation to increase uh more vasodilation so more blood is flowing and and it feels more warming to me whatever people do is fine but that's that's personally what i've done that that i find works the best and i recommend everybody as always to check with their the health practitioner obviously you want to do that that active really fast breathing in the cold and certainly not but that's why just more like conscious breathing um while you're in while you're in that cold what about um this is fascinating we talked about sighing what about humming i had to vote voice coach uh because i may speak for a living talk about the power humming does that is that if is that um related to breathing or however so many benefits this is a way of very quickly down regulating your nervous system and calming yourself down it's also a wonderful way of releasing 15 times more nitric oxide in your nasal cavities in your sinuses and nitric oxide for people who don't know i'll give a real quick primer here it so happens to be what is released when you take the drug viagra the way that viagra does all of all of its wonderful things is it's a vasodilator and it releases nitric oxide so you can release your own viagra in your own phone or any in your own nose what am i talking about um so uh and it's also uh so good for circulation and um and distribution of oxygen releases more oxygen um throughout the body there's so many benefits to having more nitric oxide so humming is the quickest way of doing that so and so the other ones we had something linked to it some kind of activity like a brain break do this kind right before you sleep i always found that the best way of kind of introducing we talked about this in the book on the chapter on habits is is linking into another existing habit so if you're going to take a brain break great then you do your this kind of breathing you know maybe with your nostrils if you're lying there in bed you know then you could do me your your four seven eight if you're going to do your ice bath you could do right before it linked that habit of your your your wim hof or your fire breathing or what have you when would you do the humming like um when do you would you make you just basically just schedule it at any time or is it is it like when's the last time you humped i was walking around my neighborhood before this interview and i was humming okay i try to do it uh as often as as i can i'm sure i look like a freak to everyone around me luckily uh people are very well spaced out here in san francisco so i don't think anyone heard me but that's one thing that wim hof everyone thinks like he's just breathing wim hof breaths all day long he's not he's doing that for about 20 minutes the rest of the time he's breathing very slowly through his nose and he's humming he just walks around humming all day so i wouldn't suggest you don't have to book in four hours of this humming but try with like five minutes here five minutes there and and see how it makes you feel and we know that there are so many benefits to doing it and again this stuff is totally free and and anyone can do it anywhere and then another question in terms of context is anxiety if somebody uh they have test anxiety some of our listeners or fear of public speaking and uh so where would your go-to what method would you personally recommend maybe one of the ones we've mentioned already so populations of people with anxiety or other fear-based disorders like panic or even anorexia agoraphobia and more traditionally breathe way more than they need to far above their metabolic needs and they tend to breathe through their mouths we know this with asthmatics with with panic suffers on and on and on um it's a consistent pattern and scientists have shown this so the very first thing that people should do with anxiety is just become aware of your breathing especially when you sense you're starting to panic become aware of your breathing once you become aware of it you can start to slow it down what happens with a lot of people with panic and asthma is they sense an attack coming on they said i'm losing the ability to breathe they breathe more and more and more and more which guess what happens that triggers the attack so there's been so many studies just retraining people with panic and asthma to breathe less to breathe slowly and through their noses and this can have a huge impact on these states and it can actually help reverse them and so if somebody's have pan attack sometimes people give them a paper bag to breathe and what's what's that doing is it is it the carbon dioxide yeah so so these people are very low in in co2 which is why they're panicking their chemoreceptors are telling them there's a problem they need to breathe more so what what the paper bag is is doing is allowing them to capture more co2 and inhaling that co2 ents do not suggest people do this anymore because the problem is this became so well known that people with heart attacks who uh they were having heart attacks not panic attacks people are giving them paper bags which is not what you want to do so the most effective thing to do instead of reaching for a paper bag or carrying a paper bag with you no we have a nose we have lips we have lungs we have a brain we can take control of our breathing on our own we can slow down our breathing we can focus on it we can start exhaling more and that's just as effective i would say argue more effective than any paper bag and it's interesting because in the book you talk about how when you do hold your breath it's not the urge the reason why you when a breed is not to get more oxygen in is actually to dispel the carbon dioxide correct yeah holding your so right now if you exhale you hold your breath that need to breathe is not dictated by a lack of oxygen but an increase of co2 so co2 is the thing telling us we need to breathe so the problem and this is being studied right now i think it's just so fascinating with so many people with anxiety other fear-based disorders is right now the theory is that these people are so sensitized to co2 that they have consciously and unconsciously force themselves to over breathe because any increase if co2 signals an attack to them because when co2 increases they consider that something is constricting them or they can't breathe so they're now working on and this is uh research again that's happening right now on just conditioning them to breathe more slowly to make their chemoreceptors more flexible so that they will be able to handle a higher load of co2 which is actually a normal load of co2 to calm their brain that's a little technical but but that's what's happening right now and then we'll put this also in the bonus and that's why every episode is always 20 minutes because they're brain hacks for busy people who want to uh to learn faster be able to achieve more that's why a lot of spotify people binge listen to many of them but i encourage everyone to watch on youtube because that's where we put the full the full conversation make sure you subscribe there and we'll also put links to everything that we're talking about in our show notes always at gymquick.com forward slash notes james i had a quick question about you know before we were talking about human beings they they did things naturally right we didn't have to go to the gym because we're always moving you know foods we're different breathing now now there's this huge rise of like ailments melodies right uh asthma sleep apnea these allergies um why why is this happening and i know there's not one simple solution right or one one thing that's causing it um but also what um what can we do about it you know you you talk a lot about and i've had i had braces growing up you know and those like that i didn't and i have sleep apnea which i talked about in the book where i stopped breathing a few hundred times in the evening each time was for at least 10 seconds i had cpap device i had done this dental device i eventually went to ucla the head of throat there did this uh you triple p and they they diagnosed it wasn't they put me to sleep and actually took the camera to see make sure it wasn't my tongue that was the obstruction that was really then i gave him permission to do the surgery only if there was actual physical obstruction they could clear um and from there i went from 90 minutes a night or two hours a night of sleep you know for five years almost uh two two to four and i got to build from there then a lot of the sleep packs helped and so that's uh this is very personal for me this conversation there's asthma in my family my parents both have sleep apnea my siblings have apnea and so what's going on as as are we passing on these these traits generation generation and is there anything we could do to kind of to to stop put a stop hold on it so future generations or even our future the rest of your life could mitigate that challenge so this is one of the things i learned from researchers early on that i just could not believe that i had always understood that evolution meant progress that we're getting stronger and fitter and better with every generation but if you look at the human species right now that is absolutely not what is happening and especially with our breathing if you look at our ancestors 400 years ago on back they all had perfectly straight teeth these huge jaws wider airways wider nasal apertures so from the skeletal record we can see that they breathe so much more easily than we have so when you consider right now the majority of the human population now has a chronic respiratory problem in your story i've heard it a zillion times i've suffered through a lot of those things i had extractions braces um you know constant airway obstruction i was getting bronchitis pneumonia and we consider that since this is so prevalent it's just normal now to be cruising around with the cpap you know wherever you go but it's not and the fact that our ancestors or no other animal in the wild suffers from this is a big wake-up call to what's happening to us so what can you do about it a lot of people have problems with their nose some people have obstruction and they're oral fairing some people have central sleep apnea it's a problem with their brain so there's no blanket prescription for everyone the first thing you have to do is become aware of your breathing dysfunction and then determine where it's coming from then you need to double down on that luckily a lot of us don't need surgery okay what we need to do is to develop proper habits so that healthy breathing becomes something that can run in our unconscious but as you know changing habits can take a long long time so that's why we do the conscious breathing so that our unconscious brain will breathe this way to begin with i know that that's probably not the answer you wanted but there's so many breathing problems and there's so many different fixes i just don't feel uh comfortable as a as a journalist trying to prescribe anything for anyone yeah i would recommend anybody it's a really good rate great place to start is to start with your book breath i would highly recommend all our quick readers you know add that into your one book a week club yeah as you're doing that and uh final question james is there is there one thing besides getting the book which uh and where can people get the book everywhere your our books came out the same time last year um is there a website or just their favorite bookstore sure i on my website there i put my publisher allowed me to put all of the scientific uh studies and articles so the entire bibliography is available for free because i know a lot of this stuff seems impossible but you can see videos you can see interviews with harvard professors um you can see uh you know archival photos you can see data sheets and all that at mr james nestor.com that's an mr because some other jerk took james nestor so mr james nestor.com we'll take you to that there are also breathing um uh techniques on there videos of breathing techniques and interviews with several experts in the field there's links to buy the book there too if you want to do that but but uh i think our books are you know available wherever books are sold which i guess now is just like online but go to your local bookstore for ignore what i just said there go to your local bookstore order it through them absolutely possible i would recommend everybody's uh screenshot this episode and tag james your con your social media which is are you active more on which social media platform i'm trying to get better at this thing called instagram which is normal for me being an old person but uh i'm on instagram more than any other um and my handle is mr james nestor on that as well very good so tag mr james nestor on instagram follow him on instagram also as well tag me in it and what i want you to do as you're posting this share of your big aha i mean this is a great in-depth conversation what was one idea inspiration maybe an instruction that you are taking away from this conversation that way you the people following you your fans your family your friends they could benefit from this also as well i'll actually repost some of my favorites and i have actually gifted your book to many of my friends and family members so i'll actually give a copy to one person also as well just says thank you for being active in this process and uh james thank you so much for being on our show and taking time at your schedule and uh much appreciation thanks a lot for having me really appreciate it hi quick brain it's your brain coach i want to thank you so much for watching this video three things to do number one make sure you share this because when you teach something you get to learn it twice update your learning so you can update other people's learning as well number two make sure you subscribe to this channel so you don't miss a thing because if you miss a video you miss a lot and finally make sure you hit that bell so you're notified and you find out we put out the latest and the greatest one extra thing if you want really close attention then text me here is my phone number three one zero two nine nine nine three did you remember that number 310-299-9362 shoot me a text and we'll stay in touch ask me your burning question and i wish your days before lots of life lots of love lots of laughter and always lots of learning i'll see you in our next video

Channel: Jim Kwik

Views: 51,965

Keywords: jim kwik, james nestor, breathing exercises, james nestor breathing, kwik brain, james nestor breath, james nestor breathing exercises, breathing techniques, kwik, jim kwik podcast, how to breathe, deep breathing exercises, wim hof, wim hof breathing techniques, nasal breathing

Id: v4haB-y8LVQ

Length: 39min 50sec (2390 seconds)

Published: Wed May 05 2021