The 4 BREATHING SECRETS That Will TRANSFORM Your Health Today! | James Nestor

if you're not breathing correctly you're never ever going to be healthy these methods can have an incredible impact on both mental health and physical health some things that scientists thought were absolutely impossible have been proven to be absolutely possible by focusing on your breathing it's hard to see someone who hasn't had a very profound reaction after 20 minutes wow i feel so good [Music] we can almost induce a feeling of anxiety and panic by changing the way that we breathe of course we can and if anyone wants to do that you can start breathing in this very unhealthy way right now you will stimulate a sympathetic response and that's easily measured so i thought this was interesting as well um at ucsf which is very close to my house university of california san francisco dr margaret chesney had worked for for decades on national institutes of health research looking into something called continuous partial awareness also known as email apnea and what she had found was that when we sit down at our desks in the morning one estimate says that 80 percent of office workers do this we open up our email got zoom on got twitter on oh my god i have 60 emails we stopped breathing we just stopped breathing then we go so she called it email apnia because we're so distracted and stressed out by what's going on if you think about when you're extremely let's say there's a tiger coming around the corner here of my house what am i going to do i'm going to be silent because that is a reflex reaction to be to be very scared to be silent so you don't become prey and once it's on once the fight is on i'm going to breathe a ton um to to get more us to get more energy to my body to feed more energy to my brain and heart and other essential muscles to get me out of that situation or to fight off that thing but we do the same thing unconsciously at work even though there's no tiger around even though there's nothing threatening us our sense of threat has become so sensitized that so many of us will stop breathing or start breathing completely dysfunctional and she's found that if you do this for long enough it can have some of the same effects on us as sleep apnea by that i mean neurological disorders physical problems again spiking blood glucose adrenaline um and it's just something so few of us are aware of and i was wearing a pulse ox and all these different measuring what happened every morning i put the stuff on and sit down my breathing would go to hell every single morning um and i realized that you know that's probably a reason why around 11 30 i'd get i used to get the slight headache i used to feel kind of fatigued it was still morning time and i wasn't full of energy and so by just switching your breathing again you can allow your body to work so much more efficiently yeah i mean thanks for sharing that and i think that term email apnea is brilliant because it just brings it to life for people that wow who doesn't check email every day who doesn't spend a lot of time on their computers particularly now more than more than ever and i really i i you know i can't stop shaking the feeling you mentioned the tiger right that might be popping around the block in san francisco around from where you live uh which i hope is not happening but um your body's actually doing what it's meant to do in response to a threat your body is meant to become anxious it's meant to become hyper vigilant you meant to your blood sugar sugar's meant to go up but your blood pressure is meant to go up all these things are happening to prepare you for danger so you can escape from that danger so actually your body is functioning the way it is designed to function given the fact that it perceives that to be a threat so the problem is that we're perceiving the email inbox or the multiple screens open to be a threat so your body is reacting in the same way so it's not that there's anything wrong with people right i actually i think it's very empowering this your body is not broken actually your body's doing what it's meant to do you just gotta give it a different signal you've got to just teach it go hey you know what i'm not in danger there isn't a tiger there it's just 20 emails right so um i'm a big fan of talking to patients about transition times so um a transition time let's say from work to home life instead of just coming all ramps up from work into then trying to relax with your partner and your children maybe have a five minute transition where you do some breathing or you do some yoga something just to move you shift you from one gear to the other gear and i've been talking to a lot of people particularly during the pandemic about zoom cause i said before you eat your lunch just take a couple of minutes maybe get outside in the garden if you're lucky to have one maybe just slow down your breathing do two minutes of nasal breathing put your body in a different uh state and you will digest your food better you'll crave different amounts it's i've actually seen uh james i'm not sure if you've come across this i've not seen any research to support this but i have seen with some patients in the last few years who thought they were reacting to a certain food now of course some people do react to certain foods whether intolerance or analogy but sometimes i realized they were reacting to the way that they their body was whilst they were eating so when they did a couple of minutes i have a breath called the 345 breath which i've been recommending for many years again a similar theme right a longer exhale than an inhale but people who who try that 345 breath for two minutes before they have their dinner sometimes they would say hey i'm not actually reacting to that food anymore so i'm saying well maybe it's about that you're eating in a completely stressed out state your body's not able to receive that food but when you chill out and relax your body's like hey this food is okay absolutely right again it comes down to nature and i thought you made a really good point there it's there's nothing wrong with us feeding more circulation to our skeletal muscles when we get threatened this is really good this is what allowed our species to survive in the wild for so long it's that perceived danger and that perceived threat that is so sensitized right now that people will react to an email the same way that they would have reacted a thousand years ago to that tiger or to being attacked by a mammoth or whatever and and so you know some of this is a lot of this is psychological but the neat thing about breathing is by changing the way in which you breathe you can actually change how your mind is processing thoughts and feelings and emotions and we know that because this is a two-way street so there are signals coming from your brain telling your organs what to do but there are also signals coming from your organs telling your brain what to do so another reason why that slower breathing works you're like i can actually not only do i feel better i can think more clearly not a placebo this is how it works in our bodies and it's so important to acknowledge this throughout the day those transition times what a wonderful thing to do especially before a meal especially if you have gut issues take a couple minutes that's not asking a lot breathe calmly relax yourself and go in and eat and i think that you'd be amazed by how how quickly you will show benefits of digestion i don't think it's too much of a mystery um why so in so many cultures there's grace before a meal right you sit down you calmly recite whatever phrase doesn't matter what religion you sit there a moment you be thankful for the food you're about to eat then you eat it i think that there is a scientific foundation for how effective that is i i completely agree and actually a few weeks ago i finished writing my fourth book on uh weight loss for people who are looking to lose weight and i've written a section on this exact exact area what exactly what you say that actually i don't think this is by accident there are many benefits of doing this and it's reflective of our busy modern culture we don't have time for this kind of stuff you know we've evolved as humans we don't need all that kind of slow stuff that gratitude that grace but you know what we're realizing more than ever now actually we are it's a as you say it's a lost art it's a lot just speaking to that this 5.5 breaths a minute 5.5 second inhale exhale this is nothing new either this was all adapted researchers found from prayers from buddhist prayers from kundalini yoga prayers from catholic prayers all of them that they looked at locked in to this respiration rate of about 5.5 seconds and these italian researchers said this is probably no coincidence all these different cultures came to the same conclusion that wow we feel so much more connected to ourselves to the universe to everything by reciting this prayer a lot of that had to do this is what the researchers said to the respiration rate to breathing in this certain way to calm your body and make you more receptive to that message yeah thanks james i was chatting to my uh videographer gareth who's just nipped out at the moment and i was saying hey i'm going to talk to james i know since you've heard my chats with uh patrick and brian he's changed his life you know he's now he's tried the mouth taping at night he sleeps better he now runs he does some light jogging only nasal breathing and really feeling the benefits but he said one thing i wonder if you could ask james about um is he says when i go upstairs now if i go up a lot of stairs and i nasal breathe my recovery is so much quicker than when i mouth breathe but you've already answered that really you said that throughout this conversation you're you're basically saying your physiology changes it works more optimally when we breathe through our nose as opposed to our mouth but there is another kind of real life example this was minutes before we started the call today he said you know it's just incredible um and you mentioned athletes and i just want if you could briefly i mean the time that we've got left i'd love to cover this and also maybe some of those more super breathing techniques so we could just cover athletics and kind of recovery and why people really should make that effort i think it'll be super helpful so the key with athletic performance is you want to do more for longer in a state of pure efficiency and we know that nasal breathing is going to allow you to perform harder with a lower heart rate you're going to be getting more oxygen more efficiently by breathing less again we know how counterintuitive this is but the science is very clear on that and you can see this with professional athletes who have adopted to nasal breathing sanya richards ross the best uh runner sprinter for 10 years going uh it's fascinating to look at pictures of her uh in the olympics closed mouth nasal breathing all of her competitors beside her breathing through the mouth she's in front of the line winning golds time and time again and she's just one example of what we've already known for decades dr john dewyard has done tons of science tons of work in this looking at cyclists nasal breathing versus mouth breathing and looking at their endurance looking at their performance and looking at recovery and it is such a drastic difference between those two what one reason why a lot of people give up is they try nasal breathing they've been habitually mouth breathing while they're jogging for sometimes decades they try nasal breathing like ah i can't get enough air in there i'm giving up but sometimes it can take weeks or even months to truly acclimate this organ here to breathe properly but once you do the benefits are huge and check out the work by phil maffetone dr john dewyar and some of the athletes that have adopted proper nasal breathing or try most importantly try it yourself and and you can very clearly see the difference i would say to people because i've literally been experimenting this for maybe 12 18 months now uh you know when i go for a walk i'm nasal breathing like i'm it's you know no question i will make sure i don't think about it now because i know why i do it but initially i had to you know consciously think about it i do you know i take the kids for warts we all go we're all sort of trying to spot one of us as mouth breathing so i'm trying to instill it in my kids from a young age and this is important actually i went for a run with my son yesterday he's like daddy daddy look that guy's running his mouth breathing that guy's mouth breathing i'm like i'm sort of conflicted have i have i started something in him i'm not sure but but on one level i like it because i think okay as you said before awareness is key right without awareness we can't make any change so first of all let's be aware of what's happening let's not beat ourselves up be aware then let's go well maybe i'll start with a walk maybe a five minute walk each day nasal breathing and see how you go um and for me personally now i sort of i'm getting into running i was going to buy a heart rate monitor and i thought you know what forget it i i sort of don't want more and more tech in my life i'm trying to sort of go more minimalist and i use uh nasal breathing as my barometer as soon as i go too fast what i cannot nasal breathe and i have to open my mouth that's my trigger to slow down and i really feel i'm getting more efficient and uh it feels really good and you know what i'm not stiff the next day or that evening i i recover quickly again i will admit this is a subjective experience but it backs up the data and the science that you've written about so beautifully in your book but there's it exactly it it may be a subjective experience but it's it's grounded in real science if if you look at nasal breathing and you look at using that oxygen most efficiently you are allowing your body to operate in an aerobic state for longer than than to go anaerobic and have that lactic acid build up and all of that and this is very well known having that balance again of co2 and oxygen and something that patrick mcewen told me which i really liked he said never work out harder than you can breathe correctly so once you've reached that threshold and you're breathing you're like i really got to breathe through my mouth or you're breathing in a dysfunctional way you have to slow down and work yourself back up and by slowly working yourself up this way your performance is just going to shoot through the roof and we've seen that time and time again and again these weren't studies that i was doing these are studies that have been around for decades that right now there's this new interest in breathing in athletics and i have a feeling these people who are going to be adopting these healthy breathing habits are just going to show some incredible improvements yeah no absolutely and it's it's again it's just reflective of culture it's the more now we're quicker faster it's like i'm going to work i want to push it hard i'm going to i'm going to be grunting i'm going to be you know it's it's i i want is it a western thing i guess it isn't on some level like it's i really feel we're at that point now in western culture where we have to go look we do so many things beautifully well but we're kind of a bit lost on some of these other things and maybe just slowing down and doing less when we you know in adverse commerce work out or move our bodies maybe use your nose as the barometer and then you know you'll be working on your efficiency maybe you'll go you'll run less but you'll run more efficiently which actually will lead to running more just a few months down the line yeah it's still tied there's nothing wrong with running further and running faster than a competitor right that's that's human nature to want to do that but if you really want to do that you have to take control of the systems in your body and you have to be operating more efficiently why waste energy like why not store that energy then use it to best your competitor that's what sports performance is all about and something you mentioned that i thought was interesting is in so many ways like what we know about eating now food i remember in the 80 growing up in the 80s just the only things that were around the house were just like processed food and this was normal white bread velveeta cheese and everyone seemed to be eating this way well we know that eating that stuff is bad news i'd be hard-pressed to find someone who is going to defend eating highly processed foods it's bad news it took us a while to get to this point right so it took about maybe 20 years of science to come out now we all know it and i really think breathing is this next thing so 20 years ago even nowadays some people are poo pooing it say how we breathe doesn't matter the science is so clear and you can go back in history thousands of years again and they had been studying this for so long and it really feels like this wave of awareness is really starting to to crash right now i would agree james so so just for the sort of final stage of this conversation then um we've just to sort of really put it in perspective you know we're setting the scene that people are breathing too much they're breathing too fast and it's not necessarily how yeah of course breathing when you're working out and running sure work on it if you want to but again if you want to do a sprint you want to breathe through your mouse mount a beaten opponent that's okay it's what we're talking about is how do you habitually breathe right so um you know because i know there's some confusion so just to clarify it's what you're saying i think and certainly what i would say is practice breathing through your nose practice for a few minutes a day breathing less try and go for that six or even eight breaths a minute see how that feels now if you want to go beyond that if you want to go into super breathing territory right the cool stuff that people get oh you know what i want to i want to do a marathon up everest like vim half or you know which again appeals to us culture of doing more and i want to do all that crazy stuff there are quite a few different methods on there where we consciously over breathe so you were talking about under breathing now i want to talk about you know vim hoff uh the breathing technical one of his breathing techniques certainly the one that i've experienced and when i saw him speak in l.a a few years ago and i recorded a podcast with him a few weeks back it's not come out yet and we actually did it where you actually you know for 30 or 40 breaths you take these big breaths in and out and then you do a hold what is that doing what why should people think about these over breathing practices did you try them as part of your research did you look into the research what what sort of what would you tell people about these practices for those who are interested sure so the first thing i just have to second something that you said i'm talking about mouth breathing as a habit some people have written me and said i noticed i was laughing today and i took a few mouth breaths and again i'm like i thought i had made this very clear in the book so i've been breathing through my mouth talking to you today right and when i swim in the ocean i'm breathing through my mouth when i'm laughing i'm breathing through my mouth this is perfectly fine and perfectly natural so a few hundred breaths per day breathing through the mouth it's fine for taking 25 000 it's about that habit and that chronic breathing um you you want to be breathing through your nose as often as you can but that doesn't mean you should hate yourself for laughing or for breathing through your mouth i just want to make that really really clear for everyone or swimmers right swimmers swimmers like you know when you're swimming you sort of have to take it you don't have to but you may gulp in a lot of water unless you breathe in through your mouth so it's it can be normal for swimming it can be fine you know um i swim and surf almost every day out here in san francisco and i'll tell you i'm not breathing through my nose when i'm doing that it's impossible there's the salt water up there and there's nothing wrong with that exactly chronic is habit so i in the book after like you get that foundation of healthy breathing that everyone can benefit from i kept hearing about wim hof breathing these intense pranayamas holotropic breath work these long breath holes i said this is completely counter to what i learned before we shouldn't like acne is a bad thing over breathing is a bad thing all of that is true when it's unconscious but when you consciously do it when you place yourself into a position in which you tell yourself to follow with this ancient breathing technique and some of these include mouth breathing exhaling through the mouth or even inhaling through the mouth something amazing happens because you're allowing yourself to consciously take control of unconscious functions in your body so with whims specifically what i thought was so interesting is we have this autonomic nervous system that turns us on for sympathetic stress or turns us off and relaxes us parasympathetic and we've been told if you get a pick up a textbook it's going to say this is autonomic as in automatic as in beyond our conscious control but we can control it through breathing and when we control our nervous system function we can take control of our immune system functions as well and we've seen this people who have been practicing wim's version which he calls it wim hof method uh but he's very clear that this stuff has been around for at least a thousand years he didn't invent anything he was able to take this thing and distribute it to the masses and he's done that better than anyone on the planet for breathing awareness but it's no coincidence that the people who practice this people with autoimmune diseases with arthritis eczema psoriasis whatever they can show a marked decrease in the symptoms of their problems and sometimes they claim that they're completely healed by adopting these simple breathing habits because what they're doing is they're breathing in a way that purposely stresses themselves out for a short amount of time so that they can spend the rest of the day relaxing and healing themselves again seems a little counterintuitive why would i purposely want to stress myself out if i'm stressed out throughout the rest of the day the point is to focus that and to regain a balance in your body and in your health and that's exactly what these more intense over-breathing practices do i think what you said there about where this has come from that nobody knew has invented anything you know vim hasn't it's these are all uh practices that have been there uh but you also paid homage to them he's very he's he's he's got it out there to the masses in a fantastic way you've said that you know that in the indus valley 5000 years ago there's there's writings on this and that you actually i think you wrote the about that yoga or the reset the scriptures you saw showed yoga initially was just a breathing practice i think that's exactly true it's not true the abs up there were no standing poses there was no movement it was focusing meditating and breathing only in the last hundred years have we developed vinyasa flow that wasn't around until 100 years ago and i want to make this very clear to all the yogis out there i do yoga all the time love it i've seen the benefits there's science proving the benefits but this practice this modern yoga that most of us do is just that it's modern so the first yoga was a practice of breathing and focusing and then it developed in to holding one pose and breathing opening up this side inhaling into that lung opening up the other side and then about a hundred years ago 110 years ago those poses were combined into this sort of dance-like movement which had nothing to do with the early yoga so it really was all based on breathing and focusing on the breath yeah amazing and one of the i think you quote someone in the book um i can't remember who it was but someone said to you there are as many breath practices as there are diets i've never heard that before i thought that was incredible because we talked about conscious over breathing and you know if we had more time i would talk about tumor breathing and holotropic breathing but you know what it's all there in your book for people to read about um but that is who who said that phrase who was it a free diver told me that very early on which i thought was very surprising i didn't know that there were different ways of breathing this was years and years ago but by adopting those those different breathing practices you can push your body into different states you can relax yourself on purpose you can stress yourself out on purpose which has pronounced benefits to doing that as well and again you can find books there's yoga books with 400 different breathing practices with all of these crazy names all of that's great but i wanted to focus on the general concept behind these there are heavy breathing practices over breathing there are there's breath holding there's slow breathing and there's nasal breathing and you can call it whatever you want you can practice the chinese version of that the greek version of that the indian version of the doesn't matter because they're really all doing the same thing to me it's no coincidence that wim hof method also known as tumo has so many of the same benefits of sudarshan kriya which has been studying in 60 different independent studies to help people with anxiety depression autoimmune problems there's there's no coincidence that these things are helping people in the same way because guess what they have you breathe really intensely and then breathe really slowly it's almost the exact same practice just coming in from different directions absolutely before we wrap up you mentioned freediving and i know you wrote a book on that i haven't read it yet and i am definitely it's on right at the top of my list to to sort of reads uh when i want to get some time but one question i had about free divers who who obviously have masterful control of their breath did you notice was there a theme that you know a free driver by definition needs to have a very high level of control over their breath you know a high degree of carbon dioxide tolerance so they can actually go down and actually maintain that you know tolerate the buildup of carbon dioxide in their body without having that strong urge to to breathe given the multiple benefits of improving your breathing have you heard any stories in free drivers that actually a lot of them had mental health problems or depression or anxiety or or autoimmune conditions that that got better or the flip side is was it those conditions that actually led them to free driving in the first place i thought it was so interesting for me that many of them had anxiety issues sometimes depression issues sometimes addiction issues there's a great film that somebody made a very short film jonathan rempel about a free diver who had all of those things and she found free diving because when you free dive you are putting it is almost like a forced meditation you cannot free dive stressed out you cannot free dive with anxiety you cannot free dive with a sense of panic you have to completely give yourself over to the water and connect so deeply in your body and when you're down there everything is silent so you were so connected with your breath and with your brain on such an intimate level and this reconnects people with themselves when they're up on dry land afterwards and to so some people have found that salvation through freediving and so much of that is due to breath control so i've never seen i've met dozens and dozens of free divers that that book deep looked at the ocean from the surface to the very bottom of the sea looking at the human connection so towards the surface there was a lot of free diving but i've never seen one who suffered from anxiety i've never seen one who panicked because you just can't do that when when you're down deep in the water holding holding your breath there hasn't been any studies on this i think it would be fascinating to look at the physiology of someone before and after training for freediving look at markers of panic look at other issues even blood glucose um and how they react because free diving is that is the ultimate art of breathing you're focused on your breath connected to your breath the whole time it's breath it's mindfulness it's meditating it's everything all in one right to be able to to to do that practice and one study that we've not had a chance to talk about which i've underlined heavily in my book and i'd encourage people to read it in the book it's it's just this idea of fear and that lady who didn't who had that genetic condition without the amygdala this sort of emotional center the fear center of the brain and how basically you can't stress her out she would get scared of nothing until carbon dioxide went into it she got a dose of carbon dioxide and that then stressed her out and scared her i won't sort of spoil the rest of the story there for people but what's really incredible for that and i really want people to get this is that we think fear and anxiety is always about an external event oh that is happening to us we forget that it can be biology it can be physiology and and i really i know how many people suffer from these sort of conditions and i really really want to encourage them that what james has been talking about read the book learn about these techniques and start small because it can really transform every aspect of your life um james look i i really i don't say this often but that is a phenomenal book uh i i feel quite lucky actually i've got these early copies they're still very sort of the early unproofed manuscripts uh so i feel i've got sort of something quite special here um the podcast is called feel better live more because james i it's pretty obvious but fundamentally i i i've seen time and time again where people feel better in themselves to get more out of their lives and i think it's pretty clear that you're making the case that if we breathe better we're going to live more so i wonder if you know i i want people to get inspired by this i want them to get your book but i want people to take action i don't want them just to hear it and go that was interesting and then get on with their lives so i always like to leave the podcast with my guests with some sort of practical advice i know you've covered a lot of it already but just some sort of what would you say someone someone's heard this and they're still skeptical how would you encourage them to get going with a breath work practice in their daily lives i would say go see for yourself because you're your best judge of this if you have a blood pressure monitor and a lot of people do take your blood pressure before and after a simple breathing practice six times a minute you could start with that start small exactly as you had said and give it a while um by that give it a week so adopt a simple practice and again this isn't requiring you to go to a monastery or sit in a dark corner you can adopt healthy breathing practices anywhere and we know that there is a solid foundation of science between all of these things we have seen people absolutely transform by adopting simple breathing habits this is not a placebo effect it's absolutely real and i'm convinced i've experienced this myself i've talked to dozens and dozens of people who have also experienced it i've talked to the leaders in the field who have introduced me to all of their data and i i find that this is an underappreciated and under acknowledged aspect of our health but that's starting to change and it couldn't happen sooner especially right now in the midst of a pandemic focusing on your breathing can really have some transformative effects we're all walking around with this reservoir of untapped potential that we don't even know how good we could feel how fit we could be how well we could sleep how much less stress we could feel in our lives if we found the right breathing technique for us that's going to suit you know our lifestyle and the way we choose to live and i thought a good place to really think about this is by talking about swami rama who we didn't talk about last time because i think he is really showing just how far you can go with this and i'm not saying we all need to go that far but i think it beautifully illustrates just what is possible when you really learn to harness the power of your breath yeah and you know before we get into swami rama i just want to mention uh pick up on one thing we were just talking about kids and we didn't mention this in the first chat either but since the book has come out and since you and i chatted how many months ago was that i've heard from so many sleep medicine researchers people who specialize in pediatrics and what i learned from them is that the pandemic of adhd about 10 percent of the population in the u.s suffers from adhd most are kids from age 2 to five and then it picks up again from ages around 12 to 17. but most adhd is tied directly to breathing and breathing quality and they showed me the percentages of 75 of kids who have adhd also have sleep disorder breathing and by improving their breathing during the day and during the night so many of these kids can overcome what is considered this psychological or neurological problem and that has just blown me away that simply breathing properly can have such a transformative effect but then i was thinking about it more i said this shouldn't be shocking because if you're doing something wrong throughout the day and if you're doing something a hundred percent wrong for a third of your life it's going to destroy your body and that's what we've been seeing with these kids for with adhd and dr stephen park at albert einstein college of medicine is doing some incredible work in this area as well looking at what happens when you allow a kid to breathe better look at how quickly they're able to overcome some of these chronic issues so i just wanted to tie that on before we talk about swami rama but in many ways i view that these things are related because it just shows you the potential of what breathing can do not only to heal us of some chronic issues but to also put us up that next rung of human potential and i think that uh old mr rama did that better than anyone this is to give a little backstory on him this is somebody who grew up in the himalayas and he was taught yoga and breath work at the age of around four and he stuck with it his whole life spent years in a cave honing this skill and he got so good at it that by the time he was in his 30s he went off and traveled the world he studied at oxford he studied at various universities he knew like eight different languages and he was so impressive that researchers at the manager clinic which at the time was the largest psychiatric training facility in the u.s and the most renowned a navy physicist there had heard about all these things he was able to do and other tests he apparently was able to stop his heart with his just by focusing on his mind and breath and he was able to increase the temperature in his fingers and this navy physicist didn't believe these stories even though the data was right there so he brought swami rama into his facility and conducted a battery of tests and they found that he was able to remain conscious while he lulled his brain into a delta state so a delta state are the states of very deep sleep we're supposed to be unconscious we're supposed to be asleep but he was able to remain conscious during these states so that was pretty impressive but what impressed them even more was that he was able to control his heart rate he was able to increase it about 20 beats per minute within a space of about eight seconds and he was actually able to make it beat at a rate of more than 300 beats per minute with his mind and he did this for more than a minute that state atrial fibrillation is supposed to be you know it will kill you after a while but apparently swami rama could do this for about a half an hour to an hour all of these things are medically impossible and no one would believe it unless there was a real doctor there researcher there recording the whole thing and still this was reported in the new york times so it was reported in time magazine and still i get letters from doctors that say you should check your sources this is obviously impossible no one can do this and you know how much more science do you need uh but that has more to do with how people want to view the world than than to actually look at data and numbers so could he also change the temperature on his hands yeah i mean there's a whole laundry list of things this guy could do i didn't want to i didn't want to bore you with it but in another experiment since you asked of course he was able to take his hand and focus on his hand and turn one area gray from lack of blood flow and the other area bright red and they went and they measured the temperature on the same hand and it varied by 11 degrees so not only could he take over entire organs like the heart and the brain but he could take over specific parts of his body and pinpoint where he wanted to control his conscious energy and a few people who had studied with rama have written me and they said oh you know it was great to read that you were able to track down this research and track down these studies but this was child's play to him this was apparently nothing and he's he's now passed away but i am now currently trying to get a hold of some other people who have learned rama's methods and who can do things that according to them i've not seen any of this will really be make what rama did in these studies seem very in insignificant so uh you know covet has put a big fork in that but things are starting to open up and i'm hoping to go back out into the field and and to record and write about more of this stuff i mean it is interesting to hear the skepticism that will come back on these sort of extreme stories you often you often get the skepticism around vimhoff as well um it's still there even though i think he's shown through a lot of science a lot of real life people have adopted these and are writing and sharing their experiences so there's a lot of real world data out there as well yet there is that skepticism and it really speaks to what i was thinking about today which is this this untapped reservoir of potential that we all have within us you know the body's pharmacy that we're not properly opening up and accessing and i guess one of the reasons vim has been so relatable to people is because certainly in the western world i should be really clear in the western world is because you know he you know he kind of the name swami rama i guess might put a block there for certain people oh that doesn't apply to me and of course he was you know this guy was rocking meditation and breath work at the age of four which is fantastic in the himalayas as well so it answered this kind of romanticism and mystique that people then sort of feel well that's not relevant for me i live in the middle of the city i've gotta you know work six days a week i've got to do this and take my kids to after school club you know it seems quite distant whereas vim i think to some people at least feels a lot more relatable but they both speak to the potential there because what what you've just described uh swami rama doing mind-blowing incredible but you know vim has also done some incredible stuff where people have injected endotoxin which would make most people sick and through his breath through his controlling his immune system he doesn't get sick enough and i i again i've been thinking about this theme recently that yes we want science and i know we want science and it's great to get the science to really give it that validation to spread the message but it feels to me on some level that breathing is so fundamental to who we are as humans that there's almost a three-dimensional quality to breathing you know the life force the energy it gives us as soon as we stop breathing we die um but actually i wonder sometimes do we look at it through a very sort of one-dimensional reductionist scientific lens whilst that has merit i sometimes wonder if we're missing some of that broader picture that some i guess of these ancient practices may have been speaking about and talking about for many years well i think when it comes to people's apprehension there's nothing much i can do about that and the last thing i want to do is to become an evangelist i really want to be even keeled here and just provide what i have found you know i'm not the one doing the research here i'm reporting and there's a big difference in that i think when you look at wim hof and tumo and i've gotten some blow back on this as well i've had people say it is impossible for a human to sit in snow for eight hours at a time and melt a circle around themselves without wearing any clothes this is scientifically impossible and then i'll send them the study done by herbert benson at harvard medical school that was published in nature the most esteemed scientific journal on the planet that shows that people can do this with their breathing and that's usually when i never hear back from these people again and that's fine right so wim has come up with the exact same resistance but the difference is he's not wearing a robe he's not wearing beads he drinks beer eats pasta plays guitar you know just like every other middle-aged adult male and so that has made him very uh approachable in many ways he's also volunteered to do whatever study people want to do and i think what he's discovered especially with a study with the endotoxin when they first shot wim up with uh the endotoxin of e coli and he didn't suffer any symptoms and they said oh you're just a weirdo there's no there's no way anyone else can do this he's like well let me take a group of people that you can pick i'm going to train them for four days and then they're going to come back and do exactly what i did which is exactly what happened so i think that it's this kind of science in this accumulation of data which is so necessary you'll see you'll certainly get to a point where people just don't want to hear about it if you look at climate change how many studies are there showing climate change is real 1200 1300 and you still have people saying ah i don't believe any of that stuff what can you do about that to me you can just offer them information right and if they want to approach this in a scientific way with truly an open view then they can do with that what what they will and really look at the data but when it comes to these superhuman feats of swami rama and wim hof and even chuck mcgee has has these to a certain extent i don't view these as superhuman at all these are human abilities that each and every one of us can hone and when we hone them we can maybe not be able to sit in snow for eight hours at a time and melt a circle around us but we can improve our health and i think that that is whims most impressive and important message he's saying don't go to everest and run a half marathon and bare feet and bare chested like me i already did that but why don't you take control of your breath then once you take control of your breath you can use that to help establish better healthy habits throughout the day and i think that's why he's resonated with so many people across the globe is because he's allowing them to use something that we are all born with right it's our own natural human body to improve our condition it's beyond health as well yeah james it's you know everything we do in life we're breathing whilst we're doing it right we take our breath everywhere with us it's not no part of our life is is lived separately to the breath and therefore improving our breath has the potential to improve every aspect of our life you mentioned health but our relationships can be significantly improved because if we can control our breath we can breathe better our stress levels will be lower we we deal with stress and friction much better your sleep quality can potentially be better we spoke about that at the start about nasal breathing at night you know yes there's going to be an impact on chronic disease as well but it's it is this three-dimensional kind of this is sort of what i was getting at that you you don't live your life without your breath so improving the quality of your breath absolutely can have profound benefits whether you want to climb everest in your shorts or whether you just want to get through the day better calmer more peace you know i guess that's why as a doctor i'm so passionate about breath work in each of my four books breath work has come up in all of them even though i write about different topics because the breath is central to so many different aspects of our lives i learned this from a sleep researcher and biochemist he said that we get most of our energy not through food but through our breath so if you look at how glucose is broken down it takes six times more oxygen than glucose to fuel us and he broke down the whole chemical structure of how that works with oxidative phosphorylation and and he said so if you explain to people that you know all of the food that they're focusing on every minute of the day all of the supplements yes food is incredibly important for health and for energy of course it is but that food can't do any of its magic if you don't have the breath there as well if you don't have that proper and efficient supply of oxygen so just as you mentioned this is not woo new age stuff this is the most basic biochemistry in the human body and breathing has to be considered as important as what we eat and how much we exercise and how well we sleep it really does and i think it's starting to i think it's been pushed to the background for a little while now but people are starting to recognize it and just concerning how the human body is able to function better with breathing and what happens when we put the body in a state of nature there's a quote by albert svent georgie who won the nobel prize for his work in vitamin c that that i love and as you were talking i was just reminded of this quote he said more than 60 years of research on living systems has convinced me that our body is much more nearly perfect than the endless list of ailments suggests its shortcomings are due less to its inborn imperfections than to our abusing it that's pretty wordy but what he's saying is the further we put ourselves away from nature the sicker we're gonna get and the more we return to the state in which we naturally evolved the better we can get and breathing again is a huge part of that returning your breathing to the way your ancestors used to breathe not super human breathing not super turbo breathing just regular natural human breathing is all you need follow your ancestors as the guide or any of the other 54 hundred different mammals in the wild right now and that to me is really the best teacher as far as breathing is concerned to breathe well and to breathe optimally we need a certain physical structure we need a certain posture we need to be able to get into certain positions and i've read somewhere in your work james that 30 percent of breathing is dictated by posture yet we're living in a society where many people have got rounded back sort of craned out next there's many reasons for that sedentary jobs smartphones laptops whatever it is but you know how how does this play a role in our ability to breathe because some people will be hearing this and go okay james you convinced me i'm in i'm i want to breathe better i want to i want to get your book i want to check out the techniques i want to find the right one for me but where does posture play a role and what can people do about that well if you consider that in your chest right now are these two huge balloons right these these are your lungs and these balloons need to inflate properly and deflate for you to get a consistent and easy flow of air and by getting that consistent and easy flow of air you will be able to consistently and easily get a flow of oxygen which is what is going to fuel all of your cells so when we're sitting like this hunched over which is how i sit a lot or if we're sitting on a couch with our feet up and if we're walking around with our shoulders like this even if we wanted to take a full and easy breath we can't because we can't inflate those two balloons in our chest those two lungs so dr belisa vranich has done some amazing work in the biomechanics of breathing and i talked with her recently and read her books and they're fantastic if you're looking at the biomechanics of breathing and she has found that most of us tend to breathe up and down right but what we should really be doing is to be breathing out and in because what you want to do is you want to be engaging the diaphragm and inhaling the lungs air into the lungs very softly so in order to do that your rib cage needs to be flexible right and if you think about what yoga does what is yoga more than just a way of stretching your ribcage and your intercostals so that you can breathe more easily so vranic has this test it's called the bic test and what you do is you place your hands and you put them above your hip bones and you breathe in and you want to feel your hands moving out laterally not just your stomach going out that's where a lot of people get it wrong like they think belly breathing is about pushing the stomach out you want your your belly around here to expand outward and inward and if you can do that then you're breathing correctly if you can't and you feel no movement there then you're an up and down breather and uh the more you focus on this i'm breathing out and in the more you start to feel your diaphragm descent descending in the proper way and the more you you start being able to breathe more easily this has made an incredible difference for me in my understanding of breathing not only that but also in athletic performance whether i'm surfing or running or whatever to focus on breathing outward and inward instead of up and down yeah it's incredible and it's i guess what your showcasing there is that it doesn't matter if your posture's a bit altered from years of not breathing well and being hunched over i guess the the positive note is there's things you can do once you now to flip that switch in your brain and say right okay i'm gonna take breath seriously i'm gonna start working on certain things i'm gonna every day just try that and just see if i can get a bit more expansion out rather than up and down i really think people are going to start to feel those differences and as i said earlier in our conversation they're going to start tuning into things that they they weren't even aware of before you know i said james that i'm training for the london marathon in october and um i was actually challenged by a radio dj last year to do it live on air and i said yes it was due to be in 12 weeks at that time and i wasn't a runner but because of covid's and the restrictions it's been delayed it's been delayed it's now meant to be happening this october now at the time i was having some hamstring issues and i was put in touch with one of the best movement therapists i've ever come across and i've dealt with many over the course of my career and she's got this machine there's only three of them in the world she's got these machines where they can literally measure every burn in your body as you're running and see the positioning and she just uses that as a tool but what's interesting is that we do lots of things together and it's it's been transformative for me in my running but also my breathing and once we did this thing where my my spine all the bones of my spine one of the big problems for me is that they always face right they never come around to the midline and go to the left this is something you you really wouldn't know until you've been on a machine like this and you can actually see and then a lot of my issues start to make a lot of sense and she gave me this uh gorgeous spiral breathing exercise to do that took about three minutes we did it together i felt totally open and my ribs expanded afterwards so we went back on the machine no worth a lie everything came back online and my spine is now going right and then whenever it's going all the way to the left it's like i said helen what that has completely changed and all i've done is three minutes a breath which she goes yeah i see this all the time it's because once we can get this working better you know i don't want to over simplify what she does once the diaphragm's working better more efficiently you know it affects everything around that affects your spine and i guess i'm just sharing that with you because again that is n equals one that is just my own experience but super super powerful so i do that three minute swirl breathing exercise every day i don't need any more motivation now because i've seen firsthand that my gates my biomechanics change simply on the back of it so this once again reminds me of another ancient quote i'm going to bore you with that's about 14. i'm loving these quotes man loving them so this one i i think speaks to exactly what you just said it says what the bodily form depends on is breath and what breath relies upon is form when the breath is perfect the form is perfect too so if you are hesitant to think that your breathing may impact your posture just consider those huge six liters of air those two balloons in your body and just take a deep breath and feel what happens to your posture when you take a deep breath and feel what happens to your spine i was talking to dr andrew weil about this and he had learned from a doctor early on in his studies he's a famous american doctor i'm not sure if he's made it across the pond here um but he said just look at scoliosis um so this is the sideways curvature of the spine it comes on right before puberty and and throughout puberty and we still don't know what causes scoliosis sometimes ms can definitely influence it and other diseases can influence it but for the mass majority of people who have scoliosis we don't know what causes it how strange is that so many people have this and we still don't know why they have it so he was convinced from the doctor that he talked to that this starts early on when dysfunctional breathing is present when people tend to breathe tend to be turned like this too much and tend to keep breathing into the right lung or tend to keep breathing into their left lung while they're sleeping while they're awake while they're playing just like you i tend to be a left side um person i that's where my posture is whenever i get my spine cracked and fixed uh they say every single person tells me that they're like why are you leaning to the left so much i don't know it's just one of those things so an extreme version of what you and i are both doing is scoliosis so when someone has this dysfunctional breathing again this is so hypothetical you can't run a randomized controlled study of this and no one ever should but just as a thought experiment i thought that that was interesting and then i researched the work by katarina shroth who was a teenager living in dresden germany at the beginning of the 1900s she had scoliosis it was very bad she was given you know a brace and a wheelchair and told that this is what you're going to do the rest of your life you're going to be in this brace and she realized that she had two lungs and these acted like balloons and that when you place something around a balloon and inflate it whatever is around it will take that form so she develops something called orthopedic breathing where she would breathe into one lung and exhale breathe into the other lung and exhale and she actually breathed her spine straight and went and taught this to thousands and thousands of women it's still being used at johns hopkins university the pictures are there the studies are there and uh it's still interesting that so many people with scoliosis now are completely unaware of how breathing just breathing and stretching can have a really profound effect on posture and for those of us lucky enough not to have scoliosis how you breathe vastly affects your posture if you're breathing unhealthy it's going to affect your posture if you're breathing healthy that's going to improve your posture and the proof is all over the place breathing better ables you know being able to use our diaphragm more fully um breathing out and then rather than just up and down now these things will have an impact on our lung capacity and of course lung capacity you know better lung capacity is going to make you fitter if you're an athlete or certainly give you a better ability to go harder for longer but i think lung capacity also really has benefits for us beyond fitness for health well-being day-to-day health and well-being but also longevity can you speak a little bit around lung capacity and and just how important that is sure so larger lungs for athletes is a bigger gas tank they can go longer without having to fill up so obviously that's going to affect their performance and it's also going to affect their recovery as we were talking about earlier but just having larger and healthier lungs has been discovered to have a profound effect on lifespan and i found this in the framingham study which is the 70 year-long longitudinal study focused on heart health but what they found was that the most significant and accurate marker of lifespan wasn't genetics or exactly what we were eating it was lung size and lung function and they found this with a study of more than 5200 people the more quickly our lungs deteriorated the more quickly we lost that lung capacity the sooner we would die and the better our lungs function the bigger they were the longer we would live so there's been various studies done that have found the exact same results as the framingham study i even found one study with something like 800 they looked at 800 people who had lung transplants and they found that people who had been transplanted larger lungs lived much longer lives so no matter how we get these large lungs healthy lungs they're gonna benefit us they're gonna benefit our performance they're gonna just benefit our health in general luckily we don't need to go out and get larger lungs surgically implanted in our bodies we can just breathe healthy stretch and exercise and by doing those things we can not only stave off the entropy of lung capacity what happens after the age of about 30 we lose lung capacity every decade it really drops off precipitously once we get into our 60s and 70s we can reverse that and we can keep the same lung capacity and same lung lung function at the time when we need it most and that's when we're older we take in 30 pounds of air into our lungs and out of our lungs every single day so if you think that that air and how we take that air in and how we expel it doesn't affect us it's it's crazy so much more than than food and and in my opinion after talking to researchers for so many years you can eat all the right foods you can eat paleo or keto or vegan or whatever you can exercise as much as you want but if you're not breathing correctly you're never ever going to be healthy and i've seen this repeatedly with people who look to be the most fit people on the planet and they have chronic respiratory problems and they suffer from that in numerous ways so once we take control of this unconscious ability to breathe we can then harness all of the power within that and use it to do some incredible things some things that scientists thought were absolutely impossible have been proven to be absolutely possible by focusing on your breathing yeah well we're going to delve into that during this conversation today because there are so many fascinating stories that you've written about research you know case studies um really quite incredible and there's there's a you know you've done so many interviews since this book came out and it is great for me as a as a medical doctor to see that there appears to be a huge amount of interest now you know with books like yours really raising awareness of how important the way we breathe is but i was really struck by your subtitle in the book and so the book's called breath but then the subtitle is the new science of a lost art now not only does that sound amazing but there's there's a real magic there uh the new science of a lost art science and art fascinates me because i say the practice of medicine is art and science you know it's not just science it's not just looking at publications it's how do you put that all together with the person in front of you the patient in front of you and how do you sort of blend it together to come up with the right solution for the right patients so tell me about that subtitle in the context of the breath why is it a lost art well what i kept finding as i researched breathing the art of breathing starting from the last century to the century before that and going back thousands of years is people have been talking about this and writing about this and studying this for for millennia so uh the earliest dated conscious breathing practices date back you know about three thousand four thousand years and if you look around the world all of these different cultures started studying the same things they started coming to the same conclusions about breathing that if we do it improperly our br our health is going to suffer if we do it properly we can really help use that to help heal ourselves and to go up that next rung of human potential so the thing that was frustrating is we would discover these things and then for some reason in some way they would be ignored and lost then they would be rediscovered renamed something else rediscovered by someone else at a different time and then be proven at that time and forgotten about and this just kept happening over and over and over i guess the more accurate title would be lost and found because that's what kept happening and it really feels like right now we're at this moment where we have the instruments we have the interest to really study breathing and to prove how it's working how it alters our minds and our bodies and how it can benefit us and that would be the new science of that subtitle um it's a new science new measurements looking at a very old practice yeah it's interesting when you compare this to other old practices such as uh let's say traditional chinese medicine which for years has been telling us that different organs in the body function [Music] function in different ways at different times of the day something that western medicine until recently has almost sort of looked down upon that was you know the liver is the liver the the kidney is the kidney but there's a lot of science down circadian biology showing that these organs at different times in the day there's different amounts of genetic expression and they have different functions different enzymatic functioning and all kinds of things yet we need almost well we've needed modern science now to go oh actually yeah you were right um and and i i sort of understand that you are a science journalist so i guess you may or is it fair to say you always approach topics with a bit of skepticism because i i kind of feel that it's not a little bit of arrogance in us as modern humans that we we sort of feel that you know i'll prove it you know prove it like we you're saying this has been written about 5 000 years ago so it's so striking that that we've forgotten it we we we need reminding of it but then also why is it at this moment in time in 2020 why does that appear to be such an interest now in breathing and breadth work because yes your book is incredible but vim half has been gaining notoriety and popularity for for a good few years now um hopefully patrick mcewen and with the oxygen advantage that's getting more and more awareness i mean what is going on why why are people interested now i think the the main thing for me was i had no slant going into this story i there's no benefit for me to say nasal breathing is better than mouth breathing or one version of breathing is better than than the other so so my job as a journalist is to go in talk to the experts in the field accumulate as much information and objectively come out and and give my uh assessment of of this world of breathing so there was a lot of what i found which was not supported at all but the areas that i focused on on the book have such a firm foundation of science and i think a lot of it has to do with the way that science is set up especially medical science right now you know at the beginning about half of the professors and doctors and other experts i talked to said breathing doesn't matter so how we do it does not matter nose mouth 20 times a day 10 times a day your body is going to compensate which is a hundred percent true our bodies will compensate but that doesn't mean they're fully working at their best potential that doesn't mean we're healthy just getting by is different than being healthy then you have all these other researchers who have studied breathing for for 50 years some of these researchers signed up for 50 years they said how we breathe absolutely affects us it even affects the density of our bones it affects us down to the atomic level subatomic level with electrons so to to think that how we breathe does not matter is not based in any real science and and again my job was to go in and talk to these people and look at the studies and piece together a story from that yeah now thanks for sharing that um when i think about breathing when i talk to people whether it's my family my friends patients i think people are starting to get awareness now but actually it's important but there's a bit of confusion there's so many different breathing methods out there and i think some people struggle to know well what sort of breathing method should i do i really want to sort of delve into that today in this conversation but i guess before we do that is it is it worth clarifying you know what is the problem at the moment what are there is there a base level breathing practice that everyone should do for example because i think it'll be easy and i want to go into you know all different kinds of breathing uh practices but i also want to make sure we don't lose people so that they can see the big picture but they also know a simple thing that they can take away and start applying yeah and that's a great question and it's a question i had early on because you've got dozens of books on breathing there's some books on pranayama that have 300 different practices in it where do i begin here what i found is so many of them all come to the same conclusion they're all doing the same thing so they're means to the same ends so if you look at ancient chinese practices of breathing they are almost identical to ancient hindu practices of breathing which are almost identical to the yoga practices that are being used now or the other practices that are being used by psychiatrists for anxiety and depression they're all doing the same thing we know this from measurements so what i try to do in the book was not to focus on these individual breathing techniques but to focus on the larger story around it how do they affect us what are they where did they come from um because it doesn't matter you could call it by 12 different names slow breathing is slow breathing and there's a very simple way of doing it so the the center of the book is a foundation of breathing that everybody can benefit from and again it doesn't matter who invented this or who claims to and have invented this stuff or at what time it's simple practices of breathing through the nose exhaling more breathing less breathing slowly so that's what i tried to focus on the the general view of this and if you want more of the specifics there's already a zillion books on on the how to with with hundreds of different practices you're just past 8 a.m at the moment in san francisco so i don't know what your normal wake-up time is but have you done any breath work this morning as a way of preparing for the day ahead i'm a night owl so my normal wake-up time is much later than this hence hence the tea over here oh wow but uh you know people think that since i studied breathing for so many years i'd be the best breather in the world and i'm i'm not i've got a lot of work to do um but at least the the first step about breathing is to be conscious of it and and to understand that this isn't something that should just be running in the background in the back of our minds but something that we can take control of so i'm acutely aware of when i'm breathing improperly and i'm acutely aware of then how to fix it so more intense breath work practices i will do about three or four times a week usually at night but throughout the day throughout the day i'm adopting very simple healthy breathing habits and that that to me is is one of the most important things about this this isn't asking people to go out and run six miles a day or to completely change their lifestyle you can adopt healthy breathing habits no matter what you're doing if you're sitting in front of a computer if you're watching netflix if you're walking around and just by adopting those you can have a transformative effect on your health that sounds like a huge claim but i've seen it and the studies have shown it yeah brilliant i think that's a great message for people so let's dive into something that you have written about you've touched on it in the conversation so far nasal breathing okay um and you know for people who have been listening to my podcast for a while they will have heard me talk about this with brian mckenzie and with patrick mcewen right um but i think we've got a lot of new listeners and i think it's always reiterating how important it is to breathe through your nose so what's going on when someone breathes through their nose compared to their mouth what is going on why does it make such a difference so when we breathe through our nose we are humidifying air we're pressurizing air we are filtering that air out and we're conditioning it so that by the time that air gets to our lungs it can more easily be absorbed and we can extract oxygen from it so we know this this is this has been proven time and time again and yet about 25 to 50 percent of the population habitually mouth breathes and when you mouth breathe you get none of those benefits you can almost think of the lungs as an external organ when you're mouth breathing right they're exposed to everything in your environment and if you live in a city like i do i don't want to expose my lungs to all those allergens and pollutants so the quickest way of filtering air and conditioning it is this wondrous organ right in the front of our faces called the nose and it is completely under and under-used in society yeah absolutely so how did you go from i think i've read you say before or i think maybe i heard it in an interview that you used to be a mouth breather how did you become a nose breather and is it possible for anyone to actually listen to this and go okay i hear you james there's all these benefits i want those benefits how do i start yeah i remember breathing through my mouth as a kid i see pictures of myself when i was young and i'm breathing through my mouth not all the time but it definitely happened and even until adulthood i thought it was normal just to go to sleep with a pint of water by my bed every single night to wake up every few hours with a dry mouth take a swig of water go back to sleep i did that for decades until i met dr jayak or nayak down at stanford and he said this isn't normal at all we should be breathing through our nose all the time especially during sleeping hours that's a third of your life and if you're breathing through the mouth you're just exposing yourself to everything in your environment and also you're loosening the tissues at the back of your throat and making yourself more apt to snore and have sleep apnea which is another thing that that blew my mind so you know once you realize how dangerous mouth breathing is you can then take a conscious effort to change it how you're doing how you're breathing throughout the day but that won't help you when you're unconscious at night right so so once i learned this i was shutting my mouth all the time practicing nasal breathing at the beginning it was very difficult i felt very congested here but the nose is a use it or lose it organ i also learned that from from stanford that the more you use it the more it's going to open up those tissues are going to acclimate and open up so i focused on that and at night this sounds a little crazy but i used a little piece of tape which i still do just on my lips to train my mouth shut at night and uh this sounds a little you know like like new age science but it's but it's not because i heard from a breathing therapist at stanford and kearney who had used it herself and uses it for her patients i talked to other researchers who did the same thing um and that has helped me tremendously and it's helped so many other people as well and it's free yeah hey james look i'm i'm totally with you on that it is incredible the difference in fact i actually spoke to a buddy this morning on the phone who i've not spoken to for a few months and i said hey he was saying how's the podcast going i said yeah great i'm actually speaking to someone james nestor this afternoon you've got to get his book it's just incredible it's all about breathing and he said to me that the thing he's changed a few months ago um was he started to take his mouth up at night and he said he cannot believe the difference is that i don't wake up thirsty i'm not groggy in the morning i've got more energy better cognition you know and and i think for people who are skeptical and i know they are out there that even within my own family they're skeptics to how important breathing is i think it really is quite profound what you can feel like you may not even know how good you can feel until you start breathing in a more optimal way um but if you when you talk about tape over your mouth some people i think will probably feel claustrophobic and the thought of actually taping their mouth shuts probably is going to scare them but but you would say it's not like that is it no and and just to to second what you were saying it's one thing to have a subjective experience and say hey i feel better after taping and that means something right but it's another thing to measure this stuff if we can measure it we can study it we can study we can figure out if it's actually working and that's exactly what we did we're working with with niacc at stanford so the measurements from these instruments aren't going to lie yes i felt better but to me as a science journalist it's much more convincing to have data because what works with one person may not work with somebody else and that's they're finding right now that stanford and kearney is booting up a study of 200 people looking at sleep apnea and snoring and sleep tape and i so happen to have a little roll here um and i want to explain to people that don't i would highly suggest not going on youtube and looking how to sleep tape because there's a lot of really sketchy stuff there all you need is a teeny piece of tape i use a piece that big it's about half the size of a postage stamp and i put it right across my lips i can still talk to you i can still breathe from my mouth if if i want but it just reminds me when i'm unconscious to keep my jaw shut and i can take it off with my tongue so this is not a hostage situation duct tape kind of thing this is a teeny piece of tape just to train the mouse shut and just anecdotally i've received several dozen emails from people who have had chronic snoring for the past few decades who have had even mild or moderate sleep apnea and they've recorded their sleep and they no longer suffer from those things so that's not psychosomatic it's not a placebo effect that's what happens when you close your mouth and you allow that air to be pressurized push the soft tissues further back in your airway and open them up to breathe more efficiently you get 20 percent more oxygen through a nasal breath than you do through a mouth breath and if you think that's not going to affect you over the long term you're you're nuts it will have a tremendous effect on your health yeah absolutely in your research you know you mentioned sleep apnea um and you know these these problems we have sleep problems are endemic now you know there's it's you know sleep deprivation is an epidemic there's many reasons for that of course um but it but it's really fascinating for me that you know i think back i always try and look at the way we're suffering now or or the maladies of of the 21st century and try and put them in it in an evolutionary perspective and a context to go what's really going on here and i don't know if in your research did you ever come across that sleep apnea and sleep problems are quite a modern problem i mean do we know if this existed three four hundred years ago was any part of your research on this at all well we can't go back and test people but what we can do is look at skeletons and so i talked to the experts in the field biological anthropologists who look at the shape of skeletons and our ancestors anything older than around 400 years maybe 500 years they would have these very powerful jaws and they would have these faces that grew outward and these huge nasal apertures in the back so from those skeletons we can we can decipher that these people had larger airways they had more room to breathe we know that obesity absolutely affects snoring and sleep apnea as well and people are not we're not as obese as they are now and that that seems very clear and understood but this idea that our ancestors had these huge powerful faces and we do not is less acknowledged and yet it's very clear in the skeletal record and an example of this is looking at the teeth of an ancient skeleton if you were to look at the teeth of one of your ancestors 400 years old 4 000 years old 40 fat doesn't matter on back they would have perfectly straight teeth there's like a 99.9 chance perfectly straight teeth today 90 percent of us have some sort of crookedness in our teeth because our mouths have grown so small with this with a very small mouth you also have a smaller airway and that's one of the main reasons so many of us suffer from snoring sleep apnea respiratory problems it's even implicated in asthma allergies and more yeah wow and why do we think that's happened why have we got such a smaller mouth smaller jaw there's some sort of theories out there yeah there's there's a few theories but there's also some a few absolute facts that have that have been uh very clearly identified in the past 20 years and that is when our food shifted from this wild tough food where we were required to chew a lot more food became soft we chewed less our mouths grew too small environmental inputs had some effect on that when you're walking around breathing through your mouth especially when you're a kid your face will grow differently it's so common that this is called adenoid face from when the adenoids or tonsils inflame and you have to walk around like this but most of it is caused by food by the softness of our diets and there's been some incredible research done done in this and i just think it's so under acknowledge the role that that chewing masticatory stress plays in the structure of our faces but it's also so simple the less you use something the less it's going to develop especially this is important in infancy they've done studies where they've looked at infants who have been bottle-fed versus those who have been breastfed and when an infant is breastfed it requires a tremendous amount of stress and exercise and helps push the face outward which will then create a larger airway yeah you know it's incredible you're talking about food that we chew more what you're fundamentally talking about is more natural foods less highly processed industrialized food so we we often think about food in the context of our health our well-being particularly a lot of people talk about it in the context of their weight but you're sort of saying yeah sure but you know yes your weight but health and well-being is so broad and now we're introducing mouth size and teeth strength and teeth structure and jaw structure into the potential benefits of eating real food yeah and here again is an example of all these disparate people in these disparate areas of science all coming to the same general conclusion in just slightly different ways so we're usually looking at foods in terms of calorie at least in the us we're looking at it in terms of calories we're not looking at it in terms of toughness or softness and i think it's it's quite interesting that even today you think about what's considered healthy food today oatmeal avocados yogurt you know goo bars all this stuff is soft it requires basically no chewing at all and the less you're chewing especially when you're younger the less you'll be working out these muscles the less you'll be developing your face yeah and you said especially when you're younger now that's really interesting because one thing yes as a doctor but also as a parent that i've always found quite curious is this idea that all the adults will eat proper food but the kids menu i don't know if it's the same in the states the kids menu it's generally for the junk it's like the proper the adults will order the proper food but the kids will have some sort of i don't know you know hyper processed industrialized foods and you know i am not blaming anyone or criticizing anyone for doing that i understand that's the almost the conditioning as well but one thing we have very much tried hard from a young age with our children is they eat the same as what we do we eat as much as we can minimally processed you know food as close to nature as possible and you know i appreciate we're lucky to be able to have access to that but we do that and that's what we give our kids we don't make separate food for them and it's just interesting you know you say all all roads are sort of leading to rome in the same place actually yeah eat the right diet it's almost like it's basically trying to say is live eat and breathe in the way that we have evolved see and we will be more thriving healthier uh happier human beings i guess yeah nature already did all of this for us it's just in the last hundred years we thought that we were smarter than nature and we thought we could take some some side tracks into this and condense food down to one pill or some mush that you could squirt into your mouth and it would have the same effect yeah we're not getting scurvy from that or barry berry from that we're not getting these diseases that we used to suffer from but we're also denying ourselves so many of the benefits and exactly what what you had said in there's this huge i would even call it a revolution right now in baby lead weaning which is not to give babies infants this soft mush in jars which we've only been doing for the past hundred years anyway and look at what's happened look look what's happened to our weight look at what's happened to our faces look what happened to our teeth i mean on and on and on is that is a modern invention so to allow kids especially early on to be able to really work out that masticatory stress to to chew properly is gonna have benefits down the road and that's been very well proven at this time yeah and it really you know the phrase use it or lose it which is which is common parlance in the english language both in the us and in the uk you know we understand that don't we with muscles we get that you know if i if i do a bicep curl every morning my bicep is going to get stronger if i stop doing it over time it's going to get smaller i think we we understand that with the you know our physical muscles but as you say i don't think we've thought about it in terms of our jaw our mastication muscles it's like if you don't chew regularly if you're not sort of um having that stress put on your jaw like the stress on the bicep what your jaw is then going to adapt it's going to adapt to what it feels that you need um i think you i think i've heard you mentioned before that there's something about chewing on one side as opposed to two sides and i found that really interesting so i'd love let's just explore that but i also just want to make sure we've covered that many people listen to this show some uh i'm sure are avid meat-eaters some are vegans and when we talk about natural food i think it's just important to say you you can probably you know whilst obviously meat is quite tough and there's bones to chew on you know there's a lot of vegetables like carrots for example or a lot of tough veg that you have to chew you can probably also get that sort of stress on the jaw right so i just want to make sure we we include everyone in this conversation that they all feel as though this applies to them um yeah so i wonder if you could just expand on that at all means to the same end that that's again you've got these different people in these different camps but of course if you're chewing on carrots if you're chewing on celery i mean just think of natural foods even wheat uh you know we got really good at removing the bran and the germ from wheat and creating this this processed white flour the same thing with rice white rice bran and germ removed we just have this this little seed left so chewing is is essential especially with or early on to developing proper airway health proper mouth uh we we know that and it's how you chew what you're chewing is i don't want to get into that that gets very very political because the carnivores are gonna say one thing vegans are going to say the other but but do not underestimate the power and benefits of chewing and this is a whole new science that is really being deeply explored now which i find is fascinating sorry to interrupt if you're enjoying this conversation there's loads more like it on my channel please do press subscribe and hit that bell now back to the conversation you've had so many emails and so much feedback you've mentioned that mouth taping at night is something that comes up regularly what are some of the other things that come up where people have fed back to you that you know i tried this james and actually this has now got better etc etc well a lot of people have written and said that they are so grateful for having this information but behind their thankfulness there is an irritation and a frustration that it took them reading a book to learn about these things to learn how asthma can be significantly reduced it can even be reversed by taking control of your breathing and if you don't believe me all you have to do is look at the dozens and dozens and dozens of scientific studies that have proven this or talked to patrick mcewen whom i know was on your your show this guy's for 20 years he's been teaching people how to reverse their asthma so i think that some of this is due to again all of the noise um it has to do with the internet everyone's got a voice now which is great but it's also problematic as we're seeing and it it took i guess um you know someone to go in objectively and to really look at this stuff and and to look at at what had worked and to talk to the people on again both sides so i think that this knowledge is obviously a great thing and that's the only thing that that we really have right now that the internet can provide is knowledge people have access to information they would not have access to 20 years ago through podcasts like yours through books and i think that through that knowledge people are becoming empowered to start to take control of their health in different ways and to listen to experts who have years and years of experience actually helping people not just conducting studies but helping people day in and day out i think that that information and those perspectives are really the most valuable it's interesting that there's an anger and a frustration coming through and i can see why there would be an anger because if you can reduce how much you're taking your inhaler let's say for asthma if you can reduce your anxiety or even eliminate your anxiety by working on some breathing practices you may well be thinking well why the hell have i not heard about this before when i've been to my doctor or my healthcare professional so i understand that anger i really do well a lot of it comes to the capacity that healthcare professionals have with with their patients there's doctors in my family we talk about this stuff all the time and they're dealing with acute often serious problems so if i get in a car accident the last thing i want is breathing practices i want surgery i want the latest in western technology to help sew me up but the people have been left out in the cold are the people with these milder chronic issues it's only when these milder chronic issues becomes really serious that people get treatment but oftentimes that's too late and i heard this so many times through so many researchers and so many doctors over the years and i'm still hearing it all the time and there's a quote that actually brian mckenzie told me which i thought was great is eastern medicine is great if you want to live western medicine is great if you don't want to die so there's a big difference in those two things and i think that they both have enormous benefits but we shouldn't be thinking that you have to pick one or the other and i think that's where it gets really problematic if you have a very serious disease and western medicine can help you why on earth wouldn't you help yourself through that so it's about integrating these two things and knowing when to say when to each of them which i think is really the key and if you look at the top medical institutions in the world right now this is the direction everything's going from harvard to stanford to yale to oxford you know and and that's inspiring it's taking a while to get there but these scientific revolutions can take decades you know i love that quote that brian shared with you it's it's really made me think but it's spot on you know certainly in my 20 years experience of seeing patients i'd have to say that is completely spot on i i recognize maybe five years and actually you know what we're really good at acutes we're just not as good with this sort of chronic stuff a lot of the time and you know i'm very proud to be a doctor but i i also i think we should be honest and say well you know these tools are great but actually we're a bit limited can we get a bigger toolbox in certain areas one of the sort of modern voices who has really helped to elevate breath work is vim hoff and you know i want to talk about vim's methods and some of the pros and the potential cons that some people talk about with those sort of hyperventilation type breaths i think that's going to be really important but i wanted to ask you james i talk about breathwork a lot and what i say what i hear is there's a lot of confusion there's a lot of confusion that oh you know i'd be i thought we need to breathe less but now you're saying to breathe 30 times then hold my breath with the vim hof method and i wonder if you could sort of unpick that for people you know what are the broad principles of these different breathing techniques and when and how should people think about bringing them into their lives so i was as confused as anyone when i was researching this book and learned this exact thing and when you start investigating different breeding methods there are different breeding philosophies in different breeding camps though so the buteyko people will say you only breathe very slowly you only breathe through your nose you never want to over breathe and the wim hof people including women himself says no breathe everybody breathe go go go so who's right and they're both right is what i learned it just depends on what you want to get out of your breath so for the majority of the time you do want to breathe slowly rhythmically lightly through the nose okay that is how you're going to get the most oxygen the most energy for the least effort and that's exactly what you want throughout the day but sometimes you want to push your breath and you want to use it to purposely stress your body out a lot of you may be thinking why do i ever want to stress my body out right i'm stressed throughout the day i'm answering emails dealing with calls dealing with the kids exercising but that's exactly why you should use breathing to stress your body out because what these practices do is they focus that stress into a controlled space in your day so the wim hof method you're not going to do that all day just like you wouldn't be going to the gym and lifting weights all day it would destroy your body wims method you do it for about 20 minutes and the point is that you use this method to purposely stress your body out so that the other 23 and a half hours of the day you can be in a state of calm and control and you know wim calls it the wim hof method but he's so clear that these practices have been around thousands and thousands of years you can call it tumo you can call it sudarshan kriya you can call it pranayama whatever they're all doing the same thing they're forcing you to over breathe to stress yourself out then control your breath and then to stress yourself out again then control it again like interval training so that you can control your stress and the science is very clear that these methods can have an incredible impact on both mental health and physical health including autoimmune diseases one of the most memorable bits in your book for me was when you were talking about your own experience of trying to breathing and um you said something to the effect of i was stressing my body out but this stress felt very different to the stress that i feel when i'm running late for an important meeting and i and i thought that was really fascinating this idea of stress which we typically associate as being a bad thing certainly the societal narrative around stress or stress is bad we want to avoid it but that was a beautiful way of describing sort of helpful stress and unhelpful stress and i wonder if you could expand on that a little bit i think the difference is when you are rushing to a meeting when you are trying to answer emails and trying to answer calls and getting very frustrated with the amount of work you have to do every day there's no outlet for that stress that stress seems to build and build and build and it starts coming out in different ways you get angry you can't think straight your blood pressure goes up you start clenching your fists or your muscles tighten and that's such bad news but if you clench your fist and tighten your muscles and control your breath and learn to do this consciously you can learn what that stress feels like and you can then learn to turn it off so a lot of these practices have you do that to i mean whim has you know you're holding your breath and then you're breathing as hard as you can and then you're holding your breath again and taking one breath and then exhaling it so this is stressful to the body but what the body doesn't want is to be in these states of low-grade stress throughout the day and throughout the night periodic stress is very good okay hermetic stress is very good for the body that's how we evolved to go and run after a tiger or fight off someone and then to chill out for the rest of the day and the rest of the night what's happening now is so many of us are staying in this chronic state of stress it's like this iv drip of stress throughout the day and you can see that in what this has done to our health so inflammation is behind the vast majority of modern chronic diseases whether you're looking at diabetes or heart disease or hypertension or whatever and so this inflammation is exacerbated by this constant low-grade stress whether that stress is coming from the foods you're eating whether it's coming from the environment so it's no coincidence that hunter-gatherer populations don't have any of these modern diseases that we have it's no coincidence that our ancestors as far as we can see didn't have the vast majority of these diseases we have today either so that's a long way of saying that controlling the stress and using breathing as your presser release valve can have enormous benefits to your day-to-day health living in incredibly stressful times at the moment the world has significantly changed the way people live over the last 12 15 16 months or so and stress anxiety is ramped up in many ways for so many people one thing i don't think people still quite fully understand is how intimately our stress levels are linked with the way that we breathe and therefore without that understanding it's hard sometimes to persuade people that hey you know what if you you literally can hack that system by working on your breath not for hours a day just a few simple things you can actually start to change your biology so can you speak a little bit to how stress and breath are linked well this is what's so great about breathing is you can feel the effects and you can see the effects immediately when you're changing your diet usually that takes a little while right to really see the transformative effects it has to eat a healthy diet it'll take maybe a few days but if you want to lose weight it's going to take a few weeks or it's going to take a few months and you know so many of us today we have a very short attention span so i think that's one reason people fall off their diets they're just i'm sick of doing this but with breathing one of my favorite things to do is to put a pulse oximeter on someone put a heart rate variability monitor on someone have them breathe in a very specific way and then watch what happens after a minute right even after a few seconds you can see this transformation taking place in your body you can watch your blood pressure go down 10 or 15 points i've seen mine even go down 20 points if i went from a state of being stressed to controlling my breathing and de-stressing myself through through those means so i think that that's what's so been that's what's been so convincing with with a lot of the readers of the book and and also to myself is if you're able to improve your health and improve the efficiency of your body within a few minutes just imagine what's going to happen after a few days or a few weeks or a few months and you start to understand how your breathing is such an integral part of your healing and your long-term health so i could get into the biochemical processes of it but that's the umbrella right that's the overview of what these things are doing and again if there are skeptics out there and i hope there are question what i'm saying but then go and grab some of these monitors and breathe in a certain way and tell me what what happens to your body what happens to your brain because what's happening in the body as well is happening in the brain eeg patterns transform when we start breathing in a slow rhythmic way different areas of the brain start coming online you're able to think more clearly because you're allowing your brain to function at peak efficiency and we feel free to expand on the biochemistry because you know in that section where you were talking about your own experience with tumor breathing you also had this gorgeous phrase that it was as if tumor opened up your own body's pharmacy and that stuck with me i thought we we've got these chemicals inside us already but it seems as though certain breath practices can sort of unlock like that full potential that we're sort of maybe keeping suppressed because of the way we're breathing and the way we're living our daily lives well this is what's been so fascinating and great to see about what wim has been doing so he's had so many skeptics too over the last 20 years he said okay be skeptical uh just take me into your lab and i'll do whatever you can shoot me up with e coli sure sounds great you can take blood work at various levels while i breathe we can bring in some other people you can take their blood work and see what happens and that's what he's shown we've known this for a long time that breathing in certain ways will create and trigger these responses in your body to release hormones to release stress hormones to release relaxing hormones to open up the blood vessels we we already know all that but i think that you know such a super human breather as whim is he's able to show the true potential of where breathing can take us so i think that what he has shown is this stressful breathing can help the body better defend itself it can bolster the immune function which is why wim hof breathing has been shown to be so effective for some people with autoimmune diseases their immune systems have gone rampant they're attacking healthy tissues in the body that helps to reverse that but we can also use breathing to release different feel good hormones and when we do that we can trigger those releases at any time and this is one of the reasons that i think wim hof breathing has become so popular because it's so hard not to feel amazing at the end of that breathing session if anyone out there has done it it it's hard to see someone who hasn't had a very profound reaction after 20 minutes says wow i feel so good you feel that good because you're triggering the release of these hormones in your body and that's what's um to me is allows people to keep coming back to this and to keep using it because you're creating a positive feedback loop to allow yourself to heal and also to allow your monkey mind to be entertained by the constant good feelings right the constant sometimes hallucinations that some of these breath work practices bring on and it's great i love the wim hof method i i do it as often as i can which is usually a couple times a week i also love kundalini i also love sudarshan korea but all of these things are essentially doing the same thing to your body and brain some people say that in a society full of stress full of adrenaline already that these hyperventilation practices like tumor like the vimhoff methods are not necessarily the best choices so i wonder what you would say to that could this potentially be the wrong method for some people to me it's just another option it's just another tool you have in your back pocket so people are going to want to come to breathing for different reasons and there is no overarching prescription that you can use to cure everyone's woes there is a foundation of healthy breathing that i tried to establish in the book said okay i don't care if you're an ultra marathoner or an asthmatic or have long-haul coveted or are just anxious here are some breathing practices that will help everybody and there are zero side effects to this right you're only going to feel better you're only going to be able to perform better it's just like with food we know that eating a healthy diet benefits everybody but when you get into more specific chronic conditions you're absolutely right some people with panic and anxiety would hate wim hof breathing and they'd hate sudarshan kriya because these incorporate states of extreme hyperventilation and that's going to give them a lot of trouble so with people like that i would say start slow right start with that five and a half seconds and five and a half seconds out that's even too much for a lot of people so it's so important not to try to go and kick your breathing's butt and this is what westerners tend to do with everything but to really dip into it slowly and become immersed into it at your body and your mind's own level of comfort and so with people with anxiety and with people with asthma and panic what i've tried to tell them is go very slowly start with three seconds in three seconds out and you would be amazed how few people have actually breathed in that way just three seconds in three seconds out get comfortable with that and extend it so if you're talking about someone who is already an extreme biohacker you know they're in constant ketosis and they're eating all the right stuff and taking all the right pills and potions and they just want to totally push it go big then go do the wim hof method go try holotropic breath work that that'll really really send you on a whirl and those people are already prepared right they're conditioned to do this it's the same reason why you wouldn't say to somebody who's been sitting on a couch for the past year go and run a marathon this is going to be really good for your body you have to do what your body is is telling you to do and and to listen to your body and go into this stuff slowly one of the things that i love personally with breath work and that i've seen so impactful with hundreds if not thousands of my patients is that tuning into your breath tunes you into your body right you start to gain an awareness that often people have never had certainly for many many years just to stop quieting the noise and actually listen to certain things like you know i'm interested in what practices you do on a daily basis if any what i do um i usually take my mouth at night but i also love doing breath holds when i'm walking and i know you have written about this in your book but when i'm out for a walk after about five or ten minutes i will do you know i will be breathing through my nose i'll breathe out i'll um you know i'll sort of breathe out a normal exhale and then i'll see how far i can walk until i get that sort of medium air hunger and then i'll do that five or ten times what i love about that is a i can see myself getting better so my body is better able to tolerate that carbon dioxide buildup compared to let's say two years ago so that's really great to see but also if i haven't slept well or if i'm quite stressed and tense with work pressures and deadlines i find i can't hold my breath as long and it's almost like a early warning sign for me as to sort of what else is going on in my body so that's one thing i love and i would really encourage people to get into some form of breath work because i think it i think it kind of teaches you about yourself and your state of stress so breath holding has been a part of every breathing practice for thousands and thousands of years ancient hindus were talking about breath holding you know three thousand four thousand years ago the chinese ancient chinese were saying the exact same thing same exact practice different culture were they talking to one another then i don't think so and yet they came to the same conclusions so to me it's no coincidence that now modern science is really catching up to what our ancestors have been saying for so long and we know that co2 tolerance plays a huge role in panic in asthma in anxiety we know that because the studies have shown very clearly that people who can't hold their breath for a very long time are much more susceptible to suffer from these conditions i thought that this was fascinating i went out to the laureate institute of brain research and met with dr justin feinstein who is a neuropsychologist out there doing co2 work and he's one of the only researchers i found doing work in to this thing called co2 and co2 tolerance and he had a huge nih study looking at co2 tolerance and panic he's the one who told me that so many of his patients over the years he would ask them just to sit down and before he hooked them up to any monitors he asked them just to take a sip of air and hold their breath and this is what they did then he'd ask them to do it again usually they last about two seconds three seconds and you see this all the time with asthmatics and with people suffering from even anorexia and other fear-based disorders so he kept wondering if you could allow them to tolerate more co2 if it would allow them to better control their condition because so much of their condition was caused by this perpetual hyperventilation they were so scared of holding their breath because a breath hold to them reminded them of a panic attack or an asthma attack or an anxiety attack that they had conditioned themselves to breathe like this all the time and this wasn't just a few people either this is so common in communities of people who have those issues so he has continued doing this research and what i thought was even more fascinating is he's not the one who invented this stuff you can look back more than a hundred years and see researchers at yale harvard and boston university and university of wisconsin doing work in co2 and mental health conditions and this stuff worked incredibly well not just breathing retraining but actually having these people inhale a bit of co2 and what does that do it replicates holding your breath that's what it does because when you hold your breath your co2 increases these people couldn't hold their breath so they allowed them to celebrate in the benefits of breath holding by giving them a mouthful of co2 so i just kept finding these stories over and over again where we had learned this it had been studied at the most prestigious medical institutions and proven to be incredibly effective and then we had forgotten it and now a few people are re-remembering it right now and that's what's been exciting since the book has come out is there seems to be a lot more interest in co2 and co2 tolerance both in athletes and in people who are looking to overcome mental health issues yeah i mean just to recap for people if they didn't hear our first conversation if they're not familiar that drive to breathe doesn't come from our oxygen levels dropping it comes from our carbon dioxide levels building up and if we can't tolerate that we we have to breathe right so you know this co2 the carbon dioxide training that you're talking about can have i could just see physiologically how many different conditions that could immediately have an impact on particularly anxiety i could you can really see how it would help people um you mentioned athletics and i know you've written and spoken about about i think was it the 1968 men's track and field team and you know tell us a little bit about that and how athletes and fitness enthusiasts can use sort of breath holding and nasal breathing and all kinds of methods to actually improve their performance well again these were methods that have been used for decades and decades but kind of became less popular for some reason in the last few decades but one story in particular which i thought was so interesting was carl stau's work looking at a long exhale so he was a coral conductor and he found that so many of his singers were breathing these very shallow breaths and when you breathe very shallowly you don't have the resonance and you can't carry a note for as long so he started training them to exhale longer and how our breath comes into our bodies the lungs just don't inflate on their own right they need something to do this they're just like two balloons but we have something called a diaphragm underneath the lungs and when we breathe in that diaphragm lowers and when we breathe out that diaphragm lifts up so s style found that even within his singers they had such limited range of their diaphragms and by extending the range of their diaphragms they allowed themselves more lung capacity and they could sing so much better so he ended up going and retraining singers at the met opera who were already pretty good singers to begin with but they were even better after he taught them these new tricks and he got so popular that va hospitals on the east coast asked him to come in and help people with emphysema who were basically put on gurneys with an oxygen cannula up to their noses and fed a steady diet of antibiotics and left in the hospital to die nobody had any idea what to do with these people emphysemics lose the ability to engage their diaphragm parts of their lungs get inflamed and destroyed by emphysema those parts don't grow back but if you engage more of your diaphragm you can use the rest of the lung to compensate so stou was able to take these people who were literally left for dead retrain them only in breathing that's the only thing he did and these people got up and left the hospital and went to live normal lives and there's x-rays of this there's data sheets of it i have even heard from a few of these patients whom stout treated and they said he absolutely saved their lives so that's a very long way of saying stout then got even more popular that he was asked by the olympic committee for the u.s to come and retrain the runners for the mexico city olympics and he used the exact same methods engaging more diaphragmatic movement and these runners went to mexico city which has an elevation of like six thousand or seven thousand feet and they were the only team not to use oxygen before and after and they destroyed everybody it's still the greatest performance of any track team in the history of the olympics and they were able to do this because they knew how to breathe properly so a lot of trainers patrick mchugh and being one brian mckenzie being the other they have adopted these same tricks and they're using them to create these absolute monster of athletes right now uh these people who are just really uh outperforming anything they were able to do before if you enjoyed that conversation i think you are really going to enjoy the one i had with the former monk jay shetty on the simple things that you can do to train your mind it's right there give it a listen and let me know what you think the monk mindset is about pursuing your truest goals your truest self and your most authentic aligned goals

Channel: Dr Rangan Chatterjee

Views: 58,770

Rating: 4.9003196 out of 5

Keywords: the4pillarplan, thestresssolution, feelbetterin5, wellness, drchatterjee, feelbetterlivemore, ranganchatterjee, 4pillars, drchatterjee podcast, health tips, nutrition tips, health hacks, live longer, age in reverse, self help, self improvement, self development, personal development, motivation, inspiration, health interview

Id: hZjQIDJOe3Y

Length: 128min 16sec (7696 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 08 2021