This BREATHING TECHNIQUE Will Transform Your BODY & MIND! | James Nestor & Lewis Howes

breathe through your nose all the time i don't care if your nose is clogged if you want to make your body a very violent place for viruses to live in start with breathing through your nose take your vitamin d and see if you see teeth imprints on your tongue then your mouth is too small for your tongue i think you've got to have a dream the school of greatness please welcome us it seems to me that most of the world at least in america breathes through their mouth is that the case in your mind that you from all of your research of this that most people breathe through their mouth the estimates are that some are between 25 to 50 percent of the population habitually breathes through its mouth and a lot of us think well who cares we've got a mouth we can breathe through it but very different breaths you're taking through those two different channels that affect us in various ways what's a uh a breath through the mouth due to the body and the mind versus a breath through the nose one of them and then what is a day of that consistently doing for our body we'll introduce my my friend here at this time yes i love this show me the science well i usually wait a while to bring them on no you you called them up so for people listening and not seeing this i'm showing a cross-section of a human skull and so you will notice if you take a breath in through your nose it has to run this gauntlet of different structures past different tissues past cilia before it makes it into the throat before it makes it into your lungs if you look at the mouth none of that is there so when you are breathing through your nose you are humidifying air you're pressurizing it you're filtering it so that you can use that air so much more efficiently so yes we can breathe through our mouths what a wonderful thing we have a backup delivery system for our lungs that does not mean you should be breathing through your mouth throughout the day and this is something the ancients have known for thousands of years and modern westerners just have not been hip to this fact why is this not taught to us at a younger age to be nose breathers over mouth breathers uh this is an eternal question that i've asked myself for years and years because the science is so clear that when you're mouth breathing you're gonna make yourself more susceptible to respiratory ailments you're gonna be denying yourself more oxygen you can actually change the shape of your face if you breathe through your mouth when you're young the skeleton will start forming to that slack jawed posture and you will have this long face i'm a great example of this right because i was mouth breathing through a lot of my youth and even up into adulthood but there is more than 50 years of research on this stuff down at stanford which is very close to me and it's indisputable no one is arguing with this research and yet go around and look and what do you see a bunch of mouth breathers wherever you go i had andrew huberman on recently i'm not sure if you've been familiar with his work at stanford brand oh yeah absolutely and and he was sharing some breathing techniques in the power of breathing for the mind and the neuroscience behind breath and he was talking about a powerful breathing technique which is uh a deep long inhale through the nose with an additional breath at the top of it so a where you can really that's when you actually oxygenate the most of the the body and the cells i guess i'm not sure if that language is correct but you're opening up pathways and creating more energy in the body when you breathe that way uh as opposed to through the mouth i've been studying a lot of your videos on instagram and the different work that you've been doing and you've had you've interviewed so many different doctors and scientists and researchers on sleep apnea on human performance from breathing i feel like a couple things happened when i was a kid i always breeds with my mouth open and i have one theory maybe you can correct me if this is true or not one theory that my teeth although genetics play a factor in it my teeth became very crooked because i always have my mouth open at night breathing and during the day and working out is that theory uh true or is it more genetic that my mouth is you know messed up with my teeth it's all those things but oral posture plays such a huge role in this and this is something that people are just starting to realize right now if you look at our ancestors they all had perfectly straight teeth really very wide faces these very broad jaws if you don't believe me go look at a skull anything older than around 500 years old i've looked at hundreds of these things they have big wide jaws big mouths huge and these are the mouths the jaws that you see in models nowadays so about 90 percent of us have this retrognathic growth which means our faces are growing backwards which is one of the reasons why our teeth are crooked which is another reason why we have smaller airways smaller mouths smaller airway breathing problems so we've known this again for decades and decades and i had a hard time believing this until i went to the labs until i was standing in this room surrounded by ancient skulls from people from asia africa europe south america all over the world all smiling back with perfectly straight teeth gosh my god what have we done you know it's interesting you say this i when i was 16 trying to yeah 16 i had eight teeth removed because i was supposed to get braces and they said that my mouth was so small that it was it was clustering the teeth and that's why i looked like edward scissors hands in my mouth right and so i had these eighties removed and then i decided not to get braces which is probably the dumb thing 20 years goes by my teeth receded back my top teeth were seated back so that the only teeth that ever touched the last 20 years were my front two teeth my back teeth have never felt each other touch until about four months ago because i finally got invisalign about a year ago and my i've been expanding my my mouth and my teeth out and it's crazy the more research i'm doing i feel like i just did this to myself because of my breathing patterns especially at night because my mouth was just always open and relaxed as opposed to shut now it's one theory i wanted to have uh clarified from you another theory i listened to a doctor of dentistry tell me that almost all disease comes through the mouth that we pick up almost all of it comes through the mouth from ingesting from breathing all these different things and the reason why people that breathe through the nose are usually healthier is because they're not breathing in the viruses or the disease that we might carry with the filtration system through the nose that catches it a lot more is that accurate as well so the first part of that looking at the mouth and teeth so why do we get our teeth straightened we get our teeth straightened because they grow and crooked why do they grow in crooked because they have a smaller playing field they have a smaller mouth to grow and straight so the western approach to this and this wasn't always this way is let's remove more teeth from a mouth that's already crowded and what's going to happen the mouth is going to get smaller so as this mouth gets smaller and smaller and smaller your airway goes from this to this so all of these orthodontists and i probably talked to 20 of them right have said that there is this big wave coming and we're going to look at what we've done 10 years from now and be horrified wow because the physics are there small mouth smaller smaller airway it's not too hard to get your head around but the question is what do we do about it we acknowledge this problem and your story i've heard this a hundred times really different people i've had extractions i've had braces i've had headgear my mouth is messed up my breathing was messed up you hear this from everyone and uh it was pretty shocking to me to to realize that breathing could be affected so significantly isn't it interesting that we focus a lot on what we eat how we sleep we focus on hydration nutrition working out but we can go a long time without eating or drinking something but we can't go a long time without breathing the right way and yet we hardly ever focus on the art of practicing how to breathe isn't it amazing that a lot of challenges we're faced with as humans whether it be our teeth our breath ways inflammation the ability to uh exert energy in workouts or whatever it may be are all affected from their ability to breathe or a lack of understanding how to breathe are we supposed to breathe through our chest are we supposed to breathe through more of our diaphragm when do we breathe how do our ancestors know this instinctively and we don't our ancestors didn't need to know this just like they didn't need to know the latest crossfit exercise to stay fit just like they didn't need to know what foods to eat to be healthy because they were living in a very different world than our own our ancestors weren't doing push-ups or burpees right they didn't need to because they were walking for four hours a day they didn't need to avoid sugars or high carb foods because they were eating everything natural and raw so when it comes to breathing we have this amazing organ called our nose which dictates so much of how the air should be coming in and how we should be using it it's harder to breathe through your nose right it is more time it pressurizes it that's all good because that allows your lungs to absorb more oxygen you get 20 more oxygen breathing through your nose then you do equivalent breaths through your mouth why is that so because of how long it takes because of the pressure and because of uh significant release of nitric oxide which is in our sinus cavities nitrous oxide and it's not um it's not nitrous it's nitric oxide so don't go out and and uh you know uh get those little things that fill up balloons or whipped cream and do them very high you want nitric oxide which is the stuff that is released when people take viagra or other sexual um uh sex performing drugs so enhancing drugs so breathing through your nose could make you more aroused i wouldn't go so far as to say that but i will say um arousal comes with a relaxation a parasympathetic response an orgasm is associated with a sympathetic response we calm ourselves parasympathetically with slow breaths we arouse ourselves with rust so you could see how whenever you you happen to be coupling with with whomever your breath is following the the arc of the experience in a lot of ways and that that's not by accident those those two things are are very uniquely combined there you've been studying this for a while now and you're doing like deep dive studies as well before that and water and things like that this seems like this is something that's been fascinating you to research and understand what have been the three biggest findings that you've realized that were kind of shocking or just big eye openers that you realized you were doing the complete opposite of or it's been impacting you in such a negative way that you've now changed in your daily lifestyle i think the first one is breathing too much a lot of us think that by breathing more we are getting more oxygen to our hungry cells in our bodies false we are doing the opposite and i'll show you what i mean by that right now if you take 10 to 20 big breaths you're going to feel some lightness in your head you're going to feel some tingling in your fingers if you keep breathing that way your extremities will get a little cooler that's not from an increase of oxygen but from a lack of circulation in those areas so by breathing slowly you actually can increase circulation and delivering deliver more oxygen to these areas really so so if i'm in a uh a cold state i go outside i'm you know i'm from ohio and it's winter time and it's cold and usually we're like shivering are you saying we should be actually slowing our breath in that cold state to allow us to get more oxygen or what does that mean it it depends what you're wearing it depends how cold it is it depends on who you are what what your fat content is in your body but having said that there are numerous breathing techniques that allow people to sit in the snow for hours at a time and not get frostbite and not get hypothermia and scientists are still wondering how the hell do they do it you can see videos of these monks they put them in a harvard medical school researcher put these guys in a cold room put a wet sheet over them they breathed in this way and they dried the sheet so within about they dry the sheet that's right and you can this is all available on youtube it's available in a study published in nature which is the most esteemed scientific journal out there and there's obviously lots of studies with wim hof where i know you've connected with i was in poland with wim i took a trip with the 13 guys that i sent there earlier this year and got to experience this firsthand with him and and experiencing it as well so what types of uh so that's one thing that uh you know this fast breathing uh is not the the way you should go in general depending on all these factors but more slow breathing uh to help you kind of get the oxygen through your extremities what's the next thing when you're working out a good thing to do is to practice breathing less so they're slow breathing and there's less breathing and these are two different things because if you're breathing slow but you're taking in a larger volume that is still breathing at your metabolic rate but by decreasing your breathing something called hypoventilation training which is getting huge right now you can mimic the effects of altitude training no way you can yes you can release more epo um build more red blood cells um and and all of these things that's what lance scott got busted for shooting up epo but you can do this naturally and they've they've been doing so many studies in this xavier warren's in in paris has been doing studies in this and various olympians have adopted this breathing technique it's not fun because the one need in life is to breathe so i've done it uh not fun but it is amazing to feel your body compensating instead of having your fingers cold just everything is hot because you've just got blood pumping throughout your body um so pretty interesting stuff about a month ago i committed to doing my first marathon so i've been doing longer runs which is not fun for me and uh i've been a i would say a a high level performing athlete most of my life from playing professional football back in the day to playing on the usa men's national handball team currently for the last 10 years and just as an active person doing a lot of different sports it's really hard to slow your breathing down when you are sprinting when you're running fast long distances when you're doing a crossfit type of workout is it healthy to to slow it down when your body your heart rate is pumping so fast and saying i need to breathe is it good to say okay let me restrict it right now breathe slower when it feels like your heart is gonna pump out of your chest what you want to be doing is be breathing all the time within your metabolic needs so you don't want to be over breathing you don't want to be under breathing but so many of us are conditioned to over breathe all the time that's what i'm saying breathing less can be very beneficial to want to be is efficient especially in athletics especially in performance why do you want to go expend more energy to do something when you could expend less energy to work at that same level which means you can push it harder you can run faster you can run further and they've done studies with with people who have been running marathons and looked at their heart rates mouth breathing versus nasal breathing and one guy when he was nasal breathing you know uh 26 miles heart rate was the same the whole time because he was pivoting into his parasympathetic state this is the state in which your body is allowed to use oxygen most efficiently you know as westerners we're just like cram it in cram it in throw out what we don't want cram it in you know that it's most efficient and it's best for your body to be working right in line with its its coherence so right in line with its needs you wouldn't get in a sports car and just rev it at every stop sign and just completely pin the rpms everywhere you go the motor is going to wear out right our body is the same thing is there ever a time as an athlete pushing the limits that's good to breathe through your mouth you would have to talk to my buddy brian mckenzie who deals with elite athletes all the time i think once you get to a certain threshold to a certain stage i'm talking top tier athletes here right then you can start exploring that in your zone five your zone four but what he's told me and what four of the breathing therapists have told me is never work out harder than you can breathe correctly so this doesn't mean when you're uh you know about ready to dunk on someone and it's the finals in the nba you can't open your mouth just slam it on someone that's fine what i'm focusing on is habitual 90 of the time you should be breathing to your nose even when you're pushing your boundaries as an athlete and you feel like you can't get the oxygen are you saying that if you're training properly the body should start to adapt and be able to that's exactly what i'm saying and there's 40 years of research with dr john dewyard who has proven that you get more oxygen breathing through your nose so why do you want if and and breathing deeply if you think about breath okay you've taken a breath it's going to go into your mouth it's going to go into your throat it's going to go into your your bronchi here but it takes a while to actually get to your lungs so why would you want to breathe a bunch of very short shallow breaths you're not using that air so 50 of it is going into your body and out without ever being by breathing slower and deeper you can increase your efficiency by 35 over breathing shallow so and this is something i was hooked up with the stanford experiment with pulse with a pulse oximeter on a bike and pushing it as hard as i could breathing through my nose at a rate of six breaths per minute which is about a quarter and i said i have to be my o2 has to be just sinking now it stayed the same the whole time six breaths a minute we were this was all through the nose we were trying to find the breaking point of when i was losing oxygen but what dictates that need to breathe is not oxygen it is carbon dioxide so in the muscles or in the blood what is that it's in the it's in the blood yes co2 is is what we off gas i'm blowing off co2 there right so if you were to exhale and to hold your breath you're going to feel that nagging need to breathe it's not oxygen that's increasing levels of co2 so once you acknowledge that and understand that an increase of co2 can actually be very beneficial it changes your relationship with how you breathe so we want to increase co2 in the body because more co2 will mean we need to breathe less more co2 will allow oxygen to disassociate from red blood cells more easily to be clear people with emphysema people with covet you don't need any more co2 i'm talking about healthy healthy people who don't have underlying conditions an increase of co2 including for asthmatics and panic suffers has been found to be profoundly beneficial because most of us breathe too much which guess what happens we offload too much co2 and without that co2 our bodies have to work harder to get oxygen this is so complicated sorry you have to go through this process but especially for a journalist i never went to medical school had to learn this stuff but we've known it for 120 years it's just few people are paying attention to it you know when i do the wim hof method and when i'm with wim and he's like okay let's do a few rounds and then breathe all the air out so there's no air in your lungs and then you can do more push-ups than you've ever done before with no i guess air stored in the lungs but it's oxygenated throughout the body what are your thoughts on techniques like that for performance i think they're fantastic and i think the science is very clear on that whether or not it's wim hof method by the way wim it makes no claims that he invented this stuff right these breathing techniques have been around for thousands and thousands of years and it's no coincidence that wim hof method does the exact same thing as sudarsh and kriya which does the exact same thing as pranayamas they all have you really breathe hold your breath or breathe really slowly and they go through these cycles so what you're doing there is you are offloading co2 you are uploading oxygen when you hold your breath that co2 goes up that oxygen releases into all your cells and you start all over again so um i found i i tried to do whims breathing tumor whatever you want to call it you know four or five times a week i'm a huge fan of it i see big benefits of it and with breath work and athletes uh trust me on this in the next five years it's already happening there is going to be an explosion of focus on breathing there used to be we forgot about it for 40 years and here we are again if someone's only got five minutes a day what's the best breathing strategy routine to just give them a boost or get them more intentional and grounded for the day what would that be for you is it a set of cycles is it a deep breathing is it a calm breathing what what would you recommend everyone's different what they need is different so this is why these blanket prescriptions for entire populations don't really work too well except for a subsect of people but there is a certain foundation of breathing it doesn't matter if you're an asthmatic if you have anxiety if you're an athlete you can all benefit from so these steps are breathe through your nose all the time i don't care if your nose is clogged if it's clogged find a way of clearing it you have to breathe through your nose people the second one is to breathe slowly to breathe less of course and to exhale fully a lot of us are conditioned this is very typical western mindset to put more and more in more and more air on top of air in order to get a full breath of air you need to get the old breath out and you need to focus on your exhales and exhalations so a simple thing and just because something simple doesn't mean it's effective look at nutrition the most simple nutrition is the most effective after 50 years of trying to find ways of hacking out i'm going to pull this vitamin out and put it in this powder we're back at square one oh yeah just eat vegetables we've been saying this for a long time so yeah breathing is the same if there's one piece of advice i would give to people beyond that nasal part is try to breathe in to account of about five or six relax yourself don't challenge yourself breathe out to that same count if you want to relax yourself even more extend the exhale nature is simple yet subtle and your body will respond to this and if you have heart rate variability monitor if you have a pulse ox look at what happens to your heart rate look at what happens to your heart rate variability when you slow down the breaths and you breathe in a rhythm this affects how we think it affects the emotional centers in the brain so it affects the entire body because of course it does it's breathing it's our most basic biological need why do you think we have adopted this other style once we when we knew this 40 60 years ago hundreds of years ago we've known this is it just a change in the society or something else well some of it is anatomical so we our faces have fundamentally changed as we were just talking about earlier that's part of it so even if you focus on healthy breathing at night you have sleep apnea you have snoring because our faces have changed some of it is environmental if you think of what happened in the victorian era people started wearing corsets okay really tight vests really tight belts what happens when you do that you can't take a deep breath add to that pollution add to that allergens add to that stress add to that um working in an office where you're in a chair like this and you're stressed out and you can't take a deep breath even if you want to and you've got this perfect cocktail of illness and if you don't believe me go look at what's happened to people in the past 50 years from bmi to asthma to copd i mean things are out of control and it's so common now that people just think ah yeah i snore my wife has sleep apnea i you know sleep in another room there's nothing normal about this what's the best way to reverse sleep apnea it really depends where your sleep apnea is nasopharynx oral pharynx hypopharynx um for a lot of people this is an issue from and i'm not saying everyone i would never say that some people absolutely need surgery but so we have this muscle tube it's our throat and all these soft tissues at the back of our mouth when you just eat soft foods which is 95 of the diet today even what's considered healthy yogurt oatmeal avocados all this stuff is soft all of those areas get flabby just like anything else with a workout in your mouth yeah you need to work them out so there's this whole new branch of science called myofunctional therapy where they have these kids and adults do exercises with their tongues this is an extremely powerful muscle right and if it's not working out it's gonna get flabby did you have a lot of sleep out here yourself not too much i was snoring for a little while years and years ago um i'm surprised because i have uh you know i've had extractions i've had all the other problems but i had numerous respiratory issues i was working out all the time eating all the right food i was surfing i was boxing i was sleeping eight hours i kept getting pneumonia kept getting bronchitis really wheezing and was told like people just like yeah you're getting old dude this is how it is i said uh i don't quite believe that so once i really learned about what's happened to our airways um basically everyone and once you understand what's happened you can figure out ways of fixing it so for people with mild or moderate sleep apnea and anyone can look up these studies online these oral pharyngeal exercises i'm not going to do them now because they they look pretty weird but they have had a significant effect on snoring and sleep apnea work out for your mouth why not it's free right what are they called oral what oral pharyngeal exercises and i'm happy to send you a few links yeah i gotta check this out is there a benefit with practicing breathing through one nostril and another nostril for the brain for memory for health is this a thing it is and if anyone is not driving i guess you could do this driving um but you can just take a finger or thumb or whatever you want and just block your right nostril and breathe in through your left nostril so there's been and breathe in and out through your left nostril there's about 20 years of studies showing that when you breathe through this channel you are you will lower blood pressure your heart rate will lower and you will stimulate more of the right quote-unquote creative side of your brain now the right nostril inhaling through that has the opposite effect it stimulates you blood pressure goes up heart rate goes up so there's this thing in yoga called alternate nostril breathing right that has you use these different channels to elicit different moods or put you into different states how often should you be practicing this this is like a one minute a day type of thing is this every hour on the hour you do this for a few seconds what do you think is the best process you shouldn't have to be practicing it at all and i say that because going back to that we shouldn't be focused have to focus on our diet our exercise but the modern era is requiring us to and what i mean by that um in regards to your nose is your nostrils are covered with erectile tissue and this erectile tissue inflames and grows flaccid just like the erectile tissue you know where so our noses throughout the day when i learned this down at stanford it just blew my mind one nostril will naturally open for about a half an hour to three or four hours and then gently close and the other one will naturally open all day all day long this is happening to us it's going back sometimes they're both open and then they both so you're kind of like when you have a little congestion sometimes it's on one side and it's like it comes out the other nose like five hours later you're like what's going on this is this is the cycle in in our noses that our bodies naturally do and if you think about how breathing air through these different nostrils affects our physiology affects us mentally what a fantastic thing that our bodies are are turning on the throttle putting on the brakes crazy back and forth so if you're breathing through your mouth like that this guy you get none of this zero wow it's kind of like nature's night and day like one nostril maybe or like when the waves come in and when they go back it's like allowing nature to happen inside of your nasal cavity which affects the rest of your body and the mind i'm assuming this is fascinating do you know how often that is is that like every few hours it changes what's the it's about every 30 minutes to three or four hours it switches and once you know this you could right now my right is more um obstructed than my left my left is a lot more open ancient believe that all humans shared these same patterns and they did a study a couple decades ago where they looked at people and had them gauge how they were breathing throughout their noses and when the moon was at its strongest during a full moon and during a new moon everyone was synchronized so oh no way what do you mean like one nose is clogged during for everyone or a new moon or something yes this is crazy more more studies need to be done of course this is one study but this is why i included this this stuff sounded insane to me but there it is on the national institute of health um library so this is fascinating so how long have you been practicing this new way of breathing for yourself personally so people think that since i wrote this book about breathing i'm now just the badass breather i'm just i got it locked in i'm no i am a science journalist and tried to take an objective view of this yeah i picked up a few tricks from the experts in the field which i have felt completely transformed from but i am not the guru um to be disseminating you know uh you have this problem breathe this way that's there are other people that do this so well uh having said that again this stuff is easy this isn't requiring you to go keto it's not requiring you to go vegan it's not requiring you to run 10 miles a day we carry our breath with us all day long and we can focus that breath and you will see instant benefits from doing this science is very clear have you seen through the research and the science people applying this new way of breathing or i guess old way of breathing that people are able to do things like cure asthma or other respiratory problems through a healthier breathing technique have you seen this so i've talked to dozens and dozens and dozens of these people people who had had asthma for 50 years who have been on bronchodilators oral steroids if you stay on oral steroids for too long it starts impacting your bones which is why increased risk of osteoporosis autoimmune diseases i mean it worsening asthma it's bad news and again this is no no controversy about this but what do you do you can't get off this stuff because then you'll die of an asthma attack so uh this story was written about in the new york times about how someone um a he was a violin maker in vermont just started breathing in this different way breathing within his metabolic needs instead of over breathing asthmatics over breathe all the time they breathe through their mouth he was able to get rid of oral steroids that he'd been on for decades and he was going from 20 pumps of a bronchodilator to i think two a day and i read this in the new york times so this is not a sketchy journal and i said what is going on here so i spent months and months talking to the top researchers in this field and a lot of people think that asthma oh i inherited it there's nothing it's an incurable disease i can't do anything about it i have to stay on these drugs that is not true if you look at the scientific literature and if you look at these people who have done nih studies into asthma and breathing and what a huge impact it's going to have i want to be perfectly clear i'm not a doctor i'm not a breathing therapist okay i'm not saying go ditch your bronchodilators no i'm saying that you should if you have asthma it would be worth your time to explore how breathing can help benefit you how it can help blunt the symptoms but don't do anything per this advice i just put that big label on there of course and what would you say are some best practices from your research when our nasal passages are congested how do we you can't breathe through your nose for five days for whatever reason what's the strategy there have you have you heard anyone share that so some people their noses are so messed up they need surgical interventions absolutely but for the majority of us including me i i was a perfect candidate for surgery right broken this nose about four times basketball surfing like i'm a complete mess but i wanted to see what my body could do and i was able to restore so much of that damage through through breathing to open up these passageways so a nice trick if you are congested is to exhale and you hold your breath and you hold your nostrils and you move your head back and forth you move your head up and down until you feel a significant need to breathe then you calmly exhale through your nose and inhale again and then wait about 45 seconds to a minute and do that same thing over again so what you're doing is you're increasing that magical molecule carbon dioxide which is a vasodilator which helps to open your nose so there's a lot of youtube tutorials on this and uh it's free right so so first close your nose then exhale or exhale then close your nose you can exhale then close your nose get all get all the air out of first and close your nose go up and down side to side then exhale more or then inhale you can inhale through your nose from that i'll throw your nose if it's still congested just be very calm about this don't just calmly inhale and try that again patrick mcewen um who's been doing this stuff for 20 years has a lot of free tutorials on youtube he seems pretty fascinating with his research yeah that this guy is someone who had severe asthma severe health problems was getting no help from anyone figured out how to breathe now has zero symptoms of asthma and is teaching thousands of asthmatics what he did he was a business guy right he had no intention of doing this in his life took a hard left turn into this world so he's scientific he's a he's a great practitioner he's uh he healed himself through it so it's worth listening to him for those who struggle with extreme anxiety or panic attacks it seems like more and more people are dealing with anxiety and panic attacks what's the easiest way to calm down using breathing that you've discovered slow your breathing down so there was a study about 10 years ago nih study by alicia moret down at southern methodist university she went to harvard and stanford and she gathered a bunch of different people who were suffering from panic and she just had them slow down their breathing and increase their co2 levels i know i keep saying co2 but but this is this is the stuff people and something like 96 of these people a year after the study concluded said they were much improved or very much improved the majority of them stopped having panic attacks because what happens when we're panic okay i'm sitting here with you oh i feel claustrophobic the more you breathe like that the more you're going to exacerbate and hasten that attack so when you feel it coming on you don't stop and take a deep breath you stop and take a slow and light breath into your lungs right and control your body and control your breathing and this is such a profound effect on people and again that that study um it was a published top scientific journal it's available for everyone it just i i find it so bizarre and i should mention that my father-in-law is a pulmonologist my brother-in-law is an er dog i'm a huge fan of western medicine but it's so bizarre that people with panic people with asthma no one's looking at how they're breathing right they're given these these pills and powders and and put on their way and the science is is very clear on this stuff it can have a really profound effect does the mind or thoughts when we're in a panic or stressed or fight or flight moment does the mind or thoughts influence the breathing or does the breathing influence the mind great question it goes both ways so what you're thinking is going to influence how you're breathing but the wonderful thing is sometimes you can't take control of those thoughts right you get nervous you can't turn that off but you can take control of your breathing and eighty percent of the messages are coming from the body to the brain not to the brain not from the brain to the body so just by allowing yourself think whatever you want to think but slow down your breathing to the way that you would be breathing when you're calm and you will start shooting calming messages into your brain interesting take control of those those states and this is something that huberman has been studying for years down at stanford right with the with the phrenic nerve and the way that the diaphragm moves how that diaphragm moves is gonna affect the signals that your brain is going to get going to get and it's going to affect how you're going to be processing things how the diaphragm moves so the diaphragm is this amazing muscle that sits underneath the lungs the lungs don't inflate and deflate themselves right they need something to do it so we have this crazy muscle it looks like a parachute or an umbrella that when we breathe in that diaphragm goes down and when we breathe out that diaphragm goes up so this rhythmic motion of this diaphragm the diaphragm works as a pump some researchers have said the heart is a secondary pump the diaphragm is the main pump so when you're when your diaphragm is going like this it is sending panic signals to your brain this is like you know red alert things are bad but if your diaphragm is going like this this is sending calming signals right so it's almost like you could be stressed out in your mind but the moments or moments you start to slow your breathing it's going to send signal back to your mind that everything's better you don't need to stress as much so you if you can control your body you'll control your mind so guess what navy seals do before they go in for some black ops mission really intense stuff they start breathing in a box pattern four in hold four exhale four hold four four in hold four imagine a box if you look at what's happening there you're in for four but you are holding or exhaling for three quarters of the time so the longer you hold and the longer you exhale the more you're gonna be eliciting that parasympathetic that calming response so these guys aren't going to sleep right they're trying to focus themselves to be the biggest badasses on the planet to go take care of business in an efficient way they can't have their brains just all over the place what what are you saying panic they can't panic they're dead so this is a technique that anyone can use i mean the vast majority of us aren't going to be in that scenario but we can breathe the way that they breathe and that so many other people do to focus our thoughts to take take advantage of our breathing to take over certain states anxiety or anger can you explain why the diaphragm is sometimes referred to as the second heart so the diaphragm again is this huge pump it's almost like the heart is a sump pump right it's just doing all the other work just the additional work but the diaphragm is enormous and as you're breathing in and out it is pumping blood okay it is helping to pump blood but it does something else a lot of people view breathing as just a biochemical act right getting oxygen in getting co2 out it is a biomechanical act so when the diaphragm goes down it also softly massages the organs which helps us leech out more lymph fluid so it is the pump for lymph fluid so everything in the body should be moving you know you can think about it like a pond gets scummy right and a lot of stuff starts growing it because it's still water that's not what happens with the river and our bodies want to act like a river things things are static for too long does not like that that's where problems occur what's uh better for the body and your health chest breathing or lower belly breathing like where is the diaphragm sitting is it in between the two is it a mixture of both so a lot of us are chest breathing throughout the day and when we chest breathe this is associated with a sympathetic or fight or flight response what happens when you get scared but instead people are doing this all all day so when you breathe like that a sympathetic response it's amazing this is what has kept our species alive it focuses us it shifts blood from less important organs to the heart and the skeletal muscles so we can like fight or we can run but it's meant only to be in that state for shorts a short amount of time so if we stay in the sympathetic chest breathing state for too long we are cutting off other organs and a bunch of problems can happen in those organs because of that i won't go down the laundry list just trust me on this so to answer your question you want to breathe lightly fluidly and deeply this does not mean you have to just go for it every breath and push out your stomach it means you should be breathing through your nose nasal breathings are are deeper okay these go to the lower lobes at the bottom of the lungs is where we have the largest profusion of blood so that's where oxygen exchange can happen much more efficiently so light slow and deep that's how we should be breathing and less ordinarily you would say breathe in line with your metabolic needs but i'm saying for the vast majority less is that's your metabolism gotcha and is it true that our lungs get smaller as we age and if so can breathing practices prevent this from allowing us to have more expansive lungs so what happens from ages around 30 to 50 you're going to lose about 15 to 16 percent of your lung capacity oh man absolutely 50 it just goes down very very quickly that sucks the problem well there's good news behind this i'm going to depress you then i'm going to inspire you factoids so the problem is our ribs get a lot less flexible our intercostals get less flexible but what's great about this is you can reverse that damage guess what yoga does i'm gonna have you reach your arm like this breathe into this lung and be flexible and now breathe into this lung so yoga is essentially just allowing us not only to maintain our lung capacity but increase it i've worked with free divers who have doubled their lung capacity so doubled average adult male six leaders this guy had 12 liters so i think he had he was abnormally large i won't say quite doubled maybe 40 you know 70 percent larger so it's not uncommon to increase your lung capacity 30 percent by by um including these exercises by breathing properly and especially when we get older this is so important we don't want to go down that entropy right and be we at least want to sustain it if we can increase it great what's the benefit to increasing our lung capacity it's the same benefit of having a larger gas tank in a car right so if you're driving cross country do you want to stop and fill up every hour or do you want to stop and fill up every six hours right so by having larger lungs allows you to take fewer breaths and to get more oxygen with those breaths it's about being efficient so when we're breathing slower and when we're breathing deeply into our lungs at our metabolic need our heart can work so much more softly we aren't overworking it when we're breathing twice the amount into our chest just feel your heart rate when you do that the heart hates this why do you want to overwork your heart you should it should just be doing what it needs to do not compensating for your bad habits and that's what this larger lung capacity this softer lower breathing allows you to do is there anything that you've learned and that doctors or scientists are saying is essential for us as human beings to practice that you don't practice for instance i know sugar is horrible i know it's the root of all evil in the body and developing cancers and all these things but i love sugar you know i'm better at it the more i know how horrible it is for me i'm better at balancing that but i still love to eat sugar you know is there anything that you're like these things i should never do but i still do it because it's just a bad habit well you're talking to a guy who just had a big old chunk of chocolate before good thing you don't have good thing you're not with me right now because i'd be sharing that with you i'm i'm with you on that you know it's i i think it's a little ironic in a lot of wellness circles people are so stressed out about doing the right thing all the time that they're miserable to me the point of wellness is to live a happier and longer life so why do you want to spend all your time beating yourself up for eating a piece of chocolate or drinking a beer you know so i think in moderation is key i these breathing practices like wim hof method sudarshan kriya they've been found to be so effective for people with autoimmune problems asthma anxiety depression but just breathing those slow and easy breaths um can there's so so many benefits to that and psychologists and psychiatrists have used this for people with anxiety and depression as well so having said that as long as you have this foundation of healthy breathing just like with with diet as long as you have a foundation where you're eating a lot of vegetables right you're not eating a lot of of highly processed carbs or not too much sugar you can have a piece of cake you can drink a beer you can have a glass of wine that's all fine the same thing with breathing if you're laughing really hard and you're breathing out of your mouth who would tell you that's a bad thing right i'm talking about the habits habitual breathing the 90 of the day even 80 of the day if you adhere to healthy habits there it's going to have a downstream positive effect on your health and the science the studies the data has really shown us that i was just trying to practice this as listening to you is there a way to communicate and speak but also breathe through your nose like while you're having a long speech for an hour on stage do we practice breathing through the nose or out of the nose while you're speaking i'm not even sure is that possible there is but it's so awkward and i'll i'll tell you what i mean by that when i was talking to these breathing therapists some of these people on the phone i thought like they had some some problems with their brain because they would say this very fluid sentence and they would keep talking and they're still talking they're still talking then they would go silent and go and now i'm gonna talk some more and talk some more no it's not natural yeah if i did that on a radio interview or with you it would be a freaking disaster so as you can see i'm breathing through my mouth right i'm trying to breathe through my nose when i'm listening but these aren't healthy breathing habits but i'm aware of it so that when i'm off this call i can go and close my mouth and breathe through my nose the rest of the time so to answer your question there is a proper way of doing this but good luck with your friends if you yeah right unless you're all breathing experts and you're part of the same language and i've i've talked to circles the conversations are really trippy you get a point across like come on it's like someone gave you nitrous oxide i knew a nitric oxide was going to come back into that so that's hilarious is there any evidence thus far if training your breathing helps to fight or reduce symptoms for viruses flu covid anything that could be affecting the immune system and weakening it in a certain way i just talked to david dr hascam about this who has been studying how different habits can help defend our bodies better against covid i don't think he's too pumped um for this hurt immunity thing he said our best line of defense is ourselves and so they have looked at how breathing plays this role in inflammation so inflammation is behind show me the the top ten killers in the world and i guarantee inflammation is behind ninety percent even ninety five percent of them so how we breathe affects inflammation in the blood if we are stressed out right now and you know how we did that heavy breathing exercise and you felt some numbness in your fingers that is inflammation okay that is blood not getting to these areas so so our uh arteries and are becoming inflamed so it's harder for blood to push through these places that's that's what it is so breathing absolutely plays a role in this and it i should also note that there's been a ton of research looking into nasal breathing and how that is your first line of defense against covid no way not only does the nose filter out pathogens and bacteria and viruses but dr louis ignarro who won the nobel prize in the 90s has found that that release of nitric oxide interacts directly with viruses to kill them so no way yes breathing out through the nose is that what that does breathing through your nose at the whole the whole time okay so not not only is this is this filtering because we have nasal hairs we have cilia we have all these other structures but the release of this nitric oxide the first round of sars which was like 14 years ago they would expose mammalian cells to nitric oxide and those cells would live so much longer and it's no coincidence there are 11 clinical trials right now looking into giving patients guess what nitric oxide to help them defeat covid and to to blunt the symptoms of covet after it happens we produce nitric oxide in our noses so we don't produce it in our mouth we produce it throughout our bodies but we get a much larger profusion through our noses our mouth specifically is not producing any nitric oxide so if you hum and if you hum on occasion you increase your nitric oxide 15 fold wait so humming why just because you have your mouth closed and you're breathing through your nose it releases more nitric oxide the vibrations of it so they found this out 10 years ago 12 years ago and there's even been this one small study where this guy had uh chronic sinusitis and he hummed at a prescribed time four times a day and he was able to clear his nose i'm not saying this is gonna work for everyone but i'm saying that the science is there if you look at what nitric oxide interacts directly with past pathogens to kill them okay that's our whole job it's it it's a vasodilator it's part of what it does uh remember wow it's also viagra when you when someone takes viagra they release more nitric oxide which allows you know what to happen you know where so they release it i mean they're getting it out of their body they're getting it releasing it inside they're releasing more nitric oxide within it stimulates the release of more nitric oxide inside the blood that's right that's right you're not you're not breathing out nitric oxide you're breathing out carbon right you you breathe out carbon dioxide that's right it's really hard to hum and inhale they were looking at humming and exhalation and it's it's also important to note that nitric oxide has a bioavailability of about two to six seconds so you have to constantly keep producing it which is why you need to constantly it really helps to constantly be breathing through your nose not just i'm going to breathe through my nose for for five minutes and fight off cobit no this is something you have to do all the time if you want to make your body a very violent place for viruses to live in i would argue start with breathing through your nose take your vitamin d and see let's say we're have our mouth shut 90 of the time right hopefully more throughout the day you're sleeping with your mouth shut you know it's interesting when i started to sleep without my mouth shut i stopped snoring you can't snore with your mouth shut you can't go i mean i guess you could but it's like your body just learns how to breathe through the nose as opposed to just your tongue flapping around in the back of your mouth i guess right i mean you you can snore when you have issues with your with your nasopharynx people can some people can do that but for a lot of people simply shutting their mouth at night can open the airway and you will you you won't snore that's it you just shut your mouth and you stop snoring most of the time moms have been saying this crap for for 300 years you know sit up straight and shut your mouth maybe they were right i know right it's interesting when i went to india four years ago to study this we were practicing uh a meditation breathing you know cycle and they were telling us the science behind each one of the reasons why we would hum for a period of time why it was all breathing through the nose while you breathe in uh let's say for two seconds and you always breathe out for four seconds or you double the breath on the exhale and they were saying this is what we've been doing in this practice for thousands of years in india but they were finding the science that then backs the reasons why each thing is valuable and they were saying to me that when you hum it releases more uh what is it nitric oxide is that what it's called and it helps release that and which defends against disease all these different things so it's it's fascinating that people have been doing this for thousands of years and now the science is catching up to it all well think about prayers right um there was a study done about 20 years ago where they looked at the catholic prayer cycle of the of the rosary ave maria and they looked at oh money pod me home one of the most famous buddhist prayers right each of these prayers requires you to uh recite a phrase that takes about six seconds so you're only exhaling when when you're reciting when you're vocalizing always on the exhale and then it was about a six-second break to inhale so so many prayers the same exact thing um all of these prayers in these different cultures had the same respiratory rate tied into it and it turns out that that respiratory rate you don't need to pray to do this you can and that's great but just breathing at that rate will increase oxygen to your brain it will slow your heart rate it will increase circulation and the systems of your body will enter the state of coherence and you can see this with heart rate variability all those lines that are disjointed suddenly become these beautiful sine waves and this is your body really working at peak efficiency so if you look at humming too guess what happens when you go um [Music] all of these prayers not all of them many prayers and different cultures incorporate elements of humming which all do the same thing chanting humming yeah i guess you're saying that this when you breathe your nose it it creates it releases more nitric oxide in the blood you have to keep doing it it's not like it's there you do it for five minutes and it's there all day you have to continually do this to keep releasing is that right that's correct but if you're for instance let's say you're exposed to someone they're coughing and they look sick this would be a good time to be breathing through the nose to be humming right to get away from them because if this nitric oxide only lasts so long it's that that time when the virus comes in which which can uh come into your body and and make you sick so that would be the time you would you would really want that extra plug of nitrogen boost and so your body isn't releasing it when you breathe through your mouth but it releases it when you breathe to your nose nitric oxide is released in various areas of the body but it is not released in your mouth specifically so you get a far you get six times more nitric oxide breathing through your nose and if you're doing it throughout the whole day through your nose you're constantly boosting your immune system i'm assuming you're constantly optimizing relaxed relaxation you're less stressed by doing all this right everything you're saying it affects your nervous system function it affects your brain it affects your biochemistry i mean i can go on and on how much of a change have you made in your personal life since researching and studying this do you feel like you're 50 of the way there are you 80 what's your personally your lifestyle like well i wanted to address it's it's pretty easy to tell people how to breathe well it's another thing to teach them why they need to breathe well or what it's doing to their bodies so that's what i really try to focus on in the book because i was frustrated when i first started this research years ago finding all these yoga books with 400 breathing techniques with these crazy names it's like cool where where do i start what's it doing so so the how is really that the easy part but what i wanted to tackle um beyond the breathing practices is how to enlarge my airway how to stop from wheezing how to stop getting bronchitis and pneumonia so when you mean enlarge your airway you mean your mouth you mean your throat what does that mean i'm talking the the uh oral pharynx in the back so the throat all those soft tissues but i was just curious um to see if you can expand your mouth so we've we've done a very good job in our culture of making small mouths smaller you're you're a great example exactly i'm a great now i'm expanding it through braces to widen it and the fat not to cut you off the fascinating thing is they were originally going to make it smaller by closing the gaps and i'm like kind of blessed because for 20 years i just had eight teeth well i really had four teeth missing they took up my wisdom as well and i'm kind of blessed because i didn't get braces if i would have gotten braces right away they would have closed my mouth and pushed the teeth back to make it straight and my orthodontist was like if we do this your tongue is gonna be pressed against your teeth you're gonna be speaking might be messed up you're gonna be you have no airway he's like we need to expand the mouth and put implants in i was like why don't i get my my teeth taken out i'm gonna put fake ones back in there but it's kind of a blessing where okay now we've been expanding it and i'm hopeful that this will be impacting my health for many years to come because of it well you just think of the the physics here so by you having a larger mouth by having more room there's more room for the tongue to naturally lie up on the upper palate okay instead of sticking out the sides like it does with mine right because my mouth was shrunk up you're gonna have more room to breathe so of course you are and and the fact that i think it's just so bizarre that for so many years we've been shrinking mouths and now we're like maybe that's not the best idea maybe we should enlarge them so they're getting us going in and going out so i i did the same thing where uh i had seen so many case studies of people who had used this device they just wore it at night which gently opened up the upper palate so there is a if you have a clean thumb don't do this with some dirty covered thumb but you can put it on the roof of your mouth and there is a crack there is a suture okay that crack can open at virtually any age and widen naturally this is how when we're born as babies our heads are this big and then they double in size you can feel all these cracks on your head right now okay those open up um and i wore this device to help expand my upper palate and i gained about 15 to 20 percent um increases in my airway you did in in in one year i took a cat scan too um and you saw the mouth expanded the mouth there was much more gentle movement in the mouth the mouth probably expanded you know two millimeters yeah um but just from having that um this also stimulated some chewing stress so it worked out these back tissues and the back tissues just opened up and subjectively i can say i've never been breathing more more freely i didn't know i could breathe this way so a lot of people don't need their mouths expanded unless they went through what we went through but they can do these oral pharyngeal exercises um which can have a significant significant improvements on your airway health what is this a thing you wear is it this thing you press on there all nighter it is and and you know i've gotten like hundreds of emails of people saying i want to do this this is going to solve my asthma i want to do this this is going to solve my cancer everyone's different man and this worked for me i'm not saying it's going to work for you but i will say working out your tongue there's no bad side effects to that okay what's one tongue exercise we can oh they look grotesque give me one give me all right one all right at least crazy one so so first of all uh this was a retainer i put on the top of my top of my mouth yeah that stimulated chewing stress and very gently opened up the the roof of my mouth because it had been so small for so long so oral pharyngeal exercises uh here's the easiest one you see how i'm gonna get around this it's just closing your mouth you want your tongue to always be on the roof of your mouth you don't want it to be down below sloshing around on your teeth all the time in general yes really so you want to be holding it up there almost gently it should naturally be doing that the front teeth should almost be touching if the front teeth are lightly touching that's fine so you're going to notice when your mouth is closed and the tongue is at the roof of the mouth the tongue goes up the airway opens if you open your mouth the tongue rocks back and the airway gets smaller so if you are constantly having shutting your mouth i can't quite demonstrate shutting my mouth while i'm talking to you so that is uh the number one thing you can do after that you can do something um that a myofunctional therapist just taught me you're gonna get it now are you happy it's yes but it's called the cave and this is doing this so i am putting the the tongue on the roof of my mouth and i'm sucking it up there yeah and and don't overdo it start with a few seconds and you can do that throughout the day and another one you can do what does that do what does the cave do do you putting that on the front of your teeth or more of the top of the roof right the front of the tongue should just be touching the back of your teeth so this is strengthening the tongue right it's getting it more more elastic and strengthening five seconds at a time 20 seconds you can do you can hold it for for 30 seconds if you'd like but another one um this is also known as mewing even though it's just oropharyngeal exercises is using the back of the tongue and putting it to the back of your palate and sort of moving your tongue forward so that the tip of your tongue reaches the back of your teeth like that so from the back of your throat almost as far back as it can go and then pushing it forward on the top of your mouth like you will feel the muscles right here when you do this and when you're doing this you are tensing those soft tissues you're just working them out and there's some other tricks i'll forward you the paper from yes guest journal which is an esteemed journal this is where this stuff was published and very effective for snoring and sleep for some people with snoring and sleep apnea do you speak uh spanish any chance james poquito for 20 years i've wanted to learn spanish and one of my theories on why i think it's more challenging than it probably needs to be is because i've never been able to learn how to roll my r's and part of me is wondering is it because i have a smaller mouth is it because i just i can't use my tongue the right way is it because i don't know has this ever come up where people can roll their r's uh in a certain way with language whether it's spanish or another language based on breathing strengthening the tongue you know working it out is this something that you've seen it's a great question i've never been asked um and i have no idea just from an anatomical perspective it makes sense to me if your tongue is not aligned with your lower jaw if your tongue is flopping around if you see teeth imprints on your tongue when you hold it up then your mouth is too small for your tongue and makes you more apt to have airway issues how that relates to languages like italian or spanish or portuguese i'm not sure but but a great it's a good that's a good thing for you to research next and let me know if you find any reason how to roll your r's are you able to do that just curious do you know how to roll the r's i sound terrible when i do it but i try and you always get this sort of snicker of sympathy which sort of allows you to get away with a bunch of stuff so i'm a terrible spanish speaker but i'm in california right and i grew up in southern california so we were just down there all the time as long as you try man that's all they want gotcha curious just my personal personal curiosity uh with the mask wearing in the global pandemic is there a way to develop better breathing techniques to help people breathe better in masks so what people are reacting to when they have a mask on is they're not reacting to a lack of oxygen you see these people walking around saying oh i'm anxious i panic i can't breathe i'm not getting oxygen that is almost always never the case what they're reacting to is that increase of carbon dioxide so when you have a mask on your breathing slowly and there is a little backdraft of co2 and co2 is the thing that makes us need to breathe just as we talked about earlier it's funny hearing people and even hearing people on the street who say you know there's no way i'm getting enough uh auction i'm not wearing this thing all you need to do is buy one of these uh it's about 15 bucks on amazon or you can buy it at your local store or whatever this is a pulse oximeter and you put your finger in here and it shows you your blood sat okay there's been numerous studies that have shown no matter what mass you're wearing i'm sure there might be some 20-ply mask that might make it really hard to breathe but all the mass that most people are wearing right now this is not an oxygen problem it's an increase of co2 as we mentioned earlier having more co2 in your body as long as you have healthy levels of oxygen can be very beneficial we're just not used to it so we think it's unhealthy it can be beneficial yeah it's interesting and are you finding it comfortable when you're breathing through a mask is it not bothering you what's your personal take on how you're doing it through the nose i take this as an opportunity to focus even more on my breath and to breathe slowly if you don't want to smell your garlic breath if you just eaten some pizza for lunch or whatever then why would you want to keep breathing 20 times a minute why not breathe six times a minute really slow down your breathing and allow your body to calm down and function better so san francisco was one of the first cities to shut down everyone's wearing mass here and uh i actually don't mind the the mask i'm a weirdo because i've checked myself i've checked my blood sads my oxygen's just fine it's that increase of co2 and knowing that there is extra vasodilation more circulation with an increase of co2 um i look at this as a as a as a benefit in some ways yeah is it possible to reverse aging if we learn to breathe better can we become younger can we live longer because of our breathing techniques or strategies and way of being you're going to be skinny you're going to look great you're going to get that leading part in a movie everyone all you got to do is free no uh really it is one is there science around it for living longer though absolutely there is if you look at lung capacity so um so we had talked about this before one of the leading markers of of death okay is when you lose respiratory health and when you lose lung capacity even more than than genetics so lung when they shrink and you can't breathe how are you going to survive lung size is a very accurate marker for life span wow this was a study they did about 30 years ago part of a longitudinal study that's been going on for 70 years and they found that lung size and respiratory health and it's amazing like you can't do anything about your genetics right but you can do something about your breathing and you can do something about your lung capacity you can really focus on that and show some substantial differences what is the is there studies or research around how many years you could potentially extend based on the size and capacity of your lungs there's not because everyone's different everyone's a different age but but i this was a pretty interesting study i found it didn't make it into the book my editor said this is just too weird but one researcher looked at people who had had double lung transplants and those people who have been transplanted with larger lungs lived significantly longer than what than people who had their original size or smaller significantly longer so those references are available for free on my site if you don't believe me that's amazing so okay so if you want to live longer increase the capacity to breathe deeper and bigger lungs don't go out and get a lung transplant if you don't have to people we have this incredible machine called the human body that really responds to the inputs we put into it so you can hone this thing if you just spend a little bit of time a little bit of focus and i i just wanted i realized i was being a smart ass before breathing isn't going to do everything for you right either is eating well either is exercising but it has to be considered with these other things it has to a lot of us know that eating crap food is gonna make you feel crappy it's gonna shorten your life it's gonna make you more susceptible to disease same thing with exercise who's talking about breathing well hopefully more people our ancestors work for thousands of years but i see that wave starting to really come up now and and a lot of scientists and researchers are very excited about exploring this further is it expanding the rib cage that we need to do or more making it more flexible so we can breathe in and out deeper what is the thing we need to do your muscles like flexibility your mental capacity likes to be flexible your respiratory system likes to be flexible your ribs want to be flexible your intercostals want to be flexible so if you look at these free divers these are people with these enormous rib cages right but they can also exhale all that air out right that's super expansive here's here's how you can tell if you're engaging your diaphragm when you're breathing because sometimes this is confused with just belly breathing you see these people they're just like i'm breathing healthy and they're just sticking their belly out yeah take your hands like this and place them just above your hip bones right and take a breath in through your nose and you want your hands to move out okay you don't want them to move forward you want them to move outward laterally and when you breathe that way just real calmly that shows that you're allowing that diaphragm to go down and gently push outwards okay so that that's a healthy breathing a lot of people are just focused on the stomach but you're just using stomach muscles there you want your your body just as i said before everything in the body wants to be moving softly like your blood wants to be coursing softly through through your veins lymph fluid wants to be moving muscles want to be flexible and they want to be moving and i would consider the diaphragm the most important muscle in the entire body because if it goes out or if you are losing function there everything's going to go to hell your health is going to go to hell oh uh okay i've got two final questions for you um that i ask everyone at the end of my interviews before i ask them i want to make sure people get the book breath the new science of a lost art they can check it out on your website on amazon everywhere and um best website for you is mr james nester.com you're also on social media mr james nestor on instagram we've got a lot of great little short bits there on instagram that i really like watching uh so make sure you get the the book and one of my final questions is called the three truths question so i want you to imagine a hypothetical situation that because you've mastered the art of breathing you've extended your life for as long as you want to live and it's the last day for you though it's got the last day of your life it could be a hundred years from now whenever it is but you've accomplished everything you've set out your life to be for whatever reason you've got to take all your body of work with you all of your content books interviews they've got to go with you so no one has access to your written audio or video words anymore but you get to leave behind three things you know to be true the three big lessons you would leave and share with us what i like to call three truths what would you say are those three truths for you that you would share i'd say never underestimate the capabilities of your body okay if someone tells you something is impossible go prove that it's not and i think the third one is ambition is the last refuge of failure and what i mean by that is to sit around and try to do something and hem and haw that's not the way to do it you just do it then you don't have to have ambition you're already on the train you're already moving forward um love that those are powerful truths james i want to acknowledge you for a moment before i ask the final question for for taking a deep dive into something that i think is affecting billions of people around the world uh that don't have the tools and the science of understanding this i'm i'm very grateful that you're popularizing this in a mainstream uh especially in america so we can understand it more for those who maybe haven't been trained in other philosophies where they learned this growing up and i think it's a lot of the a lot of the causes of pain stress anxiety mental disease can be solved or helped through understanding these practices in a major way so i acknowledge you for studying this for researching it for finding practical ways for us to apply it in our lives it's very powerful the work you're doing and i appreciate your work final question for you what is your definition of greatness flexibility there you go james nestor my man thank you so much for being on i appreciate it thanks a lot for having me really really appreciate it if you're looking for more greatness in your life make sure to check out this video right here and also check out our free pdf the three secrets to unlock the power of your mind to help you change your life download it right here deep breathing deeper conscious breathing influences the mitochondrial aerobic dissimilation

Channel: Lewis Howes

Views: 1,434,339

Keywords: Lewis Howes, Lewis Howes interview, school of greatness, self help, self improvement, self development, personal development, success habits, success, wealth, motivation, inspiration, inspirational video, motivational video, success principles, millionaire success habits, how to become successful, success motivation, James Nester, James Nester interview, james nestor joe rogan, james nestor breath, james nestor breathing exercises, james nestor mouth tape, breathing techniques

Id: TD2PNVzzoZY

Length: 83min 12sec (4992 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 25 2021