Learn Why The Way You’re Breathing Is Destroying Your Quality of Life | James Nestor

[Music] hey everybody i hope you enjoyed this episode brought to you by our sponsors at blinkist hey everybody welcome to another episode of impact theory i'm here with james nester james welcome to the show man thanks a lot for having me dude i'm going to be really honest when you were first pitched as a guest i thought is there really like a whole book to be done on breathing is there a whole episode that we can get out of this my team made a very compelling case that i should take a look and the as soon as i dove into the book i realized that this was so much bigger and i'm somebody whose life has been changed by meditative breathing for sure and even i thought that this was a relatively uh narrow topic your book was a game changer for me it's already massively influenced how i approach my day-to-day life what was the most surprising thing as a journalist in diving into the world of breathing that sort of took you by surprise i think the biggest thing for me and i did not foresee this coming was that we are anatomically predisposed to be breathing improperly and let me sort of unpack that a little bit over the past few hundred years our faces have grown in such a way they've grown so flat our mouths have grown so small that we have less room in our airways to breathe properly and that's the main reason so many of us have sleep apnea uh so many of us snore have other respiratory issues either implicated in in asthma or allergies and so this was something i always thought that breathing was more of a psychological thing it was you get anxious and that absolutely affects your breathing but that it was anatomical and related to this disevolution that's happened to the human species absolutely shocked me and what is the root cause of the diss evolution what what's going on it's industrialized foods so specifically lack of chewing so without the masticatory stress especially in youth you don't develop proper bone structure you don't develop proper musculature your mouth tends to grow smaller your upper palate doesn't fully come down which means you have an upper palate like mine that goes up and punch punctures into the sinus cavities makes it harder to breathe through your nose that's why we have crooked teeth so uh this was something i had never heard about and you know i had taken all the biology evolution classes in college no one had explained to me why humans have crooked teeth and every other animal doesn't and so this i thought was very interesting and those implications of that small mouth and those crooked teeth on our breathing is also something i had no idea about yeah the implications that is what really got me interested in your book as you begin to lay out all the different things that are touched by this and when i think about even just how to title this episode i'm sure it's going to be something along the lines of like the way that you're breathing is [ __ ] up your entire life and the number of things that can be i don't say cured but the number of things that that are impacted dramatically by beginning to change your airways change the shape of your face which is crazy to think that you can do that in adulthood um we'll go into these deeply but i'd love for you to give like just a quick thumbnail sketch of some of the things people might be surprised that are impacted by your breathing by getting the nasal passages open i didn't know it was important to breathe through your nose for instance and just what a few of those knock-on effects are so what maladies have been attributed to poor breathing just look at the top 20 maladies affecting the mass population right now metabolic problems diabetes anxiety issues hypertension i mean i can keep going gut problems gerd anxiety panic asthma they're all related to the ways in which you breathe that's not to say all of these conditions are caused by improper breathing but the reason why we have them has been a contributor to poor breathing especially in sleep apnea which we know is a cause can cause metabolic problems like diabetes which to me just completely blew my mind but if you think about breathing as the anchor to all of the different systems to the body especially inflammation and if you think if you're doing that improperly 25 000 times a day your body is going to compensate because we're really good at doing that you're going to stay alive but you're not going to stay healthy and that's exactly what's happened to us right now i mean just sleep apnea and snoring alone people think it's cute that there's an infant snoring or that oh my husband snoring they gotta sleep on the couch this is someone who's struggling to breathe during a third of his or her life if you don't think that's going to have a downstream effect on their health you're you're crazy and so much science is now coming out showing that even though we've known it for 50 years it's you'd be hard-pressed to find a researcher who says that's not going to affect your health in some big ways yeah one of the things that i love about your approach is you come into some of this with some healthy skepticism which i am always grateful for um part of the reason that i put off taking up meditation for as long as i did was it just felt super woo-woo it seemed to be a wash and so much [ __ ] that i just couldn't bring myself to do something that felt so soft and potentially bs and of course end up doing it and it ends up you know radically changing my life and gives me sort of a way to begin backing out of some of the anxiety that um i had begun to really struggle profoundly with yeah and and as a my job as a reporter is not to pick sides with this stuff it's to go out into the field talk to the experts in the field look at the science and come back with the story so unfortunately i think so much of meditation and this breathing culture has been co-opted by people who know it works or think it works but they don't bother to really explain how it affects us all you know they talk about their own personal journey which is super helpful and that's really awesome but to me that doesn't really tell me anything about my own breathing and my own body so what i try to do is separate the wheat from the chaff there and not to pick any sides but just to go out and learn to learn as much of this stuff as i could i spent several years doing this you know and it was not easy i'm not trying to be like some hero's journey but it's really hard when two doctors at top institutions are calling [ __ ] on one another and they're both published you're like who do i believe here because there just has not been that much science in some of these fringe areas but we do know the foundation of healthy breathing what we know that poor breathing can do the body everyone agrees on that what we know that healthy breathing can do to the body how it can help abate symptoms or sometimes cure outright cure these chronic problems we're seeing a burgeoning area of research there supporting all of those claims one thing that i get excited about whenever people talk about malleability into adult life i get very excited um as somebody who can i consider myself a very late bloomer um i didn't even come into a growth mindset until i was sort of about 26. um and so i worried that my sort of years of adaptation were behind me and that i was realizing all of this stuff too late um talk to me a little bit about free divers who who are able to do some just absolutely extraordinary things to their lung capacity and then i think also touching on how much bone you personally were able to add your face which is crazy um those two things in terms of what what ability to somebody who's listening to this in their 20s 30s 40s have to really make change so that was really the jumping off point for me to write about this book uh when i first had the idea i was like oh there might be a book in breathing all my friends i have a lot of author journalist friends they were just mocking me oh you're gonna write a book about breathing you know until you start to until you see a free diver and so what they're doing these people have mastered the art of breathing they were not born this way these are people through just the power of will doesn't matter if they were small doesn't matter if they were tall large doesn't matter what country they ethnic background no no no through the force of will they mastered this skill to hold their breath six seven eight minutes at a time to dive the depths of 300 400 feet no fins just just the the natural human body two lungfuls of air that's it and i went out with outside magazine this was years and years ago saw this i said oh my god what else don't we know about our human body's of potential what else have we forgotten because we have archaeological evidence that people have been freedoming for at least 10 000 years whoa right so they've been they've been diving down well past 100 feet for this long and so this isn't something like some you know westerners decided to do as a stunt this is part of what i believe has made us the species we are now so if we've forgotten that what else have we forgotten and how is it attached to breath so that was really a jumping off point for me to look into the terrestrial plane i know what free diving does underwater i'm a free diver myself i've seen it i've felt it i've experienced it how long can you stay underwater on a single breath how long can you stay underwater so this is a question i'm gonna be purposely vague about because where people get in trouble is when they're watching their their watch and they're like ah i went down 150 feet yesterday i'm gonna go down 160. i was down for four minutes yesterday i'm gonna stay down for five body changes every day so depending on what you eat how you slept you have to listen to your body not your watch so having said that big bold caveat there people i've had other people that have been with me and i've stayed about four four minutes which is and that was after a few weeks of training and that that is uh not a very significant four or four minutes after a few weeks yeah but at that point what's the adaptation that's such a short period of time is it lung capacity is it psychological like um what what is actually going on at a physiological level it's mostly psychological so i've seen within the first workshop i did i went from holding my breath at the beginning about 40 seconds i was like that's that's pretty good one workshop two hours later two and a half minutes right out the door and and everyone that was in this workshop was doing the same thing more more than me so it's it's been is that is that learning how to deal with co2 and the panic that it creates absolutely so it does it does relate to psychological mental much more than physical because we can go a long time holding our breath so that need to breathe is not dictated by a lack of oxygen right now if you exhale hold your breath you're going to feel that nagging need to breathe that's from an increase of co2 so what you're doing is understanding what's happening in your body understanding that your body is not screaming out for oxygen you're just acclimated to a lower threshold of co2 and so once you get your mind around that then it becomes a body mind thing yeah more lung capacity that's good but it's mostly tolerating that increase of co2 okay so if you were right now sort of all the caveats in the world but you're sort of roughly four minutes um what's the world record for free diving specifically twelve and a half minutes whoa how deep this is at the surface there's this competition called static breath holding where you put your head underneath the surface and you hold your breath and then people do it with oxygen so and that the record for that is 21 minutes with but that's hyperventilating with oxygen so just the natural body with pure oxygen like they they have some sort of okay well they they have hyperventilate fill their entire lungs with pure oxygen go under what about freediving is that is that based on depth and not time there's different disciplines to free diving there's static breath hold which is just head under water and then there's depth so most of them are associated with depth there's depth without fins there's depth with fins there's depth with machines there's depth with machines that don't have motors on them i mean on and on all these different disciplines but i watched a guy go down 830 feet i'm sorry 830 feet down in greece herbert nitch i was i was there uh it did not end up well for him it was awful and at that point i said i will never see any free diving competition again i don't want to this to cloud my vision of something that is so beautiful and so part of who we are as a species and so i that was my jumping off point for competitive freediving versus the more meditative and yoga side of it all right before we get to the yogic side which has better benefits i want to know what happened to him in what way was it terrible he had numerous strokes oh god while he was underwater uh he he blacked out uh right from the get-go he was on the sled you can see this 80 60 minutes was there i mean it was just a complete [ __ ] show i said why why am i here why am i reporting on this and he took the sled down which propelled him down it's supposed to go down 800 feet went down 830. he came up and if you come up that quickly he was supposed to stop about 30 feet below the surface and equalize he didn't he shot straight up and uh he was rushed to the hospital and he's still suffering from the problems associated with that he's a lot better now but he you know obviously he regrets this and that to me just showed listen i love people can do whatever they want they can compete that's badass that's none of my business but i just i saw what happens when the western mind focuses on one thing as opposed to the larger picture which is we've been gifted this incredible body to do these incredible things don't step too far over that line or you're gonna get hurt and that's exactly what i saw i don't want to derail this too much but i i am very curious to hear more you said when the western mind focuses on one narrow thing which that detached from that story i would say ooh tell me more that sounds amazing i want to focus on something like that um what are you uh bifurcating eastern western and what is sort of the pathological part of the well first define the western mindset for me if you would and then obviously that's a good example of sort of where it goes pathological um but i'd love to to hear more about how you view that if that is the dichotomy i'm absolutely bifurcating those two things because about six months after that i went to japan and i met with the ama women divers they've been diving deep in the ocean for 2000 years 1500 years and they do it as a spiritual practice they also do it to gather food because they believe that the earth will stay in harmony if you only take what you can carry out of the ocean the ocean will always provide and they've been doing this for a long time so i met with women in their seventies one was over 80 years old she had been diving every day free diving every single day rain shine snow doesn't matter these were the most fit badass women i've ever seen not only physically fit mentally so sharp i went out there to dive with them i wasn't very good at that time but they were just kicking 80 year old just kicking my ass over and coming out with an octopus holding a knock putting in her bag you know coming out with abalone and their appreciation for the ocean and their place within the ocean really resonated with me is that yeah you can push limits that's that's what people do but you also have to understand and appreciate your limits and also understand that the ocean is always going to win if you challenge it you have to understand and be humble within the ocean and when i heard that it made a lot more sense to me than hearing this western approach which was disregarding so much of that the feelings inside of your body our position in our place in our appreciation with the ocean and just trying to get the metal at the end so i think there's a way of bridging those two things gear uh jeremy neri french freediver very spiritual guy also complete badass competitor no longer competes because he found himself being taken too far into that other world that's really interesting um i want to know more about these women what what depth are we talking about and what do they wear so i was i went out there i said i'm a free diver custom made free diving suit brand new goggles snork huge fins i was like i gotta like you know show them i'm serious about this they're in these ripped up old scuba wetsuits which are awful for freedom holes in the back stitched up they're wearing those masks like this those big circular masks their snorkels barely work they're wearing boogie board fins they're probably 30 years old so they were probably diving to depths 100 feet 120 but but again it's not that's they would never come back and be like how deep did you dive oh i did 100 today they're like how'd that die feel how did you enjoy that what food were you able to take from the ocean how nurturing was that and to me that seems like a much better game plan for a long life an appreciation of yourself and your place on this planet than this i'm gonna kick the ocean's ass i'm gonna go as hard as i can if i die i die uh again if people want to do that totally that's not my business but personally i was much more attracted to the story and the culture on this other side and that's what i mean by the western eastern approach all right now i want to get use that as an example to better understand some of the benefits of what's going on so the if somebody asked me to explain what about your book like literally stop me in my tracks and make me rethink everything that i'm doing it's it's the notion of you need to breathe less and that was so that gave me the chills just saying that and when when i read it it had that same impact of like whoa is it possible that i've just approached this whole thing all wrong and that the things that i think are giving me benefits it actually isn't the the inhalation it's the exhalation and the hold and the learning to manage co2 and understanding that co2 is actually important and not just a byproduct why is this woman in her 80s so fit is it the swimming is it the holding her breath for extended periods of time and look i get it's going to be a gestalt of many of these things but why is holding your breath important and do you think it plays a factor in being 80 and being able to be such a badass i think it does because breath holding and breathing just like so many other aspects in life come down to flexibility you want to be able to be flexible so populations who have panic and who have asthma traditionally you ask them to hold their breath and i've seen this they aren't flexible their threshold for co2 is very low so i a general gauge of health and this is not a very clear scientific diagnostic that has been used for a long time is they'd have doctors who have patients come in exhale softly and hold their breath and a lot of people use this to see how they're feeling day to day i was just talking to bill bradley the senator who ran for president way back when every single morning he he wakes up and holds his breath he can tell how well he slept he can tell what food he's eaten how well he's digested that it's a good general gauge and breath holding has been part of breathing the practice of breathing for thousands and thousands of years an early translation for pranayama was a trance induced by breath holding all right so one of the things that i am still perplexed by how important it seems to be is breathing through the nose um i would classify myself as a chronic mouth breather i catch myself doing it all the time uh i i want to know why does it matter so much and what are the benefits if somebody were to go to lengths to train themselves to breathe almost exclusively through the nose so if you were to cut my head in half and i've done this with it with a cat scan and gotten a deli slicer view of my whole head you're gonna see that the nose here and the sinus passages take up about the volume of a billiard ball sometimes even more than that so this is an incredibly ornate and complex organ that looks so much like a seashell they call it the nasal concha so sea shells they use their shells the organisms within there to keep out pathogens and to filter stuff out that's exactly what our noses do so air doesn't just shoot in into our nose into our throat we have to force it through this gauntlet of turbinates and mucosa and cilia and all of these different structures and while air is being pressurized and forced through this labyrinth it is moistened it's heated it's filtered it's pressurized and it's conditioned so that by the time it enters our lungs we can better absorb that oxygen so just breathing equivalent breaths through the nose then through the mouth will increase oxygenation about 20 percent with each breath so that's caused by a number of things also nitric oxide uh i'm sure a lot of your listeners know about nitro this wondrous molecule that does uh is implicated with uh with vasodilation it helps with gas exchange it's essential we make six times more no when we breathe through our nose and if we hum we make 15 for fold more nitric oxide nitric oxide is also uh some people may be interested in knowing this that what does viagra do it stimulates the release of nitric oxide in our bodies creates vasodilation uh you know where so we can we can do this in our in our noses as well and if i remember right from your book there's actually um basically erectile tissue in your nasal cavity why on earth would that be true well i don't know how it got there but we do know it's there so the nose is more closely connected to the genitals than any other organ what do you mean by that anatomically uh their connection in the way that they both use erectile tissue which engorges with blood which inflates it and makes it firm and also when that blood releases it makes it flaccid so each of your nostrils has a coating of erectile tissue and throughout the day one nostril will become more engorged with blood and gently plug up and become more left nostril dominant after about 30 minutes to three or four hours the other nostril will switch sometimes they're both open but it's usually they call it a nostril dominance so the everyone was just like why the hell does do our bodies do this why would we do this it turns out and there's 20 years of studies showing this when we breathe through our right nostril body heat increases heart rate increases circulation increases this is associated with a stimulating effect okay and it activates the left side of the head of the brain more which is associated more with logical functions i know that there's a bunch of crossover but these are blanket explanations right now left nostril breathing calming effect heart rate goes down you relax more associated with creative functions so our bodies do this automatically throughout the day you can hack this alternate nostril breathing anyone who's taken a yoga class okay but our bodies are already doing this and if you're breathing through the mouth you're getting zero of these benefits so we are made we are designed to breathe through our noses and the fact that 25 to 50 percent of us aren't doing this i believe is causing us a bunch of undue stress and potentially is contributing to a bunch of more serious issues the fact that our noses close one side and open the other is this this is one of those things where i and i think many many many other people have felt like we're sort of living at the end of history that we're living at the end of evolution like we understand everything that there are precious views sort of mysteries left um and then you begin to realize that that just is not true the number of things we do not yet understand about the human body and so we go in and we remove things like the appendix and think that you don't really need an appendix and then oh [ __ ] wait there's this whole thing called the microbiome maybe it actually does matter um and then the getting into the nose do until i picked up your book i'm in my 40s man until i picked up your book i had no idea that any of this mattered somebody told me a couple years ago that um breathing depending on what side of the nose you breathe through would actually have an impact and i was like uh-huh like that sounded like the biggest load of crap ever it sounded so ridiculous to me and now it's like i'm training myself to have this mechanism where it's like the second you want to reject something hit the pause button because man there's so many things we don't understand and i have a feeling that on that one the fact that we have erectile tissue in our noses so that at least one of them seems to be so that we can do this cycle thing that we may find that there are other things that are tied to this so walk me now through you've gone to great lengths to be able to breathe through your nose um you've certainly inspired me to begin breathing through my nose so okay we're moistening it we're warming it or cooling it cause i think we if we're in a sauna or something we're certainly not scorching our lungs so something is happening um what ends up happening to people you did you did something where you intentionally plugged your nose for 10 days what ends up happening when you plug your nose yeah so i couldn't believe all this stuff i was finding either right uh and and i really mean this but luckily i'm in san francisco i'm very close to stanford i got to be good friends with dr jack or nyack who is the chief of rhinology research at stanford so he's the one telling me this stuff this guy publishes like 30 papers a year he's a monster and if it's coming from him and it's coming with 30 papers i'm like okay it's legit i mean this guy is top of his class um so he was also explaining something else that nasal hairs and this is a little pragmatic tip for people people obsessed with pulling out their nasal hairs they've found that there is a significantly higher chance that you will have asthma that you will be suffering from asthma the less dense your nasal hairs are so the more we have this stuff for re this helps filter air and slow it down so the idea that people are just like pulling all this pulling appendixes out you know pulling all this stuff out saying oh what what we got to get rid of this stuff why do we need this i think nature is a is a better gauge of how we need something and how important it is to us so that's a long way of saying i started talking to nayak he's just like oh man the note no one's breathing out of the nose and it's causing periodontal disease it's causing all of these other issues and i said well how how quickly does this damage come on does it do i have to be a mouthful either for 10 years 20 years for a month he didn't know so he's like well there haven't been any studies done on it so it's like you're you're at stanford man why don't why don't you do something you're like the top lab in the world why don't you do some studies on it but he's like oh i don't have any funding allocated blah blah blah so i finally convinced him i said let's let's do an experiment you you can collect all the data um it'll be me and i convinced anders olsen who's a breathing therapist from sweden who's so dedicated to his craft he's been teaching this stuff for 10 years he's like i can't rightfully go and teach people this without knowing the full story so he he spent his own money to fly to san francisco for a month to have his freaking nose plugged up and it was awful so so for 10 days we plugged our noses and we did uh pft's pulmonary function tests we did cats i mean everything blood work everything you could imagine in our home lab we had about 10 grand 15 grand of equipment that we had managed to either get donated or cobbled together heart rate variability co2 oxygen temperature everything you can imagine and so what we were doing wasn't like this stunt in in my opinion we were lulling ourselves into a position that 25 to 50 percent of the population are already new but we were measuring what happened and within the first night didn't take long for us to see how damaging this was i went from not snoring to snoring an hour and a half it's like [ __ ] that that sucks start feeling really really awful anxiety you know i was like oh psychosomatic whatever next night snoring even more three days later snowing for four hours started getting sleep apnea we started recording ourselves i mean our health just instantly went to hell and anders suffered even worse than i did right right off the bat and the day we took these plugs out it all disappeared so i just don't hear too many people talking about just the pathway through which we breathe how that can contribute to snoring and sleep apnea but they're starting to now i've received you know hundreds of emails of people saying i'm just breathing through my nose now i'm putting a little piece of tape here i'm no longer snoring why why didn't someone tell me this 30 years ago and i've no i don't have an answer for that but you know it's it's curious there there is something to the fact that like you said we have archaeological evidence people have been free diving for 10 000 years um for thousands of years people have been practicing yoga and other breathing techniques um and the subhead of your book is i'm going to paraphrase but like the wisdom we had lost and you know now we're sort of getting it back it's a terrible paraphrase science of the lost start no there we go the ballpark so what one i know you just said that you you don't really have a take on why we don't know this anymore but i'm so curious like how this stuff fell out of favor and are there other things that you know people are like tumult for instance what is it what are some of these like wisdoms that you have a sense or or maybe we already have some data that back up that it is real and it's you know something that people could begin deploying now i think so much of it has been clouded in bs i think honestly that's that's the reason same reason why someone comes up to you and says oh breathe out this nostril does this you're just like yeah [ __ ] anyway moving on because we're we're apprehensive and we're skeptical for good reason we we've been told a bunch of of garbage for so long from both sides really from the more new agey side and even from the medical institutions how how often were we told that eating high carb high sugar food was was totally fine you know having a bowl of tricks every morning that's a good way of starting your day end it with a man witch i mean we we know that that's complete garbage now but it took us 30 years the science has always been there but it took us 30 years to be like wait a second this is wrong and it didn't come from these institutions it came from people turning into a high protein diet high fat diet and saying i just lost 20 pounds in a month and i'm not hungry you know it came by people actually trying this stuff out luckily now there's so much science showing all of the benefits from from these things especially in nutrition but i think breathing is on that same path where nobody disproved this stuff we just moved on to other things so an example of that is we're talking about co2 the importance of co2 having more co2 in your body breathing more slowly they knew this 100 years ago yandell henderson at yale was administering co2 with oxygen to people who had strokes or heart attacks or infants who had exfixia and this stuff worked wonderfully and then it was just forgotten about and someone developed some other machine that they thought could do the same thing so i don't want to point fingers this is just human progress this is how we do it but it is interesting that there's this foundation of three thousand four thousand years of this technology of breathing every culture it doesn't matter if you're looking at the ancient greeks ancient chinese ancient indians they were all really into breathing and they had these very elaborate systems to breathe well we have we have instruments now to measure this stuff and the great thing about breathing is it's so easy to measure you know it doesn't it doesn't take much you can breathe in a certain way in a minute later you can see what happens to your heart rate variability you can see what happens to your blood pressure or your oxygen or your co2 and so once you actually see that and experience it and learn about how there is this huge foundation of science out there it's it's irrefutable and and it's always been there but i think that we've just been our view has been clouded by so much other stuff people come up with some new hacks you don't have to worry about breathing take take this pill and then 10 years later they're like oh actually don't take that pill it's really hurting your body you know it's allowing the body to enter a state where it can heal itself which is what it's doing every minute of every day but we need to allow our bodies to do more of that and that to me is really the core of what breathing allows us to do tulmont seems to me to be something that shows just how crazy and powerful breathing can be when i first heard about this stuff um i wanted to believe it because i want to believe in anything that makes a person sound like a superhuman but if i'm honest when i heard about them sitting in the snow and melting the snow or them being able to change the temperature on the same hand one part of the hand would be warmer than the other part i was like how real is it and is there one specific type of breathing that is tulmont or like is it something else so i had heard these stories as well and the literature on tumor goes back the the ability to heat yourself up with your breath goes back for thousands of years about a thousand years ago this guy naropa um discovered it in a cave in himalayas but there aren't video you know there's no videos of him doing it there were no scientific measurements of it then this woman named alexandra david neal a french woman who in her 40s went on this spiritual sojourn throughout the himalayas for 14 years which was pretty unheard of in in the 1900s she discovered it as well and she's like oh yeah whenever i got cold i just do what the monks do they have a single sheet on they just breathe in this certain way everyone called [ __ ] on that right as rightfully as they should when a lot of hippies started going to india and tibet in the 60s they came back with these stories they're like no really there's these monks who sit outside all night in a single sheet and they breathe in a way to melt a circle around them in the snow and then they go and they go back into the monastery so herbert benson at harvard so he was at harvard medical school heard enough of these stories he's like okay i need to go figure this thing out this was in 1980. so he went out to dharmsala in india and got some of these monks hooked them up and there's video of this hooked them with all kinds of sensors and found that they can absolutely do this so in a cold room he put a wet sheet over them they breathe in this certain way that they dried the sheet their their body temperature went up 17 degrees they never suffered from hypothermia or frostbite or any of these problems so this is in 1980 still people were like oh this is [ __ ] man he was measuring it all wrong then wim hof comes around he's like oh yeah okay well i'm gonna sit in an ice bath for two hours okay in front of all of you and my core temperature's not gonna go down i'm not going to get hypothermia i'm not going to get frostbite and explain that and i think you know we have him to thank for just shutting up so many people even though the science was there from harvard that was published in nature people are still like uh whatever those are weirdos in india so now people are learning this tumo and they're finding that it not only can allow you to heat your body up and not get hypothermia in these extreme cold conditions but it can help reset your immune system it can help people with autoimmune diseases which i think is it's real gift it's cool to be able to warm yourself on on command that's amazing but to be able to help people for whom no other therapy could help is is i think so important and and so to answer your question uh this is a question i i could not answer uh and i kept talking to people i was like well wim hof is going like you really go for it but if you look at these these tumor monks they are they're hardly moving and benson found that they were able to decrease their metabolism more than 60 percent the lowest number ever recorded and yet by decreasing their metabolism they could superheat their bodies and no one has any idea how they were able to do this so we have a better idea on how wim is able to do it right you're stimulating a stress response you're really getting that circulation going then you're holding your breath so you've gone from offloading co2 to increasing co2 that releases oxygen you can increase your metabolism and he's even shown an hour after doing his practices his metabolisms off the hook so you're using more oxygen that way but there are so many mysteries here how can those monks do what they do and when i've asked researchers they just say that's interesting not sure anyway here's this research we do know and those are the corners i really like to to open and peer into because they show the true potential of our bodies and how much we've lost these these monks aren't using some new technology stuff's been around for thousands of years and we still can't understand it even with all the modern technologies we have yeah the the thing that i find so enticing about wim is he's talking about basically taking these autonomic functions and bringing them into i can't remember if he specifically says conscious control but he certainly makes it seem like yeah i i know you're injecting me with this endotoxin e coli um and so i'm revving up my immune system i'm sending it out to attack it and shut it down and that to me is is the the frontier that i'm very eager for people to continue to explore because you know how much of this can we bring into our conscious control and is it all going to be through breathing is there another you know frontier that we have sort of equally ignored for however many millennia we've been ignoring like the real power of the breath um and i heard something once that really resonated with me as soon as i started meditating which is that the the diaphragm is the um the center of the warrior or the seat of the warrior forget the exact word but it's like the the core of a warrior is their their diaphragm and i thought you know why would that be and then i took my first diaphragmatic breath and realized whoa like this has this immediate impact on my ability to shift data sympathetic into parasympathetic um and i'm curious if we know with too much like what's going on at a cellular level like when they're heating themselves up i understand the wim hof method because it's in revving up your um your metabolism you're you're essentially igniting the furnace inside of you to burn calories basically to get this uncoupling to generate the heat i don't understand it when it's slowing something down and was the research that was done in the 80s does it give us any hints as to what that is it does not and this is a question at the end of the book i was i was saying there are still mysteries to to behold here so just as you had said with wim hof with this intense breathing i can probably make myself sweat by doing that so it's just more more kindling on the fire right you just have more fuel so you're you're burning it but i would love if they looked at atp of these monks in in these like are they able to to trick their bodies to produce more heat because all of that's coming from the production of the atp right electron transport chain that that's where heat is coming from and in water as well so are they able to activate more i don't i don't think it's measurable maybe there's a neurologist or neuroscientist out there who who thinks it is and if so man give me a call let's let's find some of these guys and check it out but he was he was measuring what was happening to them externally he was not measuring what was happening to in inside of their bodies and that to me is where where the real mystery and magic would be because we know these people can do this uh you know people have been calling bs on it for so long they're not anymore because these studies have been published in the top scientific journals and there's video tape of it you know you can see it for you for yourself but i just don't see personally beyond the the few researchers that i was fortunate enough to work with there's just not a lot of interest in this stuff especially now we're in a pandemic people are like what superheated monks it's the last thing we're thinking about like we got to get get rid of this this corona virus then we'll go back to that so so my answer to you is is they don't know and i don't know what you were just saying about people not being interested during coronavirus that is a very bizarre response to me when you talk about something that could have an immune system function uh and that we're not breathing through our noses which hey by the way is shaped like a conch shell as a way to get rid of pathogens like this all seems pretty important yeah and and guess what else breathing can do can and can very quickly decrease inflammation guess what cobit does it increases this massive inflammation throughout your body so there's a whole protocol that's being developed by dr stephen porges where he's like looking for this miracle cure is going to be hard what we have to do is focus on your body you need to focus on your breathing you need to focus on your nutrition that's how you're going to protect yourself i don't want to wade into these these waters and have someone say you know i was breathing correctly i got covered you know you're full of [ __ ] which happens by the way when you write a book about breathing but i think the important thing is to know that to bolster your body's defenses to focus on your breathing can absolutely have a profound effect on on your immune function we've seen that taking a few easy breaths right can can release constriction in the rest of your body you can breathe really fast your fingers are going to get tingly your head is going to get light because that's caused by constriction not an increase of oxygenation so we can decrease inflammation rapidly and and profoundly by changing our breathing habits in in what way specifically around inflammation with vasodilation so so that's what when we're breathing more calmly so what happens with when we are eliciting a sympathetic response so we're shuffling all this blood to areas that we need to fight or run away from something the brain the heart the skeletal muscles right to be really strong when we calm ourselves down all those other channels come back online and inflammation is decreased that's why when we breathe slowly you take some very calm breaths you rate about a count of about five to six breathe out to that same count after a few minutes there's a good chance you're going to start to feel your fingers heat up and your toes heat up that's from an increase of circulation from a decrease of inflammation in those areas you talked about that in your book so i tried it um and i'm curious when you say to in the book you specifically say 5.5 seconds is sort of the magic breathe in for 5.5 breathe out for 5.5 um does that include the sort of hold so like when i exhale i then hold then when i breathe in i hold if i include those periods of i'm not technically breathing in anymore and i'm not technically breathing out anymore i can hit 5.5 otherwise i can't i'm about two and a half seconds in and then two and a half seconds out am i doing it wrong no and just to be clear that 5.5 is a general gauge so the last thing anyone should be doing is getting a stopwatch and being like four to seven four to eight you know anything in that range can be very therapeutic in the neighborhood of five to six breaths is great and we know that the the sciences five to six second breaths five to six seconds which is yes which is five to six breaths at uh a minute right that's that's what it works out to i say 5.5 because it's easy to remember 5.5 inhale 5.5 exhale 5.5 breaths a minute that's that's how it all works out so when when we do this we are allowing just the right amount of oxygen to come in at just the right amount of time with the least effort so so that's why the heart rate will slow down that's why circulation will increase and our bodies want this to constantly be pushing our bodies especially in states of recovery is a bad idea so so i think that that general gauge and we've we've seen this in studies where they've taught people with panic and asthma who who traditionally breathe way too much i'm talking off the charts 20 breaths a minute through the mouth they the only intervention they had them do was slow down their breathing and their symptoms were rapidly reduced by a profound level uh even within a year later after four weeks of this training so this is what happens when the body comes into a state of homeostasis where it's able to do what it's supposed to do i'm guessing your answer is going to be something like it depends on what you're trying to accomplish but is there a right way to breathe i'll say for just sort of everyday um everyday health yeah what what would that right way look like well sit sitting on a couch is different than than sprinting right so you're gonna be breathing in different ways so what i tried to do instead of focusing on like you get a book on on pranayama there's 300 different ways of all of these crazy names like where do i start i just try to focus on the umbrella items here right you're going to want to breathe slowly you're going to want to breathe through your nose you're going to want to breathe less many of us are going to want to breathe less to get more and uh you know you're going to want to chew your food that's a whole other thing because that can help open up your airway but patrick mcewen pretty well-known breathing therapist told me this which totally blew my mind he found studies where people who breathe at a rate of about 20 breaths a minute so the average what's considered normal is 12 to 18 breaths a minute so 20 breaths a minute is maybe even on the low end for populations with anxiety and asthma all they're doing is bringing air here and getting it out that means they can only use 50 percent of that air okay because they're filling up their throats they're filling up their mouths they're filling up the bronchus all of these areas can't participate in gas exchange so they're just wasting air bringing it in bringing it out only fifty percent at that rate when you when you're taking it six liters a minute if you slow that down to 12 breaths per minute you're taking in 70 okay you're that's how much more efficient you are 70 20 different incredible if you breathe at a rate of six breaths a minute you have an 85 percent efficiency in your breathing so that's how much more oxygen you're going to be able to get which means you can breathe less while getting more oxygen which again is that's the key whether or not you're you're sitting on a couch and want to recover or whether or not you're really working out because if you're breathing in lines with your metabolic needs that means you're gonna have that much more energy to go even further if your heart rate is lower at states of zone three zone four or whatever then you can push your heart rate even more go further and farther and dr john dewyard has been studying this stuff for 40 years works with top ultra marathoners triathletes olympians and that's that's what he's found so uh that that those his books and his science i thought were so fascinating and they're really supported by so much of the newer research that's coming out now so let's go back to chewing for a second so um how can i now make some of these changes do i just find food that's really difficult to chew um do i need a device on my face like what do i do to open up my airways so chewing is something when we lost that ability to chew because of industrialized foods our mouths are all messed up they look a lot like mine i had braces extractions wisdom teeth out headgear all that crap and i was convinced that a middle age i was just screwed right so i screwed up when i was young i was hosed the rest of the time and i learned from various researchers that's not the case we have our throat is basically a muscle tube okay so the less we use it the more flabby it's going to get just like any other muscle so there are exercises you can do i won't take you through all these some of them are quite involved pushing the tongue up to the roof of the mouth sucking the tongue up there do this 30 times a day they found in research that this has a profound effect on snoring and sleep apnea by just making your throat more fit you can also do this by chewing chewing has other benefits beyond just helping to open your airways it helps drain the eustachian tube it increases blood flow to the brain it releases a parasympathetic state it induces that in your body that's how saliva comes on paris so there's so many benefits to chewing and if you think about all the crap we're eating nowadays even the stuff we think is healthy y'all yogurt soft foods avocados smoothies there's zero chewing so that's a long way of saying yeah you can chew food as long as you don't have a tmj problem and i need to put out that caveat now because people have written me saying my tmj hurts i've had tmj issues if your mouth is messed up have it checked out and fix that but for those who don't have those issues chewing has so many benefits and i've seen so i did a little side experiment as part of the book is to see if i could improve this this uh debilitated middle-aged face and airways and uh i showed massive improvements and the cat scans show this not just me saying hey i feel better you look at the cat scans about 15 to 20 percent increase in in airway tone and airway size plus and granulation from my sinuses is gone and i'm breathing better than than i ever had i built bone through this palatal expander we're told that we can't build bone past 30 wrong we can do it we can do it in our faces and i i added about five pennies worth of bone in my face so so the human body is very malibu malleable it's uh it's this amazing mechanism i think that we've haven't been utilizing it to its full potential for so long we've been convinced that pills and potions can do everything but you got to do the work sometimes and that will that will have its benefits in a big way my man dude speaking of doing the work thank you for writing that book absolutely extraordinary where can people find out more about you where can they get the book at mrjamesnester.com some other joke jerk took james nester so there's an mr on there uh the whole bibliography is there there's about 500 scientific references there's also q and a's with experts in the field on breathing from harvard and other universities i'm also on instagram trying to get better at the social media thing um i'm only posting about breathing there so no no pictures of like my my breakfast or my dog or anything just just breathing stuff research stuff my man again thank you so much for coming on the show your book was really trans transformational for me i hope people dive way into it um i think it's going to be a game changer so thank you for pushing all of that forward making people more aware much obliged everybody if you haven't already be sure to subscribe and until next time my friends be legendary take care what's up everybody there is no way to build an empowering mindset or get ahead in business without constantly learning and accessing new information and today i want to share one of my secret weapons in the battle to learn new things and get ahead and that is blinkist with our ever-changing routines there has never been a better time to learn something new but with thousands of options available finding the best way to learn can be challenging and that's why i recommend the app called blinkist blinkist 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Channel: Tom Bilyeu

Views: 254,816

Rating: 4.9134793 out of 5

Keywords: Tom Bilyeu, Impact Theory, ImpactTheory, TomBilyeu, Inside Quest, InsideQuest, Tom Bilyou, Theory Impact, motivation, inspiration, talk show, interview, motivational speech, James Nestor, IT, healthy breathing techniques, breathing properly, the connection between breathing and your overall health, modern breathing problems, breathing problems, science of breathing, breathe less, breathe through your nose, nose breathing, tummy breathing, everyday breathing, breathing advice

Id: 13Ae4kuULUg

Length: 57min 51sec (3471 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 20 2020