Why 70% Of People Are BREATHING WRONG & How To FIX IT For Better Health! | James Nestor

[Music] if you're able to improve your health and improve the efficiency of your body within a few minutes just imagine what's going to happen after a few days or a few weeks or a few months and you start to understand how your breathing is such an integral part of your healing and your long-term health [Music] what percentage of western populations are thought to breathe through their mouth and why is that so problematic well it's hard to pin down exactly how many people are habitual mouth breathers but the percentages that i've seen in studies range from about 25 percent all the way up to 50 percent kids tend to mouth breathe more than adults females tend to mouth breathe more than males and we know that about 60 to 70 percent of the population sleeps with an open mouth so it's the majority in some cases of us are sleeping or are breathing with an open mouth throughout hours and hours of the day which is bad news across the board if someone is sleeping with the mouth open we say bad news but what's actually going on in the body what actually happens so and why should people care about changing from mouth breathing to nose breathing so i've been sleeping with an open mouth as far as i've known i'm sure it began in childhood i was definitely sleeping with an open mouth in adulthood which is why i would go to sleep with this by my bed every single night didn't matter if i was in a hotel if i was camping i would always have water by my bed because i would wake up my mouth would be parched dry so not only does it dehydrate us we lose about 40 percent more moisture breathing through the mouth but it changes the ph in our mouths which makes us more susceptible to cavities and dentists have known this for more than a hundred years there's studies dating back over a hundred years that say that mouth breathing directly contributes to cavities dr mark burhenne who's a dentist out here and a sleep researcher he believes that mouth breathing is the number one cause of cavities even beyond sugar consumption so not only does it mess up our mouths but we're also exposing ourselves to everything in the external environment so when we mouth breathe our lungs become an external organ if you live in a city like i do that means you're making yourself so much more susceptible to inhaling pollution allergens even viruses and other pathogens so our nose is our first line of defense for the body and it's really important to breathe through your nose at night as well because it helps to push back those tissues at the back of the throat and it can in some cases make you less susceptible to snoring and sleep apnea i mean those potential downsides are you know pretty serious but the potential upside is also pretty profound there and i've got to say a big thank you to you actually james because the first time you came on my podcast you shared a tip a very a very simple tip that has been transformative within my own family home okay i have had other experts on before talking about the breath nasal breathing you know brilliant people like brian mckenzie patrick mcewen um and my audience have always responded really well to those conversations but you gave a tip about just a small bit of tape when you put on your mouth nothing to make you feel claustrophobic or as if you can't breathe just a small bit of tape like a stamp a postage stamp size i think is what you said my wife implemented that tip immediately and i tell you what happened yet like you said she she wasn't drinking during the night normally she has a big glass of water and she drinks several times throughout the night but the most striking thing was i've always been the early wiser in the house and i love that time to myself i'm downstairs i make my coffee i do some reading and then a couple of days later my wife fed rocks up at 6 00 am into the kitchen i'm like hey babe there's something okay she goes yeah i feel great i'm like what you doing she goes i just woke up i feel great i've come down that was not a one-off that has continued so essentially we have we have really experimented this with this we have seen times when she doesn't wear the tape at times where she does and she gets up earlier and she feels fresher so this has been completely game changing and i just want to say a big thank you for that well i wish i could be responsible for that hack and if so i'm sure i would have made a billion dollars and would be calling in from my yacht and monte carlo but i had learned about this from researchers in the field and it sounded so sketchy to me then i went on youtube and saw stuff that was even sketchier so this idea of sleep taping to a lot of people it reminds them of a hostage situation which is bad or some bondage thing which for some of us is bad i guess some people enjoy that and that's great but what the only thing it's really doing is that it's training your mouth to be shut this isn't hermetically sealing your mouth up okay it's just a little piece of tape and if your mouth is shut at night that means you're nasal breathing and if you're nasal breathing you're better protecting your lungs you're breathing more healthily you're breathing more efficiently your heart rate's going to go down likely and you're going to be able to celebrate and so many other benefits so there's nothing sketchy about that nothing controversial about the fact that when we nasal breathe we can sleep better and i this has been completely transformative for me as well and if there's one thing i've heard from people in the last year since the book has come out received thousands of letters from people saying i no longer snore some people say i no longer have sleep apnea here's my sleep data people with kids who had adhd and other developmental problems are saying their kids are sleeping so much better using this so you know again i would love to take credit but it's really the researchers who have been spending decades and decades researching the difference between nasal breathing and mouth breathing the importance of nasal breathing at night that should really take the credit for that what was really striking in our first conversation just about a year ago now was the realization that you approached the whole of breathing and breath work through the mind of a skeptic you you know you weren't sure you're like well what is all this is it really true you know i really and i find that fascinating that through that lens you found the research you found the science and then you've arguably written one of the most impactful books on breath work and breathing of all time you know given the the impact your book has had the reach it's had the way it's really putting it on the map in a way that very few books have managed to do what do you attribute that to well it's interesting that we look at journalism now as being different from skepticism but in my mind journalism is you are paid to be a skeptic you are paid to be truly objective but there's so much bs from both sides of the argument now of whether you're talking about medicine or politics or the environment or whatever that you can't really make out what's really true throughout all of that noise everyone constantly yelling at you so i don't view myself so much as you know a diet and wolf skeptic i do view myself as a science journalist and so my job is to go out and listen to everybody and interview everybody i probably did 200 300 interviews for this book uh you know i spent so many years looking at the real science and talk to experts in the field but i also talked to people who were breathing therapists who weren't experts in the medical science of breathing but who were clinicians who worked with people for decades and decades and helped teach thousands of people how to breathe better and saw how they improved so in a lot of ways i just viewed this book as me doing my job i have no skin in the game on one side of the camp or the other camp to believe anything but i do have an interest in looking at data and looking at what's been measured and looking at what has worked and so that's how i want to continue approaching subjects is to call bs when i see it but at the same time be open-minded enough to really listen to everybody and look at what they've done and see where the truth lies yeah given that you've had so many emails and so much feedback you've mentioned that mouth taping at night is something that comes up regularly what are some of the other things that come up where people have fed back to you that you know i tried this james and actually this has now got better etc etc well a lot of people have written and said that they are so grateful for having this information but behind their thankfulness there's an irritation and a frustration that it took them reading a book to learn about these things to learn how asthma can be significantly reduced it can even be reversed by taking control of your breathing and if you don't believe me all you have to do is look at the dozens and dozens and dozens of scientific studies that have proven this or talked to patrick mcewen whom i know was on your your show this guy's for 20 years he's been teaching people how to reverse their asthma so i think that some of this is due to again all of the noise um it has to do with the internet everyone's got a voice now which is great but it's also problematic as we're seeing and it it took i guess um you know someone to go in objectively and to really look at this stuff and and to look at at what had worked and to talk to the people on again both sides so i think that this knowledge is obviously a great thing and that's the only thing that that we really have right now that the internet can provide is knowledge people have access to information they would not have access to 20 years ago through podcasts like yours through books and i think that through that knowledge people are becoming empowered to start to take control of their health in different ways and to listen to experts who have years and years of experience actually helping people not just conducting studies but helping people day in and day out i think that that information and those perspectives are really the most valuable it's interesting that there's an anger and a frustration coming through and i can see why there would be an anger because if you can reduce how much you're taking your inhaler let's say for asthma if you can reduce your anxiety or even eliminate your anxiety by working on some breathing practices you may well be thinking well why the hell have i not heard about this before when i've been to my doctor or my healthcare professional so i understand that anger i really do a lot of it comes to the capacity that healthcare professionals have with with their patients there's doctors in my family we talk about this stuff all the time and they're dealing with acute often serious problems so if i get in a car accident the last thing i want is breathing practices i want surgery i want the latest in western technology to help sew me up but the people have been left out in the cold are the people with these milder chronic issues it's only when these milder chronic issues becomes really serious that people get treatment but oftentimes that's too late and i heard this so many times through so many researchers and so many doctors over the years and i'm still hearing it all the time and there's a quote that actually brian mckenzie told me which i thought was great is eastern medicine is great if you want to live western medicine is great if you don't want to die so there's a big difference in those two things and i think that they both have enormous benefits but we shouldn't be thinking that you have to pick one or the other and i think that's where it gets really problematic if you have a very serious disease and western medicine can help you why on earth wouldn't you help yourself through that so it's about integrating these two things and knowing when to say when to each of them which i think is really the key and if you look at the top medical institutions in the world right now this is the direction everything's going and from harvard to stanford to yale to oxford you know and and that's inspiring it's taking a while to get there but these scientific revolutions can take decades you know i love that quote that brian shared with you it's it's really made me think but it's spot on you know certainly in my 20 years experience of seeing patients i'd have to say that is completely spot on i i recognize maybe five years and actually you know what we're really good at acutes we're just not as good with this sort of chronic stuff a lot of the time and you know i'm very proud to be a doctor but i i also i think we should be honest and say well you know these tools are great but actually we're a bit limited can we get a bigger toolbox in certain areas one of the sort of modern voices who has really helped to elevate breath work is vimhoff and you know i want to talk about vim's methods and some of the pros and the potential cons that some people talk about with those sort of hyperventilation type breaths i think that's going to be really important but i wanted to ask you james i talk about breathwork a lot and what i say what i hear is there's a lot of confusion there's a lot of confusion that oh you know i'd be i thought we need to breathe less but now you're saying to breathe 30 times then hold my breath with the vim hof method and i wonder if you could sort of unpick that for people you know what are the broad principles of these different breathing techniques and when and how should people think about bringing them into their lives so i was as confused as anyone when i was researching this book and learned this exact thing and when you start investigating different breathing methods there are different breathing philosophies in different breathing camps though so the buteyko people will say you only breathe very slowly you only breathe through your nose you never want to over breathe and the wim hof people including women himself says no breathe everybody breathe go go go so who's right and they're both right is what i learned it just depends on what you want to get out of your breath so for the majority of the time you do want to breathe slowly rhythmically lightly through the nose okay that is how you're going to get the most oxygen the most energy for the least effort and that's exactly what you want throughout the day but sometimes you want to push your breath and you want to use it to purposely stress your body out a lot of you may be thinking why do i ever want to stress my body out right i'm stressed throughout the day i'm answering emails dealing with calls dealing with the kids exercising but that's exactly why you should use breathing to stress your body out because what these practices do is they focus that stress into a controlled space in your day so the wim hof method you're not going to do that all day just like you wouldn't be going to the gym and lifting weights all day it would destroy your body wims method you do it for about 20 minutes and the point is that you use this method to purposely stress your body out so that the other 23 and a half hours of the day you can be in a state of calm and control and you know wim calls it the wim hof method but he's so clear that these practices have been around thousands and thousands of years you can call it tumo you can call it sudarshan kriya you can call it pranayama whatever they're all doing the same thing they're forcing you to over breathe to stress yourself out then control your breath and then to stress yourself out again then control it again like interval training so that you can control your stress and the science is very clear that these methods can have an incredible impact on both mental health and physical health including autoimmune diseases one of the most memorable bits in your book for me was when you were talking about your own experience of trying tumor breathing and um you said something to the effect of i was stressing my body out but this stress felt very different to the stress that i feel when i'm running late for an important meeting and i and i i thought that was really fascinating this idea of stress which we typically associate as being a bad thing certainly the societal narrative around stress the stress is bad we want to avoid it but that was a beautiful way of describing sort of helpful stress and unhelpful stress and i wonder if you could expand on that a little bit i think the difference is when you are rushing to a meeting when you are trying to answer emails and trying to answer calls and getting very frustrated with the amount of work you have to do every day there's no outlet for that stress that stress seems to build and build and build and it starts coming out in different ways you get angry you can't think straight your blood pressure goes up you start clenching your fists or your muscles tighten and that's such bad news but if you clench your fist and tighten your muscles and control your breath and learn to do this consciously you can learn what that stress feels like and you can then learn to turn it off so a lot of these practices have you do that to i mean whim has you know you're holding your breath and then you're breathing as hard as you can and then you're holding your breath again and taking one breath and then exhaling it so this is stressful to the body but what the body doesn't want is to be in these states of low-grade stress throughout the day and throughout the night periodic stress is very good okay medic stress is very good for the body that's how we evolved to go and run after a tiger or fight off someone and then to chill out for the rest of the day and the rest of the night what's happening now is so many of us are staying in this chronic state of stress it's like this iv drip of stress throughout the day and you can see that in what this has done to our health so inflammation is behind the vast majority of modern chronic diseases whether you're looking at diabetes or heart disease or hypertension or whatever and so this inflammation is exacerbated by this constant low-grade stress whether that stress is coming from the foods you're eating whether it's coming from the environment so it's no coincidence that hunter-gatherer populations don't have any of these modern diseases that we have it's no coincidence that our ancestors as far as we can see didn't have the vast majority of these diseases we have today either so that's a long way of saying that controlling the stress and using breathing as your presser release valve can have enormous benefits to your day-to-day health we're living in incredibly stressful times at the moment the world has significantly changed the way people live over the last 12 15 16 months or so and stress anxiety is ramped up in many ways for so many people one thing i don't think people still quite fully understand is how intimately our stress levels are linked with the way that we breathe and therefore without that understanding it's hard sometimes to persuade people that hey you know what if you you literally can hack that system by working on your breath not for hours a day just a few simple things you can actually start to change your biology so can you speak a little bit to how stress and breath are linked well this is what's so great about breathing is you can feel the effects and you can see the effects immediately when you're changing your diet usually that takes a little while right to really see the transformative effects it has to eat a healthy diet it'll take maybe a few days but if you want to lose weight it's going to take a few weeks or it's going to take a few months and you know so many of us today we have a very short attention span so i think that's one reason people fall off their diets they're just like i'm sick of doing this but with breathing one of my favorite things to do is to put a pulse oximeter on someone put a heart rate variability monitor on someone have them breathe in a very specific way and then watch what happens after a minute right even after a few seconds you can see this transformation taking place in your body you can watch your blood pressure go down 10 or 15 points i've seen mine even go down 20 points if i went from a state of being stressed to controlling my breathing and de-stressing myself through through those means so i think that that's what's so been that's what's been so convincing with with a lot of the readers of the book and and also to myself is if you're able to improve your health and improve the efficiency of your body within a few minutes just imagine what's going to happen after a few days or a few weeks or a few months and you start to understand how your breathing is such an integral part of your healing and your long-term health so i could get into the biochemical processes of it but that's the umbrella right that's the overview of what these things are doing and again if there are skeptics out there and i hope there are question what i'm saying but then go and grab some of these monitors and breathe in a certain way and tell me what what happens to your body what happens to your brain because what's happening in the body as well is happening in the brain eeg patterns transform when we start breathing in a slow rhythmic way different areas of the brain start coming online you're able to think more clearly because you're allowing your brain to function at peak efficiency and we feel free to expand on the biochemistry because you know in that section where you were talking about your own experience with tumor breathing you also have this gorgeous phrase that it was as if tumor opened up your own body's pharmacy and that stuck with me i thought we we've got these chemicals inside us already but it seems so certain breath practices can sort of unlock like that full potential that we're sort of maybe keeping suppressed because of the way we're breathing and the way we're living our daily lives well this is what's been so fascinating and great to see about what wim has been doing so he's had so many skeptics too over the last 20 years he said okay be be skeptical uh just take me into your lab and i'll do whatever you can shoot me up with e coli sure sounds great you can take blood work at various levels while i breathe uh we can bring in some other people you can take their blood work and see what happens and that's what he's shown we've known this for a long time that breathing in certain ways will create and trigger these responses in your body to release hormones to release stress hormones to release relaxing hormones to open up the blood vessels we we already know all that but i think that you know such a super human breather as wim is he's able to show the true potential of where breathing can take us so i think that what he has shown is this stressful breathing can help the body better defend itself it can bolster the immune function which is why wim hof breathing has been shown to be so effective for some people with autoimmune diseases their immune systems have gone rampant they're attacking healthy tissues in the body that helps to reverse that but we can also use breathing to release different feel-good hormones and when we do that we can trigger those releases at any time and this is one of the reasons that i think wim hof breathing has become so popular because it's so hard not to feel amazing at the end of that breathing session if anyone out there has done it it it's hard to see someone who hasn't had a very profound reaction after 20 minutes says wow i feel so good you feel that good because you're triggering the release of these hormones in your body and that's what's to me is allows people to keep coming back to this and to keep using it because you're creating a positive feedback loop to allow yourself to heal and also to allow your monkey mind to be entertained by the constant good feelings right the constant sometimes hallucinations that some of these breath work practices bring on and it's great i love the wim hof method i i do it as often as i can which is usually a couple times a week i also love kundalini i also love sudarshan korea but all of these things are essentially doing the same thing to your body and brain some people say that in a society full of stress full of adrenaline already that these hyperventilation practices like tumor like the vimhoff methods are not necessarily the best choices so i wonder what you would say to that could this potentially be the wrong method for some people to me it's just another option it's just another tool you have in your back pocket so people are going to want to come to breathing for different reasons and there is no overarching prescription that you can use to cure everyone's woes there is a foundation of healthy breathing that i tried to establish in the book said okay i don't care if you're an ultra marathoner or an asthmatic or have long haul covered or are just anxious here are some breathing practices that will help everybody and there are zero side effects to this right you're only going to feel better you're only going to be able to perform better it's just like with food we know that eating a healthy diet benefits everybody but when you get into more specific chronic conditions you're absolutely right some people with panic and anxiety would hate wim hof breathing and they'd hate sudarshan kriya because these incorporate states of extreme hyperventilation and that's going to give them a lot of trouble so with people like that i would say start slow right start with that five and a half seconds and five and a half seconds out that's even too much for a lot of people so it's so important not to try to go and kick your breeding's butt and this is what westerners tend to do with everything but to really dip into it slowly and become immersed into it at your body and your mind's own level of comfort and so with people with anxiety and with people with asthma and panic what i've tried to tell them is go very slowly start with three seconds in three seconds out and you would be amazed how few people have actually breathed in that way just three seconds in three seconds out get comfortable with that and extend it so if you're talking about someone who is already an extreme biohacker you know they're in constant ketosis and they're eating all the right stuff and taking all the right pills and potions and they just want to totally push it go big then go do the wim hof method go try holotropic breath work that that'll uh really really send you on a whirl and those people are already prepared right they're conditioned to do this it's the same reason why you wouldn't say to somebody who's been sitting on a couch for the past year go and run a marathon this is going to be really good for your body you have to do what your body is is telling you to do and to listen to your body and go into this stuff slowly one of the things that i love personally with breathwork and that i've seen so impactful with hundreds if not thousands of my patients is that tuning into your breath tunes you into your body right you start to gain an awareness that often people have never had certainly for many many years just to stop quieting the noise and actually listen to certain things like you know i'm interested as to what practices you do on a daily basis if any what i do um i usually take my mouth at night but i also love doing breath holds when i'm walking and i know you have written about this in your book but when i'm out for a walk after about five or ten minutes i will do you know i will be breathing through my nose i'll breathe out i'll um you know i'll sort of breathe out a normal exhale and then i'll see how far i can walk until i get that sort of medium air hunger and then i'll do that five or ten times what i love about that is a i can see myself getting better so my body is better able to tolerate that carbon dioxide buildup compared to let's say two years ago so that's really great to see but also if i haven't slept well or if i'm quite stressed and tense with work pressures and deadlines i find i can't hold my breath as long and it's almost like a early warning sign for me as to sort of what else is going on in my body so that's one thing i love and i would really encourage people to get into some form of breath work because i think it i think it kind of teaches you about yourself and your state of stress so breath holding has been a part of every breathing practice for thousands and thousands of years ancient hindus were talking about breath holding you know thousand four thousand years ago the chinese ancient chinese were saying the exact same thing same exact practice different culture were they talking to one another then i don't think so and yet they came to the same conclusions so to me it's no coincidence that now modern science is really catching up to what our ancestors have been saying for so long and we know that co2 tolerance plays a huge role in panic in asthma in anxiety we know that because the studies have shown very clearly that people who can't hold their breath for a very long time are much more susceptible to suffer from these conditions i thought that this was fascinating i went out to the laureate institute of brain research and met with dr justin feinstein who is a neuro psychologist out there doing co2 work and he's one of the only researchers i found doing work in to this thing called a co2 and co2 tolerance and he had a huge nih study looking at co2 tolerance and panic and he's the one who told me that so many of his patients over the years he would ask them just to sit down and before he hooked them up to any monitors he asked them just to take a sip of air and hold their breath and this is what they did then he'd ask them to do it again usually they last about two seconds three seconds and you see this all the time with asthmatics and with people suffering from even anorexia and other fear-based disorders so he kept wondering if you could allow them to tolerate more co2 if it would allow them to better control their condition because so much of their condition was caused by this perpetual hyperventilation they were so scared of holding their breath because a breath hold to them reminded them of a panic attack or an asthma attack or an anxiety attack that they had conditioned themselves to breathe like this all the time and this wasn't just a few people either this is so common in communities of people who have those issues so he has continued doing this research and what i thought was even more fascinating is he's not the one who invented this stuff you can look back more than a hundred years and see researchers at yale harvard and boston university and university of wisconsin doing work in co2 and mental health conditions and this stuff worked incredibly well not just breathing retraining but actually having these people inhale a bit of co2 and what does that do it replicates holding your breath that's what it does because when you hold your breath your co2 increases these people can hold their breath so they allowed them to celebrate in the benefits of breath holding by giving them a mouthful of co2 so i just kept finding these stories over and over again where we had learned this it had been studied at the most prestigious medical institutions and proven to be incredibly effective and then we had forgotten it and now a few people are re-remembering it right now and that's what's been exciting since the book has come out is there seems to be a lot more interest in co2 and co2 tolerance both in athletes and in people who are looking to overcome mental health issues yeah i mean just to recap for people if they didn't hear our first conversation if they're not familiar that drive to breathe doesn't come from our oxygen levels dropping it comes from our carbon dioxide levels building up and if we can't tolerate that we we have to breathe right so you know this co2 the carbon dioxide training that you're talking about can have i could just see physiologically how many different conditions that could immediately have an impact on particularly anxiety i could you can really see how it would help people um you mentioned athletics and i know you've written and spoken about about i think was it the 1968 men's track and field team and you know tell us a little bit about that and how athletes and fitness enthusiasts can use sort of breath holding and nasal breathing and all kinds of methods to actually improve their performance well again these were methods that had been used for decades and decades but kind of became less popular for some reason in the last few decades but one story in particular which i thought was so interesting was carl stou's work looking at a long exhale so he was a coral conductor and he found that so many of his singers were breathing these very shallow breaths and when you breathe very shallowly you don't have the resonance and you can't carry a note for as long so he started training them to exhale longer and how our breath comes into our bodies you look the lungs just don't inflate on their own right they need something to do this they're just like two balloons but we have something called a diaphragm underneath the lungs and when we breathe in that diaphragm lowers and when we breathe out that diaphragm lifts up so s style found that even within his singers they had such limited range of their diaphragms and by extending the range of their diaphragms they allowed themselves more lung capacity and they could sing so much better so he ended up going and retraining singers at the met opera who were already pretty good singers to begin with but they were even better after he taught them these new tricks and he got so popular that va hospitals on the east coast asked him to come in and help people with emphysema who were basically put on gurneys with an oxygen cannula up to their noses and fed a steady diet of antibiotics and left in the hospital to die nobody had any idea what to do with these people emphysemics lose the ability to engage their diaphragm parts of their lungs get inflamed and destroyed by emphysema those parts don't grow back but if you engage more of your diaphragm you can use the rest of the lung to compensate so style was able to take these people who were literally left for dead retrain them only in breathing that's the only thing he did and these people got up and left the hospital and went to live normal lives and there's x-rays of this there's data sheets of it i have even heard from a few of these patients whom stout treated and they said he absolutely saved their lives so that's a very long way of saying stout then got even more popular that he was asked by the olympic committee for the u.s to come and retrain the runners for the mexico city olympics and he used the exact same methods engaging more diaphragmatic movement and these runners went to mexico city which has an elevation of like six thousand or seven thousand feet and they were the only team not to use oxygen before and after and they destroyed everybody it's still the greatest performance of any track team in the history of the olympics and they were able to do this because they knew how to breathe properly so a lot of trainers patrick mchugh and being one brian mckenzie being the other they have adopted these same tricks and they're using them to create these absolute monster of athletes right now these people who are just really uh outperforming anything they were able to do before for me i mean fascinating to hear that but it's not just about performance because i'm currently training to do the london marathon in october never done a marathon before two years ago i probably wouldn't have considered myself a runner certainly not a long distance runner long story as to how this came about but i have got really clear in my goals for this um you know and one of my goals is i am going to complete the london marathon nasal breathing the entire way around okay that is my goal now some people say oh you're not going to manage it or you know and i'm not saying everyone has to do this i know there are times when you want a mouth breathe and run faster and maybe move more oxygen i i get that but what i'm noticing and when i speak to other runners who've you know recreational runners who've moved from mouth breathing to nasal breathing it's not yes performance can get better a lot of the time after a bit of a crossover periods but recovery tends to be quicker uh sleep is often better afterwards people who wear trackers heart rate comes down a lot quicker afterwards you know these are super important metrics for overall health and well-being so i kind of i really want to emphasize that point because it ain't just about getting faster it is a it is about doing a lot of these activities in a way that's just more physiologically sort of harmonious with our bodies and the way they're meant to work do you know what i mean yeah i'm glad you brought that up because this is also something that brian mckenzie has mentioned to me various times he's dealing with the very elite level of athletes so sometimes these people are entering zone five zone four you know even and some mouth breathing can help them yeah when they are absolutely peaking during a competition that's perfectly fine to occasionally breathe through your mouth and i just want to make that really clear because some people have written so confused they're trying not to ever open their mouth during the day and say oh god what have i done here so right now i'm breathing through my mouth a little bit right when we laugh we breathe through our mouth i'm gonna sigh right now i'm breathing through my mouth this is perfectly fine i'm talking about habitual breathing and that includes in athletic performance so brian trains some of the some of his athletes when they really reach these extreme states you might want to default to mouth breathing for about 15 seconds and then bring it back down and that's great so with jogging the whole point of athletic performance is to work at peak efficiency especially when you're competing why would you want to be expending energy on something if you didn't have to and then analogy that i've used before it's imagine you're in a car and would you at every stop sign just be revving the motor would you just be peaking the rpms like every single time you could without moving fast no you want to be working that car at the level of the performance you need so if you want to go fast yeah pedal to the metal but the rest of the time it should be operating in a state of efficiency your body is no different we have this huge piston right here in our chest right and it's called a diaphragm and it goes up and down just like a piston so if you can allow that diaphragm to go up and down fewer times and each time it goes up and each time it goes down you get more energy why on earth wouldn't you want to do that and so that's what nasal breathing can help you do you tend to take very deep breaths when you're nasal breathing especially when you're working out and you will be taking slower breaths so you will be able to gain more energy with less effort and i'm very curious to see what happens rangan i hope you don't get hurt because then this whole theory is just thrown out that way there's a lot of pressure now not see what that's like um these analogies with exercise uh with diet that they're so apt we don't see breathing in the same way but we really should you know we don't we understand that people have got to find the right diet for them they can you know there's some broad principles that kind of most people not everyone most people would agree on and but within that you can experiment to find what really works for you i kind of see breath work and breathing practice in the same way there are some broad things you know generally speaking we want to be breathing through our nose as much as possible but there are various techniques we might want to use at various times to get a certain effect and as you say there is that confusion and it becomes oversimplified oh i try that it doesn't work you know i'm not going to bother with breathing and really we need a bit more nuance than that and i've got to say i think your book does a a fantastic job off that nuance there and showing that there's all these different methods these different techniques you know james you know i'm really struck chatting to you that when you tell these stories there's still this real passion and fire in your belly that i heard from you almost 12 months ago when we first spoke and you know your book has been a global smash hit right you will have done hundreds of interviews short form ones on television shows long form ones like on my podcast and other long form shows why are you still so passionate about it do you ever get bored talking about this stuff because i'd never get that impression from you that you're done talking about it well either i'm a great actor which i'm not or i am genuinely interested in this stuff and i'm more interested in it now than i ever was i know that sounds like a cliche but it's it's really true i get really turned on by this because i know how much it can help people i know how much it's helped me and it's helped the hundreds of other people that i've talked to and the thousands of people that i've heard from and what i like about breathing so much is it's free it's available to everybody you can use it when you want to you can use it on the couch you can use it on your bicycle you can use it during a conference call it's always with us and so if it's always with us we always have an opportunity to do it a little better and this doesn't require you to wear special robes and to sit in a corner for an hour a day it's something that just as you had mentioned you're walking around i'm going to try my breath holds um you're sitting watching tv i'm going to try to breathe more slowly you can really do it at any time and always get the benefits from it and then that's really the last thing is i have seen no negative side effects to breathing better you only get benefits from it and it's a small ass for a lot of people it's one thing to ask someone to go who's a carnivore to go vegan or or keto it's another thing to ask them just to take something they're already doing all day and to slightly tweak it so that they could be a little bit healthier and in some cases be a lot healthier so i think that's the thing that keeps me really excited about this another thing is i have been lucky enough to speak at various medical schools in the u.s here at harvard stanford at yale and i am seeing the excitement within these places which is ironic because so much of the research that i put in this book was researched at these institutions and these people are like where do you find this stuff and i've said in your medical library here here it is here are the 20 papers i found there and that's what's really exciting because i really believe that this you know this message shouldn't be a us against them or this or that it needs to be a collaboration and it needs to be based on real science real measurements and that's what this stuff is based on and so to be able to now collaborate with some of these people is an absolute thrill you know it's making my days a little more hectic but uh it's something that i'll never give up doing and there's various initiatives we're trying to put together right now that are all volunteer based trying to get the word out you know especially to kids especially to people in developing nations who this stuff could really help i mean the subtitle i think of your book says that all the new science are for lost art you really give homage to where this comes from in all the interviews i've seen you you do before tell us a little bit about some of these origins so again my job was to look at the full story of conscious breathing um and i had no interest in just focusing on one thing or the other which is why this book was such an absolute nightmare to to write and put together because when you're taking something that's been around for 5 000 years and misunderstood for most of that time there's a lot of weeds to go through to to find the real kernels of truth but uh one of the most interesting things that i'm able to do as a researcher is to look through history and make these connections and this is the part of book research i actually love the most is to read these ancient texts and to see so much of what they've been saying we have then rediscovered but we have just rephrased it in different ways so that includes ancient chinese texts of the dao to ancient hindu texts and i was able to meet with sergio alvarez de rose who is a real scholar of the ancient hindu text and he's the one who really was able to point out the text that that showed me that this concept we have today of yoga of this vinyasa flow of these movements and then you hold a pose and then you move again which i'm a huge fan of i do it all the time i love it that has nothing to do with ancient yoga so ancient yogis didn't move around they sat in one place and breathed so yoga was a entire technology of breathing and it started in the indus valley civilization about 5 000 years ago even longer than that there are figurines and there are sculptures of people in conscious breathing poses unmistakable poses so scholars attribute that as the beginning of yoga and of breath work it had probably been around for thousands of years before that and then we get into when people started writing these practices down the rigveda other books in yoga and they start really describing the specifics on how to do these practices they collect them all panton jolies yoga sutras is the famous text really codifying and including all of these different practices but what was so interesting to me one of the many things that was interesting was to see this tract in ancient hindu text right understanding breathing adopting these specific practices then seeing the exact same tract in ancient chinese text saying the exact same stuff you know just in different words and so you know that there's something there these people didn't have pulse oximeters they weren't able to check blood pressure but what they did have was time they had time and they had patience to look at what worked and what didn't work luckily today we have all these instruments to measure what they were saying and to actually see how it pans out and it turns out that so much of what they were saying was a hundred percent true and again don't believe me you can see this in the measurements on modern machines i spoke to ryan holiday a little while ago on the show and a similar theme came up which is some of these truths that he writes about um you know you can see yes in ancient greek texts and roman texts and indian texts and chinese sets you know very different civilizations at different times and different parts of the planet and we were just talking about how that should just give us more confidence that hey this stuff is real it's so humbling and i think it should be very humbling for modern humans you know if we i think we do sometimes have this arrogance that we've got all this incredible science now and i'm not against it i think it's great to have the science to to back stuff up but it's also very humbling to know actually you know what humans have been pretty clever for a long period of time and it kind of figured out a lot of stuff that they kind of just knew worked well i think we are apprehensive about things that we've discovered in the past because a lot of that stuff was false if you look at all the hucksters of the snake oil salesman at the beginning of the century i think this is what made people so paranoid about accepting and using things that weren't in the system even though a lot of people didn't realize a lot of what was in the system was also false and didn't work and had been co-opted by by corporate look at sugar look what happened to our diet eat more processed grain everybody it's good for you let's put that at the very top of the u.s food pyramid we know that stuff is a disaster for our health right um and yet it's taken us 50 years to start to reverse that so even when you think about nasal breathing here's a quote from the dao that's about 1300 years old it says the breath inhaled through the mouth is called nichi or adverse breath be extremely careful not to breathe your breath through the mouth i mean this is it goes to do with everything that we uh had just been mentioning about nasal breathing and i sprinkled the book some of these quotes throughout it but there were so many more that were even more profound they just happened to be even longer so i think that this idea that whatever is new is better we know this is false because if you look at medicine and this is something that three different doctors told me about years ago they said about 50 to 70 percent of what we've known about medicine in the past has been proven wrong including now today about 50 to 70 of how we're treating ourselves with medicine will be proven wrong in the future so when you think about things like that you you think that oh that's impossible how can that be look at all the procedures we used to do 20 years ago look at all the different drugs we used to use 20 years ago that aren't being used now so if you think about some of these practices which have really been time proven over hundreds or thousands of years why would a practice continue if it weren't working you know books were extremely valuable back in the day why would they continue to fill their books with the same exact message over and over if this stuff wasn't working you could say or maybe they were clueless or this is spiritual stuff and it doesn't apply to us now that's fine but again as i keep mentioning we have instruments to measure it so so why not if something sounds crazy that's fine be skeptical but measure it that's how science is supposed to work science is supposed to be the exploration of the unknown right you're not supposed to keep proving the same thing over and over again which is what so much of science is doing right now you're supposed to explore the unknown and it's those scientists and researchers which really change our world view and in many cases have drastically changed our understanding of health and those are the people that i try to track down and write about yeah i i think it was in first year or second year edinburgh medical school we were told the exact same thing by one of our professors 50 if what we're teaching you is going to be false the problem is we don't know what which is the 50 um and i think we all need just to keep that humbleness and humility as we as we go through the world they get you know is this really true or may we just be seeing one side of this here it's it's kind of super fascinating i mean you mentioned scientists and researchers i would also add to that um clinicians i i i really love chatting to experienced clinicians who have you know these are often n equal one things i i totally understand you there's not you know you can't replicate proper science done in proper conditions that can be repeated over and over again but i think sometimes we get the ideas from clinicians who say you know what i'm trying this and i'm i'm seeing this over and over again that this is helping people and this is working um and i know certainly that's been a huge part of my own journey a real frustration that the tools i was taught i found brilliant for some people but for a lot of my patients i thought this is just really limited i don't really feel i'm helping them i feel i'm often just putting a sticking plaster on their symptom and you know speaking to breath work about six or seven years ago i started talking to patients about something that i call the three four five breath breathing for three hold for four breathe out for five and i've written about it before and i still get messages from people saying this is my gosu for anxiety uh this is my go-to before you know before a stressful meeting it just helps to calm me down or students before their exams and again there's no research done yet on the three four five breath but the principle of a longer exhale than inhale consciously slowing down your breath i mean there's research on that it's just something i found to be super practical that people can put in their back pocket they don't need to remember anything complicated wherever they are they can access it there and then without spending a single penny well what what you found is i believe it is uh scientifically validated because just as you mentioned there briefly when you're inhaling you're eliciting a sympathetic response which is why your heart rate goes up right you're activating your body and when you exhale or hold your breath you're relaxing your body so if you're exhaling or holding your breath for three quarters of the time you're breathing you're gonna become more relaxed so all those things are measured some people prefer the 478 breathing i've noticed with people with anxiety or asthma it's way too long it's it's too long isn't it to do yeah but if you look at 478 too it's just doing the exact same thing box breathing what's that doing four in four hold four out four hold three quarters of the time you're holding your breath or exhaling so this is this is kind of what i was talking about you find just these same variations on the same themes that are eliciting the same responses and in my opinion and this is just my opinion i believe that the information the data we get from clinicians who deal with people day in day out who have dealt with thousands of people that in many ways is more important and valuable than a study with 20 people in a controlled environment and the reason i say this is because the randomized controlled studies are that's the gold standard and it's fantastic double blind i love it but look at all the different drugs and procedures that have passed through that gold standard and look at how many of those drugs are no longer used because they killed people or made them sicker so there's something slightly off with that it's only when you get these things out to huge groups of people if you can do randomized double-blind controlled studies in enormous groups of people which is basically impossible that you get the real kernel of truth there so if we know that's not possible to have these huge randomized studies with thousands and thousands of people what's the next best thing an objective scientifically minded clinician who sees what has worked who adjusts his or her own practices to suit the patients and watches what happens to me that's solid gold right there and that's why i think so many of these breathing practices have been developed by clinicians right and they've been tweaked by clinicians who have found just small little alterations here and there will have an even better effect and a better outcome before when we were talking about you know being in a car accident and wanting the very best treatment that modern medicine has and contrasting that with the sort of more chronic conditions where we can put in practices like breath work or or preventive uh practices like breath work to stop people getting ill in the first place i think that broadly works but when you were talking about carl stuff's work with emphysema these are people you know severely ill at the end of the life having huge benefit from learning to use their diaphragm better i mean that also speaks to the fact that it's about integrating it everywhere yes it's prevention but also when people are seriously yeah maybe they have to take some medication but you can also do breathing practices as well i have several patients who use breathing practices they've got very advanced pain from autoimmune arthritis type conditions and breath work actually reduces their need for pain medication breath work helps them sleep better so again just emphasizing it's not either or it can just be part of that armory that we're using no matter what we're facing if we want to stay healthy and well we can implement breath work practice but if we are severely ill as well we can also use certain ones i think to help us yeah that's really true you know one thing that michael galb who's a doctor and dentist and sleep researcher and he's on every board of dentistry imaginable he's been doing this stuff for 30 years he said that he's like oh i only deal with the walking dead it's only when people get so bad that they come to me and then oh my god now i have to fix you of that problem the point with so much of health if you look at health from an ancient yoga perspective if you look at health from an ancient chinese perspective or a persian perspective it is to not get sick health is is used to as a preventative maintenance you don't want to get sick you stop paying your doctor when you get sick in chinese medicine and you continue pain as long as you're healthy that seems like an interesting way of doing this i'm not saying that's the best way to go but it's it's interesting that they've taken that philosophy so yeah i want to be clear that breathing is so effective as preventative maintenance to keep a healthy lung volume as you grow older to keep yourself calm to keep yourself running efficiently so very effective for that but for even acute serious problems it depends what that problem is stage 4 cancer don't just do breath work and stop everything out that's a bad idea and this is where i think that people get the wrong idea about this they want to learn something say oh this is going to fix me i'm going to ditch everything else and just go into this well that's where you get into real trouble but for people with these long standing chronic respiratory issues and autoimmune issues breath work can be incredibly effective alyssa epple she is a researcher here at university of california san francisco just completed a study in rheumatoid arthritis and breath work and cold exposure basically the wim hof method and you're starting to see this all over the place right now because i think that this is one of the reasons there's no drawbacks to breathing better you know there's some drawbacks there's always side effects to taking certain pharmaceutical drugs even though the health benefits are going to far outweigh those side effects most of the time but learning how to breathe better has zero negative side effect and for people with copd and emphysema what i found that was so sad is carl stauf found a way of helping so many of these people and again the science is there it's validated but when he left the hospital system so did his research so does his practice and emphysemics are treated much the same they were in the 1950s right now and i think some of that is due to cost it's very expensive to have a personalized respiratory therapist train each and every patient but it also has to do with apprehension within the larger medical community that breath work could actually benefit people with emphysema all you have to do is look at the science and you'll see the answer to that question what goes wrong james what happens we we're born as babies right we um you know presumably a lot of us at that point have got good posture we've got good positioning of everything we're able to breathe what happens so that we then need these dozens these hundreds of breathing practices to sort of enhance our health you know presumably some of them are just bringing us back to where we might have been had we not sort of gone off track somewhere what has happened to us as a species whereby we need so much help at learning how to do one of the most basic and most important functions that exists well i think you can see right now what's happening with the different ways that we found are very effective for healing our bodies and healing our minds is the further we get away from the modern environment that we've lived in all our lives the healthier we get if we replace processed food and cookies and fritos and tortilla chips and all that other stuff that we've been told is healthy with the food our ancestors ate we can vastly improve our health if we get rid of the phones that we have on or the laptops at night if we regulate the amount of time we spend on the internet and social media this can have a vast effect on our mental health so we've lost the ability to breathe properly you can see the proof all over the place the first thing that we've lost is the skeletal structure of our faces and as we mentioned in the last podcast this is due to the shrinking of our mouths caused by lack of breastfeeding and lack of chewing when we're young if we don't have that stress our faces don't build properly and if they don't build properly our mouths will grow too small which is why we have crooked teeth our teeth have nowhere to go so they grow in crooked and having that smaller mouth also impacts the sinus cavities so this is not a theory it's not a hypothesis this is a fact and if you don't believe me you can just look at ancient skulls which is something i did for a few months with some real leaders in the field i was absolutely shocked to see i could not find an ancient skull with crooked teeth i could not find an ancient skull that ever had their wisdom teeth removed or braces or any sort of dentistry or orthodontics they didn't need any of that stuff just like today we need supplements vitamins goose powders to supplement a diet that is so devoid of proper nutrition if you look at our ancestors they needed none of that stuff were they popping their vitamin c so they wouldn't get scurvy or their vitamin d so they wouldn't get rickets no their environment provided all of that because of course it did we evolved from a wild environment which is why other animals that live in the wild don't need any of these interventions that we need now to be healthy okay it's only when we put them in zoos and feed them a western diet and acclimate them to our modern environment that they get really sick so breathing is a huge part of this because losing the ability to breathe losing the anatomy to breathe properly then gaining these very improper habits that make it very hard to breathe in just a healthy way it's dramatically affected our health and we could talk about the anatomical changes we could talk about posture we could talk about pollution but it's really been a perfect storm of different modern-day environmental inputs which have made us the worst breathers in the animal kingdom there are a couple of things to pick up on a lot of there's a lot of young parents who listen and watch this show you mentioned last time about chewing real food and how important that is but we also have this modern fear sometimes that we shouldn't give our kids these foods that needs to be mushed and pureed and soft and it all kind of speaks to what you were just saying doesn't it about how far removed our lifestyles now are compared to how we've evolved and so you know what are some of those simple things that people can think about doing with their children whilst they're still young to to enhance their breathing you know in childhood and beyond i was talking to my mom about this when i was first researching this book i said hey what did i eat when i was young i was trying to understand why my mouth was so small why needed extractions and braces and how that might have impacted my breathing and how it might have impacted my facial form and she said you know when i was growing up in the 70s and 80s nobody was breastfeeding she said no absolutely not everyone was bottle-fed and then you were weaned onto gerber applesauce directly onto it and i just thought that was interesting but she she said that it wasn't even something people talked about this is just what it was done because modern science had said oh bottle feeding is better you have to wean onto canned and bottled and and jarred processed foods that's this is the scientifically sound way of doing it and as she was talking i was thinking about how odd this is that all of our ancestors up until 200 years ago were breastfed and then they were weaned onto hard foods these foods were not processed before they were given to kids and if that was so injurious to health why are we all here today and why did they all have perfectly straight teeth and we're able to breathe so much more efficiently and effortlessly than we are right now so i think it's just this lap and a lap of of truly long-term thinking that has given us this new world view that everything new has been both vetted and is better for our health so that and answer that's a very long way of saying to answer your question specifically there's this huge movement called baby lead weaning i am not the expert in this um so i will not speak very in detail about this but this is all about returning our kids and returning infants to their natural way of developing proper facial structure and it does that by incorporating as much breastfeeding as a mother is able to do as long as a mother is able to do it and then weaning onto hard foods just like our ancestors did and it sounds dangerous but again if you look at the past and if you look at indigenous cultures right now who don't have processed food you know they they turn out just fine and they don't have any of the many of the chronic problems that we have later on in life yeah i mean even related to that you see this you know in cafes and restaurants i'm not talking about babies now but you know kids as they get older there's kids meals and there's adult meals you go out somewhere and it's like oh there's real food on the adults menu and on the kids menu it's chicken nuggets and fries and again i'm not i'm super clear i'm not trying to criticize anyone for the choices they make with their own children i understand that there's certain things that are normal in society that we often end up doing without thinking about it but i just i've always found it quite fascinating that we have kids meals as well as adult meals because food is food right and if anyone needs more vitamins and proper nutrients it would be the kid but instead we just put about 50 percent more sugar in the kids meals and remove all the vegetables i never thought about this but but i think that that's a very clear reflection on how far divorced we are from where we really need to be and how many more benefits a kid would get not only in the nutrition of eating proper quote unquote adult food but also in the masticatory stress the chewing stress which kids need so much more than adults because they're developing very quickly yeah changing tax slightly i went for a walk this morning and i was what are you thinking about the second conversation you know the first one i enjoyed so much my audience loved it james it's the most viewed video on my entire youtube channel i don't know what happened with that one but people absolutely loved it i think over half a million people so far so it was like okay where can we go in this conversation that we didn't cover first time round and we've obviously done that a lot so far but i kept coming up with this idea of untapped potential i thought you know from really your book again from thinking about breathing i think we're all walking around with this reservoir of untapped potential that we don't even know how good we could feel how fit we could be how well we could sleep how much less stress we could feel in our lives if we found the right breathing technique for us that's going to suit you know our lifestyle and the way we choose to live and i thought a good place to really think about this is by talking about swami rama who we didn't talk about last time because i think he is really showing just how far you can go with this and i'm not saying we all need to go that far but i think it beautifully illustrates just what is possible when you really learn to harness the power of your breath yeah and you know before we get into swami rama i just want to mention uh pick up on one thing we were just talking about kids and we didn't mention this in the first chat either but since the book has come out and since you and i chatted how many months ago was that i've heard from so many sleep medicine researchers people who specialize in pediatrics and what i learned from them is that the pandemic of adhd about 10 percent of the population in the u.s suffers from adhd most are kids from age two to five and then it picks up again from ages around 12 to 17. but most adhd is tied directly to breathing and breathing quality and they showed me the percentages of 75 of kids who have adhd also have sleep disorder breathing and by improving their breathing during the day and during the night so many of these kids can overcome what is considered this psychological or neurological problem and that has just blown me away that simply breathing properly can have such a transformative effect but then i was thinking about it more i said this shouldn't be shocking because if you're doing something wrong throughout the day and if you're doing something 100 wrong for a third of your life it's gonna destroy your body and that's what we've been seeing with these kids for with adhd and dr stephen park at albert einstein college of medicine it's doing some incredible work in this area as well looking at what happens when you allow a kid to breathe better look at how quickly they're able to overcome some of these chronic issues so i just wanted to tie that on before we talk about swami rama but in many ways i view that these things are related because it just shows you the potential of what breathing can do not only to heal us of some chronic issues but to also put us up that next rung of human potential and i think that uh old mr rama did that better than anyone this is to give a little backstory on him this is somebody who grew up in the himalayas and he was taught yoga and breath work at the age of around four and he stuck with it his whole life spent years in a cave honing this skill and he got so good at it that by the time he was in his 30s he went off and traveled the world he studied at oxford he studied at various universities he knew like eight different languages and he was so impressive that researchers at the manager clinic which at the time was the largest psychiatric training facility in the us and the most renowned a navy physicist there had heard about all these things he was able to do and other tests he apparently was able to stop his heart with his just by focusing on his mind and breath and he was able to increase the temperature in his fingers and this navy physicist didn't believe these stories even though the data was right there so he brought swami rama into his facility and conducted a battery of tests and they found that he was able to remain conscious while he lulled his brain into a delta state so a delta state are the states of very deep sleep we're supposed to be unconscious we're supposed to be asleep but he was able to remain conscious during these states so that was pretty impressive but what impressed them even more was that he was able to control his heart rate he was able to increase it about 20 beats per minute within a space of about eight seconds and he was actually able to make it beat at a rate of more than 300 beats per minute with his mind and he did this for more than a minute um that state atrial fibrillation is supposed to be you know it will kill you after a while but apparently swami rama could do this for about a half an hour to an hour all of these things are medically impossible and no one would believe it unless there was a real doctor there researcher there recording the whole thing and still this was reported in the new york times so it was reported in time magazine and still i get letters from doctors that say you should check your sources this is obviously impossible no one can do this and you know how much more science do you need uh but that has more to do with how people want to view the world than than to actually look at data and numbers so could he also change the temperature on his hands yeah i mean there's a whole laundry list of things this guy could do i didn't want to i didn't want to bore you with it but in another experiment since you asked of course he was able to take his hand sorry to interrupt if you're enjoying this conversation there's loads more like it on my channel please do press subscribe and hit that bell now back to the conversation and focus on his hand and turn one area gray from lack of blood flow and the other area bright red and they went and they measured the temperature on the same hand and it varied by 11 degrees so not only could he take over entire organs like the heart and the brain but he could take over specific parts of his body and pinpoint where he wanted to control his conscious energy and a few people who had studied with rama have written me and they said oh you know it was great to read that you were able to track down this research and track down these studies but this was child's play to him this was apparently nothing and he's he's now passed away but i am now currently trying to get a hold of some other people who have learned rama's methods and who can do things that according to them i've not seen any of this will really be make what rama did in these studies seem very in insignificant so uh you know covet has put a big fork in that but things are starting to open up and i'm hoping to go back out into the field and and to record and write about more of this stuff i mean it's interesting to hear the skepticism that will come back on these sort of extreme stories you often you often get the skepticism around vimhof as well um it's still there even though i think he's shown through a lot of science a lot of real life people have adopted these and are writing and sharing their experiences so there's a lot of real world data out there as well yet there is that skepticism and it really speaks to what i was thinking about today which is this this untapped reservoir of potential that we all have within us you know the body's pharmacy that we're not properly opening up and accessing and i guess one of the reasons vim has been so relatable to people is because certainly in the western world i should be really clear in the western world is because you know he you know he kind of the name swami rama i guess might put a block there for certain people oh that doesn't apply to me and of course he was you know this guy was rocking meditation and breath work at the age of four which is fantastic in the himalayas as well so it answered this kind of romanticism and mystique that people then sort of feel well that's not relevant for me i live in the middle of the city i've gotta you know work six days a week i've got to do this and take my kids throughout the school club you know it seems quite distant whereas vim i think to some people at least feels a lot more relatable but they both speak to the potential there because what what you've just described uh swami rama doing mind-blowing incredible but you know vim has also done some incredible stuff where people have injected endotoxin which would make most people sick and through his breath through his controlling immune system he doesn't get sick enough and i i again i've been thinking about this theme recently that yes we want science and i know we want science and it's great to get the science to really give it that validation to spread the message but it feels to me on some level that breathing is so fundamental to who we are as humans that there's almost a three-dimensional quality to breathing you know the life force the energy it gives us as soon as we stop breathing we die um but actually i wonder sometimes do we look at it through a very sort of one-dimensional reductionist scientific lens whilst that has merit i sometimes wonder if we're missing some of that broader picture that some i guess of these ancient practices may have been speaking about and talking about for many years well i think when it comes to people's apprehension there's nothing much i can do about that and the last thing i want to do is to become an evangelist i really want to be even keeled here and just provide what i have found you know i'm not the one doing the research here i'm reporting and there's a big difference in that i think when you look at wim hof and tumo and i've gotten some blow back on this as well i've had people say it is impossible for a human to sit in snow for eight hours at a time and melt a circle around themselves without wearing any clothes this is scientifically impossible and then i'll send them the study done by herbert benson at harvard medical school that was published in nature the most esteemed scientific journal on the planet that shows that people can do this with their breathing and that's usually when i never hear back from these people again and that's fine right so whim has come up with the exact same resistance but the difference is he's not wearing a robe he's not wearing beads he drinks beer eats pasta plays guitar you know just like every other middle-aged adult male and so that has made him very uh approachable in many ways he's also volunteered to do whatever study people want to do and i think what he's discovered especially with a study with the endotoxin when they first shot wim up with uh the endotoxin of e coli and he didn't suffer any symptoms and they said oh you're just a weirdo there's no there's no way anyone else can do this he's like well let me take a group of people that you can pick i'm going to train them for four days and then they're going to come back and do exactly what i did which is exactly what happened so i think that it's this kind of science in this accumulation of data which is so necessary you'll see you'll certainly get to a point where people just don't want to hear about it if you look at climate change how many studies are there showing climate change is real twelve hundred thirteen 1300 and you still have people saying ah i don't believe any of that stuff what can you do about that to me you can just offer them information right and if they want to approach this in a scientific way with truly an open view then they can do without what what they will and really look at the data but when it comes to these super human feats of swami rama and wim hof and even chuck mcgee has has these to a certain extent i don't view these as superhuman at all these are human abilities that each and every one of us can hone and when we hone them we can maybe not be able to sit in snow for eight hours at a time and melt a circle around us but we can improve our health and i think that that is whim's most impressive and important message he's saying don't go to everest and run a half marathon and bare feet and bare chested like me i already did that but why don't you take control of your breath and then once you take control of your breath you can use that to help establish better healthy habits throughout the day and i think that's why he's resonated with so many people across the globe is because he's allowing them to use something that we are all born with right it's our own natural human body to improve our condition it's beyond health as well yeah james it's you know everything we do in life we're breathing whilst we're doing it right we take our breath everywhere with us it's no part of our life is is lived separately to the breath and therefore improving our breath has the potential to improve every aspect of our life you mentioned health but our relationships can be significantly improved because if we can control our breath we can breathe better our stress levels will be lower we we deal with stress and friction much better your sleep quality can potentially be better we spoke about that at the start about nasal breathing at night you know yes there's going to be an impact on chronic disease as well but it's it is this three-dimensional kind of this is sort of what i was getting at that you you don't live your life without your breath so improving the quality of your breath absolutely can have profound benefits whether you want to climb everest in your shorts or whether you just want to get through the day better calmer more peace you know i guess that's why as a doctor i'm so passionate about breath work and each of my four books breath work has come up in all of them even though i write about different topics because the breath is central to so many different aspects of our lives i learned this from a sleep researcher and biochemist he said that we get most of our energy not through food but through our breath so if you look at how glucose is broken down it takes six times more oxygen than glucose to fuel us and he broke down the whole chemical structure of how that works with oxidative phosphorylation and and he said so if you explain to people that you know all of the food that they're focusing on every minute of the day all of the supplements yes food is incredibly important for health and for energy of course it is but that food can't do any of its magic if you don't have the breath there as well if you don't have that proper and efficient supply of oxygen so just as you mentioned this is not woo new age stuff this is the most basic biochemistry in the human body and breathing has to be considered as important as what we eat and how much we exercise and how well we sleep it really does and i think it's starting to i think it's been pushed to the background for a little while now but people are starting to recognize it and just concerning how the human body is able to function better with breathing and what happens when we put the body in a state of nature there's a quote by albert svent giorgi who won the nobel prize for his work in vitamin c that that i love and as you were talking i was just reminded of this quote he said more than 60 years of research on living systems has convinced me that our body is much more nearly perfect than the endless list of ailments suggests its shortcomings are due less to its inborn imperfections than to our abusing it that's pretty wordy but what he's saying is the further we put ourselves away from nature the sicker we're gonna get and the more we return to the state in which we naturally evolved the better we can get and breathing again is a huge part of that returning your breathing to the way your ancestors used to breathe not super human breathing not super turbo breathing just regular natural human breathing is all you need follow your ancestors as the guide or any of the other 5400 different mammals in the wild right now and that to me is really the best teacher as far as breathing is to concerned well and to breathe optimally we need a certain physical structure we need a certain posture we need to be able to get into certain positions and i've read somewhere in your work james that 30 percent of breathing is dictated by posture yet we're living in a society where many people have got rounded back sort of craned out necks there's many reasons for that sedentary jobs smartphones laptops whatever it is but you know how how does this play a role in our ability to breathe because some people will be hearing this and go okay james you convinced me i'm in i'm uh i want to breathe better i i want to i want to get your book i want to check out the techniques i want to find the right one for me but where does posture play a role and what can people do about that well if you consider that in your chest right now are these two huge balloons right these these are your lungs and these balloons need to inflate properly and deflate for you to get a consistent and easy flow of air and by getting that consistent and easy flow of air you will be able to consistently and easily get a flow of oxygen which is what is going to fuel all of your cells so when we're sitting like this hunched over which is how i sit a lot or if we're sitting on a couch with our feet up and if we're walking around with our shoulders like this even if we wanted to take a full and easy breath we can't because we can't inflate those two balloons in our chest those two lungs so dr belisa vranich has done some amazing work in the biomechanics of breathing and i talked with her recently and read her books and they're fantastic if you're looking at the biomechanics of breathing and she has found that most of us tend to breathe up and down right but what we should really be doing is to be breathing out and in because what you want to do is you want to be engaging the diaphragm and inhaling the lungs air into the lungs very softly so in order to do that your rib cage needs to be flexible right and if you think about what yoga does what is yoga more than just a way of stretching your ribcage and your intercostals so that you can breathe more easily so vranic has this test it's called the bic test and what you do is you place your hands and you put them above your hip bones and you breathe in and you want to feel your hands moving out laterally not just your stomach going out that's where a lot of people get it wrong like they think belly breathing is about pushing the stomach out you want your your belly around here to expand outward and inward and if you can do that then you're breathing correctly if you can't and you feel no movement there then you're an up and down breather and the more you focus on this on breathing out and in the more you start to feel your diaphragm descent descending in the proper way and the more you you start being able to breathe more easily this has made an incredible difference for me in my understanding of breathing not only that but also in athletic performance whether i'm surfing or running or whatever to focus on breathing outward and inward instead of up and down yeah it's incredible and it's i guess what you're showcasing there is that doesn't matter if your posture is a bit altered from years of not breathing well and being hunched over i guess the the positive note is there's things you can do want you now to flip that switch in your brain and say right okay i'm gonna take breath seriously i'm gonna start working on certain things i'm gonna every day just try that and just see if i can get a bit more expansion out rather than up and down i really think people are gonna start to feel those differences and as i said earlier in our conversation they're going to start tuning into things that they they weren't even aware of before you know i said james that i'm training for the london marathon in october and um i was actually challenged by a radio dj last year to to do it live on air and i said yes it was due to be in 12 weeks at that time and i wasn't a runner but because of covid's and the restrictions it's been delayed it's been delayed it's now meant to be happening this october now at the time i was having some hamstring issues and i was put in touch with one of the best movement therapists i've ever come across and i've dealt with many over the course of my career and she's got this machine there's only three of them in the world she's got these machines where they can literally measure every burn in your body as you're running and see the positioning and she just uses that as a tool but what's interesting is that we do lots of things together and it's it's been transformative for me in my running but also my breathing and once we did this thing where my my spine all the bones of my spine one of the big problems for me is that they always face white they never come around to the midline and go to the left this is something you you really wouldn't know until you've been on a machine like this and you can actually see and then a lot of my issues start to make a lot of sense and she gave me this uh gorgeous spiral breathing exercise to do that took about three minutes we did it together i felt totally open and my ribs expanded afterwards so we went back on the machine nowhere to lie everything came back online and my spine is now going right and then whenever it's going all the way to the left it's like i said helen why that has completely changed and all i've done is three minutes of breath which she goes yeah i see this all the time it's because once we can get this working better you know i don't want to over simplify what she does once the diaphragm's working better more efficiently you know it affects everything around that affects your spine and i guess i'm just sharing that with you because again that is n equals one that is just my own experience but super super powerful so i do that three minute swara breathing exercise every day i don't need any more motivation now because i've seen firsthand that my gates my biomechanics change simply on the back of it so this once again reminds me of another ancient quote i'm going to bore you with that's about 14. i'm loving these quotes man loving them so this one i i think speaks to exactly what you just said it says what the bodily form depends on is breath and what breath relies upon is form when the breath is perfect the form is perfect too so if you are hesitant to think that your breathing may impact your posture just consider those huge six liters of air those two balloons in your body and just take a deep breath and feel what happens to your posture when you take a deep breath and feel what happens to your spine i was talking to dr andrew weil about this and he had learned from a doctor early on in his studies he's a famous american doctor i'm not sure if he's made it across the pond here um but he said just look at scoliosis um so this is the sideways curvature of the spine it comes on right before puberty and and throughout puberty and we still don't know what causes scoliosis sometimes ms can definitely influence it and other diseases can influence it but for the mass majority of people who have scoliosis we don't know what causes it how strange is that so many people have this and we still don't know why they have it so he was convinced from the doctor that he talked to that this starts early on when dysfunctional breathing is present when people tend to breathe tend to be turned like this too much and tend to keep breathing into the right lung or tend to keep breathing into their left lung while they're sleeping while they're awake while they're playing just like you i tend to be a left side um person i that's where my posture is whenever i get my spine cracked and fixed they say every single person tells me that they're like why are you leaning to the left so much i don't know it's just one of those things so an extreme version of what you and i are both doing is scoliosis so when someone has this dysfunctional breathing again this is so hypothetical you can't run a randomized controlled study of this and no one ever should but just as a thought experiment i thought that that was interesting and then i researched the work by katarina schroth who was a teenager living in dresden germany at the beginning of the 1900s she had scoliosis it was very bad she was given you know a brace and a wheelchair and told that this is what you're gonna do the rest of your life uh you're gonna be in this brace and she realized that she had two lungs and these acted like balloons and that when you place something around a balloon and inflate it whatever is around it will take that form so she developed something called orthopedic breathing where she would breathe into one lung and exhale breathe into the other lung and exhale and she actually breathed her spine straight and went and taught this to thousands and thousands of women it's still being used at johns hopkins university the pictures are there the studies are there and uh it's still interesting that so many people with scoliosis now are completely unaware of how breathing just breathing and stretching can have a really profound effect on posture and for those of us lucky enough not to have scoliosis how you breathe vastly affects your posture if you're breathing unhealthy it's going to affect your posture if you're breathing healthy that's going to improve your posture and the proof is all over the place breathing better able you know being able to use our diaphragm more fully um breathing out and then rather than just up and down now these things will have an impact on our lung capacity and of course lung capacity you know better lung capacity is going to make you fitter if you're an athlete or certainly give you a better ability to go harder for longer but i think lung capacity also really has benefits for us beyond fitness for health well-being day-to-day health and well-being but also longevity can you speak a little bit around lung capacity and and just how important that is sure so larger lungs for athletes is a bigger gas tank they can go longer without having to fill up so obviously that's going to affect their performance and it's also going to affect their recovery as we were talking about earlier but just having larger and healthier lungs has been discovered to have a profound effect on lifespan and i found this in the framingham study which is the 70 year-long longitudinal study focused on heart health but what they found was that the most significant and accurate marker of lifespan wasn't genetics or exactly what we were eating it was lung size and lung function and they found this with a study of more than 5200 people the more quickly our lungs deteriorated the more quickly we lost that lung capacity the sooner we would die and the better our lungs function the bigger they were the longer we would live so there's been various studies done that have found the exact same results as the framingham study i even found one study with something like 800 they looked at 800 people who had lung transplants and they found that people who had been transplanted larger lungs lived much longer lives so no matter how we get these large lungs healthy lungs they're gonna benefit us they're gonna benefit our performance they're gonna just benefit our health in general luckily we don't need to go out and get larger lungs surgically implanted in our bodies we can just breathe healthy stretch and exercise and by doing those things we can not only stave off the entropy of lung capacity what happens after the age of about 30 we lose lung capacity every decade it really drops off precipitously once we get into our 60s and 70s we can reverse that and we can keep the same lung capacity and same lung lung function at the time when we need it most and that's when we're older so across the board you can only get benefits from having larger healthier lungs and healthy breathing and stretching is the number one most effective way of doing that when i wonder how many of the benefits of exercise on longevity and well-being may be related to lung capacity because obviously if you if you go for a run you're gonna whatever your current status you're gonna have to work that diaphragm harder you have to work those lungs harder they're gonna be coming back a little bit stronger than had you not done that and yeah it just makes you think all the research on exercise and movement how much of that is related to our diaphragm and our lung capacity do you know what i mean endurance athletics is absolutely determined by lung capacity look at vo2 max right this is the measure of athletic endurance and this is what brian mckenzie and patrick mcewen have been saying for years and years and years now you cannot perform up to a competitive level if your lungs are too small if you don't know how to breathe properly and this is one reason why some people think that female athletes are at a natural disadvantage not only are their airways different because they have different facial structure but they also have smaller lungs people with xx chromosomes have smaller lungs and by having those smaller lungs they will have less energy and the good news is we can do something about that we can drastically affect our lung size and a great example of this is just look at free divers these are people who focus on their breath all the time and look at their lung capacity herbert niche a world champion free diver he's won innumerable awards and competitions he has a lung capacity of 14 liters so that's about twice the size of an average adult male and he didn't get this when he was born this is something he did by conscious will by breathing exercises so even if we're born with something and for the vast majority of us we can change it and we can improve that other organs in the body we can't do much about our liver or kidney right but we can influence the size and function of our lungs i think james that's so optimistic for people we we're seeing that thread at various times through this conversation and our first conversation that no matter you're starting no matter where you are right now there are things that you can do that will start to improve your lung performance your lung capacity you know your body's physiology so i i really want to hammer that point home for people that it is worth starting even if you've never done anything before start with something small you know maybe try taping your mouth up at night right just just start to see and feel the benefit because once you once you feel the benefit you're much more inclined to repeat it and continue doing it yeah and you know i know that you would uh i believe you would agree with me here that we're not here to tell anyone to do anything i'm not here to force feed anyone to to or to shame anyone on to eat a certain way or breathe a certain way the only thing i want to do is provide people with information and you can do with this information whatever you choose to do but just know that the information that we've been talking about in this program so far this is stuff that has been scientifically validated and again there aren't any negative side effects to it it convinces you that there is something really magical going on with our breathing something that we can harness and better understand to improve various different functions in our body and brain yeah james i completely agree everyone can make their own choice i like you just want to share information in fact i really feel the only way for people really to make long-term changes when they kind of feel ownership on something and go right this is now something that i want to take control of and hopefully there will be a few more on the back of this conversation but you know only time will tell um james what are the the many things i love about the book is this idea of breathing plus or breath plus this this concept of i mean you could probably better explain it than me but these kind of supercharged breathing practices that aren't the kind of the base level ones but ones that you can tap into if you want we've mentioned tomo and vim hof breathing already i didn't want to briefly touch if we could on holotropic breath work because i think people are hearing about this i know you've also spoken in this conversation and i think in the book at the point that you bring up sudash in korea i think you say that may be your favorite breath practice up to that point in the book thus far so i wonder if you can explain how you came up with this term of breath plus what it means and then dive a bit into holotropic breathing and sudarshan korea i just wanted to create an umbrella term that all of these other breathing practices that do require more time they require more effort right but they also can have really profound effects they can often give you more than just these standard mellower breathing practices so you know the book is set up that it in the middle of it it's like here's the stuff that everyone can benefit from it's like oh you want some more okay well if you want to keep pushing this this is going to take more time and some of it may not always be pleasant right you you have to like really work through this but i get interested in that stuff i said okay where can breathing really take us what are the absolute limits of where our breath can take us and that's where i put all of those methods and holotropic is certainly within this breathing plus category and what holotropic breath work is is it was developed in the 1970s by stanislav gross who groff he was a psychiatrist in czechoslovakia and one of the first test subjects of lsd so before lsd was illegal psychiatrists could administer it to their patients and it did a bunch of amazing things groff went to work at johns hopkins he worked at various institutions on the east coast of the u.s very respectful and storied institutions and he was having a lot of success with lsd when it was in a very controlled environment so when lsd was made illegal he said oh no what am i going to do how am i going to help all these people schizophrenia in all of these very serious mental conditions so he developed a breathing practice that he believed elicited many of the same effects as lsd so that's how holotropic breath works started out and what it is is it involves you sitting in a room with a bunch of other people lying down on a mat and listening to extremely loud music and breathing as hard and as fast as you can for three hours at a time and if three hours seems like a long amount of time you're watching a football game you're like wow i almost spent three hours in front of the tv that took a while try sitting and breathing as hard as you can for three hours and it will feel like an eternity so i did this i wanted to try to understand it from the inside i had an interview with groff who was amazing and i looked at all of the science which is actually a little flimsy in a holotropic breath work but it is certainly an experience and this is what i mean by breathing plus this is not something you can just casually show up and do it will kick your ass and for some people they've had very profound breakthroughs using holotropic breath work dr jimmy ireman who is a psychologist used this with 11 000 patients over 10 years and found it did more than any other therapy for people with addictions or schizophrenia or severe disorders um that's all true according to that study i was not the hugest fan of it um but that's just my opinion you know so other people get incredible benefit from it and i i would never take that away from someone if if it helps them then that's great but just looking at the science and my own experience it was a lot skinnier than say sudarshan kriya or the wim hof method on as far as the studies are concerned there's some new science i think coming out soon on holotropic breathing is that right so ever since the book came out some of the holocaust people are saying hey you know what about us that's not fair and i said what wasn't fair i looked at every single study that had ever been put out on holotropic breath work and i honestly told the readers exactly what i had found i didn't say this is a bad thing you shouldn't do it i said this is what the science says and this is what happens in your body so some instructors that i went to said when you breathe this way you increase oxygenation to the brain and with that oxygen your brain is able to process thoughts better that is a hundred percent bs what you're doing is denying oxygen to the brain because when you hyperventilate you cause vasoconstriction and in states of extreme hyperventilation you can inhibit up to 40 percent of your blood flow to your brain and that's why holotropic breath work sends people on these very deep hallucinogenic journeys so ever since the book has come out i've talked to many amazing holotropic breathwork therapists some you know thought that i should have looked at the case studies a little more deeply which i thought i did but they were very fair about it and i've gotten to be friends with one of them and she said hey i want to study this further because i know you're absolutely right the scot the science is so skinny on this stuff and before it's accepted very seriously within the medical community we need some experiments that are conducted at established institutions i said sign me up i'm ready to go so we're working with johns hopkins right now which in the us is one of the leading medical institutions here and we will be doing some studies we're just developing these right now on what we want to look at i really want to do blood work before and after but that may be too logistically uh difficult at this time so we're definitely looking at brain states and how this affects the brain and i'm running into a problem that i had before is there's just no money for this stuff so yeah we'd love to have 300 people in a very tightly controlled study looking at every imaginable metric there's zero money so this will likely be coming out of pocket from from me and the other people who want to study this so if there's any researchers out there who want to do some research this stuff is very worthy of study again science is the exploration of the unknown we don't know a lot about what holotropic breath work does so what an exciting field to go into right now you know james i really admire your integrity with this you as you said you you just want to report on what's there you want to look at it you want to examine it and share that information with people uh you've been very clear about when you're giving an opinion versus when actually it's backed up by science which i really really like and i think you've really touched on you know potentially i won't say controversial but an interesting point about there's no money in this um you know earlier on in the conversation you mentioned that study on rheumatoid arthritis patients where people you know i think did you say cold showers and sort of the vimhof type hyperventilation methods showing some really promising results and that doesn't no one can make any money out of that you know people hyperventilating going into cold shower you don't have to heat the water to pay for you know to pay for hot water it's just cold water and i guess you know it really does speak to i think the wider problem that that potentially has been with getting breath work into medical curriculums because if no one's going to make money out of the research who's going to do the research in the first place therefore you know i'll be honest i really think as i said i'm i know medicine can be very helpful for many things but the more experience i get the more i reflect on my career there was a huge pharmaceutical bias to our training and that may be because there was research there at the time but because that's what we get taught that is what many doctors end up using because that's what they're familiar with whereas breath work for example is not taught even you know when i went to med school in 1995 there was research on breathing but we're not taught that we're not shown how that could help respiratory conditions and other things so i think you know without getting too political i sort of feel that money component there i think that's a big one really in terms of getting this out there so this is what i've heard from just about every single researcher that i've talked to um these are researchers at leading institutions stanford harvard johns hopkins is they say if you look at how studies are funded especially studies in medicine um more than 75 percent come from corporations and this is why they believe that the results are often skewed towards the results that these corporations pharmaceutical companies want to get because they have a vested interest in it there's no controversy about this i i don't think what i'm saying people are going to be shocked to hear not at all because because we know that this is this is how things work right now we also know that there's really no money to be made in carl stout's breathing therapy for emphysemics if anything this is going to cost hospitals so much more money we also know that not only will researchers not get funded for a lot of these studies but they could also possibly lose tenure you know if their names are attached to something that sounds completely crazy but it's these things that sound completely crazy that to me can help really move the needle forward again why not explore something that hasn't been studied if your results say oh this is total bs this doesn't do anything that's really important information to have and it'll really clear up a lot of the muck that's in the air and if they lead to another answer that oh it looks like there's a lot of potential here then what a wonderful thing that there's a new way of exploring a way of treating some certain diseases or allowing people to become more healthy but it does come down to money you know as as someone as a business person told me he said 99 of the questions in the world can be answered with money so um and i think that that's true for medicine as it is for anywhere else so we shouldn't be shocked by this i want to be clear i'm not opposed to pharmaceutical drugs and again i in my family are doctors but but it's allowing yourself to look at the true benefits and look at everything on the table first and then choosing what can work best for you it's actually saying breathing has most of these practices certainly you know if we if we take breathing plus out for a moment the the simple um less you know supercharged practices there's no downside of these things at all so you know premium non-necessary first do no harm you know the fundamental tenets of medicine kind of breadth it really fits so beautifully into that model you know try it see it experiment um before we finish i do want to hear about uh sudarshan korea because you speak so passionately about it what is it what does the research say and why you're such a big fan so sudarshan korea is another variation on that same theme of stressing your body out holding your breath breathing slowly stressing it out again holding your breath breathing slowly just like wim hof method just like so many other pranayamas just like some chinese ki gong practices as well so i think i have such a fondness for this practice because it was the first breathing practice that absolutely blew my mind i had done other healthy breathing practices i said oh i definitely feel better oh i'm sleeping better but sudafshan korea definitely cracked something in me and that was very apparent when i had just learned it and the weekend workshop was was interesting i didn't get that much out of it i'll be honest but um this workshop is based on the teachings of this guy sri sri ravi shankar who developed this breathing technique in the 1980s and has developed all these different non-profits around the world to teach this this breathing it's called the art of living um organization and yet but even though this this breathing has been around thousands of years he was able to to put it in this very controlled way and so it wasn't until uh several weeks or months this is a long time ago ten years ago that i went for a repeat session of this where i absolutely i don't know if you would call it a breakdown or what but but physically i had such a profound response and nobody could explain what exactly happened i sweated so profusely my hair was sopping wet my t-shirt was wet there were sweat blotches on my jeans and i was just sitting in a corner of a room of a very cold house here in san francisco just breathing in this in this calm rhythm and sweated as though i had just run an ultra marathon so that got me intrigued in the potential of what breathing could do for us i also got intrigued where i could not find a real scientific explanation for what had happened to me and most people said it was a placebo effect which that makes absolutely no sense that your body can just break down into this extreme sweat so i've stuck with this breathing uh i love it it offers me a clarity it calms me down as well it's very simple the one problem is you do have to take a weekend workshop that costs money so you can't learn this online um but i i find the workshop is is worthwhile because you learn this this breathing technique and i can't get into all the the my new details of how it works it's pretty complex but i will say it is interesting to see there are over a hundred independent scientific studies in sudarshan kriya done at harvard done at yale then at top institutions looking at how effective it is for all the things we just talked about panic anxiety even asthma autoimmune problems diabetes so it is scientifically validated and that helps for people who are skeptical james you've been on some journey over the past year since this book came out um lots of people are getting in touch with you i know you've been doing some work with the un on trying to educate kids around the world tell us a little bit about that that sounds incredibly fascinating and has the potential for huge impact yeah so this is something i got interested in because again i'd seen what a tremendous effect healthy breathing habits can have especially on kids you know it's easy easier to change the habit of of a kid and have them develop in the right ways and then once they're developed in the right ways it'll be easier for them to maintain proper health and so many of these chronic conditions that so many of us suffer from even heart disease diabetes and their origins start when we're young i mean they really do and a lot of them i've i've noticed can be helped or at least improved in certain ways by improving the breathing just as we mentioned with adhd so i was able to work with this incredible organization called the global classroom they're there in the uk and they do free all volunteer run programs for youth around the world focused on kids in developing nations these are hour long video programs that are free to everybody that are piped into schools that teach kids about health because a lot of these messages um don't get filtered out we tend to get them in in the west more easily than than other people in developing countries so it was an extraordinary experience uh wim hof volunteered a uh a whole technique and a video program jason marazz the famous musician lindsay sterling all of these people dedicated their time to putting together a video program you know the video program isn't an end-all be-all but we look at it as a good introduction to why you should think about your breathing when you're a kid what you can do to improve it and how to keep breathing healthy in the future so it was such a blast and honor to be able to speak along with this amazing cast of characters and to get that out so this is available for free for everyone there are no pepsi logos on it there's no cheeto logos uh this is just something that uh everybody came together to to want to do sans any corporate sponsorship to to get out into the world yeah incredible what's next for you james because you know i'm still sensing that passion to learn more there's research coming up you want to go and talk to more people you know is there a breath too in the making or you know what's coming next yeah you know i'm just gonna do another book that is just gonna be the puffy rice version of everything we just talked about no i will not i will not do that people i promise you i think last time you asked this question i said oh i'm i'm planning on sleeping more uh i still haven't done that so uh this has been you know combining the the ongoing book tour with a with a global pandemic and uh i think i need to reboot so i really want to go somewhere and turn off my phone and computer for for a month if i can um that might be impossible but even for a few weeks but i have a few different projects some video mini series opportunities where we're hoping to take a lot of the general themes we've talked about during this program and the previous one and put them into a video program um to try to get this out to a whole another group of people who don't don't read books but um the most exciting thing i'm working on is another book idea which i won't bore you with right now but um i am excited after uh being able to having the opportunity to to talk about this stuff in in the public which is great but i am also excited to go back into my little shed in my backyard and close off the world and to sink very deeply into another subject to start exploring it i really feel that hunger to learn more and do research and go meet some amazing people and interview with them and i'm so lucky to have a job that allows me to do that well james look uh as i said just before we started recording we've had well at that time one conversation now two lengthy conversations i've never met you i feel as though i know you really well from our interactions i think you're an incredible human being i think what you have done for this whole field is transformative i i genuinely believe that you are changing hundreds of thousands of people's lives across the globe if not more based upon writing such a thorough and fabulous book so i just want to appreciate you for that it really is something special and i'm delighted to see it do so well um just to finish off today as i probably said on our first conversation this is called feel better live more when we feel better in ourselves we get more out of life when we breathe better we're going to get more as for our life do you have any final words of wisdom practical tips advice for people who go yeah all right you've convinced me i'm in i want to get into this breathwork game what would mr james nestor say to them all i would say is just start with this start by breathing through your nose to a count of about five or six then start exhaling to that same count continue breathing this way for maybe 10 or 20 cycles and then just check in with yourself and ask yourself how you feel and i think you'll be surprised that doing something so simple so basic can really elicit such a strong response in your body and if you're intrigued with that then you can go so much deeper into breathing practices and these practices each of them have their own wonderful benefits to offer but it really just starts with that single breath and then you can take it from there james it's always a pleasure i know we're planning to meet up in person at some point as the world opens up i'm looking forward to that and in the meantime take care and get some rest thanks a lot rangan thanks a lot for having me back hey have a think about one thing you can take from that conversation and apply into your own life and if you want some more inspiration here is a another video that i think you are really going to enjoy how we breathe absolutely affects us it even affects the density of our bones it affects us down to the atomic level

Channel: Dr Rangan Chatterjee

Views: 14,392

Rating: 4.9350348 out of 5

Keywords: the4pillarplan, thestresssolution, feelbetterin5, wellness, drchatterjee, feelbetterlivemore, ranganchatterjee, 4pillars, drchatterjee podcast, health tips, nutrition tips, health hacks, live longer, age in reverse, self help, self improvement, self development, personal development, motivation, inspiration, health interview, james nestor interview, mouth breather james nestor, you're breathing wrong, transform your body through breathe, wim hof method

Id: CFRQOnFDc5o

Length: 136min 50sec (8210 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 07 2021