Why Being a "Mouth-Breather" Is Bad For You w/James Nestor | Joe Rogan

the jurgen experience um what what made you want to write this like where'd this come from there's actually two things uh about 10 years ago 11 years ago i had this really weird experience i was in san francisco there's a lot of breath work yoga stuff going on there and i kept getting pneumonia a surface at ocean beach and i thought that that was the reason so i kept getting bronchitis pneumonia year after year it just kept happening so a doctor friend of mine suggested a breathing class might help i didn't know much about this but went down signed up and was sitting in the corner of this studio cold room legs crossed breathing in this rhythmic pattern nothing crazy just and then really slow and i sweated through my t-shirt through my socks my hair was sopping wet sweat all over my face so i went back to her i said what happened like you're a doctor you should know this and she said oh you must have had a fever or the room must have been too hot so she had no idea but i didn't know what to do with that story so i just kind of filed it away forgot about it for a number of years until i met some free divers these are people who have through the power of will enabled themselves to hold their breath for six seven eight minutes at a time and dive to depths far below what any scientists thought possible so i thought wow there's something in breathing here that i don't know about and i figured other people might not know about as well ah that's that's that's really interesting you know um i've known a bunch of free divers and uh i've known a bunch of jiu jitsu people that got really into yoga primarily because of hicks and gracie hickson gracie do you know he is yeah famous uh probably the most famous of the of the like the classic jiu jitsu people he's known as being the very best he was like one of the uh original real pioneers of jiu jitsu in america as well and there's this uh documentary on him called choke have you seen him i have not no it's really fascinating this documentary he's doing all this crazy stomach breath stuff the yogi stuff you know because he's he's really into yoga as well for flexibility and balance and all those different things and he was uh probably the first guy to introduce yoga to jiu jitsu as well but um him and his son who's also a world champion in jiu jitsu just stressed constantly that it's all about the breath and that breathing is it's everything and it's everything for jiu jitsu it's everything for martial arts it's everything for your mindset you're going to find that in the foundation of so many different sports i think a lot of that has been forgotten i know that coaches in the 50s used to have their runners take a big mouthful of water run around the track and then they'd have to spit out that same amount of water into a cup to force them to breathe through their nose to force them to move their diaphragms up and down a little more because breathing is so essential to the recovery their endurance and their performance yeah one of the things i found interesting about your book was the experiment with plugging up the nose for a pro what did you guys do it for a month is that what it was 10 days 10 days and that that 10 day i my nose was broken most of my life i had a useless nose till i was 40 and then i got an operation to have my deviated septum corrected and the turbinates shaved down and then it changed my life it really did like i didn't realize like what like the term mouth breather is a really interesting term right because it's term for a [ __ ] but i i felt like a [ __ ] um like after i got my nose fixed i was like why didn't i do this before like i was robbing myself of oxygen yeah and there's so much science supporting how injurious it is to constantly be breathing through your mouth there's there's no debate about that but what people don't realize is about 25 to 50 of the population habitually breathes through their mouths and they don't realize the neurological problems that this causes the respiratory problems this causes problems with snoring sleep apnea even metabolic disorders i mean it goes on and on and on so i had been talking to the chief of rhinology research at stanford we've done many interviews over a series of months he's a big nose guy so he said this is the most amazing organ no one's talking about it at the nih there's no school for studying the nose and its effects and he thought that that was criminal so he had warned me how bad mouth breathing was but no one knew how quickly that damage came on so we knew that after years it can change the structure of your face it's so common in kids that it has a term called adenoid face if you see these kids with very long faces because they've been mouth breathing so long that their faces have actually that the musculature and the skeleton has have changed it changes your skeleton yeah yeah it it makes it creates a longer face so and that that also makes these people much more apt to snoring and sleep apnea so but but no one knew if if a month of mouth breathing would be bad a year like how soon those those issues came on so i asked him i said well why don't you test it you're one of the best universities in the world you have the means to do this and he thought in his words it would be unethical because he knew how damaging that it could be for people and so i volunteered i said why don't you test it on me i'll get somebody else to do it uh they had no money for this so we had to pay for this study um just to experience what what that was like and the point wasn't due to do some like jackass stunt it was to lull ourselves a new position my body certainly knew i think i was mouth breathing through much of my youth and that 25 to 50 of the population knows and and to actually measure what happens now do you think there was some bacterial growth that was inside your nose as well from this do you think that some of that could be attributed to just the i the act of plugging the nose because you physically plugged it it's not like you chose to breathe out of your mouth you actually like see you you closed up the opening yeah that's that's right and it could no one knows for sure because the less you use your nose the less you're going to be able to use your nose just like any other muscle so when people start habitually breathing through their mouths their noses are going to start to close up and we know this from the doctor of speech language pathology at stanford she measured people who had laryngectomy's holes drilled in their throats so they could breathe she found between two months and two years their noses were completely blocked zero air coming in so the more you use it the more you're going to be able to use it so the less you use it the more apt you will you will be to have problems what is the process well why does the nose close up it would seem that it's a hole like why would that hole close it's not in use those turbinates all those tissues just just start closing up um and so using your nose actually makes the opening wider absolutely really yeah absolutely my nose got physically wider after my operation it's really strange like i was i looked back on the photos from when i was 40 on my actual physical and i attributed it to the fact that they put these big foam things and these plastic spacers in there because the doctor that did the operation he's for i forget the period of time afterwards i had to have these things stuffed into my nose and this plastic that was sort of sutured in place to hold it into position and i attributed that to why my nose got wider but i noticed it like within the year or two afterwards like my [ __ ] nose is wider like it's different like if i look at older pictures of myself my nose was more narrow and now it's more flared out and i i felt like it was because of that but now that you're saying this now i'm thinking maybe it's just from breathing out of it well surgical interventions are gonna open that airway there's no doubt about that but but we know the more that you breathe through your nose the more that it's gonna open up and you can see this with people who are habitual mouth breathers who are also joggers who have just been breathing through their mouths for for decades they start breathing through the nose at the beginning it's really really hard yeah i can't do this this is awful then weeks go by months go by and their noses open up and and allows them to to breathe through the nose and the benefits of that they're innumerable so many benefits of nasal breathing not only oxygen but it helps defend your body humidifies air conditions air on and on and on and this is something i just don't think a lot of people realize and and from the researchers i've been talking to they were a bit frustrated too seeing so many chronic conditions tied to mouth breathing and how so many of those could either be improved upon or sometimes outright cured by switching the pathway in which you breathe so does breathing through your nose make your actual nostril opening wider i don't know that i i and and i haven't seen any papers on that so it's my nostril holes and everything is probably just from the surgical intervention and stuffing it with plastic and stretching it out and i would assume so yeah now what wim hof would you reference in the book he doesn't give a [ __ ] about mouth about nose breathing or mouth breathing he just goes just breathe [ __ ] breathe well that's what he says oh yeah i practiced his his motive breathing all the time i'm used to having you know his his little voice in my head why doesn't he care about breathing out from the nose of the mouth he just wants you to breathe because if we're breathing 25 000 times a day if you're taking 500 of those breaths through your mouth it's not going to really make any impact on you i'm talking about habitual mouth breathing i understand i'm just talking about through breathing exercises he's he's so what he's done is he wants to make this easy and accessible for people so many people can't breathe through their noses so they go they can't get that breath in those 30 huge breaths you need to take right they take too long to do it so he says it doesn't matter don't pay attention you need to get that breath in you need to expand your lungs and for the rest of the time you know i the the benefits of nasal breathing that habitual breathing is is so important to health it seems so strange to me reading your book um that i'm just learning this in terms of like i mean i've been doing athletics my whole life how do i not know that breathing through the nose is more beneficial how do coaches not know this this is something i just got running up against over and over again and when i first started writing this book my friends who were journalists and authors they said you're writing a book about breathing why would you write a book about breeding walking yeah yeah well there's there's a good new book about walking sorry really um so so they were ripping on me quite quite a bit until they heard some of the details of it um and the stuff is like has been right in front of us the whole time and it's so obvious that no one's really paying attention to it and the scientific foundation all the research is there and that's what makes these these researchers these scientists so frustrated is they we have 50 years of rock solid science here showing the problems with mouth breathing showing the problems with snoring and sleep apnea no one's really been paying attention we're treating all these separate problems that are associated with these core issues and we're not looking at the core issue and i think that breathing has to be considered along with diet and exercise as a pillar of health because even if you eat keto vegan paleo whatever even if you exercise all the time if you're not breathing right you're never really going to be healthy we know that to be the truth so air comes through your mouth air comes through your nose what is the difference between the air coming through your nose okay so your nose if you were to take your fist you've got a really big fist so someone with a slightly smaller fist and to take that fist and imagine just pushing it inside of your head that's about the volume of your nose and all the sinus cavities so they even stretch up above your eyes so volume of your fist that's crazy it's about a billiard ball um so so a little it depends on what size fish you have right so so all and and they call it the nasal concha because it looks exactly like a seashell if you were to split a seashell in in half and look at it that's what's happening in your nose and all of this stuff evolved this way for a reason so that air that comes in through the nose is slowed down it's filtered it's humidified and it's conditioned so by the time it gets to your lungs your lungs can absorb that oxygen so much easier and the the nose is really the first line of defense another amazing thing with the nose is it produces something called nitric oxide which is this wonderful molecule that is a vasodilator that plays an essential role in oxygen delivery and also helps battle off viruses bacteria and other pathogens so this is all happening in the nose and slowing down that air and all of these other functions allow us to gain about 20 percent more oxygen breathing through the nose than breathing through the mouth so you can breathe less and get more by breathing through the nose wow um so breathing through the mouth even though though you're filling your lungs up even though you're you're taking a big deep breath you're filling your lungs up you're not getting as much oxygen that's right because you can over breathe when people at a gym or when people are jogging you see them really going to get the maximum amount of oxygen in that's not what hap what is happening to your body so you are offloading the co2 by offloading too much co2 you're causing constriction in your circulation so right now if we were to breathe 30 huge breaths you'll feel some tingling in your head you'll feel some maybe your fingertips will get cool your toes will get too cool that's not from an increase of oxygen it's the opposite that's happening that's from a decrease of circulation so your body wants to be in balance you want to have the right amount of co2 and oxygen for optimum delivery and that's what the nose helps you to do that was one of the craziest things about the book we were talking about yogis that were able to vary the temperature between each hand no on the same hand oh in the same hand the same hand one area was gray the other was red oh in the same in the same not even this god on the same hand and you know when i came across this people are saying this is impossible there's you know who did this study some guy in taos in his garage no it was at the manager clinic which was the world's at least in the u.s the largest psychiatric research facility at the time and a navy physicist did these tests it was reported in the new york times have they been replicated they haven't found someone who had the powers of swami rama they found i think wim's about as close as we've gotten to that guy you

Channel: JRE Clips

Views: 2,973,774

Keywords: Joe Rogan, JRE, Joe Rogan Experience, JRE Clips, PowerfulJRE, Joe Rogan Fan Page, Joe Rogan Podcast, podcast, MMA, Joe Rogan MMA Show, UFC, comedy, comedian, stand up, funny, clip, favorite, best of

Id: zWQxNoqKE6E

Length: 14min 59sec (899 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 10 2020