This DAILY BREATHING TECHNIQUE Will Transform Your Body & Mind TODAY! | James Nestor

by changing the way in which you breathe you can actually change how your mind is processing thoughts and feelings and emotions how we breathe absolutely affects us it even affects the density of our bones it affects us down to the atomic level subatomic level with electrons so to to think that how we breathe does not matter is not based in any real science so james welcome to the podcast thanks a lot for having me hey no worries i see you've got to get a little bit early today um just a bit of concepts of people listening to this or watching this i'm currently in the uk uh in my new podcast studio actually in my garden so you're the very first guest i'm interviewing from the studio so i'm delighted it's you um but we're going through a bit of a heat wave here in the uk it's about 32 degrees outside at the moment which for the uk is is hot i'm dripping and i'm really sweaty so you're in san francisco is that right i am yes where it's extremely cold so our summers here are freezing yeah we wouldn't be expecting that would we from the uk to san francisco we we've got this perception of california that it's always sunny and always hot but you're sort of dispelling that myth right here complete fiction complete fiction okay well okay bit of concept says so look i was sent your brand new book breath an early copy i think march or april time and i get sent a lot of books but this book stopped me in my tracks like it's one of those where i opened it and i couldn't stop reading it because it's exactly where my personal interest and my professional interests as a medical doctor coincide breath work is something i've been thinking a lot about talking a lot about i've spoken to patrick mcewen brian mckenzie on this podcast in the past people really enjoying that content and when i saw the depth to what you had gone to in this book i i remember emailing your publisher saying i've got to talk to james where's he coming to the uk i think this is i think this was just before the pandemic kicked off and i was like let me know when he's here cause i want to meet him in person and have the conversation so first of all thank you for writing such an amazing book um but for me what's really interesting when i've done a bit of research on you you're a science journalist right and it's really interesting for me why did a science journalist who by your own account in the past was a skeptic about breathing and breath work how did you end up writing such an amazing and detailed book on breath well first of all thank you very much for those compliments i really appreciate that and uh i had never intended to write a book about breathing that was just something that i had never planned but all the pieces of this puzzle kept coming together over several years until finally i had enough tangents that i wanted to put them together into one coherent story so when i first started writing this book when i got the the contract to do it my friends were like why on earth would you ever want to write a book about breathing it's just something we automatically do we unconsciously do how could that be of any interest but once i started telling them about the real research happening here how it influences every function of our body and once we take control of it we can really help heal ourselves we can even heat ourselves up we can do all of these amazing things then they got a little more interested and and so did i in the subject so i you know the beginning point for me was really a breathing experience i had several several years ago that nobody could really describe but it wasn't until i talked to free divers and researchers were studying free divers that i truly understood the full potential of breathing yeah i mean that word potential i think is really really fascinating because when i when i think about breath work and the breath and breathing practices the sort of phrase that keeps coming up in my mind is untapped potential like so many of us as humans are walking around taking our breath for granted without any knowledge that actually a bit of care and attention a bit of deliberate practice can potentially yield some quite dramatic benefits right well we breathe the average person breathes about 25 000 times a day and most of us aren't thinking about any of those breaths we take in 30 pounds of air into our lungs and out of our lungs every single day so if you think that that air and how we take that air in and how we expel it doesn't affect us it's it's crazy so much more than than food and and in my opinion after talking to researchers for so many years you can eat all the right foods you can eat paleo or keto or vegan or whatever you can exercise as much as you want but if you're not breathing correctly you're never ever going to be healthy and i've seen this repeatedly with people who look to be the most fit people on the planet and they have chronic respiratory problems and they suffer from that in numerous ways so once we take control of this unconscious ability to breathe we can then harness all of the power within that and use it to do some incredible things some things that scientists thought were absolutely impossible have been proven to be absolutely possible by focusing on your breathing yeah well we're going to delve into that during this conversation today because there are so many fascinating stories that you've written about research you know case studies um really quite incredible and there's there's a you know you've done so many interviews since this book came out and it is great for me as a medical doctor to see that there appears to be a huge amount of interest now you know with with books like yours really raising awareness of how important the way we breathe is but i was really struck by your subtitle in the book and so the book's called breath but then the subtitle is the new science of a lost art now not only does that sound amazing but there's there's a real magic there uh the new science of a lost art science and art fascinates me because i say the practice of medicine is art and science you know it's not just science it's not just looking at publications it's how do you put that all together with the person in front of me the patient in front of you and how do you sort of blend it together to come up with the right solution for the white patients so tell me about that subtitle in the context of the breath why is it a lost art well what i kept finding as i researched breathing the art of breathing starting from the last century to the century before that and going back thousands of years is people have been talking about this and writing about this and studying this for for millennia so uh the earliest dated conscious breathing practices date back you know about three thousand four thousand years and if you look around the world all of these different cultures started studying the same things they started coming to the same conclusions about breathing that if we do it improperly our br our health is going to suffer if we do it properly we can really help use that to help heal ourselves and to go up that next rung of human potential so the thing that was frustrating is we would discover these things and then for some reason in some way they would be ignored and lost then they would be rediscovered renamed something else rediscovered by someone else at a different time and then be proven at that time and forgotten about and this just kept happening over and over and over i guess the more accurate title would be lost and found because that's what kept happening and it really feels like right now we're at this moment where we have the instruments we have the interest to really study breathing and to prove how it's working how it alters our minds and our bodies and how it can benefit us and that would be the new science of that subtitle it's a new science new measurements looking at a very old practice yeah it's interesting when you compare this to other old practices such as let's say traditional chinese medicine which for years has been telling us that different organs in the body function function in different ways at different times of the day something that western medicine until recently has almost sort of looked down upon that was you know the liver is the liver the the kidney is the kidney but there's a lot of science down circadian biology showing that these organs at different times in the day there's different amounts of genetic expression and they have different functions different enzymatic functioning and all kinds of things yet we need almost well we've needed modern science now to go oh actually yeah you were right um and i i sort of understand that you are a science journalist so i guess you may or is it fair to say you always approach topics with a bit of skepticism because i i kind of feel that it's not a little bit of arrogance in us as modern humans that we we sort of feel that you know i'll prove it you know prove it like we you're saying this has been written about five thousand years ago so it's so striking that that we've forgotten it we we we need reminding of it but then also why is it at this moment in time in 2020 why does that appear to be such an interest now in breathing and breath work because yes your book is incredible but vim hoff has been gaining notoriety in popularity for for a good few years now um hopefully patrick mcewen and with the oxygen advantage that's getting more and more awareness i mean what is going on why why are people interested now i think the the main thing for me was i had no slant going into this story i there's no benefit for me to say nasal breathing is better than mouth breathing or one version of breathing is better than than the other so so my job as a journalist is to go in talk to the experts in the field accumulate as much information and objectively come out and and give my uh assessment of of this world of breathing so there was a lot of what i found which was not supported at all but the areas that i focused on on the book have such a firm foundation of science and i think a lot of it has to do with the way that science is set up especially medical science right now you know at the beginning about half of the professors and doctors and other experts i talked to said breathing doesn't matter so how we do it does not matter nose mouth 20 times a day 10 times a day your body is gonna compensate which is a hundred percent true our bodies will compensate but that doesn't mean they're fully working at their best potential that doesn't mean we're healthy just getting by is different than being healthy then you have all these other researchers who have studied breathing for for 50 years some of these researchers signed up for 50 years they said how we breathe absolutely affects us it even affects the density of our bones it affects us down to the atomic level subatomic level with electrons so to to think that how we breathe does not matter is not based in any real science and and again my job was to go in and talk to these people and look at the studies and piece together a story from that yeah thanks for sharing that um when i think about breathing when i talk to people whether it's my family my friends patients i think people are starting to get awareness now that actually it's important but there's a bit of confusion there's so many different breathing methods out there and i think some people struggle to know well what sort of breathing method should i do i really want to sort of delve into that today in this conversation but i guess before we do that is it is it worth clarifying you know what is the problem at the moment what are there is there a base level breathing practice that everyone should do for example because i think it'll be easy and i want to go into you know all different kinds of breathing practices but i also want to make sure we don't lose people so that they can see the big picture but they also know a simple thing that they can take away and start applying yeah and that's a great question and it's a question i had early on because you've got dozens of books on breathing there's some books on pranayama that have 300 different practices in it where do i begin here what i've found is so many of them all come to the same conclusion they're all doing the same thing so they're means to the same ends so if you look at ancient chinese practices of breathing they are almost identical to ancient hindu practices of breathing which are almost identical to the yoga practices that are being used now or the other practices that are being used by psychiatrists for anxiety and depression they're all doing the same thing we know this from measurements so what i try to do in the book was not to focus on these individual breathing techniques but to focus on the larger story around it how do they affect us what are they where did they come from because it doesn't matter you could call it by 12 different names slow breathing is slow breathing and there's a very simple way of doing it so the the center of the book is a foundation of breathing that everybody can benefit from and again it doesn't matter who invented this or who claims to and have invented this stuff or at what time it's simple practices of breathing through the nose exhaling more breathing less breathing slowly so that's what i tried to focus on the the general view of this and if you want more of the specifics there's already a zillion books on on the how to with with hundreds of different practices you're just past 8 a.m at the moment in san francisco so i don't know what your normal wake-up time is but have you done any breath work this morning as a way of preparing for the day ahead i'm a night owl so my normal wake-up time is much later than this hence hence the t over here oh wow but uh you know people think that since i studied breathing for so many years i'd be the best breather in the world and i'm i'm not i've got a lot of work to do um but at least the the first step about breathing is to be conscious of it and and to understand that this isn't something that should just be running in the background in the back of our minds but something that we can take control of so i'm acutely aware of when i'm breathing improperly and i'm acutely aware of then how to fix it so more intense breath work practices i will do about three or four times a week usually at night but throughout the day throughout the day i'm adopting very simple healthy breathing habits and that that to me is is one of the most important things about this this isn't asking people to go out and run six miles a day or to completely change their lifestyle you can adopt healthy breathing habits no matter what you're doing if you're sitting in front of a computer if you're watching netflix if you're walking around and just by adopting those you can have a transformative effect on your health that sounds like a huge claim but i've seen it and the studies have shown it yeah brilliant i think that's a great message for people so let's dive into something that you have written about you've touched on it in the conversation so far nasal breathing okay um and you know for people who've who've been listening to my podcast for a while they will have heard me talk about this with brian mckenzie and with patrick mcewen right um but i think we've got a lot of new listeners and i think it's always reiterating how important it is to breathe through your nose so what's going on when someone breathes through the nose compared to their mouth what is going on and why does it make such a difference so when we breathe through our nose we are humidifying air we're pressurizing air we are filtering that air out we're conditioning it so that by the time that air gets to our lungs it can more easily be absorbed and we can extract oxygen from it so we know this this is this has been proven time and time again and yet about 25 to 50 percent of the population habitually mouth breathes and when you mouth breathe you get none of those benefits you can almost think of the lungs as an external organ when you're mouth breathing right they're exposed to everything in your environment and if you live in a city like i do i don't want to expose my lungs to all those allergens and pollutants so the quickest way of filtering air and conditioning it is this wondrous organ right in the front of our faces called the nose and it is completely under appreciated and underused in society yeah absolutely so how did you go from i think i've read you say before or i think maybe i heard it in an interview that you used to be a mouth breather um how did you become a nose breather and is it possible for anyone to actually listen to this and go okay i hate you james there's all these benefits i want those benefits how do i start yeah i remember breathing through my mouth as a kid i see pictures of myself when i was young and i'm breathing through my mouth not all the time but it definitely happened and even until adulthood i thought it was normal just to go to sleep with a pint of water by my bed every single night to wake up every few hours with a dry mouth take a swig of water go back to sleep i did that for decades until i met dr jayakur nayak down at stanford and he said this isn't normal at all we should be breathing through our nose all the time especially during sleeping hours that's a third of your life and if you're breathing through the mouth you're just exposing yourself to everything in your environment and also you're loosening the tissues at the back of your throat and making yourself more apt to snore and have sleep apnea which is another thing that that blew my mind so you know once you realize how dangerous mouth breathing is you can then take a conscious effort to change it how you're doing how you're breathing throughout the day but that won't help you when you're unconscious at night right so so once i learned this i was shutting my mouth all the time practicing nasal breathing at the beginning it was very difficult i felt very congested here but the nose is a use it or lose it organ i also learned that from from stanford that the more you use it the more it's going to open up those tissues are going to acclimate and open up so i focused on that and at night this sounds a little crazy but i used a little piece of tape which i still do just on my lips to train my mouth shut at night and uh this sounds a little you know like like new age science but it's but it's not because i heard from a breathing therapist that stanford and kearney who had used it herself and uses it for her patients and talked to other researchers who did the same thing um and that has helped me tremendously and it's helped so many other people as well it's free yeah hey james look i'm i'm totally with you on that it is incredible the difference in fact i actually spoke to a buddy this morning on the phone who i've not spoken to for a few months and i said hey he was saying how's the podcast going i said yeah great i'm actually speaking to someone james nestor this afternoon you've got to get his book it's just incredible it's all about breathing and he said to me that the thing he's changed a few months ago um was he started to take his mouth up at night and he said he cannot believe the difference he said i don't wake up thirsty i'm not groggy in the morning i've got more energy better cognition you know and i think for people who are skeptical and i know they are out there that even within my own family they're skeptics to how important breathing is i think it really is quite profound what you can feel like you may not even know how good you can feel until you start breathing in a more optimal way um but if you when you talk about tape over your mouth some people i think will probably feel claustrophobic in the thought of actually taping their mouth shuts probably is going to scare them but but you would say it's not like that is it no and and just to to second what you were saying it's one thing to have a subjective experience and say hey i feel better after taping and that means something right but it's another thing to measure this stuff if we can measure it we can study it we can study we can figure out if it's actually working and that's exactly what we did we're working with with niacc at stanford so the measurements from these instruments aren't going to lie yes i felt better but to me as a science journalist it's much more convincing to have data because what works with one person may not work with somebody else and that's they're finding right now that stanford and kearney is booting up a study of 200 people looking at sleep apnea and snoring and sleep tape and i so happen to have a little roll here um and i want to explain to people that don't i would highly suggest not going on youtube and looking how to sleep tape because there's a lot of really sketchy stuff there all you need is a teeny piece of tape i use a piece that big it's about half the size of a postage stamp and i put it right across my lips i can still talk to you i can still breathe from my mouth if if i want but it just reminds me when i'm unconscious to keep my jaw shut and i can take it off with my tongue so this is not a hostage situation duct tape kind of thing this is a teeny piece of tape just to train the mouse shut and just anecdotally i've received several dozen emails from people who have had chronic snoring for the past few decades who have had even mild or moderate sleep apnea and they've recorded their sleep and they no longer suffer from those things so that's not psychosomatic it's not a placebo effect that's what happens when you close your mouth and you allow that air to be pressurized push the soft tissues further back in your airway and open them up to breathe more efficiently you get 20 percent more oxygen through a nasal breath than you do through a mouth breath and if you think that's not going to affect you over the long term you're you're nuts it will have a tremendous effect on your health yeah absolutely in your research you know you've mentioned sleep apnea [Music] and you know these these problems we have sleep problems are endemic now you know there's it's you know sleep deprivation is an epidemic there's many reasons for that of course um but it but it's really fascinating for me that you know i think back i always try and look at the way we're suffering now or the maladies of of the 21st century and try and put them in it in an evolutionary perspective and a context okay what's really going on here and i don't know within your research did you ever come across that sleep apnea and sleep problems are quite a modern problem i mean do we know if this existed three four hundred years ago was any part of your research on this at all well we can't go back and test people but what we can do is look at skeletons and so i talked to the experts in the field biological anthropologists who look at the shape of skeletons and our ancestors anything older than around 400 years maybe 500 years they would have these very powerful jaws and they would have these faces that grew outward and these huge nasal apertures in the back so from those skeletons we can we can decipher that these people had larger airways they had more room to breathe we know that obesity absolutely affects snoring and sleep apnea as well and people are not we're not as obese as they are now and that that seems very clear and understood but this idea that our ancestors had these huge powerful faces and we do not is less acknowledged and yet it's very clear in the skeletal record and an example of this is looking at the teeth of an ancient skeleton if you were to look at the teeth of one of your ancestors 400 years old 4 000 years old 40 fat doesn't matter on back they would have perfectly straight teeth there's like a 99.9 chance perfectly straight teeth today 90 of us have some sort of crookedness in our teeth because our mouths have grown so small with this with a very small mouth you also have a smaller airway and that's one of the main reasons so many of us suffer from snoring sleep apnea respiratory problems it's even implicated in asthma allergies and more yeah wow and why do we think that's happened why have we got such a small amount smaller jaw there's some sort of theories out there yeah there's there's a few theories but there's also some a few absolute facts that have that have been uh very clearly identified in the past 20 years and that is when our food shifted from this wild tough food where we were required to chew a lot more food became soft we chewed less our mouths grew too small environmental inputs had some effect on that when you're walking around breathing through your mouth especially when you're a kid your face will grow differently it's so common that this is called adenoid face from when the adenoids or tonsils inflame and you have to walk around like this but most of it is caused by food by the softness of our diets and there's been some incredible research done done in this and i just think it's so under acknowledged the role that that chewing masticatory stress plays in the structure of our faces but it's also so simple the less you use something the less it's going to develop especially this is important in infancy they've done studies where they've looked at infants who have been bottle-fed versus those who have been breastfed and when an infant is breastfed it requires a tremendous amount of stress and exercise and helps push the face outward which will then create a larger airway yeah you know it's incredible you're talking about food that we chew more what you're fundamentally talking about is more natural foods less highly processed industrialized food so we we often think about food in the context of our health our well-being particularly a lot of people talk about it in the context of their weight but you're sort of saying yeah sure but you know yes your weight but health and well-being is so broad and now we're introducing mouth size and teeth strength and teeth structure and jaw structure into the potential benefits of eating real food yeah and here again is an example of all these disparate people in these disparate areas of science all coming to the same general conclusion in just slightly different ways so we're usually looking at foods in terms of calorie at least in the us we're looking at it in terms of calories we're not looking at it in terms of toughness or softness and i think it's it's quite interesting that even today you think about what's considered healthy food today oatmeal avocados yogurt you know goo bars all this stuff is soft it requires basically no chewing at all and the less you're chewing especially when you're younger the less you'll be working out these muscles the less you'll be developing your face yeah you said especially when you're younger but that's really interesting because one thing yes as a doctor but also as a parent that i've always found quite curious is this idea that oh the adults will eat proper food but the kids menu i don't know if it's the same in the states the kids menu it's generally for the junk it's like the proper the adults will be order the proper food but the kids will have some sort of i don't know you know hyper processed industrialized foods and you know i am not blaming anyone or criticizing anyone for doing that i understand that's the almost the conditioning as well one thing we have very much tried hard from a young age with our children is they eat the same as what we do we eat as much as we can uh minimally processed you know food as close to nature as possible and you know i appreciate we're lucky to be able to have access to that but we do that and that's what we give our kids we don't make separate food for them and it's just interesting you know you say all roads are sort of leading to rome in the same place actually yeah eat the right diet it's almost like it's basically trying to say is live eat and breathe in the way that we have evolved to and we will be more thriving healthier uh happier human beings i guess yeah nature already did all of this for us it's just in the last hundred years we thought that we were smarter than nature and we thought we could take some some side tracks into this and condense food down to one pill or some mush that you could squirt into your mouth and it would have the same effect yeah we're not getting scurvy from that or barry berry from that we're not getting these diseases that we used to suffer from but we're also denying ourselves so many of the benefits and exactly what what you had said and there's this huge i would even call it a revolution right now in baby led weaning uh which is not to give babies infants this soft mush in jars which we've only been doing for the past hundred years anyway and look at what's happened look look what's happened to our weight look at what's happened to our faces look what happened to our teeth i mean on and on and on is that is a modern invention so to allow kids especially early on to be able to really work out that masticatory stress to to chew properly is going to have benefits down the road and that's been very well proven at this time yeah and it really you know the phrase use it or lose it which is which is common parlance in the english language both in the us and in the uk you know we understand that don't we with muscles we get that you know if i if i do a bicep curl every morning my bicep is going to get stronger if i stop doing it over time it's going to get smaller i think we we understand that with the you know our physical muscles but as you say i don't think we've thought about it in terms of our jaw our mastication muscles it's like if you don't chew regularly if you're not sort of um having that stress put on your jaw like the stress on the bicep what your jaw is then going to adapt it's going to adapt to what it feels that you need um i think you i think i've heard you mentioned before that there's something about chewing on one side as opposed to two sides and i found that really interesting so i'd love let's just explore that but i also just want to make sure we've covered that many people listen to this show some uh i'm sure are avid meat eaters some are vegans and when we talk about natural food i think it's just important to say you you can probably you know whilst obviously meat is quite tough and there's bones to chew on you know there's a lot of vegetables like a carrots for example or a lot of tough veg that you have to chew you can probably also get that sort of stress on the jaw right so i just want to make sure we we include everyone in this conversation that they all feel as though this applies to them um yes i wonder if you could just expand on that at all means to the same end that that's again you've got these different people in these different camps but of course if you're chewing on carrots if you're chewing on celery i mean just think of natural foods even wheat uh you know we got really good at removing the bran and the germ from wheat and creating this this processed white flour the same thing with rice white rice bran and germ remove we just have this this little seed left so chewing is is essential especially with or early on to developing proper airway health proper mouth uh we we know that and it's how you chew what you're chewing is i don't want to get into that like it's very very political because the carnivores are going to say one thing vegans are going to say the other but but do not underestimate the power and benefits of chewing and this is a whole new science that is really being uh deeply explored now which i find is fascinating for people listening thinking okay i've got kids um for whatever reason i wasn't able to breastfeed and maybe i have been given them a lot of soft food because that's what i thought i should be doing can we change things do we know you know if we change a diet if we start to give the chore a new stressor uh particularly that one-sided stressor which i'd love to love you to expand upon you know how late can we still make those changes because it's it's not quite just in those infant years that's it it goes on quite quite a lot longer than that well i was curious about that and i will get to the one side or other side i promise um got it i was i was so you know i was young a zillion years ago so i you know i cannot take advantage of infant breastfeeding or baby-led weaning or chewing hard foods when i'm eight or nine years old so i wanted to find out what an adult could do if an adult could improve his airways and from what i'd understood um what i've heard from many people is you really couldn't whatever you've got on the inside is what what you're stuck with but i met a few researchers that have been conducting studies for decades and they told me that most of us understand that we only start losing bone mass past around 30 years old it starts going down and down and down but there is one bone in our bodies that we can remodel at virtually any age and that's the bone right here in our faces in our maxilla so they told this seems impossible they showed me pictures of people before and after these treatments uh these chewing treatments other treatments to expand their palate in which they had gained more bone in their faces and as a journalist i said i looked at all the studies they were legit they were um they were confirmed by a mayo clinic uh uh advisor and they had also been written about by a doctor uh jeremy mao in colombia but i wanted to see this for my own my own uh interest and and curiosity so i said okay you've got a year i'm gonna do whatever you want me to do we're gonna take a cat scan before and after we're going to look at my airways to see what happened in that time so during that time i wore this device at night i have a very small mouth especially my upper palate did not develop properly because i wasn't chewing enough when i was young the palette starts like this and should come down and be more flat mine is v-shaped as are the the vast majority of the population has a palette like this so i wore this device to help expand the upper palate of my mouth and by doing so expand my airways and also to help model new bone in my face that would be advantageous to breathing so this sounds like crazy stuff but we took cat scans and that's exactly what happened i gained about five pennies worth of bone in my face my airway opened up about 15 to 20 percent which is an incredible amount all this pus and granulation that had been stuck in my sinuses was gone um subjectively i can say i've never been breathing more easily in my life so you don't need a pallet expander to do this i wore one because i just wanted to see if this was possible and yes it is by chewing and specifically by chewing on one side or the other you can help tone your airway the airway is a muscle this is a muscle tube and if you're just eating soft mush and if you're eating it improperly and like that you are not working out this muscle as well as you should be and it will become lazy and flaccid so you want your muscle to be toned and open in the airway to be clear and that's what chewing helps to do so specifically the right side left side and this is what dr ted bell and scott cementi told me which blew my mind if if you think about chewing we won't talk about if you're chewing meat or carrots just just vegans imagine chewing celery you know carnivores you've got a big big rib or whatever you're not chewing on both sides of your mouth you're not you chew on one side and then you switch the food over and you chew on the other side so our bodies identify that side side-to-side chewing with a parasympathetic a relaxation response which will make it easier to digest that food when you're clenching your jaw think about before a fight or you're stressed you clench both sides of your jaw which spikes a sympathetic response a fight or flight response which makes it harder to digest so when you're chewing when you're masticating you want to have this relaxation response because during that response you're also able to help grow bone more easily i'm blown away james i mean hearing that the fact that if we chew on one side of the mouth it stimulates you know parasympathetic tone so the relaxation part of the nervous system as opposed to both sided which is jaw tension which then activates the sympathetic the stress part of the nervous system absolutely incredible then again we go back to evolution we as you say nature figured out you know if we're eating something of value it's on one side um it's it really is incredible this this idea of you know you say all roads leading to rome i love that because you can you can think of breath in the same way so you know james i i've been practicing now for almost 20 years as a medical doctor and you know i'm very proud to be a medical doctor but i do have i have concerns over uh the way we treat certain things we're very reductionists we we put things in their little boxes there's often not crosstalk between um you know that's a lung problem or that's a stomach problem that's a heart problem without this recognition that everything is connected together and i've been using breathing practices with patients i don't know how at least five years probably longer now maybe even 10 years and seen incredible benefits across a whole variety of different conditions so breath for me in many ways is almost a great unifier you can apply it to anxiety to panic attacks to just generally feeling stressed to improving your sleep and the beautiful thing about it is it's free it's available to everyone you know in this in this era where a lot of people are making the claim that wellness and looking after yourself it's the preserve of the middle classes i just don't agree with that i think i think yes some things have been marcus said are but we all breathe every day what you're asking people to look at is well how do you breathe can you improve the quality of your breath and yeah just to be clear in no ways in do i view breathing and the science of breathing is contradictory or budding against so many doctrines of western science my father-in-law is a pulmonologist my brother-in-law's an er doctor so we've been talking through this entire process and they are so good at what they do so as a pulmonologist you're dealing with pathologies of the lungs i get an accident my lungs get ripped up i have cancer i want to see a pulmonologist i want the latest most advanced technology to help fix me what a wonderful thing i likely wouldn't be alive without western medicine so this is not them versus us or anything like that it's it's coming together and looking at the limitations from each area so what they have told me repeatedly is they're so frustrated because when you're just looking at the lungs you're not even looking at the airway you're not even looking at what's happening in in the nose but this is all one connected system so what's happening in the nose and in the airway is absolutely going to be affecting what happens in the lungs but at least in the u.s where you've got private medical care everyone is siloed off and they don't really even talk to one another but you know our bodies aren't just a liver they aren't just kidneys they aren't just lungs or brains this is one complete body and what happens up here affects what happens down here and so breathing to me is this thing even though we may not be able to take conscious control of our heart rate of our circulation of our blood pressure of our liver function of our digestion when we breathe we can influence all of these functions and willingly help ourselves function in a completely different way that's beneficial to our health and again what i think is so interesting about this it's not just a subjective experience you can measure the effects of someone just shifting their breathing within a few minutes i have borderline higher blood pressure it's not too bad but i can breathe in a certain way and two minutes later take my blood pressure and it will go down 10 to 15 points you imagine that's after a couple minutes what's going to happen happen after a couple days a couple weeks couple months of adopting healthy breathing habits what we're seeing these people are able to overcome so many chronic problems and really put themselves up that next rung of human potential what are some of those cases you've come across you know what sort of chronic problems have you seen people overcome and leave behind once they start focusing on their breath the most dramatic have been asthmatics asthmatics and emphysemics so asthmatics as a population will be much more apt to breathe through their mouths and they will have much lower end tidal co2 and what that means is they are breathing too often and too much and they were blowing off too much co2 and a lot of us understand carbon dioxide co2 as being this really bad thing it's the thing that's causing global warming and acidity of the ocean all of that is a hundred percent true but in the body it really wants a balance of co2 and oxygen oxygen can't do its thing without a balance of co2 so if you don't have enough co2 in your body you are causing vasoconstriction and you can exacerbate asthma attacks we see this with asthmatics they're so scared they're they're gonna lose the ability to breathe because that reminds them of an asthma attack that they start breathing more and more guess what happens they blow off more co2 they get more constricted they start breathing more and more and they are caused to have an asthma attack and by simply changing the way in which they breathe to be clear this isn't going to work for everybody but the studies have shown alicia muret at southern methodist university did this incredible story with 120 asthmatics the only thing she changed was how they breathe they carried around this little device that calculated their carbon dioxide whenever their carbon dioxide was getting low that showed that they were breathing too much she would have them slow down and breathe more more slowly they had such a profound change from just doing this not only uh significantly fewer asthma attacks but increase respiratory function they were calmer they felt better and again this isn't some psychosomatic thing this is allowing the body to function the way it's naturally designed to function in so much of asthma i think has been i won't say misdiagnosed but i don't think asthmatics have been properly served with the right information on how they can potentially change their their asthma and really improve their health yeah and i want to reiterate what you said uh just before we got on to asthma that this is not about its breathwork or western medicine no it's about saying western medicine is brilliant at so much but there's also some things that we might be able to add into our practices it's it's like breath work and breathing practices could help expand our toolbox and so for an asthmatic walking in yeah sure they may need their brand inhaling on their blue inhaler uh absolutely particularly in the acute phase um because if you can't breathe you know that is that's a very powerful signal to the body you know it's scary it's it's problematic but it could be also that with this science well maybe uh breathing protocols can also be prescribed in the same way and and i really feel strongly that if you know people look up to the medical profession so if if you you know you listen to this podcast or you read your book or you listen to another podcast and then you go to your doctor with asthma and your ass says no it's about this brown inhaler and this blue inhaler you are automatically going to prioritize that and it's not either or it's saying hey look sure take that but what if you spent five or ten minutes a day working on breathing less breathing slower through your nose what may happen maybe over time you're gonna be able to reduce how many inhalers you need maybe you're gonna have less attacks you know that's that's where i think it's it's not about being combative one side against another it's trying to bring people together go look that's another tool here that you know what has no side effects which which which i think is a really important point to sort of hammer so oral steroids and bronchodilators are absolute lifesavers for asthmatics sure and no one would say just take a breathing ditch all that stuff absolutely not but those are dealing with the symptoms of asthma and we know that after being especially on oral steroids for decades which a lot of asthmatics are there is an increased chance of blindness of bone density issues of autoimmune problems of worsening asthma symptoms and and we know this this is very clearly defined so what i would really like to see happen is when asthmatics come in yes they get their medication for their acute asthma attacks absolutely necessary but they also get information so what they do with that information is up to them but i really believe that they would be better served to know that there are protocols that have profoundly changed other asthmatics and i've talked to people one woman was 70 years old she had had asthma since she was 10. couldn't walk a couple blocks without suffering from an attack and she had been on all these drugs for decades and decades she changed the way in which she was breathing and she no longer has symptoms of asthma she's out hiking she's out traveling so this is this is real stuff i've talked to dozens of other people patrick mcewen's a great example story he told his story on the show it's same story and it's it's like why not try and see if it works and if it doesn't okay but why not try it so so i've heard this story dozens of times and and i've seen the the effects these these people on on heroic doses of steroids and bronchodilate 20 times a day and it helps them keep the symptoms at bay but it does not help with the core issue of asthma and so much of that is tied to inflammation and what's the quickest way of reducing inflammation in the body is to put it in that parasympathetic state that is going to reduce inflammation it's going to relax you you're going to breathe easier so not only asthma though there was this researcher named carl who was a vocal teacher coral conductor in the 50s and found this new way of breathing this deeper way of breathing that really helped singers and he was then brought in to the va hospitals on the us on the east coast and just by teaching emphysemics who were laid out and basically left to die they didn't know what to do with these people just by teaching them breathing they were able to walk out of the hospital and there's x-rays of this there's an interview with pulmonologists who who were there to witness this so it's just another you know reason that that or or example of how powerful simple breathing techniques can be for so many chronic conditions yeah thanks for sharing that and i just want to reiterate to people um that look if you have got asthma if you are already on a prescribed regime of inhalers neither james nor nor i i'm asking you to reduce that at all without consultation with anyone uh what we're trying to say and i don't want to speak to you james but i i if you don't agree with this summary then please uh feel free to jump in but saying look listen to the conversation uh check out some videos we will sort of maybe i'll link to them at the end or in the show notes of how you might want to start practicing some of this stuff and see how you go and maybe you can go back and see the aspen nurse or the doctor and tell them how you're feeling definitely we're definitely not saying to stop anything or do it up your own accords uh so you sort of fair fair summary of what you said james abs absolutely i need to second that um and go out and look look at the science yourself i would suggest be skeptical go out look at look at the science look at the experts in the field look at what they've put together and you can make your mind up from there i also want a second one other thing you mentioned is this stuff is not requiring you to change your diet or to go jogging for 10 miles a day it is free okay it's accessible to anybody and these techniques are freely available on online you can buy a book probably cost you 10 bucks patrick mcewen's books are fantastic they're all based in science there's references at the back so at least i i believe that this information should be offered to people what they do with it is up to them but it should be offered and we know through decades of studies that it can have a really profound effect so one thing i've changed um i'm always experimenting with different practices and different things but the more i've gone into breadth of it i've written about it some of my books before i've i've been experimenting with different formats i've been chatting to people on the show about different breathing techniques and and i i was very lucky patrick came to my house the day he did a session with my children then we recorded the show and you know he's a is a lovely man um but b i was really convinced afterwards that i had to or i would benefit from working on breathing less now i think this is quite counter-intuitive for some people so i'm going to ask you about this in just a second but just to give a bit of context i start pretty much every day now with this kind of breathe light to breathe right exercise where i really try and slow down my breathing um through my nose which is i pretty i hope i breathe through my nose pretty much all the time these days i've been working on it for a long period of time now well over a year um but i work for about five minutes i'll do this very slow uh breath practice through my nose that patrick taught me uh and i personally feel that if i want to meditate afterwards i'm way more focused than in the zone but i mean i'll i can share more of what i do if people are interested but you know a lot of people will think well hold on a minute you're oxygen's good right i want more in my body why are you saying that people are over breathing why are you saying i need to breathe less i wonder if you could just sort of unpick that for people sure so it's basic physiology so the more you breathe and the more often you breathe you're going to be taking breaths in but you're going to be exhaling them more quickly and if you look at the airway you've got your mouth you've got your nose you've got your throat you've got the bronchi all of this is dead space and by that i mean there is no oxygen that can be absorbed in these areas oxygen is absorbed in the lungs and most oxygen is going to be absorbed in the lower lobes because blood is gravity dependent and there's more blood in the lower lobes of the lungs so if you're breathing at a rate of 20 breaths a minute at a tidal volume minute volume of about six liters you are going to take in about 50 of that air is going to make it through the lungs into the bloodstream 50 only 50 because so much of it is here you're just so 50 percent is in that dead space at the top yeah you only get to use 50 of it so if you breathe 12 times a minute you're gonna bring that air down a little deeper okay and you will be able to use about seventy percent of that air which is a huge huge difference twenty percent difference but if you breathe six times a minute at six liters you use about 85 of that air so you can see how much more efficient it is and not only is that more efficient for oxygen exchange you are also allowing your heart not to be overburdened by constantly beating you are going to decrease your blood pressure all the sim systems of the body are going to work in harmony with one another you're going to also increase your diaphragmatic movement and we know when you do that you can help release more lymph fluid so the diaphragm not only helps expand so the diaphragm is this muscle that sits under the lungs that when we breathe in it sinks down to allow the lungs to expand and when we breathe out it rises up to exhale for an exhalation but that movement also has many other benefits to have more diaphragmatic movement including removing lymph fluid so you just see it's a lot of people think well i want to breathe more breaths more air because i'm getting more oxygen the opposite is happening by breathing most closely in line with your metabolic needs and slower you are getting more oxygen and you're able to do so much more with so much less effort and your body really likes that it's almost a way of really sort of assessing modern society this idea that more is better i need to go harder i need to go more whereas actually many things whether it's breath work or other things it's about slowing down and doing less um and i think that word efficiency really really sort of hits the nail on the head there because if we thought about our car for example we'd understand if if the fuel we put in if we could drive in such a way that that fuel goes longer we don't need to fill up petrol um as often we'd go yeah that sounds brilliant but that's kind of what we're talking about in the body are we saying you're gonna you're gonna be more efficient you're gonna be using less resource um in your body to actually get those benefits i mean it's i i think that analogy works with the car yeah and just to sort of vibe off your car analogy imagine being at a stop light and just revving your motor just being in neutral is that's going to wear that car down so much more quickly and it's completely unnecessary you're going to use more gas it's just bad news across the board that's what you're doing when you're over breathing and you're just sitting here at rest if i'm breathing at 18 breaths per minute which is considered normal by the way 12 to 18 is considered in the normal rate if i'm doing that i'm causing so much unnecessary wear and tear on my heart or my cardio respiratory systems blood pressure vascular system you name your brain you're stressing yourself out anxiety sympathy i mean i could go on and on so why would you do that why why not breathe more more closely in line with your metabolic needs and this is not only a benefit for people with with asthma and anxiety this is a huge benefit for athletes because if you go out into the street and if you could go to i don't know if gyms are open uh over there but they certainly aren't open here every time i went to my gym you'd see people just working out thinking they're getting more oxygen in by doing that and there's so right now if people are sitting at home you can breathe those breaths with me after a while you're going to feel your fingers getting a little cold you're getting a little dizzy to your head that isn't from an increase of oxygen it's from a decrease of oxygen to those areas to vasoconstriction to those areas so when you're over breathing you are actually inhibiting circulation throughout areas of your body so breathing less you can do so much more yeah i want people just to really sit with what you said there you know because a lot of people will know that feeling of tingliness um in their fingers people who suffer from panic attacks will certainly know that feeling it's like one of these cardinal symptoms that we talk about and yeah i think a lot of people would think that that's because well i don't know whatever maybe they need to breathe even faster to sort of get rid of this but it but it's it's the opposite right that's that's exactly right people think oh i'm not getting oxygen to my fingertips and my toes that's why they're always cold i need to get some more air in there to get some oxygen and the opposite is happening and you can see this by instead of breathing those 18 times a minute which is again way too much you can slow down your breathing to about six times a minute and if that's difficult make it eight times a minute no one's watching you this is not a competition but by just breathing more slowly and more efficiently i think you will be amazed how your body's gonna heat up and how you're gonna feel your fingertips all that numbness will tend to go away not for everybody but for a lot of people because you are increasing circulation to those areas you're making those areas more it becomes easier for them to offload oxygen because there's an increase in co2 there's a balance of co2 and oxygen which is what it's all about again for people with chronic problems or for athletes it's that balance which is essential a lot of people they say suffer from cold hands and cold toes did any of your research come across this that some of this may be related to breathing of course there are other causes of this but it would seem pretty reasonable to me looking at the basic physiology that that could absolutely be a cause without a doubt which is why you look at populations it's no coincidence that a lot of asthmatics also have anxiety and a lot of people with anxiety and asthma have cold fingers and cold toes so so this is this is measurable stuff and you can see by by really super breathers be it a yogi or wim hof when you take control of your breathing you can not only return circulation to these areas you can super heat the body to such a degree that you can go and sit in an ice bath wim has sat in an ice bath for two hours and not has his core temperature go down and yogi's have been doing this for thousands of years uh it's been studied by uh at harvard by herbert benson we know it's real and it just shows you what the human body is really capable of but the the first thing before you go off and do that become a super breather is to get that foundation of breathing right and so much of us breathe way too much by slowing that down breathing in line with our metabolic needs you'd be surprised what a transformative effect that will have on your health yeah you i was struck by you mentioning what is considered the normal breathing rates or what we call the respiratory rate and you know i remember from medical school and early days as a junior doctor you know it's ballpark is sort of 12 to 16 or 12 to 18 depending on which guidelines you look at and before this call today before i chat i thought i'm just going to look up some you know big medical institutions and see what's going on and i came across the cleveland clinic website where they were talking about breathing rates and they said normal i think is 12 to 16 or 12 to 18. under 12 is far too little over 25 is far too many and i thought wow that's incredible because we're talking about maybe optimal efficiency might be six breaths a minute or not might be i mean you're going to tell me it is six press the minutes but our medical guidelines are actually giving us almost double that which again it's just remarkable isn't it it comes back to this normal versus optimal what is optimal for a human being well so much of those guidelines were based on people with pathologies you know and i was talking my father-in-law about this i say i saw that same cleveland clinic guideline and i was like that seems high and i sent it to him he said when he was in medical school it was 8 to 12. so so within 30 years it's almost doubled what's considered normal so he was shocked to see that as well he's like that is way too much and we know by measuring what happens when you're breathing at a rate and again people get so tied up i i say in the book 5.5 second inhale people have written said i'm a half a second off am i going to be okay i said oh my god what what have i done to these poor people so anything anything in that range so you could go down to five four breaths per minute to six or seven or eight what you're comfortable with we can so clearly see what happens to the body when we're breathing at this rate and when we're breathing slightly deeper than we're used to we can see what happens to blood pressure circulation and almost most importantly autonomic nervous system function if you get a heart rate variability monitor and look at what happens when you're talking or when you're not focusing on your breathing compared to what happens after just a minute of breathing at a rate of about six breaths per minute you will find these lines that were jagged and disorganized become these beautiful sine waves because your body is entering a state of what researchers call coherence where all the systems are really working at peak efficiency which of course why wouldn't you want to be working at peak efficiency when you're doing that you can think better you will feel better and your body will be allowed to help heal itself yeah it's just incredible and i just want to you know we are going to get into them hof stuff and tumor and all this kind of i won't say crazy all these kind of like super breather territories that people may want to hear about but you know what what you're sort of talking about is how do you breathe day to day what is your normal you know what can we improve that can we consciously for just a few minutes a day just remind your body what it's like when you take six or eight breaths a minute and you know it doesn't surprise me that people have emailed in saying james you said 5.5 i'm i'm on 5.7 or 5.8 um you know and i think this is almost i see this a lot as well i get messages on instagram all the time like yeah but what about this and that and i think sometimes we we get so caught up in the tiny details we lose the big picture big picture is we're breathing as a society we're probably over breathing okay can we individually practice a little bit every day where we sort of slow that down i i i i think that's quite simple if we can get to 5.5 or six in and six out great but anything i'm guessing slower than what we're normally doing is probably going to yield some kind of benefit yeah they found four four to ten breaths a minute all of those anything in that range is going to have some profound benefits so i i just want a second something that you said we're so as westerners we we hear oh breathing's the latest thing i'm going to go into a hundred percent i'm going to push it all the way and i'm going to do it perfectly so this isn't what i tried to stray away from in the book was this granular detail and look at this overview what is healthy breathing how can we do it what does it do to our body and you can focus on the specific ways to breathe the hundreds of different ways of breathing once you've already built that foundation so we we know that this this slower breathing we know how it affects us and we know that most of us are breathing too much and too often so even a few minutes a day of this six breaths we're just going to call it six press a minute it might confuse people going into the five yeah we'll just call it six press a minute start with that and then go down to 5.5 or five or whatever you want to do a few minutes a day uh dr patricia gerbarg and dr richard brown he's at columbia have used this for people with anxiety and depression even bulimia and anorexia all of these different maladies that you would think wouldn't have anything to do with breathing but these populations traditionally breathe way more than they should they're constantly stressed out and it's completely touching to see these people be reacquainted with their breath because they've completely lost control of it over decades and just to take a slow and steady breath in a lot of them instantly freak out because it's way too slow to them they associate that with an attack but once they acclimate to it this might take a session or two to really get this down you watch this transformation occurring you just watch the stress just lift from their faces and again this isn't just a subjective measure this is this is their bodies entering a state of of healing that we can very clearly see with instruments so the fact that psychiatrists are using this um mds are using this for for asthma it works across the board for athletics um for performance it works as well so even five minutes they found that can have an effect on blood pressure five minutes of healthy breathing a day um so start with that just focus your time again unlike meditation we know the benefits of meditation no one's going to argue that my argument is that so many of those benefits early on are tied to the way in which you breathe because i don't know of any meditation where you're sitting there and you're not focusing on your breath so if it's difficult for people to sit in a dark room and look at a wall you can breathe this way while you're watching tv while you're driving at the dinner table i mean whenever you want start with a few minutes and start developing that because after that hopefully it will start to become a habit but first you have to acclimate your body to this new form of breathing which is really the natural healthy form of breathing that we've all forgotten when you mentioned anxiety depression and other conditions i would even make the case for weight loss and explain what i mean by that um when i say i i very much believe in a lot of these chronic conditions a multi-pronged approach often works much better than just looking for that magic bullet and if we think about uh excess weight gain a lot of the issues driving that i'm not i'm not here to talk about the right diets okay because as you've said it's a it's a religious type debate that i'm not sure is that helpful a lot of the time um but stress and our emotions drives a lot of our eating behavior there's no doubt about that there's one study which shows 80 percent of us change our recent behavior in response to stress about 45 percent of us eat more 35 of us eat less so i would argue in if you're someone who uh eats more in response to stress then perhaps working on your diet you know whether it's paleo or vegan to take two extremes maybe that's not the best use for your time maybe it's working on your stress levels and if we're over breathing if we're breathing too much um that is information for your brain you know that is keeping you in that stress state so a daily breathing practice and i have done this with patients as part of a multi-prong strategy helps them to feel in control of themselves like oh i feel less stressed therefore i'm no longer needing as much food to compensate for that stress you know i'm not i'm not trying to make too many leaps there i understand that you're looking at hard research and you put that in the book but as a clinician um i really see this work in a whole variety of different conditions it helps you sleep better you know so which which of my patients don't want to sleep better um blood pressure do you know what i mean so i think you can make the case for many different conditions because breathing is fundamental to who we are and you know how our body thinks we are in that moment you know are we running away from a tiger or are we chilling out relaxing and thriving in a place of safety when i first heard that breathing and breathing problems specifically could be associated with metabolic disorders it seemed like a crazy tangent until you look at how the body functions and you look at how blood sugar functions and you know that if you're in a constant state of stress your adrenaline's going to go up blood sugar is going to spike and the longer your blood sugar is spiking the less sensitive insulin is going to get and and so we know that sleep apnea is directly tied to diabetes the onset of some forms of diabetes but you don't need to suffer from sleep apnea just to be more apt to have these conditions if you're walking around all day stressed out you've got this iv drip of adrenaline your blood sugar is jacked the whole time your body can handle that for a while but it's eventually going to break down so i could not agree with you more that if you're focused on losing weight it can't just be about calories it has to be how your body is processing those calories because if you're constantly stressed you have this unconscious stress it's going to be so much harder for you to digest food so you're not going to be able to process this food efficiently which is going to cause all kinds of problems dr stephen porges did some amazing research into the vagus nerve and this is this nerve that really is this throttle that can either turn on fight or flight functions in the body or make us relax and it's connected to all of our organs so he kept seeing patients that they would have sexual problems they would have digestion problems they would have sleep problems they would have kidney problems and they were treated for each of these problems individually but there was nothing wrong with their stomachs or their genitals or anything else what they had were problems with connectivity with the vagus nerve because they were constantly stressed so by being in this state of constant stress all of the signals that those organs normally send to the brain were cut off so by fixing this vagus nerve connectivity specifically through breathing practices through calming practices all those organs start functioning and all those problems can go away i'm not saying this is going to work for everyone with multiple problems but if you think of the body as a complete system and if you think of the vagus nerve as a telephone network and if you think of breathing as this way to crack into that network and open up those lines then it starts to make sense and that's exactly what breathing does to the body was there a study you mentioned in your book about a researcher who can predict whether you're going to have a panic attack or not just by looking at your breathing rate and that that was incredible and then i makes me think about all these kind of tracking devices we now have and is there a way of sort of uh you know predicting a panic attack i mean tell me a little bit more about that i think people will be very interested to hear that that's exactly right and guess how she was doing it she was looking at respiratory rate specifically she was looking at co2 so the lower the co2 got she was able to predict a panic attack an hour before it came on because panic attack is preceded by an increase of breathing the more you breathe the more co2 you're going to be blowing off the more constriction you're going to be uh getting throughout your body the more that's going to exacerbate and and shuffle in that that attack so by just having she was able to identify it an hour before and then she would send a little alert to these people to slow down their breathing and by simply slowing down their breathing and allowing their bodies to build up to that healthy level of co2 she was able to abate panic attacks this was after a few weeks several of her patients continued to do this onwards for a year and the numbers were incredible something like 80 percent don't quote me on this but it was around 80 percent we're no longer suffering from these attacks so so this is this is a study that was that was out about eight years ago it's widely available uh her name is uh this is alicia murat again at smu has done so many so much interesting work but if you really that sounds crazy um that breathing could be so closely attached to panic attacks but if you look at how the systems in the body work and you look at the influence of breathing in all those symptoms systems it makes perfect sense that it would be so closely tied yeah it really is incredible and then i think about rising levels of anxiety which of course is linked to panic attacks not quite the same thing but it's sort of you know they're broadly in the same area and you know emails and now we're moving into a culture where loads of zooms and i think i've heard you talk about this before how the way you breathe changes and you know we can almost induce a feeling of anxiety and panic by changing the way that we breathe of course we can and if anyone wants to do that you can start breathing in this very unhealthy way right now you will stimulate a sympathetic response and that's easily measured so i thought this was interesting as well um at ucsf which is very close to my house university of california san francisco dr margaret chesney had worked for for decades on national institutes of health research looking into something called continuous partial awareness also known as email apnea and what she had found was that when we sit down at our desks in the morning one estimate says that 80 of office workers do this we open up our email got zoom on got twitter on oh my god i have 60 emails we stopped breathing we just stopped breathing then we go so she called it email apnia because we're so distracted and stressed out by what's going on if you think about when you're extremely let's say there's a tiger coming around the corner here of my house what am i gonna do i'm going to be silent because that is a reflex reaction to be to be very scared to be silent so you don't become prey and once it's on once the fight is on i'm going to breathe a ton to get more us to get more energy um to my body to feed more energy to my brain and heart and other essential muscles to get me out of that situation or to fight off that thing but we do the same thing unconsciously at work even though there's no tiger around even though there's nothing threatening us our sense of threat has become so sensitized that so many of us will stop breathing or start breathing completely dysfunctional and she's found that if you do this for long enough it can have some of the same effects on us as sleep apnea by that i mean neurological disorders physical problems again spiking blood glucose adrenaline and it's just something so few of us are aware of and i was wearing a pulse ox and all these different measuring what happened every morning i put the stuff on and sit down my breathing would go to hell every single morning um and i realized that you know that's probably a reason why around 11 30 i'd get i used to get the slight headache i used to feel kind of fatigued it was still morning time and i wasn't full of energy and so by just switching your breathing again you can allow your body to work so much more efficiently yeah i mean thanks for sharing that and i think that term email apnea is brilliant because it just brings it to life for people that wow who doesn't check email every day who doesn't spend a lot of time on their computers particularly now more than more than ever and i really i i you know i can't stop shaking the feeling you mentioned the tiger right that might be popping around the block in san francisco around from where you live which i hope is not happening but um your body's actually doing what it's meant to do in response to a threat your body is meant to become anxious it's meant to become hyper-vigilant you meant to your blood sugar's meant to go up but your blood pressure is meant to go up all these things are happening to prepare you for danger so that you can escape from that danger so actually your body is functioning the way it is designed to function given the fact that it perceives that to be a threat so the problem is that we're perceiving the email inbox or the multiple screens open to be a threat so your body is reacting in the same way so it's not that there's anything wrong with people right i actually i think it's very empowering this your body is not broken actually your body's doing what it's meant to do you just gotta give it a different signal you've got to just teach it go hey you know what i'm not in danger there isn't a tiger there it's just 20 emails right so um i'm a big fan of talking to patients about transition times so a transition time let's say from work to home life instead of just coming uh all ramps up from work into then trying to relax with your partner and your children maybe have a five minute transition where you do some breathing or you do some yoga something just to move you shift you from one gear to the other gear and i've been talking to a lot of people particularly during the pandemic about zoom cause i said before you eat your lunch just take a couple of minutes maybe get outside in the garden if you're lucky to have one maybe just slow down your breathing do two minutes of nasal breathing put your body in a different state and you will digest your food better you'll crave different amounts and it's i've actually seen er james i'm not sure if you've come across this i'm not seeing any research to support this but i have seen with some patients in the last few years who thought they were reacting to a certain food now of course some people do react to certain foods whether in intolerance or analogy but sometimes i realize they were reacting to the way that they their body was whilst they were eating so when they did a couple of minutes i have a breath called the 345 breath which i've been recommending for many years again a similar theme right a longer exhale than an inhale but people who who try that three four five breath for two minutes before they have their dinner sometimes they would say hey i'm not actually reacting to that food anymore so i am saying well maybe it's about that you're eating in a completely stressed out state your body's not able to receive that food but when you chill out and relax your body's like hey this food is okay absolutely right again it comes down to nature and i thought you made a really good point there it's there's nothing wrong with us feeding more circulation to our skeletal muscles when we get threatened this is really good this is what allowed our species to survive in the wild for so long it's that perceived danger and that perceived threat that is so sensitized right now that people will react to an email the same way that they would have reacted a thousand years ago to that tiger or to being attacked by a mammoth or whatever and and so you know some of this is a lot of this is psychological but the neat thing about breathing is by changing the way in which you breathe you can actually change how your mind is processing thoughts and feelings and emotions and we know that because this is a two-way street so there are signals coming from your brain telling your organs what to do but there are also signals coming from your organs telling your brain what to do so another reason why that slower breathing works you're like i can actually not only do i feel better i can think more clearly not a placebo this is how it works in our bodies and it's so important to acknowledge this throughout the day those transition times what a wonderful thing to do especially before a meal especially if you have gut issues take a couple minutes that's not asking a lot breathe calmly relax yourself and go in and eat and i think that you'd be amazed by how how quickly you will show benefits of digestion i don't think it's too much of a mystery um why so in so many cultures there's grace before a meal right you sit down you calmly recite whatever phrase doesn't matter what religion you sit there a moment you be thankful for the food you're about to eat then you eat it i think that there is a scientific foundation for how effective that is i i completely agree and actually a few weeks ago i finished writing my fourth book on weight loss for people who are looking to lose weight and i've written a section on this exact exact area what exactly what you say that actually i don't think this is by accident there are many benefits of doing this and it's reflective of our busy modern culture we don't have time for this kind of stuff you know we've evolved as humans we don't need all that kind of slow stuff that gratitude that grace but you know what we're realizing more than ever now actually we are it's a as you say it's a lost art that's a lot just speaking to that this 5.5 breaths a minute 5.5 second inhale exhale this is nothing new either this was all adapted researchers found from prayers from buddhist prayers from kundalini yoga prayers from catholic prayers all of them that they looked at locked in to this respiration rate of about 5.5 seconds and these italian researchers said this is probably no coincidence all these different cultures came to the same conclusion that while we feel so much more connected to ourselves to the universe to everything by reciting this prayer a lot of that had to do this is what the researchers said to the respiration rate to breathing in this certain way to calm your body and make you more receptive to that message yeah thanks james i was chatting to my uh videographer gareth who's just nipped out at the moment and i was saying hey i'm going to talk to james i know since you've heard my chats with patrick and brian he's changed his life you know he's now he's tried the mouth taping at night he sleeps better he now runs he does some light jogging only nasal breathing and really feeling the benefits but he said one thing i wonder if you could ask james about um is he says when i go upstairs now if i go up a lot of stairs and i nasal breathe my recovery is so much quicker than when i mouth breathe but you've already answered that really you said that throughout this conversation you're basically saying your physiology changes it works more optimally when we breathe through our nose as opposed to our mouth but there is another kind of real life example this is minutes before we started the call today he said you know it's just incredible um and you mentioned athletes and i just want if you could briefly i mean the time that we've got left i'd love to cover this and also maybe some of those more super breathing techniques so we could just cover athletics and kind of recovery and why people really should make that effort i think would be super helpful so the key with athletic performance is you want to do more for longer in a state of pure efficiency and we know that nasal breathing is going to allow you to perform harder with a lower heart rate you're going to be getting more oxygen more efficiently by breathing less again we know how counterintuitive this is but the science is very clear on that and you can see this with professional athletes who have adopted to nasal breathing sania richards ross the best runner sprinter for 10 years going it's fascinating to look at pictures of her in the olympics closed mouth nasal breathing all of her competitors beside her breathing through the mouth she's in front of the line winning golds time and time again and she's just one example of what we've already known for decades dr john dewyard has done tons of science tons of work in this looking at cyclists nasal breathing versus mouth breathing and looking at their endurance looking at their performance and looking at recovery and it is such a drastic difference between those two what one reason why a lot of people give up is they try nasal breathing they've been habitually mouth breathing while they're jogging for sometimes decades they try nasal breathing like ah i can't get enough air in there i'm giving up but sometimes it can take weeks or even months to truly acclimate this organ here to breathe properly but once you do the benefits are huge and check out the work by phil maffetone dr john dewyar and some of the athletes that have adopted proper nasal breathing or try most importantly try it yourself and and you can very clearly see the difference i would say to people because i've literally been experimenting this for maybe 12 18 months now uh you know when i get for a walk i'm nasal breathing like i'm it's you know no question i will make sure i don't think about it now because i know why i do it but initially i had to you know consciously think about it i do you know i take the kids for warts we all go we're all sort of trying to spot a foreign person's mouth greetings i'm trying to instill it in my kids from a young age and this is important actually i went for a run with my son yesterday it's like daddy daddy look that guy's running his mouth breathing that guy's mouth breathing i'm like i'm sort of conflicted have i have i started something in him i'm not sure but but on one level i like it because i think okay as you said before awareness is key right without awareness we can't make any change so first of all let's be aware of what's happening let's not beat ourselves up be aware then let's go well maybe i'll start with a walk maybe a five minute walk each day nasal breathing and see how you go um and for me personally now i sort of i'm getting into running i was going to buy a heart rate monitor and i thought you know what forget it i i sort of don't want more and more tech in my life i'm trying to sort of go more minimalist and i use uh nasal breathing as my barometer as soon as i go too fast what i cannot nasal breathe and i have to open my mouth that's my trigger to slow down and i really feel i'm getting more efficient and uh it feels really good and you know what i'm not stiff the next day or that evening i i recover quickly again i will admit this is a subjective experience but it backs up the data and the science that you've written about so beautifully in your book but there's it exactly it it may be a subjective experience but it's it's grounded in real science if if you look at nasal breathing and you look at using that oxygen most efficiently you are allowing your body to operate in an aerobic state for longer than than to go anaerobic and have that lactic acid build up and all of that and this is very well known having that balance again of co2 and oxygen and something that patrick mcewen told me which i really liked he said never work out harder than you can breathe correctly so once you've reached that threshold and you're breathing you're like i've really got to breathe through my mouth or you're breathing in a dysfunctional way you have to slow down and work yourself back up and by slowly working yourself up this way your performance is just gonna shoot through the roof and we've seen that time and time again and again these weren't studies that i was doing these are studies that have been around for decades that right now there's this new interest in breathing in athletics and i have a feeling these people who are going to be adopting these healthy breathing habits are just going to show some incredible improvements yeah no absolutely and it's it's again it's just reflective of culture it's more now we're quicker faster it's like i'm going to work i want to push it hard i'm going to i'm going to be grunting i'm going to be you know it's it's i i want is it a western thing i guess it isn't on some level it's i really feel we're at that point now in western culture where we have to go look we do so many things beautifully well but we're kind of a bit lost on some of these other things and maybe just slowing down and doing less when we you know in adverse commerce work out or move our bodies maybe use your nose as the barometer and then you know you'll be working on your efficiency maybe you'll go you'll run less but you'll run more efficiently which actually will lead to running more just a few months down the line yeah it's still ties there's nothing wrong with running further and running faster than a competitor right that's that's human nature to want to do that but if you really want to do that you have to take control of the systems in your body and you have to be operating more efficiently why waste energy like why not store that energy then use it to best your competitor that's what sports performance is all about and something you mentioned that i thought was interesting is in so many ways like what we know about eating now food i remember in the 80s growing up in the 80s just the only things that were around the house were just like processed food and this was normal white bread velveeta cheese and everyone seemed to be eating this way well we know that eating that stuff is bad news i'd be hard pressed to find someone who is gonna defend eating highly processed foods it's bad news it took us a while to get to this point right so it took about maybe 20 years of science to come out now we all know it and i really think breathing is this next thing so 20 years ago even nowadays some people are poo pooing it say how we breathe doesn't matter the science is so clear and you can go back in history thousands of years again and they have been studying this for so long and it really feels like this wave of awareness is really starting to to crash right now i would agree james so so just for the sort of final stage of this conversation then um we've just to sort of really put it in perspective you know we're selling the scene that people are breathing too much they're breathing too fast and it's not necessarily how yeah of course breathing when you're working out and running sure work on it if you want to but again if you want to do a sprint you want to breathe through your mouth mouth to beat an opponent that's okay it's what we're talking about is how do you habitually breathe right so um you know because i know there's some confusion so just to clarify it's what you're saying i think and certainly what i would say is practice breathing through your nose practice for a few minutes a day breathing less try and go for that six or even eight breaths a minute see how that feels now if you want to go beyond that if you want to go into super breathing territory right the cool stuff that people get oh you know what i wanna i wanna do a marathon up everest like vim half or you know which again appeals to us culture of doing more and i wanna do all that crazy stuff there are quite a few different methods on there where we consciously over breathe so you were talking about under-breathing now i want to talk about you know vim hoff uh the breathing technique or one of his breathing techniques certainly the one that i've experienced and when i saw him speak in l.a a few years ago and i recorded a podcast with him a few weeks back it's not come out yet and we actually did it where you actually you know for 30 or 40 breaths you take these big breaths in and out and then you do a hold what is that doing what why should people think about these over breathing practices did you try them as part of your research did you look into the research hearing what what sort of what would you tell people about these practices for those who are interested sure so the first thing i just have to second something that you said i'm talking about mouth breathing as a habit some people have written me and said i noticed i was laughing today and i took a few mouth breaths and again i'm like i thought i had made this very clear in the book so i've been breathing through my mouth talking to you today right and when i swim in the ocean i'm breathing through my mouth when i'm laughing i'm breathing through my mouth this is perfectly fine and perfectly natural so a few hundred breaths per day breathing through the mouth fine for taking 25 000 it's about that habit and that chronic breathing um you you want to be breathing through your nose as often as you can but that doesn't mean you should hate yourself for laughing or for breathing through your mouth i just want to make that really really clear for everyone or swimmers right swimmers swimmers like you know when you're swimming you sort of have to take it you don't have to but you may gulp in a lot of water unless you breathe in through your mouth so it's it could be normal for swimming it can be fine you know i swim and surf almost every day out here in san francisco and i'll tell you i'm not breathing through my nose when i'm doing that it's impossible there's there's salt water up there and there's nothing wrong with that exactly chronic it's habit so i in the book after like you get that foundation of healthy breathing that everyone can benefit from i kept hearing about wim hof breathing these intense pranayamas holotropic breath work these long breath holes i said this is completely counter to what i learned before we shouldn't like acne is a bad thing over breathing's a bad thing all of that is true when it's unconscious but when you consciously do it when you place yourself into a position in which you tell yourself to follow with this ancient breathing technique and some of these include mouth breathing exhaling through the mouth or even inhaling through the mouth something amazing happens because you're allowing yourself to consciously take control of unconscious functions in your body so with whims specifically what i thought was so interesting is we have this autonomic nervous system that turns us on for sympathetic stress or turns us off and relaxes us parasympathetic and we've been told if you get a pick up a textbook it's going to say this is autonomic as in automatic as in beyond our conscious control but we can control it through breathing and when we control our nervous system function we can take control of our immune system functions as well and we've seen this people who have been practicing wim's version which he calls it wim hof method uh but he's very clear that this stuff has been around for at least a thousand years he didn't invent anything he was able to take this thing and distribute it to the masses and he's done that better than anyone on the planet for breathing awareness but it's no coincidence that the people who practice this people with autoimmune diseases with arthritis eczema psoriasis whatever they can show a marked decrease in the symptoms of their problems and sometimes they claim that they're completely healed by adopting these simple breathing habits because what they're doing is they're breathing in a way that purposely stresses themselves out for a short amount of time so that they could spend the rest of the day relaxing and healing themselves again seems a little counterintuitive why would i purposely want to stress myself out if i'm stressed out throughout the rest of the day the point is to focus that and to regain a balance in your body and in your health and that's exactly what these more intense over breathing practices do i think what you said there about where this has come from that nobody knew has invented anything you know vim hasn't it's these are all uh practices that have been there but you also paid homage to them he's very he's he's he's got it out there to the masses in a fantastic way you've said that you know that in the indus valley 5000 years ago there's there's writings on this and that you actually i think you wrote the about that yoga or the reset the scriptures you saw showed yoga initially was just a breathing practice i think that's exactly true it's not true the abs up there were no standing poses there was no movement it was focusing meditating and breathing only in the last hundred years have we developed vinyasa flow that wasn't around until a hundred years ago and i want to make this very clear to all the yogi's out there i do yoga all the time love it i've seen the benefits there's science proving the benefits but this practice this modern yoga that most of us do is just that it's modern so the first yoga was a practice of breathing and focusing and then it developed in to holding one pose and breathing opening up this side inhaling into that lung opening up the other side and then about a hundred years ago 110 years ago those poses were combined into this sort of dance-like movement which had nothing to do with the early yoga so it really was all based on breathing and focusing on the breath yeah amazing and one of the i think you quote someone in the book um [Music] i can't remember who it was but someone said to you there are as many breath practices as there are diets i've never heard that before i thought that was incredible because we talked about conscious over breathing and you know if we had more time i would talk about tumor breathing and holotropic breathing but you know what it's all there in your book for people to read about um but that is who who said that phrase who was it a free diver told me that uh very early on which i thought was very surprising i didn't know that there were different ways of breathing this was years and years ago but by adopting those those different breathing practices you can push your body into different states you can relax yourself on purpose you can stress yourself out on purpose which has pronounced benefits to doing that as well and again you can find books there's yoga books with 400 different breathing practices with all of these crazy names all of that's great but i wanted to focus on the general concept behind these there are heavy breathing practices over breathing there are there's breath holding there's slow breathing and there's nasal breathing and you can call it whatever you want you can practice this chinese version of that the greek version of that the indian version of the doesn't matter because they're really all doing the same thing to me it's no coincidence that wim hof method also known as tumo has so many of the same benefits of sudarshan kriya which has been studied in 60 different independent studies to help people with anxiety depression autoimmune problems there's there's no coincidence that these things are helping people in the same way because guess what they have you breathe really intensely and then breathe really slowly it's almost the exact same practice just coming in from different directions absolutely before we wrap up you mentioned freediving and i know you wrote a book on that i haven't read it yet and i am definitely it's on right at the top of my list to to sort of reads uh when i want to get some time but one question i had about free divers who who obviously have masterful control of their breath did you notice was there a theme that you know a free driver by definition needs to have a very high level of control over their breath you know a high degree of carbon dioxide tolerance so they can actually go down and actually maintain that you know tolerate the build up of carbon dioxide in their body without having that strong urge to to breathe given the multiple benefits of improving your breathing have you heard any stories in free drivers that actually a lot of them had mental health problems or depression or anxiety or or autoimmune conditions that that got better or the flip side is was it those conditions that actually led them to free driving in the first place i thought it was so interesting for me that many of them had anxiety issues sometimes depression issues sometimes addiction issues there's a great film that uh somebody made a very short film jonathan rempel about a free diver who had all of those things and she found free diving because when you free dive you're putting it is almost like a forced meditation you cannot free dive stressed out you cannot free dive with anxiety you cannot free dive with a sense of panic you have to completely give yourself over to the water and connect so deeply in your body and when you're down there everything is silent so you were so connected with your breath and with your brain on such an intimate level and this reconnects people with themselves when they're up on dry land afterwards and to so some people have found that salvation through freediving and so much of that is due to breath control so i've never seen uh i've met dozens and dozens of free divers that that book deep looked at the ocean from the surface to the very bottom of the sea looking at the human connection so towards the surface there was a lot of free diving but i've never seen one who suffered from anxiety i've never seen one who panicked because you just can't do that when when you're down deep in the water holding holding your breath there hasn't been any studies on this i think it would be fascinating to look at the physiology of someone before and after training for freediving look at markers of panic look at other uh issues even blood glucose um and how they react because free diving is that is the ultimate art of breathing you're focused on your breath connected to your breath the whole time it's breath it's mindfulness it's meditation it's everything all in one right to be able to to to do that practice and one study that we've not had a chance to talk about which i've underlined heavily in my book and i'd encourage people to read it in the book it's it's just this idea of fear and that lady who didn't who had that genetic condition without the amygdala this sort of emotional sensor the fear center of the brain and how basically you can't stress her out she would get scared of nothing until carbon dioxide went into it she got a dose of carbon dioxide and that then stressed her out and scared her i won't sort of spoil the rest of the story there for people but what what's really incredible for that and i really want people to get this is that we think fear and anxiety is always about an external event oh that is happening to us we forget that it can be biology it can be physiology and and i really i know how many people suffer from these sort of conditions and i really really want to encourage them that what james has been talking about read the book learn about these techniques and start small because it can really transform every aspect of your life um james look i i really i don't say this often but that is a phenomenal book uh i i feel quite lucky actually i've got these early copies they're still very sort of the early unproofed manuscripts so i feel i've got sort of something quite special here um the podcast is called feel better live more because james i it's pretty obvious but fundamentally i i i've seen time and time again where people feel better in themselves they get more out of their lives and i think it's pretty clear that you're making the case that if we breathe better we're going to live more so i want to if you know i i want people to get inspired by this i want them to get your book but i want people to take action i don't want them just to hear it and go that was interesting and then get on with their lives so i always like to leave the podcast with my guests with some sort of practical advice i know you've covered a lot of it already but just some sort of what would you say someone someone's heard this and they're still skeptical how would you encourage them to get going with a breath work practice in their daily lives i would say go see for yourself because you're your best judge of this if you have a blood pressure monitor and a lot of people do take your blood pressure before and after a simple breathing practice six times a minute you could start with that start small exactly as you had said and give it a while um by that give it a week so adopt a simple practice and again this isn't requiring you to go to a monastery or sit in a dark corner you can adopt healthy breathing practices anywhere and we know that there's a solid foundation of science between all of these things we have seen people absolutely transform by adopting simple breathing habits this is not a placebo effect it's absolutely real and i'm convinced i've experienced this myself i've talked to dozens and dozens of people who have also experienced it i've talked to the leaders in the field who have introduced me to all of their data and i i find that this is an underappreciated and under acknowledged aspect of our health but that's starting to change and it couldn't happen sooner especially right now in the midst of a pandemic focusing on your breathing can really have some transformative effects james thanks so much thank you really really helpful advice there thank you for writing a brilliant book thank you for your time today and good luck with the rest of the promotion i'd love to see this book the best seller in every country around the world get out there give people this information this knowledge that really is transformed so thank you thank you very much for having me appreciate it press subscribe to get more inspiration and ideas on how to feel better so you can get more out of life and if you have a moment why not check out this conversation that i've picked out as a perfect follow-up remember lifestyle change is always worth it because when you feel better you've lived more

Channel: Dr Rangan Chatterjee

Views: 542,610

Rating: 4.8761392 out of 5

Keywords: The Four Pillar Plan, GP, Four Pillar Plan, lifestyle medicine, the stress solution, feel better in 5, feel better live more, drchatterjee, rangan chatterjee, how to make disease disappear, apple podcast, obesity, type 2 diabetes, joe rogan, sleep, health advice, richroll, therichrollpodcast, breath, breathe, breathing, james nestor, breathwork, nasal breathing, masticating, mouth tape

Id: woyIhwomy1U

Length: 112min 28sec (6748 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 22 2020

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[u/neuromancer420]

Controlling your breath is controlling your biofeedback. It's a simple expansion of your experience of the illusion of free will.