5 Ways To Improve Your Breathing with James Nestor

So really the only people who could benefit from

breathing

correctly are people who breathe, so if you don't breathe, you probably won't get much benefit from learning to breathe better. Hello, my name is James Nesser. I'm the author of breathe the new science of a lost art and these are five

ways

to

improve

your

breathing

stop breathing through

your

mouth so breathing through your mouth won't kill you it will allow you to get enough oxygen to survive, but simply surviving is different from being healthy, so compensation is different than actually celebrating vibrant health, so the difference between the mouth and the nose there are numerous differences, but the main one is that the nose is the filter, this is our first line of defense For the body, the nose also warms the air. pressurizes it, humidifies it and conditions it so that when the air reaches our lungs, we can extract about 20 percent more oxygen breathing through the nose than the equivalent breathing through the mouth, if you think that's not going to achieve a difference throughout the day throughout your life, it drives you crazy when you start to see so many chronic ailments, from asthma to allergies and even anxiety, and how they are directly related to the way you breathe and many times they are related to the way we tend to breathe.

As you breathe, you begin to understand that having that extra pressure and resistance in your breathing is essential to calming your body, filtering that air, and allowing you to work at maximum efficiency, and when we go through the day just once, we are not filtering. that air, but we're also inhaling too much air, which stresses the body, so many of you mouth breathers right now may be thinking this guy is crazy. I breathe through my mouth. Everyone I know breathes through their mouth. What is it? It's crazy to look at 5,400 other mammals on the planet right now and see how dogs breathe through their mouths when they are thermally regulated to discharge heat, but no other animal is a forced mouth breather for one reason: It's terrible for our health. affects the appearance of your face makes you more susceptible to periodontal disease creates hyperventilation can stress you out I can give you a long list of problems associated with this the science is very clear do not breathe through your mouth breathe through your nose as often as you can use it , so if you were to get an Pool ball.

If you could imagine putting a billiard ball in the middle of your head, those structures are not there randomly when we breathe air through the nose. We're forcing this air through a set of different passage

ways

where that air is purified and where that air is heated and pressurized. We see shell-dwelling animals use their shells to keep invaders away and stay safe. We use our noses to do exactly the same thing. The way we breathe affects every system in the body. It affects the way the heart beats. It affects circulation. Affects digestion. It affects the functioning of the brain.

If we breathe dysfunctionally, if we inhale too much air, we work too much. We ourselves all the time put these other systems of our body in a state of stress and if you don't believe me, try hyperventilating right now for about 10 to 20 seconds and see how you feel afterwards, many of us won't be. We spend all our days in a state of acute hyperventilation, but we will breathe too much and eventually our bodies will break down, so we want to breathe through our nose, we want to filter the air, especially if we live in an environment with pollution or allergens or covid or any other place where we want the air to be humidified, we want the air to be pressurized because we want to take fewer breaths but get more oxygen in each breath, so that's efficiency, why would we overwork ourselves unnecessarily all day?

We don't want to do that, we want to be in a state of calm and efficiency and that is what breathing through the nose helps us

improve

lung capacity. There was a fascinating study done about 40 years ago where they looked at all this data. of about 5,000 different subjects and they found that the number one marker of longevity was not genetics, it was not diet, it was lung capacity, the bigger our lungs are, the more efficiently and healthier they will function, the longer we will live, so How can we fix this if you have bad lungs or if you are older and your lungs start to shrink, which is what happens to everyone after age 35.

Well, you can solve it by breathing properly and you can help yourself to breathe properly by having a proper posture and breathing very slow and low breaths, this is not trying too hard, this is breathing in this almost imperceptible way in which you breathe very calm, controlled and rhythmic, this It helps you retain your lung capacity as you age and helps your body stay in a calm state and get oxygen more efficiently with each breath, so one of the things you can do to improve your lung capacity would be Exercising, even mild to moderate exercise, helps us preserve lung capacity.

We can also do something called yoga, which was a breathing technology before it had vinyasa flows, so the yoga that most of us practice today was invented about a hundred years ago. The original yoga was about sitting in a position and controlling your breathing, controlling your breath and staying flexible in it. area where you can allow your lungs to inflate and deflate to their maximum potential and that's exactly what we want to do throughout the day. Inhaling and exhaling slowly has numerous benefits. One of those benefits is that you are sending signals to your brain that you are in a calm state, so about 80 of the messages between the brain and the body come from the body to the brain, so if you are slouched and stressed and you breathe like this, you are sending alarm signals to your brain that there is a problem where you need to be ready to fight or flee from something, you are also unleashing all these different hormones and adrenaline to allow you to be awake and alert.

Well, we don't need to be awake and alert all the time during the day. that leads to chronic inflammation and many other problems, so by breathing slowly you can control these systems, you can control your nervous system in many ways to send brain signals that you are relaxed and in a safe place, and when you do that, the rest of the body and brain respond. The best thing about breathing is that it's very easy, so when it's time to slow down, for some people you simply slow down, which means breathing in on a count of three and exhaling on a count of About three other people they feel comfortable extending that, which is great, but a key little trick that I like to use is to inhale to a count of about three and then extend the exhale to about six or eight; when you do this you relax the body even more and trigger a parasympathetic response and you can measure this by measuring what happens to your heart rate when you tend to extend your exhalations by measuring what happens to your blood pressure and you can feel it throughout your body as well and this It is something that you can use anytime and anywhere, so slow down your breathing.

By doing this, you will calm your body and send those signals to your brain that you are in a safe place and can relax, and it will also balance your CO2 and oxygen levels so that you will be able to use more oxygen as it enters your bloodstream. holding our breath so holding our breath is good and bad when we hold our breath unconsciously it is very bad and it is estimated that 80 office workers do this. What we do is sit down. and we see all these emails and then our phones blow up, we get stressed, we hold our breath, then we breathe too much, we hold our breath again if you're doing something that stresses your body eight hours a day 10 hours a day, 12 hours a day, It will eventually catch up to you.

Holding your breath can also be very beneficial for you because when you hold your breath you increase your carbon dioxide levels and by increasing your tolerance over time to carbon dioxide you can learn how to calm the body and increase athletic performance is not very easy when At first, it seems counterintuitive, a lot of people say, oh, I need to keep breathing because I need oxygen, but you'll notice something when you hold your breath and look at your oxygen levels, they don't go anywhere for a very long period of time, it takes a couple of minutes your oxygen will actually reach some serious levels of deficiency, so by holding your breath what you're doing is simply controlling your breathing, you're taking yourself deeper into your body and then you can use those breath holds as tools to help you perform better or enter states of concentration or even warm up when you're cold, I think the first thing I would like to do is what people need to learn is that things don't have to be complicated to be effective and, in some cases, transformative.

Making very simple adjustments to your breathing throughout the day and even before sleeping, before studying, before exercising, can have a transformative effect. It seems impossible, it seems too simple to be true until you spend years looking at the science until you talk to hundreds and hundreds of people who have helped take control of their own health and their own illnesses by helping to take control of their own breathing. . That's what I've discovered and I think you'll find the same for yourself thanks for looking. You can buy my book Breath in audiobook, hardcover and paperback ebook at the link below this description and don't forget to subscribe to Penguin for more videos like this