Patrick McKeown meets James Nestor, author of Breath The new science of a lost art

James Nestor is here with me and if you want to read one of the best books I've ever read on

breath

ing, his is... and the name of the book is called Brett. I only have a galley copy, but you'll see the title. there and it's Brett, the new

science

of a

lost

art, so I'm talking to James and I'm intrigued. I've been working with

breath

work for 18 years and I guess I'll approach it from a biased perspective because that's my job and James has an independent mind, he's an investigative journalist. Well, I'm not sure what research is, but certainly journalists will be researchers anyway and I'm intrigued and James thank you very much.

This is a podcast that I'm very interested in talking to you about. and I think this could be a tremendous book to pave the way towards recognition or at least a discussion about breathing, so for a little context, how did you come to it? It's completely random, this is not something I set out to do. purpose and I suppose the first instance that stimulated some reflections on where the subject might go was thirteen twelve thirteen years ago, when a doctor friend of mine suggested that he attend a breathing class because he had had several respiratory problems.

A little bit, he had had pneumonia for the last few years in a row, bronchitis, you name it, he even snored a little, so I went to this breathing class and had this extremely strange physiological reaction. I sat there cross-legged in a room with other people breathing. very slowly and then very quickly again and again, about 15 to 20 minutes after this, I noticed that I was sweating, my whole body was sweating, so there were sweat stains on my jeans, on my shirt, on my sweater, my hair was soaked and I thought, wow, that was a pretty interesting experience when I asked my doctor friends about it and they said, Oh, you had a fever, you were wearing a jacket that was too big, which is all fake, so I kept it in the bottom of my brain.

I don't know what to make of this because it was a subjective experience and I don't normally write from that perspective. I am a journalist. I focused a lot on

science

and I look at things that are based on facts and studies and people have studied. stuff so about five years later I was asked to cover something called the world freediving championships. It's a very strange sport where athletes challenge each other to see how deep they can dive on a single breath and return to the surface conscious, if that sounds like it. crazy because it's absolutely safe, but I remember being on this boat and seeing a swan dive in hurt.

William Trubridge took a single breath. I had no fins, nothing but a wetsuit and I completely disappeared into the ocean for about five minutes and came back to the surface take a breath get back to the boat come back to land then he had just dived about 330 feet on a single breath of air. so when I started talking to these free divers they told me how do you do what you do they said oh we can just hold your breath breathing and not only do you get these benefits from learning to breathe in water by being able to die very deep, but they also benefit on land and one of the divers told me that right now take your hand, hold it. in your heart and breathe extremely slowly and exhale for a count it was around eight feel your heart go down mm-hmm explained that the way we breathe affects blood pressure affects our respiratory health affects bone density in our skeleton over and over again things that sounded completely crazy but were intriguing enough that after writing a book on freediving I filed all these stories in a very large file and I thought this is what I was going to do next: explore freedom, no, no is that we breathe, but how we are breathing those nuances, yes, and the title is the new science of a

lost

art and I find that interesting because I know that when I was right, I spoke to a stranger about breathing, the magnification often becomes glassy And it is not like that. too interested and you know that's often the case in your playing, why is it a lost art?

I think it's because of the medication you know you're prescribing. Air. There are very few people who think about how we inhale and exhale. 25,000 breaths a day will affect the safe skeleton of our faces hmm how will it affect our asthma how will it affect our allergies our snoring our sleep apnea our hypertension our psoriasis I mean I can go on and on and on and everyone is extremely skeptical that something so basic that it's within our power can be so transformative and certainly I was skeptical too, which is why I was hesitant to go into this world and explore these themes at first because I thought well, what if this was a complete failure?

What if these stories these freedivers told me were completely made up? They are their study science, so it took me years of research and fortunately I was able to find leaders in the field, major institutions Harvard University, Stanford of Pennsylvania, who were doing this research, so I was able to learn from them, They took me into their worlds and showed me their science and then they showed me studies from 20 years ago, from 50 years ago and from a hundred years ago, all of these studies said the same thing, but for some reason no one really listened, which is still a mystery to me when the science is solid and there's a century of it and yet people have been hesitant to accept it, but I'm definitely seeing a change in that now with Kovat and our awareness of respiratory diseases. cheers yes, no, I agree and you found it frustrating to write about it.

You try to teach it for so many years and there's a lot of resistance, you know, over the years, like telling you one thing, it really gives you a very different experience. medicine, health and silos that people manage, you know, the professions are very attached to what they have learned and rarely go out of the ordinary, but what really surprised me was that in 2008 or seven I received a call from a dentist , Dr. Hugh McDermott and he said to me: I would love for you to give a talk on the importance of nasal breathing to my group of dentists and then I spoke to them and they told me all about craniofacial growth and I know you've been through this part. and you have talked to different people and no one seems to know about this.

The father who takes his child for orthodontic treatment does not know the rRNA of the impact of mouth breathing on the development of that child's face. Yeah, and this was something where this My path to this research really took a weird turn where, in nonfiction writing, you send out a proposal and it's about 50 pages long and you say, these are the people I'm going with. Let's talk, these are the topics I'm going to research, this is what I'll do for the next two years, so I did it and I got a contract to write this book.

I thought I had it all figured out and it wasn't until about six months into this research that I realized there was a real story. layers underneath that and I had to throw away my entire contract and six months of work and start over and it started with a conversation I had with a biological anthropologist looking at changes in the human body. I was talking to people who are looking at the changes in the human face and they asked me a rhetorical question and it was why do humans have crooked teeth and I said, well, we have crooked teeth because of genetics, right, it's just an inheritance, Well, that doesn't mean anything.

It makes sense, so it doesn't make any sense that you can go into the wild and look at 5,400 different mammals and they all sport perfectly straight teeth. You can take a skeleton, a human skeleton from a thousand years ago, from ten thousand years ago, from a hundred thousand years ago. or millions of years old and they had straight teeth, they never needed their wisdom teeth removed, they never needed braces, they have perfectly straight teeth, so I started thinking about this question more and more and then they started explaining that to me in the last 400 years . 300 400 years ago because of our diet and the softness of our diet, our mouths have become so small that our teeth no longer fit and have become crooked.

Now there's another problem with having a mouth that's too small, your airways smaller, which means it's harder to breathe. and if your mouth is also small, the top of your mouth, which is the arch, will be arch-shaped, it can penetrate the sinuses and it can inhibit nasal breathing. Yes, due to these changes, humans are now the most covered animals in the world in this part. explains why we snore, we have sleep apnea, certain problems, asthma correlates with this, even ADHD, over and over again, yeah, so this is really the cornerstone of why we breathe so badly and yet, From what I found out, no one talks about this and no one knows.

Why don't they tell us this at school? Why don't they tell us this before they put our braces on? And I was absolutely shocked as to why so much of this has been the case, so I won't say berry, but they ignored it for so long. and even though the data, the science is absolutely proven and I thought, what else is out there? Something so big is out there. What else is out there? I can't see you. I mean, you know these stories. You've known him for 10 years, so this. It's old news for you, but for someone who comes from nothing into this world, I just couldn't believe it, yeah, but I would love to see if I love to see that you came out and I found out for you and because we've been shouting this from the rooftops and You know, sometimes he can meet resistance and he even has asthma because I'm a kid growing up with us, I had two kids who snored and had obstructive sleep apnea.

I didn't even know it at the time, but I was tired from school, I was falling asleep, my grades were suffering. I really had to work hard and no one told me in 20 years to breathe through my nose and I found ice. I decided for me and for you. I know that I often feel very frustrated and feel very disappointed. In 25 to 50% of the children in the study my breathing persists and with the exception of a few, you know there are some really excellent doctors and orthodontists, but they are the minority in terms of the knowledge that they have and they made the case in terms of getting kids to bum their noses and you talked about the tall or purplish dr.

Christian Game, you know, published an article a few years ago and looked at young babies who died as a result of sudden infant death syndrome, which has to be the most traumatic thing any parent would have to go through. All of these children had increased purplishness and that could have easily been fixed and all they had to do was a runny nose. Can you imagine that a runny nose led to the death of these children? Know? Some hear more statistics like this, more data like this, although The book has been written by Don for a while like, oh my gosh, I keep collecting these stories to put them in a revised edition because it really feels like consciousness even with this and him It's at Stanford's flagship institution, yes, and it stopped digging several layers deep. to read any of his articles, yeah, I don't understand why more people don't discuss these topics.

Bree no mouse, no need. I think it's because he's buried in medical journals. No, unfortunately he passed away about six months ago, but. You were talking about the science that was available, the dental carts of him must in 1909 wrote about the effect of mouth breathing on children and you have come to a conclusion, do you know why it has not spread? It's because we are trapped. our silos is because there is too much money to be made. Am I being cynical by asking that question? Is there too much money to be made from the current scheme of things with children with crooked teeth allowing these children to have oral bridges or is it that people don't have time or what are the reasons why I think there are too many culprits and not You can blame one group or another.

You really can't. I think awareness is number one and especially that starts with parents teaching their children to be aware, not to read with their mouth. I mean, I look at pictures of myself as a kid and I was probably mouth-reading the whole time. I didn't know, I didn't know better, no one was talking about this and the distinction is important. If you are on a soccer field or know how to swim, you breathe through your mouth. I swim all the time in the ocean. I try to breathe through my nose. It's not going to work when you bend over. but that's one hour a day, the rest of the time you have to breathe through your nose.

I think a lot of the resistance is at least from what I've heard from people, including runners or other athletes, or even people who snore or people. who otherwise feel healthy say: well, I can't, I can't, you tell me to breathe through my nose. I can't breathe through my nose, and that's where I think a conversation I had with a guy named Kearney at Stanford is interesting. a respiratory therapist there and he mentioned that this is the nose, it's really an organ that can be used or lost, so he looked at 200 z-laryngectomy patients, who had a hole drilled in their throat for one reason or another, mainly due to cancer. and he discovered that from 2 to 2 years old his nose is completely 100% blocked,so the less the nose is used, the less it can be used.

She was now a chronic mouth breather herself. This is someone who is a respiratory therapist at Stanford. Yes, and she was. scheduled for surgery and she said: I don't want surgery. I'm going to try to fix this myself so started using sleep babe she's really focused on breathing through her nose a couple of months later now she's a digital nasal breather and she was very convinced. of the power of this, he is now trying to put together a study of 500 people to study the effects of nasal breathing on sleep apnea and snoring, so the great researcher at Stanford yeah, very good institution and there still doesn't seem to be any a lot of awareness about this and again, I think it goes back to people just saying well, I can't, so why do I bother?

And for some people that's true, they need surgery, but I would say, in my experience, the vast majority just need to try a little harder and focus on it, yeah, no, I've had 7,000 people in front of me, it's been more 18 years old and was mainly working teaching nasal breathing for asthma, for sleep, for anxiety, for children with panic disorder, for craniofacial development. It was only about 15 people that we were unable to establish nasal breathing and since 1923 it has been known that if you do Breck toll and physical exercise, the closed amer opens the nose that when a man or a woman when human beings hold their breath, they have the open nose now it is not known exactly how it is happening, but every time I talk to doctors I always avoid deterioration, except that sometimes, when a doctor asks me what is happening here, I give them a For example, last year I gave us a talk to 150 year old nose and throat doctors in Madrid and I asked them all to do the exercise, they were all nodding and lowering their heads and I saw it and then they started looking at each other so obviously they were feeling a difference with their nose , but these ear, nose and throat doctors were obviously not aware of the exercise and, if we were to talk about what was happening with their carbon dioxide, this does not detract from the most accepted reason, but I really like what they said.

I read it in your book about Kearny and that when we break the nose, the nose works absolutely better and you pointed out that 60 to 75 percent of people have deviated septums, like I did with the line going down. It's crooked, but the human nose is an amazing organ once we start using it and I guess what you're telling people is to start breathing through your nose, even if you feel a little short of breath, keep doing it with confidence when listening to statistics. From a doctor like you, someone who deals with people on a daily basis, it's really interesting because I usually talk to scientists or researchers who are in the lab, not in the field, so if you say you've taught 7,000 people have nasal breathing and 15 those 7,000 people can imagine, yeah, that's a pretty good percentage of a ninety-nine point four percent success rate, so when I hear things like that it inspires me because I have to be very careful with how I present myself. this because a paramedic will come to me and say you know 40 percent of people need surgery and this is why and here cat scans so I speak from my own perspective and from my own experience. a cat scan of my nose is a complete deviant disaster said here Concha bullosa these growths I refer to the doctor in NT Jayakar Nayak, who helped me with the study and some of the research for the book, said that you are a perfect candidate for Surgery If I saw this you're a perfect candidate I thought I'd go another route and start reading habitually from my nose and I feel absolutely no need for that surgery this is mine yes Barry it's here.

I exercise all the time. high volumes and I don't feel like I need more air. I know my nose is moderating and allowing me to get 20% more oxygen by breathing through my nose, so I would have to take 20% less air into my mouth, so get started. doing the math here and it makes more sense across the board, yes, yes, totally and we have a rule of thumb: we do the nose and block exercise and if the person can breathe through the nose for one minute, they can do it for life. So even if you feel a little short of breath now, I'm not saying that the 7,000 people I've worked with will switch to nasal breathing, but what I am saying is that they could switch to nasal breathing and they could break their noses. because there is also some work to change behavior, you know, when we take into account all the children who had tonsillectomy and adenoidectomy, there is very little follow-up in terms of restoring nasal breathing with these children and, most notably, discharged at will.

They are mouth waiters because if you have an obstruction in the back of your nose you don't feel like you have enough air, so you go back to breathing through your mouth when you feel hungry for air breathing through your nose, but even when the obstruction room is removed , the behavior continues and that is why I believe that there should be respiratory rehabilitation in hospitals with these children who are coming out of tonsillectomy and adenoidectomy and also with adults who do not undergo surgery. I didn't have surgery in 1994, but no one told me the truth afterwards, so I continued breathing with my open mouth until about 1998 and it was a newspaper article where I read about the importance of nasal breathing.

That newspaper article completely changed my life. Now I'm back in the game, you know. 60, there is a 65% worsening in the ahii index in children. which is the apnea-hypopnea index within three years, unless nasal breathing is not restored, so it is only short-term, so we subject children to traumatic and traumatic operations and it is just a result to short term if we do not change behavior, etc. yeah, so it's really, I guess it's about the intelligence of the human body, there are so many things in the human body if we can harness them, as you say, consciously, so you hold your nose for ten days.

I know Anders as Well, by the way, and Anders from Sweden, so you two trace your noses for ten days. I'm intrigued, tell me. Working with NIOSH, which is the head of rhinology research at Stanford, I had this idea. We know it's okay. established now, you certainly know it. I'm sure your viewers and listeners know that mouth breathing is bad news. take in unfiltered air, without heating and without air conditioning. everything is bad, but no one really knew how quickly the problems associated with Bad breathing appeared. They found out after years. it could be bad but good a few months bad mouth breathing some weeks even a few days no one knew and I knew no one was going to do this study so I convinced Nayak to do a 20 day experiment with me and I wanted someone else. because otherwise just an n1 something significant but not really significant, you have two people at least you can look at both sets of data and compare them, so for 10 days we held our nose completely, no air was getting into the silicon, I mean, They were horrible earplugs for the nodes. with tape, especially at night, really very bad news and the point of this was not to do some big stunts, like you mentioned, 25 to 50% of us are mouth breathers and some of them, you know, maybe be just a little smaller.

The percentage is breathing through our mouths all the time, so in many ways we feel alone, we meet in a state that the vast swath of the population is already experiencing and that I had certainly experienced as a child, so we take every data marker pulmonary function test imaginable. blood tests cortisol levels co2 hormones I mean over and over again and during the first night of forced mouth breathing my snoring increased by one thousand three hundred percent a couple of days later I was snoring for hours all night I went from snoring about two minutes to four hours in about three days I suddenly had sleep apnea.

Anders had exactly the same experience. His was even worse and the glorious day we got all this shit out of our noses and we could breathe through our mouth or nose. unlike our mouths, all the snoring went away and all the sleep apnea went away and all our scores changed. Stress levels changed. Heart rate variability shot through the roof. Heart rate variability is good. You want that? I mean, I could go on and on and on. The fact that we felt the awareness of fatigue on an emotional level and not constantly being dehydrated made a tremendous difference and I was lucky enough to feel both sides of this, the really bad part and the really good part after we had restored proper breathing, but a lot of people don't do it because they are conditioned to constantly breathe through their mouth and their bodies are used to fighting to keep up with mouth breathing to constantly have to defend the body against all the pathogens that come in against the dry air and cold. air and everything else, so it was an extremely valuable lesson for me.

Nayak, was a research scientist very interested in it. Anders thought it was fascinating and respiratory therapists, but it's also something I will never do again and I wouldn't recommend it to anyone else. all our data sheets will be available online so everyone can see our blood pressure weight, that's another thing, my blood pressure from mouth breathing alone closed about 15 points at one point, it was 20 points higher just when I switched to nasal breathing. it just went down, yeah, yeah, no, I get it, I was there and when you consider the populations that are operating the ruffed and you know the individuals, they're not in shape like you, they're not acting like you guys, and there's a relationship where as we get sick our breathing becomes labored and we often shift to married and elderly people in a nursing home, you know, their mouth breathing and a question that I suppose will come up often is is there so many different breathing techniques. and everyone, one guy says this and the other guy says that and the toast says whatever and everyone, we all seem to contradict each other, what's your opinion when you look at slow breathing, breathing through the nose, strong breathing using holotropics or the vehm media technique, you're breathing and the list goes on, can you give us a comment on?

Yes, I was lucky enough to come into this world without any ulterior motive. He had absolutely no inclination. There was no benefit for me. I say that nasal breathing was really good and I could have had a much more interesting book if I had said that I just discovered something surprising. Mouth breathing is so good for the body. I don't believe in 3,000 years of ancient research, but I discovered that almost everything that the ancients had discovered thousands of years ago that there is now something regarding breathing and especially breathing through the mouth or nose is now supported by modern science. , so what's interesting is that you mentioned something about older people and breathing and mouth breathing.

I think a lot of this is due to what happens to the lungs as we age, so starting at age 30 we will start to lose our lung capacity, so by the time we are 50 we will have between 12 and 15 percent. hundred less. we are 80 years old, we will have about the lung capacity of someone there, maybe 17 17 19 years old, so it shrinks and it keeps shrinking and if you look at the graphs of this, it's very scary because when we are very old That's when we need respiratory health the most and we don't have it, so I think that's why some people switch from nasal breathing to mouth breathing because they feel like they're not getting enough air, but what they need to do is take it slower.

Deeper breaths and they activate your diaphragm so you can get more air, more oxygen, you bring out more toxins with each breath instead of taking tons of little breaths to do the same thing. An analogy I learned was that you know to observe your breathing. Like rowing a boat, you can do a million short little strokes, you can get where you're going, but it pales in comparison, it doesn't really focus on a few very deep, very long strokes. I truly believe that breathing should be considered like this over and over again. I was lucky enough to go into this world without knowing much about it, without knowing the researchers, so I talked to everyone, I talked to the heavy breathers, I talked to the wim HOF, people talk to the 2 month old holotropic people who they make people breathe slowly and Over and over again I was able to form in my mind what I believe to be a fair assessment of the benefits of all these things.

What I learned is that they all have benefits, so if someone is going to tell you, you can only breathe very shallowly, very slowly. directly into your chest, you don't want to breathe too much, that has very benefitsdeep for some people in the population and at some point mm-hmm, but there are millions of different ways to breathe, as many ways to breathe as there are foods to eat. If you think about all the nutritious foods to eat, there are many of them, so why not access them all in various conditions and learn about them? That's what I tried to do on this boat that I didn't do.

Your books are very close to where I made it. I didn't find this where there was this generalist view of these different areas and these different approaches and how to incorporate them into the backstory and again I think you know how to do that. There are millions of books on how to breathe well, you can go online and find steps on how to breathe well, but unless you know why it's important, where it comes from and what it will do for you, I find that a lot of people will dismiss it and that's the What I'm trying to do is focus on the backstory of how this has been an essential part of human health for thousands of years and how it's coming to light in modern science how effective and transformative it can really be, you know, I think we're stuck in silos, you know, I was, I'm beautiful.

Co is my experience, of course, you know, and with the advantage of oxygen I open it to sports because we were not getting healthy people to do Beauty Co. I found freedom with the advantage of oxygen, so now we have achieved a cadence of coherent breathing, deep breathing. So because I think this is the way that if you train in a particular field, it's not up to me to change Beauty Co because you take OS Dub, you take a method for your phone. When I started on this journey, I felt that freedom that could begin to open it up and possibly that is what is happening with her and with other therapists, as well as with the world of ogres, for example.

I think Beauty had a lot to do with biochemistry and yoga has a lot to do with Biomechanics and coherent breathing have to do with heart rate variability, but beauty Coe is not really looking at biomechanics in an HIV and of fact RV is not looking at biomechanics and biochemistry M and that's what I felt. I had to open up too and you. I've certainly touched on it in great detail in this book, so the other thing is that I always wondered about holotropic breathing and how it brought benefits. I was teaching people how to reverse chronic hyperventilation for almost 20 years and then I went to give a talk. and holotropic and I almost ran out of the room because they were doing the absolute OPS and damn, I better get out of here, but I didn't.

I stayed, what's your opinion? How does it work well if you look at the original yoga? It was not. meant to cure people of the problems you were supposed to do yoga once you were already healthy and this would allow you to go to the next step and human potential, something like holotropic if you are dealing with someone who has an emergency room constant hyperventilation. Probably the worst thing you could do is make them hyperventilate somewhere else, so this is another reason why I think you have to be a generalist about these things. You know someone and I have seen how deeply Holotropic Breathwork works with people. with certain conditions it absolutely works since eyford, but sorry for chronic anxiety trauma because there was even a study where someone used it with 11,000 patients in st.

Louis and I studied 480 of them and found that this therapy worked better than any other therapy for serious mental disorders, like even depression and addiction to the schizophrenia zone, so it's a great tool, but I've also seen in the another extreme how effective Buteyko is. I spoke with several people who teach Buteyko and with several people who have healed or improved their lives through Buteyko breathing. No doubt, it absolutely works, but when you talk to a lot of Buteyko teachers, they say this is the only way to do it. Breathe all the time Limit your air intake Never want to do these deep breaths Never sleep on your back and that's true for a lot of people some of the time but not for all people all the time so I really think how the medical community needs to start to look beyond their specific silos, begin to look beyond pathologies and look at prevention.

I think the respiratory community would benefit from doing the same thing and looking at all these different ways of breathing, all these different therapies and adjusting them based on for the clients that come in as to what they need, so specifically to your question, would you consider holotropic once You have the basics of healthy breathing from Helly so you know how to breathe slowly, not breathe less, it's always ringing. with your nose, exhale deeply and then you can take the next step and I call it in the book. There's the last section of the books called breathing as well because you need to have that foundation before you start because it gets pretty wild, but I was interested.

I tried it and I talked to Stan Grof, who invented this in the '70s and looked at the science and what I found was very interesting was that a lot of the therapists I talked to said that breathing like this oxygenates. the body is why you have these hallucinations, that is why you are able to step out of normal consciousness and into your subconscious and unconscious thinking, but what you are doing is absolutely the opposite, so if you are denying yourself in your brain oxygen up to 40 percent, which is an incredible amount, that doesn't mean it's not completely therapeutic, but we can understand it from a scientific perspective and recognize that you're not oxygenating your body.

You are depriving yourself of that, but there is a benefit to consciously depriving yourself of oxygen. As contradictory as it may seem, that is why I again call these therapies breathing plus, because they are definitely the step forward, they will kick your butt in one go. in many ways, but they can also work tremendously, so it's really hyperventilation over a sustained period of time and when I was reading the few paragraphs in it, it seemed to me that you used the word recess, it's almost that you're That's what I'll leave you with. discuss, how you think it might be working, so if you look at someone with anxiety and how slow breathing would benefit them, you're helping them increase their CO2 tolerance.

I think that's That's a big benefit: it activates their diaphragms so they can calm down and, most importantly, you can put them back into their bodies so they can control their mental states when you feel panic or anxiety. and just stop for a moment read through your nose get ready and breathe slowly mmm it absolutely works. I have spoken to psychiatrists who use this for patients with depression, anxiety or bulimia. It absolutely works, but for some people they need a little harder push. direction and they are willing to take it, so I think for them this conscious overproduction can be effective because it shows them how to activate acute stress and it shows them how to turn it off so that you don't relax when you are breathing for three hours in a room with Lehren music here, as strong as your heart.

I don't know if any of your listeners have done this, but it's pretty wild. He experiences breathing as hard as you can for three hours. There is nothing relaxing about it. that the benefit of this is that you try to blow a fuse in your brain and reset your system so that you then spend the next few weeks, months, years in a state of relaxation, so you turn on stressed specifically to turn it off. and that's what wim HOF also does, it's a state of stress that you're putting yourself in with Touma wim Hof's version of melting down and after doing that for 20 minutes you can spend the next 23 and a half hours in a state of relaxation, which is where you really want to be, you are neither half stressed nor half relaxed, or you are completely stressed or completely relaxed.

I do that too. I breathe heavily every other day. I'm a big fan. I can do it. I definitely feel a difference in myself being able to control my nervous system and even my immune function this way, it really does all that and that's backed up by several studies mm-hmm yeah, there's an interesting study on vim Huff by Matthias Cox in 2014 where I injected endotoxin and I think it's very appropriate in the current climate with bovids and I really like the paragraph you used and about doctors being a single doctor made a comment about tuberculosis patients in something like something in nineteen twenties about mouth breathing, yes.

Again, I call it the new signs of a lost art because it seems like we discovered this a lot of times we forget it and it keeps showing up in a different culture at a different time, but in the 1920s the director of a large hospital had studied people with tuberculosis. and he said I forgot the percentage, it was up to 60 or 70 percent, he said, or chronic mouth breathers and there was an absolute correlation with the occurrence and infection rates of tuberculosis in the way we breathe, but this was in the 20s and even before him this was something that was known.

He had heard from another researcher. I couldn't find the study and I looked and looked that someone did a big study of sailors of sailors that on the same ship at the same time mouth breathers nose breathers and the occurrence of diseases between those two groups so you know... I don't know if anyone is willing or curious enough to do a study like this today, but I think it would be interesting if we knew, with respect to COBIT, that respiratory health absolutely affects the level at which You are going to suffer from Mobit symptoms, so it is not something we should think about once.

If we have Kovac, it's something we need to focus on now to help us prevent it. It won't prevent you from getting the virus, but it will help you deal with it, deal with the symptoms of it much better and we know it, yes. Yes, even nitric oxide gas is an antiviral and it emanates from the nose into the nasal cavity and there are only clinical trials being done in the United States if you look at David's nitric oxide clinical trials and just one aspect was this person Slough . Can you talk a little bit about? I actually felt sorry for the guy at the end, he did a tremendous job.

Yes, maybe a little out there, but some of us are a little out there. You know, you don't go into anything about it. fringes of society, unless you're out there, you have to be a bit of a pioneer and it's kind of, you know, thinking about a bit of leaving the field because if we were all mainstream we'd be accountants or we'd be accountants and you know . we would be in the conventional professions and we would slow down their history. I don't remember and I was a woman, but yeah, this is just another example of someone who was led into breathing and breathing research. and using breathing as therapy, which he had absolutely no interest or reason to do, but he found was the only thing that worked.

He was a choir teacher and discovered that many of his singers didn't sing well because they didn't do it. exhale properly, so he taught them this way of inhaling by fully engaging their diaphragm and really exhaling properly because if you think about singing or speaking or any vocalization is always done on the exhale, then you really have to focus on exhaling if you're going to become a better singer. and it has better tone and resonance, so we developed this method of diaphragmatic breathing, these exercises to develop respiratory health and lungs and the ability to exhale more deeply and it became so famous that the Met Opera hired him to start training with opera singers, so he did this for several years until he got a call from the head of emphysema management at a very large VA hospital on the East Coast, who told him that you seem to know something about breathing that we don't.

I want you to come here, we have a lot of patients for you, so he went to the hospital and he is absolutely horrified because for the last 50 years they were taking people with emphysema and putting them in this room and putting them on oxygen, putting a mask on them. to him and left him there to basically die, they had no way to treat them, they got infections, they gave him antibiotics beyond that, they put a pillow on his back so his chest was raised so Sound knew enough about the breath so he knew that. having a pillow on your back is the worst thing you could do knowing that more lungs will be flexed in the back than in the chest, so if you have someone with emphysema you don't want to put them on their back all the time. time you want to sit them up or have them at least on their side, so we started with that, we started training these patients and all of a sudden they had these remarkable recoveries, so just by activating their diaphragms they were breathing like that, you know, because that's the only thing what was it. the breathing muscle memory that they had went so high in the chest, you know, just turning that five percent of diaphragmatic capacity to about 10 percent, then 20 percent and then 50 percent, just half from where it should be, yeah, it's such a tremendous impact that they stopped. using oxygen, several did this after several weeks, it wasn't a next day thing, yes, they startedwalk around them and they walked for four years straight and several left the hospital and we're fine yeah so the stout worked within the hospital system for about ten years and this was not a placebo effect because they started taking x-rays and films of additional x-rays of what was happening and even the staff discovered that what he was doing was considered medically impossible. it's supposed to be able to develop an internal organ, they said you can't develop any longer, you can't develop, in other words, the irreversible damage to the lung tissue was healing, that damage to the lung tissue was irreversible, okay , but it was still irreversible, okay. when the alveoli are when it's when it's gone it's become rocky rocky Olli is detached from the outside there's no way it could get that bad what he was doing was expanding his lungs in his lung maybe they had lost 10% of his lungs but they still he had ninety percent of his lungs healthy and with that alone he was able to truly restore these nations to hell and when he left the hospital system all his therapy was gone.

I know it's a shame and today I look at the treatments for emphysema, there are four million Americans who have emphysema, yes, it's the bronchodilators, it's the antibiotics, it's the diet training, it's the help to quit smoking, it's not about the diaphragm, yes, yes, I think it's really important, but emphysema is inevitable when we suffocate. I'm going to have shortness of breath, rapid breathing in the upper chest and, like you said, it's totally inefficient because all we're doing is bringing air into the dead space and with human lungs the highest concentration is in the lower lobes, so what the stars work on in terms of carrying the breath. towards the regions has to die because of that, as the patient inhales, his ribs move outwards and when the patient exhales, the ribs move inwards and he did manual manipulation there too, if he can breathe slower, it is wasted , so we know that breathing more slowly is simply more economical because if we breathe 20 breaths per minute and 150 thousand of that air is dead space, when there is 20 times 150, the dead space is lost, so there are three liters that do not They are going to go down to the alveoli so that the gas exchange can take place and I know that if you do the calculations and I took them from Bernardi's work and I see your psychic Luciana Bernardi also that 12 breaths per minute and a tidal volume of half a liter gives you six liters and of those 4.2 liters go to the smaller air sacs, but when the respiratory rate is reduced from 12 breaths to six breaths per minute and the tidal volume is allowed to increase to one thousand, alveolar ventilation increases to five point one percent and you are given the twenty percent figure above, which is very close to that and it is surprising, often even with physical exercise, why don't people breathe with the remote control closed and doing physical exercises?

I know that's another topic of conversation. I want to go back to the vim Huff technique on injecting two endotoxins, did you look at that paper and what was your opinion, Enosh, yes it seemed irrefutable what they came up with and what really baffles people about the wim HOF technique is the benefit and the benefit is that you are stimulating adrenaline. you're stimulating norepinephrine, you're stimulating cortisol and we've learned in our lives that having these things in your body is bad, the cortisols come back, get that cortisol up north, never put that adrenaline down, like you really need it, but you don't.

So. You don't want to run on adrenaline, you need to get it down, but what people don't understand about this is when you do it consciously, when you voluntarily put yourself in a state for 20 minutes, hold your breath mm-hmm, this has tremendous tremendous benefits yes Yes You look at people with autoimmune diseases, they are incurable autoimmune diseases that are related to diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, yes, psoriasis, eczema, nothing else had worked for these people once they learned to control their nervous system, they were able to help to control their immune system once they achieved it. able to control their immune system, a lot of the symptoms of these chronic conditions were brought on and it's the combination of occasional cold therapy but also but mainly breathing and I say mainly breathing because I've gotten some criticism from wim HOF, people say no. cold therapy that is the most important thing breathing the secondary thing is not if you look at other heavy breathing techniques like Sudarshan Kriya which is exactly the same not exactly the same quite similar heavy breathing to very slow breathing heavy breathing to very slow breathing has almost the same Same same list of benefits and helps here or lessen the symptoms of almost all the same conditions as wim HOF, so when I see that cold therapy absolutely works, it's very important, it's great, but breathing is the anchor here, yeah, I think we have to be very careful what I say about the vim half because everything I say also gets a lot of criticism and you know it may be with the best of intentions because all I'm trying to do is explore bright and I think That's very interesting about surgery, there is a therapy that consists of breathing fast, which will stimulate everything and stress the body, and then breathing slowly, which does the opposite, stimulating the vagus nerve to activate the parasympathetic response and return to normal. fast breathing, it's something incredible.

You know, it's tremendous in terms of what you must have been surprised by, you've written your book and I know it's already out, it's available in the United States, we're currently in May, okay, it was made on May 26, so I don't know when. you're going to post this so a couple of weeks I put it up next week and then yeah and Oh perfect and then in July in the UK it's supposed to come out at the same time but I think this pandemic got away with yours. distribution, so July will be in the UK and your overview of your journey as an independent person looking at bread.

Do you feel like breathing will become more common? Get more science. It's already happening. Knows? It wasn't me who really unearthed this and it won't be me who, you know, will be the big catalyst for people to think about it. My team. I don't think I did. I rode a wave at the right time, with what's happening. in the scientific community and how people talk about these things. I think 10 years would have been a different story, but right now there's a lot of awareness, even in pulmonology, even in the ER, even in Ryanology, about the importance of breathing and, again, these things.

It is being studied in the best institutions and I knew that many people would be concerned about these facts, that is why I put the bibliographies on my website. There are 557 scientific references, so if you don't agree with my conclusions, you can check. You figure that out for yourself and come to your own conclusions, but from what I've learned and I truly believe this right now, this is something that a researcher told me years ago that how we breathe is just as important as how much exercise we do and the foods we eat. We eat are this missing pillar of health and they need to be considered along with those things if you really want to live a long and healthy life and at this point I absolutely agree with that more than any other time you believe in that.

Thank you very much James. Thanks Patrick.