Why Changing The Way You Breathe Will Transform Your Body and Mind with James Nestor

By

changing

the way you

breathe

, you can actually change the way

your

mind

processes thoughts, feelings, and emotions. The way 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. Thinking that how we breathe doesn't matter is not based on any real science, so James, welcome to the podcast, thanks so much for having me, hey, don't worry, I see you have to arrive a little early today, um, just a little bit of concepts . of people listening to this or watching this I'm currently in the UK, in my new podcast studio, actually in my garden, so you're the first studio guest I've interviewed, so I'm delighted it's you, um, but we are going through a bit of a heatwave here in the UK, it's about 32 degrees outside at the moment which for the UK is hot.

I'm dripping and I'm really sweaty, so you're in San Francisco, right? I'm, yeah, where it's really cold, so our summers here are freezing, yeah, we wouldn't expect that, from the UK to San Francisco, we have this perception of California that it's always sunny and it's always hot, but you're a kind of dispelling that myth right here complete fiction complete fiction okay okay a little bit of concept says it so look they sent me

your

new book breathe an advance copy I think in March or April and they sent me a lot books, but this book stopped me in my tracks as if it were one of those where I opened it and couldn't stop reading it because it is exactly where my personal interest and my professional interests as a doctor coincide.

Breathwork is something I've been thinking about a lot, talking about a lot. I've talked to patrick mcewen brian mckenzie on this podcast in the past, people really enjoy that content and when I saw the depth of what you had done in this book I remember emailing your editor saying I have to talk to

james

, where is? He came to the UK, I think this was just before the pandemic started and I told him to let me know when he was here because I want to meet him in person and have the conversation, so first of all, thank you for writing this. an incredible book, but to me what's really interesting when I've done a little bit of research on you, you're a science journalist, right, and it's really interesting to me, why a science journalist who, by your own account, in the past Was he a skeptic? on breathing and breathwork, how did you end up writing such an amazing and detailed book on breathing?

Well, first of all, thank you very much for that praise, I really appreciate it and I never intended to write a book about breathing that was just something. I had never planned that, but all the pieces of this puzzle kept coming together for several years until I finally had enough tangents that I wanted to tie them together into a coherent story, so when I started writing this book, when I got the contract for Make It, My Friends They said to me: why would you want to write a book about breathing? It's something we do automatically, we do it unconsciously, how could it be of any interest?

But once I started telling them about the actual research that's going on here, how it plays a role. every function of our

body

and once we take control of it we can really help heal ourselves, we can even warm ourselves, we can do all these amazing things, then they got a little more interested and so did I in the topic, so you I know that the starting point for me was actually a breathing experience that I had several years ago that no one could really describe, but it wasn't until I talked to free divers and researchers were studying free divers that I really understood the full potential of breathing, yes.

I mean the word potential I think is really fascinating because when I think about breath work and breathing and breathing practices, the kind of phrase that keeps popping up in my

mind

is untapped potential, like many of us as humans. We walk around taking our breathing for granted without knowing that, in reality, a little care and attention, a little deliberate practice, can produce some pretty spectacular benefits. Well, we breathe, the average person breathes about 25,000 times a day and most of us don't think about it. With any one of those breaths we take 30 pounds of air in and out of our lungs every day, so if you think that air and how we take it in and how we expel it doesn't affect us, that's crazy. much more than food and in my opinion, after talking to researchers for so many years, you can eat all the right foods, you can eat paleo, keto, vegan or whatever, you can do all the exercise you want, but if you don't breathe . correctly, you are never going to be healthy and I have seen this repeatedly with people who seem to be the fittest people on the planet and they have chronic breathing problems and suffer from it in numerous ways, so once we take control of this unconscious ability to breathe We can harness all the power within it and use it to do incredible things.

Some things that scientists thought were absolutely impossible have been shown to be absolutely possible if we focus on breathing, yeah, well, let's do it. I delved into that during this conversation today because there are so many fascinating stories that you've written about research, you know, case studies, really quite incredible, and there's one, you know you've done so many interviews since this book came out and it's great to For me, as a doctor, to see that there seems to be a lot of interest now, you know, with books like yours that really raise awareness about how important the way we breathe is, but I was really struck by the subtitle of the book and then the book is called breath but then the subtitle is the new science of a lost art.

Now not only does it sound amazing but there is real magic there. The new science of a lost art. Science and art fascinate me because I say the practice of. medicine is art and science, you know, it's not just science, it's not just about looking at publications, but how to put all that together with the person in front of me, the patient in front of you, and how to combine it to achieve that. with the right solution for white patients, so tell me about that subtitle in the context of breathing, why is it a lost art?

Well, what I kept finding as I was researching breathing, the art of breathing from the last century to the century before that and If we go back thousands of years, people have been talking about this, writing about this and studying it for millennia, so The first conscious breathing practices date back three thousand four thousand years and if you look around the world, all these different cultures started studying the same things, they started coming to the same conclusions about breathing, that if we do it incorrectly, our health

will

be affected, if we do it correctly we can really help use that to help us heal ourselves and get better. next step of human potential, so the frustrating thing is that 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 as something else, rediscovered by someone else at a different time, and then tried at the time and forgotten and this kept happening over and over again, 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 in this moment where we have the instruments we have the interest to actually study breathing and demonstrate how it works, how it alters our minds and our bodies and how it can benefit us and that would be the new science of that subtitle is a new science new measurements looking at a very old practice, yes, it is interesting when Compare this to other ancient practices, like say traditional Chinese medicine, which for years has been telling us that different organs in the

body

work in different ways at different times of the day, something that Western medicine until recently had not done. almost despised, you know the liver is the liver, the kidney is the kidney, but there's a lot of science in circadian biology that shows that these organs at different times of the day have different amounts of gene expression and they have different functions different enzyme functioning and all kinds of things, but we need it almost well, we've needed modern science to work now, oh actually, yeah, you were right, and I understand you're a science journalist, so I guess you can or it's fair. to say that you always approach topics with a little bit of skepticism because I feel like it's not a little bit of arrogance in us as modern humans that we feel like you know I'll try it, I'll try it like we're saying this was written about five thousand years ago, so which is so amazing that we have forgotten, we need to be reminded, but also why is it at this time in 2020, why does it seem to be that way?

Now I'm interested in breathing and breath work because yes, his book is amazing, but Vim Hoff has been gaining notoriety in popularity for a few years, hopefully Patrick McEwen and with the advantage of oxygen he is becoming more and more conscious, I mean what's happening. As for why people are interested now, I think the main thing for me was that I had no inclination going into this story. It is of no benefit to me to say that nasal breathing is better than mouth breathing or that one version of breathing is better than the other. So my job as a journalist is to go talk to the experts in the field, accumulate as much information as possible and go out objectively and give my evaluation of this world of breathing, so I found a lot of things that were not at all, but the The areas that I focused on in the book have a very firm scientific basis and I think a lot of that has to do with the way science is set up, especially medical science right now, you know, in the beginning, roughly the half.

Of the teachers, doctors and other experts I spoke to said that the breathing doesn't matter, so how we do it, it doesn't matter the nose, the mouth, 20 times a day, 10 times a day, your body

will

compensate, which It's one hundred percent true, our bodies will compensate. but that doesn't mean they are working at their full potential, that doesn't mean we are healthy, just surviving is different than being healthy, then there are all these other researchers who have studied breathing for 50 years, some of these researchers signed on for 50 years they said that how we breathe absolutely affects us, it even affects the density of our bones, it affects us down to the atomic level, the subatomic level with electrons, so to think that how we breathe doesn't matter, is not based on any real science 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 realize that it's actually important, but there's a little bit of confusion, there are so many different breathing methods and I think some people have a hard time knowing what kind of breathing method I should use.

I really want to order it. I'll delve into that today in this conversation, but I guess before I do it's worth clarifying. Do you know what the problem is right now? Is there a basic level breathing practice that everyone should do, for example? It's going to be easy and I want to dive into all the different types of breathing practices, but I also want to make sure that we don't lose people so that they can see the big picture, but also know something simple that they can take. away and start applying, yeah, and that's a great question and it's a question that I had from the beginning because you have dozens of books on breathing, there are some books on pranayama that have 300 different practices, where do I start?

Here what I have found. is that many of them come to the same conclusion, they are all doing the same thing, so they are means to the same ends, so if you look at the ancient Chinese breathing practices, they are almost identical to the ancient Hindu breathing practices. breathing, which are almost identical to the yoga practices that are used now or the other practices that psychiatrists use for anxiety and depression, they all do the same thing, we know that from measurements, so what I try to do in the book was don't focus on these individual breathing techniques, but focus on the broader story around them, how they affect us, what they are, where they come from, because it doesn't matter, you could call it 12 different names, slow breathing is slow breathing and There is a very simple way to do it, so the center of the book is a foundation of breathing that everyone can benefit from and, again, it doesn't matter who invented this or who claims to have invented these things or at what point they are simple practices of breathing through the nose exhale more breathe less breathe slowly, so that'sso I tried to focus on the big picture of this and if you want more details there are already millions of books on how to do it with hundreds of different practices.

It's just after 8 a.m. right now 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 to prepare for the day ahead? I'm a night owl so my normal wake up time is much later than this, hence the t here oh wow, but you know, people think that since I studied breathing for so many years, I'd be the best respirator in the world. and I am. I don't have much work to do, but at least the first step about breathing is to be aware of it and understand that this is not something that should be running in the background in the back of our minds, but something that we can control, so I am very aware of when I'm breathing incorrectly and I'm very aware of that. how to fix it, then I will do more intense breathing practices about three or four times a week, usually at night, but throughout the day I am adopting very simple healthy breathing habits and that for me is one of the most important thing about this It's not asking people to go run six miles a day or completely change their lifestyle;

You can adopt healthy breathing habits no matter what you are doing, if you are sitting in front of a computer, if you are watching Netflix if you are walking and just by adopting them you can have a

transform

ative effect on your health, that sounds like a huge statement but I have seen and studies have shown it, yes, brilliant, I think it's a great message. for people, so let's dive into something that you've written about, you've touched on it in the conversation so far, nose breathing, okay, and you know, for people who've been listening to my podcast for a while, you'll have heard it. .

I talked about this with brian mckenzie and patrick mcewen, right, but I think we have a lot of new listeners and I think it's always reiterated how important it is to breathe through your nose, so what happens when someone breathes through their nose? compared to your mouth, what is happening and why it makes such a difference, when we breathe through the nose, we are humidifying the air, we are pressurizing the air, we are filtering that air, we are conditioning it so that when that air reaches our lungs, it can be absorbed more easily and we can extract oxygen from it, so we know this has been proven time and time again and yet 25 to 50 percent of the population routinely breathes through their mouth and when they breathe by mouth, I don't get any of those benefits.

You can almost think of your lungs as an external organ when you breathe properly through your mouth, they are exposed to everything in your environment and if you live in a city like me, I don't want to expose my lungs to all those allergens and pollutants, so that the fastest way to filter air and condition it is this wonderful organ right in front of our faces called the nose and it is completely underrated and underutilized in society, yes absolutely, so how did you get past me? I think I've read what you say before or I think maybe I heard it in an interview that you used to breathe through your mouth.

How did you become a nose breather? Is it possible for anyone to actually hear this and say okay, hate? You, James, there are all these benefits. I want those benefits. How do I start? Yes, I remember breathing through my mouth as a child. I look at pictures of myself when I was young and breathe through my mouth, not all the time, but it definitely happened. Even into adulthood I thought it was normal to just go to sleep with a pint of water next to my bed each night and wake up every few hours with a dry mouth take a drink of water and go back to sleep.

I did this for decades until I met Dr. Jayakur Nayak at Stanford and he told me this is not normal at all. We should breathe through our nose all the time, especially during sleeping hours, which is a third of your life, and if you breathe through your mouth, you are simply exposing yourself to everything in your environment and you are also loosening the tissues in the back of your throat and you become more prone to snoring and sleep apnea, which is another thing that blew my mind, so you know once you realize how dangerous your mouth is.

Breathing is that you can then make a conscious effort to change it. How are you doing that. How you're breathing during the day, but that won't help you when you're unconscious at night. So once I learned this, I was closing my mouth all the time practicing nasal breathing at first it was very difficult I felt very stuffy here but the nose is a use it or lose it organ. I also learned from Stanford that the more you use it, the more it will 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 that I still use only on my lips to train my mouth to close at night and, Uh, this sounds really good.

You know little about new age science, but it's not because I heard from a respiratory therapist that Stanford and Kearney had used it herself and uses it for her patients and I talked to other researchers who did the same and that has helped. It helped me tremendously and has helped many other people as well. It's free, yes. Hello James. Look, I'm totally with you on that. The difference is incredible. In fact, this morning I was on the phone with a friend who I haven't talked to for a few months and I said, hey, he was saying how the podcast is going.

I said yes, great. In fact, I'm talking to someone, James Nestor, this afternoon. You have to get the book from him. It's just amazing. It's about breathing and him. He told me that what changed a few months ago was that he started picking up his mouth at night and he said he couldn't believe the difference, he said, "I don't wake up thirsty, I'm not groggy in the morning." I have more energy, better cognition, you know, and I think for people who are skeptical and I know they're out there, even within my own family they're skeptical about how important breathing is.

I think it's really quite deep what you can feel. You may not even know how good you can feel until you start breathing more optimally, but if when you talk about taping your mouth shut, I think some people would probably feel claustrophobic at the thought of taping their mouth shut. duct tape, probably so. I'm going to scare them, but you'd say that's not the case, right? And just to back up what you were saying, it's one thing to have a subjective experience and say hey, I feel better after recording and that means something, but it's another. thing to measure this if we can measure it we can study it we can study we can find out if it's really working and that's exactly what we did, we're working with niacc at Stanford, so the measurements from these instruments are not going to lie, yes, I felt better, but for me, as a science journalist, it's much more compelling to have data because what works for one person may not work for another and that's what they're finding out now that Stanford and Kearney are starting a study of 200 people looking at sleep apnea. , snoring and sleep tapes, and it turns out that I have a little bit of a problem here, and I want to explain to people who don't, I strongly suggest that you don't go to YouTube and search for how to sleep tapes because there are a there are a lot of Really sketchy stuff there, all you need is a little piece of tape.

I use a piece about this big, it's about half the size of a postage stamp, and I put it right over my lips. I can still talk to you. I can still breathe from my mouth if I want, but it just reminds me when I'm unconscious to keep my jaw closed and I can take it off with my tongue, so this is not a hostage situation, duct tape, this is a little piece of duct tape alone for Train the Mouse to Shut Down and anecdotally, I've received several dozen emails from people who have had chronic snoring over the last few decades and who have even had mild or moderate sleep apnea and have logged their sleep and already They don't suffer those things. so that's not psychosomatic, that's not a placebo effect, that's what happens when you close your mouth and allow the air to be pressurized, you push the soft tissues further back into the airways and open them up to breathe more efficiently, You get 20 percent more oxygen through nasal breathing than through your mouth and if you think that won't affect you in the long run, you're crazy, it will have a tremendous effect on your health, yes, absolutely on your research, you know you mentioned sleep apnea and you know these these problems that we have sleep problems are endemic now you know there's you know lack of sleep is an epidemic there's a lot of reasons for that of course um but it's really fascinating to me, you know, I think about the past, always Try to look at the way we are suffering now or the diseases of the 21st century and try to put them in an evolutionary perspective and in a context.

Well, what's really going on here? I don't know within your investigation. Have you ever found that sleep apnea and sleep problems are quite a modern problem? I mean, do we know if this existed three four hundred years ago? It was part of your research on this. Well, we can't go back and evaluate people, but what we know. What we can do is look at skeletons, so I talked to experts in the field, biological anthropologists who look at the shape of skeletons and our ancestors, anything that's over 400 years old, maybe 500 years old, would have these jaws. very powerful and would have these faces. that grew outward and these huge nasal openings in the back, so from those skeletons we can figure out that these people had bigger airways, they had more room to breathe.

We know that obesity absolutely affects snoring and sleep apnea too, and people don't. We're not as obese as they are now and that seems very clear and understood, but the idea that our ancestors had these huge, powerful faces and we didn't, is less recognized and yet very clear in the skeletal record. and an example of this is looking. in the teeth of an ancient skeleton if you looked at the teeth of one of your ancestors 400 years 4 000 years 40 fat doesn't matter on the back they would have perfectly straight teeth there is like a 99.9 chance of having perfectly straight teeth today in Day 90 of us have some type of curvature in our teeth because our mouths have become so small.

With a very small mouth you also have smaller airways and that is one of the main reasons why many of us suffer from snoring, sleep apnea, breathing problems. even implicated in asthma allergies and more, yeah wow, and why do we think that happened? Why do we have such a small amount of smaller jaw? There are some kind of theories out there, yes there are some theories, but there are also some absolute facts that have it. They've been identified very clearly over the last 20 years and that's when our food went from being this wild, hard food where we had to chew a lot more food, it became soft, we chewed less, our mouths grew too small.

Environmental inputs had some effect on that. When you walk breathing through your mouth, especially as a child, your face will grow differently, it is so common that this is called adenoid face because the adenoids or tonsils become inflamed and you have to walk like this, but most of it is caused by the foods for the blandness of our diets and there has been some incredible research done on this and I think the role that chewing stress plays in the structure of our faces is very under-recognized, but it's also so simple the less If you use something, the less will develop, especially this is important in childhood.

They have done studies where they looked at babies who have been bottle fed versus those who have been breastfed and when a baby is breastfed it requires a tremendous amount of stress and exercise and it helps to push the face out which will then create airways. bigger. Yeah, you know, it's amazing, you're talking about foods that we chew more, what you're fundamentally talking about is more natural foods, less highly processed industrialized foods, so we. We often think about food in the context of our health, our well-being, in particular, a lot of people talk about it in the context of their weight, but you're saying yeah, sure, but you know yeah, your weight, but health. and wellness are so broad and now we're introducing mouth size and tooth strength and tooth structure and jaw structure into the potential benefits of eating real food.

Yes, and here again is an example of all these disparate people in these disparate areas of science, all coming up with the same thing. The general conclusion is slightly different, which is why we normally analyze foods in terms of calories, at least in America we analyze them in terms of calories, we don't analyze them in terms of hardness or softness, andI think it's quite interesting that even today you think about what is considered healthy food today, oatmeal, avocado, yogurt, you know, sticky bars, all of this is soft, it basically requires no chewing at all and the less you chew, esp.

When you are younger, the less you develop your face, the more you will work these muscles. Yeah, you said that 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, adults will eat the right food, but the children's menu I don't know if it is the same in the United States. The children's menu is generally for junk food. It's like adults order the right food, but kids. I have some kind of I don't know, you know, hyper-processed industrialized foods and you know, I'm not blaming anyone or criticizing anyone for doing that, I understand that that's almost conditioning, also something that we've tried a lot from a young age. with our kids they eat the same thing we do, we eat as much as we can, minimally processed, you know, food as close to nature as possible and you know, I appreciate that we're lucky to have access to that, but we do that and that's what they like. we give to our children, we don't prepare separate foods for them and it's just interesting, you know, you say that all roads lead to Rome to the same place, actually, yes, eat the right diet, it's almostBasically, it's trying to say: live, eat and breathe the way we have evolved and we will be more prosperous, healthier, happier human beings, I guess so, nature already did all this for us, it's only in the last hundred years that we think. that we were smarter than nature and we thought that we could take some secondary steps in this and condense the food into a pill or some mush that you could put in your mouth and it would have the same effect, yes, it doesn't give us scurvy. that or barry berry that we're not getting these diseases that we used to suffer from but we're also denying ourselves a lot of the benefits and exactly what you said and there's something so huge that I would even call it a revolution, right? now on to baby-led weaning, which is not giving babies this bland porridge in jars that we've only been doing for the last hundred years anyway and look what happened, look, look, look what happened to our weight, look what happened to our faces.

Look what happened to our teeth, I want to say again and again, it is a modern invention, so allowing children, especially from the early years, can really discover that chewing stress to chew correctly will have benefits in the future and that is. it's been very well tested at this point, yeah, and you actually know the phrase use it or lose it, which is common parlance in the English language in both the US and the UK, you know, we understand that don't we have muscles? ? You understand that if I do a bicep curl every morning, my biceps will get stronger if I stop doing it over time, they will get smaller.

I think we understand that with you know our physical muscles, but like you say. I don't think we've thought about it in terms of our jaw, our chewing muscles, it's like if you don't chew regularly, if you don't have that tension in your jaw like the tension in your biceps, what? your jaw will then adapt it will adapt to what you feel you need um I think I think I heard you mention before that there's something about chewing on one side instead of two sides and I found that really interesting so I'd love to explore that, but also I want to make sure that we've covered that a lot of people listen to this show, some, I'm sure, are avid meat eaters, some are vegan and when we talk about natural foods, I think. it's just important to say that you can probably tell, although obviously the meat is quite tough and there are bones to chew, you know there are a lot of vegetables like carrots, for example, or a lot of hard vegetables that you have to chew, you probably can too. get that kind of stress on the jaw, so I just want to make sure that we include everyone in this conversation so that everyone feels like this applies to them. um, yeah, I wonder if you could expand on that in every way.

In the end, that's again, you have different people in different fields, but of course, if you're chewing carrots, if you're chewing celery, I mean, just think about natural foods, even wheat, you know, we're very good at eliminating . the bran and germ of wheat and creating this processed white flour, the same with rice, white rice bran and removing the germ, we are only left with this little seed, so chewing is essential, especially when developing adequate respiratory tract health or an adequate mouth. uh we know and it's how you chew what you're chewing. I don't want to go into it like it's very, very political because meat eaters are going to say one thing, vegans are going to say another, but don't do it. underestimate the power and benefits of chewing and this is a whole new science that is really being deeply explored now, which I find fascinating for people who listen and think, well, I have children, for some reason I couldn't breastfeed and maybe I've been given a lot of soft food because that's what I thought I should do.

Can we change things? We know? Know? If we change a diet if we start giving the task a new stressor, particularly that one-sided stressor. I would love for you to expand on this, do you know how late we can still make those changes? Because it's not just in those childhood years, but it lasts much longer than that. Well I was curious about that and I'll get to one side or the other I promise you I got it I was I was so you know I was young millions of years ago so you know I can't take advantage of breastfeeding or weaning directed by the baby or chewing hard foods when I'm eight or nine years old, so I wanted to know what an adult could do if they could improve their airway, and from what I understand, what I've heard from a lot of people is that they really don't know. can do anything.

It's what you have on the inside that gets you, but I met some researchers who have been doing studies for decades and they told me that most of us understand that we only start losing bone mass after age 30. down and down and down, but there is one bone in our body that we can reshape at virtually any age and that is the bone right here in the face in the jaw, so I'm 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 where they had gained more bone in their face and as a journalist I said I looked at all the studies that were legitimate, they were confirmed by a Mayo Clinic consultant uh uh and they had also been written by a doctor, uh jeremy mao, in colombia, but I wanted to see this for myself, my own interest and curiosity, so I said, okay, you have a year.

I'll do whatever you want. Are we going to do a cat scan before and after? Let's look at my airways to see what happened at that moment. During that time I used this device at night. I have a very small mouth, especially not my upper palate. Develop properly because I didn't chew enough when I was young. The paddle starts like this and should lower and be flatter. Mine is V-shaped, just like the vast majority of the population has a paddle like this, so I used this device. to help expand the upper palate of my mouth and in doing so expand my airway and also to help shape new bone in my face that would be advantageous for breathing so this sounds crazy but we did cat scans and that's exactly what happened.

About a nickel of bone in my face, my airways opened about 15 to 20 percent, which is an incredible amount. All this pus and granulation that had been trapped in my sinuses disappeared. Subjectively I can say that I have never breathed easier. in my life so you don't need a paddle expander to do this, I used one because I just wanted to see if this was possible and yes, chewing and specifically chewing on one side or the other can help tone your airways. the airway is a muscle, this is a muscular tube and if you are only eating soft porridge and if you are eating it improperly and so on, you are not exercising this muscle as well as it should and it will become sluggish and flabby. so you want your muscles to be toned and open in the airways so they're clear and that's what helps with chewing, specifically on the right side and on the left side, and this is what Dr.

Ted Bell and Dr. Ted Bell told me. Scott Cemento, which blew my mind. about chewing we won't talk about whether you are chewing meat or carrots only vegans imagine chewing celery you know carnivores you have a big rib or whatever you are not chewing on both sides of your mouth you are not chewing on one side and then you change the food and chew on the other side so that our bodies identify that side-to-side chewing with a parasympathetic relaxation response that will make it easier to digest that food when you're When you clench your jaw, think about before a fight or you're stressed, you clench both sides of your jaw, which creates a sympathetic response, a fight or flight response that makes it harder to digest, so when you chew, you want to chew. you have this relaxation response because during that response you can also help the bones grow more easily.

I'm impressed, James, I mean to hear that the fact that we chew on the side of our mouth stimulates parasympathetic tone, so relaxation. part of the nervous system as opposed to both sides, which is the tension of the jaw which then activates the sympathetic part, the stress part of the nervous system absolutely incredible, then again we go back to evolution, as you say, nature discovered, already You know, if we are eating something. of value is on one side um it's really amazing this idea of ​​you know, you say all roads lead to Rome, I love it because you can, you can think about breathing in the same way, so you know, James, I've been practicing .

Now I've been a doctor for almost 20 years and you know, I'm very proud to be a doctor, but I have concerns about the way we treat certain things. We are very reductionist. We put things in their little boxes. There's often no interference between um, you know, it's a lung problem or it's a stomach problem or it's a heart problem without this recognition that everything is connected and I've been using breathing practices with patients, I don't know how, probably at least five years. It's been longer now, maybe even 10 years, and I've seen incredible benefits in a variety of different conditions, so for me breathing is almost a great unifier in many ways.

You can apply it to anxiety, panic attacks and general stress to improve your sleep and beauty. The thing is, it's free, it's available to everyone you know in this era when many people claim that wellness and self-care are the exclusive domain of the middle classes. I just don't agree with it, I think. I think so, some of the things that Marcus has said are, but we all breathe every day. What you ask people to look at is well, how do you breathe? Can you improve the quality of your breathing? And yes, just to be clear in no way.

Seeing breathing and the science of breathing is contradictory or incipient compared to so many doctrines of Western science. My father-in-law is a pulmonologist. My brother-in-law is an emergency room doctor, so we have been talking throughout this entire process and they are very happy. good at what they do so as a pulmonologist you are dealing with lung pathologies I have an accident my lungs are destroyed I have cancer I want to see a pulmonologist I want the latest most advanced technology to help me heal how wonderful I probably wouldn't be alive without Western medicine , so it's not about them against us or anything like that, but about coming together and looking at the limitations of each area, so what they've told me repeatedly is that they are very frustrated because when we're just looking at the lungs, we're not even We're looking at the airways, we're not even looking at what's happening in the nose, but this is all a connected system, so what's happening in the nose and the airways is absolutely going to be affecting what's happening in the lungs. , but at least in the US where you have private healthcare, everyone is isolated and they don't even talk to each other, but you know our bodies are not just a liver, but they are also.

It's not just kidneys, it's not just lungs or brains, this is a whole body and what happens up here affects what happens down here, so for me breathing is this, even if we are not able to take conscious control of our heart rate. our circulation our blood pressure our liver function of our digestion when we breathe we can influence all of these functions and voluntarily help ourselves function in a completely different way that isbeneficial to our health and, again, what I think is so interesting about this is not just it's a subjective experience, you can measure the effects of someone simply

changing

their breathing in a few minutes.

I have almost higher blood pressure, it's not that bad, but I can breathe a certain way and two minutes later I take my blood pressure and it will go down. 10 to 15 points, you imagine, that's after a couple of minutes, what will happen after a couple of days, a couple of weeks, a couple of months of adopting healthy breathing habits. What we are seeing is that these people are able to overcome so many chronic problems and actually recover. that next step of human potential. What are some of those cases that you have come across? Do you know what kinds of chronic problems you've seen people overcome and leave behind once they start focusing on their breathing?

The most dramatic have been asthmatics, asthmatics and emphysemics, therefore, asthmatics. as a population they will be much more likely to breathe through their mouths and they will have a much lower tidal CO2 level and what that means is that they are breathing too often and too much and they were breathing out too much CO2 and many of us understand carbon. CO2 dioxide is a really bad thing, it's what's causing global warming and ocean acidity. That's all one hundred percent true, but the body 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 can exacerbate asthma attacks.

We see this in asthmatics who are so afraid that they will lose the ability to breathe because it reminds them. them from an asthma attack they start breathing more and more, guess what happens, they expel more CO2, they contract more, they start breathing more and more and they get an asthma attack and just changing the way they breathe to have Of course this is not going to work for everyone, but studies have shown that Alicia Muret from Southern Methodist University did this incredible story with 120 asthmatics and the only thing that changed was how they breathed, they carried this little device with them that calculated their carbon dioxide Every time their carbon dioxide level was low, which showed that they were breathing too much, she would make them slow down and breathe more slowly, they had such a profound change just by doing this.

Not only does this mean fewer asthma attacks, but it also increases respiratory function, they were calmer, they felt better and again, this is not a psychosomatic thing, this allows the body to function the way it is naturally designed to function in much of asthma, I think that has been the case. . I won't say misdiagnosed, but I don't think asthmatics have been adequately given the right information about how they can potentially change their asthma and actually improve their health. Yes, and I want to reiterate what you said just before we continue. For asthma, it's not about breathing or Western medicine, no, it's about saying that Western medicine is brilliant at many things, but there are also some things that we could add to our practices, it's like breathing and breathing practices breathing could help expand our toolbox, etc., for an asthmatic who comes in, yes, sure they may need to inhale their brand with their blue inhaler, absolutely particularly in the acute phase, because if you can't breathe, you know that It's a very powerful signal for the body, you know what it is.

It's scary, it's problematic, but it could also be that with this science, well, maybe breathing protocols can also be prescribed in the same way and I really strongly believe that, if you know, people admire the medical profession, so if you know yourself 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 butt says no, it's about this brown inhaler and this blue inhaler, you're automatically going to prioritize that and it's neither one nor the other. other. he'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 can happen? Maybe over time you can reduce the number of inhalers you need. I'm going to have less attacks, you know, that's where I think it's not about being combative from one side against another, but about trying to bring people together. Look, that's another tool here that you know, has no side effects, which I think is really important. Point out some kind of hammer, so oral steroids and bronchodilators are absolute lifesavers for asthmatics, sure, and no one would say to just take a breath, not all that, not at all, but it's about the symptoms of asthma and what we know after being especially taking oral steroids.

For decades, many asthmatics have had a higher chance of blindness, bone density problems, autoimmune problems, worsening asthma symptoms and we know that this is very clearly defined, so what I would really like to see happen is when asthmatics get . Yes, they get the medications for their acute asthma attacks that are absolutely necessary, but they also get information, so what they do with that information is up to them, but I really think it would be better for them to know that there are protocols out there that have changed profoundly. to other asthmatics. and I talked to people - one woman was 70 years old and had had asthma since she was 10.

She couldn't walk a couple of blocks without having an attack and she had been on all these medications for decades and decades. She changed the way she acted. in which she was breathing and no longer has asthma symptoms, she was hiking, she was traveling, so this is a real thing. I've talked to dozens of other people. Patrick McEwen is a great example of history. He told his story on the show. Is the same. story and it's like why not try to see if it works and if it doesn't work, but why not try? I've heard this story dozens of times and I've seen the effects of these people on Heroic Doses of Steroids and Bronchodilators 20 times a day and it helps them keep their symptoms at bay, but it doesn't help with the core problem of asthma and much of it is related to inflammation and what is the fastest way to reduce inflammation in the body. is to put you in that parasympathetic state that will reduce inflammation, relax you, breathe better, so not just asthma, although there was a researcher called Carl, who was a vocal teacher and choral director in the '50s and he found this. a new way of breathing, this deeper way of breathing that really helped the singers and then they took it to the VA hospitals in the US, on the east coast, and just teaching emphysemics who were laid out and basically left die, they didn't know what. what to do with these people by just teaching them to breathe, they were able to leave the hospital and there are x-rays of this, there is an interview with pulmonologists who were there to witness this, so it's just another reason why you know that that or example. how powerful simple breathing techniques can be for so many chronic conditions, yeah, thank you for sharing that and I just want to reiterate to people, look, if you have asthma, if you're already on a prescribed regimen of inhalers, neither James nor I I'm asking you to reduce that without consulting anyone.

What we're trying to say and I don't want to talk to you, James, but if you don't agree with this summary, feel free to jump. in but saying look listen to the conversation uh watch some videos maybe I'll link them at the end or in the show notes about 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 doctor and tell them how you feel. We're definitely not saying to stop doing anything or do it on your own, so that's a fair summary of what you said.

james

abs absolutely need to back that up um and go out and look at the science yourself I would suggest being skeptical go out look at the science look at the experts in the field look at what they've put together and you'll be able to make a decision from there.

I also want a second thing. Another thing you mentioned is that this doesn't require you to change your diet or go jogging 10 miles a day. It's free. That's okay, it's accessible to anyone and these techniques are freely available. online you can buy a book that probably costs you $10. Patrick Mcewen's books are fantastic, they are all science based, there are references at the end so I at least think 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 it can have a really profound effect, so one thing I've changed.

I'm always experimenting with different practices and different things, but the more I delve into the breadth of I've written about it in some of my books before. I've been experimenting with different formats. I've been chatting with people on the show about different breathing techniques and I've been very lucky. Patrick came to my house that day. He did a session with my kids, then we recorded the show and you know he's a lovely man. But then he was really convinced that he had to do it or that I would benefit from working to breathe less. Now I think this is quite counterintuitive.

For some people, I'll ask you about this in just a second, but just to give you a little bit of context, I start almost every day with this kind of light breathing exercise for breathing where I really try to slow myself down. Breathe through your nose, which is nice. I expect to breathe through my nose almost all the time these days. I've been working on it for a long period of time, over a year. But I work for about five minutes. I will do this very slow breathing practice through my nose that Patrick taught me and I personally feel that if I want to meditate afterwards I am much more focused than in the zone, but I mean, I can share more than I do if people are interested , but you know a lot of people will think, wait a minute, you're good on oxygen, right?

I want more in my body, why do you say people breathe too much? Why do you say I need to breathe less? I wonder if you could undo that for people, sure, it's basic physiology, so the more you breathe and the more often you breathe, you're going to inhale but you're going to exhale more quickly and if you look at the airways you have the mouth you have the nose you have the throat you have the bronchi this is all 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 of the oxygen will be absorbed in the lower lobes because the blood depends on gravity and there is more blood in the lower lobes of the lungs, so if you breathe at a rate of 20 breaths per minute at a tidal volume, a minute volume of about six liters that you are going to inhale, about 50 of that air will pass through the lungs to the bloodstream. 50 only 50 because a lot of it is here, 50 percent is in that dead space at the top, yeah, you can only use 50 of it, so if you breathe 12 times a minute, you're going to take that air a little deeper and you'll be able to use about seventy percent of that air, which is a huge, huge 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 it more efficient for the exchange of oxygen, but it also allows your heart not to be overloaded by the constant beating, you will lower your blood pressure, all the sim systems of the body will work in harmony with each other. , you're also going to increase your diaphragmatic movement and we know that when you do that, it can help release more lymphatic fluid, so not only does the diaphragm help expand, so the diaphragm is this muscle that's underneath the lungs and that when we inhale, it sinks to allow the lungs to expand and when we exhale, it rises to exhale for a while. exhalation, but that movement also has many other benefits to having more diaphragmatic movement, including the removal of lymphatic fluid, so you see, a lot of people think, well, I want to breathe more, breathe more air because I get more oxygen, the opposite happens When you breathe. more closely in line with your metabolic needs and more slowly, you get more oxygen and you can do a lot more with a lot less effort and your body really likes it which is almost a way of really evaluating modern society this idea that more is better I need to try harder. the more I need to try harder whereas actually a lot of things, whether it's breath work or other things, it's about slowing down and doing less um and I think the word efficiency really hits the nail on the head because If we were to think about our car, for example , we would understand if the fuel we put in if we could drive in such a way that that fuel lasts longer, we don't need to fill up with gas so frequently, we would go, yes.

It sounds brilliant, but that's what we're talking about in the body. Are we saying that you are going to be more efficient? You are going to use fewer resources in your body to obtain those benefits. I mean, it's i i. Think thatthe analogy works with the car, yes, and just to give a vibe to your car analogy, imagine being at a stoplight and just revving the engine, just being in neutral, that will wear out the car much faster and is completely unnecessary. I'm going to use more gas, that's bad news across the board, that's what you're doing when you're breathing excessively and you're just sitting here at rest if I'm breathing at 18 breaths per minute, which is considered normal. the way 12 to 18 is considered normal rhythm if I'm doing that I'm causing a lot of unnecessary wear and tear on my heart or my cardiorespiratory system blood pressure vascular system you name your brain you're stressing out anxiety sympathy I mean I could go on and on go on, so why would you do that?

Why not breathe more closely according to your metabolic needs? This is not just a benefit for people with asthma and anxiety, it's a huge benefit for athletes because if you go outside and if you could go, I don't know if gyms are open there, but they're certainly not open here. Every time I went to my gym you would see people exercising thinking that We are getting more oxygen by doing that and right now if people are sitting at home you can breathe those breaths with me after a while you will feel your fingers get a little cold and you get a little dizzy. in your head, that is not due to an increase in oxygen, but a decrease in oxygen in those areas, a vasoconstriction in those areas, so when you breathe too much, you are actually inhibiting circulation in all areas of your body, so by breathing less you can do a lot. more yeah, I want people to really sit with what you said there, you know, because a lot of people will know that tingling feeling in their fingers, people who suffer from panic attacks will surely know that that feeling is like one of these cardinal symptoms that we talked about and yeah, I think a lot of people would think that's because, well, I don't know what maybe they need to breathe even faster to get rid of this, but it's the opposite, that's exactly the right thing, people.

Think, oh, I'm not getting oxygen to the tips of my hands and feet, that's why they're always cold. I need to get more air in there to get some oxygen and the opposite is happening and you can see this instead of breathing those 18 times a minute which is again too much, you can slow your breathing down to about six times a minute and if that It's hard, do it eight times a minute, no one is watching, this is not a competition, but just by breathing slower and more efficiently, I think you'll be surprised how your body will warm up and how your fingertips will feel, all that numbness.

It will tend to disappear, not for everyone, but for many people, because you are increasing the circulation in those areas, you are making those areas easier to discharge oxygen because there is an increase in CO2 there is a balance of CO2 and oxygen that That's what it's about again for people with chronic problems or for athletes it's that balance that's essential a lot of people say they suffer from cold hands and cold toes, has any of your research found this that something Could this be related to breathing? Of course, there are other causes of this, but it seems pretty reasonable to me, looking at basic physiology, that that could absolutely be a cause without a doubt.

That's why if you look at populations, it's not a coincidence that many asthmatics also have anxiety and many people with anxiety and asthma have cold fingers and toes, so this is something that can be measured and You can see through really great respirators. If you are a yogi or wim hof, when you take control of your breathing, you can not only return circulation to these areas, but you can also overheat the body to the point that you can go and sit in an ice bath. Wim has sat in an ice bath for two hours and his core temperature has not dropped and yogis have been doing this for thousands of years.

He has been studied at Harvard by Herbert Benson. We know it's real and it simply shows what the human body is truly capable of. The first thing before you go out and become a super breather is to get the foundation of breathing right and many of us overbreathe by slowing down our breathing according to our metabolic needs. You'd be surprised how

transform

ative it is. effect it will have on your health, yes, it caught my attention that you mentioned what is considered the normal respiratory rate or what we call respiratory rate and you know, I remember it from medical school and from my early days as a junior doctor. 12 to 16 or 12 to 18 depending on the guidelines you look at and before this call today, before we chat, I thought I would look up some major medical institutions that you know and see what's going on, and I came across Cleveland. clinic website where they talked about respiratory rate and they said normal, I think it's 12 to 16 or 12 to 18. less than 12 is very little more than 25 is too much and I thought, wow, that's amazing because we're talking about what is perhaps optimal. the efficiency may or may not be six breaths per minute, maybe they tell me it's six breaths per minute, but our medical guidelines are actually giving us almost double that, which again is just remarkable, isn't it?

This is normal versus optimal, what is optimal for a human being. A lot of those guidelines were based on people with pathologies, you know, and I was talking to my father-in-law about this. I saw the same guideline from the Cleveland Clinic and thought, that seems high, and I sent it to them. He said when he was in medical school it was 8 to 12. So in 30 years it almost doubled what is considered normal, so he was surprised to see that he also thinks that's too much. and we know by measuring what happens when you're breathing at a pace and again people get so obsessed, I say in the book 5.5 Second Inhale, people have written, I'm half a second away, I'm going to be okay, I said God.

My, what have I done to these poor people? Anything in that range so you can go down to five, four breaths per minute, six, seven or eight, whatever you feel comfortable with, we can clearly see what happens to the body when we breathe at this rate and when we breathe a little deeper than we're used to, we can see what's happening with blood pressure circulation and almost most importantly, the function of the autonomic nervous system if you get a heart rate variability monitor and watch If you watch what happens when you talk or when you don't focus 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 that these lines that were irregular and disorganized become beautiful. sine waves because your body is entering a state of what researchers call coherence where all systems are really working at maximum efficiency, and of course, why wouldn't you want to work at maximum efficiency?

When you do, you can think better. You will feel better and your body will be able to help heal itself. Yeah, it's just amazing and I just want you to know that we're going to address those things, the tumors and all these kinds of things. I won't say crazy things, all this kind of stuff. like super breathing territories that people may want to hear about, but you know what you're talking about is how you breathe day to day what is your normal you know what we can improve that we can do it consciously for just a few minutes one day just remember to your body what it's like when you're breathing six or eight a minute and you know I'm not surprised people have sent emails saying james, you said 5.5, I'm at 5.7 or 5.8 um, you know?

And I think this is almost it. I see this a lot too. I get messages on Instagram all the time like, yeah, but what about this and that? I think sometimes we get so caught up in the small details that we miss the big picture. is that we are breathing as a society, we are probably breathing too much, well, can we individually practice a little bit every day to slow down? I think it's pretty simple if we can get to 5.5 or six in and six out, great, but I guess anything slower than what we normally do will probably produce some kind of benefit.

Yes, they found four to ten breaths per minute. All of that in that range is going to have profound benefits, so I just want to. wait a second, something you said, we're so western that we hear, oh, breathing is the last thing. I'm going in one hundred percent. I'm going to try my hardest and do it perfectly. This is not what I tried to deviate from in the book, it was this granular detail and look at this overview, what healthy breathing is, how we can do it, what it does to our body and you can focus on the specific ways to breathe. hundreds of different ways to breathe once you've built that foundation, so we know this slower breathing we know how it affects us and we know that most of us breathe too much and too often, even just a few minutes a day.

Of these six breaths we'll just call them six pressures per minute, it might confuse people who go into the five, yeah we'll just call them six pressures per minute, start with that and then go down to 5.5 or five or whatever you want. do a few minutes a day uh doctor patricia gerbarg and doctor richard brown, he's in columbia, they've used this for people with anxiety and depression, even bulimia and anorexia, all these different illnesses that you would think would have nothing to do with with breathing, but These populations traditionally breathe much more than they should, they are constantly stressed and it is completely moving to see these people reacquainted with their breathing because they have completely lost control of it for decades and just take a slow breath and constant in a many of them get instantly scared because it is too slow for them, they associate it with an attack, but once they acclimatize to it, this can take a session or two to achieve.

You watch this transformation happen, you simply watch the stress disappear. their faces and again, this is not just a subjective measure, it's that their bodies go into a state of healing that we can see very clearly with instruments, so the fact that psychiatrists are using this, doctors are using it to asthma, it works. generally for athletics, for performance, it works too, so even five minutes they found can have an effect on blood pressure, five minutes of healthy breathing a day, so start with that, just focus your time again, unlike meditation, we know the benefits of meditation, no one is going to argue that my argument is that many of those benefits from the beginning are tied to the way you breathe because I don't know of any meditation where you are sitting and not concentrating in your breathe, so if it's hard for people to sit in a dark room and look at a wall, you can breathe this way while watching TV while driving at the dinner table, I mean, whenever you want, start with a few minutes and starts. developing it because after that, hopefully, it will start to become a habit, but first you have to acclimate your body to this new way of breathing, which is really the natural, healthy way of breathing that we all forgot about when you mentioned anxiety, depression and other conditions.

I would even advocate for weight loss and explain what I mean by that when I say I'm a big believer in many of these chronic diseases, a multi-pronged approach often works much better than just looking for that magic bullet and if you think about excessive weight gain, a lot of the issues that drive I'm not here to talk about proper diets, okay, because like you said, it's a religious type debate that I'm not sure about. useful most of the time, but stress and our emotions drive much of our eating behavior, there is no doubt that there is a study that shows that 80 percent of us change our recent behavior in response to stress, about 45 percent of us eat more. we eat less, so I would say if you're someone who eats more in response to stress, then maybe work on your diet, do you know if it's paleo or vegan to take two extremes, maybe that's not the best use of your time. , maybe it's working. about your stress levels and if we breathe too much if we breathe too much um, that's information for your brain, you know, that keeps you in that state of stress, so a daily breathing practice and I've done it with patients as part of a strategy multiple helps them feel in control of themselves like, oh, I feel less stressed, therefore, I don't need as much food anymore to offset that stress, you know, no, I'm not trying to jump around too much.

There I understand that you are doing rigorous research and you put it in the book, but as a doctor, I really see this work in a wide variety of different conditions, it helps you sleep better, you know which of my patients doesn't? I don't want to sleep better, blood pressure, you knowwhat do I mean? I think you can make a case for a lot of different conditions because breathing is fundamental to who we are and you know what our body thinks we are like at that moment, you know? running away from a tiger or are we kicking back, relaxing and thriving in a safe place when I first heard that breathing and respiratory problems specifically could be associated with metabolic disorders, it seemed like a crazy tangent until you look at how the body works and look at how it works. blood sugar and you will know that if you are in a constant state of stress, your adrenaline will increase, your blood sugar will increase and the longer your blood sugar is increasing, the insulin will become less sensitive and We know that Sleep apnea is directly related to diabetes, the onset of some forms of diabetes, but you don't have to suffer from sleep apnea to be more prone to these conditions if you walk around stressed all day.

You have this intravenous drip of adrenaline, your blood sugar goes up all the time, your body can handle it for a while, but it will eventually break down, so I couldn't agree with you more that if you focus on losing weight, you can do it. It's not just about calories, it has to be how your body processes those calories because if you're constantly stressed, you have this unconscious stress, you're going to have a much harder time digesting food, so you're not going to be able to digest food. Process this food efficiently, which will cause all kinds of problems.

Dr. Stephen Porges did some amazing research on the vagus nerve and this is the nerve that really is this accelerator that can activate 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 who would have sexual problems, they would have digestion problems, they would have sleeping 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 the connectivity with the vagus nerve because they were constantly stressed, so being in this state of constant stress all the signals that those organs normally send to the brain were cut off by fixing this Vagus nerve connectivity specifically through breathing practices through calming practices all those organs start to function and all those problems can disappear.

I'm not saying this is going to work for everyone with multiple issues, but if you think about the body as a whole system. and if you think of the vagus nerve as a telephone network and if you think of breathing as a way to access that network and open 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 was amazing and then it makes me think about all these types of tracking devices that we have now.

I have and is there a way to predict a panic attack? I mean, tell me a little more about that. I think people will be very interested to know that that's exactly right and guess how he was doing it. I was looking at respiratory rate specifically, I was looking at CO2, so the lower the CO2 was. able to predict a panic attack an hour before it occurs because the panic attack is preceded by increased breathing, the more you breathe, the more CO2 you expel, the more constriction you will feel throughout your body. body, the more it will flare up and become agitated in that attack, so just having it was able to identify it an hour before and then it would send a little alert to these people to slow down their breathing and just slow down their breathing. and by allowing their bodies to reach that healthy level of CO2, they were able to decrease panic attacks.

This was after a few weeks, several of his patients continued doing this for a year and the numbers were incredible, something like 80 percent don't do it. Quote me on this, but about 80 percent of us no longer have these attacks, so this is a study that was published about eight years ago and is widely available. Her name is Alicia Murat again at smu she has done a ton of interesting work but if it really sounds crazy breathing could be so closely related to panic attacks but if you look at how the body systems work and look at the influence of breathing on all of those symptom systems it makes a lot of sense that it is so closely related, yes it really is amazing, and then I think about the increasing levels of anxiety which of course is related to panic attacks, it's not exactly the same, but it is like you know they're broadly related. in the same area and you know emails and now we're moving into a culture where there's a lot of zooms and I think I've heard you talk about this before, how it changes the way you breathe and you know we can almost induce a feeling of anxiety . and panic by changing the way we breathe, of course we can, and if anyone wants to do that, they can start breathing in this very unhealthy way right now, it will stimulate a sympathetic response and that can be easily measured, so I thought this was interesting too.

At ucsf, which is very close to my home, university of california at san francisco, dr. margaret chesney had worked for decades at the national health research institutes researching something called continuous partial consciousness, also known as email apnea, and what he discovered was that when we sit down at our desks in the morning, one estimate says 80 of office workers do this, we open our email, we turn on zoom, we turn on Twitter, oh my goodness, I have 60 emails. , we stop breathing, we just stop breathing, then we're gone, so she called it email. apnia because we are very distracted and stressed by what is happening if you think about when you are extremely let's say there is a tiger coming around the corner of my house what am I going to do I am going to be silent because that is a reflex reaction being very afraid be silent so you don't become prey and once the fight starts, I'm going to breathe a ton to have more energy for my body.

Feeding more energy into my brain, my heart and other essential muscles to get me out of that situation or fight that thing, but we do the same unconsciously at work, even if there is no tiger around, even if there is nothing that threatens us, our feeling of threat. has become so sensitized that many of us will stop breathing or start breathing completely dysfunctionally and discovered that if you do this long enough it can have some of the same effects on us as sleep apnea, i.e. neurological disorders , physical problems again. increase the adrenaline in the blood glucose and it's something that very few of us are aware of and I was wearing a pulse oximeter and all these different measurements, which happened every morning, I would put the things on and I would sit down, my breathing would go to the hell every morning, um and I realized you know that's probably why around 11:30 I was getting a slight headache.

I used to feel a little fatigued. It was still morning time and he was not full of energy. So by simply changing your breathing again, you can allow your body to function much more efficiently. Yeah, I mean, thanks for sharing that and I think the term email apnea is brilliant because it just brings life to people who don't check email every day. They don't spend a lot of time on their computers, particularly now more than ever and I really, you know, I can't help but shake the feeling that you mentioned the tiger, which might be showing up around the block in San Francisco, near where you are. live, which I hope isn't happening, but your body is actually doing what it should do in response to a threat.

Your body must become anxious, it must become hypervigilant, you wanted your blood sugar to go up, but your blood pressure is bound to go up, all these things are happening to prepare you for danger, so that you can escape from that danger. , so your body is actually functioning the way it is designed to function, given the fact that it perceives you to be a threat, so the problem is that we perceive the email inbox or the multiple open screens as a threat, so your body reacts the same way, so it's not like there's anything wrong with people, right?

In fact, I think it's very empowering that your body doesn't. broken actually your body is doing what it's supposed to do you just have to give it a different signal you just have to teach it go hey you know what I'm not in danger there's no tiger there it's only 20 emails right? um I'm a big fan of talking to patients about transition times, so a transition time, let's say, from work to family life rather than just coming from work and then trying to relax with your partner and your kids. maybe they have a five minute transition where you breathe a little bit or do some yoga, something just to move, you shift from one gear to the next and I've been talking to a lot of people, especially during the pandemic, about zoom because I said before you eat your lunch just take a couple of minutes, maybe go out into the garden if you're lucky to have one, maybe just slow down your breathing, do two minutes of nasal breathing and it will put your body in a different state and you will digest the food better.

I crave different amounts and have actually seen er james. I'm not sure if you've come across this. I don't see any research to support this but I have seen some patients over the years who thought they were reacting to a certain food now of course some people react to certain foods either by intolerance or by analogy but sometimes I realize they were reacting to the way their body was while they were eating, so when they did it for a couple of minutes, I had a breath called the 345 breath, which I have been recommending for many years again, similar theme, a longer exhale than an inhale, but people who try that three four five breath for two minutes before dinner sometimes say "hello." I don't really react to that food anymore, so I'm like, well, maybe it's that you're eating in a completely stressed state and your body can't take that food, but when you relax and relax, your body says, hey. , this food is good.

Absolutely true, it all comes down to nature and I thought you made a very good point. There is nothing wrong with feeding more circulation to our skeletal muscles when we are 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's so sensitized now that people will react to an email the same way they would have reacted a thousand years ago to that tiger or to that mammoth attack or whatever and and So, you know, a lot of this is psychological, but the great thing about breathing is that by changing the way you breathe, you can change the way your mind processes thoughts, feelings and emotions, and we know this because it's a street of double meaning, 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, another reason why that slower breathing works.

I feel better? I can think more clearly. It's not a placebo. This is how it works in our bodies and it is very important to recognize this throughout the day. Those times of transition. What a wonderful thing, especially before a meal, especially if you have intestinal problems. a couple of minutes that's not asking too much breathe calmly relax and go in and eat and I think you'd be surprised how quickly you'll show the benefits of digestion I don't think it's a big mystery, why? In so many cultures there is grace before a meal, just when you sit down, you calmly recite any phrase, no matter the religion, you sit there for a moment, you are grateful for the food you are about to eat and then you eat it, I think there is a scientific basis on how effective that is.

I completely agree and in fact a few weeks ago I finished writing my fourth weight loss book for people looking to lose weight and I wrote a section on this exact area, what exactly do you want? I mean I actually don't think this is by accident. There are many benefits to doing this and it reflects our busy modern culture. We don't have time for this kind of thing. You know, we have evolved as humans. I need all that kind of slow stuff, that gratitude, that grace, but you know what we're realizing more than ever, actually, it's like you say, it's a lost art, thatIt's a lot, just talking about it, 5.5 breaths per minute, 5.5 seconds of inhalation. exhale, this is nothing new either, this was all adapted, the researchers found it from Buddhist prayers, from Kundalini yoga prayers, from Catholic prayers, all the ones they looked at looked at this respiratory rate of about 5.5 seconds and these Italian researchers said this is probably not It's a coincidence that all these different cultures came to the same conclusion that while we feel much more connected to ourselves, to the universe and to everything, by reciting this prayer, a lot What it had to do with, here's what researchers said about breathing rate to breathe in this certain way to calm your body and make you more receptive to that message.

Yeah thanks James, I was chatting to my cameraman Gareth who just logged off at the moment and I was saying, "Hey, I'm going to talk to James, I've known since you." I have listened to my talks with Patrick and Brian. He has changed his life. You know, now he tried the mouth bandage at night. Sleep better. He now runs. Jog lightly, just breathe through your nose and really feel the benefits. But he said one thing. I wonder if. You could ask James about that, he says that when I go up the stairs now, if I go up a lot of stairs and breathe through my nose, my recovery is much faster than when I breathe through my mouth, but you already answered that you actually said that throughout From this Conversation you are basically saying that your physiology changes, it works more optimally when we breathe through the nose instead of the 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 amazing, um. and you mentioned the athletes and I just want to, if you could just briefly, I mean the time we have left.

I would love to cover this and also maybe some of those super breathing techniques so we can cover athleticism and recovery type and I think it would be very helpful why people should really make that effort. So the key to athletic performance is that you want to do more for longer in a state of pure efficiency and we know that nasal breathing will allow you to perform more with less effort. heart rate you will get more oxygen more efficiently by breathing less again. We know how counterintuitive this is, but the science is very clear on this and you can see it with professional athletes who have adopted nasal breathing.

Sania Richards Ross is the best. sprinter for 10 years, it's fascinating to see photos of her at the Olympics with her mouth closed, breathing nasally, all her competitors next to her breathing through their mouths, she's at the front of the line winning golds over and over again and she's just an example of what we've already known for decades that Dr. John Dewyard has done tons of scientific work looking at cyclists with nasal breathing versus mouth breathing and looking at their endurance, looking at their performance and looking at recovery, and It's such a drastic difference between those. Two, what is the reason why many people give up is that they try nasal breathing.

They have been habitually breathing through their mouths while running for decades, sometimes trying nasal breathing as if they can't get enough air in. but sometimes it can take weeks or even months to really acclimate this organ to breathing properly, but once you do, the benefits are enormous and look at the work of phil maffetone, dr. john dewyar and some of the athletes who have adopted proper nasal breathing o Try it, most importantly, try it yourself and you will be able to see the difference very clearly. I would tell people because I've literally been experiencing this for maybe 12 or 18 months.

You know, when I go for a walk, I breathe nasally. Know? No doubt. I'll make sure not to think about it now because I know why I do it, but initially I had to think about it consciously. You know, I take the kids by the warts, we all go. We are all like trying to detect the mouth of a foreign person. Greetings, I am trying to instill it in my children from a young age and this is important. In reality, I went for a run with my son yesterday. He is like dad, dad. Look, that guy is running through the mouth, breathing through the mouth. that guy breathing I'm like I'm conflicted have I started something on him?

I'm not sure, but on one level I like it because I think it's okay, like you said before, awareness is the key, without awareness we can't make any changes, so first of all let's be aware of what's happening, let's not beat ourselves up. , let's be aware and then let's be aware. go well, maybe start with a walk, maybe a five minute walk every day, nasal breathing and I'll see how you go. And for me personally, I'm now starting to run. I was going to buy a heart rate monitor and I thought you know what, forget it.

I don't want more and more technology in my life. I'm trying to be more minimalist and use nasal breathing as my barometer as soon as I'm going too fast, which I can't nasally. breathe and I have to open my mouth, that's my trigger to slow down and I really feel like I'm getting more efficient and it feels really good and you know, I'm not stiff the next day or that night. I recover quickly again. I will admit that this is a subjective experience, but it supports the data and science that you have written so beautifully about in your book, but that's exactly it, it may be a subjective experience, but it is based on real science if you look at Nasal Breathing and look to use that oxygen more efficiently, you're allowing your body to operate in an aerobic state for longer than going anaerobic and building up lactic acid and all that, and this is very well known by having that balance again. of co2 and oxygen and something that Patrick Mcewen told me that I really liked, he said never push yourself harder than you can breathe properly, so once you've reached that threshold and you're breathing, it's like you really have to breathe. . through my mouth or you are breathing in a dysfunctional way you have to slow down and come back up and by working slowly like this your performance will shoot through the roof and we have seen it time and time again and again , these weren't studies that I was doing, these are studies that have been around for decades and right now there's this new interest in breathing in athletics and I have a feeling that these people who are going to adopt these healthy breathing habits are just doing it. doing. to show some incredible improvements yes, no, absolutely and it's again, it just reflects the culture, it's more, we're faster now, faster, it's like I'm going to work, I want to work hard, I'm going to do it. growling I'm going to be you know it's it's it's what I want it's a Western thing I guess it's not on some level it's I really feel like we're at that point now in Western culture where we have to go look, we do A lot of things are wonderfully good. , but we're a little lost on some of these other things and maybe we just slow down and do less when we know that in the adverse trade we exercise or move our bodies, maybe we use our nose as a barometer and then I know you'll be working on your efficiency, maybe you will, you will run less, but you will run more efficiently, which will actually lead you to run more in a few months, yes there are still links, there is nothing wrong with running more. and run faster than a competitor, true, it's human nature to want to do that, but if you really want to do it, you have to take control of your body systems and you have to operate more efficiently.

Why waste energy? Why not store? that energy then use it to outperform your competitor, that's what sports performance is all about and something you mentioned that I thought was interesting is, in many ways, similar to what we know about eating now, food that I remember in the '80s while I was growing up in the '80s, just the Only things in the house were like processed food and this was regular white bread, Velveeta cheese and everyone seemed to eat this way. Well, we know that eating those things is bad news. It would be difficult to find someone who would do it. defending the consumption of highly processed foods is bad news, it took us a while to get to this point so it took about 20 years of science to come to light now that we all know it and I truly believe that breathing is the next so 20 years ago even today some people poop they say it doesn't matter how we breathe the science is very 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 consciousness is I'm really starting to break down right now, I agree with James, so just for the final stage of this conversation, then we have to put it into perspective, you know, we're selling the scene where the People are breathing too. a lot, they're breathing too fast and it's not necessarily how yes, of course, breathing when you exercise and run, make sure you work on it if you want, but again, if you want to do a sprint, you have to breathe through your mouth to beat an opponent. , okay, what we're talking about is how you breathe correctly on a regular basis, so you know, because I know there's some confusion, so just to clarify, that'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 to achieve those six or even eight breaths per minute see how it feels now if you want to go beyond that if you want to get into super breathing territory, right, things interesting ones that people understand, oh you know what I want, I want to do a marathon on Everest like vim half or you know, which again draws us into the culture of doing more and I want to do all those crazy things, there are quite a few different methods in those who consciously about breathing so you were talking about lack of 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 have experienced and when I saw him speak in Los Angeles a few years ago and I recorded a podcast with him a few weeks ago that hasn't come out yet and we actually did it where you know for 30 or 40 breaths you inhale and exhale deeply and then you hold, what's that doing?

Why should people think about these excessive breathing practices? Did you try them as part of your research? Did you investigate the fact-finding hearing? What kind of what would you tell people about these practices? For those who are interested, sure, the first thing I have to back up something you said, I'm talking about breathing through your mouth as a habit, some people wrote to me and said I noticed I was laughing today and I took a couple of breaths through my mouth. mouth and again I thought I had made this very clear. in the book so I've been breathing through my mouth talking to you today and when I swim in the ocean I breathe through my mouth when I laugh, I breathe through my mouth this is perfectly fine and it's perfectly natural So a few hundred breaths a day, breathing by mouth, it's okay to take 25,000, it's about that habit and that chronic breathing.

You want to breathe through your nose as often as you can, but that doesn't mean you should hate yourself for laughing or breathing through your mouth I just want to make that very clear for everyone or for the swimmers, right swimmers, swimmers like you, you know that when they swim they have to drink it, it's not necessary, but they can swallow a lot of water unless you breathe through your mouth, so it could be normal for swimming, it can be fine. You know, I swim and surf almost every day here in San Francisco and I'll tell you, I don't breathe through my nose. when I do that it's impossible, there's salt water up there and there's nothing wrong with that exactly chronic habit, so in the book afterwards I like that foundation of healthy breathing that everyone can benefit from.

I kept hearing about Wim hof breathing. These intense pranayamas, holotropic breathing, these long breathing holes, I said, this is completely contrary to what I learned before, we shouldn't like it, acne is a bad thing, breathing is a bad thing, all of that is true when it is unconscious, but when you do it consciously. When you put yourself in a position where you tell yourself to follow this ancient breathing technique and some of them include breathing in through your mouth, exhaling through your mouth or even inhaling through your mouth, something amazing happens because you allow yourself to take control consciously. unconscious functions in your body, so with whims specifically what I thought was so interesting is that we have this autonomic nervous system that activates us for sympathetic stress or shuts us down and relaxes parasympathetic and we have been told that if you pick up a In the book of text it will be said that this is autonomous, automatic and beyond our conscious control, but we can control it through breathing and when we control the function of our nervous system, we can also take control of the functions of our immune system and we have seen these people. who have been practicing the version of wim, which he calls the wim hof method, eh, but he is very clear that this has been around forAt least a thousand years ago, he didn't invent anything, he was able to take this and distribute it to the masses and he's done it better than anyone else on the planet for respiratory awareness, but it's no coincidence that people who practice this, people with autoimmune diseases, like arthritis , eczema, psoriasis, whatever they may show a marked decrease in the symptoms of their problems and sometimes claim that "They seem to be completely cured by adopting these simple breathing habits because what they do is breathe in a way that you intentionally stress them out for a short period of time so you can spend the rest of the day relaxing and healing again a little counterintuitive, why would I want to stress myself out on purpose if I'm stressed for the rest of the day?

The point is to focus on that and get back on track. balance in your body and in your health, and that is exactly what is most intense. breathing practices, I think what you said there about where this came from that no one knew has invented anything you know that vim is not that these are all practices. who have been there but you also paid tribute to them he is very he is he has You told it to the masses in a fantastic way. You've said that you know that in the Indus Valley 5,000 years ago there are writings about this and I actually think you wrote about that yoga or the reestablishment of the scriptures that you saw.

Initially yoga was just a breathing practice, I think that's exactly true, it's not true, crunches up there were no standing postures, there was no movement, it was focused on meditating and breathing, only in the last hundred years have we developed vinyasa flow that didn't exist until a hundred years ago and I want to make this very clear to all yogis. I do yoga all the time. I love it. I have seen the benefits. There is science that demonstrates the benefits. But this practice of this modern yoga that most of us do is just it's modern, so the first yoga was a practice of breathing and concentration and then it developed into holding a posture and breathing opening this side, inhaling into that lung, opening the other side and then about a hundred years ago, 110 years ago, those positions. they were combined into this kind of dance-like movement that had nothing to do with early yoga so it was really based on breathing and focusing on breathing, yeah it's amazing and I think you quoted someone in the book, "I can." I don't remember who it was, but someone told you that there are as many breathing practices as there are diets.

I'd never heard that before. I thought it was amazing because we talked about conscious overbreathing and you know, if we had more time, I would talk. about tumor breathing and holotropic breathing, but you know what's in your book for people to read about that, but that's who said that phrase, who was it, a free diver told me that, very early on, which I thought which was very surprising. I didn't know there were different ways to breathe, this was years and years ago, but by adopting those different breathing practices you can bring your body to different states, you can relax on purpose, you can stress yourself on purpose, which has pronounced benefits. to do that too and again you can find books, there are yoga books with 400 different breathing practices with all these crazy names, that's all great, but I wanted to focus on the general concept behind it, there are heavy breathing practices about breathing , there is holding your breath, there is slow breathing and nasal breathing and you can call it whatever you want, you can practice this Chinese version, the Greek version, the Indian version, it doesn't matter because they are actually all doing the same thing.

For me, it is no coincidence that the wim hof method, also known as tumo, has so many benefits of sudarshan kriya, which has been studied in 60 different independent studies to help people with anxiety, depression, autoimmune problems. It's not a coincidence that these things are helping people in the same way because guess what they have, you breathe very hard and then you breathe very slowly. It's almost exactly the same practice, it's just coming from different directions. Before we finish, you mentioned freediving and I know you wrote a book about it. I read it still and it's definitely at the top of my list to read it, uh, when I want to have some time, but I had a question about free divers who obviously have masterful control of their breathing.

Did you notice that there was a topic in which you know that a free driver, by definition, needs to have a very high level of control over his breathing. You know a high degree of tolerance to carbon dioxide so that it can go down and maintain that you know how to tolerate the construction. of carbon dioxide in your body without having that strong need to breathe, given the many benefits of improving breathing, have you heard any stories from free drivers who actually many of them had mental health problems, depression, anxiety or autoimmune conditions that that got better or the flip side is that it was those conditions that really led them to drive freely in the first place.

I thought it was so interesting to me that a lot of them had anxiety issues, sometimes depression issues, sometimes addiction issues. There's a great movie that, uh. someone made a very short film, jonathan rempel, about a free diver who had all those things and discovered free diving because when you free dive you put it on it's almost like a forced meditation, you can't free dive stressed, you can't free dive with anxiety, you can't freedive with a feeling of panic, you have to completely surrender to the water and connect so deeply with your body and when you are down there everything is silent, that's why you were so connected with your breathing and with your brain turned on . on such an intimate level and this reconnects people with themselves when they are then on dry land and some people have found salvation through freediving and a lot of that is breath control so I had never seen.

I met dozens and dozens of free divers that book looked deep into the ocean from the surface to the 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 that suffered. for anxiety I have never seen anyone panic because you just can't do that when you are deep in the water holding your breath there has been no study on this I think it would be fascinating to look at someone's physiology before and after training to freediving, look at panic markers, look at other problems, including blood glucose, and how it reacts because freediving is the supreme art of breathing, you are focused on your breath connected to your breath. all the time it is breathing, it is mindfulness, it is meditation, it is all in one right to be able to do that practice and a study that we have not had the opportunity to talk about and that I have emphasized a lot in my book and I would encourage people to reading it in the book, it's just this idea of ​​fear and that lady who didn't do it, who had this genetic condition without the amygdala, this kind of emotional sensor, the fear center in the brain, and how basically you can't get stressed. .

She wouldn't be scared of anything until she got carbon dioxide. She received a dose of carbon dioxide and that then stressed her out and scared her. I'm not going to spoil the rest of the story for people, but what's really amazing? That's why, and I really want people to understand this, we think that fear and anxiety are always due to an external event, oh, that thing that's happening to us, we forget that it can be biology, it can be physiology and I really know how many people suffer . of these types of conditions and I really want to encourage you that what James has been talking about read the book, learn about these techniques and start small because it really can transform every aspect of your life. um, James, look, I'm not really saying that. this often, but it is a phenomenal book.

I feel very lucky. I actually have these early copies. They're still sort of old, unrevised manuscripts, so I feel like I've got something pretty special here. The podcast is called. feel better live longer because james i it's pretty obvious but fundamentally I've seen time and time again that people who feel better about themselves get more out of their lives and I think it's pretty clear that you're arguing that if you breathe better we're going to live longer that way. which I want, if you know, I want people to be inspired by this I want them to get your book but I want people to take action I don't want them to just listen to it and walk away that was interesting and then go on with their lives so I always like that leave the podcast with my guests with some kind of practical advice.

I know you've already covered a lot of that, but just something like what you would say someone has heard. this and they are still skeptical how would you encourage them to start a breathing practice in their daily life? I would say see it for yourself because you are your best judge of this if you have a blood pressure monitor and much more. of people take their blood pressure before and after a simple breathing practice six times a minute. You could start with that, start small exactly like you said and give it a while. For that, give it a week, so adopt a simple practice and again this.

It doesn't require you to go to a monastery or sit in a dark corner, you can adopt healthy breathing practices anywhere and we know there is a solid scientific basis behind all of these things. We have seen people absolutely transform by adopting simple breathing habits. It is not a placebo effect, it is absolutely real and I am convinced that I have experienced it myself. I've talked to dozens and dozens of people who have also experienced it. I have spoken to leaders in the field who have introduced me to everyone. from your data and I find that this is an underrated and underrecognized aspect of our health, but that is starting to change and couldn't happen sooner, especially now in the middle of a pandemic, focusing on breathing can really have some transformative effects.

Thank you very much, really useful tips, thanks for writing a brilliant book, thanks for your time today and good luck with the rest of the promotion. I would love to see this book be a best seller in every country in the world. out there gives people this information, this knowledge that is really transformative, so thank you, thank you so much for inviting me to appreciate it, hit subscribe for more inspiration and ideas on how to feel better so you can get more out of life and if You have a moment, why don't you check out this conversation I've chosen as the perfect follow-up?

Remember that a lifestyle change is always worth it because when you feel better, you have lived longer.