Breath - James Nestor

The New Science of a Lost Art

Nestor suffered from stress and some physical ailments and on the recommendation of his doctor took a breathing class. That changed everything for him and he spent the next several years studying breathing and uncovering this “lost art.”

[bq] “We assume, at our peril, that breathing is a passive action, just something we do. […] But breathing is not binary.”

Calls people who explore breathing “pulmonauts.”

I. The Experiment

1. The Worst Breather in the Animal Kingdom

If the mouth doesn’t grow wide enough, often due to food that’s too soft, the roof of the mouth grows upwards instead and blocks the development of the nasal cavities.

Humans are the “most plugged-up species on earth.”

Nestor and Anders Olsson, a fellow pulmonaut, do a 20 day experiment. The first 10 days they get their noses plugged and breathe only through their mouth. Then the net 10 days only through the nose, and also do breathing exercises.

Looking at skull of people just a few hundred years ago, see that they had much larger jaws, mouth, and nasal cavities, straighter teeth, and very likely fewer breathing problems.

As our ancestors learned to cook food, their brains grew, but their mouths and noses shrunk to make space for the larger brain. Our big snout turned into a small protruding nose that’s much less efficient at filtering air.

The adaptations that allowed us to speak, similarly changed our throat and made us prone to choke.

2. Mouthbreathing

Experiments in the 1990s showed that athletes could see huge performance gains if they focused on and trained nasal breathing.

Experiments with monkeys in the 1970s and 80s show just how quickly their faces would deform when you force them to mouth-breathe.

Sleep breathing issues, snoring, and sleep apnea are linked to a huge number of other diseases, from depression to ADHD, cancer to heart disease.

Nestor himself really started suffering during his mouth-breathing experiment and felt absolutely miserable.

II. The Lost Art and Science of Breathing

3. The Nose

Our noses go through regular cycles with the nostrils expanding and contracting. The two different sides switch their dominance.

[bq] “The interior of the nose, it turned out, is blanketed with erectile tissue, the same flesh that covers the penis, clitoris, and nipples.”

Found that breathing through different nostril has different effect on brain: Breathing through right nostril activates sympathetic nervous system, the fight-or-flight response. It increases blood pressure, heart rate, and cortisol. Left nostril does the opposite, activating the parasympathetic nervous system. I cools the body, and reduces anxiety. It also stimulates creativity.

Many techniques exist, especially in yoga tradition, to deliberately make use of this difference through “alternate nostril breathing.”

The hair and membranes in our nose vibrate to slowly move mucus, and everything trapped in it, inward and down into the stomach where it’s sterilized and then passed out.

[bq] “Working together, the different areas of the turbinates will heat, clean, slow, and pressurize air so that the lungs can extract more oxygen with each breath."

American native tribes have practiced nasal breathing for millennia, believing that mouth-breathing causes disease, stress, lack of growth, and ugly faces.

If the nose isn’t used for breathing, nasal tissue will very quickly atrophy.

Taping the mouth shut during sleep can be very effective to help with breathing issues, and many people have actually used this technique.

4. Exhale

Framingham Study, a 70 year long study with 5200 subjects focused on heart disease, found that lung capacity was the greatest indicator of lifespan.

Lung capacity can be increased through training.

Blood circulates through body roughly once per minute, and much of the speed and strength of this circulation is due to the pressure that builds in our chest as we breathe, the thoracic pump. It’s driven by the diaphragm.

[bq] “A typical adult engages as little as 10 percent of the range of the diaphragm when breathing, which overburdens the heart, elevates blood pressure, and causes a rash of circulatory problems.”

Diaphragm is sometimes called “the second heart.”

The exhale, more so than the inhale, is the key part of the breath.

5. Slow

Carbon dioxide actually plays a much more important role than we usually give it credit for. It’s not just a waste product.

[bq] “We lose weight through exhaled breath. Foe every ten pound of fat lost in our bodies, eight and a half pounds of it comes out through the lungs. Most of it is carbon dioxide mixed with a bit of water vapor. […] The lungs are the weight-regulating system of our body."

[bq] “What our bodies really want, what they require to function properly, isn’t faster or deeper breaths. It’s not more air. What we need is more carbon dioxide.”

Inhaling more oxygen is useless to healthy people, since we just breathe the excess out again without our tissue absorbing it.

Carbon dioxide is required for the hemoglobin in the blood to release oxygen into the tissue. Without CO2 we would suffocate, even with fully oxygenated blood.

[q] “Carbon dioxide is, in fact, a ore fundamental component of living matter than is oxygen.” - Yandell Henderson (Yale physiologist)

Average people only absorb around a quarter of the oxygen they breathe in. Slowing down our breath can make this more efficient, without or bodies getting less oxygen.

Almost all traditions in the world contain forms of prayer or meditation that when analyzed lead to a slow breathing rate around of around 6 breaths per second. At that rate the heart rate slows down and the body comes in resonance.
[NFW: Exactly the same rate as the typical “resonance frequency” of Heart, Breath, Mind]

This technique has been used to help people with anxiety as well as certain chronic conditions.

[bq] “The resonant breathing offered the same benefit as meditation for people who didn’t want to meditate. […] It offered the healing touch of prayer for people who weren’t religious.”

[bq] “Prayer heals, especially when it’s practiced at 5.5 breaths a minute.”

6. Less

[bq] “We’ve become a culture of overbreathers. Most of us breathe too much, and up to a quarter of the modern population suffers from more serious chronic overbreathing.”

[bq] “The key to optimum breathing, and all the health, endurance, and longevity benefits that come with it, is to practice fewer inhales and exhales in a smaller volume.”

Breathing has strong effects on circulation, blood pH, and metabolism. Overbreathing can throw these systems out of balance and lead to all sorts of issues like high blood pressure.

Hypoventilation training, training at significantly lower breath intake, has been discovered several times independently and shown to dramatically improve performance if kept up for at least a few weeks. It’s not pleasant to do though.

Asthma has become a global epidemic and leading cause for emergency room visits. Asthmatics tend to breathe considerably more than other people, and therapies like “Voluntary Elimination of Deep Breathing” have helped many asthmatics.

Ideal blood pH is 7.4. Overbreathing raises blood pH and our body has to do all sorts of sub-ideal things to compensate. The kidneys start “buffering" to keep pH at 7.4. This is fine in the short term, but in long term leads to mineral depletion and many issues associated with it.

7. Chew

The deformation of our mouths and faces, and the breathing (and dental) issues that come with it, really started to skyrocket around 300 years ago, when industrialized food suddenly became available and widespread.

All ancient and modern indigenous cultures that follow a traditional diet have much straighter teeth, bigger mouths, and almost no cavities. Their diets varied tremendously, but the foods all required more chewing and contained more vitamins and minerals.

Especially the chewing is the issue. Our ancestors spent hours a day chewing, but today even most foods considered healthy are extremely soft in comparison.

Many orthodontic procedures that were common in 20th century made the mouth more manageable for dentists, but actually worsened a lot of the breathing issues.

[bq] “The more we gnaw, the more stem cells release, the more bone density and growth we’ll trigger, the younger we’ll look and the better we’ll breathe."

Studies that fed pigs the exact same food, either as hard pellets or in softened form, showed that the ones who received the softened food quickly developed mouth and face deformities and breathing issues.

Despite the huge amount of evidence, the wider scientific/clinical community still doesn’t appreciate the importance of chewing on the development of the mouth and on our breathing, and many scientists supporting this are chastised.

III. Breathing+

8. More, on Occasion

Beyond the basic breathing techniques discussed so far, there are also more extreme ones that are not meant for continuous use, but that can be very potent if used for short amounts of time. Collectively calls them “Breathing+”.

Deep slow breathing stimulates the parasympathetic nervous system, responsible for relaxation. Shallow and fast breathing on the other hand stimulates the sympathetic nervous system, putting us in a state of alert.

[bq] “We’ll spend our days half-asleep and nights half-awake, lolling in a gray zone of half-anxiety. When we do, the vagus never stays half-stimulated.”

Consciously ramping up the stress response to extreme levels can then make it easier for our body to later completely switch off again.

Tummo, or Inner Fire Breathing, is one technique that overstimulates the sympathetic nervous system.
Wim Hof method also very similar, basically a modern, simplified form of Tummo.

Holotropic Breathwork is even more intense. It was developed by psychiatrist Stanislav Grof to mimic the effects of LSD after that got banned.

With the heavy breathing, we breathe out too much CO2 and blood vessels constrict, reducing blood flow to the brain by up to 40%, which can lead to visual and auditory hallucinations. In addition, the pH imbalance sends stress signals to the brain, potentially making it think you are even dying, which could explain people’s death-rebirth visions during holotropic breathing.

9. Hold It

The amygdala is responsible for our fear response. Without it, we probably wouldn’t survive long. But if it’s too active it can lead to anxiety, panic attacks, and phobias.

But as studies of people with damaged amygdalae showed, there’s one other switch in the body that can trigger fear. Letting such patients inhale a single breath of CO2 induced severe panic even though they hadn’t experienced any form of fear in decades.

The fear of suffocating seems to sit deeper than even the amygdala.

Our breathing is determined by our central chemoreceptors, and they detect CO2 rather than oxygen.

Elite athletes like climbers and free divers have trained their chemoreceptors to withstand strong fluctuations in CO2 without triggering panic.

Conscious breathholding has been a part of many ancient spiritual and medical traditions for centuries.

While unconscious breathholding, like apnea, can have debilitating effects, conscious practice could actually be a treatment or cure for anxiety.

In first half of 20th century, carbon dioxide therapy was actually a common treatment for anxiety, depression, skin issues, asthma, and more. And it was effective and had research backing it up. But then it was forgotten again, and replaced with pills that just numbed the symptoms.

Anxious people might have over-sensitive chemoreceptors, and the slightest increase in CO2 triggers panic. But it’s a vicious cycle.

[bq] “They are anxious because they’re overbreathing, overbreathing because they’re anxious.”

[NFW: I noticed this with Wim Hof breathing, when I was more stressed/anxious my breath hold times were dramatically reduced compared to usual.]

Slow breaths [like resonance breathing] increase CO2, calming/desensitizing the chemoreceptors.

10. Fast, Slow, and not at all

While some of the effects and mechanism of the Breathing+ techniques like Tummo and Wim Hof are scientifically understood, others, like the heating of the body, are still a mystery.

But many ancient texts and techniques knew about this phenomenon.

Almost all ancient civilizations, from Asia to Europe and the Americas, had a concept of “life force,” what Indians called prana, or ki in Japanese. And it was almost synonymous with breath.

Many advanced yogis can do seemingly impossible things like control their body temperature, blood flow, and even control, or stop, their heat itself. The effects are scientifically well documented but the mechanisms are not understood yet.

The ancient Indus Valley civilization are not known to have worshipped any gods or practiced any religion. No religious depictions have been found. But depictions of people breathing consciously have been found.

The modern yoga we all think of with poses and movement flows was invented in the 20th century. Ancient yoga was purely a breathing practice.

Epilogue: A Last Gap

Breathing is not a cure for everything! Many serious conditions require the attention of modern medicine.

[bq] "The role of modern doctors was to put out fires, not blow away smoke.”

Doctors only see patients when they are severely broken. But breathing can in some cases help us not even get to that state.

[bq] “Breathing is a missing pillar of health."