What's Poppin family? Welcome to episode 154 of the genius life.
What's going on everybody? Welcome to another episode of the show. I'm your host Max. Look of you're a filmmaker Health Science journalist, and author of The New York Times best-selling book genius foods and the genius life this week. We welcome the incredible James Nestor to the podcast James has revolutionized how we look at breath and breathing something. We think we do autonomically, but with a little thought and adjustment can make a huge difference in
Your health James is a journalist who has written for outside magazine Men's Journal Scientific American dwell magazine and PR the New York Times the Atlantic and others. He's the author of the new book breath the new science of a lost art, which is available. Now James and I chat about the many research backed benefits of nasal breathing over the habitual mouth breathing practice by a staggering 25 to 50 percent of the population James shares how nasal breathing gives us a six-fold increase in nitric oxide a crew.
Real component to our cardiovascular neurological and sexual well-being. He talks about the potential consequences of structural abnormalities, which may affect your ability to breathe through your nose how to use your breath to de-stress and evoke Altered States Of Consciousness, and we finally discuss how taping your mouth shut before bedtime might sound like something a serial killer might do but it can help to ensure that you're reaping the benefits of nasal breathing while you sleep unlike possibly 70% of the population. I certainly have been obsessed with this topic for some
I'm if you're a regular listener of the podcast you probably know that already but I'm really glad to have dedicated entire hour to this topic. I got to be honest since I've become more conscious of breathing through my nose and have since applied a few specific hacks to my sleeping at night which encourage nose breathing over mouth-breathing. I have felt great and I really understand why so many people are such big fans of this.
Guys book so listen closely to James take notes and be prepared because it could change your life aside from nose breathing. You know, what else? I love a Paleo Valley meat stick. That's right. It's still my Numero Uno snack time solution paleo Valley meat sticks provide you and your body with the nutrients that a snack is meant to provide. I love having paleo Valley as a sponsor of the show because they are truly so easy to promote. I mean they make some of the best meat sticks around paleo valleys 100% grass-fed grass-finished beef sticks are the only beef sticks in the USA made from 100% grass-fed.
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That's thr I ve market.com genius life to get 25% off of your first order and a free gift gifts and snack filters do it today your future self. Will thank you. Alright guys, I'm excited to dive into the work that James Nestor has put into his new book breath. It's going to blow your mind. I'd love taping this episode and I learned a lot. But before we dive in I want to give a shout-out to Apple user Eternal nowhere man, who wrote this glowing review for the show on the Apple podcasts app Eternal Nowhere Man wrote I recently turned into
Is podcasting was positively surprised with both content and how Max's interviewing his guests. He lets them speak listens and follows up with intelligent questions, the choice of guests and topics are also superb many of which have been covered on other podcasts, but you always try to find new angles and you are not working off a pre delivered script. Well done. Well, thank you so much for tuning in Eternal Nowhere Man and you're right. We are flying by the seat of our pants here on the genius life. Don't forget that you guys can text me at any time by hitting up 310 2999 401. Text me your thoughts feelings questions.
Comments concerns anything everything. I really enjoyed texting with you guys. So don't hesitate and with all that said let's take a deep breath and move into episode 154 with the brilliant James Nestor. Mr. James Nestor. Thank you so much for being with me on the genius life.
Thanks a lot for having me.
Oh, it's my pleasure. I feel like I've gotten many requests from my followers to have you on after your wonderful book breath came out. I subsequently then went and I picked it up. I got it on an audible and I listened to it and I was just
Thrilled that you had put together such a cohesive work on such an under appreciated topic, you know the power of breath of breathing. So I'd love to just you know, start things off by going into your background. I mean, you're a you're a journalist. I can sort of relate to you know to your career path in that sense, but you've covered a myriad of different topics. So why don't we just sort of go into that sort of back story and then how you came to Pivot and write about about breath for your latest
work.
Sure. So I you know, I started off having a very respectable job were pretty nice shoes and went down to an office for for about 12 years. I was a copyright are I wrote ads I manage groups of riders all that kind of thing. And on the side, I would write magazine articles just to keep my brain sort of activated and over several years those articles started piling up more opportunities.
Came to me, and I finally cut the cord and that was about 12 years ago and not the smoothest transition from getting a steady steady paycheck to like getting no money for four months and months. But you know, I weathered the storm and kept chipping away because I knew that this is what I wanted to do with my life.
That's awesome. You wanted to write books you wanted to go deep as opposed to like magazine articles or you'd work on a piece for a few weeks books are a lot more intensive of a process. So
So what was the what was the first book that you wrote after making that decision?
So deep was the first nonfiction narrative nonfiction book I wrote and this was a book. There's a lot of free diving in it, but it was really about the human connection to the ocean. And I know that seems a little fuzzy but it's a science book and it looks at not only the way that we are connected through our chemistry, but through various senses that we share with marine animals such as sharks magnetic.
Action echolocation mammalian dive reflexes. So I start that book at the very surface of the ocean and it ends the last chapter is that the very deepest ocean in the world of the Marianas Trench.
Are you like the most interesting guy at any party that you're that you go to definitely not no. No.
I failed that test repeatedly. I happen to have a job that allows me to be curious that I chipped away out for a long time.
And there isn't a day that goes by that I'm not grateful for what I do.
Wow. Yeah, I mean so cool. So then what piqued your interest in in terms of like breath how we breathe?
It wasn't one thing in particular, you know, it wasn't like I read some study and thought Oh, the my next book is in this it was several things that kept grouping together and kept adding up over so many years. I mean this process
Years and years and years. I find an interesting article. I'd read a book. I talked to someone who would tell me something impossible. Like they cured their autoimmune disease with breathing total BS. Of course now, I talked to someone else who said they use breathing to heat their body up and they no longer need to wear jackets when they're walking in the snow total BS, of course, but once I really got to know freedivers once I start freediving myself, and once I started reacquainting myself with all of these senses,
That humans modern humans have completely forgotten about I thought there might be a larger story in all of this not just about how to breathe. That's easy. There's a zillion books about how to breathe. But what happens to our bodies where does this stuff come from? What what can it do for us? And that's what I spent so long
researching that's amazing. You open up your book with the story of your participation in an experiment at Stanford. Can you tell us a little bit about that?
Yeah, so I had no intention of having myself as a character in this book the book proposal was written months and months and months before that and I was nowhere to be seen because I cannot stand it when writers keep unnecessarily inserting themselves into stories. It drives me crazy, but there were a few instances in which I needed to show up and I needed to test this stuff because there
wasn't anyone else who was able to test it and I had the opportunity working with these experts in the field. So this idea came up about three years ago when I'm lucky enough to live in San Francisco, which means I'm very close to Stanford, which is one of the top research institutions in the world and I got to talking with the chief of rhinology research. Dr. Jayakar Nayak about the knows about nasal breathing. How about how no human really understands or
^ just breathing through the nose. And so he knew the damage that was caused by persistent mouth-breathing something that 25 to 50 percent of the population does but nobody knew how quickly that damage came on. So we decided to test it 10 days just mouth-breathing 10 days just nasal breathing collecting data the whole way through
so why is mouth-breathing quote-unquote dangerous like it? What what's what are the harms that come from excessive mouth?
Breathing. Yeah, and I'm glad you clarify that because mouth breathing in and of itself is not a bad thing. I'm breathing through my mouth right now when I'm talking I breathe through my mouth when I when I laugh sometimes when I eat that's all fine, but it's chronic habitual mouth breathing. That is so bad for our health because when we breathe through our noses, we humidify are we heated we condition it so that by the time it reaches our lungs its treated its
Refined in some ways when you breathe through your mouth you get none of those benefits. It's you can think of the lungs as an external organ when you're breathing through the mouth or just exposed to allergens and pollution and whatever viruses whatever else is in in the air and our nose is our first line of defense against all these things and the fact that so few people know this I certainly didn't know this and the fact that so many people are mouth-breathing. I think that there are very clear
We're links linking mouth-breathing to Chronic maladies chronic diseases.
That's fascinating. So there's a potential immune function that the the nasal passageway plays as well. You mentioned he
big time in various ways that that's what's so interesting about it. So when you breathe through your nose that that air is moving slower, right? It's moving. There's pressure negative pressure coming in positive pressure coming out those slower breaths help relax your body.
Also allow you to help upload more oxygen more efficiently and there's one other thing in the nose. It helps to release more nitric oxide. And this is this miracle molecule that interacts directly with viruses to kill them. So breathing through the nose especially now is is essential for good
health. I'm so glad that you brought up nitric oxide. I was going to bring it up, but you beat me to it. It is indeed a miracle molecule and I over the past couple of months. I've done a
a really deep dive into you know, all of the benefits of encouraging nitric oxide, you know production. I had an expert on the on the podcast and we talked about how when you masticate when you chew vegetables that contain nitrates that are naturally found in them like beets arugula and things like that you generate this gas essentially that helps to boost blood flow. It has a vasodilator, you know dilation effect. It reduces blood pressure. And so you're saying that you
At those benefits the benefits of increased nitric oxide production when you breathe through your nose as well.
That's right. You get a six-fold increase in nitric oxide breathing through your nose because the paranasal sinuses are coded with these endothelial cells which release nitric oxide and when you hum you can increase that by 15 times so humming. Hmm. Just humming can increase nitric oxide as well foods help. So nitric oxide has a very short bio.
Availability it lasts for about 2 to 6 seconds. So you need to constantly be producing this in order for your body to operate correctly and there's links direct links between erectile dysfunction and a decrease in the production of nitric oxide. There's links between Diabetes Type 2 diabetes this goes on and on and on this you really need a lot of nitric oxide in your body all the time and breathing through your nose is a way of helping your body do
that would
It during sex be advisable then
you can you can do whatever you want during sex is not that's that's your own dirty business, you know, whatever works.
This is a safe space James. Yeah, you
can certainly try it might annoy your partner, but I don't know if anyone's looked into that extensively, but they have definitely looked into the links between eighty percent of men who have
Have type 2 diabetes have erectile dysfunction so that that's not a random connection. And there's also a reason why sadena Phil, I believe that's that's the actual name for Viagra. Guess what it does. It releases nitric oxide in your body and allows all those things to happen. So the fact that our bodies can naturally produce this miracle gas and the fact that our nose plays such a huge role in that to me I think is just fascinating
it is it is fascinating.
We generate a lot of really interesting hypotheses on this podcast whether or not they have any scientific Merit. That's the you know, that's another story but going so going back to this experiment at Stanford that you participated in what that 21-day experiment. What did that involve
it involved just breathing through my mouth for 10 days. It was me and another subject. I managed to convince this poor breathing therapist from Sweden to fly out here on his own dime and participate in this.
Study because Stanford didn't have any money allocated whatever so we had to pay for it, which was not cheap. So we had silicon up our noses, which if that sounds like it's sucked. It's because it totally did and we were just reading through our mouths. And again, this this wasn't intended to be like some prank or some stunts. We were just putting ourselves into a position that so much of the population already knew, but we were collecting data the hallway through three times a day with
Huge
experiments and huge data collection in between each of the phases of this whole study. So, you know within a couple of hours, my blood pressure was high as ever seen in my life and a couple hours after that went to sleep and I snored for an hour and a half and I had previously not been snoring at all. And the longer the experiment went on the more I started snoring. I was snoring for four hours a night. I had sleep apnea. I had hypertension. I mean I
I'd just give you this this laundry list of bummer maladies and they kept getting worse and worse.
Wow, that is fascinating. Yes. Oh, pardon me. I think I mentioned that it was a why I said that it was a 21 days experiment was a 10-day experiment. Did you I'm just curious. Did you do blood work before and after? Yeah,
you were right. By the way, I was 21. So interesting for the SEC for the second phase we breathe through our noses the whole time or as often as he could so and compare data sets. That was the
Whole point of it to see how the pathway through which we breathe air affects our bodies because I had been told by various researchers by various professors that how we breathe does not matter we can breathe whatever way we want the body will compensate and we found that to be complete garbage and there's a huge Foundation of science showing showing otherwise as well. So yeah, the other 10 days was 11 days was much more pleasant because we were nasal breathing.
We're nasal breathing at night. These will bring that day nasal breathing while we're exercising and everything else.
I love that were you were you mouth taping? Is that something that you did during the during the second phase?
Yeah. So this mouth taping thing sounded completely sketchy to me. This is a process or a practice in which you place a little piece of tape on your lips so that you can just breathe through your nose and seems yeah pretty weird thing until I heard about it from the
Dr. Of speech-language pathology at Stanford who said oh I prescriber to all my patients. I talked to dr. Mark / Hani. He said the exact same thing. So what's going on here? They said because at night so many of us are apt to gently open our mouths when we go to sleep, right? We got gravity working against us and I probably slept that way for four decades and one estimate is that 70% of the population sleeps with an open mouth. So taping is just a way of
Lee closing that mouth it's not to create a hermetic seal. It's just to train yourself to keep your mouth. Shut so you breathe through your
nose and so I'm just so curious. What did you experience then after those 10 days where you were breathing mostly through your
nose. So my health was completely wrecked from from mouth breathing and we did take blood work. We did pulmonary function tests. We did cat-scans. We did like four rounds of different blood where I mean, it was awful.
Eight hours of getting poked and prodded. So a lot of those hormones like there was a huge jump in cortisol for Anders the the blood a lot of the blood work was was inconsistent or didn't show too much and what I had heard from the researchers is you know, these effects will probably come on in months after after several months. You should start seeing some some of those broader effects, but as far as stress and heart rate variability and those more immediate changes all of that came on immediately high blood
pressure and all that and all of it disappeared when we when we started nasal breathing which isn't it's not like we proved anything people have known this researchers have known this for decades, but it was something completely different to experience this yourself to go from snoring at my worst four hours to storing 0 minutes just by changing the pathway through which I breathe
air in your research. Did you discover any you know any potential reasons as to why so many of us have
Come chronic mouth breathers.
There's so many reasons for sure. So there's environmental factors. There's pollution. There is allergens. A lot of people are more allergic. Some people have autoimmune problems. Most asthmatics are mouth breathers. So people have inflamed turbinates. These are the structures in the nose and some of it is anatomical so through the last 300 400 years of human evolution.
Our mouths have gotten smaller which means our upper pallets. That's the roof of your mouth have tended to grow upward and when they grow upward they can block the sinus passages. So so many of us are hos just right out of the gate. So there's a lot of reasons why we become mouth breathers and there's a lot of science showing just how deleterious this. This is to our health.
You were on Joe Rogan's podcast and I'm not a regular listener of the show. I'm a fan of his I think he does.
Does a wonderful job but one thing that I know about him is that he had a surgery to repair a severely deviated septum and I became aware of that because actually my little brother has a very deviated septum and it prevents him really from breathing freely out of his nose. And so he's considering getting the surgery. I think it's called a septoplasty. Yeah. Do you is that something that you've looked into for people who have structural challenges when it comes to breathing out of their noses?
Some people absolutely need surgical interventions without a doubt and I was a great candidate for that. We took a CAT scan of my head and and Nayak the chief of rhinology research on Sanford started laughing. You don't want your doctor laughing when he's looking at scans of you. He's like you were so completely messed up. I broke my nose like three times four times very deviated septum. I have Coulson Coulson Coulson. Bullosa, Concha. Bullosa. Sorry, not up.
Latin which are all these deformities in my nose and you know, he's like this this could really help you out. But then I went down the hall and started talking to other researchers who said you start slow and steady and try to see what breathing can do for you because the body is malleable. It shifts depending on what inputs are given to it. And so you could try that and I absolutely have been transformed by just doing that not saying this is going to work for everyone. I will say something though.
Though that a lot of people go into their aunties and their aunties will look at their scans and say you have a deviated septum. You need to get this fixed seventy-five percent of the population has a deviated septum. So some people have a very deviated septum and then absolutely septoplasty can really help them. But a lot of people just have a slight deviation in their septum where if they follow healthy breathing habits that can have an outsize effect on their ability to nasal breathing. So again,
No blanket prescriptions here. But to me, it makes a lot more sense to see what you can do with your natural body before going under the knife.
So wait, you're saying that if you have a mildly deviated septum, you can remodel your your sinus Airways by just by just concentrating on nose breathing or by prioritizing those breathing. You
will not be remodeling any skeleton sure in there. But what you will be doing is you will be toning all of the other passages.
The turbinates all of the other erectile tissue in there to dilate to open up a lot more and that will allow you to breathe much more easily and we've seen this time and time again in cat-scans. I took a CAT scan a year before and the year after after practicing healthy breathing after practicing healthy oral posture after using this device which help to stimulate chewing stress with toned my Airway my Airway opened up about 15 to 20 percent in some
Is and I'm no exception. There's there's hundreds and hundreds of people that have done the same thing and shown the same benefit. So again, I want to be clear. This is not a blanket prescription for everyone to not get surgery or to get surgery or whatever. Everyone is different, but it's my belief that if we start with easier free techniques to see what our bodies can do we can benefit from that and then you can make a more reason decision as to whether or not you need further interventions.
Love that, you know something something that I've discovered recently that I think is pretty could could reasonably be recommended to a wide population. I've become kind of hooked on no strips like the strips that expand your nasal Airways, you know, I actually think that you know, the term biohacking is sort of thrown about these days and very little of what you see in the biohacking ROM is true biohacking but I think that actually a nasal strip because it's hacking the architecture of your nose.
In a non-permanent way is actually deserving of the term. And so my reasoning is that if any, you know, if air flow is the rate limiting factor in the production of nitric oxide then any sort of increase in air flow is going to potentially be beneficial. So I've been using these strips every night when I go to sleep. And now when I write like when I write if I don't have them around where I forget to put them on I actually like get out of bed. I go put them on I'm that hooked on them.
These are great training wheels. And I think that it's an awesome idea. Like how much do those cost? Not a lot how much effort is it to use these things? Huh? Not too much effort. So you can try something if you're talking about nostrils, you can try something called the caudal maneuver, which is where you place your fingers and you open your nostrils up like that and if it's significantly easier to breathe that way then yes, these little hacks can can really help you. There's something
All mute inserts, which I've used before you insert them into your nostrils. They helped open up Breathe Right Strips work great and what I've found at least talking to people I use some of these things when I was exercising trying to adapt to nasal breathing during exercise and they were great and then after a couple weeks I didn't need them and that's usually what happens. You can acclimate your body. You can start to condition those tissues those different structures to whine up and then
You just don't need them. If you have to continue using them. That's okay too to me. And this is just my personal opinion that might be better than going and getting surgery. But but again everyone's different and surgery has been transformative for so many people but there's just a lot of options on the table for people.
Yeah and surgery is not without risk, but even even my brother has it who has a severely deviated septum. He's benefited from those nasal those nasal strips. I found just anecdotally that my favorite ones are the generic
CVS brand, you know, I have a CVS close to my house. Just the generic nasal strips the what are they? The Breathe Right Strips, they find that they leave a residue on my nose and they're hard to pull off.
Yeah, again personal preference. Some people really dig those other people like, you know, the non brand-name ones as far as sleep tape goes. I'm a big fan of just this 3M stuff.
Off mic Rapport sensitive skin tape this cost like three bucks at last 3 months. That's pretty cheap people like Psalm to fix which is a brand of sleep tape. It's a lot more expensive. They say it's more comfortable whatever works, you know, but by any means whatever works to allow you to breathe through your nose is that's the right thing to do for you. I love that.
What's what's one of the more surprising things that you discovered while writing this book? I'm sure there were many mind-blowing moments for you. But if you could just think back to like, you know something that you don't
Discovered that you just that just blew your worldview wide open.
Well, I think it was two things and I only want one. I'll mention too brief to I'll take two it was
okay two for the price of one.
Thank thank you. Yeah, it's discount day. It's Tuesday. So it's the fact that were so messed up like the fact that evolution is not Progressive. This was complete news to me that Evolution means change. It doesn't mean survival of the fittest if it meant.
Survival of the fittest. Why are so many of us obese? Why do we have autoimmune diseases? Why do we have asthma it just doesn't make any sense. And once you learn that you can't unlearn it. You're like, wow. I've been taught something completely different for so long. And now that I understand that life can change in ways that are not advantageous for their long-term survival. It starts making the world a little more clear in the way that things are functioning right now, especially with our species the second thing that
Blew me away which continues to blow me away and next week. I'm doing a little more research in this area is the fact that we can use breathing to heat our bodies up and the fact that monks have been doing this for thousands and thousands of years the sounded like a complete fabrication that someone could sit in the snow and breathe in a certain way for eight hours and melt a circle around them in the middle of winter sounds fallacious, right?
Until you learn that Herbert Benson at Harvard Medical School went out and tested these guys and found that we can do exactly that and women off which I'm sure you've heard of he's the one who is really blowing this up and showing people the true power of their breathing to not only heat themselves, but to heal themselves up so many chronic
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On blood Labs wasn't there something that he did that like actually affected whether or not he, you know became vulnerable to some kind of endotoxin that was injected into into his his
blood. Yeah, and this is what really blew things up in this world and continues just to confound me and it's been interesting that some researchers have denied that this happened because it's so outside of their worldview, even though the study was published in nature the top scientific.
Journal in the world and even though people are demonstrating this all the time. So anyway, we'll get into that later. But what happened is they took women to a lab and they shot him up with E coli and if you get an E, coli infection, which is an endotoxin you start sweating you get a fever you get chills. You're totally miserable. So they shot him up with E. Coli he breathed in his Wim Hof way doing that to mow breathing and he was
Completely fine. He had basically no symptoms. He got up got a cup of coffee. So the researchers told him they said listen, you're just this super weirdo. We see that you can do this and that's cool. But anyway, we're moving on and when challenged them. He said give me any group of people and give me four days and I will teach them how to do this. So that's exactly what they did a few years later. They did a randomized controlled study in which they had a control group and then they had the group.
That learned wins method and guess what happened every single one of those people who learned his method women were shot up with E. Coli breathed in that pattern and didn't suffer any symptoms of E coli. Meanwhile, all of the controls suffered extreme symptoms of equalize. So there's the proof everybody and they're just trying to get their heads around how exactly this works down at University of California. San Francisco. Elissa epel just concluded a study.
Rheumatoid arthritis and this breathing method. I'm talking to her next week about all this.
She's a telomere a researcher,
isn't she she is indeed? Yes.
She is. Yeah love her work. So I mean obviously we're just sort of at the very beginning of you know, unraveling how his method may have prevented, you know infection from E coli, but is there any can you speculate at all? I mean like how that why that might have worked the way that it did
absolutely. So what happens when you breathe this way.
Is you stress your body out and a lot of people are thinking I don't want to be stressed. I'm stressed all day a lot of a lot of Us carry around this low-grade stress, which is so unhealthy. It gives us chronic inflammation would lead to so many modern diseases. I was talking to dr. David hascomb last week and he said every modern disease is a disease of inflammation Alzheimer's diabetes, you know on every autoimmune disease on and on and on so
We don't want this chronic low-grade stress, but we do want burst of stress. And this is what Alyssa apple is working on this hermetic stress or hormesis where you control your stress to a specific amount of time so that for the rest of the day you can chill out. So that is probably why Wim Hof method works so well and why you can get shot up with E coli and not suffer from from any.
Symptoms because when we stress our bodies out when we're breathing like this, we release adrenaline or epinephrine and other hormones that actually fight off viruses. So the sympathetic state is the state in which we can help fight off viruses and toxins. And so that's what it does. That's that's the ongoing Theory right now is when you know, you're exposed to something you can do this method and help your body combat.
Very quickly and very anecdotally here a couple years ago when I felt a very bad cold coming on I went and did this method I really went for it for half an hour and came out and I didn't have a cold. What does that mean? Nothing much, but I've heard the same thing from from literally dozens and dozens and dozens of people and it's free and it makes you feel good. So why not give it a go.
So you're basically you're forcing an acute sympathetic state that just basically puts your immune system on high
alert.
Exactly, right. I wish I could have said it that succinctly. I feel like a fool. The next answer will be extremely succinct like a haiku. I
promise as succinct as that you're doing pretty you're doing pretty well James. Have you done any in your book you talk about the difference between diaphragmatic breathing versus like the more shallow upper body chest breathing that so many of us seem to be stuck, you know in that in that sort of mode of breathing these
days sure so,
Posture dictates how you breathe in your breathing dictates your posture. So if you're like me if you're an office Bozo and you're just sitting in front of a computer all day long you tend to be hunched over like this. Even if you want to take a very deep fluid breath, you can't because your back is arched so you can only take many very short and stilted breaths. I was talking to Patrick McEwen whose world-renowned breathing expert in show me this chart that just blew me away.
Way when we breathe just into our chest and we breathe about 18 times a minute, which is on the upper end of average. But so many people breathe this way. We only use 50% of that oxygen we take in so the rest of it just goes into her mouth sore throat the bronchi and we breathe it back out because just a little bit of it actually makes it to the lungs and can put participate in gas exchange. But when we breathe slowly at a rate of about six times
A minute we use 85% of our breath. So a 35% increase in efficiency and who the hell doesn't want that who doesn't want to run more efficiently. So this very slow and stilted breathing will force us to overwork our bodies over work our hearts overworked so many other systems in our body and eventually our bodies are going to break down. So that's that's one reason to take fewer breaths, but deeper breaths and do engage that
diaphragm and do what it is naturally designed to do.
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Max for 20% off. I think we're also more inclined to breathe shallowly when we're stressed out, you know as opposed to just being merely a function of posture. I think when you're stressed, you take things like short breaths and you know, you got me thinking whether or not we can de-stress ourselves by forcing deeper breaths
for sure. And and yeah, I should have mentioned that so when we're stressed out when we have a purse
Seemed threat we do but we're conditioned to do we either hold our breath or we breathe too much because back in the day when we were hiding from enemies in a cave or hiding from a woolly mammoth or whatever. What is your best defense to be silent or to breathe a bunch so you can get more blood to your skeletal muscles so you can run faster or fight harder, right? So these are wonderful things to be programmed with but now are perceived.
I'd value of threads is so low that we get an email from our boss and our bodies react as though it were severe life-threatening situation. And so we have this response where we either hold our breath or we breathe way too much and this is so well known it's called constant partial attention syndrome. It's been studied by someone at you see another doctor at UCSF Margaret Chesney for about 20 years and IH studies.
It's tough It's also known as email apnea and one estimate says that 80% of office workers suffer from this. I wanted to see if I suffered from it. So I wore a pulse oximeter and I wore it for several days and I looked at my breathing throughout my work day and it was a total disaster. I was holding my breath or breathing way too much the whole time and no wonder I was so exhausted at the end of workdays email
apnea.
So just to be the waiting on bated breath for every for all the notifications and whatever that that it's actually causing us to breathe differently in a more counterproductive way.
Yeah, and what what Margaret Chesney is found is she said it can have some of the same Downstream effects of sleep apnea. It can give us a chronic inflammation. It can stress us out. It can boost our blood sugar which is not always a good thing. It can have this little adrenaline.
Len elicit this adrenaline a drip, you know on nor up and ever on and on and on all those hormones have great those reactions are great when we need them. But to do them throughout the day when there is no threat is going to wear us down. I mean, look at how many people have autoimmune diseases right now how many people have diabetes how many people have depression or anxiety or Panic? It's things aren't good for us right now and our breathing plays a really large part in that.
So what's
the prescription in for listeners to make sure that their breath that they're that they're breathing deeply with their diaphragms and to let that sort of guide their posture to let your their breath lead the way so to speak
there is one blanket prescription. I'm going to give everyone that doesn't matter if you're an asthmatic or you suffer from anxiety or if you're an ultra-marathoner or whatever. So breathe through your nose breathe through your nose all the time if your nose is clogged figure out a way of opening your nose Nayak.
Told me he's like if a sink is clogged in your house. What do you do you find a way of opening it? So breathe through your nose breathe slowly breathe less train yourself to breathe less. Okay by breathing less we get more oxygen. We get more energy with less effort. That's what you want and exhale fully. So a lot of us will will tend to think we're breathing deep will go. Yeah deep breaths. This is cool. Yeah can really feel it. This is
awesome, but we don't exhale so we're just forcing air on top of are on top of are what you want to do is
Exhale first fully and then take that deep breath that engages the diaphragm full diaphragmatic movement. And so breathing isn't just a biochemical process. It's biomechanical that diaphragm moving up and down helps with circulation and helps to pump lymph fluid. This is how lymph fluid gets away from or organs and I'm talking to another doctor on Friday about all of this stuff. We're going to do a video interview because I've just
Clued into this that will have on the site and be available for free for everyone.
I just love that you've covered this topic and your work and that you've become a champion for nose breathing. It's so it's so important ever since I started looking into the literature my mind like yours. I'm sure was before you wrote. The book has just been completely blown by this and it's and it's become something in my life. That is now a staple, you know, just like eating a eating a nutritious diet exercising regularly making sure that I'm managing my stress breathing.
Through my nose is something that I'm now, you know, it's now always in my purview
and that's a good thing. You know, it's a weird thing to to pick that as my campaign,
but it was only
after years and years of listening to so many researchers and looking at the science. It was so undeniable and yet no one's really talking about it. I mean think about when you go to your doctor, they check your blood pressure. They asked him if you have any anxiety, they ask maybe about your sexual performance they asked about
Migraines, but they don't ever talk to you about your breathing. They don't look at your levels of o2 or CO2, but breathing is the anchor to so many of those issues and if you fix your breathing as we've seen very clearly you can really blunt the symptoms or in some extraordinary cases heal yourself of those chronic problems. I know this sounds nuts. Oh, but but the science again is very clear and I could give you the phone numbers of a two dozen people who have done just that
man in La where I live there are
Are there many people are obsessed with breath work which is you know ranges from holotropic breathing, you know to various meditation ceremonies. Have you studied that at all in your in your journey?
I have I just spilled water all over myself. So thank God this isn't all video. I guess it is. I'm hosed. Hopefully I just see that
just breathe deeply so you don't have a stress response. Well, I can't even
look.
Like I just coughed up some vomit on my lunch on my shirt. So taken out of context. This could really be incriminating. Let's talk about speaking of vomit. Let's talk about holotropic breathwork. So holotropic breathwork. Is this breathing practice in which you breathe is hard as you can in a room full of people listening to very loud music and you do this for three hours and if that sounds like things are going to get weird they get real.
Weird real quick. And so some people can have very severe reactions to this bowel reactions or vomit reactions that does not happen too often, but it can happen and the point of doing this is to break through chronic problems. The thinking is this is a baptism by fire method of really opening up your subconscious and unconscious mind and bringing your problems to the surface so that you
Better process them the science is is not very thorough in this area. We know what happens to the body when you breathe this much. However, I will say the studies I've seen in the people who practice this that I've talked to James ironmen is a great example, he ran this with 11,000 people in a hospital in st. Louis and followed over 400 of them and found that this had a profound benefit for these people whether or not they had
Had depression or they were addicts or they had other psychosis. So there it is. I wish that there were more studies on it. There's not but breathing is free. And I promise you it is an extremely surreal experience. So you could give it a go tell me what you think,
you know people people love to do it in LA. I've never been a big fan of the experience has always been a little bit too uncomfortable for me, but one of our colleagues and joy
was Michael Paul and I had him on the show and we talked about how holotropic breathing has been, you know, there are at least some similarities to the shift in Consciousness that occurs when you take psychedelic drugs, like psilocybin mushrooms and that you know, these could be a sort of more mild and of course drug-free means to unraveling the psyche in a way in the way that they're now kind of looking at these drugs, you know for their for their potential to
he's things like PTSD depression addictions and things like that. So very a very interesting line of research indeed.
That's that's how it was developed. So it was developed by Stan grof who was a big proponent of using LSD with with his patients and when LSD was made illegal in 1968. He looked for other methods to elicit those same reactions and he developed holotropic breathwork. So what is interesting is is looking at the biochemistry.
Is looking at what happens to the body when we breathe really hard for a really long time and they found that you can decrease the blood flow to the brain by about 40 percent in extreme cases. And what this does is it cuts off certain centers in your brain that are dealing with day-to-day life. And so the thinking is that by cutting off some of these centers to the brain other centers can help open you can process
Thoughts in a different way so we know it's doing something and you can certainly feel it and experience this when you do it. It is a deep dreamlike state that you put yourself into four hours. But what exactly is it doing? I don't know if we're ever going to know and I've been trying to get in a lab to do EG studies or fmri studies of holotropic breathing because I can't find any
So I have volunteered to go in and breathe this way for three hours so we can really look at what happens to the body now covid around that God, you know put on the back burner, but hopefully in the next few months I'm going to be able to do this.
I love it. How has your life changed since writing breath any any new practices that you've integrated into your day? Yeah, what's been your life like in the in the sort of?
In the wake of writing this book.
Yeah. Well writing a book about breathing makes you complete breathing and erotic. I don't suggest anyone do it. It will drive you crazy what the point to train yourself to breathe in these ways isn't so that you constantly have to think about it. It's so that they become a habit and if you're really bad breather, like I was through so much of my life. It takes a long time to break habits. I'm still working on I still use sleep date every single night. I've used it for two.
There's and have experienced a huge benefit from doing that. So another thing is people expect me to now we be like the best breather in the world, but I'm not just like pollen isn't the best drug taker in the world. I'm a journalist who went into this field to write about some of the best breeders in the world to write about the experts and to glean a few of their hacks along the way. So yeah, I've Incorporated the stuff into my life. Yeah it I felt completely transform from it.
But that's no proof of anything, you know, which is why had to rely so heavily on the science because these claims sound impossible, you know, there's 500 scientific references in the back of the book and on the website for people to look up but this is stuff that we've known for so long. It just hasn't really come to the surface in any way and and got into the hands of the general public and as a journalist. That's that's what I do what I try to do. It's
amazing. Your book has been so successful. Has it do you?
Helped draw more attention, especially from you know, Academia to the the value of breath.
Yeah, and this is really the highest compliment and the thing that really gets me the most giddy. It's interesting to go into these institutions to find research that has been done at these institutions right about it and then have the same institutions come back to you and say hey, we didn't know about any of this. Can you come speak at our
Medical school so the best letters. I've been getting and gotten dozens and dozens and dozens of them maybe even hundreds of them are from doctors are from Dennis some of whom have been saying this is what I've been talking about for 30 years. No one's been listening and others who have said this all makes perfect sense. Why haven't we known about it? I'm going to go do something about this. So I've had the honor of speaking at Stanford Medical School. I'm speaking at Yale and Harvard next year. It seems like there's a lot of interest in breathing, right?
Now especially amidst this pandemic it's better late than never and I'm so excited to get this this word out and and I'm so excited to get more researchers interested in studying this stuff and getting the word out because really it comes from them. They're the ones kick-starting how this thing is going to get it to patient. And so it can't just come from a journalist. It really has to come from from academics who understand this and who have tested it thoroughly.
Yeah. I love that. What's up?
What's next for you? Can you give us any
hints? I'm going to turn off my phone for ten days and sleep for a while. It's been a little crazy six months amazing. But but I'm a little exhausted at this time. I'll be honest. So we're hoping in the New Year. This is all knock on wood stuff, but to turn this into a miniseries and that's what I'd really like to do in the next year because a lot of people read books but a lot of people don't read books who might be turned on to this stuff to help take control of their
Their own bodies through other mediums and so there's that and I have a few other creative projects and a few other book ideas, but I just need a reset and that thank God the holidays are coming and I'll figure out how to how to tackle all that
next. You need a breather. See what I did there
some I'd say some might say I need to just chill out and just breathe fully man. Why are you so stressed out? But you know if I hadn't had those hacks, I probably would have been
Been a much much worse shape. So it's stuff that I use every single day and I've really felt and seen measured Improvement in my
life. Well, your work is so important. It's added so much value and I'm so glad that I got a hold of your book and that I listened to it and you're also a wonderful writer. So I implore people listening to this to go and check out breath to you know, it's also an audible. It's very well done. I've got just one last question for you. But before we get to that we're can listeners find you on social media and where can they
Where can I find your book? I mean, I'm assuming it's everywhere but
sure wherever books are sold, which I guess nowadays is means like Amazon or no go go to your local Indie people ignore what I just sex ed up support your local book stores. That's right. So my website the publisher allow me to publish the entire bibliography on the website and that's available for free for anyone. There are also breathing instructions by
doctors at Johns Hopkins and Columbia and dr. Andrew Wiles on there. I'm doing expert interviews with professors at Harvard all about breathing and that's available at mr. James Nestor.com. That's mr.james Nestor.com some other ask took James Nestor. So that's what I'm stuck with people. I'm trying to get better at this thing called social media to know if you've heard about it. I'm a little old. So I am on Instagram and I'm just posting stuff related to
Breathing and the science there in no puppies or good-looking food on my site. I promise man.
I like I like. Mr. James know it's better than the when people put the before their names. So it's a little pretentious, you know, like the James Nestor.com. I think mr. Is I think mr. Is fine
it thank you for that appreciate that.
It works not something I ever
had a lot of gruff from people people think that's pretentious and I said hey some
Copter and Michigan took my URL, you know, and so I got a way to wait around for that guy to to give that up to to the internet and then we'll see
what happens. Yeah. Well the last question I guess I was everybody in the show. Mr. James Nestor. What is it? What does it mean to you to live a genius life? What is living a genius life mean to you?
I think it means to be flexible to be open to listen to as many people as often as you
Possible possibly can and to take that information be skeptical about it and check it out. I think that when you think of science, this is not a closed book science is constantly changing. So the thought that you can just stop your belief system at one point doesn't make any sense scientifically so that flexibility and that Curiosity I think what is what really drives signs and what drives journalist
I love that couldn't agree more. Well, thank you. This has been a
Szura, I learned a lot and yeah, I was just cool connecting with you getting to know you and your up in SF. You
said San Francisco?
Yes. Nice. Nice. Nice. Well, if you're ever in the in the LA area love to grab a coffee, maybe do some breath work together that would be fun
would love that. I was born in Orange County, you know, so old La family so I flew the coop early on but but would love to do that. Nice.
Well, thanks again to all you guys out there and play.
As land, I appreciate your time and attention text me to let me know what you thought about this episode of the show. Did it blow your minds? Let me know. My number is 310 2999 401. I look forward to hearing from you. Go to the genius life.com. We got some really cool merch up and I will catch you on the next episode Peace.
