BY: JAMES NESTOR
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4 Thoughts
1. Breathe Through Your Nose
“The readouts reveal what the previous days have revealed: mouthbreathing is destroying our health. […] My blood pressure has spiked by an average of 13 points from where it was before the test, which puts me deep into stage 1 hypertension. … Meanwhile, my heart rate variability, a measure of nervous system balance, has plummeted, suggesting that my body is in a state of stress. Then there’s my pulse, which has increased, and my body temperature, which has decreased, and my mental clarity, which has hit rock bottom. Olsson’s data mirror mine.”
The craziest part of this book was the experiment Nestor and breathing expert Anders Olsson did. They plugged their noses for 10 days and then shut their mouths for 10 days. As stated above, the first 10 days of mouth breathing destroyed their health.
When they switched to nose breathing, everything improved: their blood pressure returned to near normal, HRV increased by as much as 150%, and their energy levels skyrocketed.
This set the stage for Nestor to explore all the benefits of nasal breathing. He goes through the standard benefits, things like warming and humidification, nitric oxide, better oxygenation, nasal cycles, and the differences between left and right nostril breathing.
But one thing that really stood out was his discussion on nasal breathing and nighttime bathroom breaks. One of the most consistent things I hear from people who start taping their mouths for sleep is that they don’t get up to use the restroom as much. Nestor explained that this is related to a hormone called vasopressin:
“But if the body has inadequate time in deep sleep, … vasopressin won’t be secreted normally. The kidneys will release water, which triggers the need to urinate and signals to our brains that we should consume more liquid. We get thirsty, and we need to pee more.”
Truly mind-blowing. We could go on and on about the nose. But, I think this quote perfectly summarizes everything he presented: “the nose is the silent warrior: the gatekeeper of our bodies, pharmacist to our minds, and weather vane to our emotions.”
2. Exhale to Increase Lung Capacity?
“They gathered two decades of data from 5,200 subjects, crunched the numbers, and discovered that the greatest indicator of life span wasn’t genetics, diet, or the amount of daily exercise, as many had suspected. It was lung capacity. … larger lungs equaled longer lives.”
The next thing Nestor discovered was that nasal breathing wasn’t enough for optimal breathing. We also need bigger lungs.
And fortunately, expanding our lung capacity is pretty straightforward. Something simple like stretching and breathing will do. Nestor specifically mentions the 5 Tibetan Rites here, but it seems like almost any form of yoga would work. Additionally, he found that moderate exercises, such as walking or cycling, could increase lung capacity by 15%.
But the most paradoxical way to expand lung capacity was to exhale fully, which Nestor introduced in his phenomenal section on Carl Stough:
“What Stough had discovered, and what Martin had learned, was that the most important aspect of breathing wasn’t just to take in air through the nose. Inhaling was the easy part. The key to breathing, lung expansion, and the long life that came with it was on the other end of respiration. It was in the transformative power of a full exhalation.”
By exhaling fully, we can get more air in during our next breath. Over time, this can expand lung capacity and have life-changing effects (Stough used this approach to help people with emphysema, asthma, pneumonia, and more—the book is worth reading for this chapter alone).
Putting it together, we have learned that to optimize our breathing, we should (1) breathe nasally and (2) expand our lungs via stretching and breathing, exercise, and/or full exhalations. The next step is to slow our breathing down and breathe less.
3. Slow, Less, and the Perfect Breath
“One thing that every medical or freelance pulmonaut I’ve talked to over the past several years has agreed on is that, just as we’ve become a culture of overeaters, we’ve also 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.
The fix is easy: breathe less. But that’s harder than it sounds.”
Chronic overbreathing has many harmful effects because, when we do it, we offload too much carbon dioxide (CO2). As you know, CO2 is critical to all aspects of health. It loosens the bond between oxygen and hemoglobin, releasing more oxygen into the tissues and cells. It’s also a vasodilator, improving blood flow and enhancing oxygen delivery.
But an even more detrimental effect—one that I hadn’t learned until this book—is buffering. It was complicated, but Nestor explained that overbreathing causes kidney buffering, which depletes mineral stores. This can cause nerves to malfunction, muscles to spasm, poor energy production, and even contribute to osteoporosis—that last one is pretty mind-blowing.
Learning to breathe less can counteract these damaging consequences.
Nestor presents two ways to do this. The first is simply taking fewer breaths per minute (aka slow breathing). He discusses many benefits of slow breathing, which include calming the nervous system, stimulating the vagus nerve, improving blood flow, and eliciting a state of coherence in which our body’s peak efficiency is achieved.
But breathing slowly isn’t enough. We also need to breathe less air, which is where the real health benefits occur:
“To be clear, breathing less is not the same as breathing slowly. […] 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. To breathe, but to breathe less.”
And when we combine nasal breathing, slow breathing, and breathing less, we get “the perfect breath,” something you can start practicing today:
“By various means, in various ways, in various eras of human history, all these pulmonauts discovered the same thing. They discovered that the optimum amount of air we should take in at rest per minute is 5.5 liters. The optimum breathing rate is about 5.5 breaths per minute. That’s 5.5-second inhales and 5.5-second exhales. This is the perfect breath.”
4. Breathing+: Sometimes Fast, Sometimes Not at All
“Collectively, I’m calling these potent techniques Breathing+, because they build on the foundation of practices I described earlier in this book, and because many require extra focus and offer extra rewards. Some involve breathing really fast for a very long time; others require breathing very slow for even longer. A few entail not breathing at all for a few minutes. These methods, too, date back thousands of years, vanished, then were rediscovered again at a different time in a different culture, renamed and redeployed.”
Breathing+ is not only the coolest name, but it covers all the paradoxes of breathing. The things we “shouldn’t do” yet have been used for millennia to enhance wellness. The methods that should cause harm based on medical knowledge, but instead seem to promote health.
Let’s start with fast breathing—the opposite of everything discussed so far—as Nestor has a perfect description of its benefits:
“Breathing really fast and heavy on purpose flips the vagal response the other way, shoving us into a stressed state. It teaches us to consciously access the autonomic nervous system and control it, to turn on heavy stress specifically so that we can turn it off and spend the rest of our days and nights relaxing and restoring, feeding and breeding.”
On the flip side, super slow breathing and breath holds cause intense stress due to the build-up of CO2 and drop in oxygen saturation. Although it seems dangerous at first, they can build mental and physical resiliency when done safely and in a controlled manner.
This brings us to the vital point about Breathing+. It’s about conscious control:
“Under normal circumstances, these conditions are considered damaging and would require medical care. (//) But something else happens when we practice these techniques willingly, when we consciously push our bodies into these states for a few minutes, or hours, a day. In some cases, they can radically transform lives.”
So, the take-home is that if things like fast breathing and breath holds occur unconsciously, they have terrible effects. But when done consciously, these Breathing+ techniques “can radically transform lives.”
1 Life-Changing Idea
Chew
“When mouths don’t grow wide enough, the roof of the mouth tends to rise up instead of out … The upward growth impedes the development of the nasal cavity, shrinking it and disrupting the delicate structures in the nose. The reduced nasal space leads to obstruction and inhibits airflow. Overall, humans have the sad distinction of being the most plugged-up species on Earth.”
The most incredible (yet disheartening) thing Nestor discovered was that the human face and airways have been shrinking. That we have become “the most plugged-up species on Earth.” The natural question was, why? Why are we like this? The answer was chewing.
It turns out our ancestors used to spend a lot of time chewing…like hours and hours a day. This came to a somewhat abrupt end when we began processing food. But our faces and airways still desperately need this simple act to grow to their full potential.
Nestor outlines all kinds of ways in which chewing positively impacts facial growth and airway expansion. As one neat example, chewing releases stem cells that help the bones in our face grow at any age. Check out the book for tons of information on chewing.
From a practical perspective, it’s difficult to fix our chewing deficiency unless we go back to eating like cave people. However, here are a few of things you can do to help:
Chew more. As much as you can. Liquify the food before you swallow. (NOTE: I am terrible with this, so I’m putting it here for me.)
Use proper oral posture: mouth closed, top and bottom teeth slightly touching, and tongue resting on the roof of the mouth.
Consider trying Mewing, chewing gum (he suggests Falim or mastic), or even a device to expand your airways (the links come from the book).
Let’s wrap up by putting everything we’ve learned together: Chew, breathe through your nose, mostly less but sometimes more, and enjoy the healing powers of the breath.
1 Stack of Memorable Quotes
“No matter what we eat, how much we exercise, how resilient our genes are, how skinny or young or wise we are—none of it will matter unless we’re breathing correctly. That’s what these researchers discovered. The missing pillar in health is breath. It all starts there.”
“In a single breath, more molecules of air will pass through your nose than all the grains of sand on all the world’s beaches—trillions and trillions of them.”
“’I foolishly had assumed that everyone had at least a rudimentary knowledge of physiology,’ Stough wrote in his autobiography, Dr. Breath. ‘Even more foolishly I had assumed that a universal awareness of the importance of breathing existed. Nothing could have been farther from the truth.’”
“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.”
“Carbon dioxide is, in fact, a more fundamental component of living matter than is oxygen.’’ – Yandell Henderson
“In many ways, this resonant breathing offered the same benefits as meditation for people who didn’t want to meditate. Or yoga for people who didn’t like to get off the couch. It offered the healing touch of prayer for people who weren’t religious.”
“The less one breathes, the more one absorbs the warming touch of respiratory efficiency—and the further a body can go.”
“The earliest yoga was a science of holding still and building prana through breathing.”
“Like all Eastern medicines, breathing techniques are best suited to serve as preventative maintenance, a way to retain balance in the body so that milder problems don’t blossom into more serious health issues. Should we lose that balance from time to time, breathing can often bring it back.”
“From what I’ve learned in the past decade, that 30 pounds of air that passes through our lungs every day and that 1.7 pounds of oxygen our cells consume is as important as what we eat or how much we exercise. Breathing is a missing pillar of health.”
My favorite quote from the book:
“To breathe is to absorb ourselves in what surrounds us, to take in little bits of life, understand them, and give pieces of ourselves back out. Respiration is, at its core, reciprocation.”